Tag Archive: Science Fiction
The Vorrh (by B Catling)
Inside cover of the Coronet issue of "The Vorrh"
It is said that jetlag is the effect of the traveller’s soul lagging behind the body. A European city, “Essenwald” is transferred stone by stone and reassembled in Africa, at the edge of the Vorrh. One train track goes into “the abyss of the Vorrh”, “the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species, and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate. The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans but could also devour a thousand of their little lives in a microsecond…
Continue Reading →Ready Player One – Cline and Spielberg
(“Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline) (2011) (We bag Spielberg at the bottom). Ready Player One begins with an aphorism – “‘Being human totally sucks most of the time, Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.’ Anorak’s Almanac, Chapter 91, Verses 1-2.” If this reminds you of a Bokononism, you are right. Our 2040’s teenage hero Wade Watts names a spacecraft “The Vonnegut”, after one of his favourite 20th century novelists. Readers have complained that this novel is so crammed with 1980’s American pop culture that it is dull as an episode of Family Ties. Well, that’s the point. If you find…
Continue Reading →10 Cloverfield Lane
You would think that these are hard to make....
(Dir. Dan Trachtenberg) (2016) No, it’s not 10 Rillington Place. Unlike that rotten little Richard Attenborough film about Dr John Christie, here, the villain may not be the real villain. Not originally intended to be related to Cloverfield, it was thought during production that the story shared aspects with that that highly successful film and so it was titled 10 Cloverfield Lane. Vive la franchise! Flakey Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) drives off into the night after an argument with her husband. Oops, she loses control of her car and it rolls into a ditch. She wakes up on a thin mattress in a…
Continue Reading →Ender’s Game (by Orson Scot Card)
Make no mistake. This is a Young Adult book. It masquerades as “adult science fiction” on many a best-of list, but it is a novel for the tweens and teens. Unlike Ender – who between the ages of 6 and 11 trains day and night to save the world – this book is just too juvenile to impress grown-ups . Far be it from us at TVC to suggest that calling this a novel for adults is to misguide the reader, but let’s just say that it is a bit like promoting Harry Potter as a really really good read for grown-ups too. If you want to…
Continue Reading →The Lathe of Heaven
Mt Hood, Portland, USA, in a good world
(by Ursula K. Le Guin) In his Aegypt cycle, John Crowley asks; what if the world was different once, but we don’t remember? What if it changed again, and we thought the new world was the way it had always been? In The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin asks the same questions but adds – what if you could control that change? If you could have whatever you wished for, how carefully would you have to word those wishes? When George Orr dreams “effectively”, the world changes to align with George’s dream and only George notices that there has been a…
Continue Reading →