Update and Reminders

Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire gets its UK premiere tonight at 9pm on BBC-2. Apparently each episode will have 8-10 minutes of extra material that the US version had to cut to make room for adverts, so I may tune in to see if this stuff improves the existing episodes, which were very meh.

Best Served Cold, Nights of Villjamur and The Strain are now all on sale in the UK, whilst Retribution Falls arrives next week.

Currently Reading: Fire by Kristin Cashore
Currently Playing: Bridge Commander, Third Age: Total War, Company of Heroes multiplayer

Wertzone Classics: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

A group of researchers and scientists at the civilian research facility Regula I have created an amazing piece of technology, the Genesis Device. This device can instantly terraform any lifeless world into a terrestrial, habitable one in a matter of hours. The Federation has sponsored the development of this device, assigning the USS Reliant to assist the team in locating a dead planet to use in the initial testing. The Reliant's survey of Ceti Alpha VI runs into problems when Khan Noonian Singh, arch-enemy of James T. Kirk, is unexpectedly encountered on the planet. Soon, the Reliant is under his control and he is on his way to Regula I to take control of the Genesis Device and turn it into the ultimate weapon...


Meanwhile, the USS Enterprise under Captain Spock is on a training mission with a fresh crew of cadets. Admiral Kirk is on board to oversee the training cruise. When a garbled distress call is received from Regula I, Kirk assumes command and is soon forced into a desperate battle against Khan and the Reliant.

The Wrath of Khan has the reputation of being not just the best Star Trek movie, but also one of the best SF movies of its age. Unfortunately, in recent years it has perhaps become better known for the numerous parodies of a certain seminal William Shatner moment roughly halfway through the film, although in-context it works a lot better.

There are several factors which combine to make The Wrath of Khan such a good movie. First off, it has an extremely well-drawn villain played by a good actor. Khan having previously appeared in the classic Star Trek series (in the first season episode Space Seed) gave him a decent backstory and rationale for wanting vengeance against Kirk without getting bogged down in continuity. It was many years after I first saw the movie as a kid before I saw the episode, and really all you need to know is that Kirk dumped Khan on a planet as a gesture of supposed mercy which ended up killing Khan's wife and several of his shipmates. Ricardo Montalban plays Khan with a certain theatrical malevolence which treads a razor's edge between high camp and genuine evil. He also gets some ripe lines which he manages to dignify through totally believing in them. Seriously, who else could pull off, "Revenge is a dish best served cold, and it is very cold...in space"?

The second factor is that the script plays to the strengths of the individual actors and gives most of the Enterprise crew their own stories to follow (although Nichelle Nichols' Uhura and George Takei's Sulu are not as well-served as others) . Chekov, notably under-used in the actual series, turns up as the first officer of the Reliant who is captured by Khan early on and eventually ends up back on the Enterprise. There is an interesting and tragic subplot for Scotty, who gets his nephew a job as a trainee in the Enterprise's engineering department, whilst McCoy spends most of the movie trying to pull Kirk out of his brooding depression at turning 49. There's also the new character of Saavik, Spock's protege who is angling for her own command. Effectively played by Kirstie Alley, Saavik serves as a viewpoint character for those viewers unfamiliar with the series. Oddly, a line referencing the fact that Saavik is actually half-Romulan, half-Vulcan was cut from the movie (and not restored in any one of the half-dozen or so different cuts and edits of the movie released over the years), whilst a later joke by McCoy referring to this fact is left in, somewhat confusingly. Spock only seems to have a minor subplot at the start referring to Kirk's guilt when he takes command of the ship from him, only to disappear in the middle third of the movie whilst Kirk, Saavik and McCoy travel to Regula. Of course, this was only to set up the unexpected ending (more on which in a moment).

