Tad Williams talks to George R.R. Martin

There's an interesting transcript here of a George R.R. Martin book signing in California hosted by Tad Williams. Before the signing itself started, Williams fired off some questions at George about his work. Particularly interesting is when Martin expands on how he was partly inspired to write A Game of Thrones after reading the first two volumes in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. Amusingly, Williams avoids responding to Martin's request to write more stories set in Osten Ard.


There's another report of the event and some pics here as well.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

22-year-old Canadian slacker Scott Pilgrim faces ridicule from his friends and bandmates when he hooks up with 17-year-old high-schooler Knives Chau. However, his life becomes infinitely more complicated when he dumps Chau for enigmatically cool American girl Ramona Flowers. Flowers' seven 'evil exes' have decided that Scott must defeat them all in order to date Ramona. Scott is forced into seven battles of escalating difficulty as he tries to win Ramona's heart and make amends for his rough treatment of Chau.


Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting film. It's a full-scale, all-out assault on the viewer's sensibilities, with radical shifts of tone and pace as the film moves from what appears to be a grounded comedy with some geeky overtones to a flat-out fantastical cartoon-made-flesh, with characters levitating through the air and unleashing 'demon hipster chicks' in battle, before shifting back to an intense relationship drama for five minutes before side-shifting into a bloodless Tarantino movie. In many ways cool, but it makes for an at times uneven film.

The movie is directed by Edgar Wright, who previously helmed the flicks Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and the TV series Spaced. This film marks his first major work without the partnership of Simon Pegg (who was writing and filming Paul at the same time; Pegg and Wright will apparently be soon reconvening for a third film). The film also marks Wright's first work with an American-sized movie budget: Scott Pilgrim cost ten times as much as Hot Fuzz and twenty times as much as Shaun of the Dead to make and every cent of it can be seen on screen. The visuals in the movie are kinetic, explosive and rich (multiple viewings may be required to take everything in), though never too confusing. The fight scenes are pretty good, and the choreography makes you believe that Michael Cera could kick some backside, which is an impressive achievement. As an action movie - the American Kung Fu Hustle is a comparison I've seen made - it works very well.

As a relationship drama/comedy it's more varied. It's not helped that central character Scott Pilgrim is rather unlikable. I know that's the point of both comic and film, but he doesn't really improve and become more likable over the course of the film, at least not until the last few seconds of the movie. Michael Cera is also pretty much just Michael Cera in the film, only really springing to life during the battles (particularly the bass battle, when he brings the required attitude) and the rest of the time doing his whiny indie actor spiel, which risks becoming tiresome. In a film full of villains exploding into coins, music-summoned CGI dragons and people reincarnating after using an 'extra life', the most fantastical thing is that any of these women would find Pilgrim even remotely attractive.

Luckily, the rest of the cast is almost flawlessly excellent. Kieran Culkin is superb as Pilgrim's 'cool gay flatmate' who acts as his moral compass, whilst Anna Pill is suitably demented as drummer Kim (whose band introductions are among the funnier things in the film). Ellen Wong and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are both great as Scott's love interests Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers. Winstead hits the note that Cera fails to by successfully portraying a sympathetic character despite her many bad decisions and judgment calls.

The film also has a few nice ironic cameo appearances. Brandon Routh (the ex-Superman) and Chris Evans (Captain America/the Human Torch) play two of Ramona's evil exes, a rival bassist with psi-powers gained through veganism and a skateboarder-turned-action-movie-star. Both actors take the mickey out of their tough guy roles with excellent comic timing, not to mention Wright reusing the Spaced approach of getting characters to do things they don't want to by using the magic phrase, "There's girls watching".

Once you get past the great performances (a variable lead aside) and startling visuals, the movie is effectively a metaphor for characters having to confront the demons of their past and not let bad history restrict the potential for happiness in the future. Or something along those lines. It's also a crazy action flick with tons of excellent geek references which will appeal to those who know what Scott Pilgrim is talking about when he references the bassline to the theme tune for Final Fantasy II (which I believe is actually Final Fantasy V, but given a different number due to...sorry, getting off-topic there) and where the beautiful 'L word' is 'lesbian'.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (****) goes on a little too long and towards the end becomes repetitive (I think it might have worked better with five evil exes), and Wright's visual brilliance becomes a little over-manic when not restrained by a stronger writing partner like Simon Pegg, but overall this is a fun and frantic movie with strong performances and an offbeat sense of humour. The movie is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines for under £4!

