Tag: SF

Spare Parts

  By

★★½
“Somewhat more than pure junk.”

All-girl punk band “Ms. 45” – and I’m awarding half a star purely for that name – are on tour, though things threaten to fall apart due to the bitching between members Emma (Alatalo) and Amy (Argyris), despite them being sisters. Driving away from their latest show (which turned into a bit of a bar-room brawl), they are run off the road by stalker fan Sam (Rouse). The local cops are kind enough to arrange for a tow to a nearby scrapyard. Except, there, the four woman are drugged, and wake up to find themselves each missing an arm, and forced to fight in gladiatorial combats for the pleasure of the Emperor (Richings), Sam’s father and his devotees. But Sam has taken a shine to Emma, and has an eye on using her to replace his Dad, while Emma and her friends only want to escape.

It’s not a bad idea, though the contemporary American setting is poorly considered. Make it a Central American shithole, post-apocalyptic wilderness or something similar; as is, it’s ludicrously implausible, and outside the first five minutes the musical angle is completely irrelevant too, bar a couple of axe jokes. It’s more than similar to Kiss Kiss, which had four women, kidnapped and made to fight in a rural American setting. Admittedly, their count of functioning limbs passed three, though here, it’s never less than obvious that the makers just slapped a weaponized glove on top. There’s no Imperator Furiosa level effects here, and you wonder why they bothered, rather than just handing the women their tools. Though the arm-flamethrower was appealing. It’s not as if I use my right arm for much…

If you liked Gladiator, but felt that it needed more punk rock, this is perhaps for you. I was moderately amused, even though there are only about three actual fights over the ninety minutes, and while those are decent, much of what goes on between them isn’t particularly exciting. You’ve got Sam’s plotting against his father, and there’s a trainer type who seems to be quite an interesting character. Otherwise, it’s kinda meh, especially since the members of Ms. 45 got off on the wrong foot with me, by being cringeworthy stereotypes. I cared little or nothing for their fates thereafter.

In concept, this feels like something out of Japan, perhaps by the creators of The Machine Girl. It just doesn’t have the necessary sense of gonzo, go for broke-ness, save for a couple of nice uses of an arm-chainsaw. Richings seems to be the only one who is truly buying into it, giving the Emperor a sense of insane omnipotence that’s a lot of fun to watch. The other performances need to be equally larger than life, in order to sell what is, let’s be honest, a difficult concept – and in most cases, they weren’t enough to hold my interest. Never a good sign, when the ending seems to point to a better movie than the one you just watched.

Dir: Andrew Thomas Hunt
Star: Emily Alatalo, Michelle Argyris, Jason Rouse, Julian Richings

Valhalla Online by Kevin McLaughlin

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

I could have sworn this isn’t the first entry in the LitRPG genre I’d reviewed, but I’m damned if I can find the previous one. So, just to be safe, I’m going to explain what LitRPG is: apologies if this is unnecessary! Basically, it takes the structure of role-playing games (RPGs) – things like character levels, ability scores, etc – and applies them onto a story structure. Obviously, the overlap between RPGs and books has been a long one: Dungeons & Dragons is heavily influenced by the work of Tolkein. But it has been mostly one-way traffic. The LitRPG genre sends things back the other way, producing novels that adopt the practices of the games.

Quite how this is managed, is up to the author. Here, the heroine is Samantha, a military police officer who wakes to find herself part of Valhalla Online. This is a fantasy-based online RPG, which was intended to act as a virtual repository for the personalities of the deceased, granting them eternal life. Which comes as a shock to Sam, because she never signed up for this very expensive process. However, for good reason, the “virtual dead” are extremely limited in their ability to communicate with the outside world. Only those who complete the entire game are allowed to do so. This means Sam will first have to figure out how to rack up a high score, in order to begin finding out how she got here and what’s going on. Her army training might help. But even West Point didn’t prepare her for dealing with magic spells and storming castles.

