TALES FROM THE LOOP boardgame launches on Kickstarter

Tales from the Loop started as an art book in 2014, became a roleplaying game in 2017, recently launched as a television series and has now made the transition to board games.

Free League Publishing, who publish the Tales from the Loop roleplaying game, have launched a board game which is based closely on the same premise. The players play a number of Kids who are drawn into investigating strange mysteries emanating from a massive particle accelerator lab called the Loop. These mysteries involved investigations, avoiding "Trouble" and dealing with some of the odd creations of the Loop, including teleportation, robots and even dinosaurs.

Free League have provided a "Print and Play" system which allows people to try the game before deciding to back the project. Their pedigree is pretty good: the Tales from the Loop RPG is excellent and the same design team designed the superb Crusader Kings board game.

The project has already exceeded its funding target, so additional pledges will secure more content and features. The currently-planned delivery date is May 2021, global pandemic crisis notwithstanding.

In another sign of the End Times, I have been nominated for a Hugo Award

The 2020 Hugo Award nominations have been announced this evening and, to my surprise, I have made the shortlist for Best Fan Writer, which was unexpected.

Congratulations to my fellow nominees, a formidably talented bunch who will ensure that I have zero chance of actually winning the award.

In the "big" category, Best Novel, the nominees are The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders; Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley; A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine; Middlegame by Seanan McGuire; and The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow.

The Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) nominees are The Good Place: The Answer, The Exapanse: Cibola Burn; Watchmen: A God Walks into Abar and This Extraordinary Being; The Mandalorian: Redemption; and Doctor Who: Resolution.

The Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) nominees are Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Good Omens, Russian Doll: Season 1, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Us.

The Hugo Awards are normally announced at WorldCon, the annual World Science Fiction Convention which this year was going to be held in New Zealand. Unfortunately, the global coronavirus pandemic means that the convention cannot be held as planned. Instead, a virtual convention and awards ceremony will be held instead.

Thanks again to everyone who nominated me. It's very much appreciated.

RIP Honor Blackman

Veteran British actress Honor Blackman has sadly passed away at the age of 94, of natural causes.

Blackman began her film career in 1947 as an extra in the film Fame is the Spur. She went on to appear in many films through the 1950s and 1960s, including the Titanic-based disaster movie A Night to Remember (1958) and as Hera in the Ray Harryhausen movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

In 1962 she was cast in the television series The Avengers, alongside Patrick Macnee. She played the role of Dr. Cathy Gale for two years, leaving when she got her role on the James Bond franchise (something referred to in the TV series, when the other characters refer to her visiting Fort Knox).

She played arguably her most famous role in 1964, when she starred as Bond girl Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, alongside Sean Connery (with whom she re-teamed in 1968 for the Western Shalako).

Her other roles include episodes of Columbo and Doctor Who, as well as Midsomer Murders and a late-career regular role on The Upper Hand. She also starred in Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001. She never formally retired from acting, and kept her hand in with a role on British soap opera Casualty in 2013.

A staunch republican, she declined a CBE in 2002. She alternated between living in the UK and in Maine, and is survived by two children. She married twice but spent most of the latter half of her life single, noting she enjoyed the independence it gave her.

A strong actress noted for her powerful and iconic roles in the 1960s, Honor Blackman will be missed.

Tales from the Loop: Season 1

1982, Ohio. The town of Mercer sits on top of the Loop, an immense particle accelerator built around a unique stone with unusual properties over time, space, light, magnetism and reality. The Loop's scientific discoveries have led to the creator of magnetic suspension technology and efficient, almost intelligent robots, and the detritus of past experiments litters the landscape. A number of individuals and families have their lives impacted by the Loop and its legacy, which brings them to a closer understanding of the universe, themselves and each other.

