The Social Network

In 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg alienates most of his classmates when he creates a website comparing the attractiveness of girls on campus. However, a trio of other students are impressed by his technical skills and hire him to create a social networking site. When they discover that Zuckerberg has created a rival site based on the same idea, 'The Facebook', they decide to sue him for intellectual theft. At the same time, as Zuckerberg's fame grows and the site becomes more and more popular, he risks alienating the friends who helped build him the site.


The Social Network is a movie which has a substantial problem: the premise is a very hard sell. The story of Facebook's founding is pretty straightforward: geek hits on winning idea, becomes billionaire, cheeses off a lot of people along the way and gets sued. In order to make a compelling and entertaining movie, the producers decided to bring out the big guns: hire the writer of The West Wing to pen the script, get the director of Fight Club and Se7en to direct, employ the creative force behind Nine Inch Nails to produce the score and finally bring on board a number of the best, promising young American actors of their generation to play the roles. And it more or less works.

David Fincher directs the film like a thriller, using intense close-ups and a steady pace, intercutting between the two court cases in the present and events unfolding on-campus in 2003-04 to give us a clear overview of the situation. He uses some great techniques to make otherwise dull scenes real energy, such as the use of rather bizarre camera techniques whilst the Winklevoss twins row in a boat race to the sound of a crazy cover of Flight of the Bumblebee. He is helped by Sorkin's clever script with its rapid-fire dialogue and cutting insults which may lack realism (were these young people really all that incredibly witty?) but is a lot of fun.

Performances are excellent, particularly Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, who delivers a controlled, twitchy performance with outbursts of (improbably good) acerbic humour. Armie Hammer plays both of the Winklevoss twins through a combination of CGI and split screen techniques which are flawlessly executed (not being familiar with Hammer's prior work, I genuinely thought they'd hired a pair of twins to play the roles), and his performance is excellent, reaching a height in a scene where the twins confront the president of Harvard and are told to their incredulity that they don't have a leg to stand on as they try to punish Zuckerberg for 'stealing' their idea. Andrew Garfield - the soon-to-be new Peter Parker - is also great as the most sympathetic character in the film, Zuckerberg's best friend Eduardo Severin who is screwed over for no real reason (though note that Severin is the only major player to cooperate with the writing of the book the movie is based on, which may account for this). Justin Timberlake fulfils his early acting potential by playing Sean Parker, the founder of Napster whom Zuckerberg turns to for advice despite Parker's irresponsible reputation, to Severin's disgust.

So, we have a great script, some great actors and a great director. Does this add up to a great movie? Almost. The film is ticking along nicely and is saying some interesting (if somewhat over-familiar) things about fame, avarice and genius when coupled to a strong work ethic but a lack of morality, when it just stops. There's no real climax or a conclusion, the movie suddenly screeches to a halt on a rate trite note: Zuckerberg is told, completely contrary to everything we've seen, that he's not a bad person in an awkward scene that might as well have, "PLEASE DON'T SUE US," flashing at the bottom of the screen. This is one of the risks of making a film based on events that are so recent. The Facebook story is still ongoing, and the film simply catches up with the present day and then runs out of plot. No real conclusions are reached, or are indeed reachable, since we are also told that none of the major participants could take part in the movie due to various legal gagging orders and NDAs, meaning a fair amount of guesswork has to go into the story. There's also some rather interesting deviations from the facts for the sake of drama, such as the fact that Zuckerberg had a steady girlfriend for almost the entire timeframe of the events in the movie, but in the film he is presented as a bachelor who is motivated by a bad break-up.

The Social Network (****) almost succeeds in being a modern dramatic version of Seinfeld: a movie about nothing that succeeds thanks to winning scripts, performances and direction. The tremendous creative forces involved make the film as tense and effective as it can be, but at the end of the day there is the feeling that this is a movie which is based on a thin premise. That they make it into such a compelling movie is a tribute to their skills, but the lack of a climax leaves the film feeling a little incomplete. The movie is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

Here Come the Dwarves

The full cast of dwarves for The Hobbit movies has been unveiled in costume.