It’s a quick and light read, one which contains few surprises at all. We don’t learn much about Sam’s life before Valhalla Online, and I’m not even sure we even discover what she looked like in the real world. All we’re told is that in-game, “Her hair seemed to be about the same color. Her skin tone looked familiar to her.” The cover tells you more than the entire novel. It would probably help to be loosely familiar with at least the concept of RPGs, though McLaughlin does a decent job of explaining the game mechanics, without getting bogged down in it.

The main issue is that death literally has no sting here. If Sam suffers a mortal wound, she just gets sent back to a set location. She may lose some of her equipment, and suffer a bit of psychic shock, but that’s about it, despite the author’s efforts to put over some mental trauma. It’s accurate enough as a computer game goes, but shows that what works there doesn’t necessarily transfer to other media. This lacking of a sense of mortality may partly be why Roger Ebert said in 2010 that computer games can never be art. But that aside, this keeps moving forward at a brisk pace, and for obvious reasons, the reader learns about Valhalla alongside Sam, which makes for a smoothly entertaining experience. It’s more or less standard hack and slash, though towards the end, she subverts things nicely by recruiting a pack of enemy kobolds (think: mini-orcs) to her side. Pretty sure that wasn’t in the tutorial…

The ending is little more than a save point, though it does come after a neat bit of loot sniping. Again, the lack of mortality applies as much to Sam’s enemies as to her; there’s little sense of triumph when the villain will simply re-spawn tomorrow. I finished the first volume having been pleasantly entertained, just not much more. I feel I probably don’t need to buy the remaining entries, because I suspect I can largely figure out how things are going to progress in them. There’s just not enough replay value to be found here.

Author: Kevin McLaughlin
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Valhalla Online series.

Burst Angel

  By

★★★
“Jo…just Jo. Forget about the rest!”

A couple of years ago when I wanted to rekindle my interest in anime, I stumbled over this series. Having been spoiled by the high quality of the GWG-anime Black Lagoon, I watched a couple of episodes of Burst Angel online, then left it and later couldn’t find it anymore. But also I didn’t bother, as the Youtube reviews I found painted a very dismal picture. According to one reviewer the series would later become stale, and always repeat the plot twist of the character of Meg being kidnapped and rescued by action girl Jo. Another – female – reviewer complained about the characters being sexually fetishized and getting bigger breasts in the inevitable “beach episode” (a standard in anime series which always gives a reason for some good-natured laughter).

Flash forward to today when – after having consumed around 40-50 more anime shows – I rediscovered the show on the German amazon.prime. I have now seen the entire 24 episode run and can definitely revise my ill-informed opinion.

The story so far. Time: The future. Young student and upcoming cook Kyohei (Ueda) starts a new job, becoming cook to four girls of different ages. They all live in a very comfortable and large-sized  mega-mobile home and also command a giant mecha. Financed by the mysterious organization “Bailan”, the four are always getting into action, after they get a (paid?) mission to fight monsters, giant robots or other strange creatures that suddenly appear.

Usually that means that tough grey-haired red-eyed Jo (Watanabe) gets into the mecha-armour and beats the opponent, until it stops moving. Who is behind these action usually stays unresolved. The other girls are Amy, a very young computer nerd; useless but obviously absolutely possessive Megan; and the older, leader of the team, Chinese girl Sei. Named after the characters in Little Woman (no, really!), they all assist and support Jo. And of course there’s Kyohei who is… just there. Which is strange, as it seemed in the beginning, he would be the main character – or that the story would at least be told from his perspective. But the series quickly all but forgets about him.

But to be honest, most of the characters don’t serve much purpose. The action usually centers almost all around Jo. Jo is a tough cooky from the street. As told in a short manga series, she and Megan originally formed a duo that would take on any job, before they formed a team with the other two girls. As a matter of fact, one episode even depicts how Jo meets Meg and her gang for the first time. Strangely, Meg appears in this episode much more grown-up and tougher than the rather infantile cry-baby she is depicted as, throughout most of the series.

