Category: Reviews

Review of Hugo Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form 2016

written by David Steffen

This is the “movies-ish” Hugo category, a fan-voted award.  I say “ish” because it’s any presentation over 90 minutes, which sometimes includes things that aren’t movies, such as a season of a TV show or something like that.

Most of the nominees this year were also nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award, which I reviewed previously.  So, for expediency’s sake, I have just copied over the pertinent reviews of repeat nominees.  The one new review in the bunch is of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

1. Max Max: Fury Road

Humanity has wrecked the world.  Nuclear war has left much of the earth as a barren wasteland.  Humanity still survives, but only in conclaves where those in control lord their power over the common people.  Those in power hoard water, gasoline, and bullets, the most important resources in this world, and guard them jealously.  Immortan Joe is the leader of one of those conclaves, with a vast store of clean water pumped from deep beneath the earth, and guarded by squads of warboys who are trained to be killers from a young age.  Despite these relative riches, what Immortan Joe wants more than anything is healthy offspring, his other children all born with deformities.  He keeps a harem of beautiful wives in pursuit of this goal.  When his general Imperator Furiosa goes rogue and escapes with his wives in tow, Immortan Joe takes a war party in pursuit, and calls in reinforcements from Gas-Town and Bullet Farm to join in the fight.  Mad Max of the title is captured at the beginning of the story and strapped to the front of a pursuit vehicle to act as a blood donor for a sick warboy, to give him the strength to fight.

I am only a bit aware of the original Mad Max franchise.  When the previews for this movie came out, I thought it looked completely unappealing.  I honestly didn’t understand what other people were raving about when they were so excited about it as the movie’s release date approached, and after they saw it in theaters.  I wasn’t expecting to see it at any point, so I read some reactions and found them interesting but still didn’t feel compelled to see it.  I finally decided I would see it when I heard some reviewers giving the movie a bad review because they thought it was awesome and action-filled but that this concealed a feminist agenda and they were angry that they had been tricked into liking a movie that had a feminist message.

I finally rented the movie, expecting it to be pretty much just okay, but really quite enjoyed it.

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa was badass, and I hope there are more movies with her in this role.  Tom Hardy as the eponymous Mad Max was also solid.  Really, great casting all around, and it was really cool to see a woman in one of the lead roles of an action movie where she is an essential part of the action.

Probably one of the coolest things about the movie are the vehicle designs.  Since most of the movie takes place on the road in pursuit, there is plenty of opportunity for these vehicles to be showcased.  They are so much fun just to look at, that I more than once laughed in delight at the absurdity of a design.  My particular favorite was the sports car with tank treads driven by the leader of Bullet-Farm.

Similarly, costume design and other character design were incredible.  It’s… hard to play a flame-throwing electric guitar as serious, but it’s just one example of the over-the-top design that should be stupid, but somehow it all works and ends up being both exciting and hilarious.

It had a lot of striking images, sounds, moments.  In this bleak, most desperate of landscapes you see the most depraved of the depraved of the most heroic of the heroic.  There were heroes to root for, but even those heroes are no pristine blameless creatures, because no such people have survived so long.  Rather the heroes are those who want to try to make some small change for the better in the world around them.  The movie is basically one long chase scene, full of action, full of surprising and epic and violent moments.  I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, by any means.  But I thought it was a really incredible film, despite coming into the movie with reservations.


2.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens

(this review copied verbatim from my review of the movie posted in January)

The movie picks up about as many years after the original trilogy as have passed in real life, I suppose.  The First Order, the still active remnants of the Empire, is still opposing the New Republic that replaced it.  A group of storm troopers of the First Order raids a Resistance camp on the desert planet Jakku, looking for information.  Resistance fighter Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) hides the vital information in the droid BB-8 and sends it away from the camp before he is captured. One of the stormtroopers known only as FN-2187 (who is later nicknamed Finn) (played by John Boyega) chooses to turn his back on a lifetime of training and chooses not to kill anyone in the raid.  Finn helps Poe Dameron escape.  Together they meet Rey (Daisy Ridley), a Jakku scavenger and they join forces to get BB-8’s information to the people in the Resistance who need it.

