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The Wertzone
SF&F In Print & On Screen
Saturday 16 January 2077
Support The Wertzone on Patreon
After much debate (and some requests) I have signed up with crowdfunding service Patreon to better support future blogging efforts. You can find my Patreon page here and more information after the jump.
Sunday 24 March 2024
Dune: Part Two
Halo: Season 2
The war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command is continuing to escalate. Frontier colonies continue to fall, whilst both sides are desperate to track down the mysterious artifact known as "Halo." The Covenant's advance soon brings Reach, the largest planet in the outer colonies, within range, sparking the biggest battle of the war so far.
Halo is a military science fiction franchise about people and aliens shooting one another, understandable as its primary instalments have all been first-person shooter video games. But as it has gone on, the series has built up a loyal following for its surprisingly deep background material (partially worked out by "proper SF author" Greg Bear) and extended cast of characters, despite them being mostly relegated to cut-scenes and secondary media.
A Halo TV series therefore isn't quite as batty an idea as it sounds, as the universe contains enough interesting ideas to be fleshed out in a dramatic format. Unfortunately, the first season of the show proved divisive, at best. Elements of the lore and setting were jumbled up and delivered in an odd order, established canon characters were either nowhere to be seen, showed up in different roles or were killed off in short order, and Master Chief spent most of the season without his helmet on (Chief, like Judge Dredd, is never seen in the games without his helmet). Some fans were livid, whilst more casual viewers found the show watchable but underwhelming.
This second season, like a lot of recent second seasons for adapted shows with iffy openings (see also Foundation and Time, Wheel of), is an improvement, but again, a qualified one. The show is more focused this year with the search for Halo being a driving force in many episodes, at least for Master Chief. Early episodes complicate this with internal UNSC politics and internal shenanigans with those space pirates nobody really cares about, but the writers are at least determined to bring all the storylines together mid-season on Reach for a massive showdown with the Covenant. This war episode is mostly impressive, but it does strain the limits of even this show's generous budget. The second half of the season unfortunately engages in some wheel spinning and makes the crucial error of thinking the audience gives even 10% as much of a toss about Soren's family than the writers do. Things do pull back together to deliver a very satisfying finale which finally, after seventeen episodes, does catch us up to where we really should have been in Episode 1 of Season 1. Better late than never, I guess?
The cast deliver good performances, with Pablo Schreiber doing a good growly Master Chief (although he somehow spends even less time in Season 2 with his helmet on than in Season 1), Kate Kennedy making Kai-125 both a sympathetic character and a badass, and Natascha McElhone's walking moral vacuum of Dr. Halsey being delightfully conniving in every scene she's in. Kwan (Yerin Ha) and Makee (Charlie Murphy) are still here, but are much better-served than the scripts they had in Season 1, and the finale finally makes us realise why Kwan is important and it nicely ties into the established Halo backstory. Bokeem Woodbine continues to have more fun than anybody else in the cast as Soren-066 (since Burn Gorman sadly left the show in Season 1), although even he seems to get bored of his "family kidnapping" plot after the interminable-feeling number of episodes it takes up. Particularly welcome are newcomers Joseph Morgan as Colonel Ackerson and Cristina Rolo as Talia Perez, who both add some surprisingly good scenes to the show, the former as an apparent new antagonist and the latter as an ordinary UNSC soldier dragged into Master Chief's orbit.
It does feel like maybe Season 2 has had a little bit of a budget trim: there's a lot of re-use of the same sets (one hallway on Reach becomes incredibly familiar) and there's very few of the all-Covenant CGI scenes we had in the first season. The action is mostly good, with the highlight being a one-on-one duel in the finale and several parts of the fall of Reach, but some of the effects are definitely iffy, like muzzle flares looking like they were made in MS Paint and copy-pasted over the guns. Obviously and correctly Hollywood is being ultra careful with weapons on sets these days, but it feels like the vfx for that could have been a lot better (especially as after-added muzzle flares is something people have been doing for decades at this point).
For those wanting an accurate retelling of the video games, Season 2 is better, but marginally. Seeing the fall of Reach, the iconic backstory moment of the franchise, later fleshed out for a prequel novel and game, is cool, but the absence of the many of the characters and events from both the Fall of Reach novel and the Halo: Reach video game may be frustrating. Some elements that don't show up until much later in the storyline turn up surprisingly early here, which feeds into the feeling that the TV writers don't seem to want the story to unfold as naturally as it did in the games, instead feeding in deep cuts from the lore when the people who really care will be annoyed by the show's deviation from the source material, whilst newcomers will likely be bewildered or not notice/care. Including an Arbiter, but not the Arbiter (the co-protagonist of Halo 2 and one of the franchise's most popular characters after Master Chief), but not making that clearer, is a good example of the writers tapping the game material but in an unnecessarily obtuse way.
