Aliens Archive

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Book Review: Fear the Abyss

By
Adam Shaftoe
– January 18, 2013Posted in: Lit Reviews

In his introduction to Fear the Abyss, an anthology of dark horror and science fiction from Post Mortem Press, editor Eric Beebe asks, “What is more frightening than an unending unknown?” To answer this question, twenty-two authors present a variety of narrative insights into the relationship between curiosity’s call and the anxieties of discovery.

While these stories are well suited to the editor’s thematic mandate of exploring the science, knowledge, and fear, I believe another concept unites these stories. Almost all the fiction within Fear the Abyss probes the actual act of perception, be it visual, psychic, or something else, as both a reaction to and a means of comprehending the unknown. The tones of pessimism, nihilism, and, in a few cases, optimism which materialize out of these stories speak not simply to the construction of an imagined unknown, but how readily identifiable characters process that which is alien to them. Though the range of sub-genres is broad, from outright body horror to far-future science fiction, the experience is quite cohesive.

Honour Roll

Extraction by Jessica McHugh

Certain stories live on in a person’s memory long after they have been read. Extraction is not one of those stories. Rather, Extraction is the story that gives nightmares to all the other stories which keep a person up at night. Beginning with the phrase “I can’t stop jerking off at work,” what follows is an evocative piece of short fiction, dwelling in the cracks between body horror and contemporary science fiction.

It naturally follows that McHugh’s text is somewhat challenging to read. In exploring a literal form of human alienation, the story risks evoking a particularly sour taste from the reader. For me, the experience prompted equal measures of repulsion and fascination, akin to the first time I watched Hellraiser. Throughout the text, motifs of desire and addiction collide in what is quite rightly a reproductive grotesquery. Unsettling as the imagery may be, it’s not exploitative so much as an attempt to relocate the reader from a safe conceptual realm into a place where any pop culture preconceptions of the fantastic are stripped away. The remnant is a vision of reality which frames the great “other” as something genuinely horrifying to behold.

That Which Does Not Kill You by Matt Moore

Matt Moore offers a near-future war story that blends the best elements of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Though there are some aspects of body horror in the story, its raison d’etre seems to be an inquiry into the consequences of denying agency to its two central characters. A number of interesting questions emerge out of this denial of control. Should we have to confront the horrors of our world if there is an escape at hand? At what point do we accept our circumstances rather than trying to work around them?

There’s also a strong juxtaposition between the characters’ inner conflict and the war going on around them. It’s an almost MASH like quality which sees the grand questions of the war ignored. Instead, the story focuses on the war’s casualties, in both physical and psychological terms. In shining just enough light on battlefield apparati to avoid being bogged down in back story, That Which Does Not Kill You showcases the cheapness of life and death in a war where soldiers are adjuncts to military hardware.

The American by S.C. Hayden

I have been waiting for a story like The American for as long as long as I’ve been genre fiction. To me, there’s nothing more tiring than stories which try to shock me with the battle for Heaven as waged on contemporary Earth. We’ve all seen The Exorcist, and most everything that has followed after that, regardless of medium, has been variations on the theme. Moreover, stories of demonic possession often presume too heavily upon the audience’s ability to be moved by the Judeo-Christian legacy.

The American begins as a deceptively derivative story about demonic possession. And then with one perfectly placed knock-out paragraph, which can not be discussed without moving into the realm of spoiling, it takes a tired trope of Christian pseudo-mysticism and places it firmly within a post-modern context. It’s short, smart, and manages to double down on subversion in a genre niche which is firmly rooted in ignorance and superstition.

Life After Dead by Jeyn Roberts

Anytime a writer does something different with zombies, I’m going to pay attention. Though unique in its own right, there are echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road within Life After Dead. Post zombie Vancouver is a bleak and desolate place. The heady thrill of immediate survival, as seen in so many zombie stories/films, has given way to resource scarcity and a profound existential void. The survivors are forced to reconcile their continued existence with the reality that modern city dwellers don’t know how to do anything when it comes to survival in the purest sense of the word.