Richard Armitage is playing King Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the band of dwarves who set out to reclaim Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, from the dragon Smaug. He is seen here wielding his sword Orcrist.


John Callen and Peter Hambleton are playing Oin and Gloin respectively. Gloin is the father of Gimli (from The Lord of the Rings) and they do a good job here of making him look like John Rhys-Davies' father.


Dean O'Gorman and Aidan Turner are playing brothers Fili and Kili. O'Gorman is a veteran of the Xena and Hercules franchises, whilst Turner is well-known for his role as a vampire in three seasons of Being Human (he left Being Human to star in these films).


Mark Hadlow, Adam Brown and Jed Brophy as Dori, Ori and Nori, respectively.


Stephen Hunter, James Nesbitt and William Kircher as Bombur, Bofur and Bifur respectively. Nesbitt is best-known from his many comedic roles on British television, most famously Cold Feet.


Ken Stott and Graham McTavish as Balin and Dwalin. Stott is a very well-respected Scottish actor with a long list of TV and film credits, but he's pretty much unrecognisable under the dwarven make-up. Fellow Scot McTavish is a veteran of numerous TV projects, including the final season of Red Dwarf.

Interesting. Not strictly accurate to the books (Thorin is looking like he's about to yell, "Today is a good day to die!") but giving each dwarf an individual look and character is important to differentiate them in the film. Looking forward to seeing them in action. The first Hobbit movie, An Unexpected Journey, is due out on 14 December 2012.

Wertzone Classics: Startide Rising by David Brin

The abandoned and fallow ocean world of Kithrup, AD 2489. The predominantly dolphin-crewed starship Streaker has sought refuge deep underwater whilst pursuing armadas belonging to dozens of major Galactic races clash in the skies overhead, each fighting for the right to capture Streaker and the secrets she possesses. Streaker has found a fleet of abandoned starships in a globular cluster that date back to the time of the fabled Progenitors, and there are races willing to commit murder and genocide to learn more about the birth of intergalactic civilisation. The crew of the Streaker will have to call upon all their resources and cleverness if they are to escape from Kithrup, but the crew itself is divided over the course of action to take, and the planet itself harbours dark secrets of its own.


Startide Rising was first published in 1983 and is one of the rare SF novels to 'win the double', securing both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, a feat also achieved by Dune, Neuromancer, Doomsday Book, Rendezvous with Rama and Ender's Game. It's one of the best space opera novels published in the last thirty years and is probably the most advisable starting point for reading Brin's Uplift Saga (the first book, Sundiver, is the weakest in the series and has little to nothing to do with the other five books, though still a reasonably entertaining novel on its own merits).

The book is notable for being a space opera where most of the action takes place deep underwater, and where humans are in the minority as characters. Most of the cast are neo-dolphins, 'uplifted' from animals into sentient beings. They are mostly at home in the water, but have cybernetic walkers to allow them to interact with humans on dry land. Because dolphins are a new addition to the ranks of uplifted races they are also a tad of the flaky side, and several subplots in the books follow the problems caused when some of the dolphins' conditioning fails in the face of stress and they revert into mindless animals (especially dangerous for the ones that have elements of more hostile aquatic species spliced into their genetic code). Brin puts a lot of work into the dolphin society, organisation and language (the dolphins have a haiku-like way of speaking which bridges their primal language of squeaks, clicks and sonar and the human language, Anglic) and it's extremely convincing. The premise - talking space dolphins! - could veer into silliness very easily, but Brin overcomes this by simply taking the subject seriously, though injecting a lightness of tone into proceedings to reflect the playful nature of the species.


The character-building is strong. The neo-dolphin captain, Creideiki, is developed as a philosophical warrior who has developed a personal code of combining the best traits of his pre-sentient ancestors with things they have learned from humanity, rather than valuing one above the other as some of his other crewmembers do. Similarly, many of the other dolphins are painted distinctly with their own personalities, goals and motivations, some of them in conflict with one another. The other crewmembers of Streaker - seven humans and a neo-chimp - also come across well, though they fall into broader archetypes than the dolphins: the befuddled professor, the morally ambiguous and ambitious scientist, the hotheaded young kid who discovers responsibility and maturity and so on. Still entertaining, but it is interesting that the human characters come across as slightly broader than the dolphin ones. I was also surprised that some characters who play major roles in later books barely even appear in this one.