I enjoyed this movie.  It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen but I enjoyed it from beginning to end and I am glad to see someone has been able to turn around the series after the mess Lucas made of the second trilogy.  The special effects were good, and not the fakey CG-looking stuff that was in the second trilogy.  The casting of the new characters was solid and it was great to see old faces again.  To have a woman and a black man be the main heroes of the story is great to see from a franchise that hasn’t historically had a ton of diversity.    It was easy to root for the heroes and easy to boo at the villains.  The worldbuilding, set design, costume design all reminded me of the great work of the original.  I particularly liked the design of BB-8 whose design is much more broadly practical than R2D2’s.  Kylo Ren made a good villain who was sufficiently different than the past villains to not just be a copy but evil enough to be a worthy bad guy.

Are there things I could pick apart?  Sure.  Some of it felt a little over-familiar, but that might have been part of an attempt by the moviemakers to recapture the old audience again.  I hope the next movie can perhaps plot its own course a little bit more.  And maybe I’ll have some followup spoilery articles where I do so.  I don’t see a lot of movies in theater twice, but I might do so for this one so I can watch some scenes more closely.  I think, all in all, the franchise was rescued by leaving the hands of Lucas whose artistic tastes have cheapened greatly over the years.  I know some people knock Abrams, and I didn’t particularly like his Star Trek reboot, but Star Wars has always been more of an Abrams kind of feel than Star Trek ever was anyway.

I enjoyed it, and I think most fans of the franchise will.

(You also might want to read Maria Isabelle’s reaction to the movie, posted here in February)

3. The Martian

During an American manned mission on Mars, a fierce storm strikes the base camp of the astronauts.  One of the astronauts, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is left behind and presumed dead as the rest of the crew aborts the mission and leaves the planet to escape the storm.  But Mark is not dead.  He is alone on the planet with only enough food to last for a year when the soonest he can expect rescue (if anyone realizes he’s alive to attempt a rescue) won’t be for several years.  Determined to live, he sets about the task of survival–cultivating enough food and water to live, and contacting NASA so they can send help.

I can see why this movie got so much critical acclaim.  Usually my tastes don’t align with the Oscar Awards much, but I can see why this one did.  There was a lot to love about the movie–soundtrack, solid casting and acting, great writing, a cast of characters that support each other and succeed through cooperation.  Most of all it managed to capture that sense of wonder that surrounded the exploration of the moon decades ago.  As real manned trips to Mars come closer and closer to reality, it’s easy to imagine this all happening.  (Note that I don’t have enough background to know to what extent the science in the movie was authentic or not, but it felt pretty plausible at least, which is good enough for me)

4.  Avengers: Age of Ultron

The second in Marvel’s Avengers series of movies, that are mega-blockbusters tying together individual comic franchises together in a super-series of movies, this movie starts with the same set of Avengers as The Avengers had:  Iron Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk,  Black Widow, Thor, and Hawkeye.  The movie starts out in the middle of the action as the Avengers raid a Hydra compound in the Eastern European country of Sokova.  They capture Baron Von Strucker and acquire Loki’s scepter from the compound.  Tony Stark (Iron Man) discovers an artificial intelligence contained in the gem of the scepter, and he and Bruce Banner (Hulk) try to use it to complete a global defense program that they have been working on–meant to keep the earth safe from attacking alien forces and the like.  But, Ultron (the AI) goes rogue almost immediately, destroying JARVIS (Stark’s helper program) and escaping with the scepter, soon working to upgrade his body and build an army of drones to fight for him, as well as recruiting Pietro and Wanda Maximoff to his cause, two supers with a grudge against Stark.  To save the world they have to find a way to take Ultron down.

This movie was fun action, and I’d happily see it again.  Again it has a cast of big stars who each have their own Marvel movie franchises and it has been a lot of fun seeing that all come together.  Even more so than your average Avenger movie, you can expect an Avengers movie to be even more so because every threat has to be big enough to justify bringing together a whole team of superheroes and trying to get them all to work together.

This was fun, and I quite enjoyed James Spader as the voice of Ultron, as well as the Maximoffs both in character and in seeing their abilities.  But, overall, this movie was not as appealing as the first Avengers movie.  I’m sure part of that is that it doesn’t have the same novelty, starring mostly the same hero cast.  And, personally, I didn’t Ultron as interesting of a villain as Loki from the previous film, or many of the other Marvel villains–he seemed just very much just a default rogue killer bot kind of villain rather than someone with more interesting and nuanced motivations.   So, it was all fine and I am neither disappointed nor amazed at it, but it kind of felt like they were trying to just ride the momentum from the first movie rather than making something that was spectacular in its own right.  On the bright side, (minor spoiler in this last sentence), they left off the movie making it clear there was a third one being planned with a bunch of new members swapping in for the Avengers team–I found I was much more interested in that because then we can find out more about some characters who have not played lead roles, find out how they interact with each other, and build the team anew.

