New Arrival - The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Had a busy couple of weeks on the arrivals front - evidenced by the five hours I spent yesterday putting together the latest Books Received item for UKSFBN - and one item in particular was a real stand-out for me:

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Right then, laddie! Straight to the top of the 'to be read' pile for you... Iain Banks's latest non-sf novel; this time it's about the lives, loves, machinations and manipulations of a family that invents and makes millions from selling a best-selling board/computer game called Empire!.

Let's face it, it's got to be a winner for anyone who has spent as much time as I have staring at a strategy-game-filled monitor; especially as I know - from various things I've both heard in person and read at a later date - that it's not just a love of good malt whisky that I can claim to have in common with the esteemed Mr Banks; it turns out that we're both (hopefully recovering) Civilization addicts as well...

I first had my suspicions when I read about the world-spanning empire-building game that Banks's main character played in Complicity, although I don't think that was called Empire! at the time... Anyhow, I do remember confronting Mr Banks (gently, mind) after a signing session back in my W'Stone's Deansgate days. "Do you play Civ?" I enquired. "No, no, no, no..." he replied, with much head-shaking. But I did rather suspect at the time that the shaggy-bearded one was perhaps protesting just a tad too much, and merely wanted to avoid the inevitable attempt at geek-conversation to follow...

And indeed, my suspicions were confirmed when, at a publisher-funded curry night during Eastercon up in Glasgow a few years later (but still a few years ago), Mr Banks and I actually had that conversation and he admitted that yes, he was partial to a bit of Civ from time to time... although by that time the game was up to version 2 or 3, I forget which. But he did confess, and we chatted, and it wasn't too geeky, honest...

Next thing I hear, the publicity-line for the new book is that for the first time in his career he actually delivered a manuscript horribly late, because he lost a whole three months playing Civ IV and eventually had to wipe the game - and all those pesky save-files - from his machine if he was ever going to get any work done at all, ever. But hey, we've all been there, right? (At this point Jo usually rolls her eyes and adopts the look of the long-suffering Civ-widow...)

So, anyhow, yes. This one will definitely be next, just as soon as I've finished ~~conquering the Mongols~~ reading Richard Morgan's Black Man.

Honourable mentions also for proofs of the new Ian McDonald and Justina Robson novels... if only there was another 12 or 13 hours in the day...

February 26, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Gaming | 2 Comments

Watched 'Constantine', quite liked it. 'Elektra' was better…

This Friday night just gone, Jo was out at her work Xmas do and unlikely to return until the early hours. So, after spending a couple of hours of overtime on my current Big Project, I settled down to spend a few hours in the company of my usual vice-of-choice when the missus is out: Civilization IV (Warlords expansion) on the laptop, a couple of bottles of whatever beer happens to be in the fridge (in this case Leffe brun, with an option of an Old Ember for later on) and then I started channel-flicking on Sky.

Didn't take me long to find Elektra on Sky Movies 4; a film that I didn't rush to go see when it came out on account of having thoroughly enjoyed the comic and therefore wanting to avoid the let-down of paying money to go see some ropey adaptation full of o.t.t. SFX and with not much else going for it.

So I'm glad to report that I was pleasantly surprised; for the first half of the movie, at least. It was dark, almost sinister, and very, very stylish. Oriental demons cropping up all over the place, martial artistes leaping all over the screen, Jennifer Garner (a handsome woman, you have to admit) in that outfit... generally speaking it was all good stuff. And then... well, I don't want to commit wanton spolierage for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, so let's just say that human interest raised its all-too predictable Hollywood-shaped head, and everything got a bit too twee and nice for my liking. So I kept half an eye on the fight scenes, concentrated on guiding my fledgling empire through its tricky early expansion phase instead.

And then, scheduled straight after Elektra on the same channel, came Constantine. Now, I'll freely admit that I've had truly massive reservations about this movie, pretty much from the day that I heard Keanu "plank" Reeves was going to be playing John Constantine. It stems from my deep and abiding love of the Hellblazer series (as aforementioned here) and the fact that, well, Reeves is just so totally wrong for the part of the chain-smoking, wise-cracking, demon-thwarting (note: thwarting, not arse-kicking), British anti-hero John Constantine that I don't even know where to begin...

And you know what? It was every single bit as crap as I'd feared it would be, from the first blatant Exorcist-rip-off exorcism scene, through to the shoe-horning in of every single major plot strand and throw-away appearance of just about every interesting support character from the first sixty or seventy issues of the comic series; from the piss-poor character adaptation to the lousy attention to established detail.

Okay, I'll admit that some of the effects were quite interesting, as techno eye-candy goes, and again there was a nicely dark, atmospheric feel to most of the movie. But it just could have been so much better in so many ways, you know..?

And then, about a quarter of the way through - and just before I was going to reach for the remote and resort to MTV2 instead - I realised there was one long-established comics trope that could actually save the day and turn this execrable desecration of my favourite comics series into a half-watchable action movie.

So... what if, you know, what if, this was actually an Elseworlds-style alternative take on the whole Constantine mythos? What if the central concept of the movie itself was one big 'what if'? As in: "What if John Constantine was a wooden-faced American with a shocking inability to emote, limited vocal talent (but an oh, so photogenically square jaw), an all-too predictable penchant for big guns and gimmicks, and an aversion to proper khaki trench-coats? How would that look..?"

At that point, it did actually become half-watchably bearable. Looking at it as an average Hollywood action movie, something to put on in the background on a Friday night (as I made in-roads on the technology tree and wondered whether making a land-grab for the mineral-rich area on the Aztecs' border would over-stretch my economy and stifle my scientific development into the medieval period), it was... okay. So yeah, once I'd managed to put myself through the aforementioned mental gymnastics I kinda, sort of, quite liked it. But by 'eck, I had to suspend a whole Sci-Fi Channel mini-series' worth of disbelief in the first place...

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, by 1.30 a.m. I'd managed to pull off my usual trick of over-developing my core cities whilst neglecting my military build-up, so when the massed (and I do mean massed) ranks of Egyptian war chariots and horse archers appeared on the eastern horizon, my paltry defences were set to be swept aside in record time, and that was looking like the end of Asoka's Indian Empire... so I very sensibly switched off when Jo came home, and went to bed.