The movie was also made on a crushingly small budget of $8 million (later raised to $11 after positive studio reaction to dailies), less than one-quarter of that assigned to its forebear, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The producers, director and special effects crew had to work with their backs to the wall with only a limited number of sets, miniatures and effects shot available. Some shots from the preceding movie were re-used, whilst two-thirds of the movie took place on the same set, the Enterprise bridge which was redressed to serve as as the bridge of the Reliant. This saved enough money so that the final, iconic battle sequence - the Enterprise and Reliant playing cat-and-mouse in the Mutara Nebula - could be rendered as impressively as possible. The battle scenes in the movie are also superb, with the ships acting less like oversized fighters (a common complaint levelled against later movies and TV episodes) and more like the lumbering battleships they're supposed to be, dishing out and taking enormous amounts of punishment. The battle is also tremendously visceral, with decks collapsing and crewmen getting crushed, burned or subjected to lethal radiation in a manner that hadn't been seen previously on Trek (and led to the movie getting a hitherto unthinkable '15' certificate in the UK). Additionally, there's a small piece of history in the movie in the Genesis Device training movie, which is the first-ever 100% computer-generated sequence in the history of film (or so it is claimed anyway).


Particularly worthy of mention is James Horner's score, which re-uses a few elements from his earlier movies (particularly Battle for the Planets) but mostly consists of new material. His new overture, used for flybys of the Enterprise and the main title theme, is instantly classic.

Of course, what really got people talking when the movie was released was the jaw-dropping ending, which in the pre-Internet age had successfully been kept secret in a manner unlikely to be replicated today. It's still an emotionally powerful moment played by the actors in a convincing and almost poetic manner (the oft-mocked Shatner is on top form throughout this movie and its sequel). In fact, despite the sometimes hokey dialogue as related above, the movie has a number of iconic lines and quotes (mostly from A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick) which help give the movie a thematically satisfying through-line. This is a movie about not just revenge, but age, finding your right place in the world and the fact that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or indeed, the one). There's also satisfying attention paid to not copping out on the story. The writers couldn't conceive of a way that Khan and Kirk could meet without Kirk being killed, so they simply don't meet. And whilst victory is eventually won, it is only at a hard cost.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (*****) is a great film because it doesn't go overboard on the gimmicks or macguffins (the Genesis Device - which doesn't really do much - aside) and simply has two enemies on two equally-matched ships slugging it out and one winning through the use of his wits. With strong thematic underpinnings, endlessly quotable dialogue, a score to die for, great effects and some solid acting, the movie overcomes a few cheesy lines, a couple of continuity gaffes (Chekov never met Khan in Space Seed and didn't appear until the following season) and some 80s hairstyles to retain its place as not just the best Star Trek movie, but an entertaining and breathlessly exciting SF movie in its own right.

The movie has just been reissued on DVD in the UK and also released for the first time on Blu-Ray. In the USA the movie is only currently available as part of a boxed set also featuring the other five original-cast movies, on Blu-Ray (UK, USA). Oddly, this collection is not available on DVD in the USA, with only a 'trilogy collection' containing the second, third and fourth movies available, whilst the full box set is available on DVD in the UK. Exactly why Paramount have done this, or not included any of the excellent special features from the 2002 DVD release, I have no idea.

Iron Master by Patrick Tilley

Steve Brickman, former Skyhawk pilot turned AMEXICO secret agent, is out of his depth. His mission to capture Mr. Snow, Cadillac and Clearwater, the three M'Call Mutes whose powers pose a direct threat to the Amtrak Federation's expansion, has been complicated by the fact that Cadillac and Clearwater have been sent as envoys to Ne-Issan, the homeland of the mysterious Iron Masters. With little choice, Brickman is forced to follow and soon learns that Cadillac is posing as a Tracker wingman, using the knowledge and information he stole from Brickman's own mind to construct an air force for the Iron Masters.


Meanwhile, in Ne-Issan the Shogun is concerned over the ambitions of the powerful Yama-Shita family, who already control the lucrative Great Lakes trading routes into the Mute heartlands and now seem to be organising themselves for an attempt to displace him from power by sponsoring the air force project. His top agent, Herald of the Inner Court Toshiro Hase-Gawa, is dispatched to sabotage the aircraft production facility by any means necessary, and soon finds an unlikely ally in the shape of Steve Brickman...

If Cloud Warrior was an exploration of the culture of the Mutes and First Family looked more closely at the inner workings and government of the Federation, Iron Master turns its attention to the society of Ne-Issan. For reasons that Tilley doesn't entirely explain, vast numbers of East Asian refugees from the War of a Thousand Suns somehow reached the former Eastern Seaboard of the United States and set up a feudal society based heavily on Shogunate-era Japan, running from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. The society they have built is undeniably well-drawn and fascinating, but it seems a bit odd that refugees from Asia would end up on the Atlantic coast of America and not, say, in the Washington-Oregon-California area.