The series is certainly not so uninspired or repetitive as one of the Youtube reviewers claimed it would be. It tells a range of stores stories, and also brings new elements into its narrative over its course. Every girl gets an episode where she can shine. So we see young Amy fight against robots in the Cyberworld, or Sei being confronted with a renegade faction within Bailan who wants to take over the organization by getting in possession of a powerful seal.

But the most interesting character is naturally the super-cool, calm Jo. Originally, my interest in the series grew because I thought she would be similar to Revy from “Black Lagoon”. Well, that might be a bit toi much of a compliment. While Revy is a three-dimensional character, Jo appears one-dimensional, almost a cliche, in comparison. The series gets its act together in the last few episodes when we discover Jo is one of two survivors from a biological weapon program run by an evil organization, who lost her memory. The show ends with her having to win her final fight, against the other, superior combatant spawned by the program.

This means lots of tears for Meg, as she clearly has to grow up now! ;-) In any way, while the series had a clear (and satisfying) ending, I amn’t so sure that things are quite as they seem, or that the dissolved team will never come together again. Though I hope the friendly Kyohei – whom I really wanted to see get a girl-friend – will find a better, or at least, more peaceful workplace in the future!

My personal judgement: Burst Angel is a good, solid and entertaining girls with guns show. There might be some improvements that could/should have been made but overall it’s good entertainment. Yes: stupid, sometimes downright silly Meg gets kidnapped more than once, though it didn’t bother me too much, and it’s not as apparent as you might think. I have much more an issue with the general uselessness of the character, though even she had an arc where she could do something, going undercover in a girl’s boarding school.

Concerning “sexually fetishization”… yeah, right. This is an anime show, what do you expect? But honestly, in comparison to other series – now I’ve got the experience to make a balanced judgement – the teasing is very limited. You want sexually fetishization? Watch “High School of the Dead” and then come back to the discussion. I’ve no problems with that, at least not in Burst Angel. You also don’t complain about Superman having a large chest or Batman wearing black latex and leather, do you?

Overall: A good show, though in the genre segment covering science fiction/fantasy action girls with guns, there are better shows with more developed characters. But as I said: I had a lot of mindless fun.

Dir: Koichi Ohata
Star: Akeno Watanabe, Megumi Toyoguchi, Rie Tanaka, Yūji Ueda 

Savage Creatures

  By

★★★
“Vampires vs. Zombies”

Is it possible for a film to try and cram in too much? This might be guilty of that, being simply too full of ideas. It begins with a serial killer mother and son pair, who are also cannibals, to boot. They think they’ve found their next victims, when they pick up a pair of young hitchhikers, Ursula (Steadman) and Rose (Brown). However, the psychos are in for a shock, because their targets are actually a pair of vampires, centuries old. But, wait! There’s more! Weird meteorites have landed on Earth containing alien creatures, that devour human souls. Those they infect turn into aggressive, zombie-like creatures, that can only be terminated by destroying their pineal glands. And I haven’t even touched on Father Cooper (Travis), and his “nun with a gun” associate, Sister Gigi (Smith, right).

You certainly can’t fault this for its inventiveness, and some of the ideas work very well. For example, the soul-stealing aspect of the aliens fits nicely with the vampires; they’re immune to this, because they have no souls. The two leads have good chemistry, exhibiting the easy rapport you’d expect, from people who have known each other for hundreds of years.Yet, they both have their own traits, and feel like individuals. It’s perhaps this angle which feels most pushed out by all the other stuff, and it is a bit of a shame. The idea of vampires dealing with an alien invasion or the zombie apocalypse is strong enough to carry a film. All the other stuff piled on top, feels kinda superfluous, operating as a series of distractions, rather than adding dimensions to proceedings. That’s especially true, given the relatively short running time of only 75 minutes. 

Ursula and Rose provide a no-nonsense response to their predicament – or, more accurately, series of predicaments. Their fangs are far from their only weapon; indeed, they’re not much use when it comes to destroying pineal glands. Semiautomatics work much better, and the pair wield them with some enthusiasm. For a low-budget entity, the technical aspects are pretty decent. The model alien which gets dissected with cutlery by our heroines (technically, one of them; the other has a bit of a weak stomach) being a particular highlight. 