5.  Ex Machina

Software engineer Caleb Smith wins a week-long getaway to the home of Nathan Bateman, the reclusive CEO of the tech company where Caleb works.  Bateman reveals that he has been working privately on the development of AI and the contest was arranged to get Caleb to his private lab in isolation.  The AI is housed in a human-like body with realistic hands and face but with a visibly artificial rest of her body, and she goes by the name Ava.  After agreeing to extreme secrecy, Bateman reveals that Caleb has been brought there to determine if she passes the Turing Test, a theoretical experiment in which one examines an AI personality to determine if it can pass for human.

I was skeptical of this from the first reveal that it was going to be based around the Turing Test.  I am skeptical of the Turing Test as more than a momentary discussionary point because it claims to be a test of intelligence, but it’s really a test of humanity-mimicry.  For an artificial intelligence to appear to be truly human would probably mean that it would have to feign irrationality, which is a poor requirement for a testing of an intelligence.  I thought the movie worked pretty well with the flaws in the concept of the test by moving beyond the basic theoretical Turing Test and starting with a later development of the same concept in which the tester already knows the  AI is artificially created, but wants to see if the tester can still be convinced emotionally of the being’s humanity despite knowing its humanity is manufactured.  This still has the flaw that the thing being tested is human-mimicry and not actual intelligence, but it seemed like the movie was aware of this continued flaw and in the end I thought that by the end I was satisfied that the AI had not just been treated as a human-analog but a separate entity in its own right, which made the movie much more satisfying than I had thought it would be.

Hugo Novella Review 2016

written by David Steffen

The Hugo Awards Best Novella category covers stories between 17,500 and 40,000 words.  See here for a full list of the nominees this year.

1. Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment)

Kairominas is God-Emperor, who has defeated every foe and united the world under his rule.  He has lived for hundreds of years and has become powerful in Lancing, an arcane power drawn from the sky.  Of course, everyone else in the world is a simulation, all of it designed specifically to keep him engaged and interested and satisfied with his life.  Knowing this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel a sense of responsibility for the simulated people he rules–EVERY natural person is the most important person in their own custom-designed simulated world.  Kai tries to forget, as often as he can, but he has been called upon by the Wode, the makers of these worlds, to fulfill his obligation by going on a date with the ruler of another world in a neutral world.

Brandon Sanderson continues to be consistently one of my favorite writers from year to year, in large part because I love his worldbuilding, especially his magic system worldbuilding.  In this case the magic that the protagonist wields is a simulated magic, part of a computer program, and the protagonist knows this, but it still ends up giving the story as a whole a magic parallel worlds story even though it is actually a science fictional simulated worlds story.  I like science fantasy, and enjoy that mixed feel.  As ever, Sanderson provides stellar worldbuilding with interesting and relatable characters, and manages to convey all this at the perfect pace so that it is never bogged down with excess explanation nor confusing in its brevity.  Solid read from beginning to end.

 

2. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)

Binti is the first of the Himba people (of Namibia) to ever be offered a place at Oomza University, the seat of learning in the galaxy.  To accept the offer, she leaves her family behind and travels far away from the place where her family is so deeply rooted.  Her fellow travelers do not respect her cultures or traditions, and she has a long and frustrating (if enlightening) road ahead of her.  But before they even arrive at their destination planet, their ship is attacked by the Meduse, a deadly alien race at war with the world she is joining.