Steam sales can be a thing of beauty, when a game you've wanted to get for years suddenly crops up on sale for the equivalent of pocket money.


In this case, for this weekend only, the critically-acclaimed RPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is at 75% off. In the UK that equates to £3.74. For a game that's six years old and whose development company no longer exists, Bloodlines has rarely cropped up on Steam sales and has maintained a mid-ranking price of £14.99 for most of that time. So this price drop is great news for people who've been waiting to try the game out for a while.

There are a number of fan-made patches available for the game, though it's a bit of a minefield trying to work out which one is the best. Rock Paper Shotgun covers some of these issues here.

Original TRANSFORMERS storyline to resume

For a laugh, I recently went through the original run of Transformers comics on the Westeros.org forum. This incorporated all 80 issues of the original US comic published Marvel between 1984 and 1991, as well as the British comic stories that were interwoven with them. It was therefore a very surprising, but appropriate, coincidence that IDW (the current license-holders for Transformers comics) then announced that they would be picking up the original storyline left truncated by the comic's unexpected conclusion in June 1991.


The original creative team - writer Simon Furman and artist Andrew Wildman - are returning and the new comic will pick up storylines left dangling back in 1991. Apparently they are ignoring the Generation 2 sequel mini-series that ran in 1993-94, since they feel it hasn't aged as well as the original comics.

Transformers #81 will be released in 2012. The current plan is for a 19-issue arc taking the comic up to #100 and a grand conclusion to the original story begun way back in 1984. Depending on when the exact dates, that could carry them through to the franchise's 30th anniversary in 2014. Needless to say, old-school Transformers fans who still have all of their old comics in a secure drawer (cough) are very pleased by this news.

Simon Furman on what to expect from the new title:

"It is going to shatter your trousers! Guaranteed!"

Excellent. Though probably not a hint that the first storyline will be called Shattered Trousers.

Brandon Sanderson update on A MEMORY OF LIGHT

Brandon Sanderson has Tweeted that the final Wheel of Time novel, A Memory of Light, is about one-third done. He's caught up with some material he worked on whilst working on the first leg of the final three books back in 2007-09, and the percentage completed bar on his website should move up significantly in the next week or so.


A Memory of Light is currently planned for release in November 2012. Tor have also recently announced that Michael Whelan will be creating the cover art for the e-edition of the series, though Darrell K. Sweet will be providing the hardcover image for the sake of uniformity with the earlier books in the series.

EDIT: In a further Tweet, Sanderson confirms that he hopes to turn the book in to Tor in November this year.

Interview with R. Scott Bakker, Part 2

Pat has posted the second part of an interview with R. Scott Bakker here. This is an interesting exchange as Scott gets into some detailed discussions of the metaphysics and backstory of his world, some of which may be spoilerish for The Unholy Consult, the next book in his series.

A Game of Thrones - The Board Game: 2nd Edition

Fantasy Flight's A Game of Thrones: The Board Game has been a major success ever since it was first published in 2003, spawning two expansions and winning the Origins Award for best original board game. The game has recently drifted out of print and started commanding insane prices on eBay, so Fantasy Flight have decided to release a new 2nd Edition of the game, incorporating elements of the expansions into the core game. This also means an excuse to trot out some fantastic artwork of King's Landing on the new box:


The game will be out before Christmas, and is likely to sell well given the ludicrous boost in sales the books have gotten from the TV series.

Wertzone Classics: The Uplift War by David Brin

Far across the Galaxy, a dolphin-crewed starship has made a discovery of startling significance. Senior Galactic clans have dispatched fleets to find that ship, but have also decided to hold Earth and her colony worlds hostage for the data being handed over. To this end, Earth and her Tymbrimi allies have been forced to pull back most of their military to defend their homeworlds, leaving outlying colonies vulnerable.


Garth is one such world, a verdant planet nearly wrecked in an ecological holocaust millennia earlier. Humans and their neo-chimpanzee clients have worked hard to restore the planet to a livable state, but now find their world under occupation by the hostile, avian Gubru. With most of the human populace imprisoned, it falls to a band of chimps, a single free human and the Tymbrimi ambassador and his daughter to resist the occupiers...and try to keep a secret that Garth has held for years.