The book is broken up by interludes focusing on the various alien races battling for control of the planet: the humourless but honourable Thennanin, the avian Gubru, the rapacious Tandu, the cruel Soro, the weird Jophur (a race of hostile stacked donuts!) and so on. Brin doesn't have much time to do more than characterise these races in the quickest of strokes and they lack real depth, something I suspect Brin realised as subsequent books flesh out various of these races in more detail (the Gubru and Thennanin in The Uplift War, the Jophur in Infinity's Shore and so on). However, they are in the book primarily to provide an impetus for the Streaker to get away, and the regular switches away to their POVs keep us updated on the course of the battle and how much time the Earthlings have before one of the alien races triumphs and is able to pursue the Streaker. It's an effective way of building tension, especially as the novel moves into is climactic stages and the author puts his foot down in the run-up to the finale.

Essentially, Startide Rising is a big, brash, colourful and fun space opera. He addresses some interesting and real scientific issues and concerns (the need for the Galactics to be ecologically aware to avoid 'burning out' their galaxies of habitable planets in just a few tens of millennia is touched on, though lightly enough not to get preachy), but his main objective is to entertain, and he does that in spades. The structure of the series means that a number of storylines are left hanging at the end of Startide Rising which aren't revisited until the fifth book, which isn't a problem now but was a bit more unusual at the time (especially as the fifth book wasn't published until fifteen years after the second), but these hanging elements are more, "What adventures will they have next?" rather than cliffhangers. The book does a good job of standing alone, whilst the subsequent book, The Uplift War, shows the fall-out of events in this novel on Earth and her colonies, but also works more or less as a stand-alone.

Startide Rising (****½) is a tremendously readable, entertaining and smart novel that takes a wild premise and runs with it. The novel is available now in the USA, though is currently not in print in the UK (Amazon has some second-hand copies).

Dan Abnett pens DOCTOR WHO Ice Warriors novel

A strong claimant to the title of Busiest Author Alive, Dan Abnett has announced he will be writing this year's big Doctor Who hardcover novel, following on from last year's effort by Michael Moorcock.


The book is entitled The Silent Stars Go By and will pit the Eleventh Doctor, Rory and Amy against the Ice Warriors (who are way overdue an appearance on the new show), my favourite antagonists (who are sometimes good guys) from the original series. It will be published by BBC Books on 29 September.

George R.R. Martin confirms 'Dunk and Egg Vol I'

George R.R. Martin has confirmed in an interview with the Chapters Indigo blog that he has signed a deal with Bantam to release a collection of his Dunk and Egg stories. This first volume will collect the first four short stories into one book, but there will be more.


The collection will include The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword, The Mystery Knight and the forthcoming fourth story, The She-Wolves (a description of the story, maybe not even a working title at this stage). The fourth story will be published in Dangerous Women, a new anthology due in 2012, so I assume the Dunk and Egg collection will follow in 2013.

The stories follow the adventure of Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight of rude birth, and his very unusual squire, Egg, as they have adventures across the Seven Kingdoms approximately ninety years before the events of A Game of Thrones. Along the way they become embroiled in the doings of kings, princes and rebels, and inadvertently have a major impact on the history of Westeros.

Excellent news. These stories are pretty cool and it'll be great to have them in one volume.

Sundiver by David Brin

Two billion years ago, the Progenitors commenced the process of 'uplift': genetically engineering the more intelligent animals of many scores of worlds to sentience and intelligence. They in turn uplifted other races, and then others, in an unbroken chain that would eventually span aeons and no less than five galaxies. Each 'Patron' race would receive 100,000 years of indentured servitude from their client races before the clients would be allowed to uplift species of their own and become Patrons themselves. The Progenitors are long gone, as are many of the races they sired, but the process of uplift goes on. When a race is discovered in a tiny corner of one galaxy which has no Patrons and claims to have evolved naturally without outside intervention, it sends shockwaves through galactic society.


