BookThing would like to welcome Tracey Risebrow to our little book addicted corner of the interwebs. She matches Grete in her enthusiasm and voracity for reading and she has a special love for all romance genres.
Stay tuned for her reviews and you can also follow her on Twitter!
You may remember in June last year we reviewed Robopocalypse, and we liked it! We gave it four out of five stars, and described it as
… an excellent, entertaining and emotional look at what might be if the Robots ever do rebel.
We knew at the time that Steven Spielberg had picked up the movie rights, and there’s news today on that project and when it might start going into production.
Via SFX magazine,
If current plans remain in place, then the next sci-fi film we’ll see from Steven Spielberg will be Robopocalypse, based on the novel by Daniel H Wilson, which should go into production after the director’s finished his next movie project, Lincoln (not the vampire-hunting one, the serious one).
That’s pretty exciting news, but movie projects have a way of coming together and falling apart so we’ll continue crossing our fingers. You can track updates about the movie on IMDb (normal caveats about accuracy).
Over on my personal blog, I’ve posted my annual movie preview for the year ahead, where I take a tiny subset of the movies coming out and make sarcastic comments about them. You can see it here. Grete asked me to write something for BookThing, and it occurred to me that many of those films are book adaptations. Here’s a run-down of a few of them.
The Woman In Black (February 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596365/
http://www.womaninblack.com/
Harry Potter travels to a remote location and ends up investigating mysterious goings on that hint at something dark and dangerous. Oh wait, sorry, Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe) travels to a remote village and ends up investigating something mysterious, well you get the point.
Based on The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.
Dr Seuss’ The Lorax (March 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482459/
What can I say
a movie a film
with voices and action
and all nice and trim
Animation and graphics
and wonderful sights
No doubt a huge hit
with those troublesome mites
The children.
Based on Dr Seuss’ The Lorax.
John Carter (March 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401729/
http://www.johncarterarrives.com/
Avatar, but the big aliens are green. Unfair? Maybe. Based on the John Carter of Mars pulp stories, the movie has dropped the ‘of Mars’ because Mars based movies suffer from the kiss of death. Much like Russian Mars based space missions. I’m not sure people will ‘get it’ but we’ll see. If it’s fun and light it might catch an audience.
Based on many John Carter of Mars pulp fiction novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The Hunger Games (March 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/
http://www.thehungergamesmovie.com/
A book adaptation! How unique! Televised death matches, love stories, kids pitted against other kids, utopian world ‘supported’ by horrific practices? Nothing new here so I hope the implementation brings something exciting.
Based on The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (August 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1611224/
I’m pretty sure the title has everything you need to know. Seriously.
Based on Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.
The Bourne Legacy (August 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194173/
It’s Bourne, without Bourne. Same universe (er, the real world?) but with a different undercover blackops blacklisted CIA operative who will probably have to do stuff, and put himself at risk, to save something. Without the ‘I don’t remember who I am’ schtick isn’t this just Mission Impossible: Solo or Bond #24?
Based on Robert Ludlum’s The Bournce Legacy.
Total Recall (August 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386703/
http://www.totalrecall-movie.com/
Total Remake! Will it bring something new? Will we get a fat headed special effect saying “Twwooo weeekkkss” and giving me nightmares for 10 years? Who knows. I’m quite excited despite myself. The original, as with many of Arnie’s sci-fi movies, was heavy and lumbering despite my enjoyment of it. I’d love to see an agile, light-on-it’s-feet remake which injects some pace and intrigue into this story. Also, hoping for some hot chicks in latex to complement the plot (Len Wiseman, don’t let me down now!)
Based on We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, by Philip K. Dick.
Cloud Atlas (October 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/
The Wachowski’s bring their talent to a sprawling story set over six different periods in time, hoping to tie them all together into an overall tale. It’ll either tank, or it’ll be a cult hit that eventually makes billions, maybe. Oh, and check out the cast!
Based on the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (December 2012)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/
http://www.thehobbitblog.com/
Need I say anything? This is it. The Film He Said He Would Never Make. The Movie That We Thought We Would Never Get. The start of it all. The journey that gave us Lord of the Rings. The tale that gives birth to a legend. The story that enthralled a generation. Bilbo steps out of his front door, and nothing is ever the same again. Beards, dwarves, wizards, pipes, hairy feet and Middle Earth. I’ll be there. I’ll be there if the reviews say it stinks worse than dragon shit. I’ll be there no matter what.
Based on a little known work, The Hobbit, by someone called J.R.R. Tolkien.
I had a reason to use the Kindle last month – a couple of medium length train journeys. Normally I’d be quite comfortable taking a book on such a trip, but I thought I’d try out the Kindle and see if it really could replace the book experience.
I read Changes by Jim Butcher. To be fair, I’d read it before, but I wanted to re-read it before I got stuck into Ghost Story. In the end I read them both on the Kindle, not all on the train journey of course, but I stuck with it when I got back home.
