Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Stuart Starosta

The Dune films: The Mt. Everest of SF films remains unconquered

Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013 documentary; actual movie never filmed)

Watch trailer.
It was inevitable that Dune captured the imaginations of film directors, but the scale and complexity of the story made the transition to film extremely difficult. Film rights were acquired in 1971 but little progress was made until 1974, when a French group acquired the rights and Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean avant-garde film maker, writer/poet and spiritual figure most famous for his 1970 bizarro Western El Topo and The Holy Mountain.

Batman: Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

Batman: Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

Batman: Dark Victory (2000) takes place immediately after Batman: The Long Halloween (1997). In the aftermath of the Holiday Killer, Gotham’s Falcone and Maroni crime families are in chaos. Dark Victory is steeped in the same dark crime noir atmosphere as Long Halloween, so if you liked the first title you will like this one too. It’s all about mysterious killings, Mafia wars, the rise of the arch-villians,

February 27th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4 | Comics, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Ancillary Mercy: Marion loves it. Stuart doesn’t.

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

I loved Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword, but as I got to the end of Ancillary Sword, I began to have some doubts. As good as the books were, and as good as Ann Leckie is, I didn’t see how she could possibly wrap up such an elaborate story. I should have had more faith! Ancillary Mercy completes Breq’s tale, resolves the story of the intelligent Ships and tells a bit more about what’s beyond the Ghost Gate,

February 26th, 2016. Marion Deeds and Stuart Starosta | Ann Leckie | SFF Reviews | 9 comments |

Ancillary Sword: Mixed opinions

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

In Ancillary Justice, Leckie’s award-sweeping 2013 novel, we met Breq. Breq was a soldier, but before she was a soldier, she had been a ship, the Justice of Toren. Specifically, Breq was an ancillary, a human body whose personality has been erased, so that she could be a node of awareness for the ship’s AI. Justice of Toren comprised the ship itself and 2,000 human ancillaries in a distributed network. When Justice of Toren was destroyed in an act of treachery,

Gotham, Season 1: The backstories of Gotham’s heroes and villains

Gotham, Season 1

This is such a great idea for a TV series. We all know the basic story of the Batman thanks to the venerable comics franchise, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns, and the recent Christopher Nolan DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY of films. It seems like origin stories are very trendy these days, and it’s an obvious direction to go to expand the reach of any popular franchise. But who would have thought to explore the origins of all the notorious villains of Gotham City while centering the story on rookie detective James Gordon and his cynical older partner Harvey Bullock,

February 23rd, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 5 | Film / TV | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb

Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb

Batman: The Long Halloween (1997) takes place soon after Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One (1987) in chronology. Batman is still in his early days of crime-fighting, while Captain Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent are trying to combat corruption in the police force and courts. This book is a lengthy and gripping noir story that goes back to Batman’s roots as a detective, as he and Jim and Harvey all try to solve the mystery of the Holiday Killer,

February 20th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Ancillary Justice: An excellent debut!

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Breq used to be a spaceship, or at least a fragment of the spaceship known as Justice of Toren. The ship controlled innumerable human bodies, known variously as “ancillaries” to the people of the interstellar Radchaai Empire and as “corpse soldiers” to the cultures and planets the Empire has conquered. Those soldiers used to be regular, innocent human beings who, if sufficiently healthy, were slaved to one of the Radchaai ships, their personalities more or less overwritten to become part of one of the Empire’s many-bodied artificial intelligences.

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One (1988) completely reinvented the caped crusader as a dark and conflicted figure. This time, it was Alan Moore’s turn to reinvent Batman’s greatest rival, that homicidal madman The Joker. Batman: The Killing Joke (1988) tells its compelling story in just 51 pages, but the writing and artwork are so phenomenal that it has retained a legendary status.

The Windup Girl: Divisive

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

My Body is Not My Own…

Having just finished Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, I’m left rather bereft at how to describe, let alone review, The Windup Girl. I am not a big reader of science-fiction or dystopian thrillers, which means that no obvious comparisons come to mind, and the setting and tone of the novel are so unique (to me at least) that they almost defy description.

Set in a future Thailand where genetically engineered “megodonts” (elephants) provide manual labor and “cheshires” (cats) prowl the streets,

February 11th, 2016. Rebecca Fisher, Marion Deeds, Stefan Raets, Justin Blazier, Ruth Arnell and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4 | Paolo Bacigalupi | Audio, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 8 comments |

Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010: Interesting choices

Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo

Note: You may also be interested in Stuart’s reviews of:
Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, 1946-1987.
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984.

Ever since high school, I’ve used David Pringle’s Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984 (1985), Modern Fantasy: 100 Best Novels, 1946-1987 (1988), and The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction (1991) as excellent guides to some of the highest-quality,

February 8th, 2016. Stuart Starosta | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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