The other main issue is a lack of escalation. Rather than plot threads being developed, they get replaced. As a result, we reach the end, and almost nothing has been resolved. The aliens are still invading, as the vamps hit the road again. They don’t even seem too fazed by the thought of their food supply being zombified. After all, as one of them points out, there are enough blood-banks in the country to keep them going for a good century. It’s one last piece of invention, in a film that hardly needs it. Yet it seems churlish to complain about too much of that, and this remains a pleasant slice of energetic horror/SF, powered by two heroines with whom it’s fun to spend time.

Dir: Richard Lowry
Star: Victoria Steadman, Kelly Brown, Greg Travis, Kannon Smith

Stalked

  By

★★
“Lacking in military intelligence”

A promising idea has its concept snuffed out by shaky execution and even worse writing. Sam (Rogers) is a former solder and now single mother. When her child falls sick, Sam heads for the chemist’s for medicine. She never gets there, being abducted in a van and rendered unconscious. She wakes in a large warehouse-like facility in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a military production facility. She’s not the only woman there, and finds that an invisible adversary, using advanced tech to cloak his presence, is taking advantage of the weekend to turn the place into a stalker’s amusement park. However, Sam’s background perhaps gives her a very particular set of skills, unavailable to the other victims.

I’m generally fairly oblivious to script-holes: Chris is considerably better at spotting them. But here, even I could see the glaring flaws. This is supposedly a cutting-edge military facility, yet the security is so bad, a child can literally get in. The motivation for the villain is poorly drawn, and it’s never explained how the lowly caretaker – for that’s what he is – manages to get to use all of his wonderful toys. Do the army also let soldiers take tanks off to drive around on the weekend? But it’s not as if the film has any confidence in him as a bad guy, for even after Sam has managed to avoid his threat, she then has to handle a military drone. Just one – for like I say, security is pretty bad. And it can easily be taken out with a conveniently to hand brick. If we ever go to war, I swear, we are screwed…

If the film had made much of Sam’s background, supposedly in the engineers’ corps, that might have helped. Watching her MacGyver her way against her opponent, using the plentiful material at hand could have been fun. But that would have required thought, something largely absent from the script. There are few points at which we are ever convinced of her military background, and the scenes where she is “fighting” her invisible opponent, all too often reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about self-wrestling. It’s a shame, as Rogers is by no means terrible otherwise, and is quite empathetic.

The same cannot be said for the ending, however. It’s understandable that the writer-director felt the need to tack something on, after the considerably underwhelming confrontation with the drone. What he delivers is the ultra-cliched finale where someone isn’t who they seem to be, but turns out to be the killer. No, those are not a pair of fidget spinners, they are my eyes rolling at this “twist”. At least he has the good grace not to stretch this out, bringing things to a ending that is brisk to the extreme. It’s clear the budget on this was limited, and I forgive it that. The lazy plotting is considerably harder to forgive.

Dir: Justin Edgar
Star: Rebecca Rogers, Nathalie Buscombe, Ian Sharp, Laurence Saunders

Destiny Lost, by M.D. Cooper

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This is the second book from Cooper here, after Outsystem, and has some of the same characters. Initially, it seemed to have a shot at being considerably better, with a first half which was impressive. Unfortunately, it couldn’t sustain this, and ended up dropping back to a similar level and for similar reasons. If you’re interested in SF which is so hard, you could use it to cut glass, this is for you. But I’m not typically a fan of books which need to include a twenty-page appendix of “Terms and Technology” at the back. Especially when half of them don’t help much, e.g. “A CriEn module is a device which taps into the base energy of the universe, also known as zero-point, or vacuum energy” – glad that’s cleared up. And some of the rest are superfluous: any fan of SF won’t need to be told what “FTL” travel is.