The Solar system, 2246. Humanity has narrowly avoided being given to another Patron race to 'complete' their 'long-abandoned' uplifting. At the time they were discovered, humanity had already uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins to sentience, and were able to claim Patron status for themselves, to the fury of many, far older races. When a scientific mission is launched from Mercury to investigate lifeforms discovered living in the Sun's upper layers, several other alien races are furious with humanity's temerity: the Galactic Library states that life cannot exist in the atmosphere of stars, so their claims are clearly lies intended to bolster their own status. Jacob Demwa, an expert in uplift, is called in to help clarify the situation, but he finds several human and alien factions battling to control the information about the discovery for their own ends, and some of them may be willing to kill to achieve their ends.

Sundiver (originally published in 1980) is the first novel in David Brin's acclaimed Uplift Saga, a space opera series running to six novels. The series has won two Hugos, two Locus awards and a Nebula for Best Novel, and is highly regarded in the SF canon. However, most of these plaudits are aimed at later books in the series (particularly the second and third volumes, Startide Rising and The Uplift War). Sundiver itself tends to get a little overlooked in the mix.


Sundiver is a totally stand-alone SF novel. It's set about 240 years before the other books and features no ongoing storylines or characters. Readers are in fact often encouraged to start with the superb second volume and disregard this one (there are also a few minor continuity issues between Sundiver and the other books), which is a bit of a shame. Though Sundiver is the weakest book in the series and the most forgettable, it's still a reasonably entertaining SF mystery novel.

Our primary POV in the novel is the conflicted character of Jacob. Jacob is suffering severe PTSD after saving one of Earth's space elevators from destruction through various feats of derring-do, which has led to various mental problems that he has to deal with through conditioning. This makes for a highly unreliable narrator, who often pauses to wonder if his own psyche is undermining his efforts to solve the mystery. This introduces an element of uncertainty into the story which is effective at being unsettling and forcing the reader to re-examine everything that's going on. On the other hand, Brin isn't as good at doing this kind of thing as Gene Wolfe or Christopher Priest and eventually it turns out that the amount of misdirection going on is rather slight compared to the potential. Still, it's a nice idea.

The mystery itself is at the centre of the book: what is going on with these newly-discovered lifeforms floating above the Sun? There are your usual assortment of false leads, red herrings, enemies turning out to be good guys and vice versa, but the reader is not given sufficient information to solve the mystery by themselves (always a slight problem with a mystery-based narrative). The mystery is solved through the application of scientific principles, which is quite enjoyable, but the way Jacob gathers everyone around to reveal the secrets in a scene straight out of Columbo is a little bit cheesy. Luckily, the characters other than Jacob are a colourful and interesting bunch (though the annoying journalist with the outrageous French accent borders on caricature), and Brin is already doing his signature trick of giving us really bizarre and 'different' aliens but also making them relatable as individual characters, something that will come out much more strongly in the later books.

Sundiver (***½) is a reasonably solid SF mystery novel, though the solution is a little bit too neat and the story's full potential is not realised. The book's biggest problem is that its sequels are so vastly superior they tend to outshine it, which I suppose isn't the worst problem in the world to have. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Steph Swainston to leave writing

Author Steph Swainston, the writer of the Castle series of weird fantasy novels (The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time, The Modern World and Above the Snowline), has announced in an interview with The Independent that she is to quit writing novels.



According to Swainston, she has become tired of the demands of writing one novel a year and the amount of self-marketing that a modern writer is expected to do via the Internet. She has also expressed a desire for a more social job, and is looking into becoming a chemistry teacher. Her desire to give up writing was so strong that she has negotiated an early end to her contract with Gollancz.

The news is likely to be a surprise to many. Swainston is one of the more critically-acclaimed authors to emerge in the last decade, and her admirers include Chine Mieville and, slightly randomly, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. I've only read her first novel, but found it to be enjoyable in its strangeness.

Hopefully we'll see more books from her one day, but for the time being this is regrettable news.

UPDATE: Apparently Ms. Swainston is planning to continue the Castle series eventually, but at her own writing pace.

