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- Alasdair Czyrnyj on Same Vodka, Different Bottles at 14:23 on 11-03-2010 - link Not in bookstores, no. I managed to get the first two paperbacks in a comic book store back in 2006, and had to order the last two from their website. It's sorta the downside of the "whenever I feel like it" publishing schedule: if you need to consult the auguries to know when the next book is coming out, there isn't much incentive to keep stocking it.
- Rami C on Same Vodka, Different Bottles at 00:26 on 11-03-2010 - link I am a sucker for a well-done industrial aesthetic, so I may need to pick this up -- is it available in mainstream bookstores?
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Arthur B on The Reading Canary: The Eisenhorn Trilogy
at 23:23 on 10-03-2010 - link
I've got the Ravenor omnibus, it's in the backlog. I'll get to it at some point, but there's over 100 books in my backlog, so it may be a while. :)
Of course, in Eisenhorn the problem is further compounded because his retinue is actually quite inconsistent from book to book, due to deaths and new members and so on, until at the end of Hereticus he's left with...absolutely no one he knew in Xenos except the daemonhost.
To be fair, it's kind of thematically appropriate that Hereticus should end like that. ;) But I agree that the inconsistent cast doesn't really help. -
http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on The Reading Canary: The Eisenhorn Trilogy
at 22:55 on 10-03-2010 - link
An omnibus edition of Ravenor just came out last year, including the "Playing Patience" short story you passed over in Let the Galaxy Burn and another short story, featuring interaction between Ravenor and Eisenhorn. Have you had a chance to take a look at it?
I think one of the biggest problems of Eisenhorn has been addressed in Ravenor, namely Eisenhorn's gigantic retinue of fairly uncharacterized helpers. Of course, in Eisenhorn the problem is further compounded because his retinue is actually quite inconsistent from book to book, due to deaths and new members and so on, until at the end of Hereticus he's left with...absolutely no one he knew in Xenos except the daemonhost.
Ravenor has a smaller retinue than Eisenhorn, and Abnett spends more time writing from their POV than Ravenor's. Unlike Eisenhorn, which was exclusively Eisenhorn's first-person perspective, the Ravenor books alternate between first-person (Ravenor) and third-person limited (his crew). His warband is both smaller than Eisenhorn's and more stable. It helps that a couple of its members, Kara Swole and Harlon Nayl, were at least cursorily established in Eisenhorn before we met them again in Ravenor.
Re-reading Ravenor, I'm struck by how far short Sandy Mitchell's books about the Inquisition fall. Much as Xenos was a tie-in novel for the Inquisition game, Mitchell was tapped to write Scourge the Heretic (and, later, Innocence Proves Nothing) for Dark Heresy. Unfortunately, Mitchell's books are rather less interesting. The characters arem't quiet transplants of characters from Ravenor--Danuld Drake is rather less badass than Harlon Nayl, for example--but they definitely never really take off on their own. It's really apparent that Mitchell is at his best when writing Ciaphas Cain books (which I absolutely love and adore); when he isn't writing funny stuff about well-characterized folks like Cain, Jurgen, and Vale, he's just...not that good. -
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Who Watches The…oh never mind
at 17:06 on 10-03-2010 - link
Necromancy ho!
@the issue of datedness and the nuclear arms race
After reading through the article again, I kinda get what you were saying, Kyra. The theme didn't really date the comic for me, partly because I've always got one foot stuck in nuclear war fiction, and partly because I found it easy enough to read the nuclear symbolism as a symbol of an unstoppable force of annihilation that none of the characters are capable of understanding, something that can be applied to many eras and contexts.
Still, it does date the movie. IIRC, Paul Greengrass was attached to the project for a while, and he was making noises about moving it to a contemporary War on Terror setting, which I don't think you could really do without totally rebuilding the story, simply because, while we may be as scared in 2010 as we were in 1985, our fears are coming from different places and take different forms. In the '80s, we assumed that the silos would open and all humanity would die screaming. Nowandays we just assume that life is going to continue getting shittier and shittier and mor and more incomprehensible, with extinction as a vague possibility we suspect may be denied to us.
Did what I just write make any sense? -
Kyra Smith on Girl in the Dystopia
at 16:10 on 10-03-2010 - link
Yes, I've heard about the comparison to The Hunger Games - but not having read it, I thought it was a bit silly to say "I've heard this has been compared to the Hunger Games but I have no insight into that whatsoever" :P
I might actually get round to reading The Hunger Games one of these days - whereupon I'll probably discover it's way better and lose respect for Girl in the Arena :P - Arthur B on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 15:42 on 10-03-2010 - link The MST3K Hobgoblins episode is one of my favourites; I'm glad someone made the connection. :)
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Alasdair Czyrnyj on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back
at 15:36 on 10-03-2010 - link
Damn, Arthur, that sounds pretty bad. Howver, you may be pleased/horrified/saddened to know that the Critters franchise is not the worst Gremlins knock-off in existence.
That honor goes to a forgotten ultra-low budget American film entitled Hobgoblins, once described by TVTropes as having "the acting and production values of a low-budget porno, only with none of the porn."