Anyway, ignoring that geographic oddity, Iron Master is the best of the first three books in the series. Tilley's grasp of political intrigue and his appetite for plans-within-plans and multiple layers of deception reaches its full flower here, as Brickman pursues his agenda, Hase-Gawa pursues his, the Shogun's wily chancellor pursues yet another and AMEXICO do their bit to add to the confusion as well. It's a complex and at times confusing story, but Tilley's clear prose, relentless pace and gift for action sequences keeps events ticking along nicely. Characterisation is strong, with Brickman's evolution to a full-blown double agent continuing in an intriguing manner and Hase-Gawa making for an effective supporting character (his true motivations are held back for the last few pages of the book and make for a nice twist). Unfortunately, Clearwater, despite being one of the central figures in the series, remains a bit bland and distant as a character.

Iron Master (****) is a strong and compulsive read and is a solid continuation of the series. Again, it is no longer in print but second-hand copies are available in the UK and USA.

First Family by Patrick Tilley

Having escaped from the clutches of the M'Call Mutes, Steve Brickman triumphantly returns to the Federation fully expecting to be congratulated on his exploits and his gathering of vital intelligence on the enemy. Instead he is arrested as a deserter and narrowly escapes death before being sent to menial, ball-busting work in the A-levels. According to the doctrines of the First Family, the rulers of the Amtrak Federation, Mutes do not take prisoners, and that 'truth' cannot be contradicted. But now Brickman knows something of the truth the Family has other plans for him, and for his Mute friends...


Picking up immediately after the events of Cloud Warrior, the second volume in The Amtrak Wars is a slightly different beast. There's still a fair amount of action and the pace remains furious and at times page-turningly addictive, but after the straightforward plot of the first book things get murkier here. Conspiracies are revealed, deeper mysteries are alluded to and labyrinth plots are set in motion. Political intrigue also rears its head as we meet some key figures within the Family, such as the President-General and Karlstrom, the ruthless head of the clandestine intelligence agency AMEXICO. Tilley's grip of worldbuilding also remains strong, as we begin to learn more about the shadowy Iron Masters who live on the Eastern Seaboard and trade weapons with the Mutes through great steamships ploughing the Great Lakes.

As I mentioned in the first book, true-blue all-American hero Steve Brickman started off as a bit of a lemon, but in this second book he starts evolving into a more interesting protagonist. A key theme of the series is Brickman's torn loyalties between the Federation and his family, and the Mutes, his would-be mentor Mr. Snow and Steve's would-be lover, Clearwater. This results in Steve having to spin out some pretty spectacular lies, cover-stories and half-truths to keep either side from plugging him, and seeing Steve struggle through the mental gymnastics required to keep one step ahead of everyone else is fascinating (and it's all rather mild here, compared to the labyrinth of plots and counter-plots that have developed by the final volume).

The writing in this volume is also notably better, with Tilley restraining his more excited passages to convey the action in a slightly more thoughtful style. However, the refreshingly informal prose remains intact, as do the slightly confusing multiple POV switches in one chapter.

First Family (***½) steps up the pace, deepens the world and the story and the cliffhanger ending effectively hooks the reader into the third book in the series, Iron Master. Again, the book is out of print at the moment but copies seem to be available in the UK and USA.

RIP David Eddings

SF Crow's Nest broke the news this morning that fantasy author David Eddings passed away last night at the age of 77. Eddings is best-known as the author of the five-volume Belgariad series of novels published in the early 1980s. Alongside Terry Brooks' Shannara books, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar series and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant novels, they are credited with establishing the subgenre of modern epic fantasy.