Better Than Life by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor

Three million years into deep space on the mining ship Red Dwarf, the last human alive, Dave Lister, wants nothing else other than to go home. Instead, he has become trapped in a virtual reality computer game, Better Than Life. In his fantasy he is a resident of Bedford Falls (the town from his favourite movie, It's a Wonderful Life), married to Kristine Kochanski with twin sons. The Cat has his own Gothic castle, where his every whim is attended to by Valkyrie warriors in skimpy underwear and he amuses himself by going dog-hunting on his favourite fire-breathing yak. Service mechanoid Kryten has mountains of washing-up to get done. And Rimmer is a multi-billionaire, married to the most beautiful woman alive and using a time machine to get 'the lads' (General George S. Patton, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte) together every now and then so he can beat them at Risk. Outside the game, the AI Holly embarks on a mission to return his IQ to its previous level of 6,000, but unfortunately relies on the advice of a sentient toaster, with catastrophic results.


The problem with the game is that it is almost impossible to escape from, and, eventually it will kill you. However, Rimmer's psyche is so ridiculously self-loathing that he cannot stand to see himself or his friends happy, and it sets out to destroy them...

Better Than Life, published in 1990 when the Red Dwarf TV show was on hiatus for a year, is the follow-up to Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and is the last novel written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor as a team. After this book they concentrated on the TV show for a few years until their writing partnership dissolved in the mid-1990s. They would return with solo Red Dwarf novels further down the line: Naylor's disappointing Last Human in 1995 and Grant's superior Backwards in 1996.

Better Than Life itself is an improvement over the first novel in several areas. First of all, the already-strong characterisation is deeper and more interesting than before, getting into the psyches of these damaged people, laid bare by the game. The contrast between Lister's fantasy, in which he just wants an enjoyable job and a loving family in a happy community, and Rimmer's world of corporate jets, time machines, gorgeous supermodels and a ridiculously huge manhood, is hilariously emphasised, though the Cat is a bit one-note in the book. We have a new character in the shape of the Talkie Toaster ($£19.99 + tax), whom Holly rather unwisely activates to provide him with some companionship. Unfortunately, the Toaster is completely and totally obsessed with force-feeding everyone around him with toast. It's a great gag, but one in the TV series that was wisely used in only a few scenes and then dispensed with. He hangs around for longer in the novel and starts getting annoying but, realising this, the authors do some very funny things with his character to turn this into an asset, and his eventual fate is amusing.

As with the first novel, the authors re-work the plot of several episodes but use them to form a longer narrative. So, as well as the Better Than Life episode itself (which is more of an inspiration than a direct contribution) we get the Polymorph showing up, an interaction with a realm where time runs backwards, Rimmer and Lister being marooned together and having to help each other survive, and a close interaction with a black hole (a white hole in the TV series). Unlike the first book, where the episodic nature of the plot was more obvious, here events are more successfully combined to create a more cohesive story that stands free from the TV series.

Again, there are elements of pathos and tragedy that enter the story, particularly towards the end which is unexpectedly emotional (and then brilliantly subverted in the opening to Backwards, the chronologically-succeeding novel). But Lister learning the eventual fate of Earth and rising to become the leader of an entire community (kind of) is well-handled.

Better Than Life (****½) is a stronger novel than its forebear, cleverer, funnier and more enjoyable than that already-strong book. It is available now in omnibus form with its predecessor in the UK and USA.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor

Mimas, 2180. After an epic all-night bender in London to celebrate his 25th birthday, Liverpudlian slob Dave Lister wakes up a billion kilometres away on one of Saturn's moons with the mother of all hangovers. Desperate to get home, Lister hits on the plan of enrolling in the Space Corps, getting a job on an Earth-bound ship and then going AWOL the second he gets home. Unfortunately, the only vessel that will have him is the city-sized Jupiter Mining Corporation ore-hauler Red Dwarf. And before it gets back to Earth, it's going all the way to Triton on a job. So it will take Lister four and a half years to get home.