Still, making a nine-hour TV show based on corridor shooting and occasionally driving a Warthog (or is it a Puma?) was clearly never going to work, so changes were necessary in the transfer of medium. It'll be up to each viewer to determine if this level of change works for them, and if they're unfamiliar with the games, whether the show works as a stand-alone experience.
For this non-hardcore Halo fan (casual appreciator might be a better descriptor), the sophomore season of Halo (***½) is better than its first, and moves up from "worth watching if there's nothing else on" to "solid sci-fi pulp action." It feels like a lot of potential from the source material is being left on the table here, but the show is at least moving in the right direction. Halo is available to watch worldwide right now on Paramount+.
Thursday 21 March 2024
RIP Vernor Vinge
News has sadly broken that science fiction author Vernor Vinge has passed away at the age of 79. Vinge was best-known for popularising the idea of the AI Singularity, and writing two of the best-regarded SF novels of all time, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Vinge was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1944, and attended the University of California, San Diego, where he later returned to teach mathematics. Vinge published his first science fiction story, "Apartness," in 1965 in New Worlds. He became a prolific short story writer in the 1960s and through the 1970s, and published his first novel, Grimm's World, in 1969.
His early work was interesting and reviewed promisingly but did not generate significant amounts of buzz. This changed with his 1981 novella, True Names. This book was notable for being the first depiction of cyberspace in an American SF novel. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and saw a change in Vinge's profile; he next two novels, the duology of The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), were both nominated for the Hugo Award.
Vinge's next novel was A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and immediately saw him become an SF author of prominence; the novel won the Hugo Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Set in a distant future, the novel postulates a galaxy divided into "Zones of Thought," areas close to the galactic centre where human intelligence and FTL cannot exist and areas towards the galactic rim where superintelligence and near-instant travel systems exist; Earth is caught in the "slow zone" between. The novel operates on a massive scale, involving human, posthuman and nonhuman intelligences dealing with the threat of a superintelligent AI which is inadvertently released from an ancient date archive. The novel combined brash space opera with hard SF thinking about ideas, including artificial intelligence.
The following year, Vinge drew on some ideas from the novel to write the essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (1993). The essay postulates the arrival of true artificial intelligence which is able to create new versions of itself and better itself exponentially in a very short timeframe, effectively ending the world as we know it, and creating a new world or reality which is as fundamentally unknowable to us as what lies beyond the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Ray Kurzweil drew on Vinge's work for his own writings on the Singularity, most notably in 2005's The Singularity is Near. Vinge postulated that the Singularity would take place by 2030, but Kurzweil allowed for a later date of 2045.
Vinge returned to the Zones of Thought universe to write a prequel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), set tens of thousands of years earlier. The novel won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prometheus Award. A sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, The Children of the Sky, was released in 2011 but did not attract the praise of the earlier books.
Vinge's last standalone novel was Rainbows End, set in a near-future San Diego, released in 2006. The novel also won a Hugo Award, making him one of the more successful authors at the awards, with three wins from five nominations.
Vinge was married to fellow science fiction writer Joan D. Vinge from 1972 to 1979. After their separation, they remained on good terms and Joan wrote several works set in the Zones of Thought universe, with his approval. Vinge was good friends with fellow SF author David Brin, who made him an honorary member of the "Killer Bs," a trio of hard SF authors active from the 1970s to 2010s; Brin himself, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. Brin judged his work superior enough to overcome the lamentable deficit of not having a surname starting with "B."
Vinge wrote hard science fiction, sometimes dealing with quite complex ideas, but did so in a clear manner, and always remembered to incorporate interesting characters with recognisable motivations. In this manner he exemplified one of the strong spirits of good science fiction, thought-provoking ideas made accessible.
Vinge was not the most prolific of SF authors, but his small body of work is notable for how almost every part of it is interesting, influential and, at least three times, quietly revolutionary. He will be missed.
Tuesday 19 March 2024
RIP James M. Ward
News has sadly broken that tabletop roleplaying pioneer James M. Ward has passed away at the age of 72.
Born in 1951, Ward was an acquaintance of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and agreed to help him road-test a new game he was developing in 1973. This game became Dungeons & Dragons, with Ward as one of the early players. Gygax created the wizard Drawmij of Oerth in Ward's honour. When Gygax started TSR in late 1973 and published D&D in January 1974, he recruited Ward to help work on the game as a writer and designer.
Ward collaborated with another of the original plays, Rob Kuntz, to create Gods, Demigods & Heroes (1976), a D&D sourcebook that introduced gods and religion to the game. Back when TSR was trying to publish a number of different systems, Ward created the first science fantasy roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha (1976). Drawing on this work, Ward then co-created (with Gary Jaquet) the better-known Gamma World (1978).
Ward continued working as a staffer at TSR, contributing to different projects. He wrote Deities & Demigods (1980), an effective update of his 1976 book to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition rules.
In 1988 Ward drew on his background playing in Gygax's home games to write Greyhawk Adventures, which updated Gygax's signature home setting for the upcoming Advanced D&D 2nd Edition rules. Ward contributed to the design of AD&D 2E and was responsible for the removal of the assassin class, something he noted did not go down well with many fans.
Also in 1988 Ward worked on Ruins of Adventure, the tabletop supplement based on the Pool of Radiance video game set in the Forgotten Realms. Ward further developed the story and scenario into a trilogy of novels, published as Pool of Radiance (1989, with Jane Cooper Hong), Pools of Darkness (1992, with Anne K. Brown) and Pool of Twilight (1993, with Anne K. Brown).
Ward developed Spellfire, TSR's answer to Magic: The Gathering, in 1994. After an initially strong start, the game suffered from a lack of budget (resulting in a considerable reuse of art from existing projects, to fans' dismay).
Ward left TSR in 1996 during the major financial upheavals caused by Random House returning unsold stock to the company for refund, which the company could not afford to pay. This triggered the company's collapse and its subsequent buy-out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. After departing, Ward worked as a freelancer on various projects (including a Metamorphosis Alpha reboot) before joining Troll Lord Games to work on their Castles & Crusades game line. Ward continued to work on Metamorphosis Alpha material - of which he retained full ownership - until the late 2010s.
As well as the projects with his name on it, Ward contributed in an enormous number of ways to other projects in a variety of roles, from proof-reading the Planescape Campaign Setting (1994) to providing additional design support for the Serenity roleplaying game (2004).
Ward produced new material under his solo companies, Fast Forward Entertainment and WardCo.
Ward was diagnosed with a serious neurological disorder in 2010, for which he received treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Friends, colleagues and fans rallied around with crowdfunding campaigns that ultimately helped him receive the treatment he needed to considerably extend his quality of life.
Ward passed away on 18 March 2024, and is survived by his wife and three children.
Monday 18 March 2024
MACROSS and ROBOTECH to join Disney+, with some caveats
The history of the Japanese anime series Macross and its American adaptation, Robotech, is a frightening cobweb of rights, lawsuits and legal shenanigans that have persisted for a large chunk of the forty-two years the franchise has existed. A few years ago, the Japanese consortium of companies that created Macross signed a new deal with American rights-holders Harmony Gold that would allow Harmony Gold to develop new Robotech projects (including the long-mooted live-action movie) whilst the numerous Macross sequel and prequel shows that Harmony Gold had been blocking from reaching the west would finally be released.
It's taken a while for that to be fully sorted out, but now we have the information on how the initial release will be handled.
Harmony Gold and Big West/Studio Nue have reached an agreement with Disney+, which will become the official home of both the Macross and Robotech franchises.
Globally, the following shows will be included on the service:
- Super Dimension Fortress: Flash Back 2012 (music video collection)
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers, Again (6-episode mini-series, non-canon)
- Macross Plus Movie Edition (115-minute movie cut of the original 4-episode TV show)
- Macross 7 (49-episode animated TV series)
- Macross 7 The Movie: The Galaxy's Calling Me! (animated film)
- Macross Dynamite 7 (animated film)
- Macross Zero (5-episode prequel series)
- Macross Frontier (25-episode animated TV series)
- Macross Frontier: The False Songstress (theatrical adaptation of the TV series)
- Macross Frontier: The Wings of Farewell (animated film)
- Gekijo Tanpen Macross Frontier Toki no Meikyu (short film)
- Macross FB7: Ore no Uta o Kike! (animated film)
- Macross Delta (26-episode animated TV series)
- Macross Delta the Movie: Passionate Valkyrie (theatrical animated adaptation of the TV series)
- Macross Delta the Movie: Absolute Live!!!!!! (animated film)
There will then be a divergence based on location.