Tales from the Loop is based on a fictional universe created by Swedish writer and artist Simon Stålenhag. This universe was detailed in his art books Tales from the Loop (2014) and Things from the Flood (2016) and was fleshed-out in Free League Publishing's excellent roleplaying game (2017). Amazon Prime's television adaptation is not quite set in this universe, but it does borrow a lot of iconography and imagery from the book to craft a series of almost-standalone stories.

The season takes place mostly in 1982, although there are also flashbacks to the 1950s, when the Loop was first being constructed. If the series has an anchor, it's in the central Willard family consisting of Russ (Jonathan Pryce), the founder of the Loop; his wife Klara (Jane Alexander); son George (Paul Schneider); daughter-in-law Loretta (Rebecca Hall); and grandchildren Jakob (Daniel Zohlgadri) and Cole (Duncan Joiner). We learn gradually that Russ is a genius but has been emotionally absent from his son's life, something he is striving to correct with his close relationship with his younger grandson Cole, a lonely path that his heir apparent, Loretta, may also be following. This lays the groundwork for melodrama, but the show steers away from such cliches, instead choosing to depict events more calmly.

Tales from the Loop's 1980s setting and the source material would both lend themselves to becoming a nostalgia fest; indeed, the original book and RPG both have a much stronger Stranger Things vibe, down to the characters playing Dungeons & Dragons and listening to contemporary bands. Although the Tales from the Loop franchise predates Stranger Things, the TV show clearly does not, so the decision was made to steer the show away from that aesthetic and instead adopt a completely different tone. If Stranger Things is a 1980s action/horror movie on steroids, spread across 24 hours (and counting), Tales from the Loop is more restrained, even arthouse film, more The Quiet Earth than The Goonies.

Tales from the Loop is also much less serialised. There is an on-going story arc of sorts, but sometimes this is not referenced at all in an episode and at other times only barely. Instead the focus of each episode is dramatically different: the first features a little girl (played with beyond-her-years wisdom by Ant-Man's Abby Ryder Fortson) who finds herself in a strange place and has to get home; the second focuses on Jakob Willard and his best friend who play a prank that gets out of hand; the third on a young couple who find the ultimate way of spending time together (played by Nicole Law and Danny Kang); the fourth on Russ Willard; the fifth on a maintenance man (played by Veep's Dan Bakkedahl) who buys a robot to defend his family; the sixth on a security guard (Ato Essandoh) who is searching for a mysterious man; the seventh on a teenage boy (Emjay Anthony) who is trapped on an island with a terrifying presence; and the final episode on young Cole Willard and his despair at change. Events and characters which are front and centre in one episode are on the periphery of another, with the timelines of some episodes intersecting in interesting ways.

Tales from the Loop therefore comes across more like a set of Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episodes, if they were all set in the same town and everyone was kind of accepting of the oddness going on. There are also similarities to Eureka (although a totally different tone) and Lost, which I suspect the island episode might have been a tip of the hat to.

The series has attracted some criticism for being slow, but I found this to be a point in its favour. Each episode has its own storyline and focus, but the story is usually relatively simple and the generous 50-60 minute running time allows each idea to be explored in depth without contrived events to spin things out for another few minutes (a key weakness of many shows in this age of streaming, which seem to assume the audience consists solely of people who will stop watching if there isn't some crazy plot twist, explosion or death every ten minutes). The series has also been criticised for being emotionally remote, a complaint I find utterly baffling. The show is deeply interested in themes like family, love, mortality, morality and the consequences of actions, and it explores each theme with emotional depth and resonance. There are several moments in the series which are capable of reducing the viewer to tears, through the restrained direction, almost uniformly excellent performances (Jonathan Pryce's performance in the fourth episode should win him every award under the sun in particular) and the way the story keeps circling around to touch on ideas raised earlier.

Tales from the Loop's first season (*****) is not for everyone. But the relaxed and quiet pace, the thoughtful storytelling and the measured characters do combine to produce something uniquely compelling, visually beautiful and at times genuinely heartbreaking. The season's conclusion, which may be more timely than ever, is that life may be fleeting and perhaps random, but it is also beautiful and wonderful. It is available to watch now on Amazon Prime worldwide.