Now if this story only worked with the above mentioned elements, it would likely still be doing enough to land on my honour roll. The mid-story transformation, however, really makes Life After Dead stand out from the horde. It’s a common enough thing to see a zombie apocalypse survivor putting down an infected loved one; the bio-political struggle between monster and sickie is pretty much standard fare in a post World War Z world. Rather than peeling away another layer of that onion, Roberts’ inverts the format. The result is unexpected and emotionally resonant. A survival narrative morphs into a story about love, and love is rarely handled with such adroit among the undead.

What We Found by Andrew Nienaber

When a writer frames a story around the question “Are we alone,” the answer is almost always yes; I call it the Sagan Doctrine. Answering one of science fiction’s most holy questions with a definitive negative invites not only the wrath of optimistic readers but also opens the door to fundamental questions about the purpose of the narrative itself. Through a survivor’s final words for a future that may never come, Mr. Nienaber imagines the psychological, as well as practical, consequences of terrestrial life as a cosmic accident.

The emerging story is simultaneously a commentary on the ever present isolation and dread of urban life, as well as a thought experiment on humans as creatures of hope. If humanity was confronted with absolute knowledge of our loneliness in the cosmos, would that realisation become a viral meme capable of flaying the humanity out of those who come in contact with it? Could we, as a people who strive to greater and greater heights, cope with a universe beholden unto ourselves? It is a troubling question, but one relevant to a world which pushes the frontiers of astronomy and quantum physics with each passing year.

Honourable Mentions

A Box of Candy by Nelson W. Pyles: A classic ghost tale focused through the lens of Quentin Tarantino style revenge.

Broken Promises by Jamie Lackey: My first thoughts after reading: this is what Prometheus should have been.

The Nostalgiac by Robert Essig: Hitchcock flavoured sci-fi horror focusing on working class characters.

The Bottom Line

Of the twenty-two stories contained within Fear the Abyss, there were only five which didn’t strike some sort of meaningful chord with me. The writers mobilize a broad range of styles and genres to plumb the depths of fear, knowledge, and perception. Would that The Outer Limits were reborn on HBO, freed from the conservatism of network television, I expect its first season would look something like Fear the Abyss.

Fear the Abyss

Edited by: Eric Beebe

Published by: Post Mortem Press


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Movie Review: Alien Armageddon

By
Adam Shaftoe
– October 17, 2012Posted in: Movie Reviews

This must be what it was like to work on MST3K; it’s my birthday and I’m writing a review of a crappy movie. Ah well, let’s get our hands dirty with this week’s Netflix’s Basement entry Alien Armageddon.

Much like the other movies in this series of reviews, Alien Armageddon is a giant waste of time. Yet at some points it almost feels salvageable. One scene in particular, where we find out the aliens are genetically manipulating certain women into being perpetually pregnant with alien meatballs which are then fed to the other captives of the alien’s brutal regime, felt like something out of a really good episode of Tales from the Crypt or The Outer Limits. Unfortunately, enduring everything that precedes and follows this scene is a painful chore. This is a movie with about fifteen gun battles, but not a single squib pack to be found. All of the barrel flares and gunshot sounds are added in post-production. And on a scale of one to Terranova the blood splatter special effects and pew-pew gun sequences rate on par with the lowest budget SyFy original movie.

But at least the casting director managed to get Virginia Hey (Farscape, The Road Warrior) in the movie. Though Hey’s presence is almost comically short lived. After two scenes and what amounts to about four lines of dialogue her character is unceremoniously killed.

So what is this movie actually about? I honestly wish I knew. It’s as if the screenwriter, who is also the director, was drunk on homemade bathtub gin during the entire creative process. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to set this up for you.

There are aliens called the Nephilim. Despite walking around in bargain basement storm trooper armour, the Nephilim are blind space worm things. Imagine Stargate’s Goa’uld, only more low-rent. But wait, the Nephilim are actually Martians and they created humans eons ago to be their bodies…or something like that. The whole relationship is a pastiche of biblical appropriation and Panspermia that isn’t nearly as clever as the movie wants it to be. Anyway, the aliens decide to invade the Earth, as all aliens are wont to do. The Nephilim destroy every major city on our world except Los Angeles (this is where you groan because heavenly beings set the City of Angels as their seat of power). For some reason that makes absolutely no sense from a biological point of view, the Nephilim can only feed on a species containing their own DNA. So their invasion is a pretense for interplanetary take-out. The actual story, which does manage to insert itself between all the exposition, is about a group of people trying to break out of a Nephilim prison. In doing so, they kill all the aliens with the power of Deus ex Machina.

