The Boxtrolls is a 2014 claymation film by Focus Features. Everyone knows Boxtrolls are dangerous monsters. Everyone knows they capture and eat children. This is only confirmed when a boy is taken by them, and the exterminator Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) establishes a deal with the cheese-loving aristocratic council The White Hats that if he exterminates all of the boxtrolls they will let him join their council.
What everyone knows is wrong. Boxtrolls are peaceful creatures who hide from humanity and whose only interaction with them has been to scavenge human garbage for tools and other things of interest. They’re called boxtrolls because each one wears a box as a sort of permanent garment, like a hermit crab’s shell, and will retreat into their box as a refuge to hide. A boy lives among them, called Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) (because he wears a box with a picture of eggs on it), who thinks he’s a boxtroll like any other. He is the boy who had disappeared years ago, his very existence acting as the proof of the fraud of Snatcher’s arrangement with the White Hats. As Eggs witnesses the continual disappearance of boxtrolls, he decides to venture up to the surface where he finds out about Snatcher’s quest to exterminate them all.
The setting and character design are particularly good because the characters each have their own characteristic style, from the sinister and greasy character of Snatcher, to the polished and aloof White Hats, to the grubby but well-grounded Eggs.
The Boxtrolls is a fun, funny, and well-paced movie that’s well worth watching, that does enough unexpected to keep things interesting. The boxtrolls themselves are easy to root for and loveable, while both Snatcher and the White Hats are easy to root against.
Pokémon Detective Pikachu is a live-and-CG children’s mystery/action movie based on the Pokémon franchise.
Through most of the world they are mostly used as the fighting creatures we know them as from the game/card franchises, who are trained by humans and pitted against each other in arena-style battles against other Pokémon. Ryme City is the exception, where humans and Pokémon live together as fellow citizens, each human citizen paired with a Pokémon citizen.
Tim Goodman (Justic Smith) is a 21-year-old insurance salesman in a world where are real. He used to love Pokémon but lost interest when his mother died, and his dad took a detective job in Ryme City and has had very little contact since. But when Tim is informed that his father has disappeared, he travels to Ryme City to take care of his father’s affairs. While he’s there he meets a strange Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds), the only Pokémon he’s ever heard of who can talk with a human. Pikachu wants to be a detective, and seems to have been Tim’s father’s Pokémon partner, but he has no memories.
He also meets junior reporter Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton) and her Psyduck companion, who claim that they have information about Tim’s father’s disappearance. They work together to investigate clues about what actually happened.
This was fun and funny, and had plenty of action to keep the kids interested, dialog and story, it’s all around quite a lot of fun. You don’t have to know much about Pokémon to follow the movie, though there are jokes and references that Pokémon followers will get that others want (I knew just enough to get a few of them, but I’m sure I missed many). Recommended, and fun for the kids.
The PPMS had cordoned off Jalan Mandailing. They had guards posted along the banks of Sungai Chua. But it was not enough. The battles ranged from midnight till the cock’s crow and the call for prayers every dawn while the sun painted delicate fingers of rose across a yellow ombre sky. In the daytime, the blistering heat of the day kept the undead under protective cover. Even in their present state the British could barely handle the heat of the tropics. Penghulu Udin discovered he was exceptionally good at killing the undead. He could spear them, decapitate them, blow them up or use the bamboo blowgun the way his Dayak ancestors had before they had travelled to Selangor to build a new life by marrying into the Javanese community. He learned how to construct bombs from the materials they’d scavenged from the army barracks. He’d trained a small army that grew larger, and larger. They’d called it the “Persatuan Pertahanan Manusia Sejagat” or the PPMS for short. Udin sometimes thought that they were being rather grandiose by calling themselves an alliance for the defense of all of humankind. But on other days, he felt that this was precisely what they were. It felt like they were defending more than their piece of the earth. It felt like they were defending all of humanity. He marvelled when no one challenged his command. Instead, they called him their Penghulu, as though the Alliance was a village. They were a community against the damned who had come from across the vast sea to colonise them. Their colonisers had been desiccated from the inside, transformed into the undead who cannibalised them in an entirely more literal way. The undead had been created from the contagion that infected every omputih in sight. All of the British running administrative duties, all of the navy, the army, the merchants and their wives, even their mixed-race offspring. Not a one was spared.
Humidity swathed the night as did the low-hanging mist that had been a persistent torment since the contagion started. Udin’s cotton shirt clung to his back, clumping against deep gouges that were slow in healing. The contagion had not spread to him. None of the Asian denizens of Kajang were infected by what had turned the colonial soldiers, officials and merchants into shambling beings with eyes that rotated biliously within desiccated sockets. Not even when they had been scratched, gouged, and even half-consumed. There were members of the PPMS who had missing limbs, eyes, and various maimed body parts. And yet, none of them had transformed into the undead.
