Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, what have you.

MOVIE REVIEW: My Neighbor Totoro (Japan, 1988)

You know, I’m finding it difficult to understand why this animated kids’ movie is so well-liked by both people and critics. It’s got none of the things you expect and love from both animated films and kid movies. It’s billed as a fantasy, but even the non-fantastic elements reveal that it takes place in some crazy Bizarro World.

Let’s take things from the top, shall we?

The movie opens with a really lively and bouncy theme song, so you are deluded into thinking all will be right. But that’s the only song in the movie! There’s no other singing or musical number that they can sell to the kids (or their parents).

It goes downhill quickly from there. We see a father and his two daughters in a dangerously overloaded truck as they move to a new home in a small farming village. If this were a normal movie, the kids would be bickering amongst themselves, and whining to their barely tolerated dad about how they hate leaving all their friends behind and moving to someplace out in the middle of nowhere. But they are actually a happy family! Insane!

Continue reading →

BOOK REVIEW: Fleet of Worlds (series)

Fleet of Worlds (2007)
Juggler of Worlds (2008)
Destroyer of Worlds (2009)
Betrayer of Worlds (2010)
Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld (2012)

Larry Niven and Edward Lerner
Published by Tor Books

It seems to be par for the course these days in SF/fantasy book publishing that if you are an established author, you have to write a series of novels. Standalone books don’t cut it anymore. Even new authors, if their first novels are even modestly successful, are encouraged to write more books in the same milieu. From a publishing standpoint, it’s a good way to get guaranteed sales. For writers, the dirty work of basic worldbuilding has already been done, so there’s generally a little less effort in going down the same road than in blazing a new trail.

I’ve also noted that older authors who have written many stories and novels in the same or similar universes may, as they get on in years, try to tie everything together and write a few works that link all the stories or fill in the gaps in the chronology. Some years ago, Larry Niven commented that part of the reason he hadn’t written any “Known Space” stories covering the Man-Kzin Wars that he had frequently referred to was that having no military background, he didn’t feel comfortable writing war stories. So he “opened up” that era of Known Space to other writers; the result was several books worth of stories filling in that era and providing much detail on Kzinti society.
Continue reading →

BOOK REVIEW: The Game Must Go On

The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII
John Klima
St Martin’s Press
(c) 2015 by the author

Pretty much every baseball fan is at least passingly aware of the effects of World War II on the game, if only that it kept some players from achieving milestone goals. Bob Feller didn’t get 300 wins, Ted Williams didn’t get 600 home runs, etc. And that since players were not exempt from the draft, teams reached so far down the barrel for talent that Pete Gray, a guy with one arm, actually played in the Major Leagues.

But there’s a heck of a lot more to it than just names and numbers in the reference books.

Continue reading →

Movie Review: When the Wind Blows (1986, UK)

Nuclear war movies had their heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s, with irradiated animals turning into mutant monsters and Communists lurking in every shadow. The “Silver Age” came during the Reagan administration, when his saber-rattling led to fears of a global nuclear holocaust destroying civilization if not all life on Earth.

In the US, the TV movie The Day After (1983) showed the effects of such a war on Lawrence, KS. Not to be left out, the next year the UK came out with Threads, which showed the breakdown of civilization in Sheffield in the aftermath.

Coming late to the party, and taking an entirely different approach, was the UK’s animated film When the Wind Blows.

Continue reading →

Book Review: The Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead
Jared Shurin, editor
Jurassic London, 2013

Vampires and werewolves have never really left our collective social and cultural consciousness. Neither has Frankenstein’s Monster, once it was created. Of the classic “Universal monsters”, the Mummy has been the one left by the wayside. Partly because it’s so culturally specific; and partly because (perhaps) it’s pretty lame when you come to think of it. They have no special powers, and a well-thrown torch will have them go up in flames. They are just dessicated corpses, whose spirit for some reason has yet to complete the passage to the afterlife.

Does that mean there are no stories left to tell? Is the idea of a mummy as a monster one that has run out of scares? This collection of original stories says emphatically NO.
Continue reading →

Movie Review: Requiem for a Heavyweight (TV, 1956)

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. When reminiscing about the past, we automatically filter out all the crap and spend time thinking only about the good things. When we recall the first decade or so of television, we think of it as a “golden age” as we recall shows like “The Honeymooners” and “Dragnet”. We conveniently forget all the mid-level stuff like “Drama at Eight” or “Richard Diamond, Private Detective”. But the really good stuff, just as in any art form, lasts and lasts because each era can find something new or something relevant to its own time.

Continue reading →

Book Review: Time Salvager

Time Salvager
Wesley Chu
Tor Books
(c) 2015 by the author

Several centuries in the future, the Solar System is dominated by a handful of corporations. Civilization is fading, thanks to what seems to have been an almost non-stop parade of wars and disasters. A quasi-independent organization controls access to time travel, and uses it to plunder the past for technological assets that would have otherwise been lost or destroyed.

James Griffin-Mars, our protagonist, is one of the “chrononauts” who dive back in to the past, risking life and limb to scoop up those artifacts. On one mission, he has a crisis of conscience about leaving people in the past to die…

Continue reading →

Movie Review: Killdozer (TV movie, 1974)

When you see the basic description – a bulldozer is taken over by an alien entity and starts attacking a construction crew – you’re going to suspect that this is a pretty crappy movie. When you find out that it was made for television, you’re going to figure it’s another lump of crud from the SyFy Channel (or whatever the heck they are calling it these days), and give it a miss.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Back in the 1970s, in the heyday of the made-for-TV-movie, the networks took them seriously. They were crucial elements of the Ratings War between the three networks. Some of them launched their own series (Columbo, The Night Stalker), some launched careers (Duel), others can still stand up to the best that Hollywood has to offer (Brian’s Song, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark). Whatever you could say about them, they were all at least competently made. Experienced actors and professional crews knew what they were doing, and they had writers who didn’t pander to the lowest common denominator.

Continue reading →

BOOK REVIEW: The Strange Case of Dr. Doyle

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. DOYLE: A Journey into Madness and Mayhem
By Daniel Friedman, MD and Eugene Friedman, MD
Square One Publishers, 2015

Sometimes it’s not easy being an amateur reviewer, especially with today’s obsession with “spoilers”. You really, really don’t want to give anything away about your subject. But sometimes, it’s almost impossible.

So in this case, if you don’t want to know too much, don’t go reading past the “More” link. Just take my word that this book is a very good recounting of the five “canonical” Jack the Ripper killings, intermingled with an equally good biography of Arthur Conan Doyle in his early years (before he became a famous writer). It’s worth reading for either of those.
Continue reading →

MOVIE REVIEW: Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (USSR, 1961)

When most people think of Soviet Cinema, they picture ponderous and didactic propaganda pieces. Or badly hacked / edited redubbings of SF films only suitable for Mystery Science Theater 3000. But just like Russian literature, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in what is now Ukraine. Self-conscious and withdrawn (probably something to do with his height; schoolmates called him their “mysterious dwarf”), he developed a talent for mimicry and storytelling. In 1831, he met the writer Alexander Pushkin. Inspired, he wrote and published a collection of stories from his youth entitled Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. This movie is an adaptation of one of those tales – “Noch pered Rozhdestvom,” or “Christmas Eve.”

Continue reading →