Star-struck by Stardust
Jo and I finally got around to watching the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust last night via Sky Anytime.
I've always had a soft-spot for fairytale movies - two of my favourites being Labyrinth and The Princess Bride (of course). I think it's the über-story-telling element that attracts me to this sort of fantastical tale more than any love of the aesthetic elements or desire for a simple story with a happy ending.
Perhaps Stardust won't be quite as memorable as the other two, which both have more one-liners and out-and-out comedy moments or stand-out performances (although Robert de Niro as Captain Shakespeare was a definite highlight). But still, it was a good adaptation of the Gaiman original - I think, it's been a while since I read it - which Jo and I thoroughly enjoyed watching and would recommend to anyone looking for a good, entertaining family movie (with just a soupçon of adult humour thrown in) this holiday season. Or, indeed, at any time.
New Arrivals - mid November '07
Here's the pick of the crop from my latest trip to the P.O. Box:
Swiftly by Adam Roberts (UK Proof)
A rather intriguing alternate history-meets-literature premise this time out from Adam R: following Gulliver's return from his well-publicised Travels, the British Empire has grown rich on the slave labour of Lilliputians; but France has enlisted the aid of the Brobdingnagians and launched an invasion of the British Isles.
I'm still waiting on confirmation from Adam, but I think the novel is an extended riff on the 'Swiftly' tale first published on SciFiction.com in 2002, which would certainly explain why the new novel has the same title as Adam's Night Shade Books anthology, in which 'Swiftly' (the story) also appears. Confused? You might be...
Shooting War by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman
I've been looking forward to seeing this graphic novel adaptation of the original webcomic ever since Joe Gordon heralded it a year ago and I was fortunate enough to be sent a copy by UK publisher Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
It's a vicious satire on America's war in the Middle East, set in 2011 and told from the point of view of a video-blogger who becomes caught up in the ongoing media frenzy after he captures the terrorist bombing of his apartment block on his blog and is catapulted to stardom as a result.
I read a couple of the early webcomic installments and thoroughly enjoyed them. Roll on a bit of free time.
Matter by Iain M. Banks (UK Proof)
Yes, I too have been blessed with a copy of the proof that everyone's been bragging about receiving, and which I'm jolly and properly grateful for my copy of.
Matter is the new Culture novel and I didn't realise that it's the first for seven years, so no wonder it's being billed as the 'science fiction publishing event of 2008'.
All I have to do now is find a slot in the old reading schedule for 593 pages of brand new Banks. Shouldn't be too much of a chore... :)
The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick (UK Proof)
I was first told about this one a while back by Robert's agent, John Jarrold, who very klindly sent me over a couple of proof chapters by email, which I thought were very promising indeed. Gollancz's Simon Spanton has subsequently bought the trilogy for UK publication and now the UK proofs are out...
Judging by my earlier first impressions, this weird-ish (although it could of course get much weirder) fantasy, set on a legendary, 600-year-old sailing ship, should appeal to fans of Scott Lynch, China Miéville, Alan Campbell and co. This one's heading towards the top of the 'to-be-read' list and I'll let you know when I've had a crack.
Gorgeous cover art by Edward Miller as well, which is always a bonus.
Plus:
Black Man by Richard Morgan
The UK paperback of Richard Morgan's Black Man is definitely worth picking up if you haven't already got a copy of the hardback. Highly recommended.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Good Omens is one of my very favourite comic novels, which I must have read four or five times already. Very nice indeed to see it republished in a handsome hardback edition (and a bargain at only £9.99 - less on Amazon.co.uk, of course...)
Highly Recommended Reading: Neil Gaiman's 'Fragile Things'
I thoroughly enjoyed Neil Gaiman's latest collection of short stories (plus one novella, and a smattering of poetry), Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders, as I rather suspected I would.
Given the sheer variety and frequency of Gaiman's major projects (novels, comic series, movies, theatre, audio performances, you name it...) it's almost a surprise to find that he actually has time to sit down and put pen to paper on a short story these days; but I'm very glad that he does, because the results rarely disappoint. It does, however, mean that his collections (or miscellanies) are rather few and far-between; there are but two of them, in fact. The first, Angels and Visitations (later re-released in an expanded edition as Smoke and Mirrors, of course) was published by Dreamhaven back in 1993, so it's been quite a wait for this, his second.