The hunger had transformed Sir Roger Lawford into a mindless, drooling automaton of preternatural gluttony. Udin had himself shot the nobleman with a rifle he had taken from the corpse of an undead lieutenant. Lawford had been a stiffly starched man with a stiffly starched wife. He had two children who liked to beat and pinch their amahs, their cooks, and the children of the servants who lived in their mansion. That mansion was now gutted; the ravenous members of the Lawford family had glutted themselves on the brains, meats and marrow of their servants before they were killed by Udin and his men. Udin had ordered the construction of a bamboo fence around it, and around all the homes of the omputih who colonised them. That fence had been studded with metal spikes and small sachets with holy verses pinned inside them. It held the undead back, but unholy hunger caused them to persevere against the orisons and vigilant guard of the PPMS comprising the Mandailings, the Bugis, the Tamil and the Hakka population of Klang.
Udin wiped the sweat off his brow as he removed his cotton shirt. The muscles of his aching pectorals and upper arms strained as he reached to clean and dress the wounds that gouged his back. He used the iodine and bandages from one of the many first aid kits they had scavenged from the hospital and the army barracks. Wincing, he washed and then applied iodine to the lacerations. It hurt, but at least the wounds would not be infected. Udin was careful about that. He could not afford to die. He needed to protect the people he loved. Salmah, Nyonya Salleh and his many Dayak-Javanese cousins. He then bandaged himself as best he could.
“Din,” came a soft whisper in the night. “Udin. Are you there?”
“Yes sayang, I am here. I was just dressing my wounds,” his voice was mellow and warm as he replied.
“You were wounded again?” an odd edge of panic inflected Salmah’s voice as her footsteps shambled on the plank boardwalk outside their hut.
Udin said, “Like every other night, sayang. It’s nothing new to us, kan?”
They had fought in different sectors today for the twenty-first day in a row. He missed her badly. As Salmah grew more skilled in fighting, so was her leadership needed to keep the undead at bay – delegation involved also one’s beloved in these exigent times. No one could shoot a rifle like Salmah, and she was nonpareil in the reloading of weapons with bullets during tight situations. When she took charge, no one argued with her. He never could win any argument with her, he thought, melting with both fondness and longing. Udin hoped they would have time for more than just food and banter tonight. His back hurt, and his soul was weary. He was in need of physical comfort.
Udin moved to slide the door open. Salmah crawled in bearing with her a tiffin carrier fragrant with the Peranakan cuisine he so enjoyed. “I visited Nyonya Salleh earlier and despatched some zombie corporals who were trying to break into her house. She packed this for us. Her Ayam Pongteh and Jiu Hu Char is inside. She also made otak-otak,” Salmah said with a strained, yet impish smile.
Udin couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. “Otak-otak! Nyonya Salleh is a funny one. I hope there’s no otak in the otak-otak!”
“Eesh, tak adalah, Udin. She managed to get some fish and she remembered how much you liked this. You know, from the days before the disease changed everything.”
Salmah trailed off, her voice uncertain in the silence.
Udin was reminded of the days when he was just a boy working in the printing press owned by Pak Salleh, Nyonya Salleh’s husband. The days before the Undead Wars began, barely a quarter of a century after the Selangor Civil War that had helped shaped the town of Kajang and the destiny of its inhabitants. No one knew when the first infection spread. Only that the disembowelled human bodies started to stack up, attracting flies. Only that grey-skinned walking corpses started to crowd Jalan Reko, Jalan Mandailing and teemed along the banks of Sungai Chua until they were beaten back. There were no guides. They learned how to kill the undead through trial and error. Through fire, through decapitation, through nightly recitations of Quranic verses and the help of the pak bomohs and the pawangs. Bamboo seemed to frighten the undead and so bamboo walls poisoned with holy water kept the British at bay. But it was not enough. It created safe spaces but the undead British kept coming at them.
*
At least a dozen of his men patrolled the perimeters of the watch-house, but they left Udin within for his moments of privacy. He took what moments he could have. Alone, and with Salmah. Everything he did, he did to make Kajang safe again for Salmah.
He told himself this, and believed it with all of his heart.
Quietly, he helped Salmah unpack the food. He enjoyed the quiet moments of domesticity that they were still able to share.
“You eat first, Udin, I’ll take over the watch.” She wiped her face where it was scratched. Udin stilled. He had not noticed that she had been wounded.
