fevered.earth

  • Books 4

    The joke is on you, the reader! I have only read more books since coming off parental leave!

    The Ionian Mission – Patrick O’Brien

    The Master & Commander books are well into a single continuous, roiling narrative at this point. A couple of classic-faire, tense boat-to-boat action scenes where O’Brien excels, and plenty of opportunities for the smiling boat-men of the Royal Navy to do boat-things described at length. There’s a particularly fun sequence where a large rope is tied up so a cannon can be lifted up a hill, which you wouldn’t believe is something that could be described as ‘particularly fun’. The handling of Ottoman politics and the depiction of the Ottomans we meet can be fairly easily described as ‘orientalist’ though, I fear.

    Heir to the Empire – Timothy Zahn

    [Kirk Voice] Zahn!!!

    After my experience with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye last time I was baited into reading the ‘Thrawn Trilogy’, which seem really to be the foundational texts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As a one-time reader of 90s Doctor Who novels which were very much happening in the margins of this sort of thing there was a warm familiarity to the slightly askew style of 90s sci-fi writing and Thrawn – the titular Heir – is but one of several fun additions to the Star Wars cast alongside the pleasantly distinct rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Talon Karde and his first officer Mara Jade, who manages to escape the gravity well of her ridiculous backstory.

    Treason’s Harbour – Patrick O’Brien

    “It’s treason then.” Wait, wrong series. We’re back with the boats, and despite – as the review quoted on Wikipedia says – this being a book where nothing really happens, it remains a fun read. Maturin is engaged in carting a diving bell around, after his success in the previous book Aubrey is assigned more wildly unsuited political work, and surely one of fiction’s all-time least fired Chekov’s guns takes place as the interpreter assigned to the ship by the secret French agent takes a short bath in the Red Sea.

    Dark Force Rising – Timothy Zahn

    We can’t rule anything out when this book has a Grand Admiral in it. Well, maybe we can. Zahn (who by all accounts was hammering these out at the time) totally misfires and ends up writing the same book again but worse. The parts which do distinguish this one (Leia’s adventure on the planet of honourable assassins) are tedious in the extreme. Even the title gets in on being misconceived, with the ‘Dark Force’ in question being no relation to the mystic, luminous force the setting is primarily concerned with, but instead referring to the nickname for some missing robot starships.

    Samurai Detectives Volume 1 – Shotaro Ikenami

    Bought this primarily on the strength of the cover, as with most books I buy. That’s my motto: strength of the cover. Despite being referred to as a ‘volume’ and being made up of nominal short stories there’s one continuous narrative that shifts back and forth between retired Samurai master Akiyama Kohei and his voluntarily celibate son Akiyama Daijiro. Set in the Edo period, there’s a fantastic realisation of what it would mean to travel and investigate in such a place. If only so much emphasis were not placed on Kohei’s, uh, passionate relationship with a woman forty years his younger.

    The Last Command – Timothy Zahn

    Zahn just about brings it home – not at all sure about the late-in-the-game decision to rework insane clone Jedi Master C’Boath into an Emperor-type (an heir… to the empire?!) just so the climax can be the throne room scene from Return of the Jedi, again, but this time Lando is also there for some reason. One of the problems Zahn has writing these is that his original characters end up being breaths of fresh air in the narrative because they’re not constantly thinking about or referring to the events of the movie trilogy. This means that Mara Jade’s bits are generally the best parts of the books and it’s annoying to have to go back to Luke fondly reminiscing about-

    Hey, nothing ever happened with that remote control Luke found on Dagobah!

    The Far Side of the World – Patrick O’Brien

    Hey, that’s the name of the film! A bit of a patchwork effort, this one, which concludes with the real whiplash of going from the intolerable sequence where Jack and Stephen are taken aboard a Pacific Islander boat which hates the penis to a 10/10 do-over of the climax of Desolation Island, wherein an outnumbered but technologically superior group of stranded Englishmen have to maintain a precarious peace on a desert island they share with a large group of nominally defeated American sailors.

    The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr

    Bought this based on Daniel Craig flapping the book about on-screen in Wake Up Dead Man. It’s good fun, and Carr’s penchant for having a gaggle of detectives hang around operating in various different styles is distinctive, even if Chesterton-esque author insert Prof. Gideon Fell always takes primacy. Carr also has a strong line in making his witnesses useless or needlessly antagonistic, it’s something of a revelation the contrast to the usually pliable and cooperative characters you wind in murder mysteries – e.g. the killer in The Red Room would always answer questions even if he didn’t like to hear them.

    The Black Spectacles – John Dickson Carr

    I felt this was slightly less effective than The Hollow Man just because it increases the contrivances – in that book the mystery boils down to two bullets and two dead men, where here there’s two dead man, a poison pill, a movie camera, and that’s basically before things have got going. Slightly less enamoured with Fell’s theatrics here too. We get it Mr Fell, you think the killer is eeeeeevil. We know. Despite this, it is a meticulously constructed mystery and I was constantly kept guessing.

