Tag: scifi

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (2019)

Promises a complex mythos of a time-travelling serial killer early on and then just sort of shoves it over the line in the end — having someone explain the pretense to you in two mintues will probably stimulate the same amount of intruigue as the whole two hour runtime.

For a time travel movie it’s incredibly linear, and too shallow in its rules and consequences. Figured out the plot about 20min in and none of the other stuff was really fascinating in its own right.

It’s fine, but PREDESTINATION is still the gold standard for this sort of movie and you should watch that instead.

by Thomas Scott Holland

HIGH LIFE (2018)

Uncomfortable and confronting, full of surrealism, body horror, disturbing psychosexual imagery and violence.

Some fantastic visuals and good design wrapping around a minimal, slow tone and dark, weird story choices.

More SOLARIS than INTERSTELLAR, definitely not for everyone.

Don’t know if I liked it, but it was certainly interesting.

by Thomas Scott Holland

Don’t Panic: “ENDYMION”/”THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY”

Twenty-two books down on audiobook alone since October last year! Hot damn, that seems like a lot…

I was intending to write up Dan Simmons’ ENDYMION last night as I finished around halfway through the work shift, but alas I managed to be under a wall of boxes when it came down and took a solid thump to the head so spent the rest of the night in a mild, headachey daze, and really didn’t have the brain function to cobble a sentence together. Tonight, my phone mysteriously erased the sequel, RISE OF ENDYMION, from my library so instead I had to look into my backup supply of audiobooks and managed to get through the entirety of the first HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY in its place, so now it’s a double-up!

Continue reading “Don’t Panic: “ENDYMION”/”THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY””

by Thomas Scott Holland

“FALL OF HYPERION” – Dan Simmons (1990)

Shrikes are passerine birds of the family Laniidae. The family name, and that of the largest genus, Lanius, is derived from the Latin word for “butcher”, and some shrikes are also known as “butcher birds” because of their feeding habits –  known for catching insects and small vertebrates and impaling their bodies on thorns, the spikes on barbed-wire fences or any available sharp point. This helps them to tear the flesh into smaller, more conveniently-sized fragments, and serves as a cache so that the shrike can return to the uneaten portions at a later time. — Wikipedia

It’s something of a tricksy task trying to analyse the sequel to HYPERION, in that it’s not so much a sequel to what has almost instantly become my favourite sci-fi novel ever as it is a continuation of the story picking up immediately from the pilgrims’ arrival at the Time Tombs on the titular planet at the very end of the first book. So really, the two should be viewed as a single story in two parts and ideally I’d have thus reviewed them together, but there’s jsut so much to each of them in their own right as well that it was certainly wiser to do it in halves. Eschewing the Canterbury Tales structure of the previous volume, THE FALL OF HYPERION is not more about the groups’ individual reasons for coming to the planet to ask The Shrike for a single wish as it is the story of what those wishes are and the consequences they will come to have for all of existence.

Continue reading ““FALL OF HYPERION” – Dan Simmons (1990)”

by Thomas Scott Holland

“THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE” – Niven & Pournelle (1974)

A thief was on trial before the Sultan and sentenced to death. He asked the Sultan to spare his life.
“You don’t know it, but I am the greatest teacher in your land. If you spare my life, I promise to teach your horse to sing hymns.”
The Sultan smirked but accepted the offer. “You have a year, and if the horse cannot sing, you will be killed.”
Daily, after that, the thief spent his time singing hymns to the horse. His friends laughed as they saw him and asked what he hoped to accomplish.
“Many things can happen in a year,” the thief told them. “The Sultan may die, the horse may die, I may even die. Or, maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

Continue reading ““THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE” – Niven & Pournelle (1974)”

by Thomas Scott Holland

“A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ” – W.M. Miller Jr (1960)

canticle (from the Latin canticulum, a diminutive of canticum, “song”) is a hymn, psalm or other song of praise taken from biblical texts other than the Psalms.

The divide of Church vs State has been around since approximately forty-five seconds after the rise of churches and/or states (whichever came latter), and to this day remains a touchy subject in a realm of touchy subjects. Don’t talk about politics or religion over the dinner table, someone’s parents have echoed throughout time, but Walter M. Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ doesn’t so much focus on the aggressive dichotomy so much as it broadens the scope to tell how each shapes the other in turn, and how the results become neither and both. As each side tries to co-opt the discovery of articles relating to Saint Leibowitz (an engineer in the time immediately proceeding the Great Flame Deluge/Third World War of Atomics) Miller looks at the ways that various sociopolitical factions approach information and fact, and tailor it to their own agendas as humanity first crawls out of a new Dark Age to a new technological Renaissance and in doing so reawakens knowledge of destructive power so vast that it threatens to break the cycle of societal/historical recurrence and technological progress/regress to eradicate mankind altogether. Mostly set within the development of the Order of Saint Leibowitz, traditional religion is forefront – much language being derived from the Latin employed by the Roman Catholic Church – though for the most part they are portrayed as more centrist-atheistic and institutionally focussed in practice. Primarily, this is divided into three sections of the book, each a little over a half-millennium apart:

Continue reading ““A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ” – W.M. Miller Jr (1960)”

by Thomas Scott Holland