“Salmah, are you fine, sayang?” he asked.
“Sure, I just had to kill five of the undead on the way here. It’s nothing to be concerned about. I’ve killed more than that before,” said Salmah with some nonchalance as she stretched to undo the frizzy topknot on her head. She smoothed her long fingers through her ikal mayang tresses before she redid them into a sanggul at the nape of her elegant neck.
She was so beautiful, his Minangkabau love.
They were supposed to have been wed in the Minangkabau way. The Minangs were a matrilineal people but Udin loved that about Salmah. Loved that she took charge in their relationship. Loved the life they had made together out of cooperation and mutual trust. They were going to be married. But then their family and friends had been consumed by the undead. They had been left in disemboweled piles outside their home before the PPMS had been formed out of grief and anger. They had to be burned because they had no time for Muslim burials. Even the pak imam who would have married them was dead and the mosques had become infested with the undead. Udin and Salmah decided to live together in sin anyway. After all, who knew how long they had to live?
Nobody in the PPMS seemed to mind, mostly because theirs was not the only such arrangement. Lovers huddled together to take what comforts as could be had against the encroaching horrors of the night.
“If you’re sure, sayang. Iodine’s in the first aid box. Do you want me to…,” he began, half getting up to help clean her scratches.
“No, no. Just eat your dinner, I’ll grab the first aid box.” said Salmah. Her voice sounded oddly distracted and almost distorted as she rummaged through the supplies in the watch-house they had built together along the banks of Sungai Chua, the river that was the lifeblood of Kajang.
Reassured by Salmah’s confident movements as she removed her kebaya to fully clean her wounds, Udin started his dinner. He dished out rice, ayam pongteh and the jiu hu char onto the enameled plate they kept in the watch-house. Carefully, he opened the last tiffin container where steamed otak-otak lay, fragrant and redolent of fish lightly spiced and seasoned with fresh herbs from Nyonya Salleh’s courtyard garden.
He ate carefully, delicately even. His table manners often amused Salmah.
“Will our children be as delicate as you, bang?” Salmah had asked him more than once during his courtship of her when he’d been an assistant printer in a printing press. When he’d been saving his money for their wedding.
“Delicate? Me? Excuse me, I am manly and strong,” he would say and show off his forearms just so she knew.
She would laugh fondly at him but always bring him more food from her mother’s Nasi Padang stall that had been popular with the Sumatran workers along Jalan Reko. Salmah’s mother had been a Minangkabau widow who had never remarried. She had been one of the casualties of this long war. He had held Salmah as she wept in abject sorrow at her orphanhood, that first horrific night when this new war had begun between the living and the undead.
“Udin,” began Salmah, snuffling a little as she spoke. Her voice sounded almost distorted.
“Yes, sayang?” he said absentmindedly as he picked at the otak-otak, which tasted creamy and succulent, flavoured delicately with turmeric leaves. It was possibly why this piscine delicacy had been named after brains, Udin mused.
“There’s something I never told you about my father, `din.”
“What is it? I thought he was a fisherman who died at sea?” he said as he licked his fingers.
Done with his dinner, Udin grabbed a canister filled with water from Sungai Chua. He washed his hands quietly in the glow of the hurricane lamp that sat on an emptied wooden arms crate. Behind him, a rustling sound as Salmah tidied up the hut.
“Actually, he was a naval officer, `din. My mother…and he — they never married. He left her here in Kajang to make her fate. She and my grandmother raised me. She told everyone she was a widow.”
“Oh Salmah, who are we of all people to judge, after all we’ve been through together? You know I will stick with you through it all.”
He laughed gently at what he supposed was a confession that she thought would shock him as he pulled out a pilfered cheroot, snipping off the edges before he lit it for a post-dinner smoke. This was part of the stash he looted from Sir Roger Lawford’s mansion, along with many gold ingots and jewelry. One day, when this was all over, he would build a fine home for Salmah and their many children from the proceeds of his many lootings. In this new world created by horror, who really cared about bloodlines, ancestry and legitimacy anymore, kan?
The snuffling grew louder as she said, “No, Udin, it’s worse than that. I’m so afraid to tell you. So afraid…”
Salmah’s voice sounded even more distorted as she wheezed. Outside, only the sound of the waters of Sungai Chua lapping against the pier could be heard. Where were his men? Usually the sound of their chatter would be loud enough that it inhibited Udin a little when he wanted some comfort from Salmah.