You can’t fault the Kindle screen, it’s easy to read, easy on the eyes and very high quality. Equally, the interface couldn’t be simpler, click to turn the page, remembers where you are and the little flash was no where near as bad as I expected. It doesn’t really weigh that much either and it’s light enough to comfortably hold in one hand, so no issue there.
However, I do have a significant problem, and that is hand position. My natural one-handed book grip and two-handed book grip don’t work with the Kindle. I also have an ‘I’m being lazy and holding the book down with my whole hand’ thing going on which you can’t do either. Basically, if I wanted to avoid having my thumb on the Kindle screen (and I assume I did want to avoid that), there’s only one place for it to naturally go – and that place is occupied by the keypad that I never used.
I need a keypad-less Kindle.
I ended up settling on a ‘holding it in my hand like a smart phone’ which was okay, I’ve got pretty big hands, and I could turn the pages, but it tired my fingers out reasonably quickly. I had to switch between that grip and a ‘thumb between keypad and screen’ grip. None of them felt natural compared to holding a book, where it doesn’t matter where your thumb or fingers end up, you can always move them to read a word or two.
It feels like a pretty significant issue to me, although maybe I’m alone in the matter. Here’s a few photo’s to show you what I mean.
Normal thumb grip, with the book ‘resting’ on my fingers.
Another thumb grip, but I can put my thumb anywhere I like.
Reading with the book balanced on my leg.
Kindle – delicate thumb grip, tiring on the thumb.
Kindle – smartphone grip, tiring on the whole hand.
Kindle – side grip, not bad, but cramps the fingers.
In summary – I got on fine with the Kindle for actual reading. The screen is sublime and reading is as easy as real paper, but it’s just not quite the right shape. A larger section under the screen with no keys would have been ideal, or a ‘touch’ keypad that you can turn off and use as a thumb rest would have worked too.
It’s been five years and a couple of months since David Gemmell tragically died, and a great storyteller was taken from us. His final two books were published posthumously, with Fall of Kings being completed by his widow, Stella. Even now writing these words isn’t easy; I was lucky enough to consider David a friend, and to spend time in his and Stella’s company.
I haven’t read any of David’s books since Fall of Kings, in fact I’ve read very little since completing Fall of Kings, and anything I have read has been distinctly not heroic fantasy. I don’t think I’ve been avoiding it intentionally, but there’s definitely a small part of my reading soul that doesn’t want to accept David is gone and doesn’t want to move on.
I read a huge amount of fantasy literature in the late 80′s and throughout the 90′s but eventually I struggled to find anything fresh and enjoyable, with the sole exception of David Gemmell’s work. His books were always entertaining, always enjoyable, and always emotional. People can discuss style and prose as much as they want, but in his heart, David was a storyteller and that shines through in everything he wrote. His ability to engage you, to show you the hearts of the people in his stories, to embroil you in their lives and their emotions is unparalleled in modern fantasy literature. I struggled to find that engagement anywhere else in the genre, and although I’m sure it exists, not finding it left me jaded and put me off fantasy fiction for a long time.
While helping Grete sort out the book collection and get them all onto Good Reads, we went through all my David Gemmell books and it was the first time in a long time that I’d seen them all lined up. I resolved to start reading them again, and there’s no other place, no better place to start, than Legend.
I picked it up last night, and put it down a hundred pages in and a couple of hours later. It’s still as good as I remember, instantly engaging and enjoyable. I hadn’t realised, or had forgotten, just how much of the world Druss inhabits is described in the first few chapters, and how many of the later books are based on short throw-away lines or character names in Legend. David’s style is just so easy to read, and that’s because it’s like being there with him, listening to him tell you the story.
Legend is about honour, courage, fear, duty, age and faith.
It is as poignant and as relevant now as it was when he wrote it.
I would have sat in the darkness and listened to David tell stories to hold back the night, without that chance, I’ll re-read all his books and share my life with him again.
Halting State is a book that ticks all my “I’m interested” boxes. Its has lots of technology, virtual reality, augmented reality, on-line gaming, intrigue, mystery, crime, tabletop roleplaying references and a protagonist who’s full of self doubt. So I keep having to ask myself why I found it so hard to finish. The story is set in the near future and augmented reality is an essential part of every day life, the best example in the book is a network used by the Police to drive heads-up displays and overlays on their goggles/glasses. The result being they always know who they’re talking to, their past history and everything they do is recorded and analysed. The whole thing is so pervasive that the author tells us people can’t even find their way around big cities any more without their augmented reality map overlays. Massively Multi-player Online Games are huge business, telephones are insanely powerful and provide all your local computing needs, everything is highly-connected, pervasive computing is the norm, and taxis drive themselves to your destination.