There’s also some sort of power struggle between rival castes of the invading aliens, but the dialogue therein is painfully opaque and utterly inconsistent. Since it has almost zero bearing on the story, I gave up on my attempts to bring order to said theatrical chaos.

At least I could laugh at The Dead Undead. Watching Alien Armageddon evoked the same “dear god I need scotch” feeling that I have when I mark a written-on-the-day-its-due undergraduate paper.

For example, don’t set the movie in Los Angeles when you can’t afford permits to shoot in LA. Rarely does a scene pass when Alien Armageddon neglects to remind its viewers the story is set in LA. But what do we see of LA? About sixty minutes of concrete walls inside a building which could be a partially completed condo unit.

Then there’s Alien Armageddon’s answer to every film maker’s great question: do I need to show one of my character’s embarking upon a post-chili night magnitude shit? The answer is no. Sure, gastrointestinal distress might be a symptom of having one’s DNA over written by alien meatballs. But there’s no way to take an actor, or his character, seriously when he’s making this face.

It's not so much an O face, but an S face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, if as a director you are going to have a character puking their guts out on-screen, the splashing sound of puke hitting the bottom of the toilet should be concurrent with the actor retching, not consecutive. Unless this movie was made by Mormons somebody on set should have known that.

Then there’s the over-the-shoulder camera work which has the back of one actor’s head obstructing the sight line on the focal character. And who could forget such Oscar worthy dialogue as “She’s acting,” “I’ve got cramp,” and “You gotta choke me, bro”. After enduring all of the above who’s going to notice the flagrant use of iPhones as alien scanning devices or convenient lesbianism to wake up an otherwise comatose audience?

Seriously, this movie should be a right of passage for would-be directors. If upon a first viewing the neophyte director can not find 85% of the things the movie did wrong, they don’t get to make their own movies.

Still, I can’t help but think that in the hands of better people Alien Armageddon might have had some redeeming quality to it. Terrible as it is, most of its problems connect to a sense of creative control which presumed too highly upon its own cleverness. The premise is okay, but the execution is just a god awful mess.

Alien Armageddon

Writen, Directed, and Produced by: Neil Johnson

Starring: Katharine McEwan, Don Scribner, and Rochelle Vallese


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Essential Genre Music Volume 2

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 10, 2012Posted in: Movies, Music, Television, The Daily Shaft, Video Games

That’s right, it’s time for “Essential Genre Music Volume 2”.

I’ve pulled together fifteen (mostly instrumental) selections from television, movies, games, and anime for this ultra nerdy “what if” CD.

So without further ado, let’s get right into some tunes.

The title track – Icarus – Deus Ex Human Revolution Soundtrack – Michael McCann – 2011

McCann’s work on the Deus Ex: HR soundtrack earned him “best in music” nominations in the Canadian Video Game Awards and the BAFTA’s Video Game Awards. It’s a haunting and powerful piece of music that serves as the perfect complement to Eidos Montreal’s recent post-human masterpiece.

Track 2 – Terran Suite #2 – Starcraft soundtrack – Derek Duke and Glen Stafford – 1998

Why this particular piece? Because every time I set out to build something from Ikea, this is the tune that starts playing through my head. More than iconic, the Terran Suite is a touchstone to the very roots of Starcraft’s success as a piece of contemporary mythology.

Track 3 – Tank – The Seatbelts – 1998

If I had to guess, “Tank” is probably second to the Space Battleship Yamato anthem as the most remixed/covered song to emerge from an anime series. It’s also the benchmark for any saxophone players who want to prove their musical chops while simultaneously establishing their nerd cred.

Track 4 – Blade Runner’s End Theme – Vangelis – 1982

I don’t know why I didn’t think to put this on the first volume of essential genre music. In the thirty years since the song was first heard by human ears, it has become the godfather of music to all things cyberpunk.

Track 5 – Inner Universe – Origa – 2002

Perhaps not as iconic as “Making of a Cyborg”, the title track to 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, Inner Universe, from the 2002′s Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, has always stood out in my mind as a fascinating song. Setting aside the fact that the lyrics are in Russian, Latin, and English, I’m told the range required to hit all the notes is quite challenging.