    The Reverse of the Medal – Patrick O’Brien

    “And then everyone stood up and clapped [for Jack Aubrey, unfairly placed in the pillory just for trying to do some insider trading].” I will note the bizarre manner in which O’Brien reminds the reader that Wray is a French trader, taking care to do it at the beginning of every book he features in after the decision to rework him from land-based duelling threat to craven Admiralty man. Feels like it would work just fine to have it be a surprise within each book where it’s relevant. Alas.
    I’m going to take a break from Master & Commander books after this one; not because I’m sick of them, but because the ones after this are an eye-watering £6.49 on Kindle. Outrageous.

    Death-watch – John Dickson Carr

    I was wondering why Dickson Carr isn’t more fondly remembered as a writer of murder mysteries; there’s a potential answer in Death-watch, which not only has the proclivity for complexity that was present in Hollow Man and Black Spectacles, but is also staggeringly misogynistic. At one point Fell, in full-on bloviating author stand-in mode, has a digression on why woman can’t be good barristers however intelligent they seem at university. Similar to Black Spectacles, there’s no final collapse of the contrivances here either, so while it’s satisfying how it all unfolds it’s difficult to hold the whole thing in your head to assess it.

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  • 2025 review of films

    2025 review of films

    Let’s get it out of the way up front: this has been a terrible year for my movie-watching. The baby, alluded to in my 2024 review of films, proved more and more adept at keeping me from carving out cinema visits as she grew steadily larger (within the prediction of the standardised curves which govern such things). I had a very brief patch of catching up with some Oscar nominees back in February, and since then it has been the slimmest of pickings with seven full calendar months in the year passing by without a single movie in them.

    To match this, in a stunning piece of visual metaphor the physical, real world cinema I visit caught fire this year. It was ultimately fine, with only mild water damage that has since been repaired, but talk about a bad omen. The only film I managed to see there over the course of the year was James Gunn’s Superman (of which more later) which I was obliged to see both as a terminal DC super-fan and as a connoisseur of Dog Movies. I’m hoping to make it over there for Avatar: Fire and Ash before the end of the year, which will mean having to edit this list. A similar story with Netflix’s new Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man. (update: I made time for both!)

    I’m not going to make any kind of limitation on what gets in here: if I watched it for the first time this year, it’s going in the list.

    12. Carry-On

    Look I’ll be very honest: I don’t remember this. I had a three-month-old and this was a shit film streaming at Christmas. Die Hard 2 by way of Phone Booth? Or something? I remember the climax hinging on a contrivance about permissible cabin bag sizes, which is great commitment to the part if nothing else. Michael Bluth was in it?

    11. Superman

    I was amiable enough to this in the cinema, I slated it in review at the time, and now I hold it in contempt. Pablum and shlock, dream bigger. Dream bigger!

    That thing looks so cozy. Monks knew how to live.

    10. [This space intentionally left blank.]

    I didn’t see a tenth best film this year.

    9. The Name of the Rose

    Starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater as the only two clean men in Christendom. An enjoyable convention of grotesques in an adaptation that I felt kinda missed the point the book was making by throwing an epic rationalist in among all these superstitious monks: that modernity is an evolution of society, not fire handed down to the apes.

    8. F1

    The two things a Formula 1 team has never tried: cheating and hiring a superfluous American. Looks great though and brings a bit of that race-day magic to the screen, even if glossing over qualifying should be a capital crime.

    7. Wake Up Dead Man

    Rian Johnson does atheist G.K. Chesterton pretty well. Daniel Craig is having the time of his silly life. Like the second one, it’s somehow less than the sum of its parts, but this time some of the parts are pretty great.

    6. Anora

    This was a fun watch, bags of charisma and lots of sympathy for its characters. With hindsight I’m not too sure what it was trying to say, beyond the enjoyable yarn about a woman who sees her chance, grabs it with both hands and holds on for dear life. I just don’t think I’ll remember it? Best picture? Not sure about that, although thank God Emilia Perez didn’t get it.

    Maybe it’s just that I have infinite sympathy for scenes of baffled tourists standing on train platforms in Europe.

    5. A Real Pain

    Sometimes a film is just a great excuse to hang out with two of your favourite on-screen guys, and Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin definitely fall into that category. Eisenberg’s wound way too tight, Culkin is chronically oversharing, they’ve gone on holiday to Poland together to remember their dear departed Gran.

    4. Wicked Part One

    I don’t think there have been many successful Hollywood movies split into two parts, and I haven’t seen Part Two yet so maybe Wicked will still fluff it, but I can say that this particular split was made for me, the guy who stood up after Defying Gravity at the Apollo theatre in London circa 2008 and started putting on his coat and hat.

    People moan about the colour palette as a synecdoche for this era of digital colour but eh, it works here. Movie looks great. As I said in my review at the time, it’s fascinating seeing someone do what Disney keep trying and failing to do in recent years and hitting a home run with it.