Against this backdrop of near-future technology is the theft of a bunch of digital assets which drags our little band of protagonists into a deadly hunt for what’s really going on. Mix in some spy-vs-spy style espionage, some politics and a little bit of big business and we have what seems to be an engaging and complex backdrop for what should be an excellent journey.
Sadly, Charles Stross manages make it hard going. The book is written in the 2nd person, with chapters alternating between the main protagonists. Sometimes there’s even some overlap, so the end of one chapter from Elaine’s point of view in the second person, is then covered by Jack in the start of the next chapter. This is particularly frustrating when one chapter ends, “You squeeze his hand tightly”, and the next starts, “You feel her hand in yours” (those aren’t in the book, just my example). The 2nd person structure might work in some circumstances, but here it just adds to the overall confusion. The rest of that confusion is delivered via the plot which is straggly and badly connected, and the technical jargon. In an interview, Stross suggests that when he wrote this in 2008, only one of the technologies mentioned in the book wasn’t actually commercially available. That may be true, but the sheer amount of jargon and technology mentioned is overwhelming.
I kept reading because I liked Jack (the burned out games developer), and Elaine (a forensic accountant), I even liked Sue (a Scottish policewoman). However, thanks to the 2nd person delivery and the rest of the structure, the characters don’t grow and remain pretty shallow. Sure, they have their moments, and there are some brief flashes of what they could have been, but every time I felt I was getting to know them the 2nd person style threw me back to the real world.
The pace is okay, there’s humour, some amusing revelations and some excellent examples of what technology might turn into – but it’s all wrapped in such a chaotic and confusing plot that it’s too well hidden to fully enjoy. I was not at all surprised when the end turned out to be nothing that we expected and it had to be explained de-briefing style in the last chapter.
The actual conclusion was a real let down after the build up and it felt like Stross just didn’t know where to take the whole thing in the end.
Having said all of that, I read the whole thing, and I laughed out loud a few times. I enjoyed the technology when I could get past the jargon and I think Stross has provided an interesting insight into how things could turn out. This book is absolutely not average – but I’m going to give it a squarely average score. It could have been so much better and it’s saved only by the touches of brilliance amidst the chaos.
Rating: 
The story might sound familiar; sometime in the near future, a super-intelligent AI has co-opted all the machines in the world to wage war against humanity. Humanity, of course, has lined itself up for this disaster by allowing more and more of the machines it takes for granted to be controlled by their own inbuilt computers. It should be no surprise that eventually the machines stand up and rebel, and that premise has driven any number of books and movies in the past. But dig just the tiniest bit deeper and you’ll find a far more complex story going on in Robopocalypse.
Along with the more subtle presentation of a familiar theme, this book presents the story in an unusual style. It is presented as a number of reports or incidents viewed retrospectively by a third person, the narrator. So while all books are a fusion of style and content, in this book the style is more than just a container for the words, it’s an actual part of the story. Robopocalypse relies on this unusual structure to build a cohesive and moving story from a number of engaging vignettes.
Cormac Wallace narrates the story for us after a brief introduction, which actually starts just after the war is over. In fact the first sentence in the book starts, “Twenty minutes after the war ends ….” so there are no spoilers in revealing this. Cormac takes us back to before the war starts, through reports of a small groups of individuals who turn out to have pivotal roles in the upcoming struggle. They include a US congresswoman, a lonely inventor, an American soldier and a London based hacker to name a few. Each shows up over and over in different chapters focussed on them, and we eventually witness the rise of the artificial intelligence (Archos), and the terrible war which follows.
The vignettes are all excellently written and Wilson manages to present well rounded and engaging characters very quickly. Which is good news, because this format could so easily have failed if the reader couldn’t empathise with or join the characters on their journeys. It is the emotional engagement that drives the overall story arc, we mostly already know the end, so the only reason to read is to see how these people get there.
The individual chapters each cover very short periods of time, but together they take us from just before the war, to the moment where Archos takes control, through the actual fighting and right up to the end over three years later. Each chapter has it’s own pace, some are frantic and filled with panic while others are more relaxed. While we don’t get to see individual characters often or for very much time, the long time scale involved in the main story arc gives Wilson a chance to show us those characters have changed even if we don’t watch that process in action.
I did sometimes feel that pieces of the story were missing, or that I would have liked to have seen more of some of the characters, but that’s the nature of the format Wilson has chosen. Perhaps less is more, and that desire to find out kept me turning the pages. Either way the end result is an excellent, entertaining and emotional look at what might be if the Robots ever do rebel. If my only complaint about a book is that it’s too short, then I think it’s a pretty good sign. I thoroughly enjoyed Robopocalypse, and hope you do as well.
Rating:
Author Diana Wynne Jones died on March 26th 2011 (after battling with cancer for over a year). Diana’s work spanned five decades, and although primarily known for her young adult work, many of her stories were loved by young and old adults alike.
You can read more here (Telegraph), here (Diana’s official site), here (SF Site), and here (Guardian).
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