The eagle and shark of the title are in fact Jarrod and Lily, who meet at Jarrod’s ‘dress as your favourite animal’ party, bond over video games, and then have cringe-inducing sex. Lily is desperate to find love, but Jarrad is a man on a mission – he’s training to fight his high-school nemesis, and he just doesn’t have time for romance.
It’s a work of two halves, and the first isn’t particularly great. It follows the arrival of a mysterious stranger in the small English village of Iping, the reaction of growing suspicion towards him, and finally his unveiling as – you guessed it – an invisible man.
What separates Bourne isn’t that he can get the girls or how he drinks his martini, but the fact that he could kill you with a rolled-up newspaper in two seconds flat…
David reviews The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, a Gollancz SF Masterworks novel.
Having previously only read Slaughterhouse 5 and Breakfast of Champions, I couldn’t help but wonder where the science-fiction label sometimes thrown at Vonnegut had come from. Granted there were nods to sci-fi in both books, but that was it, and I figured it was the usual case of a lazy industry trying to pigeon-hole someone who was too damn good to be slotted into any easy category. In retrospect, I was probably right. Vonnegut’s work, even as early as his second published novel, was unique. But now that I have read The Sirens of Titan, the classification makes a little more sense. It is science-fiction enough, at least, for Gollancz to justifiably stick it under their SF Masterworks banner–though if by Vonnegut’s standards it is straight genre fiction, it is still primarily and unquestionably Vonnegut.
Maybe it’s just the people I hang out with, but every time my friends and I get to discussing all the astounding stuff modern technology can do and how none of the sci-fi we read growing up predicted (for instance) carrying around several freakin’ days’ worth of music in something the size of a cigarette [...]
Pete’s introductory post takes a look at Star Control II, a classic computer game from the early 90s that is still alive and kicking.
When I tell people Star Control II (released in 1992 by Accolade) is the Best Video Game Ever, I’m only slightly exaggerating for effect. I’m not an avid gamer these days–the gags in Penny Arcade and VG Cats have a tendency to whiz over my head–but I’ve played my share, and Star Control II did some truly amazing things.
Jeremiah reviews Triangulation: End of Time, an anthology edited by First Draft Theater‘s very own Pete Butler.
Triangulation: End of Time is the latest entry in a series of annual anthologies put out by PARSEC, “Pittsburgh’s premier science fiction organization.” Each of the stories somehow touches on the theme “End of Time,” but wide-ranging and far-reaching is the name of the game here. In typical speculative fiction fashion, the anthology’s twenty stories cover territory ranging from the wild west to the far future to even more exotic locales, some of which exist outside of time itself.
David reviews Tales from Earthsea, an animated film by the son of Hayao Miyazaki.
You have to feel a little sorry for Goro Miyazaki. Entering the family business must be an intimidating prospect when your dad is master-animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the famous Studio Ghibli and Oscar winning director of films like Princess Mononoke and, most famously, Spirited Away. Not only that, but Goro’s first project is an adaptation of one of his father’s favourite works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic Earthsea series – Miyazaki has said that he keeps the books by his bed, and had once hoped to direct the project himself. Goro’s choice of first directorial project seems almost calculatedly masochistic.
Josh finds a game that promises to simulate real life.
Rather than just blatantly plug my latest published story, like I usually do, here’s the press release for issue 30 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine…