Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (22 page)

Captain Darian Frey has been down on his luck recently and his latest run-in with a smuggler called Macarde almost gets his crew murdered. Escaping in Frey's beloved flying ship, the
Ketty Jay
, the captain is contacted with the offer of an easy job with a huge payoff: a straightforward heist from the flying ship
Ace of Skulls
that's travelling with minimum protection. And Frey plans on keeping most of the payoff for himself.

But Frey is being set up and the
Ace of Skulls
has been rigged to explode when he attacks. Suddenly, he and his crew are the focus of every military organisation going, not to mention more than a few vicious bounty hunters, and it's only a matter of time before they track down Frey and the
Ketty Jay
. Their only chance of survival is to find out why the ship blew up and expose the real culprits, but the plot goes far deeper than he ever imagined and uncovering it will lead them all to a legendary pirate sanctuary that they didn't believe existed.

Pirate stories have a long and glorious history dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries when ocean-crossing sailing ships first appeared. Amongst the most famous fictional pirates are Long John Silver and Captain Hook but Wooding's book stays away from over stereotyping his crew—there's not a peg-leg or parrot in sight—and he uses the smaller details instead, picking those rum-swilling, treasure-loving traits that no good pirate would be without.

These traits are just the seeds for Wooding's story. He's assembled an interesting bunch of characters to crew the
Ketty Jay
. They're all on the run from something, in several cases with dark secrets festering in their past, and the author is in no rush to reveal them to the reader. He lets each character's back story evolve steadily, as their personalities and drives become clearer.

Drawing all these characters together is the overarching mystery about why the captain and his crew have been set up to take the fall for the
Ace of Skulls
. The answer is intriguingly complex and the layers are peeled back in stages, giving the story a sense of forward motion while still dangling more questions.

More movement occurs with the changes in Darian Frey's outlook throughout the book. It's a shame that actual character development is restricted to the captain alone but as he matures, his crew stop being disparate souls and develop a tighter bond. The story has been compared to the TV series
Firefly
but Frey's personality is more like Han Solo's roguishness than Malcolm Reynold's tighter sense of morality and loyalty. Like Solo, Frey's adventures fundamentally change him from loner to team-player and the only things missing are a huge hairy co-pilot and a three-movie deal.

For the rest of crew, we have to make do with meeting the characters and discovering their secrets, something that is handled through a series of focal moments within the action. This is the same way that Wooding achieves his world building: skilfully and without disrupting the pace of the story. Political systems, military structure and technological advances (or the lack of them since radar hasn't been invented and electricity is not available everywhere yet) these details all arise naturally out of the story. Wooding has always written highly imaginative stories, with little cribbing of standard elements like elves and trolls. His worlds tend to be logical and original, laced with magic and legends—perfect backdrops for his all-too-human stories.

Visiting Wooding's worlds is always fun and
Retribution Falls
is no different. More please.

Copyright © 2009 Sandy Auden

Reviewed by Ian Sales

It pays to do your research. If I'd known that Robin Parrish is a journalist “working at the cutting edge of Christian culture” and that Bethany House is a Christian publisher, I might not have chosen to read
Offworld
. After all, with a premise in which the first manned mission to Mars has returned to Earth to find it empty, what “type” of Christian science fiction is
Offworld
most likely to be? Not that I understand the whole concept of “Christian fiction” anyway. Surely it's nothing more than religious propaganda? Or do those who subscribe to “Christian culture"—"cutting edge” or otherwise—imagine only they possess a moral framework? Is it like optimistic sf? Or mundane sf?

Happily,
Offworld
is not Rapture science fiction. Nor is it overtly propagandist. Yes, there's a discussion on living according to the precepts of Scripture badly shoe-horned into the narrative at one point, but on the whole the novel mostly resembles an airport best-seller sf thriller. Which, for entirely different reasons, is not necessarily a good thing either.

As previously mentioned, the crew of the first mission to Mars has returned to Earth and discovered that everyone has vanished. The only clue to their disappearance is a giant column of intensely bright light directed skywards from Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. After surviving the crash of their orbiter at the Kennedy Space Centre, the four astronauts—Commander Chris Burke, Pilot Terry Kessler, and mission specialists Trisha Merriday and Owen Beechum—travel across the US southern states in order to discover what has happened.

En route, each visits the centre of their lives before the Mars mission—Burke his parents’ home, where he finds his father's grave; Trisha, the house she shared with the boyfriend she had hoped would wait for her ... Also en route, they find a single survivor of the catastrophe, Mae, a young woman who grew up on the streets of New Orleans. She has no clue where everyone has gone. Except, it transpires Mae is
not
the only person to survive. There are also the men in black. Military men in black. And it is when they appear that Beechum, super-intelligent multi-disciplinary scientist astronaut, suddenly reveals that he had previously been a CIA super-spy.