In this world, that faster-than-light breakthrough allowed humanity to occupy a swathe of the galaxy, but the resulting wars triggered a dark age from which we are now only just recovering, in the ninth millennium. Sera is a transporter-for-hire, who’ll move anything, anywhere for the right price. But when one commission brings down unexpected heat, she cracks open the package, and is startled to find it contains Tanis Richards. She was a colonist from Earth, whose ship set off over five thousand years ago and is only now reaching its destination. While events overtook them,  her ship, the Intrepid – its construction was the subject of Outsystem – carries long-lost technology, on which everyone, from pirates to stellar alliances, wants to get their hands.

One such pirate, Rebecca, kidnaps Sera, seeking to swap her for Tanis and access to her tech. But both Sera and her crew, helped by the colonist, are made of sterner stuff. Through this section is when the book is at its best, combining interesting characters with a conflict which is taking place on a personal level. All seems lost for Sera and her trusty AI, when she’s secreted away in Rebecca’s headquarters, hidden in the depths of dark space, outside our normal universe. Yet, through grit and determination, she manages to return to her allies, then prepares to take the fight to Rebecca, as well as reunite Tanis with her crew. It’s a very good, gripping read. Unfortunately, after that is where things go a bit pear-shaped.

For once everyone arrives at the star-system of Bollam’s World, the hard SF elements really kick in, as if Cooper wanted to make up for the time lost earlier. It becomes more like watching a gigantic game of three-dimensional chess, with vessels of various kinds moving around and firing weapons at each other, for lengthy sections. Rather than technology enhancing the human elements in the story, it threatens to overwhelm the characters entirely, and even a (not exactly surprising) revelation about Sera’s origins couldn’t stop this from becoming laborious by the end. Quite a few typos, such as a reference to a “grizzly task” when no actual bears were involved, don’t help matters. I’ll not be going further in this series.

Author: M.D. Cooper
Publisher: The Wooden Pen Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 13 in the Orion War series.

Nemesis 5: The New Model

  By

★½
“Left longing for the subtlety of Albert Pyun.”

It has been twenty years since Nemesis 4 apparently signalled the end of Pyun’s cyborg saga. I was therefore rather surprised when a fifth installment cropped up on my radar. Not directed by Pyun, admittedly, but he had given his blessing to it continuing under the guidance of Ferguson. It’s one of those things which probably seemed a good idea at the time, and there are elements that occasionally teeter on the edge of working. However, there’s far from enough content here, and the execution turns into into a fan film for the Nebraskan rivet-head community, with the severely limited appeal that implies. 

In the future, the Red Army Hammerheads are waging a war against the Los Angeles Police Department and their allies. Among the latter is Ari Frost (Craig), a part-human, part cyborg, who was trained in the ways of a warrior by Alex Sinclair (Price). That’s one of those nice elements, having the star of Part 4 show up to pass the torch on; seeing her was a bit like seeing Linda Hamilton pop up in the trailers for the new Terminator movie. Ari and her pals are being hunted by various elements of the R.A.H., dispatched by their leader (Novak), before she can stop them by… Well, you’ll have to watch it to find out. Which is code for “I completely lost interest and stopped paying attention.”

The director seems to think that slapping a random filter on the lens equates to art, and the complete lack of consistency between consecutive shots is enough to give you a migraine. The special effects are mostly bargain basement post work, though the Terminator-like android was decent enough, at least in comparison to most of the rest. The fight sequences leave a great deal to be desired, and the entire film grinds to a halt in the middle, for what amounts to a 20-minute promo film for local venue, the Zero Bar, including the least sexy go-go dancing in cinematic history. That’s a lot, considering the whole thing runs barely an hour between the lengthy opening text crawl of set-up, and equally extended closing credits. And apparently, after the apocalypse, the world will look like downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. Who knew?

Positives are hard to find here. The electronic soundtrack works quite well, including a surprising theme by Velvet Acid Christ, of whom I was well aware previously. Craig isn’t bad either, though when she’s acting alongside her predecessor, you realize that she’s desperately in need of the  sheer physical presence Price brings. Though again, apparently when people get cybernetic implants, they turn into refugees from Hot Topic. Even by the limited standards of what was already a bargain-bin science fiction franchise, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. To be honest, it would probably have been better for all concerned if they’d left the franchise on the strange yet relatively high note which was the fourth installment.