Well worth waiting for, though. I picked up Fragile Things because I was in the mood for something wonderful, and wonder is what I got. From the opening of the clever and charming Doylesque-Lovecraftian collusion 'A Study in Emerald' through to the conclusion of the moral and mythic novella 'The Monarch of the Glen' - which tells the tale of Shadow, a couple of years after the unfolding of events in Amercian Gods - I think I can honestly say that there wasn't single piece in Fragile Things that I didn't enjoy.
Particular favourites though, were 'The problem of Susan', 'Inventing Aladdin' and 'Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire' and the aforementioned 'A Study in Emerald'. I think I've always been drawn to the way that Gaiman tells the stories within stories, or the stories behind the well-known stories; this for me was the essence of The Sandman and has been Gaiman's best riff ever since; one that he continued to play on to great effect in American Gods (and, as I understand it, Anansi Boys, although I haven't had the time to appreciate that one just yet).
Would the non Gaiman-acolyte gain as much from this collection? I think so. It's a rich and varied assortment of interesting words put together in all sorts of entertaining, intriguing, amusing, evocative and wonderful (and wonder-full) ways. What's not to like?
Author info: www.neilgaiman.com
Ordering info: Amazon
Publication info: April 5th (pb edtn), Headline Review (UK)
New Arrivals - late March '07
Another month, another batch of great new books that I really, really wish I had time to read...
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
I realised the other day - when this paperback edition of Gaiman's second (third) short fiction collection arrived - that I'm shockingly far behind with my Gaiman reading - I still haven't set aside time for American Gods, and I haven't even bought a copy of The Wolves in the Walls yet, nor much of his recent graphic novel output.
So, given my love of Gaiman's short fiction, and my (increasingly rash-seeming) vow to read more short fiction this year, I might have to bump this one up the list...
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
This is one I definitely want to read sooner rather than later, not least because my good friend Joe Gordon had some very good things to say about it when we were chatting by email a couple of weeks ago. I also want to read it while it's still topically speculative, instead of historically retrospective... well, hopefully things won't get quite so bad as Ken is forecasting in Execution Channel but then you just never know. After all, George Orwell's prediction of a Big Brother-obsessed mindless drone-society was only 20 or so years out... Mind you, I've never watched the TV series, so I don't know how faithful an adaptation it is...
Have also received hardback copies of The Intruders by Michael Marshall Smith, and Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box - both of which I've read and thoroughly enjoyed already - as well as John Meaney's Bone Song, which is right up there on the to-be-read list (which I really need to update sometime).
Stardust movie trailer online
Neil Gaiman points us in the direction of an extended trailer for the forthcoming Stardust movie - based on his novel and original Charles Vess illustrated book (which Titan seem to be reissuing in the UK in May) - over at Yahoo! Movies UK, although the movie itself isn't actually out until October.
The film stars (among others) Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller, Peter O'Toole and Ricky Gervais who, judging by the trailer, seems to be playing... Ricky Gervais. In a hat.
Looks terrific, and there aren't too many plot spoilers in the trailer, either. Which makes rather a pleasant change...
The Hellblazer marathon: Part I - From Swamp Thing to Soho
Hellblazer is one of my all-time favourite comics series, bar none. It's provided an expressive outlet for some of the very best writers, cover artists and interior artists in the industry, and if I'm right, is the DC Vertigo imprint's longest-running title.
I first started buying and reading Hellblazer back when I was at school (aged about 17 or so), along with the original run of Sandman, Doom Patrol, Black Orchid, the four issue mini-series that was the original Books of Magic and a whole bunch of the early Vertigo titles. Then pretty much all comic buying activity stopped in my second or third year at University when I started to run up the overdraft. But I've picked up the occasional graphic novel in the series since then, and I've always promised myself that one day I'd sit down and re-read the whole run, from the very beginning.