Given the nature of the genre, a reader can expect their disbelief to be hoisted up and hung out for thrills at some point in a story. Usually this occurs at the point which defines the story as science fiction, or at the very least allows it to present itself as science fiction. For
Offworld
, this would be the disappearance of everyone on Earth, and the explanation for it. Except Parrish blows his suspension of disbelief by making Beechum into some sort of Batman-type Bond figure who is single-handedly responsible for saving the crew's lives on multiple occasions as they travel towards Houston.

I suspect Parrish has watched too many Hollywood movies. The story of
Offworld
falls neatly into three acts, each character's back-story is neatly introduced via a visit home, and some of the set-pieces consist of the sort of physics-defying stunts common in action movies. As for the ending ... well, it's not so much
deus ex machina
as
Deus ex machina
. Which is not entirely unexpected. The mangling of quantum mechanics as an explanation is less, well, convincing.

Offworld
appears to have been written as a Hollywood film, and as such it'll probably play in Peoria. Science fiction readers, however, are unlikely to let it pass.

Copyright © 2009 Ian Sales

[Back to Table of Contents]

File it under ‘very silly', but
Kyûtî Hanî
(2004), released on DVD as
Cutie Honey
(11 May) is directed by Hideaki Anno as just the sort of live-action tokusatu translation of manga (derived, in this instance, from a popular franchise dating back to 1973) mania that seems almost specifically designed to alienate western audiences with a mindless confection of sci-fi cartoon action, garish fantasy tropes and cringe-worthy packaging. In fact, murdered scientist's daughter/unlikely android-superhero Honey Kisaragi (Eriko Sato,
Funuke
) is an iconic ‘magical girl’ character in Japanese media, fusing ideas from classic
Metropolis
(robot girl Maria) and comic-book lore (particularly Amazonian fighter Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel, who transformed from a mortal boy). Here, though, the female protagonist has progressed from the comics’ usual schoolgirl sitcom to adulthood, so Kisaragi is an ordinary office-worker when she's not fighting bizarre super-villains. From the original manga and anime series, Honey's best friend/sidekick Aki ‘Nat-chan’ Natsuko (Mikako Ichikawa, the sickly sibling in
Memories of Matsuko
) is updated as a police detective investigating chaos and crimes perpetrated by a colour-coded ‘Panther Claw’ league of baddies. Typically, these are pantomimed, but occasionally advancing some extraordinarily weird antics—especially vampiric shape-changer Cobalt Claw (Sie Kohinata,
Shark Skin Man And Peach Hip Girl
), whose spiderly pursuit of the stressed heroine, and attack in a stuck lift, grants an unnerving sense of menace and claustrophobia to an otherwise routine chase and confrontation sequence. Despite its nanotech and cyber-mecha backstory, cut-price
Transformers
devastation, and the vegetative transmogrification of hidden criminal mastermind ‘Sister Jill', much of this remains unashamedly cheesy in affect. Various outfit changes for musical interludes, exposition rendered by 2D anime clips, and drunken karaoke (as if campy
Cutie Honey
needs comic relief!) help fill the busy 90-minute runtime, almost matching the madcap eventfulness of Richter's
Buckaroo Banzai
, while espousing ideals of friendship and universal love. Noticeable influences include
The Matrix
films, and the spoofy adventures of
Spy Kids
, and yet for lovers of cultish Asian kitsch ephemera, this is a bonkers-fun overload.

With turgid chatter instead of inspirational speeches, and fuzzy incoherence mistaken for narrative complexity, the final run of
Battlestar Galactica
(DVD, 1 June) proves this ‘re-imagining’ has outstayed its welcome over the last five years. The 2003 mini-series was good—as an enjoyable updating of Glen Larson's ineptly derivative 1970s’ programme—but with each season Ronald D. Moore's poorly developed and deeply flawed serial just became worse than ever. While shoehorning the junk-DNA of pulp sci-fi into story-arcs about western frontier heroics, dreary wartime survivalism, and American colonial melodramas based on sophomoric philosophical tracts,
BSG
soon began to generate boring soap subplots which accumulated like pocket fluff, jinxing trial-and-error episodes that are more like gambling on the fit of jigsaw pieces than any significant ‘unpredictability’ resulting from scriptwriters’ ingenuity. The hollow victories of internecine conflict, shallow ambitions of many vague political/religious allusions, and lumbering analogies for slavery and creation myths, only succeeded in elevating unpretentious timewaster
Space Above And Beyond
(1995-6) to a status of worthwhile TV drama by comparison. Flashback revelations involving both androids and humans expose bad writers abandoning a lost cause, exercising salvage rights to implausible/rejected notions from traditional/canonical SF, in themes regurgitated here as a confusing “desperate grab for procreation, evolution” where the intolerable static hiss of illogical noise to pure signal ratio favours the random bewilderments of regrettably self-delusional paths—for main and supporting characters—which lead nowhere very interesting.