Star Trek: Picard - Season 1

2399 AD. Fourteen years ago, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard failed in his mission to help save the last remaining people on the planet Romulus before it was destroyed in a supernova. Riven by guilt and anger that Starfleet and the Federation (both more insular in the wake of decades of war and uncertainty) did not do more to help, Picard retires to his winery in France. The arrival of a young woman who is being targeted by Romulan assassins calls Picard back into action, especially when he learns that events are tied into the death of his friend Lt. Commander Data twenty years ago and his experiences with the Borg.

Picard represents a key moment in the Star Trek franchise. For the first time since the release of the film Nemesis in 2002, the Star Trek universe is moving forwards. Every Star Trek project since 2002 has been a prequel or set in a parallel universe (or, in the case of J.J. Abrams' movies, both). It's way past due time that we get to see what happens next.

Picard is a bit of a mixed bag and, like its CBS All Access label-mate Star Trek: Discovery, is often deeply frustrating. The ingredients are here for a compelling and enjoyable SF series reflecting on timely themes like mortality and nostalgia, but instead we get moments of excellence interspersed with terrible dialogue and moments of contrivance that will make you very briefly wish Brannon Braga was still working on the franchise (okay, never that bad, but still).

The season opens with a mystery and it is here that Picard shines, as the titular ex-admiral takes charge of the investigation which is deeply connected to his own past. Patrick Stewart is physically incapable of acting poorly, even in his elder statesmen years (Stewart turns 80 this year and is playing a 94-year-old), and when required brings gravitas and integrity to the scenes. One change is that Picard is here suffering the very earliest stages of Irumodic Syndrome (the same disease that was afflicting his future self in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, All Good Things...) so Stewart has to make Picard a somewhat more tremulous, feeble character than the one we remember.

This adds an interesting element of human mortality to the series. Stewart was such a commanding force of nature in The Next Generation series and movies that seeing him here as an older and less certain figure is sometimes genuinely distressing. Time is not a kind figure, but having it thrown in the viewer's face as vividly as here is startling. Thankfully, Stewart has still got the old magic in flashback scenes set years earlier and is a much more commanding and forceful figure.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, not for acting talent but for writing. Isa Briones as Dahj and Soji is outstanding in the first few episodes as she portrays two versions of the same character, one fleeing Romulan assassins and the other trying to unearth the secrets of the Borg. She does tremendously well in both roles, and even better in a third role a lot later in the season. Inbetween she is not always well-serviced by the scripts, and becomes too much of a passive figure in the central third of the season, first swept up in a morally dubious romance and then buffeted around by various people trying to save her.

Santiago Cabrera (Heroes) is fun as ace pilot Chris Rios, especially as his narcissistic side has led to him crewing his ship with variations of the Emergency Medical Hologram Programme from Voyager, complete with ever more outrageously terrible accents. It's a fun gag, but one that feels a bit of out keeping with the tone of the rest of the series and is perhaps a bit over-used. Outside of that, Rios gets very little character development. Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Harry Treadway and Peyton List all do the best they can with the material they are given, but the quality is again all over the place. Particularly egregious is Alison Pill playing a character who commits an absolutely horrendous crime at one point and everyone seems to forget about it five minutes later and welcomes her back into the crew with open arms.

Particularly baffling is the character of Elnor, a Romulan swordsman prodigy whom Picard recruits for the mission for no particularly convincing reason and proceeds not to do very much for the rest of the series. Evan Evagora does the best he can with the material, but it's hard to make a character with no story purpose compelling.

More successful is the return of Jonathan Del Arco and Jeri Ryan as former Borg drones Hugh (from two episodes of The Next Generation) and Seven of Nine (from the last four seasons of Voyager). Both take care to root their characters in the way they last appeared (twenty-seven and nineteen years ago, respectively) but also layer them with two decades of off-screen character development. It's also good to see Brent Spiner back as Data (albeit in dream and flashback sequences), even if trying to accommodate for his ageing pushes both the makeup and CGI to their very limits. Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis also make very welcome return appearances as Riker and Troi.