Great epic story from a point of view not usually portrayed in speculative fiction.  Before reading this story I was entirely unfamiliar with the Himba people, and I enjoyed it in large part as an opportunity to learn something about a real-life  culture, as well as to see wider representation in fiction.  Besides those factors, Binti is also a protagonist that I loved to root for–smart, capable, and brave.  I’ve been hearing people talk about this story all year as a possible award nominee, and I can see why.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

3. Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)

Lord Penric is riding on the way to his betrothal when he comes upon a riding accident with an old woman injured on the ground.  She turns out to a Temple divine, the servant of the Bastard, one of the five gods that rule over the world.  In her dying breath she bestows upon him the demon that possesses her as part of her role, which now resides in Penric’s body.  While demons are expected to pass to another person after the death of their hosting divine, normally it is all prearranged with a specific chosen person, rather than a random passerby.  What, exactly, this means for Penric or for the demon, no one seems willing to say, apart from the fact that he now must change plans in order to speak to the people who can tell him.

This story is billed as taking place in the same world as three of Bujold’s novels, but I never would’ve suspected from only reading the story itself.  The story is self-contained, so you can read this story (as I did) with no prior knowledge of the world or people in it, and expect to be able to follow the story.  It’s possible that you may have a greater appreciation for events if you have more familiarity, but it could all be followed very easily.

Not long after his possession Penric learns that the demon can speak to him using his own mouth, so much of the book envelops as part of Penric (sort of) talking to himself in private, learning about the demon and what it is capable of, and more about their uncertain future together.  This was a clever way to convey the world to the reader, and was fun to read as well, because the demon is an interesting character in its own right and there is a great deal of chemistry between Penric and  the demon.  Since Penric is entirely unfamiliar with demons apart from rumors, and knows little about the inner workings of the temple, he has to learn on the road as he’s traveling with the demon, and so does the reader.  He is taken out of his familiar but unremarkable town out into the wider world.  This story was a great deal of fun and it was quite interesting to see the demon’s abilities unfold as it established a rapport with Penric.

4. Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)

Scur is a soldier in a vast interstellar war spanning hundreds of solar systems.  That war is finally nearing an end, and she is beginning to allow herself to contemplate the life that may come after when she is taken prisoner by a war criminal and left for dead.  She wakes up on a prisoner transport where everything seems to be going wrong–the passengers are all thawing out at once, war criminals and prisoners from both sides of the war lines.  Their slow bullets (implanted devices that both store their soldier’s history, and can be set to kill them if they turn rebel) are their only links to their past.  Not only that, but there is something seriously wrong with the ship.

Lots of action and difficult decisions in this story, as soldiers from opposite sides of a long and gruesome conflict wake up in a closed system with each other.  Scur takes on the responsibility of being an impromptu leader to try to keep everyone from each other’s throats long enough to understand how they all ended up there, how to best salvage as much functionality out of the malfunctioning ship as possible, and where to go from there.  A solid science fictional tale about a group of opposing soldiers trying to unite in a post-war environment to try to survive.

 

5. The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)

The Captain, a mouse, sets out to reunite the old gang of thieves and scoundrels of various  species (stoat, owl, mole, salamander, and others) who had all scattered after the last job went disastrously wrong.  As he seeks each one out and recruits them anew on this mission to right what has gone wrong, we learn about each of them and their background before they reach their destination and carry out The Captain’s revenge.

This story was cleverly told, with a feel that I found reminiscient of Ocean’s Eleven or other heist films, about gathering a group of elite specialists and then facing down insurmountable odds (though here there is more direct confrontational action rather than sneakery in general).  My favorite character was probably Bonsoir the stoat, whose blustery mannerisms were fun to witness.  The story was laid out so that you gradually find out more and more about the job that went wrong as each character appears and plays their own part.

I enjoyed the story best when it bordered on the comedic, often in Bonsoir’s dialog, or in some of the amusing chapter titles.  The action was well written and convincing as well, and there was no pulling punches with the deadly consequences of the  whole quest.  I enjoyed the read, but I guess for me I was hoping to be able to relate to some degree to the purpose of the quest, and I just didn’t find it at all compelling.  I was interested in the characters, their histories, and what they wanted from their futures, and I cared enough about them that it just seemed a waste to send them into this situation to quite likely die for a reason that I didn’t find that compelling.  That’s a testament to the portrayal of the characters that I cared enough about them to care about the potential waste of their lives, I suppose.

 

Hugo Novelette Review: “Obits” by Stephen King

written by David Steffen

“Obits” is one of the Hugo Finalists for the novelette category this year.   It was published in Stephen King’s short story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.