I started doing just that a couple of months ago. First I had to fill in a few gaps in the collection, which involved some scrabbling around on eBay and I still haven't gotten hold of a copy of issue #27 - Neil Gaiman's guest writing slot; the incredibly moving ghost story 'Hold Me' - but luckily it was reprinted in a 'best of' anthology GN when the movie came out a couple of years ago. And I decided to forego John Constantine's very earliest appearances in the pages of Alan Moore's early Swamp Thing tales, because he only plays a peripheral role, and I can pretty much remember most of it (turn up, act mysterious, smoke fags, disappear...)
I have to admit that the series does take a little while to get going properly. In fact - although this is going to sound horribly disrespectful to Jamie Delano, a writer whose work I generally admire very much - it wasn't really until Garth Ennis began writing the classic Dangerous Habits [Amazon] storyline that, for me at least, John Constantine really got going as a lead character in his own right.
The earliest Delano episodes start out as a pretty straight Brit-horror comic, with demon yuppies and neo-nazi golems and all sorts of fun. It was all heavily informed by the state of Britain at the time; languishing under Thatcherism's yoke and slowly crumbling into a state of abject moral terpitude, if Delano's themes and plotlines are to be taken at face value. Plus the occasional segue to tie up some loose ends from the Swamp Thing series and generally play ball with some other stuff happening in the DC Universe at the time.
Then, round about episode #14, a rich, mystical vein kicks in, as Constantine finds himself swept along by the events of the 'Fear Machine' storyline, tangles with the Family Man and then gets involved with some serious heavy-duty magic towards the end of the run as the Pagan nation attempts to restore the balance of the world set awry by some of the earlier events, and Constantine takes numerous trips into his own twisted psyche.
All good stuff; far more intriguing, dark and mature than most folks would probably expect from a comic book, but to be honest, you do have to be interested in that sort of thing to get the most out of it. And to be honest, except for the revelation of What Happened in Newcastle in issue #13, there's probably not an awful lot in there that constitutes required reading for the rest of the series, at least, judging by how inferequently the material is referenced in the next few dozen issues. There are a couple of interesting guest writer slots though; the aforementioned Neil Gaiman, Dick Foreman's one-off about a possessed bulldog, and a typically off-the-wall and hallucinatory two-issue slot from Grant Morrison.
But that whole mystical, slightly inaccessible air is probably the main reason why relatively little material from Delano's run has been released in GN form to-date. The first fourteen issues were collected, in four volumes, by Titan Books in the UK; they were printed in black & white, which I think actually enhanced the original artwork. And DC have published the first nine issues in their Original Sins [Amazon]
volume, with the original (not so great) colourisation. Personally, I'd recommend skipping that and tracking down the Titan volumes on eBay; but there you go.
All of which brings us - rather neatly - onto the first Garth Ennis storyline: Dangerous Habits, illustrated throughout by the wonderfully scratchy and smudgy ink pen of William Simpson. This six-issue segment is probably the comics equivalent of that classic first album; the one that bands spend years honing their craft for, but then never quite manage to come all the way close to with their subsequent efforts. For me, at least, it's the distilled essence of everything that Constantine is and represents. Forget your Mother Goddes, your Arthurian heritage, your yin-yang duality, your hanged man magus hang-ups; here's a guy who 's basically a bit of a bastard, who knows a lot more than you or me about the way the other side of the supernatural fence operates, and who is faced with a fatal problem: he's just been diagnosed with lung cancer.
How Constantine brings his unique perspective and knowledge to bear on the matter, how we decides to deal with his mortal problem, is the stuff that story-telling legends are made of. I won't commit heinous spolierage here and tell you what actually happens, but suffice to say, if you only read one John Constantine, Hellblazer storyline in your life, make it Dangerous Habits. This segment also neatly sets up a number of sub-plots that will come to fruition in the next few issues (and, incidentally, spawns the basis for the whole Preacher series, which Ennis went on to write after his Hellblazer run came to an end).
Absolutely classic stuff, the sort of thing I could read over and over, and most probably will. Yes, it really is that good...
Not that it's all downhill from there, though, by any means. There's more good material on the way, and I'll check back in another 30 or 40 issues and let you know how I'm getting on. Actually, I must admit that I only ever read up to the end of the Garth Ennis run, first time around, so from issue #83 or so I'll be heading off into new territory myself. I'm looking forward to that immensely.
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