Tag: SF

Terminator: Dark Fate

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★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

Bloody Chainsaw Girl

  By

★★★
“Japan Chainsaw Mascara.”

A solid enough entry in the Jap-splat genre, this benefits mostly from a winning central performance from Uchida as the title character, Giko Nokomura. Her family are in the demolition business, which is at least a token gesture towards explaining the F-sized chainsaw she carries everywhere – initially in a guitar case! She’s a bit of a delinquent, harking back to the sukeban movies of the sixties like Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, and with some resemblance to Meiko Kaji, in attitude more than anything. Despite her bad girl credentials, she does want to graduate (there’s a speech later on about how delinquents actually love their schools, and the identity it gives them), and on this summer day, is going back to the otherwise largely-deserted educational establishment, to re-take a missed test.

Of course, it’s never that simple, is it. For pitted against her is her nemesis, Nero Aoi (Yamachi), plus the army of cyborg students created by this wannabe mad scientist. She started off by kidnapping and working on pets, but now has a lethal array of “enhanced” humans at her disposal, such as “Whole-Body Bomber” and former cheerleader Sayuri Bakutani (Sato). Nero is intent on taking her revenge on Giko, following a perceived slight which the latter has long forgotten. Even before she has arrived at school for the exam, Giko is under attack by the first three of these, including a girl with a rocket-launcher embedded in… a most unusual part of her body. Let’s just say, reloading is fun.

Based on the manga series Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw, by Rei Mikamoto, it has the fast-and-loose sensibility you’d expect, with things taking place for little or no reason other than the maker thought it’d be entertaining. Sometimes they are correct, other times… not so much. There seem to be flashbacks every three minutes, explaining how everyone got to where they are, and it alternates between scenes that go on beyond their merit or purpose, and ones which feel too short. The low-budget is often palpable, falling well short of being able to deliver what is asked of it, and the blood is more digital than physical.

Despite these flaws, I was entertained, though obviously, those of delicate sensibilities should stay well away. Uchida has an appropriate range of expressions for the situations in which Giko finds herself – “deadpan astonishment” is probably the main one which gets used. There’s a dry sense of humour in concepts like the school having a Ninja Club, such as them still deferring obsequiously to the jocks). When Giko meets the president of Shop Club, who is also about its only un-cyborged member, her chainsaw gets some power-ups (“Extending Chainsaw”), though it still proves no match for Nero’s “Chainsaw of the Dead”. Actually, how you react to that sentence will likely determine whether or not you’ll enjoy this. Personally, if a little short of the best entries in this strange little genre, I still found plenty here to appreciate.

Dir: Hiroki Yamaguchi
Star: Rio Uchida, Mari Yamachi, Seira Sato, Yuki Tamaki

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion

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★★★
“Lucy  in disguise…”

The first in an intended trilogy, this stands on its own reasonably well, balancing between tying up the loose ends and leaving the future uncertain. The heroine is Ja-Yoon (Kim), who begins by escaping from a shadowy, quasi-governmental facility as a raw eight-year-old, despite being hunted by the woman in charge, Dr. Baek (Jo) and her minions. She is found by husband and wife farmers, and they adopt Ja-Yoon, who has no apparent memory of her early life as their own. Ten years later, with Mom suffering from Alzheimer’s, and the farm struggling financially, Ja-Yoon enters a nationwide singing contest. However, the resulting attention brings her firmly back on the radar of Dr. Baek and Nobleman (Choi), the other survivor from that night a decade ago. The not-so-good doctor won’t let Ja-Yoon escape this time.

After a messy opening, which establishes Dr. Baek as someone specializing in giving no damns at all, this certainly takes its time to get going. For most of the first hour and a half, it’s mostly Ja-Yoon and perky best friend Myung-hee (Go) interacting and progressing through the competition. Though when you hear her… ah, let’s just say “startling” and leave it at that, rendition of Danny Boy, you’ll wonder if perhaps she was selected as the Korean version of William Hung. Meanwhile, the villains are hovering nearby in ways which appear so obvious and suspicious, they would be rejected as painfully unsubtle by Auric Goldfinger.

Eventually, even they realize a more direct approach is needed, i.e. Nobleman storming the farmhouse and threatening everyone Ja-Yoon cares about if she refuses to co-operate. This proves successful, and she meekly goes off to see Dr Baek at her new facility. But as the title and the cover both suggest, Ja-Yoon might be quite comfortable, coming to terms with her inner superwoman. The final 30 minutes show her to be not so meek after all. The movie certainly makes up for lost time, with a slew of well-choreographed mayhem, as our heroine goes all Lucy on the asses of everyone within reach, now she’s using more than 10% of her brain. Or maybe all Hanna? For, in many ways, this is a cross between them, with the pseudo-scientific approach of the former, and the “innocent who strikes back” of the latter.