Eddings was born in Spokane, Washington State in 1931. He grew up near Seattle and attended the Reed College and University of Washington. He was drafted into the US Army in 1961 and, upon leaving, worked as a college lecturer. Poor pay led him to move to Denver where he worked as a grocery store clerk whilst working on his first novel, an adventure story called High Hunt. He worked on many other books in this time, but found most of them to be poor and he abandoned them. The only other book he completed at this time was The Losers. Frustrated with his lack of success in the writing field, he was only re-inspired when he picked up a copy of The Lord of the Rings in a bookstore and found it was on its 78th printing. He retrieved a map he had drawn as a diversion a few years later, and used it as the basis for his first fantasy world. Although his early fantasy work was credited to David by himself, in later years he announced that his wife Leigh had co-written all of his fantasy novels with him.

They wrote The Belgariad as a trilogy, but upon selling it to Del Rey Books, he was asked by his editor Lester Del Rey to expand it to a five-book series. Del Rey also suggested the chess-inspired titles for each individual book. The early novels sold very well, and the Eddings suggested a sequel series to Del Rey, called The Malloreon, over dinner. Apparently Lester had to be dissuaded from drawing up a contract there and then on a napkin. During the latter part of writing The Malloreon novels Eddings came up with an idea for a trilogy which he liked so much that he actually wrote the last couple of Malloreon novels alongside the Elenium trilogy. When this series also proved successful, he and his wife went on to write The Tamuli sequel series.

In the mid-1990s, Eddings' output slowed and he gave his wife full cover credit for the remaining works of his career. They produced two prequels to The Belgariad, a companion volume called The Rivan Codex (which described their writing and worldbuilding processes), a stand-alone novel called The Redemption of Althalus and a four-book series called The Dreamers. Leigh Eddings fell ill with a series of strokes around this time, and passed away in early 2007. Eddings also briefly made headlines in his local area around this time when he accidentally set his office on fire and the local fire brigade had to be called out.


Eddings' work is beloved by readers, many of whom got their first taste of fantasy by reading The Belgariad at a young age (and current editions of The Belgariad are indeed aimed primarily at YA readers). Older readers and critics were less kind when contrasting Eddings' work to more adult fantasy novels, but Eddings' career continued to prove an enormous success. The Rivan Codex is a refreshingly candid account of how Eddings was motivated to write fantasy initially purely for profit, and he was certainly successful at this endeavour. Eddings was famously old-fashioned and, with his wife, wrote everything in longhand, not even using a typewriter. Although he appreciated his fans, he was wary of the modern expected methods of book marketing and communication, and as a result refused to allow an official website to be set up for him either.

I read The Belgariad, as many others did, as a kid and enjoyed them. Reading The Malloreon as a teenager, I spotted Eddings' more notable flaws (extreme repetition, shallow descriptions, caricatures rather than characters etc) and was unable to finish The Tamuli, one of the two or three worst works of fantasy I have ever read. However, The Rivan Codex is a surprisingly decent and honest account of how to create formulaic fantasy, and Eddings' informal way of writing in this book is enjoyable. Despite his flaws, Eddings' contribution to the expanding appeal of the epic fantasy subgenre cannot be underestimated. He had millions of fans around the world, and he will be missed.


Bibliography

The Belgariad
Pawn of Prophecy (1982)
Queen of Sorcery (1982)
Magicians' Gambit (1983)
Castle of Wizardry (1984)
Enchanters' End Game (1985)

The Malloreon
Guardians of the West (1987)
King of the Murgos (1988)
Demon Lord of Karanda (1988)
Sorceress of Dashiva (1989)
Seeress of Kell (1991)

The Elenium
The Diamond Throne (1989)
The Ruby Knight (1990)
The Sapphire Rose (1991)

The Tamuli
Domes of Fire (1992)
The Shining Ones (1993)
The Hidden City (1994)

The Belgariad Companion Books (with Leigh Eddings)
Belgarath the Sorcerer (1995)
Polgara the Sorceress (1997)
The Rivan Codex (1998, non-fiction)

The Dreamers (with Leigh Eddings)
The Elder Gods (2003)
The Treasured One (2004)
Crystal Gorge (2005)
The Younger Gods (2006)

Stand-alone works
High Hunt (1986)
The Losers (1992)
Regina's Song (2000, with Leigh Eddings)
The Redemption of Althalus (2000, with Leigh Eddings)

Return to Monkey Island

LucasArts have, somewhat out of the blue, revealed that they are releasing a specially-remade version of their 1990 classic adventure game, The Secret of Monkey Island, this summer. This will coincide with the release of a new, five-part episodic game called Tales of Monkey Island, produced in conjunction with Telltale Games (producers of the recent Sam 'n' Max and Wallace & Gromit episodic games).