Track 6 – Doomsday – Murray Gold – 2006

Yes yes, the actual Doctor Who theme song is awesome. But there’s more to the musical history of the recent series than various takes on a fifty year old tune. As performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, “Doomsday” is tied with “Vale Decem” as the musical high point of David Tennant’s time in the TARDIS.

Track 7 – Audi Famam Illius – Nobuo Uematsu – 2006

Famed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu lent his talents to “Audi Famam Illius”, the theme song to Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Too bad the game is nowhere near as epic (it’s actually very pointless) as the music.

Track 8 – Prelude to War – Bear McCreary – 2005

The rebooted Battlestar Galactica reached its zenith with the second season cliff-hanger “Pegasus”. There, I said it, and I don’t care how much fan rage it gets me. After Admiral Cain died it was all downhill, albeit at a gentle gradient. This song, which built to an epic crescendo during Adama and Cain’s camera-pan face off, accompanies not only the best moment of the series, but arguably one the finest moments in television this side of the 20th century.

Track 9 – Enterprising Young Men – Michael Giacchino – 2009

Giacchino made a bold decision when he abandoned Alexander Courage’s influence in crafting a new Star Trek theme. Though Courage’s score would be remixed into the ending credits, “Enterprising Young Men” became the headline refrain for Trek’s alternate timeline. Like it or not, it’s here now.

Track 10 – S’il Vous Plait – Fantastic Plastic Machine – 1997

You may not recognize the name, but fans of the British series Spaced will know the song. It’s a song to be played in moments of pure, unrivaled joy. Such moments include getting around giving notice at a job by telling your boss that Babylon 5 is shit (not actually true) so that he fires you.

Track 11 – Bishop’s Countdown – Aliens Soundtrack – James Horner – 1986

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that one track on this album is superior to another. Consider that I haven’t watched Aliens in a couple of years, but I could tell you exactly what scene accompanies each piece of music on this CD. If that’s not the mark of a brilliant piece of musical accompaniment, I don’t know what is.

What’s that? You want me to name the scene where this track plays? Fah, child’s play.

This starts playing as Ripley emerges from the service elevator in LV 426’s fusion plant. With Newt in tow she yells out, “God damn you, Bishop,” suspecting that the synthetic has taken the Sulaco’s remaining dropship and fled. Ripley turns around to see the other service elevator, presumably containing the xenomorph queen, rising up. Low on ammo, she tells Newt to “Close your eyes, baby.” At the last second Bishop flies the dropship into the frame, allowing Ripley and Newt to escape. As the ship tries to break atmo, a computerized voice counts down to zero before the fusion plant explodes.

Track 12 – The Elder Scrolls Themes – Jeremy Soule – 2002, 2006, 2011

Since 2002, Jeremy Soule has been the composer on the hugely popular Elder Scrolls series of video games (Morrowwind, Oblivion, and Skyrim). I suppose I could have just used the Morrowwind theme since the other two are built upon its back, but listening to the evolution of ten years worth of work is just too fantastic to pass up. Also, the Skyrim bit makes me want to drink a lot of mead and pick a fight with somebody weaker than me, preferably in the East coast of England.

Track 13 – Still Alive – Jonathan Coulton – 2007

Unlike the cake, this song is not a lie.

Track 14 – Il dolce suono/The Diva Dance – Gaetano Donizetti, Salvadore Cammarano, and Eric Serra – 1997

Fun fact: The voice of Albanian opera-singer Inva Mula was dubbed over that of the actress playing the Diva in The Fifth Element. Luc Besson’s movies might not be the smartest thing out there, but it takes a certain kind of something to integrate opera into beating the piss out of aliens.

I know I promised a fifteenth track for this piece, but the chances are good that I’ve missed something that you think is absolutely essential. Therefore, track 15 is up to the readers. Leave a comment and telling the world what you think is absolutely essential genre listening.


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Short Story Review: An Election

By
Adam Shaftoe
– January 13, 2012Posted in: Lit Reviews, Reviews

Summary Judgement: A near flawless story that balances the often opposing forces of comedy and science fiction.