The edge of his hunger blunted, Udin suddenly realized something was seriously wrong. It was too quiet outside. There was a strange tension inside. The air felt unbearable. But he could not turn to look at her. Udin could not explain why. Foreboding pebbled his bare skin.
Udin started breathing in shallow gasps. He removed the cheroot from his lips before a strange anxiety caused him to return to smoking, almost desperately.
In the silence, Salmah’s snuffling sounded almost animalistic. The confines of the watch-house felt unbearably small. The urge to scream clotted his airways.
Finally, he forced himself to ask, “Salmah, are you feeling alright? You haven’t been resting. If you have the flu you should take the vitamins that are in that other first aid kit we grabbed from the barracks when we killed those soldiers. It’s beside the gunnysack of rice I grabbed from that warehouse last night.”
He knew his words were a lie even as he said them. Perhaps he was trying to delay the inevitable. Perhaps he was just feverish from the wounds. Perhaps they were infected. Perhaps…
Udin’s voice trailed off as he listened to her laboured breathing. A familiar stench filled the confines of room. He inhaled the tobacco smoke, not wanting to accept what was happening. He dragged on the cheroot as though it would save his life.
Salmah began to speak. He did not want to hear the rest of what she was going to say, but there was no avoiding it, was there? It was an inevitability.
“Udin, my father, he was an Anglo-Indian. He grew up in India with the other Anglo-Indian children. Udin. I’ve been lying to you because I was afraid…afraaaid of losing you. And I was hoping foolishly enough that I would be skillful enough to avoid being infected. But now, Udin…”
Salmah’s voice trailed off into a night that now manifested into Udin’s cold horror. The truth he did not want to acknowledge from the moment she entered the watch-house, with that strange, glassy look in her eyes.
Udin was still stubbornly reluctant to look up. “Look at me, Udin.”
“I can’t, Salmah. I can’t,” he said. If his men saw him as he was now, they would shoot him as a traitor, he thought. As a coward. So be it, then. Salmah had always been the strong one. She had always been the real Penghulu here. Perhaps the PPMS was now lost.
Fortunately, he would be dead before the PPMS got to him, he thought.
“Please, look at me, Udin. I need you to see me as I am now,” she begged.
“Salmah. I will always love you. If you’re going to kill me, please be quick and gentle about it, but I want to remember you the way I loved you.”
“Udin, please look at me. Udin,” she begged.
“I can’t, Salmah. If I do, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’d rather you kill me than I kill you.”
She sobbed as Udin sat as still as stone, as cold as death. His gut churned with the food she said came from Nyonya Salleh. He did not dare question too deeply what he had consumed, what had winged its way into his body. He controlled his gag reflex.
He was meat, and he was to be killed. But he would not kill her.
An exhalation like a tender sigh caressed the contours of his face as Salmah’s desiccated fingers ran through his hair.
“Selamat tinggal, Udin. I really wish you’d look at me, just once.”
Silence descended like a death sentence.
Udin clenched, waiting for a mortal blow that never arrived. He did not know how long he lay still, until the cool breeze of the night air was all that he could feel. Until the stench abated because of the winds that blew in through the open door. He opened his eyes. His men were still silent. Too silent. Oh Salmah, he thought with sorrow. One night, he’d have to face off with her. One night, if the PPMS had not now been obliterated by the growing army of the colonial undead.
Alone in a house they had built together amidst a fortress of bamboo, Udin made his preparations. The undead feared the bamboo. The bomohs and the pawangs who worked for Udin’s army believed this. Another lie, Udin acknowledged with a bitter smile. Another lie they told themselves as they tried to fortify against the encroaching night with its attendant contagions. Outside, the sound of thousands of shambling feet. Udin got up, and pulled out his rifle. As the first pair of misshapen hands pulled apart the wooden planks of the watch- house, he took aim and fired.
*
But in the jungle that surrounded Kajang a lone woman strode with her rifle. A woman of two cultures, made monstrous by one and rejected by the other. A woman rejected by her lover. With the easily shambling steps of a zombie and the military skills that she had cultivated, she unconsciously mimicked the desperate gestures of her former lover. She too, slowly took aim and fired. And fired some more. She fired at both the human, and the zombie host alike until there were no more left for any war.