It is so bad that it makes robot puppets cry. And it makes ordinary viewers spend the movie wishing all the characters would perish in a horrifically bloody manner, possibly involving power tools. - Alasdair Czyrnyj on Girl in the Dystopia at 15:26 on 10-03-2010 - link Hmm...there seems to be a family resemblence to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which has been making a fair bit of noise over here in North America. Not sure what that means...
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Arthur B on Girl in the Dystopia
at 15:06 on 10-03-2010 - link
It sounds great! I wonder whether Haines was influenced at all by the various controversies surrounding WWE wrestling? I mean, aside from the Chris Benoit incident there's all sorts of nasty stories about the professional wrestling scene chewing people up and spitting them out. And now the whole Ultimate Fighting thing is getting bigger and bigger, which can only mean there'll be more business/corporate interest...
Brr. It really is disturbingly plausible, isn't it? -
Kyra Smith on The Death Paradox
at 14:21 on 10-03-2010 - link
Given the theme of the article ... I think it's appropriate :)
And actually we like necrophilia here at Fb ... errr ... I mean when it comes to articles! -
http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on The Death Paradox
at 06:49 on 09-03-2010 - link
Reviving a two-year dead article to promote a pet author. The ultimate faux pas?
Have any of you read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? It's one of the only examples of an interesting, thought-provoking imagined history I've come across. (Specifically, it's a history of the human race from the mid-20th century to billions of years in the future, over the course of which the species changes unimaginably several times.)
That reminds me of Evolution by Stephen Baxter, except Evolution starts billions of years ago and ends billions of years in the future and Baxter probably has even less characterization than Stapledon. His books generally aren't as event-driven as they are concept-driven, in the vein of the sci fi authors who have this technology/science concept rattling around in their brain and want to create a story as a way of airing it out. (It's telling that he's co-authored four novels with Arthur Clarke.)
On the other hand, Evolution is almost always told from a relatively low-to-the-ground POV, either a person or an over-the-shoulder third-person-limited type thing. So it's about the grand sweep of history and the transformation of species, but only insofar as it can be evidenced by actually looking at members of those species in snapshots taken over the course of millions of years.
Plus he proposes the idea that predator dinosaurs were actually intelligent, with language and tools, but they tended to build things that were pretty biodegradable and so their artifices don't show up in the fossil record. Totally awesome. - Sister Magpie on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 04:28 on 09-03-2010 - link Yes, child labor laws. Almost all memorable TV characters under a certain age were played by twins. I don't know if it always happens in movies, but they might have just figured it was easier with their shooting schedule.
- Melissa G. on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 01:41 on 09-03-2010 - link It has to do with child labor laws from what I understand. Kids can only work for a very few amount of hours and having two kids playing the same characters doubles the amount of filming time. Or so I've been led to believe.
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Arthur B on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back
at 00:18 on 09-03-2010 - link
I thought I'd heard of other cases where it had happened, thanks for confirming. :)
It should be said, though, that the kid is barely in the film enough to justify hiring two actors to play him. The character could have probably been cut without too much effort and I can't think of a single significant way in which the film would have been changed - except they'd need to find another reason for DiCaprio and Brooks to wander off and find Charlie. -
Viorica on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back
at 23:49 on 08-03-2010 - link
which sounds like a bizarre decision, but the kid is young enough that I suppose having twins play him means they can substitute one brother in for when the other gets tired
It's actually a pretty common technique in the film industry- the Olsen twins played the same character on Full House, and twin babies played Sunny Baudelaire in the Series of Unfortunate Events movie. - Andy G on Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land at 15:41 on 08-03-2010 - link The game sounds a lot like the kinds of online games or treasure hunts that are used in teaser marketing campaigns, but I guess those have different expectations of quality since they're not intended as "proper" games.
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Daniel Hemmens on Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land
at 13:09 on 08-03-2010 - link
Not a lot to say except, yeah, that's a big part of what bugged me about it, and I'm glad it wasn't just me (I sometimes worry that it's a personal failing, I sometimes get the same problem with first person narratives that don't seem to have a clear idea when the narration is located relative to the text).
It's interesting that we seem to have both fallen foul of precisely the opposite assumptions. For example you seemed to assume that you were supposed to read the "main" story to the end before taking any of the "unicorn" options, I assumed you were supposed to find all the unicorns before finishing the story. I assumed there'd be stuff outside the main content, you assumed there wouldnt be. - Arthur B on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity at 22:22 on 07-03-2010 - link Snowdog is, indeed, the protagonist of the hilariously bad Business as Usual.
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http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity
at 18:34 on 07-03-2010 - link
I actually don't particularly remember the politics in that first book, but then I don't really remember much of anything, other than it had necrons and one of the C'Tan in it.
The most memorable moment, I think, came in Warriors of Ultramar where Uriel and That Other Guy managed to take out the entirety of Hive Fleet Behemoth by themselves. Well, okay, no, someone gave them the Anti-Tyranid Syringe, which they took by themselves into the queen and injected her with, blowing up everyone.
Also, good lord, I just found that he ended Warriors of Ultramar on an underhive ganger repeating "Business as usual" to, I think, a hot be-catsuitted female sidekick. Was a guy named Snowdog one of the characters in "Business as Usual", because if so he reappears and takes up vast wodges of Warriors of Ultramar.