    3. Avatar: Fire and Ash

    It has only taken sixteen years but James Cameron has convinced me. I’m a Na’vi guy now. I’m true blue. I will watch these until the end of time if he keeps making them. I hope every single one ends with a fistfight between Jake Sully and Quaritch.

    2. Danger: Diabolik

    In a year where I was starved, parched, fully withdrawn from the glory of the movies, I am so glad I managed to pack Danger: Diabolik in. Anarchic glee from the first frame to the last, all centred round the happy, healthy relationship between a man who only leaves the house in full leathers and his beautiful partner who sees things on the news and wants to steal them. Featuring possibly the worst Bond villain trap of all time, a plane with a trap door built in.

    1. The Wolf of Wall Street

    I’ve accidentally been savouring the Scorcese big hitters so this is a genuine first timer for me, and in terms of craft it’s basically flawless. Funny, infuriating, scandelous, every vignette chosen for maximum effect. Three hours float past like a dream as the guy gets it all and… well, doesn’t lose it all. Loses some of it. And that’s just how it went.

            Impressively, I don’t appear to have watched a single film from the docket list at the end of my 2024 review. Whoops!

            If you like my writing and want to read more, you can dissuade yourself of that notion by trying out “Step One: You take an onion”, my one-page party game RPG for making your friends all hate you. Otherwise I continue to review films on Letterboxd.

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          1. A Grand Admiral

            A Grand Admiral

            “Any idea who that guy with the red eyes is?” he asked Ghent.
            “I think he’s a Grand Admiral or something,” the other said. “Took over Imperial operations a while back. I don’t know his name.”
            Han looked at Lando, found the other sending the same look right back at him. “A Grand Admiral?” Lando repeated carefully.
            “Yeah. Look, they’re going—there’s nothing else to see. Can we please—?”
            “Let’s get back to the Falcon,” Han muttered, stowing the macrobinoculars in their belt pouch and starting a backward elbows-and-knees crawl from their covering tree. A Grand Admiral. No wonder the New Republic had been getting the sky cut out from under them lately.”

            Heir to the Empire

            We all love Heir to the Empire, don’t we? Timothy Zahn’s magnum opus of Star Wars fiction that introduced the world to the blue-skinned, red-eyed Admiral Thrawn, the Imperial Remnant’s one and only Grand Admiral. A Grand Admiral, I hear you say? Yes, a Grand Admiral. But if you forget the unique threat posed by a commander of such senior rank described above then don’t worry, Zahn’s sequel Dark Force Rising has one or two reminders for you:

            With a Grand Admiral in charge of the Imperial Fleet again, perhaps there was now a chance for the Empire to regain some of its old glory.

            “A Grand Admiral,” Ackbar said at last, his voice sounding even more gravelly than usual.

            “We’re dealing with a Grand Admiral, Han,” Lando reminded him. “Anything is possible.”

            “Great,” Han growled. “Problem is, with a Grand Admiral in charge of the Empire, we might not have that much time.”

            “Especially with a Grand Admiral in charge of the Empire,” Han pointed out. “If he catches you here alone, you’ll have had it.”

            Mara looked into those glowing eyes, beginning to remember now why the Emperor had made this man a Grand Admiral.

            A small shiver ran up Mara’s back. Yes; she was remembering indeed why Thrawn had been made a Grand Admiral.

            But he was a Grand Admiral, with all the cunning and subtlety and tactical genius that the title implied. This whole thing could be a convoluted, carefully orchestrated trap… and if it was, chances were she would never even see it until it had been sprung around her.

            “The glowing eyes bored into her face, the question unspoken but obvious. “What was here for me before?” she countered. “Who but a Grand Admiral would have accepted me as legitimate?”

            “The Empire’s being led by a Grand Admiral,” [Han] muttered. “I saw him myself.”
            The silence hung thick in the air. Mon Mothma recovered first. “That’s impossible,” she said, sounding more like she wanted to believe it than that she really did. “We’ve accounted for all the Grand Admirals.”

            …if the Imperials got their hands on the Katana fleet, the balance of power in the ongoing war would suddenly be skewed back in their favor.
            And under the command of a Grand Admiral…

            [Mara] took a deep breath, forcing calmness. She would not fall apart. Not here; not in front of the Grand Admiral.

            “If there is,” Mon Mothma interrupted firmly, “we’ll soon know for certain. Until then, there seems little value in holding a debate in a vacuum. Council Research is hereby directed to look into the possibility that a Grand Admiral might still be alive.”

            “With a Grand Admiral in command of the Empire, political infighting in the New Republic, and the whole galaxy hanging in the balance, was this really the most efficient use of [Luke’s] time?”

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          2. Gentle People: A Band Management Sim

            My current ongoing game development project is ‘Gentle People’, a sixties-era band management sim about nudging some bands towards putting out some hit singles, albums etc. Updates are currently paused while I pick through a large UI overhaul but the bones of the game are in place and quite fun to muck about with. It’s written in Rust using Bevy and compiles to WASM for the browser.

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