In Japan, this list will be bolstered by:
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross (36-episode animated TV series, the OG entry in the franchise)
- Super Dimension Fortress: Do You Remember Love? (animated feature film)
- Robotech (85-episode animated TV series, including the Americanised version of Macross plus the unrelated anime series Super Dimension Fortress: Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, edited into one single story spanning three generations)
- Robotech II: The Sentinels (3-episode animated TV series)
- Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles (animated TV movie)
Wednesday 6 March 2024
AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER renewed for two more seasons at Netflix
Ciaphas Cain: The Last Ditch by Sandy Mitchell
Commissar Ciaphas Cain and the Valhallan 597th are deployed to Nusquam Fundumentibus to deal with an incursion of orks. The campaign promises to be standard, although still dangerous, until Cain learns of a far greater threat lurking on the planet, one which sees both the humans and orks as enemies.
The redoubtable Ciaphas Cain - the science fantasy by-product of an unholy union between Flashman and BlackAdder - returns in his eighth novel. Once again, Cain is deployed to a trouble spot which seems a bit iffy, but practical to deal with. Also once again, complications ensure which gives Cain an enormous headache and results in a highly enjoyable adventure for the reader.
The previous Cain novel, The Emperor's Finest, was solid but did not represent the series at its best, with too much of Cain and Jurgen running around in isolated corridors where the opportunities for Cain - and Mitchell - to show off their skills with entertaining dialogue and character observations were limited. Fortunately, The Last Ditch is a return to form. Whilst we once again get a lot of action sequences, we also get a lot more character development and even politics, as Cain has to balance the needs of the 597th in fighting the ork incursion with the civil administration of the planet, who are trying to hold things together in the face of collapse. Of course, Cain (and the aromatic Jurgen) ends up at the hot end of the fighting despite desperately trying to find reasons to stay behind the lines.
The timeline means we get to spend more time with the characters of the 597th, including the batty Sulla, whose insane hero worship of Cain (further enhanced by excerpts from her later-published, badly-overwritten memoirs) remains extremely amusing. However, by this time Cain has been fighting (successfully) alongside the 597th for so long that Colonel Kasteen and Major Broklaw just go along with anything he suggests, which means relatively little tension in that quarter.
Tension is restored by the difficult relationship between the 597th, Cain and the planetary governor, who for once is (relatively) immune to Cain's charms and tries to continue politicking even in the face of an overwhelming alien threat. This is promising, but Mitchell punts off this storyline for Kasteen and Broklaw to deal with off-page, meaning we only get edited highlights from the subplot whilst Cain is off elsewhere.
Another potential source of rich conflict is Cain encountering a younger, more gung-ho Commissar fresh out of the academy, all too eager to start executing Imperial troops the nanosecond they slack off. Cain's more pragmatic, cooperative approaching clashing with the raw orthodoxy of the Commissariat would again be an interesting storyline, but again it's cut short by Commissar Forres relatively quickly coming around to Cain's way of thinking and becoming a useful ally.
Still, if Mitchell dodges these potentially engaging storylines, what we have is fun enough. A relatively epic narrative featuring a raging war across an entire planet told in a commendably concise number of pages, with enough plots twists, reversals, action sequences and wry humour to satisfy fans of the series, The Last Ditch (****) is entertaining. The novel is available now as part of the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus, along with the preceding and succeeding novels and several short stories.
924: Death or Glory (Book #4): Perlia campaign.
928: Echoes of the Tomb (Short Story): Adeptus Mechanicus mission, fights necrons.
928: The Emperor’s Finest (Book #7): Cain joins Reclaimer Space Marines, aids in Space Hulk retrieval mission.
931: For the Emperor (Book #1): Gravalax campaign, formation of the 597th Valhallan Regiment.
932: Caves of Ice (Book #2): Simia Orichalcae campaign.
932: Duty Calls (Book #5): Periremunda campaign.
937: The Traitor’s Hand (Book #3): Adumbria campaign.
942: The Last Ditch (Book #8): Nusquam Fundumentibus campaign.
c. 951-954: Choose Your Enemies (Book #10): Ironfound campaign.
992: The Greater Good (Book #9): Siege of Quadravidia.
c. 993: Vainglorious (Book #11): Eucopia engagement.
999 (40,999 CE): Cain’s Last Stand (Book #6): Thirteenth Black Crusade. Chaos assault on Perlia, Cain comes out of retirement to lead defence.
Wednesday 21 February 2024
Marvel changing plans to recapture the zeitgeist
In an in-depth article for the Hollywood Reporter, it has been revealed that Marvel Studios is pivoting hard as it tries to overcome a series of recent obstacles to recapture the zeitgeist it imperiously commanded for over a decade.
