Category: Longform
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
This Is Spinal Tap, 1984 - ★★½
This isn't as good as I remembered, nor, in all honesty, as good as its legend suggests. It's well done, certainly, and the iconic moments are all there, of course. But it's not really that funny.
Some moments, are humorous enough, to be sure.
I wonder if the forthcoming sequel will go up to 12.
📗 Books 2025, 26: Matrix, by Lauren Groff
A book about nuns in the 12th century? Why not? Austin Kleon rates it, which is how I came to it.
About one nun, more accurately, a real historical figure, who may or may not actually have been a nun at all: Marie de France. She was definitely a poet, though.
None of that really matters, though. The book isn’t a biography, it’s fiction. A novel based loosely on a historical figure about whom not much is known. She’s descended from a fairy, or said to be in the story. She has visions of (or from) the Virgin Mary. She saves an abbey full of nuns from starvation, and turns it into a power in the land.
It’s very good. In my ongoing, unstructured notes on how writers present speech, and such: there is no direct speech at all in this. Or there is at times, but it’s not punctuated as such. I would have expected to find that annoying, but actually I hardly noticed it.
Groff is an excellent writer, I would have to say. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by her.
📗 Books2025, 25: Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi
I enjoyed this, but it hasn’t really stuck in my mind. By which I mean, I finished it a few weeks ago, and don’t really recall much of it now. I’ve read two of Hannu’s hard-SF trilogy, but never got to the third, despite what I predicted back then. They were hard work, as I recall, which is probably why I never got to the third.
This one, which was recommended by Warren Ellis is much more approachable. It’s 1938 and the afterlife has not only been discovered, living humans can communicate with the souls in it. And the intelligence services of the the Great Powers are making use of it to extend the reach of their empires.
It’s good, but thinking about it now, one idea that’s mentioned and doesn’t really get explored is this. People no longer fear death. When you know there’s an afterlife — and especially when your one of the privileged ones with a ‘Ticket’, that means your soul will persist in ‘Summerland’ and not dissipate — then there’s nothing really to fear.
But it’s a spy story, so the focus is on the plot, as it should be, and it’s a good one. Thought it maybe slightly runs out of steam at the end. Worth checking out, though.
📗 Books 2025, 24: Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness, Translated by Magnus Magnusson
This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.
In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.
It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.
We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.
It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ‘the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.
Asteroid City, 2023 - ★★★½
Daft fun from Wes Anderson. The story isn't much here, but every frame is a painting, as that YouTube channel had it. Gorgeous to look at, filled with famous faces, highly mannered acting.
The film isn't SF, but the play within the film is very lightly SF. Nothing is made of the alien's visit, though, because that's not the point.
I enjoyed it a lot.
Mission: Impossible, 1996 - ★½
I didn't see this film when it came out, but I used to love the Mission: Impossible TV series back in the seventies.
So this really annoyed me. Why the fuck would you make Jim a traitor? The heroic leader of the IM team for years? The man to whom the self-destructing message was always given. Give him a peaceful retirement, for god's sake. Or just leave him out of it. Don't have him betray everything he ever stood for.
I mean Jesus fuck almighty. It's like if Star Trek: The Next Generation had come along, and they were like, oh yeah, Kirk? He was a Romulan agent all along. Blew up the old Enterprise and everyone on board.
That's the kind of betrayal this film starts with.
Anyway, some shit happens. Things explode. Restaurants, helicopters, trains. Fuck knows.
Crucial Track for 10 October 2025: Clash City Rockers
"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash
Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?
Today's prompt is:
A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.
Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.
What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.
I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.
Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.
'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'
📗 Books 2025, 23: How to Solve Your Own Murder, by Kristen Perrin
Most sites describe How to Solve Your Own Murder as ‘cosy crime’, which I suppose it is. It has a first-person protagonist, so the reader doesn’t think there’s much chance she’ll die. She does find herself in some danger, though, and hell, she might not inherit her great aunt’s fortune, if she doesn’t solve the mystery of her murder.
The great aunt’s murder, that is. Our heroine has never met the great aunt at the start, and never does, because she’s murdered right away. But we know from a prologue that the great aunt always expected to be murdered. A medium told her so — or at least implied as much — when she was 16. It became the defining fact of her life, which is quite sad.
The great aunt is a secondary first-person narrator, by way of her diaries. So we get alternating chapters of the past and present. It’s a good read.
I did something unusual for me at the end: I read the few pages fom the sequel that are included at the back. Usually I skip that kind of thing. Especially when it’s not from a sequel, but from another book entirely. Not this time, though, and I’ll be seeking out How to Seal Your Own Fate (‘Book two in The Castle Knoll Files’) at some point.
📗 Books 2025, 22: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
A Booker winner, no less. And a science-fiction novel, too. Well, of sorts. It’s set in space, but very much the non-fictional, real space of the International Space Station, and the present day. And nothing weird or fantastic (in the fantastika sense) happens.
Yet it is set slightly into the future. On the day it takes place — the whole story happens across a single day, sixteen orbits of the space station — a new mission to the moon is launched. A crew of four, scheduled to land on the moon a few days later. Is that enough to make it SF? Kind of. If it were up for SF awards, which I’m sure it must have been, few would quibble.
But none of that matters compared to how gorgeous the prose is. This is a very writerly novel. The language is lovely, almost poetic in places; yet with a lot of lists, oddly, both from the author and from at least one of her characters.
I was, however, mildly annoyed at times, in two aspects of my being. The physics graduate disagreed with some word choices. Right in the opening line, for example, a space station in orbit is described as ‘rotating’ round the Earth. While that’s not exactly wrong, it’s not how we’d usually phrase it. Orbiting or circling, we’d say. It might be rotating too, but that would be around its own axis. A tiny thing, though.
Then the writer and user of English was mildly disturbed by how the small amount of dialogue was presented: no quote marks. That’s not uncommon nowadays, but it can be distracting, and what purpose does it serve?
It’s a delightful work. There isn’t much plot, but there are fragments of all the six crew members' stories. We see them at work, performing experiments and maintaining the station; watching a typhoon building on Earth and worrying about the people in its path; and musing about and remembering their lives and families back home.
It’s incredibly skillful to conjure so much from so little text — it’s unusually short for a modern novel. A worthy winner, and very highly recommended.