Story by: John Scalzi

For a fleeting moment I was over the moon when a random twitter message led me to what I thought was a new John Scalzi short story.  “Yes,” I said to myself.  “I finally get to review something of his hot off the press.”  I fired up my Kindle only to see an original copyright date of November of 2010.  Damn, Johnny come lately once again.

As the title suggests, An Election treads into territory that was previously the sovereign domain of Laura Roslin’s oft mentioned back story: local politics. This tale begins with David Sawyer announcing to his husband that he will be running for city council in an upcoming by-election as their district’s former city councilman was splattered by a bus.  There are only two problems with David’s plan: he and his husband reside within a ward where humans are a racial minority, and said district has not elected a human councilman in nearly half a century.

Even within this opening movement An Election offers so much to enjoy. I’ll start with the world in which it is set.  When I think about aliens and humans living together, I go to one of three places, Star Trek’s 24th century San Francisco, Alien Nation’s 20th century LA, or more recently District 9’s 21st century Johannesburg. But where Star Trek is too milquetoast in its race relations, District 9 too oppressive, and Alien Nation too assimilated, An Election strikes a perfect balance between the three.  Humans are very much in charge of this city, but only to the extent that the polyglot alien vote, along with their associated religious fringe groups and Canadian hating xenophobes, are important to the political landscape, or at least its expected image.  Naturally, the allegory in play isn’t buried too deep within the text. It is, however, subtle enough to allow for more than one interpretation therein.  Though I’m tempted to wax eloquent on urban spaces as colonizing forces, it would likely do this story an injustice as comedy is at the absolute crux of David Sawyer’s life on the campaign trail.

John Scalzi is often hailed as a successor to Heinlein.  Having enjoyed every word of his debut novel, Old Man’s War (Sidebar: I once had the pleasure of talking to Mr. Scalzi about what I saw as a relationship between the Colonial Defence Force’s policies and the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare.  This happened after another conversation where I gushed to him about how much I enjoyed Agent to the Stars.  It was a good weekend for me.) I’ll attest to the veracity of that statement.  Yet such a statement should not undermine this author’s consistent ability to make his audience laugh. An Election captures the precarious balance in contemporary politics between battles of sophism and the slapstick gaffes that fuel Jon Stewart’s wildest fits of incredulous apoplexy.  David goes from making an oath to his husband that he will not be insufferable in inevitable defeat, the two are the quintessential old married couple, to having his campaign manger remind him that Gherkins are pickles and Hegurchans are part of the electorate.

Speaking of aliens, Scalzi writes extraterrestrials in a way that I can only describe as Scalziesque.  Many writers seem compelled to describe every nuance and detail of their aliens, Scalzi, not so much. In my experience, he is the sort of writer who gives just enough detail to connect his alien to something already known, or to offer a conceptual framework that a reader’s imagination can fill in on their own.  For example, a Hegurchan is described as “a tall creature with an array of facial tentacles…”  When David introduces himself to a Hegurchan voter, the alien’s “face tentacles extend straight out and…wrap around David’s head, pulling him into an intimate embrace.”  I don’t need any more details to know that this thing bears a similarity to Futurama’s Doctor Zoidberg. Yet for all their strange appearances and mannerisms, the all too human desires and motivations of these aliens make them totally accessible to a reader. Again, it’s a balancing act that Scalzi pulls off with the utmost aplomb.

The only weakness I can see in this otherwise flawless story manifests itself in the defeatism that orbits David’s campaign.  At every turn, David is told that he has no chance of winning the election. Even his own campaign manager suspects that a rival candidate, whose only platform plank relates to the freedom to eat a neighbour’s pet, will do better than David.  So much inverse foreshadowing so early on made it pretty clear that David will end up as more than a token human candidate. At the same time, the constant doubt and bad mojo directed at David serves to make this comedy of errors/political manoeuvring that much more genuine and charming.

An Election is currently available as an e-book for the Kindle and Nook from Subterranean Press.  It is the best .99 cents you could spend. But why spend anything at all when I’ll contest away a couple copies. Leave a comment on this post by high noon-ish on Wednesday, January 18th and you will be entered to win.

Hits

+1 for ripping great aliens

+2 for a fantastic protagonist

+2 for start to finish humour that opens the door to no end of allegorical interpretation.