Salmah kept walking without feeding on the hosts she had decimated, bolstered by anger, fed by grief. Salmah walked until she reached the pier, until she reached the port. Salmah walked until she found a boat she could navigate on her own into the Straits of Malacca, into the arms of a remote island in the Malay Archipelago where she could exist and feed, undisturbed. There, Salmah built her home at the base of a dead volcano that broke away into the sea, and laid out her traps for errant fishermen. If they looked like Udin, she plucked out their eyeballs and swallowed them whole.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by a postulate I gave in my creative writing lecture about writing impossible things within an ordinary setting. For us, the ordinary setting would be the town of Kajang which is next door to our university. I then threw in zombies to my example, and while I was telling them the story about Udin the zombie-killer, the story took a life of its own and I knew I had to write it down. Along the way issues of hybridity and of passing crept in (I am mixed-race) and then I wrote an ending that surprised even me!
Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed.
MIB International is a science fiction action/comedy movie, the 4th and most recent movie in the Men In Black series about a secret government agency that keeps the world safe from intergalactic security threats as well as ensuring that extraterrestrial residents of Earth can live in peace and secrecy among us. When someone joins the Men In Black, they give up all remnants of their former life to devote their lives to the cause.
As with previous movies, this one follows a pair of MIB agents working together against some new threat against the world. This time the agents are Agent M (Tessa Thompson) and Agent C (Chris Hemsworth), working under the leadership of High T (Liam Neeson) in the London office of the MIB.
Agent M had been Molly Wright, who witnessed her parents meeting with the MIB after an alien snuck into their house. Molly’s parents thought that she was asleep, so her memory of the event did not get wiped like her parents’ did. She committed her life and extraordinary academic career into seeking out the Men In Black and finally earned a position in them.
Agent C is a living legend, having fought off an invasion of The Hive with High T using only their wits and Series 7 De-Atomizers. His ways are unorthodox, to say the least, much looser than the usual stiff MIB protocol, and probably only tolerated because High T is the leader.
There’s a new threat to the world, a new excursion of the all-subsuming Hive and it’s up to Agent M and Agent C to stop it.
I love the series, and this one had a lot of potential. I love both Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth to bits, and I thought that they did an exemplary job with the parts given to them, but I felt like the parts given to them were a little 2-dimensional. The movie was all right but I wanted more from it, especially since this is #4 in the series, the novelty can’t carry it at this point and nothing spectacularly new was done with the premise. So, not bad, it was fine, I loved seeing the two lead actors in particular, but I felt like it didn’t reach its potential.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV show presented on the Hulu streaming service, based on the 1984 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, which was previously reviewed here, about a near-future dystopia in which the USA has become an extremely oppressive theocracy in which women are second-class citizens, especially the handmaids who are little more than breeding stock. Season two aired on Netflix in 2018 (season 1 was reviewed here).
The protagonist is June (Elisabeth Moss), a handmaid in the new nation of Gilead, a dystopian vision of a violent fundamentalist Christian regime in the near future. Women have no rights, can own no property, and the handmaids in particular are basically only treated as breeding stock, meant to get pregnant by the commanders of the society in a monthly ceremony with their wives. She is known officially as “Offred” because she is considered the property of Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), to conceive for his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).
The end of season 1 ended in the same place as the book it was based on, with June being hauled away with no explanation in a van, with no idea if she is going to be freed or killed or something else entirely. She is smuggled away from her household and hidden somewhere else, with the help of Nick (Max Minghella), her household’s driver and her secret lover , but her fate is still far from certain.
This season explores areas of the world of Gilead and the surrounding world in ways that are never directly explored in the book or season 1, seeing what life is like in other countries (especially Canada) as well as other parts of Gilead itself, like the colonies that are the destination of the doomed, and finding out more about the roles of different people in the world and how they are rewarded and trapped in their roles as well.
Season 2 was an excellent addition to the series, continuing to expand on the world and the characters (and I’m in the middle of watching season 3!).
The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV show presented on the Hulu streaming service, based on the 1984 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, which was previously reviewed here, about a near-future dystopia in which the USA has become an extremely oppressive theocracy in which women are second-class citizens, especially the handmaids who are little more than breeding stock. Season one aired on Netflix in 2017.
In the near-future world of the story, a worldwide infertility epidemic is affecting the whole world, and the United States has been overthrown by a violent fundamentalist Christian regime and renamed Gilead. The leaders of Gilead think that the world’s problems are a punishment from God for their wickedness, and have taken over to enforce their own view of morality on their citizens.
One of the largest of these changes is the introduction of handmaids, fertile women who are assigned to commanders whose wives have not borne children, to be raped every month when they are ovulating with the intent of bearing a child that will then be taken by the commander as his own child.
The protagonist of the book is June (Elisabeth Moss), who is a handmaid officially known as “Offred” (as in “of Fred” because Fred is the first name of the commander she is assigned to(Joseph Fiennes)), who had a husband and a young child before the rise of Gilead and she was made a handmaid because of past infidelity. She is trying to survive despite the extreme circumstances, and she is trying to make her place in this new world with potential friends like the commander’s driver Nick (Max Minghella) and maybe make a difference to someone and if she is very very lucky, make a mistake.