Dir: Dustin Ferguson
Star: Schuylar Craig, Crystal Milani, Mel Novak, Sue Price

First Strike by Justin Sloan, Kyle Noe + George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

Not sure I’ve ever read a book with three authors before, though Amazon omit Noe from the list given on Goodreads. This “novel by committee” might explain some of the problems with this, and its failure to mesh the two strands in any effective way. It’s a pity, as it starts off in entirely blistering fashion, with the arrival on Earth of the Syndicate, an extra-terrestrial invading army. We knew they were coming, so humanity’s forces take them on, in a massive and spectacular battle at their landing site in Mexico. It doesn’t go well for us, thanks to the attacker’s vastly superior technology. Survivors are few, but include Marines Quinn and Giovanni.

The former is one of the soldiers abducted by the Syndicate and taken up into their orbiting mother-ship. There, she’s given an ultimatum: fight for the Syndicate or be turned into a mindless zombie… and fight for them anyway. With a 12-year-old daughter, Sammy, back on Earth – albeit status unknown – Quinn decides to accept the offer, but keeps her fingers crossed, so to speak. She teams up with another abductee, a scientist who might have found the germ of a way by which the Syndicate can be defeated. Though they’ll have to stop their employers from finding out about it.

This aspect isn’t too bad, with no shortage of solid action sequences, even if I’m still not sure about the method behind their plan. Except there was time travel involved. Definitely time travel. Somehow. Anyway, it’s the kind of thing I can easily imagine becoming a major Hollywood picture. That makes some sense, since Mahaffey’s bio says he’s a screenwriter – despite his IMDb listing including nothing to have ever made it to the screen. The problems are back on Earth where Giovanni has joined up with the resistance and… Well, nothing of importance happens. Possibly his character becomes relevant in future volumes, but here, he serves little or no purpose to proceedings.

Oh, except for being gay, that is. I’ve no problem with that, but it’s handled in such an incredibly clumsy way. It’s announced as he and his lover, Luke, “had largely ignored whatever it was that had happened that night between them.” Except that’s the first we heard of it. I literally went flicking back to try and see if I’d skipped something. But short of there being an entire chapter missing, there was nothing. And then there’s this sentence, which literally made me cringe when I read it. “‘FUCK ME!’ Luke shouted, and Giovanni couldn’t help but think how under different circumstances he would love to hear those words.” Giovanni’s near-absence from much of the second half of the book is likely a blessing, but his presence in the first half almost single-handedly destroyed any interest for me in reading further installments.

Author: Justin Sloan, Kyle Noe + George S. Mahaffey Jr.
Publisher: Elder Tree Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Syndicate Wars series.

Cutie Honey: Tears

  By

★★★
“Battle Angel Cutie”

Or, perhaps: “What Blade Runner would have been like, if android Roy Batty was a good guy.” For this appears to be a mash-up of elements from that and Battle Angel Alita. While preceding the film version of the latter, it does seem to borrow elements of the manga, not least in its depiction of a future society where there is a strict, and basically vertical, division between the haves and the have-nots. After disease and pollution have pushed society to the brink, the rich and powerful live towards the top of a self-sufficient mega-city, under the control of ice queen Lady Jiru (Ishida) and her “Sodom” cyborg enforcers, leaving everyone else struggling for scraps down below. And leaving is a death sentence, due to the viruses infecting the outside world.

Falling from the sky, also just like Alita, is Hitomi Kisaragi (Nishiuchi), an android girl with the ability to transform, created by her scientist “father”, Professor Kisaragi. Witnessing this event is a young child, Hayami. Years later, he has become a journalist (Miura), and encounters Hitomi again as she stops a Sodom patrol from arresting an opponent to Jiru’s rule. He tracks Hitomi down, and requests her help in the resistance movement of which he is a member, telling her Jiru is actively causing the pollution which affects the lower levels. However, there are other members of their group, intent on taking more direct and violent action against the powers that be, and there’s also uncertainty over what happened to Prof. Kusaragi.