Misses

-0.5 for a bit too much “David’s going to lose” bait and switch foreshadowing.

Overall Score: +4.5


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The Daily Shaft: How bad is The Darkest Hour?

By
Adam Shaftoe
– January 3, 2012Posted in: Movies, The Daily Shaft

I don’t want to be that guy who dwells on the previous year, but there was no way I was letting The Darkest Hour pass without comment.

Perhaps it was the twelve year old single malt holiday cheer flowing through my blood stream, but the first commercial I saw for The Darkest Hour looked fascinating.  People running from aliens in Moscow; what sci-fi/horror/survival fan wouldn’t perk up at that pitch?  Two days later  I saw another trailer that had Emile Hirsch wearing what looked like a low rent Soviet Navy take on Ghostbuster’s positron glider.  That’s when I got suspicious.

Unless the central characters are those nerds from The Big Bang Theory, there’s no way that your average person is going to have the physics or engineering know how to build an DIY energy weapon.  Given that I couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to get through the trailer, I decided to see what some other critics had to say about this movie.  The results are not encouraging.  In fact, I think that The Darkest Hour is a dark horse candidate for worst sci-fi action movie of 2011, right up there with Battle LA or Skyline.

Jeannette Catsoulis asks in her New York Times review, “…how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you’re going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you’d better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve. But if all you have is the equivalent of exploding garden gnomes, then your problems are greater than a disposable cast and a filming style as flat as the color palette.”

Catsoulis also points out that The Darkest Hour’s screen writer, Jon Spaiths, is credited as one of the two writers for Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus. Live in fear, boys and girls.

Mark Olsen, in his review for the LA Times, takes aim at questionable direction and sub-par performances from the actors. “Director Chris Gorak previously made the effective, low-budget, horror-thriller Right at Your Door and in making this move to a splashy, bigger film his instincts for character have perhaps been overwhelmed by the demands of a larger production. Capable and compelling performers like Hirsch and Thirlby seem left to their own devices to make some connection with the material.”

In a review for the Boston Globe, Joel Brown also targets bad character development.  “Hirsch, Minghella, Thirlby, and Taylor resemble dollar-store knockoffs of Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, and Nicole Kidman.”

Brown also poo poos The Darkest Hour for a shameless attempt to connect its alien invasion to the 9/11 attacks. “Even though the movie is set in Moscow, some will be disturbed by the way it evokes 9/11 with abandoned cars, drifting ash, and collapsing buildings. There are even towers of fire and smoke, although this time they’re shooting upward, as the aliens take our electricity or minerals or whatever.”

True to form, Nathan Rabin on The Onion’s AV Club offers the most scathing review, also picking up on the movie’s prop plagiarism.  “The Darkest Hour reeks of desperation even before the cast straps on what looks like homemade versions of Ghostbusters proton-packs and go out on the offensive against the bad guys. The Darkest Hour is a film utterly devoid of merit, a dreary sci-fi slog so tedious even its own actors seem bored. Who can blame them? They’re in a film that tries to make a variation on static cling terrifying.”

Amid the cutting reviews, I managed to find one critic who actually enjoyed the picture.  Josh Tyler over at Giant Freakin Robot said The Darkest Hour is, “a notch above every alien invasion movie released in the past two years, outside of Attack the Block.”

That’s not saying much considering the steaming pile of Rhino crap that is the last two years in sci-fi action.  His bottom line is that “…director Chris Gorak is good enough to keep his film entertaining, if not exactly engaging, throughout. The Darkest Hour is worth a look.”

I’m not usually one to ignore a movie because of its trailers or critical reviews, but in this case I think I’ll make an exception.  Thirty seconds of this movie was more than enough to convince me that it’s not worth my time or money.  Of course, if somebody wants to pay for my ticket I’ll gladly eviscerate or defend (high unlikely from the look of it) this movie.

NB: Tomorrow’s post will be the 200th post to the Page of Reviews.  Not quite sure what I’ll do for it, but I’m sure it will be something interesting.


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Short Story Review: Alien Apocalypse – The Storm

By
Adam Shaftoe
– November 12, 2011Posted in: Lit Reviews

Summary Judgement:  It’s incredibly difficult to pull off an innovative alien invasion story.  Alien Apocalypse manages that task in just under ten thousand words.