Part of the schizophrenic writing quality can be put down to the competing interests of the two showrunners: Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer and Hugo Award-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is by some margin the most feted author to ever work on a Star Trek series and you can see his influence in the musings on the ethics of creating artificial life, the moral comprising of the utopian Federation by the trauma it has undergone in previous decades (multiple Borg attacks, the absolutely devastating Dominion War, a brief war with the Klingons etc) and the intelligent consideration of themes like mortality and nostalgia. However, it feels like this has been compromised by executive producer Alex Kurtzman, a writer who wouldn't know subtlety and thematic exploration if they joined forces and ran him over with a snowplough. At every turn, Kurtzman's over-earnest need for exposition, lens flares, infodumps, incongruous humour, explosions, needless character deaths for shock value only and murky CGI drags the writing down whenever it seems to be in danger of getting interesting. A good example of this is how Chabon wanted to reference the Dominion War and how the trauma of seeing millions of Starfleet personnel killed in battle rocked the certainties of the utopian Federation and put it on a more isolationist course, but Kurtzman overruled him because he didn't think anyone had ever watched Deep Space Nine, which is a deeply stupid decision.

Picard does have plenty of good points. The production values and effects (bar some strange use of stock footage) are better than they have ever been before in Star Trek, even the movies, and the actors all do the best they can with the material. It's genuinely fun to see Picard back in action and a few character reunions do bring lumps to the throat. The setup in the first two or three episodes is genuinely compelling (plus Into the Badlands' Orla Brady as an Irish-Romulan Tal Shiar agent turned housekeeper is absolutely fantastic) and some of the moral quandaries faced by the crew are intriguing. But it does feel that for every good thing in the series that makes it worth watching, there's something else that weakens it.

Star Trek: Picard's first season (***½) is inconsistent and problematic, but anchored in Patrick Stewart's still-formidable gravitas. It's certainly a stronger first season than Discovery's and it's revelling in continuity is refreshing after Discovery played very fast and loose with it (although the laughably impractical holographic controls in both shows do need to die a death soon). Whether the promised second season can build on the good points of the first season and jettison the numerous weaker elements remains to be seen. The season is available now on CBS All-Access in the United States and on Amazon Prime in much of the rest of the world.

The Broken Heavens by Kameron Hurley

The Tai Mora, invaders from a parallel universe, have overrun and conquered much of the island-continent of Grania. Their ruler plans to activate the five great temples and use their power to seal the ways between the worlds shut, ending the chaos that has engulfed every world and every timeline. For Lilia, the former scullery maid turned military leader, an opportunity to strike back at the Tai Mora is approaching, one that may hold the key to saving the world, but she must first persuade her reluctant allies (who prefer the idea of flight) to stand with her.

The Broken Heavens is the concluding volume of The Worldbreaker Saga, Kameron Hurley's epic fantasy trilogy set in a world that is being invaded by mirror versions of itself. Following on from The Mirror Empire and Empire Ascendant, the book chronicles the adventures of a number of core characters scattered across Grania as events begin to converge.

The Worldbreaker Saga is, as with much of Hurley's fiction, offbeat and weird but is anchored in believable human characters. The book plays with the "chosen one" trope by pitting these as the people who happen to be in the right place at the right time to deal with the crisis, and they succeed or fail, live or die based on their own strengths and weaknesses, and isn't afraid to have them mess up, sometimes catastrophically. It's unusual for an epic fantasy following a standard three-act trilogy structure (albeit in an original and unusual world) to be so inventive in how it handles its characters and plot.

Particularly interesting, and something much more strongly focused on here than previously, is the idea of the mirror characters being not just different characters with the same face, but different versions of the actual same character: the pacifist in one world and the war-mongering dictator in another could have been the same person if it were not for circumstance. Thematic ideas of nature/nurture, environment and desperation are woven intriguingly into the story and developed as it continues.