The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the most influential games of all time, combining a ton of humour and inventive visuals with fiendish puzzles and excellently-realised characters. For 1990's standards, it looked amazing and was a huge hit. Its 1993 sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, was considerably larger, far funnier, with jaw-dropping graphics (for the time) and a far more epic story with an ending that people are still talking about today. I'd easily rank it as the best single adventure game ever made (and if they do a remake/re-release of MI2, which is probably dependent on sales of this one, I will be first in queue to pick it up). Series creator Ron Gilbert departed LucasArts after MI2 and the later Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island were comparatively disappointing, although not without merit.

The Monkey Island remake is interesting because, anticipating purist fans who hate the new art style, the team have enabled a mode to allow you to switch between the new, sharper HD graphics and console-based controls to the old-school pixels and cursor controls at will (no word if the PC version will allow the use of the mouse cursor with the new graphics, although it would be weird if it wouldn't). It looks very nice indeed, with the original soundtrack re-recorded and the new graphics looking solid without going way overboard (and they're not 3D, thank LeChuck).

Tales of Monkey Island I'm less crazy about. Telltale Games have a very variable track history, and the graphics look ropey and the trailer didn't make me laugh at all. Maybe it'll turn out okay, but for now I'll stick with the remake.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition will be released on PC and X-Box 360 in the summer, Tales of Monkey Island should launch on the PC and Wii in a few weeks.

Cloud Warrior by Patrick Tilley

AD 2989. Nine hundred and seventy-four years ago, the Old Time ended in the War of a Thousand Suns. The cities of the United States were seared from the face of the Earth in a nuclear holocaust unleashed by the evil 'Mutes', malformed immigrants whose only desire was to destroy all that was beautiful and good about this great country. Or at least, that's what the historical databanks of the super-computer COLUMBUS say, anyway.


The Amtrak Federation: a network of underground cities and overland way-stations that grew out of a few bunkers where the top-ranking politicians and generals of the United States rode out a thermonuclear war. Forced to abandon the surface world due to radiation, the descendants of the survivors dug out a vast subterranean, high-tech civilisation where everyone knows their place and does their bit to help society survive, whilst the wise and just First Family rules over everything. Once radiation levels had dropped to a relatively safe level, the Federation emerged to retake the surface world. Unfortunately, they found that the Mutes had prospered and multiplied to truly frightening numbers in the intervening centuries. The Federation's response is to build enormous 600-foot-long wagon-trains and send them into Mute territory to begin the process of conquest and purification. With the Southern Mutes cowed, the Federation dispatches one of its most decorated trains, the Lady from Louisiana, and its air wing deep into the heart of the territory of the northern Mutes, or the Plainfolk as they call themselves. But the Plainfolk are a hardier breed with unusual weapons at their command, and in the epic Battle of the Now and Then River the clan M'Call drives off the Lady and takes one of its pilots captive.

For Steve Brickman, captivity amongst the Mutes is a terrifying prospect, but as he plots his escape he learns from his captors a radically different version of history and begins to question the very foundations of the society he was born into.

The Amtrak Wars is Welsh author Patrick Tilley's grand SF adventure series, originally published in six volumes throughout the 1980s. It is a cross-genre story, incorporating elements of post-apocalyptic SF fiction with the Western and epic fantasy (with North America standing in for a Middle-earth clone as the landscape) and, in later books, Shogun-style historical fiction as well. There is also a strong, often darkly comical subversive and satirical streak as well, with the Amtrak Federation itself coming over as a fascist state which employs some of the rhetoric and traditions of the 20th Century United States. Tilley himself spent a lot of time in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s and appears to be something of an Americanphile (not just in the Wars but also in his excellent 1976 disaster novel Fade-Out), but his use here of many of the traditions and 'feel' of the US government and military in the hands of an unelected dictatorship is effectively disturbing. However, I gather that American readers got the impression that Tilley was taking the mickey instead, perhaps accounting for its low sales in the USA compared to its much greater success in the UK, Canada and Australia.