Written by: Dean Giles

Alien invasion stories are an interesting sub-genre of science fiction.  They compare quite nicely to high fantasy in that the seminal entries were written about a century ago, and in that time we haven’t really come up with any interesting ways to divert from the formula.  Consider that Independence Day is for all intents and purposes War of the Worlds only bigger and bloated with American jingoism.  Despite the ninety-eight years that separate the two stories, the ending is still the same:  all the armies of man couldn’t defeat the invaders were it not for a humble virus; a computer virus with respect to the latter but the conceit remains a constant.  Therefore in evaluating an alien invasion story only one all-important question comes to my mind: Does it do something new?  Alien Apocalypse: The Storm, most certainly does.

The story, though a discrete unit on its own, represents a first episode in a much larger narrative.  Yet it would be mistake to assume that this is a blasé introduction.  There’s no filler or extraneous back story as the plot shifts between the story’s two principle characters. Elliot Weber is an eleven-year-old living with his grandparents in the English countryside.  Leon Weber, Elliot’s father, is serving out the last few months of a four year prison sentence.  For reasons that are both deceptive and poignant, Elliot has not seen his father since Leon’s incarceration.  In spite of the physical isolation, the two maintain a relationship through phone calls, email and letters.  At the beginning of the story, their most recent correspondence involves a comet that passes very near to the Earth.

My first thought when I read about the comet: “Great.  Here come the tripods, heat rays, and black gas.”

I’m convinced that Mr. Giles took this approach just so he could have a laugh at the expense of readers like myself who jumped to a false conclusion.

Either by accident or design, the close pass of the comet deposits a form of semi-sentient plant life on the Earth. Excreting acid and multiplying at exponential rates, the moss eats everything that it comes into contact with.  Earth and all its life upon it have no natural defence against the invading life form.  In that sense these “aliens” are more akin to the virus from The Andromeda Strain than any sort of grey alien.  Of course, the green moss assimilates biological life with such terrifying efficiency as to make Andromeda look like a bad case of the sniffles.  At this point, I could draw a line between the red weeds that H.G. Welles’ Martians used to terraform the Earth.  However those plants were nowhere near as pernicious as the green moss and only took root, pardon the pun, as a consequence of tripods and war machines.

After only a few days of exposure to our planet’s biosphere, the green moss has brought civilization, or at least England, to an absolute ruin.  Leon wakes up in his solitary confinement cell thinking that the prisoners are rioting only to find that society has collapsed in around him.  From there, the plot is rather straight forward; Elliot must survive the encroaching moss long enough for his father to rescue him.

I will admit that at first I found both of the characters to be a little archetypal.  Granted invoking familiar archetypes is necessary in a story that very quickly moves from everyday life to a post-apocalyptic environment.  While Elliot remains little more than a goal for his father throughout the story, Leon’s personality develops quite nicely beyond the cliché of an ex-military ex-con with a heart of gold.  In fact, by the time the story was done I felt genuinely connected to Leon as a character.

There are also hints of environmental and colonizing force motifs at play within the story.  It begins with Leon’s attempts to maintain his sense of self within the brutal environment of Her Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs.  The metaphor continues with the nature of the green moss as a literal colonizing force upon the Earth.  In both instances an environmental force is acting upon a pre-existing system to forcibly convert it into something made in the former’s own image.  Since the grand narrative is still very much in its nascent phase, the over arcing ideas remain somewhat undeveloped.  However, the seeds have clearly been planted for some interesting extended metaphors in subsequent editions of the series.

Overall, Alien Apocalypse deals with what I call the “Welles Paradox” (Where the capacity for narrative depth within an alien invasion story is proportional to the efficiency of the invasion) by destroying the world and then turning his characters loose within it.  This setting results in an immediate empathy with the story’s adult protagonist as he embarks on a routine but wholly accessible quest.  The nature of the story is focused enough to keep a reader interested while maintaining a natural potential for serialization without feeling pulpy.  I for one can’t wait to see what Mr. Giles come up with next.

Overall score: +3

You can buy yourself a copy of Alien Apocalypse: The Storm as well as reading its free prequel story at TWB Press.