Some of the weaknesses of the first two books remain: there are occasional moments of obtuseness and the limits of the magic-wielding characters' powers are not always clear. There's also the feeling of events sometimes being a little rushed. There's easily a more sedate thousand-page story which could have explained things a bit better lying within these sometimes compressed-feeling five hundred pages. On the plus side, it does mean that the book moves like it's on fire, with little time or pages wasted.

The setting, with its living killer trees and seething organic temples, is vividly drawn and Hurley's formidable powers of characterisation are at their peak here, not just in depicting different characters but different versions of the same character, which requires a great deal more nuance. Overall, The Broken Heavens (****½) is a worthy conclusion to an often engrossing and original work of fantasy. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey

The Laconian Empire has conquered the Solar system and most of the colony worlds established through the ring space. A resistance movement led by the crewmembers of the Rocinante is hoping to win back the freedom of the individual worlds, but High Consul Winston Duarte has taken James Holden captive. As tensions rise, Duarte makes the bold decision to declare war on the unknown, possibly unknowable aliens that killed the creators of the protomolecule, a war that will have unforeseen consequences.

Tiamat's Wrath is the eighth and penultimate novel in The Expanse, moving the series decisively towards its endgame with the conflict against the unknown aliens beginning in force. This is the moment that The Expanse has been building towards for a decade, with the true conflict finally getting underway.

It's a shame, then, that it feels anti-climactic. Part of the problem in this latter part of the series is that it feels like it is trying to do too much in too little space: the conquest of the Solar system by the Laconians happened very rapidly (and mostly off-screen) in the previous book and in this book the resistance movement forms and takes action with almost indecent haste. Persepolis Rising did at least benefit from the tight focus on the Rocinante crew trying to escape Medina Station and using that as a lens through which other events unfolded. Tiamat's Wrath is a much more epic, widescreen book which tries to tell the story across a number of fast-moving fronts, but in almost exactly the same page count. This results in a much faster-paced story where events happen quickly and sometimes without enough setup.

We've been here before, and in fact Tiamat's Wrath forms the second half of a duology that began with Persepolis Rising, and in doing so comes across as a near beat-for-beat retread of the previous duology (Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes): in the first book a huge, epic, game-changing event takes place with apparently massive ramifications for the series, and in the second it is wrapped up with almost indecent haste, both times relying on an important female character in the enemy camp deciding to swap sides. The structural similarities between the two duologies can leave the reader with a nagging sense of deja vu. The pieces are different but the game is being played the same way.

There is also the problem that we still know very little about the extradimensional alien threat. We know they're bad news, but their motivations, capabilities and real level of threat remain unclear after eight books out of nine in the series. It does feel a little like the situation with the Others in A Song of Ice and Fire, where we're supposed to be wary of this species but we don't really know what they want so it means their level of threat remains vague. The stakes, rather than being made clear or raised, are instead simply left undefined.

As usual, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who together make up the gestalt entity known as James S.A. Corey) deliver a fast-paced, moderately well-written space opera yarn with some exciting battles, interesting plot twists and some decent characterisation, but also one that feels like it is repeating earlier beats from the series and still leaving a lot of information undisclosed before heading into the final volume of the series. Tiamat's Wrath (***) is solid but occasionally feels like a detailed plot summary of a novel rather than a novel in its own right. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

TALES FROM THE LOOP arrives on Amazon Prime

The first season of Tales from the Loop has hit Amazon Prime Video today (USA, UK).

The eight-part series is set in Ohio in 1982, in a town called Mercer which sits on top of a gigantic particle accelerator known as the Loop. Various scientific experiments have been run at the facility for the preceding thirty years and detritus from these experiments litters the landscapes, including escaped robots and mysterious spheres with strange properties. Each episode focuses on a different character and their interaction with the Loop and its properties.