Mike Anderson takes a job at the online celebrity gossip mag Neon Circus writing joke obituaries of recently-deceased celebrities.  His article becomes one of the most popular in the magazine.  After he is turned down for a raise in frustration he writes an obituary about his boss to blow off steam and his boss dies unexpectedly that same day.  Does his writing have the power to kill?

Overall this story is Stephen King in his best short story form–real world situation but with one bizarre idea thrown in, and explore the consequences.  As is typical for Stephen King his characters feel like real people, enough so that it’s easy to imagine it all actually happening.  As his colleague at Neon Circus starts to encourage him to explore his ability further I could really feel the downward spiral of feeling out that horrific talent.  I was enjoying it quite thoroughly until the ending which was more of an ellipsis than a period or exclamation point.  I don’t know if it makes it better or worse when the narrator of the story points out its lack of ending–I guess hanging a lantern on the lack of resolution is better than nothing?  But I would’ve rather seen a more satisfying ending on the end of it, whether it took a lighter turn or a darker turn.

 

 

Hugo Novelette Review: “And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander

written by David Steffen

“And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead” is one of the Hugo Finalists for the novelette category this year.   It was published by Lightspeed, and you can read it here in its entirety or listen to it in audio.

Rhye is a cyborg freelancer working with her partner Rack on whatever jobs they can find that suit their skills.  Rack specializes in cyberspace hack-jobs, diving into corporate networks to liberate valuable data.  Rhye’s specialty is more on the physical side of things; she is a killing machine with her pistols.

The pair are hired to rescue the son of a mob boss where he’s gotten lost trying to dig information out of a security system. The job goes south in a big way when the mobsters get frustrated at lack of results and shoot Rack through the head before his mind returns from the system.  But… he is still in the system, and it’s possible that Rhye might be able to dive in after him and bring him back intact (though without a body to occupy).  The mobsters are going to let her do this, intending to get the data they’d been seeking in the first place.

I enjoyed this story.  An action-packed cyberpunk rescue attempt into dangerous territory.  If you are averse to profanity you’ll probably want to give this one a pass–Rhye is very foul-mouthed, dropping f-bombs all over the story.  I found the profanity rather fun, myself.  It was part of her character, part of the way she is and cutting it out would’ve made her very different.  A badass character to root for, nasty villains to root against, the weird subtextual world of cyberspace, satisfying ending.

Hugo Novelette Review: Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, transl by Ken Liu

written by David Steffen

“Folding Beijing” is one of the Hugo Finalists for the novelette category this year.   It was published by Uncanny Magazine, a magazine that debuted in 2015, and you can read it here in its entirety.

In the future, Beijing is not just one city, but three.  The five million residents of First Space have the city for 24 hours at a time and have the most enviable prestigious jobs.  The twenty-five million residents of Second Space have the city for 16 hours at a time and have jobs of middling prestige and power and pay.  The fifty million residents of Third Space struggle to scrap out a living, and mostly spend their time sorting the recycling of the other two spaces.  One of the three is active at a time, and during that time the residents of the other two sleep in a deep drugged sleep with their buildings folded up tightly underground and out of the way.

Lao Dao is a sorter of recyclables in Third Space, but he has been offered a rare and lucrative employment opportunity by a contact in Second Space to deliver a message to a person in First Space.  Generally movement between the spaces is highly restricted, especially movement from the lower class spaces to the higher class spaces, but it is possible to avoid the drugged sleep of transition and to ride the folding pieces of the city to move from Third Space to First Space.  Lao Dao explores the normally hidden upper class facets of the city, trying to figure out what choices are best in this foreign space where people don’t have to scrimp for money.

I thought the premise for this was really clever, and I got the impression that it was based in a good understanding of the economics of the class system that would support the city’s economy (I don’t have much knowledge of macroeconomics, but it sounded plausible to me at least).  While such a mechanism would be cost-prohibitive and too dangerous for anyone to consider (even discounting the possibility of malfunction in self-collapsing buildings, consider the risks of not waking up from any kind of general anesthesia and applying that to tens of millions of citizens once every 2 days) I was willing to go with the flow for the sake of the interesting premise.

The setup of the story gave a good outsider’s perspective to explore the upper levels of the city’s classes.  Even though Lao Dao is a resident of the city and so is familiar with much of its layout and structure and social system, he has never actually been to First Space before, and the level of technology and privilege in that space is as foreign to him as anything could be.  I read this story with great interest from start to finish–a clever SF premise with a compelling human story at the center of it.  Well told, well translated, well done.