Besides the monthly “ceremony” when she is ovulating, she also has to deal with the passive-aggressive tendencies of the commander’s wife Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), and the overbearing leadership of Aunt Lydia who oversees all of the local handmaids.
For those who have read the book, the first season pretty much matches the timeline and major events as the book, also ending in pretty much the same place. It has been a couple years since I’ve read the book but the parts that I remembered matched the book quite closely.
The writing, the casting, the music, the production, everything about this show is done very well. It is not a show for the lighthearted, and is as relevant (or more relevant) than the story was when the book was originally published in the mid-80s–it is all too easy to believe some of the dystopic religio-political beliefs in Gilead taking root in some current trends. The Handmaid’s Tale is a good story, but even more so than other dystopias it is a warning about where we might end up if we don’t resist changes that would take us to that dystopia.
Highly recommended, if you feel you can handle something so dark.
“I’ve got it!” Barnes leapt out of his chair and knocked hot synth-coffee over his work interface and paunch. Perhaps that was why the idea vanished. By the time he had swabbed away the mess, the brilliant flash of creativity was no more than the memory of something that had almost been within his grasp. He needed a few breaths of bottled fresh sea air–his last multi-million global craze–to boost his brainpower.
He had exactly twenty-three minutes to find the next big thing, the product that everyone–young, old, straight, gay, white, black and everything in-between–had to have. Innovations Manager Oona Hardy had smiled at him at the last project development meeting–that smile. Barnes was sure it was produced by twitch implants that pulled back her lips to reveal entirely too much gum and teeth. No one who had been on the receiving end of that smile survived the next meeting unless they came up with something so good no one could understand why it had not been thought of before. The trouble was, the harder he tried to snatch at ideas, the faster they fled. What was that idea he had been about to have?
*
“I don’t need to tell you we’re under pressure. Yes the ‘Shake It’ instant drying fabrics are still selling well, particularly the towels, but with OmniCom launching its ‘Perfect Image Flexi You’ technology we have to come up with something to compete.” Oona Hardy had a way of pausing behind the so-called creatives at the conference table as she paced around it that made each one flinch. When it was Barnes’ turn, he had to fight himself not to draw in his head like a tortoise. She moved on, and Barnes exhaled.
Someone stammered out an idea. Hardy’s lips began to pull back. Any moment now, Barnes would be called upon to speak. If only there was a way to make inspiration come to order. If only there was a way to backtrack to the flash of light and stop it escaping.
“What we need is an inspiration machine.” He had not meant to say it aloud, but Oona Hardy pounced on it.
“An inspiration machine. That has possibilities… expound!”
Barnes filled in the panic with words. “Think of all the priceless inventions that have been lost because an alert beeped or someone spoke. An inspiration machine would take you back to the instant when the idea began to form and allow you to follow it through… ” He was babbling, but Hardy was already filling in the gaps.
“How long before it’s market-ready?”
“Umm… ” He should not have hesitated.
“Four months. Bravo Barnes! Who’s next?”
Barnes tried to breathe naturally, as Hardy’s smile lasered the colleague next to him. Four months, and he had no idea what he had just proposed, let alone how to make it. The trouble was, he needed an inspiration machine to show him.
*
Four months of experimenting with electronically induced hypno-regression, combinations of auditory stimuli and implants in the primitive brain, and Barnes was no further forward. All he had to show for his work was a mess of interlinked nano-chips and nerve switches.
“Is this it?” Hardy’s demand caught Barnes off-guard.
“Yes.” That was it so far.
“Good. Give me a demonstration. Is this how it goes?” Hardy picked up the contraption.
“It isn’t ready yet.” Barnes hastily positioned the kit on her.
“Absolutely. It needs to look more sexy… ”
“I meant… ”
“Switch on… ”
Barnes held his breath as Hardy closed her eyes and waited for something to happen.
“It doesn’t work,” he said.
“Mm… tingling… not unpleasant… ”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Of course it works! I’ve just had a brilliant idea how to market it.” Hardy turned on her smile.
Barnes knew better than to disagree.