The Uplift War is the third novel in David Brin's Uplift Saga, originally published in 1987, and takes place concurrently and just after the events of Startide Rising, but many thousands of light-years away. Whilst the events of Startide Rising set in motion The Uplift War, knowledge of that novel is not required to really enjoy The Uplift War, which stands alone. The novel won the Hugo and Locus awards for Best Novel in 1988.

The Uplift War is a fine SF novel which is notably different in tone to Startide Rising; in the intervening four years Brin had penned three non-Uplift novels and had become a better, more experienced writer. The Uplift War is slightly darker and much less frantic than its forerunner, with a somewhat less frivolous tone. The cast of characters is smaller, with a much greater focus on the motivations and ambitions of each individual character. Startide Rising was good at this, but the larger cast meant that there was a fair bit of 'off-screen characterisation' (i.e. we are told about great a character is but only get glimpses of it ourselves due to limited page space). Here much more is on the page, and more effective for it. Brin seems to have realised that his alien races in the previous novel were very broadly sketched, so here we get much more information and depth to the Tybrimi, Gubru and Thennanin, as well as the neo-chimpanzees whose culture and social structure are as well-realised as that of the dolphins in the previous novel.

The book is essentially a war story where the military conflict is undertaken under extremely limiting rules of war (though the ruthless Gubru show some ingenuity in getting around these restrictions), resulting in occasionally humorous comedy-of-manners moments as the chimps (who, as a junior client species, have to show respect for senior Patron races, even enemy ones, at all times) bow and use formal greetings and dialogue against the Gubru whilst simultaneously trying to blow them them with prejudice. These lighter moments are set in contrast to the more ruthless methods imposed by the invaders at other points.


This is a long novel - over 600 pages in paperback - but moves quite quickly. Brin's prose is easy to read and quite page-turning, but bogs down a little whenever the Tymbrimi characters appear, as they express emotions through a series of psi-glyphs which appear above their heads. Rather than explaining what these glyphs mean in the text, Brin instead merely mentions their name and expects the reader to refer to the glyph-glossary at the front of the book, the sort of narrative 'cheat' more commonly encountered in epic fantasy. This interrupts the narrative flow, but fortunately becomes less common in the second half of the book.

Brin develops an ecological theme throughout the novel. The Uplift universe is based on the idea that if races were allowed to exploit each planet they colonised however they liked, then all of the Five Galaxies would be 'burned out' in a few tens of millennia (an eyeblink for a civilisation between two and three billion years of age). Even the most fanatically conservative Galactic clans are aware of this danger, so ecological maintenance and repair is a primary responsibility of all races. This also handily explains the virtual non-existence of biosphere-wrecking weapons, such as nukes and antimatter, from the Uplift universe...at least whilst the rules of war are being respected. Brin doesn't use this as an excuse to lecture - although the importing of one of Earth's endangered species to Garth to help in the ecological recovery skirts close to it - but instead as a way of intelligently developing the plot and bringing about a logical conclusion to the crisis. I suspect at the time (this book came out just before the movie Gorillas in the Mist) the ecological angle may have come across as a bit more strident.

The Uplift War (****½) is well-written, with memorable characters (flamboyant neo-chimp Filben could helm his own spin-off series) and some great ideas. There are moments of cliche and perhaps a slight feeling that everything falls out a little too neatly to allow for a happy ending (contrasted to the messy ending to Startide Rising, with multiple characters killed or abandoned in hostile territory), which dents the book a little, but overall this is a fine, colourful and entertaining space opera. The novel is available now in the USA and, second-hand, in the UK.

Alastair Reynolds to pen DOCTOR WHO novel

With Michael Moorcock penning last year's big Doctor Who hardcover and Dan Abnett writing this year's one, BBC Books seems to be developing a taste for getting known SF figures to work on the series. They have just announced that SF author Alastair Reynolds is working on a Doctor Who novel called Harvest of Time.


The book will feature the Third Doctor and Jo Grant facing the Master. In his blog post on the subject Reynolds talks about his love of the series and why he decided to use this particular Doctor/companion/enemy combination.

The novel should be released in 2012.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN clip

I've been ambivalent about the new Conan movie. Jason Momoa looks great in the role, but the existing trailers made the film look a bit cheesy. However, this (NSFW) new clip is great:

Pure Conan attitude there (especially spitting the egg out at the end) and Ron Perlman is always good value. I might check this out when the movie is released next month.