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Shaftoe’s Rants: Aliens

By
Adam Shaftoe
– August 16, 2010Posted in: Movie Reviews, Rants

Two nights ago I came home to find James Cameron’s Aliens on television.  Not only is Aliens one of my favourite movies, but in my mind it is where the franchise ends.  My epilogue to Aliens sees Ripley adopting Newt and marring Hicks.  Ripley’s danger pay allows her to buy a house out in the suburbs where she runs a cat hospital.  Hicks spends the rest of his life doing consulting work for films and television programs featuring the United States Colonial Marines.  As for Newt, she goes to university to become an architect who specializes in ventilation shafts. With the Xenomorph Queen dead, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation gets out of biological weapons and begins dealing in environmentally sustainable cold fusion reactors.  From time to time people talk to me about these things called Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. While I recognize those words and numbers, they are meaningless to me when arranged in that fashion.

Despite my hatred of James Cameron’s recent work, I’m still okay with Aliens. Despite its age, I’ll take a film like Aliens – you know something with sets and actors and props – over migraine inducing 3D CGI.  However, one thing came up last night that I’ve never really noticed before.  It’s actually a pretty sizeable logic flaw; the fact that I haven’t picked up on it before makes me feel a little slow.

Ripley, Paul Reiser and the Marines climb aboard the U.S.S. Sulaco and fly-off to LV-468.  The Marines do their thing until the Aliens kick their collective asses, destroying their dropship in the process.  Stranded on the doomed planet, the survivors concoct an elaborate plan to fly down the Sulaco’s other dropship via remote control.  Wait one, I have a better idea; why doesn’t Corporal Hicks call the Sulaco’s captain and have him send down a rescue party?  If we are dealing with United States Marines, the Navy should be ferrying them about, right? The Pacific made quite clear that the Navy exists only to be the Marine Corps taxi service.

Seriously, which one of the future Joint Chiefs thought that a starship, something I presume to be a complicated machine, wouldn’t need a crew?  Such frugality might make sense if the mission was under the command of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s security division.  Corporations are nothing if not cheap.  However, a military deals in contingencies and that means you crew your interstellar warship, not abandon it in a parking orbit.  I may have imagination to spare when it comes to being terrified of face-huggers and chest-bursters, but the idea that the United States would crew a warship with two rifle squads only to give command to a baby Lieutenant is too much.  No sir, Mr. Cameron.  I’m not buying that one.

Then there’s Lieutenant Gorman, the fearless leader.  Granted that the closest I’ve come to military training is drinking with a Navy buddy of mine, but I disagree with his deployment of forces.  There is a heavily armed starship, two pilots, two dropships and two rifle squads of marines.  Lt. Gorman puts both pilots on one dropship and abandons his starship in a parking orbit.  Personally, I would have left one of my pilots on my starship so that if I needed to call down an air strike I’d have somebody to fire the guns.  Or, if worse came to worse, I could have my other pilot rescue me from my own armchair quarterback incompetence.  Then again, what do I know?  That M.A. in military history is just for decoration.

Finally there is the plan to “prep and fly” a dropship remotely from the surface of LV-468.  I know that Bishop, the Sulaco’s android, is a clever bloke, but I’m throwing out the bullshit flag on this one.  To avoid a fiery death, a starship must orbit a planet; gravity is a real bitch that way.  My math is a bit rusty but I know that in order to maintain orbit around a planet, a thing in space has to move fairly quickly.  What this means for Ripley and company is that there are going to be large periods of time when the Sulaco is on the other side of LV-468 relative to the survivors making line of sight communication impossible.  Even if we assume that the fledgling colony had a satellite network, Bishop would need to be aligning that system, in real time, to keep in constant contact with the Sulaco.  I suppose the Sulaco could have been in a geo-synchronous orbit relative to the colony.  If that was indeed the case, the first dropship should have gone straight down when it initially launched from the Sulaco.  Not to mention the fact that you wouldn’t perceive the planet’s orbit from space.

Ever since James Cameron unrepentantly insulted my intelligence with Avatar, I find myself that much more inclined to dismantle his other films.  Overall, Aliens seems quite preoccupied with passing itself off as plausible, if not hard, science fiction.  If so, why allow for such glaring omissions?  Or should I just shut up and assume that a wizard is responsible?

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