*
The more time that passed and the steeper the sales graph rose, the harder it was for Barnes to unglue his tongue. The inspiration machine was a sensation, acclaimed by avant-garde artists and company directors alike. Barnes enjoyed the bonus Hardy gave him, but not the smile she seemed now to reserve for him. He pretended to be working on a way of tapping into parallel universes, but continued his research into trapping the creative moment. Sooner or later, the bubble was bound to burst, and if he could come up with a machine that worked he might not get caught in the blast. He attached himself to the machine’s latest incarnation and closed his eyes. He sighed. It didn’t work, he was on completely the wrong track. The reason he knew was because there was the light of an idea glimmering in the distance.
“This doesn’t look much like a parallel universe interface to me.” Hardy’s smile cut off the protest Barnes was about to make. “It’s amazing what people can do when they believe things are possible. All those testimonials we have from satisfied customers who’ve found our machine increases their innovation. Anyone who hasn’t can’t have any imagination.”
“But I know how to make it work.” Barnes tried not to listen to her: the light was still there.
“Of course you do, you invented it.”
Not the smile, not the smile, not the smile, Barnes repeated in his head. “All we have to do is… ” But there it was–the pulled back lips, the expanse of gums.
“Well?”
“Um… er… ” It was no good, it had gone.
Hardy twitched her smile back until Barnes thought her face would split in two. More alarming still, she patted his hand. “I thought so. Best stick to the parallel universe interface. I’ve got just the market for it.”
Author’s Note: Two things were mainly responsible for The InspirationMachine: the panic when you have to come up with an idea, and that pesky inspiration is hiding again (It’s never there when you want it.), and the memory of team briefings to discuss corporate strategy. I still have nightmares.
Karla Dearsley’s stories, flash fiction and poetry have been published on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in Northampton, England, and when she is not writing she lets her dogs take her for walks. Her fantasy novels are available on Amazon and Smashwords. Find out more at http://www.ksdearsley.com.
The Road is a post-apocalyptic survival novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf (which also inspired a 2009 movie adaptation by the same name).
A man and his son travel across the wasteland that had been the United States of America after a major (but largely unexplained in the text) catastrophe that left almost everything dead. They are following a road traveling toward the south where they believe they will find sanctuary. Subsisting on scrounged food supplies from pantries of empty homes, and avoiding other survivors who might wish them harm, they don’t know if they will find enough food to make it to their destination, or how they will survive the coming winter, or whether the sanctuary they are hoping for actually exists.
This novel, as you might expect, is bleak as hell. They and other survivors they come across are all people who’ve managed to survive for years and years after the end of almost all life on the planet, and so have made tough decisions to survive. While the man and his son have stuck to certain moral choices, many of those who still survive have not, and running into others is frequently a dangerous encounter. I found the book very compelling, despite the characters not being named, and the very sparse (and often repetitive) dialog in the book was a strong element of that, there’s not much to talk about, and much of it is the man answering the same questions or try to tell the boy what he needs to hear, and about how their relationship changes over the course of the book. The boy has never known a pre-apocalyptic world, so his father’s stories about the time before are like a fairy tale, compelling but imaginary. A solid post-apocalyptic book telling a deeply compelling and emotional story about trying to survive and trying to help your surviving family however you can, while still trying to make moral choices.
(When I picked the book up, I could have sworn it was a very old book that was published before I was born that everyone talks about, but it turns out I had it mixed up in my mind with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a completely unrelated book, apart from them both being about road trips in some sense)
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a 2003 time travel romance book written by Audrey Neffenegger, about a man afflicted with a condition that causes him to time-travel more-or-less randomly and the woman he marries. The book was very popular and inspired a 2009 movie adaptation of the same name, previously reviewed here.
Henry has experienced the time-traveling condition since he was a child. When he travels, only his body is transported, so he does not take along his clothes, wallet, or any other possessions. He learned from a very early age to be ruthlessly pragmatic as a way to survive, because if you get dumped with no clothes and no resources into random locations you’re always against steep odds of getting arrested or starving or whatever else. He has a more or less central timeline that is the trunk from which all of his time travel branches, so he has some normal continuity, but at seemingly random intervals he will travel for seemingly random amounts of time to seemingly random places.
He spends much of his life just trying to survive and get by, until he runs into Clare in his main timeline (when he is in his 30s and she in her 20s) and she tells him that she’s known him since she was a grade schooler and that they’re going to get married in the future. He hasn’t experienced this yet, but early in her life he gave her a list of the times when he would appear in the grove outside her family’s house so that she could remember to bring food and clothes out to him.
Their romance after that is very complicated, as at any given point they are in different parts of their relationship, just as with this initial meeting where she has known him for most of her life and he’s just met her. He then proceeds to meet her as a child and eventually meet her when it was the first time for her. It’s a story of marriage, the obstacles to finding happiness together and what we do to fight for it, and in many ways is about being in different parts of a relationship at the same time, which I think can be true of real relationships that have no time travel involved.
