January, 2010
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January Reading
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Big Fan Review
Monday, January 25th, 2010Big Fan. Okay. I think this film was done a disservice by its trailer, though I completely believe it would be challenging to create a perfect trailer for it. Patton Oswalt is great, as expected. This is the second film I’ve watched recently, though, in which I found the pacing, shall we say, contemplative. Maybe this effect was accentuated by my watching it on my laptop; regardless, I don’t think that I’ve just been so trained by modern media to expect something to happen every three seconds that anything slower makes me antsy.
Related (but not identical) to my issues with pacing, I wonder if maybe the film would have made me happier at about half its length. You’ll never get a theater distribution deal for a 45-minute film, but there are enough alternative distribution outlets out there now that it ought to be possible to get such a work in front of at least as many eyes as would see it in “selected cities.”
Collected Zelazny Vol. 6 Review
Friday, January 1st, 2010The Road to Amber: Volume 6: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, ed. Grubbs, Kovacs, Crimmins. Yes. I was a little surprised to find I hadn’t read all of Zelazny’s contributions to George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, and so was pleased to have the opportunity to rectify that situation. I was disappointed to see some reports that Robert Sheckley was not the most honorable of collaborators: re-writing Zelazny’s work after being asked not to, claiming to have written the first of their novels with almost no Zelazny input, and other contrary-to-documented-events assertions. Doubtless every human endeavor is freighted with, well, humanity.
A treat in this volume is an essay by Michael Whelan providing insight into his lovely cover art for the series. When he says “…once I had the essential foreground/background areas defined I went to work, trusting myself to find the shapes in the image as I worked on it”, I hear echoes of one of Zelazny’s most frequent approaches to composition.
Many thanks to the New England Science Fiction Association, and especially editors David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs, and Ann Crimmins, for tackling this project and seeing it through.
Collected Zelazny Vol. 5 Review
Friday, January 1st, 2010Nine Black Doves: Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, ed. Grubbs, Kovacs, Crimmins. Yes. Another collection that does what it says on the tin, this one includes the last of the Dilvish shorts and other later work. I found myself increasingly fond of the story “Permafrost”, contained in this collection, due in no small part to passages such as this one: “The wind, already heavy, rises, hurling particles of ice against the building with a sound like a multitude of tiny claws scratching.”
I had not at all remembered reading “The Bands of Titan”, so was surprised to see that it had been collected in Frost & Fire. On the other hand, I found it fairly forgettable on this reading, too.
Friends of the Collective will likely recognize one of the names listed amongst the proof-reading corps in the backs of Volumes 5 and 6.