In the first book, it is fair to say that Tilley is still getting a feel for the story. His previous novels had been an SF-tinged disaster scenario called Fade-Out and a rather bizarre story about Jesus turning up in modern New York (Mission), so Cloud Warrior represented a rather unusual new direction. The tone of the writing here is less formal than in his earlier novels, and it has to be said that the prose jumps around in its remoteness from the reader (at one point directly addressing the reader in a rather jarring fourth-wall-breaking moment). Some scenes take place in the limited third person perspective that is now traditional in epic fantasy, but most adopt an omnipresent viewpoint which feels curiously old-fashioned (and this is a book that's 26 years old) but not ineffective.

It's a tribute to Tilley's vivid and well-conceived (if somewhat barmy) story, characters and setting that the book overcomes these problems and roars along like a greyhound on crack. The traditional modern fantasy approach of the author spending two hundred pages just clearing their throat has no truck here as we are whizzed through the Amtrak Federation's air force training programme, introduced a dozen protagonists in both the Mute and Tracker camps and machine-gunned with inventive concepts and ideas (although luckily most are revisited later under somewhat more relaxed circumstances) in less than a hundred pages. The book hangs on its characters and one of The Amtrak Wars' trademark concepts is that half of those characters are tools whom you want to spend a fair amount of time beating the hell out of, most notably Steve 'All-American Hero' Brickman, whose arrogance and pig-headedness makes him a hero that's hard to like. However, he is also only 17 and the result of a disturbing indoctrinated upbringing, and as the book progresses and you see the scales falling from his eyes (a bit), the reader warms to him a bit more. Amongst the other characters, Steve's Mute antithesis Cadillac is well-drawn but is also a bit of a plank (the contrast between these two characters' developmental arcs over the course of the series is extremely well-handled), with the most fascinating character in the book being Mr. Snow, the Mutes' chief wordsmith and summoner who fulfils the traditional mentor role, although his approach of thinking his would-be students are total morons is refreshing (Mr. Snow is the missing link between Gandalf and Abercrombie's Bayaz). Other characters such as the inevitable romantic interest Clearwater are a bit one-note in this first volume, whilst later, more important characters like Jodi Kazan and Steve's sister Roz barely get more than a few lines. There is also an intriguing mention of a group called the 'iron masters' and a typical cliffhanger ending, setting up the inevitable sequel, First Family.

In Cloud Warrior (***½) Tilley sets up an interesting and somewhat original (in combination, if not in original conception) world and story with well-drawn and often ambiguous characters and some fresh takes on old concepts (Tilley's handling of the tired prophecy motif is particularly nicely done). The writing is a bit all over the place, though never less than readable, but settles down in the later, stronger volumes. The novel is not currently in print but second-hand copies appear to be readily available in the UK and USA.

Wertzone Classics: Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

St. Louis, 1857. Abner Marsh is the owner of the Fevre River Packet Company, running several steamboats up and down the upper Mississippi and its tributaries. But, during a particularly harsh winter, he loses all but one of his ships. In some financial difficulties, he encounters an unexpected saviour when a European, Joshua York, offers to bail him out and fund the construction of a grand new steamboat. Marsh's career and company is saved, and he is soon the captain of the Fevre Dream, the greatest side-wheeler to ever run the river. The ship begins its maiden voyage to New Orleans, but as the ship travels south, rumours begin to circulate about the unusual Mr. York, who takes his meals at midnight and sleeps through the day, and who takes a strange interest in the reports of unexplained deaths along the river banks.

UK Fantasy Masterworks covers, 2001 and 2008 editions

Meanwhile, in New Orleans a man named Sour Billy Tipton recruits slaves for his employer, a mysterious recluse named Damon Julian, who lives in an old, crumbling estate on a bayou south of the city. Julian has an odd reputation and people mutter about all the slaves who go onto his estate but never leave. It becomes clear that, to their 'people', Julian is a constant, ancient and immovable force, and York is a new saviour, come with a promise of liberation and freedom. Only one of them can prevail. But in this clash what will be the fate of the Fevre Dream, its crew and its captain?