Hugo Review: Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle

written by David Steffen

“Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is one of the Hugo Finalists for the short story category this year.   It was self-published on Amazon.  As you might expect, it is chock full of explicit sexual content, and is… I guess you’d call it absurdist erotica?  Satirical speculative erotica?  I don’t know, something like that.  So, if you are averse to explicit sexual content, well, you’re going to want to skip this one.

So…  if you haven’t been following the Hugo Awards closely these last couple of years, your first question is probably “How in the world did erotica end up on the Hugo ballot, no matter how speculative it may be?  Well, if you asked that, you are right; its presence on the ballot is highly unusual.  This year and last year have been very unusual years all around for the Hugo awards.  It is a long story and one that would certainly overshadow this review were I to include it here, but bottom line:  It is not what one would normally expect as a Hugo finalist.  But it is a Hugo finalist in this unusual year, and it was included in the Hugo packet (a downloadable collection of many of the eligible works provided to voters) and I decided I would read it and review it.  So here we are.

“Space Raptor Butt Invasion” follows astronaut Lance Tanner assigned to a space station far distant from Earth. Due to budget cuts, he is assigned to live and work in the station completely by himself for a year and is not looking forward to the extreme isolation.  Before he has been there long, though, he discovers that he is not alone–there is another astronaut there, an intelligent raptor named Orion.  One thing leads to another, and soon Lance and Orion are getting hot and heavy.

I had never heard of Chuck Tingle before this year’s Hugo season, but I’ve been getting some sense of his online personality since the announcement and his online persona on Twitter and elsewhere has been very weird and entertaining.  Tingle is pen name–no idea who the person behind the name is, but I’m using male pronouns on the basis that the persona is male though the author may not be.  Much of his online content is incoherent at first glance, but this is because he speaks in his own invented lingo that one learns to parse into meaning once you’ve spent a bit of time catching up.  It is bizarre and worth some laughs in a Hugo season that has otherwise been very lacking in the laughs department.

This story is the only thing that I’ve read by Tingle so far, and I admit I didn’t know what to make of it.  The premise is funny, but the premise is pretty clear just from the Amazon listing with the ridiculous book cover and ridiculous title (Tingle’s titles in general are very silly and amusing, look up his bibliography) but I felt the book didn’t really follow through with that.   The only other thing about the story I thought was funny was a bit of musing about whether a sexual pairing of a male human and a male dinosaur is gay or whether the interspecies pairing negated that.  I have heard  that Tingle’s works are generally satirical on some level, but apart from that amusing bit that I just mentioned which has some commentary inherent in it, I didn’t pick up on the satire–maybe its subject matter is something I’m not familiar enough with to recognize?  Admittedly I don’t really read erotica of any variety, so if it’s meant to be erotica satirizing erotica I probably entirely missed it.

My enjoyment wasn’t helped by the book needing proofreading–it is not a very long story but I noticed a half dozen grammatical/spelling errors that didn’t seem to be intentional.

So, I seem to have missed the satire, I’m not really that interested in erotica, so I guess I’m just not the target audience for this book.  I gave it a try in the hopes that it would be funny but most of the humor was inherent in the title and book cover rather than in the contents of the book itself.  I’m still following Tingle online to see what he has to say, and maybe I’ll try another of his books if I hear some recommendations, but at least from this sample I didn’t get into it.

 

Anime Review: Prince of Stride: Alternative

written by Laurie Tom

prince of strideOut of all sports anime I could have watched as my first, I picked Prince of Stride: Alternative because I was a track and field athlete in high school, and the idea of a parkour/relay race would totally have been up my alley.

There are really two elements to the show. One is the story that follows the stride club of Honan Academy. The other is the sport itself.

Most of the characters aren’t terribly deep, but considering that this is more about the team rather than any one character’s experience I think that’s all right. This series is based on a visual novel aimed at the female audience (explaining the pleasing character designs of the male athletes), but to be honest I’m really watching for stride and showrunners seem to have taken the tack of making this a sports series. There’s no romance at all. Just friendship.

Stride is a made-up sport consisting of a five man relay team plus a relationer, for a total of six. The race is run through urban environments with a number of obstacles referred to as “gimmicks” in the way. There can be narrow bridges to prevent passing, boxes that must be vaulted over, etc.