The series is based on the work of Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish artist who rose to fame with his atmospheric paintings merging 1980s nostalgia and hard-edged SF technology. His work resulted in both a 2014 art book and a 2017 roleplaying game, although the TV series draws solely on the art book for copyright reasons (and also re-sets the action from Sweden to Ohio).

The creative team behind the project is strong, with Stålenhag working as a concept artist, Philip Glass as the co-composer, Matt Reeves as a producer, Jodie Foster among the directors and Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce leading the cast.

LAST OF US II delayed indefinitely due to coronavirus pandemic

The eagerly-awaited video game The Last of Us II has been indefinitely delayed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The movie and TV industries have been hit badly by the pandemic, which has seen almost the entire global TV and film production industries shut down until further notice. The video game industry has been much more bullish, developers announcing that they are much better equipped to work from home and some even citing the advantages of doing so. CD Projekt Red recently confirmed that, after a few days' delay whilst they transitioned to home working, they are full steam ahead on Cyberpunk 2077 (due for release in September) and a new game in The Witcher series.

However, it appears that whilst development work can continue from home, the pandemic is impacting on the ability to manufacture and deliver physical copies of the finished game. The release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first major release during the pandemic (Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons both managed to slip out just ahead of most countries going into lockdown), has become fragmented with some countries receiving their copies of the game almost two weeks ahead of the official release date, whilst other territories may not receive copies until after the date given worldwide delivery disruptions. There is also the matter of retailers such as Amazon low-prioritising entertainment products in favour of essential goods.

The Last of Us II is functionally complete and ready to roll, with Sony admitting the main problem is the practicalities surrounding the release of the game.

Fans will be hoping that other games will not be impacted, particularly the year's other big release, Cyberpunk 2077.

HBO is currently developing a Last of Us television series with Sony Television, with Chernobyl head writer Craig Mazin attached to write.

LIFE ON MARS revival mini-series in the planning stages

Matthew Graham, the co-creator and co-writer of the time-travelling metaphysical police drama Life on Mars and its sequel series Ashes to Ashes, has confirmed that he is developing a mini-series revival of the franchise.

Life on Mars starred John Simm as Detective Sam Tyler of the Greater Manchester Police. He is hit by a car and goes into a coma, but when he wakes up it's 1973 and he is working for a considerably less professional, more sexist police force under the leadership of DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Tyler has to solve crimes whilst navigating culture-clash issues, avoiding altering his own past and finding out what has really happened to him and if he can return to his own time.

The show aired two seasons in 2006 and 2007 and was both a critical and commercial success (an American remake starring Harvey Keitel was less accomplished, and axed after a single season). Simm declined to return for a third season, so the concept was rejigged as Ashes to Ashes. A new police officer, Alex Drake, who is obsessed with the strange story of Sam Tyler, finds herself in London in 1981, working for Gene Hunt who has moved down south to help combat a deadly crime wave in the capital. Ashes to Ashes ran for three seasons from 2008 to 2010 and ended on a surprisingly definitive note which fully explained the strangeness and seemed to close the door on any further adventures in this world, although Glenister did reveal that a 1950s or 1960s-set prequel series focusing on a young Gene Hunt had been discussed as a joke, with the title The Laughing Gnome (all of the show titles come from contemporary David Bowie song).

Although Ashes to Ashes was well-received, fans were disappointed that it did not reveal the fate of Sam Tyler and other key characters on-screen, instead relaying news of their fates in dialogue.

Life on Mars: The Final Chapter (working title) will be partially set in the 1970s, partially in the 1980s and mostly in an "alternate now." The series will also involve a TV show-within-a-show called "Tyler: Murder Division." Provisionally, Philip Glenister and John Simm have agreed to return and the writers want to bring back as many characters from both series as possible.

The producers actually let slip the news in a tweet on 30 March, and have confirmed that the news is not an April Fool's (which, in the UK at least, ends at midday anyway). The timescale for the new series will, of course, depend on when the current pandemic crisis eases.