Everything Is Nice

So, as I mentioned, it hasn’t been a great year for reading. At the same time, I have written substantially more reviews than ever before. The upshot of this is that I will be reviewing less in 2010 and probably reading a lot less SF. I am feeling a bit stale and I need revitalising.

Another change is that from next month I will take over as reviews editor for Vector. I am working my way through the handover at the moment and I will post more about this once my first issue is ready towards the end of February. For the moment, I will just say I am excited about the opportunity. Anyway, I have a couple of reviews outstanding for the long-suffering Rodger Turner over at SF Site and I will probably continue to write four reviews a year for Vector but other than that I’m going to have a bit of break. Unless, of course, my resolve crumbles. This only applies to formal reviews (I will continue to blog about books) and books (I am hoping to write more film reviews).

The latest mailing from the BSFA has arrived. It includes a special pamphlet edited by me called SF Writers On SF Films: From Akira To Zardoz. It does exactly what it says on the tin. As I said, Matrix has relaunched (although the whole site seems to be down at the minute) so hopefully we will be able to make some of the contributions from indivudal authors available online at some point in the future.

Elsewhere in the mailing there are a couple of odd articles in Focus. Well, the one on Blake’s 7 isn’t so much odd as misplaced since its obvious home is in Matrix. The other one – Christopher Priest on writing sex scenes – is very rum indeed. I’ve only flicked through Vector but it seems to contain the usually goodness. It also includes my review of Fools’ Experiments by Edward M Lerner which opens:

Perhaps this is just an unfair prejudice of mine but as far as I’m concerned any book that uses sound effects is likely to be a bad book. In this case, at least, the cracks and thwocks and blats do indeed herald a writer with very little facility for the English language.

Look forward to some more thoughts on sound effects and possibly didactic italics when I read Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains.

I know, I know, it is a bit of a cheesy and obvious title but it does capture both the essential nature of this project and the eclectic results it has produced.

A couple of years ago, PS Publishing put out a book edited by Mark Morris called Cinema Macabre. The idea was simple but brilliant: get a bunch of horror writers to write about horror films. In fact, this was such a good idea that I have ripped it off for this booklet by simply substituting SF for horror.

When I started approaching writers, I knew that I didn’t necessarily want this to end up as a best of list, rather I wanted a bunch of films people loved. Ian Watson opens his piece by saying “Dark City is the only film which has caused me to build a garden feature”. That is exactly what I was after. This means that in this pamphlet you will find people writing about such diverse films as Lilo & Stitch, Robocop 2 and yes, Zardoz.

This isn’t just an exercise in contrarianism though. Adam Roberts and Paul McAuley – writing about Blade Runner and 2001, respectively – show that some films are loved precisely because they are the real deal. Sometimes the canon is there for a reason.

There was only room for sixteen contributions to this supplement but it is still interesting to see what the gaps are. Star Wars and The Matrix are referenced but not chosen. Perhaps surprisingly no one picked Alien but we have two views of Aliens, both with testicles (Neal Asher) and without (Jaine Fenn).

Hopefully the passion for science fiction cinema on display here will rub off on the reader. Certainly I don’t see how Gwyneth Jones’s gleeful exegesis for The Fifth Element could fail to fire your enthusiasm. And Philip Palmer has even persuaded me to watch Robocop 2 again, which is something I never thought I would say.

Matrix – the BSFA’s online media magazine – has just relaunched. This is probably a good time to point out I’ve added links to all my reviews for Matrix to the reviews page of this blog. Some of these reviews are quite old and they aren’t necessarily what I would write today but it is good to have them available.

I saw Moon last night which I won’t be reviewing but having been thinking about. It has the courage to do something very different to most science fiction cinema but unfortunately it doens’t have the courage to follow its convictions through. So while it is a welcome change it is not the great film that a lot of us hoped for. I have some further thoughts over on Jonathan’s post.

Oh yeah, and the 2009 Strange Horizons fund Drive has just started. Give early, give often.