The relationer comes in play during the most contrived part of the race, which would be the handoff in a regular relay race (but they high-five instead of using a baton in stride). Since this is on city streets and not a race track, the next runners in the relay cannot necessarily see the speed or direction their teammates are approaching. Generally they’ll start running at an angle compared to the main race track and then race into the track and takeover zone where they need to high five.

Since it’s a blind start, the relationer calls out the approach and how much of a lead they or their opponent have before cueing the next runner for a ready, set, go. A good relationer should be like the team strategist, making decisions based on how their runners are doing and advising whether high risk high reward shortcuts are necessary. However, in practice Nana, the only female cast member and Honan’s relationer, hardly ever does this.

The races are dramatic and individually well choreographed, though after a while it’s a little surprising that there aren’t more races that are plain blowouts one way or another. I realize that’s not as dramatic as a down to the wire finish, but having seen a lot of high school relays, I know it happens from time to time. Even a hint of those off camera would have been nice.

Perhaps because of my background I found there were some elements of the sport that I didn’t necessarily understand. Several times I would see characters jumping around for no reason, or going around an obstacle that was clearly in their path when it seems like they should be obligated to go over it. There doesn’t appear to be a scoring system other than time, so unnecessary jumping should actually be bad (as a hurdler, I learned to spend as little time in the air as possible), but there are times where they jump around in preference to straight running.

When the show is not focusing on the races themselves, they’re usually focused around team building, either through training or by having the five boys and Nana hang out together. Most of the show’s focus is on Nana, Takeru, and Riku, who are the three first years who join the stride club at the start of the school year when it’s on the verge of nonexistence.

In addition to the races, there is a subplot involving previous members of the stride club and how Honan’s stride team dropped to the point that without the new first years they couldn’t field a full team. It’s probably not the strongest storyline and only necessary because otherwise Takeru and Nana wouldn’t have gone to Honan in the first place to become talented but plucky underdogs (enrolling because Honan was renowned for stride).

Prince of Stride is strongest when it focuses on the more realistic parts of races and what it’s like being part of a sports team. The animation is by the studio Madhouse, which regularly turns in beautiful work (like last year’s Death Parade), and captures the energy of being in a race and screaming for teammates all the way down to the finish line.

The rest of it can be pretty forgettable, and I wish the production had focused more on the sports part of the show than the interludes where the team is horsing around. They face a lot of other teams on their way to the End of Summer race finals, and while it’s not realistic for them to get to know every set of opponents, even their rival team doesn’t have much opportunity to be more than a few surprisingly friendly faces. More stride would have fixed that, and I actually was a little disappointed in the episodes that didn’t have any races.

Still, it was a fun watch, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s been through high school team sports. There was a lot of nostalgia in this one.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: exciting and well animated races, excellent soundtrack

Minuses: non-stride segments can get pretty goofy, other than Nana there is a serious lack of recurring female characters

Prince of Stride: Alternative is currently streaming at Funimation and Hulu and is available both subtitled and dubbed (though dub requires a Funimation subscription). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

Hugo Short Story Review: “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S.R. Algernon

written by David Steffen

Asymmetrical warfare is one of the Hugo Finalists for the short story category this year.   It was published by Nature Magazine’s Futures feature, and you can read it here in its entirety.

“Asymmetrical Warfare” is a science fiction story written as a military mission log from the point of view of militant starfish-like aliens invading earth with the hopes of proving earthlings’ battle prowess as a way of inducting the species into the Galactic Union.  The aliens have made the assumption that earthlings are anatomically similar to themselves (including body regeneration) because of the commonly used five-pointed stars on earthling spacecraft.

I love flash fiction, and generally consider it an under-appreciated form.  I would love to see more flash fiction on award ballots, and humorous flash fiction even more so.  Humor is incredibly difficult to write well because each person’s sense of humor can be very individual so that something hilarious to one is unamusing to another.

I thought this story was cute, and I did chuckle at it a bit.  But, even though it was a very short story, it was too long to sustain its joke.  The joke is the premise itself and so once the premise is clear it keeps on going without any new sources of humor.  It could’ve made a great drabble–reveal the premise, reveal a consequence, and be done, but at its current length it needed something more than the small joke to fill out the word count.