Fevre Dream was originally published in 1982 and was a big hit for its author. It sold very well and attracted a great deal of praise, even a cover quote from the hard-to-please Harlan Ellison. The novel is a hybrid of Heart of Darkness, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the complete works of Byron, welded to Martin's gripping storytelling abilities, here at the height of their powers. In terms of completed works, it is GRRM's finest novel published to date (although in terms of incomplete ones, A Storm of Swords may be slightly stronger).

The genre here is horror, mixed in with a strong historical flavouring. The atmosphere of the novel is vivid and extremely rich, and after a few pages of reading about the steamboats on the Mississippi you'll be swatting aside imaginary flies and thinking about opening a window. GRRM strikes an impressive balance between the romantic vision and the harsh reality of a historical period here, as he does with 1960s bands in The Armageddon Rag and with medieval warfare in A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, the steamboats on the river at dusk are a stirring and evocative sight, but there's also the slave trade and the dirty riverside towns where crime runs amok and the slowly building tensions that will explode in civil war just a few years later, all of which is well-depicted.

US mass-market edition from Bantam and limited edition from Subterrenean Press

GRRM is widely-regarded for his characterisation and here it is no different. From the bluff, fat and straightforward Abner Marsh to the driven, passionate Joshua York to the weaselly Billy Tipton (who may be GRRM's most pitiably hateful character ever) and the horrifyingly empty Damon Julian, he has populated this book with characters who stay with you long after the final page is turned. The plot is page-turningly compulsive and the pace furious, but still with enough pauses for breath to let the atmosphere sink in. And, as a horror story, it is genuinely horrific. No punches are pulled, there are no cop-outs and what victories there are come at a terrible price.

That said, like Huck Finn travelling downriver with Jim, Fevre Dream has at its core the notion of friendship and what lengths people will go to help one another, and this is worked through the narrative in a masterful manner culminating in a final chapter which may be GRRM's finest piece of writing to date.

Fevre Dream (*****) is a book I curse, for it has destroyed almost all other vampire fiction for me. Very little of it stands up to this volume (Ultraviolet, maybe Buffy before every other vampire on the show started getting a soul and going Twilight on us). But the price is worth it. This is a magnificent novel. It is available now in the UK from Gollancz (the current edition has a disappointingly bland new cover, but thankfully the superb one which previously adorned it is still in print) and in the USA from Bantam and also as a limited edition from Subterrenean Press, attractively illustrated by Justin Sweet.

Getting in touch with orc feelings

A short video where Jaine Fenn, Alex Bell, Suzanne McLeod, Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan and Alastair Reynolds discuss the differences in approach to writing fantasy:



Thanks to NethSpace for the find there.

Fallout 3: DLC Expansions 1-3

Fallout 3 was an enormous success for Bethesda when it was released last autumn, and Bethesda were quick to confirm they were working on DLC (downloadable content) for the game. Learning from the lukewarm response to DLC for their previous game, Oblivion (shelling out several pounds or dollars to get in-game 'horse armour' was a bit weak), Bethesda decided to make the DLC for Fallout 3 more ambitious, splitting the development team into three to quickly deliver three substantial expansions to the existing game in short order: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel. This has since expanded to include two further expansions, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta, which will be released in the coming months.


Operation Anchorage and The Pitt are 'plug-ins' to the existing game and can be played at any time, whether upon emerging from Vault 101 at Level 1 or having completed the original game at Level 20. Broken Steel is a direct sequel to Fallout 3, with new quests expanding the story past the end of the game. It also lifts the experience cap to Level 30. If you finished FO3 and want to carry on earning experience, it makes sense to install Broken Steel before tackling any of the DLC, which makes it a bit odd that they released Broken Steel as third expansion. The two expansions to come are also plug-ins. Assuming you don't do too much random exploring or ruin crawls, the five DLC expansions should just get you to Level 30.