As with the best speculative stories, this one explores real territory with a speculative lens for emphasis. The characters are very different but compelling (with a plus that I didn’t have to watch Eric Bana’s acting for the book, but the minus that I didn’t get to watch Rachel McAdams’s acting). I thought the book as a whole was reasonably well done.
One of the big hangups I had about the book, not being able to tell where in the timeline this fit in, was resolved in the book by section headings that gave the date and the age of both characters. Time is always somewhat confusing at the best of times, but this made it a lot easier to just go with it than I found the book to be.
I also thought it was interesting how Neffenegger chose to follow the continuity thematically rather than necessarily chronologically for either character in particular. For a series of chapters it may follow Clare chronologically through a particular set of years to explore themes of her childhood, then follow him chronologically from his point of a view for a while to show how he ended up there, then switch to something else. Because of the caption headings this was reasonably seamless and I probably only really thought about it because I was thinking about the writing process.
The big thing that makes the book harder to recommend is that for much of the first quarter or so of the book, 30-something Henry is interacting with grade-schooler Clare and I found that whole section of the book deeply creepy and troubling. By that time, he already knows that he will marry her someday when she’s older, and he depends on her for food and clothing on these visits where he would otherwise have to steal and forage like his other time travel jumps. So, it makes sense from a character motivation perspective. But at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the interpretation that he is grooming her during this period. If you removed the time travel element and you had a thirty-something man hanging around a grade-schooler without her parent’s knowledge while mentally preparing himself to marry her, that would be a story about a predator. There are reasons to think that’s not where this was going, but I found it really hard to shake myself off of that interpretation, so throughout this whole section I really just wanted it to be over and get to the part where they’re both consenting adults (even thought that was also somewhat colored by her having been groomed by him for so long that she’s bound to have feelings for him). I’m not sure that was supposed to be creepy or disturbing, but for me it absolutely was, and it makes the book hard to recommend as a result, though overall I thought it was pretty good.
American Gods is a contemporary fantasy/mythology novel by Neil Gaiman, published in 2001. I’ve heard the book highly recommended by many readers, and in 2017 Starz started airing a TV series adaptation, so I decided I needed to find out what it was all about.
The protagonist of the book, Shadow, is released from prison three days early when his wife Laura and best friend die in a car accident, and he learns had been having an affair with each other. He had gotten through his time in prison largely by looking forward to reuniting with her, and his job prospects after his release had depended on his best friend’s business.
Bereaved and bereft of all of his hopes for the future, with no good prospects for worth and nothing to look forward to, he is offered employment by a strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. Mr. Wednesday is a con man, and takes on Shadow as a bodyguard. Shadow is skeptical at first, but in the face of his options finding work as a recent ex-con, he takes the job.
Soon he is drawn into a strange war between ancient and new mythologies. The gods of the old world, a version of them transported here by the belief of immigrants who traveled here to the United States, are weak and dying from the waning beliefs of the people who brought them here. Meanwhile, new gods are rising up, not of the traditional sort, gods of technology and change. A cold war has been building for quite some time, and it’s about to come to a head.
I had trouble getting into this book. Much of the book is spent with Shadow spending time in random hotels or apartments by himself, waiting for Mr. Wednesday to come back again. And while much of the purpose of the seemingly unimportant events of these “waiting around” times becomes clear later, it didn’t make it quicker or more interesting to read at the time. In addition, it’s almost two hundred pages into the book before the mythology plot comes to the forefront–until that point it’s just Shadow hanging about with odd people with quesitonable motivations. The mythology plot is what drew me to the book, so it was frustrating to wait so long to really get into it.
I found Shadow hard to relate to in particular, which made it especially difficult to keep going with the book. I empathized with the depths of his despair when he was released early because of tragedy but many of the decisions he makes in the book make no sense whatsoever to me. Taking the job with Mr. Wednesday, I get in itself, because he was very short on options at the time for being able to make a living in his post-conviction life. But throughout much of the rest of it, he would make a decision that would just leave me scratching my head, and this is for major decisions that the entire plot is built on, so I couldn’t just ignore the oddity, the entire book depended on them.
There were some elements near the very end that helped justify some of the long periods of not much happening, which helped some in retrospect.
This book was not for me. I’d like to talk with some of the people who recommended it so highly and see what it was they got out of the book, because I am curious to hear another perspective. I might consider trying out the TV show at some point because I feel like the premise is very promising, maybe I’ll enjoy a different adaptation of the story.