I enjoyed the read pretty well, but it was pretty good not great.  I wanted more substance, whether that was story or character or new sources of humor as the story goes on.

 

Anime Review: Erased

written by Laurie Tom

erased

Erased is based on the manga Boku Dake ga Inai Machi (The Town Where Only I am Missing) and while I’m sorry to lose the more poetic title, the story itself is no less meaningful.

Satoru Fujinuma is a 29-year-old man working a dead end job as a pizza delivery guy. He used to have dreams of becoming a manga artist, but like many people, those dreams didn’t pan out and he’s doing what he can to get by.

Unlike most people though, Satoru has what he considers a bothersome ability. Every now and then what he calls Revival kicks in and he flashes back a few minutes in time. After the rewind, if he makes the effort to look around, he can find out where something has gone wrong and take the opportunity to change it. This allows him to save a kid’s life, though the reason he considers the ability bothersome is that his intervention usually costs him in some way, like ending up in the hospital after stopping a wayward truck.

When Satoru’s mother visits he’s visibly annoyed, because he’s trying to be independent. He doesn’t like her prying into his friendships or the fact he’s still single without a girlfriend, but circumstances rapidly change when she’s murdered in connection to a serial killer case from his childhood and Satoru is framed as the culprit.

The shock of his impending arrest by the police triggers his Revival ability and sends him all the way back to his final year of elementary school, a few days before his eleventh birthday, and a few days before his classmate Kayo Hinazuki is abducted as the first in a series of child murders.

Once he gets over his shock, Satoru concludes that if he manages to save Kayo’s life, then he’ll save his mother’s life as well, but as a kid he’s a person of limited means. What Satoru has in his favor though is that he knows the future. He knows the last time Kayo was seen alive and where. He knows who the accused will be even though he believes that person is innocent.

As he works on his plan, Satoru doesn’t entirely behave like a kid on the verge of being eleven (since he’s mentally his adult self) and though he tries to fit in, his friends notice the change in him, his sudden drive and maturity.

But while in the past, perhaps more importantly, we see Satoru’s relationship with his mom, who is still alive as her younger self. Satoru realizes what he lost when she was killed and he now trusts her implicitly, understanding that she always has his back. And Satoru’s mom is really the world’s most awesome mom, allowing him an incredible amount of freedom because even though she’s not aware of his Revival ability, she understands he’s trying to do something incredibly important to him.

When his mom was murdered in the opening episode, I was disappointed, because even in the first episode it was possible to see her as a fully realized character with her own agency (she figures out the serial killer’s identity, which is why she gets killed in the first place), so I was very happy that she plays an active role in the events of the past.

Watching Satoru relive his childhood with a better appreciation and understanding of his mom and his friends is the real joy of Erased, and his plan to foil the serial killer is easy to buy into. It never goes out of the realm of what a real live kid could accomplish (given the appropriate drive and knowledge), and the way he befriends the lonely and abused Kayo so she never has reason to be alone is one of the show’s charms.

If there’s any fault to Erased it’s in the villain. Narratively there are very few potential culprits and most viewers who think about it will correctly conclude who the killer is long before any proof comes out. It’s a little frustrating because Satoru himself doesn’t have enough information for him to realistically identify the killer before the reveal happens. He doesn’t have the benefit of knowing that he’s in a story.

There is also, perhaps, a little too much time spent on the villain’s motivation, which I don’t think the show really needed. It’s hard to justify why someone would kill children in a way that would make sense to the audience and it feels like it had to be shoehorned in to make the climax work.

Aside from that weakness, the rest the show comes together in the end, giving a real feeling that things have changed for the better. I like how Satoru emerges from his experience as a more confident person, at ease with himself, and it’s easy to see how he’s grown between the beginning and the end of the series due to his determination to save Kayo, his mother, and the other children who were killed.

“Erased” is lovely combination of a second chance to be a better person and a mystery thriller. It’s not perfect, but definitely worth a watch.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: engaging characters, child Satoru is interesting to watch and cheer for, his mom isn’t a passive character and is in fact one of the show’s active players

Minuses: killer’s identity is narratively easy to figure out, villain’s motivation is nonsensical and doesn’t really add anything, Airi is an overall superfluous character who could be cut from the story but was presumably left in so adult Satoru could have a love interest

Erased is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Aniplex of America has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.