Operation Anchorage (***) opens with a distress signal calling you deep into the Washington, DC ruins, where you find the base of the Brotherhood Outcasts. These individuals were found wandering around the landscape in the original game, but you now get their full story and learn they are trying to get into a vault equipped with some hardcore weaponry and high-level items. The only way to do this is to beat a VR simulation of Operation Anchorage, the US Army's retaking of Alaska after the Chinese invasion in 2077. If you volunteer to undergo the simulation, you enter the battlefield bereft of weapons and have to take the part of a US soldier fighting on the front lines. This is a combat-focused expansion with almost no roleplaying elements at all (save conversations with your commanding officer). Players who liked the VATS-fuelled combat of Fallout 3 will enjoy the battles, the new weapons and in particular the early access to Power Armour (doing Operation Anchorage at Level 1 is eye-opening, as you leave the vault with the best armour in the game). Those who want something more meaty and story-driven may be more disappointed.

The Pitt (***½) also starts with an SOS signal, this time calling you to a train tunnel at the northern edge of the map. Here you meet Wernher, an outcast from 'the Pitt', the enormous rebuilt steel mills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who asks your aid in freeing his people from slavery. You agree and have to go incognito as a slave in the Pitt (any NPC allies return to their home and can be re-hired upon your return to DC). Although illogical (at Level 20+ you could go through the Pitt, kill all the slavers and save everyone in about half an hour), being temporarily bereft of all your weapons and armour does reintroduce an element of challenge to the game, and the only weapon allowed to you, the Autoaxe (a mechanical axe with a spinning blade head), is one of the best melee weapons in the game. The Pitt is small, consisting of only a couple of outdoor areas linked by the steel mills and a dungeon-like area called the Scrapyard, but ingeniously designed with maximum use made of vertical space. The story is also solid, with a very morally ambigious climax. Unlike the Anchorage simulation, you can return to the Pitt any time after completing it, but there is very little reason to do so.

Broken Steel (****) is the main attraction of the DLCs and is the best of the three. Your character wakes up two weeks after the end of Fallout 3 (which you may recalled involved a massive water purification project, a face-off between the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave and the unleashing of a demented giant weapon of war) to find all-out war raging. The Brotherhood has pushed the Enclave back to the edge of the DC area, but momentum is faltering as the Enclave strike back with powerful new weapons. At the same time, the Brotherhood's attempts to use the Purifier to decontaminate the tidal basin of the Potomac are complicated by the fact that several self-serving groups in the Capital Wasteland are trying to cash in on the new, inexhaustible source of fresh, safe water. The player's job is to investigate these latter problems and put a stop to them, and help the Brotherhood see off the Enclave once and for all.


Broken Steel is an excellent addition to the game, with the raising of the level limit allowing your character to become more skilled and powerful and the addition of some impressive new weapons, such as the Tesla Coil, the only weapon in the game which can shoot down Enclave aircraft. There also seems a lot more to do, with some decent side-quests and a major new area (Edwards Air Force Base) to explore. Also, since Broken Steel takes place on the existing DC map, you can also finish off any random missions you were previously pursuing or explore any buildings you missed the first time around. Finally, unlike FO3 itself, Broken Steel ends with the game world still fully explorable, so you can carry on adventuring or hold out for the next DLC episodes as you please.

The Fallout 3 foray into DLC is mostly a success, adding a decent amount of content to the game for a reasonable price in a reasonable timescale (to have twelve hours or so of content added to the game within six months of its original release is highly impressive). There are some issues, however. Buying the expansions from Games for Windows Live is frustrating experience, notably because the expansions cost 800 points each but you can only buy points in batches of either 500 or 1,000. No matter which way you swing it, you're going to have points left over which you may never use, and thus wasted money. Holding out for the boxed copies is an option, but the fifth one, Mothership Zeta, will only be available online or in the Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition, which isn't due until October. PS3 players have also missed out, with Operation Anchorage not due until next month and the other four at irregular intervals after that. All three DLCs also had some bugs and download issues when they were first released, although these have all now been fixed.

Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel are available to download from Games for Windows for PC and X-Box 360 now, and will hit PS3's Sony Marketplace over the next few months. Boxed omnibus copies of Operation Anchorage/The Pitt and Broken Steel/Point Lookout will be released in the summer on all three formats. Point Lookout will be released on Games for Windows in late June and Mothership Zeta in August. According to strong rumours, Bethesda are not working on a large-scale Fallout 3 expansion and will instead be focusing on The Elder Scrolls V for 2010/2011 release, with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas (due in mid-2010) instead filling the gap.