In 2008 Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an interconnected series of superhero films which shared a single continuity, canon and cast of characters, who could pop up in one another's movies and occasionally team up for big "event" pictures. From 2008's Iron Man to 2019's Avengers: Endgame, a mind-boggling run of twenty-two films, the series rarely put a foot wrong. It dominated the box office and the cultural discourse of the time. Even its weakest entries, like Thor: The Dark World or Iron Man 2, remained watchable.
Since 2019, the franchise has faltered. Box office receipts have fallen - The Marvels became the first Marvel movie to definitively lose money at the box office in November 2023 - and critical acclaim has also dropped off sharply. Eleven further films have been released since Endgame and only a few of these - particularly Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - have garnered the type of critical and commercial success the franchise once wracked up almost automatically. There has been much discussion over why the franchise has suddenly started faltering so badly, with several problems identified:
- The loss of the franchise's most charismatic and best-written characters and the actors going along with them, most notably Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) in Endgame.
- The failure of most of the succeeding new heroes in making an impression that they can pick up the slack moving forwards.
- An increasingly tiresome inability to break free from the "Marvel format," namely a lot of quips, some action, some moderate character development and then a large setpiece CGI battle at the end, which is rarely outstanding. The few films which did experiment with this, such as Eternals adopting a more serious tone, ended up doing poorly with audiences.
- The conclusion of the mostly straightforward and well-defined Infinity Stones storyline with a well-realised villain (Thanos) and their replacement with the much murkier, more confusing Multiverse storyline and a lower-key villain (Kang) who has not resonated as strongly.
- Simple superhero fatigue: thirty-three films and ten TV series (sixteen, if you include the recently canonised Netflix series) in sixteen years is a lot, not to mention dozens more films and TV shows about superheroes from rivals DC and numerous other studios and streamers.
- An over-expansion into television as part of the streaming wars and then during COVID, bombarding audiences with new shows every few months.
- The increasing feeling that keeping up with the MCU requires having to do "homework," watching shows and films that don't appeal to you because they're going to be referenced in the next Spider-Man movie that you do care about.
- Plans to use the always-popular Spider-Man as a lynchpin for the next generation of movies hit a snag with the Sony/Marvel legal disagreement of a few years ago, which means Marvel can't use Spider-Man as a key character moving forwards when they can lose access to him at almost any time.
- The relatively rapid transition of films from the cinema to Disney+ now means that people can sit out films that look uninteresting or middling until they hit streaming, rather than having to see them in the cinema or risk falling behind the curve.
Marvel has also had to contend with a major problem from one of its tentpole actors for the next slate of films. Actor Jonathan Majors had debuted in the TV series Loki as Kang, a charismatic villain who exists in millions of different incarnations and versions across the Multiverse, a multitude of parallel universes and different timelines. The development of the Multiverse has been a major focus of the films since Endgame and has allowed Marvel to rule that other movie series using their characters - such as the X-Men and Deadpool film series from Fox and the Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man films from Sony - exist in the same Multiverse. Kang was supposed to be the lynchpin of this story moving forwards, as different versions of the character appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki's second season, setting up a confrontation between Kang and the Avengers in two big movies coming down the pipe.
But in March 2023 Majors was arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, whom he had met on the set of Quantumania. Marvel refused to take any action whilst legal action was ongoing. In December he was found guilty of two misdemeanour counts of assault and harassment. Marvel quickly confirmed they had terminated their relationship with the actor. Despite initial speculation that the character would be recast - previous different versions of characters across the Multiverse had been portrayed by different actors, with three versions of Spider-Man showing up in No Way Home to great success - it now appears that Marvel is moving away from the character and storyline altogether, minimising him in future projects and pivoting to another villain (speculated in other sources to be Doctor Doom) to be the "big bad" in the next two Avengers films coming down the line.
According to the HR article, Marvel are taking a number of further steps to address their issues. The first is a reduction of output: 2024 will see the release of just one Marvel movie, Deadpool and Wolverine, which will introduce the Merc With a Mouth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and also cement the Multiverse connections between the older X-Men films and the MCU. Only one more TV show is expected this year, Agatha: Darkhold Diaries. 2025 is expected to focus hard on the arrival of Marvel tentpole characters the Fantastic Four in the MCU, with Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn recently announced in the starring roles for the film. Marvel is hoping that the integration of the Fantastic Four into the MCU, followed later by new versions of Blade and then the X-Men, will give their franchise new legs as it - improbably - heads towards its third decade of production.
Whether these steps are going to be enough to right the ship remains to be seen, or whether at some point Disney and Marvel will have to accept that the MCU's time has simply run out and it needs to be rested for a few years before the inevitable reboot with new actors playing Iron Man, Thor and Captain America.