I really liked the look of this film: with the split between rich and poor, the style manages both to be sleekly neon and grimly dystopian, having its design cake and eating it too. Admittedly, the level of devotion to Blade Runner becomes almost slavish – somewhat ironic, watching this in November 2019, the month and year in which Blade Runner was originally set. However, I guess there are few if any better movies from which to lift. I also admired the maker’s willingness to go in a radically different direction to the previous Cutie Honey live-action adaptation, Gone is the cute bounciness, replaced by a dark, almost cyberpunk approach. It’s one best personified by the excellent performance of Ishida as Lady Jiru, who looks and acts every inch the part of an evil overlord.

The story-line, however, is severely underwhelming, with elements that are unconvincing when clear, and unclear when they are convincing. While we do get the expected confrontation between Hitomi and Jiru, the former has to deliver, with a straight face, lines of dialogue like “Because I’m incomplete, I never give up… Because I have defects, I will beat you.” Cue much rolling of eyes here. More generally, neither Hitomi nor Hayami provide enough to make you want to keep watching: Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford, they most definitely are not. As a result, you’re left largely to admire the production design, while waiting for the next Jiru appearance. It’s not quite sufficient.

Dir: Asai Takeshi
Star: Mariya Nishiuchi, Takahiro Miura, Nicole Ishida, Sousuke Takaoka

Danger’s Halo, by Amanda Carlson

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

In the late 22nd-century, Earth is pretty much screwed. The impact of a giant meteor killed a huge number of people, wiped out the everyday infrastructure, and sent the world into perpetual twilight. Thirty years ago, the wealthy upped and left, never to be seen again, abandoning the rest of the survivors to scramble in the ruins of civilization, simply trying to survive. Holly Danger is one of them, a salvager who lives by her wits in the labyrinth of a coastal city’s destruction. Which means dodging the seekers, addicts of the hyper-destructive drug, Plush, as well as the outskirts, those who come in to the city and raid it for supplies.

An encounter with a young kid, Daze, leads Holly into further trouble. He is in possession of a quantum drive belonging to Tandor, an outskirt who has kicked off a plan to take over the entire city. Holly and her allies represent one of the biggest impediments to Tandor’s plan, considering the authorities here are largely notable by their absence. He’ll stop at nothing to make sure they can’t interfere, and having his drive puts her in greater danger. If only she had the necessary gadget, called a ‘pico’, to read the drive…

It’s a really fascinating world, one which comes to life off the page and fully occupies your imagination. Even though the apocalypse has been over for generations by this point, it still determines every aspect of existence. People hang on by their fingernails, living on crappy, mass-produced food blocks and trying to make the best of things, however they can, with whatever they find. Paranoia is a very necessary order of the day: homes, possessions and even travel routes are typically highly booby-trapped, to prevent access by the unauthorized, making every day a potentially lethal one.

Holly, too, is a sharply-drawn and likeable lead character: loyal to a fault, once you have gained her trust, though this is something which can be exploited as a weakness by Tandor. It’s refreshingly romance-free – merely surviving occupies all her energy – though I get the feeling future volumes might drift in that direction. I do have to say, the plot at the core is perhaps a little thin, with the quantum drive more of a MacGuffin. If you want to find out what’s on it, folks, you have to buy the sequels! But at $2.99 for an omnibus containing the first three novels, I’m honestly very tempted. A little more evidence of the heroine’s combat talents might have been welcome, too.

These are relatively minor complaints, and this is the kind of book I’d love to see made into a film. It plays somewhat like a post-apocalyptic take on Tomb Raider, not least given Holly’s fondness for crossing the gaps between buildings on cable swings. Admittedly, simply re-creating the post-meteor cityscape, with its toppled and decapitated skyscrapers, would be far from cheap. Guess I maybe will have to pick up that omnibus.

Author: Amanda Carlson
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 6 in the Holly Danger series.