An assortment of sci-fi and fantasy books, TV, cinema and games I’ve recently enjoyed, some made recently, some not so much…
Dune (2021)
Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbet’s seminal sci-fi classic isn’t its first adaptation, but despite a soft spot for David Lynch’s version, I’d say it’s much the most successful. Partly that’s because it’s stayed pretty close to the book, keeping plenty of its weirder flourishes and not trying to crush everything down into a single film.
Partly it’s because the design is truly spectacular, working in all kinds of weird and wonderful influences to create a world that feels both familiar and alien.
For my own personal taste I could’ve lived with a few less lingering shots of pensive Timothy Chalamet as Paul, and a bit more exploration of the culture and politics via the stellar supporting cast, but it’s a big film that never bored me, and I very much look forward to the next installment…
Dark
It’s always nice when a new season of something you like drops on a streaming service, but even better is when you discover a series that already has several seasons sitting completed on a streaming service. So it was for me and Dark.
It starts as an ever so slightly sinister and very nicely shot and acted German soap opera, played out in a community with secrets in the shadow of a nuclear reactor. But it quickly hits you with a gobsmacking time-travel revelation, than never stops hitting you with more, ending up in the most complex knot of time-travel paradoxes I’ve ever witnessed.
One could argue that by its third and final season it’s gone slightly off the boil, but it’s still unlike anything else I’ve seen on TV.
Age of Ash
Before Daniel Abraham gained success as one half of James SA Corey, author of The Expanse, he was known for writing subtle, character-focused fantasy.
Now he’s gone back to it, beginning a new series set in the crossroads city of Kithamar. Abraham builds his characters with painstaking patience, mostly avoiding big action and big politics in favour of emotional heft at a thoroughly detailed street level.
It’ll be fascinating to see where he takes the story in future installments, as he’s opted not so much to move the world forward, as to show the same events from different points of view, elevating bit players to central cast.
Perdido Street Station
From a brand new book to one published over 20 years ago – China Mieville’s definitive New Weird manifesto is a dizzying mosaic of a novel taking place in the sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon.
The disparate lives of a rogue’s gallery of bizarre citizens collide and intertwine – a disgraced scientist, a winged man who’s lost his wings, and an artist with an insect for a head to name a few – as something very unpleasant grows in the shadows.
Mieville is well known for rich prose and epic imagination but he shows a quick wit and a deft touch with character here too.
Horizon Forbidden West
I resisted even trying to get hold of the notoriously difficult-to-get-hold-of Playstation 5 for some time, mostly because there weren’t any games coming out that I felt I really needed to play. But that changed this year with the release of Horizon Forbidden West.
I’d very much enjoyed the precursor Zero Dawn – an open world adventure in a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by a mixture of primitive tribes and killer machines.
Forbidden West suffers slightly from being a sequel – the setting doesn’t feel quite so classic as that from the first game and there’s a slight sense of diminishing returns to revelations about the nature of the apocalypse. But the beautiful detail is second-to-none – leaves, light, water and weather more lovingly rendered than in anything I’ve seen before. The characters even sweat, for god’s sake.
Protagonist Aloy remains a highly appealing character, and trashing giant machine dinosaurs piece by piece never gets old.
Elden Ring
Horizon is beautifully realised and fluid to play, but very much an example of the classic open-world formula, with a map scattered with various categories of challenges, and exhaustive logs to help you keep track of errands done and still to do. It feels safe, familiar.
Elden Ring, on the other hand, feels anything but. It’s very much a development of From Software’s famously unforgiving, frustratingly abstract and gloriously gloomy Dark Souls games – but shifting the action to a vast open-world has created something that feels truly revolutionary.
It’s immense and uncompromising, by turns beatiful, horrible, fatalistic and mysterious, a trippy mix of gothic fantasy and cosmic horror, a fairy tale turned into a rotting nightmare. It has very few characters and, by contrast with something like Horizon, almost no dialogue and somewhat clunky gameplay. The ‘story’ if you can even use the word to describe its slow unfolding, is dripped through to the player in shreds and fragments.
It’s a difficult, weird and unknowable beast, yet utterly compelling, packed with ruined fortresses to explore, secrets to uncover and towering monsters to overcome. A game that seems, at times, to touch the numinous…
The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie is out now in paperback from Gollancz.
