Culture Update

What with the cat crisis, the virus and some heavy work-related demands being made on B. with knock-on domestic demands on me, it's been ages since I posted anything of substance (last week's rant about Nathan Barley being the one exception).

I've also failed to follow up my first Speculative Cityscape with any of the other nine in the projected series. This I'll be trying to rectify soon, possibly with something about Istanbul.

Meanwhile, here are some notes on all the stuff I've been watching and reading since, ooh, ages ago now.

BOOKS

Natural History by Justina Robson. A fabulous work of hard S.F., made all the more palatable for me by the fact that most of the science is the one I'm interested in, biology. Robson's posthumans are among the most sympathetic and convincing I've read about, managing to be both alien in outlook and clearly human in their psychological heritage: the first chapter shows a bioengineered deep-space probe discovering the first signs of non-terrestrial life whilst listening to "American Pie". Robson's "unevolved" characters unfortunately become a little insipid in comparison, but it's a reasonable trade-off.

There's some astonishing imagination at work here, and when the big central concept is revealed, near the end, it makes sense and is convincing rather than being empty technobabble. I gather Robson's earlier books are classical cyberpunk, which (since I've read rather a lot of it) makes me less keen to try them. But Natural History is very much worth reading, and I'm looking forward to whatever she comes out with next.

Raw Spirit: the Search for the Perfect Dram by Iain Banks. This is Banks's only non-fiction book to date, and to be perfectly frank I can see why. His style of writing is always entertaining, and the ostensible subject -- whisky -- is one I'm interested in but know little about, which is always a winning combination. Unfortunately, the focus on whisky is extremely loose, and the other things Banks seems keen on banging on about are very much less interesting to the reader than they are to him. If he was talking about writing, science fiction or even politics I'd probably have found it fascinating even so -- though others perhaps wouldn't. These subjects do come up on rare occasions, but in between times Banks treats us to interminable descriptions of his various cars and what they're like to drive, andecdotes involving his mates (often not even about drinking whisky with his mates), and -- the ultimate turn-off for me -- a digression about football.

This is a great big shame, because the stuff about whisky is absolutely fascinating, and really makes me wish I had the money to do some serious investigation of the distillers and varieties he recommends. Which, unfortunately, I don't.

TV

Nathan Barley. I forgot to watch or record it on Friday, so I have no idea whether Morris & Brooker's opus became any funnier or more relevant during the week. I'll have to try and remember to tune in for the final episode, in the hope that it ends with a blackly humorous massacre of all the characters. Although Blackadder made that a cliché years ago, of course.

Firefly. God, I could write screens and screens about this. I finished watching it in February, having been given it for my birthday in November. It's bloody excellent. Pretty much anything I say about it here will be inadequate -- every aspect, from scripts to sets to acting to the underlying S.F. worldbuilding, is absolutely consummate. Of the fourteen episodes that were made, only one -- "Safe" -- struck me as having naff elements. That's a better strike rate than any other genre show, and certainly better than Joss Whedon's two better-known fantasy series. Some mainstream dramas like Six Feet Under bear the comparison, however; and indeed, the drama in Firefly is so character-based that it's easy to forget it's science fiction. Even the theme song is gorgeous. For a first season, this is quite simply phenomenal.

So naturally Fox cancelled it.

Desperate Housewives. No no, honestly, listen, this is a lot better than you think. The subject matter (four bored housewives in the suburbs) may seem unpromising, and I could personally do without the Sex and the City-style voiceover narration, but both of these elements are assiduously subverted right from the start. The narrator is dead, having killed herself in the very first scene, and observes from some unspecified afterlife as her four friends seek to uncover the reasons for her suicide. This arc story -- which so far has involved blackmail, human remains, child abuse, a contract killer, a brutal onscreen murder and an escape from a mental hospital -- runs more or less in the background while the lives of the four protagonists play out their more mundane dramas of rivalry, divorce, romance and parenthood. The scripts are crisp and witty, and even the sunny suburban setting takes on a sinister X-Files tinge after a while.

With the exception of Teri Hatcher, whose "kooky" act could do with being turned down a couple of notches, the main cast are all excellent as well, my particular favourite being icy redhead Marcia Cross as the Stepfordish domestic tyrant Bree.

...OK. So I just jettisoned the whole of my remaining credibility in one go, didn't I?

FILM

I'm having trouble remembering the last time I went to the cinema, actually. It may well have been before Christmas. You'll have to make do with the following on DVD:

Cypher. Intriguing and clever S.F. thriller revolving around questions of identity. I particularly enjoyed the way it started off as a dour, noirish technothriller and built up slowly into James Bond secret-base territory, with colour slowly seeping into the washed-out palette as it did so. Mind you, with the right binoculars the big climactic twist would have been obvious from Belgium.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. This was great fun, much as you'd expect, but veering so close to substancelessness as to be effectively indistinguishable from it. I was intrigued to know whether the pulp-adventure style events were supposed to be taking place in our own history or an alternate one: for a story apparently set in 1939 (the characters watch The Wizard of Oz at the cinema) and featuring German scientists, the complete lack of any mention of Nazism is at least a little surprising. I'd have liked to see some connection made between the retro-futurist machinery and architecture (not to mention Tibetan mysticism) which Sky Captain pastiches and iconises, and that which was actually constructed or planned as part of Hitler's Reich. There was, to say the least, a lot of implicit fascism in the pulp fiction of that era, and the filmmakers skirt around this rather.

They did include an awful lot of cool explosions, though, so never mind.