Driven to distraction by his mind-bogglingly anally-retentive bunk-mate Arnold Rimmer and heartbroken by a doomed romance with navigation officer Kristine Kochanski, Lister hits on a plan: by smuggling an unquarantined cat on board and getting caught, he gets condemned to spend the rest of the trip in temporal stasis and forfeit four years pay. Unfortunately, whilst he's in stasis, the Dwarf's fusion reactor unleashes a deadly radiation pulse which kills everyone. The ship's AI, Holly, takes the Dwarf into deep space and waits for the radiation to die off before reviving Lister...which takes three million years. Lister awakens to find his only companions are a holographic simulation of Rimmer, a senile AI and a creature which evolved from his pet cat. Their mission: to get back to Earth. Somehow.

As the above precis indicates, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (originally published in 1989) is a spin-off of the British TV series Red Dwarf, published just after the airing of the show's third season. It is not a novelization of the episodes, but can be regarded as sort-of reboot of the format. Creator-producers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor were unhappy with both the small budget given to the show and how that money was spent for the first two seasons; notably, when they took over as showrunners in the third season it took a quantum leap forward in its visual style and quality. When asked by Penguin Books to write a novel based on the series, they leapt at the chance and used the opportunity to write the big-budget SF epic that the BBC's lack of money had denied to them.

The result is something far more interesting than a bog-standard TV novelization. Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stands alone very nicely as a solo SF novel, with no foreknowledge of the TV series required. The storylines of several episodes have been reworked into one large over-arcing narrative and the start of the story is very different, with a lot more time spent on the pre-accident Red Dwarf. This allows the writers to flesh out a number of other characters (some new, some recast versions of TV characters) before the accident takes place and they zero in on the characters of Rimmer and Lister.

These two characters are well-established in the TV show, but the authors take advantage of the novel format to really delve into their psyches and get into their internal drives and motivations. Lister benefits from this the most, since as the TV show continued Lister was sometimes sidelined in favour of the more inherently funner character of Rimmer. The Cat also benefits from added material, turning him from a rather one-note character in the first two seasons to a more rounded figure whose alien, non-human characteristics are emphasised. Holly also gets more development, with the reasons for his computer senility made clear (though current editions of the novel drop his ongoing inexplicable hatred of 1970s British footballer Kevin Keegan for legal reasons, sadly).

The novel is cleverly written, using ingredients and events from several episodes to build up a larger storyline. Some jokes are re-used a little too freely from the TV series and there's a couple of spots where the episodic building blocks betray themselves (Lister's determination to go back into stasis until they get back to Earth is handwaved away a little too easily in both the TV series and novel, but in the novel is more jarring given we move into the Nova 5 storyline almost immediately), but overall this works well.

As the novel continues, the more amusing and comic moments start giving way to moments of pathos, even tragedy, which gives the novel more depth than it first appears. It's a very funny book, but it's also one that focuses on character-building and using the humour to illuminate the story and themes. A more disappointing element is that the actual science in the novel is occasionally woeful (the writers' understanding of relativity, breaking the speed of light and, in particular, how long it takes to travel between different star systems at below lightspeed is rather lacking). Given that the TV series, particularly in later series, prided itself in the use of real science to back up the story, the somewhat shoddy application of it here is unfortunate.

Overall, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (****) is a splendid comic SF novel, funny but with real depth of character. The book builds along nicely to a big climax (that riffs heavily on the movie It's a Wonderful Life) and a huge cliffhanger. The novel is available now in an omnibus edition with its sequel, Better Than Life, in the UK and USA.

DEADHOUSE GATES limited edition cover art

Subterranean Press have released their cover art for their forthcoming limited edition of Deadhouse Gates, the second Malazan novel by Steven Erikson, with art by J.K Drummond.


Hmm. It's not exactly as impressive as the Komarck cover for Gardens of the Moon.


But still, it could be a lot worse.

ARRGH! So 80's it hurts! Burn it with fire!

That's the actual original American cover art, which was so horrendous that even Tor - who pay actual money to Darrell K. Sweet for his work, remember - couldn't stomach it and ditched it. But for some reason it was inflicted on innocent Bulgarian readers instead. What did the Bulgarians ever do to Tor to deserve such harsh treatment?

It'll also be interesting to see if SubPress step up their release schedule a little. At this rate it'll be 2027 before the limited editions of all ten books are out, which is a long time to collect a complete set.