At more than two hours in length, it would probably have benefited from being about half an hour shorter. The entire “talent show” angle could have been covered just as effectively in about five minutes. And if the bad guys has been more direct, instead of opting for lurking and dropping ominous hints, that would have been a major time-saver as well. However, the twist near the end is handled effectively, and the resulting carnage is brutal and effective. I was left with more than slight interest in the next entry. It will hopefully provide more in the action department, and less in the way of poorly-executed exposition.

Dir: Park Hoon-jung
Star: Kim Da-mi, Jo Min-su, Choi Woo-shik, Go Min-si
a.k.a. Manyeo

Kiss Kiss

  By

★★½
“Weaponized strippers. What could go wrong?”

Four exotic dancers go on a trip to vineyard, courtesy of a customer at their club. However, they get more than they bargained for, falling unconscious and waking up to find themselves test subject in a scientific experiment run by Gibson (Wagner – no, not that one). He is attempting to convince the military-industrial complex to invest in his project to create “super soldiers”. To this end, he has a serum which vastly enhances both aggression and compliance, and has invited Senator Graham (Farino) to witness a test, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. Oh, who am I trying to kid: he actually just shoots up the strippers with the serum and makes them fight to their deaths. In sports bikinis. And face-paint. In subdued yet artistic lighting. Because science! And that’s how government funding works!

It’s every bit as silly as it sounds. Unfortunately, it’s probably not as entertaining. It’s as if the editors of Maxim rented a copy of Raze, and decided to do an unofficial remake for their target demographic. They just forgot to bring along any of the significant players, leading to a result which is more pale imitation than loving homage. Even beyond the color filters, King does shoot proceedings with a good deal of style, and certainly no excess of slow-motion. Though he mixes this up with over-kinetic editing, e.g. showing the same punch landing from multiple different angles in quick succession. This can, however, only go so far in covering up that the fights are no more than average.

It’s never clear quite why the protagonists have to be strippers. Even during the opening scenes, where we see them “at work,” they don’t actually show any significant skin, and it’s weird having them called each other by stage names, like Kiss (Hopkins) and Promise (Castellon). I will admit that I knew some dancers back in my youth, and they never used the fake names outside. It may backfire, in that these pseudonyms repress the feeling these are real people, and I certainly didn’t feel any significant connection to the victims. Instead, it feels for much of the time like you are watching video-game: a well-rendered one, it has to be admitted, though one where the cut scenes go on considerably longer than normal.

To that end, I did quite enjoy Wagner, who chews the scenery to good, “mad scientist” effect. His performance reaches the point that the silly trappings (I mean, do we really need an electric fence around the ring?) begin to make weirdly flamboyant sense. You can even believe his scientific research establishment has a whole team of hair and make-up artists, to ensure the test subjects never have a lock or lick of mascara out of place, despite repeatedly brawling each other in the dirt. But in the end, it’s all just too daft. 35 years ago, it would, however, have made an excellent Duran Duran video.

Dir: Dallas King
Star: Natascha Hopkins, Robert Wagner, Nathalia Castellon, Julia Farino

Into the Dark, by J.A. Sutherland

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Alexis Carew is a third-generation settler on the planet Dalthus, and the ward of her grandfather, her parents having been killed in an accident. But her future is murky, for Dalthusian law prohibits women from inheriting property, such as her family’s estates. With the alternative being a marriage Alexis really doesn’t want, the 15-year-old girl instead signs up to become a midshipman in Her Majesty’s Navy (or, at least, the space version thereof), on the interstellar sloop Merlin. However, this is largely just exchanging one set of problems for another, whether winning the respect of her colleagues, fending off the too admiring ones, or adapting to the harsh life of outer space – and, stranger still, the “darkspace” which facilitates interstellar travel. And then there are the pirates…

This isn’t the first SF/sailing combination to feature a female protagonist, apparently being quite similar to David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. The first volume of that is still sitting in my “to read” list, so while I can’t directly compare them, Werner has you covered for a review of Weber’s book. They definitely seem to have a mutual inspiration in C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series, with a futuristic spin. Here, I’m not certain quite how well it works: some of the sailing elements definitely seem forced, even with the hand-waving nature of “darkspace”. For it basically behaves in whatever way is necessary for the plot to be jammed into Sutherland’s nautical peghole.

That’s probably the main weakness: it’s one especially apparent in the early going, when Alexis first goes into space, until my brain seemed to get used to it. On the plus side, she does make for an admirable heroine, one who uses her wits more than her fists. As such, the action quotient is fairly low; there’s a steep learning curve here, for both Alexis and the reader, as we all learn the mechanics of how things work in this strange universe. When that is finally out of the way, the energy ramps up: in particular, when a ship captured by the Merlin, is being taken back to port with Alexis at the helm, when the captured crew mutiny and retake the vessel.

This sequence likely the action highlight of this first volume, the rest being mostly long-distance space battles. Though with war breaking out right at the end, it’s likely things escalate further in subsequent volumes. Although the supporting characters are nicely drawn, I could perhaps have done with more of an antagonist.  The nearest this book has to offer never meets Alexis directly – his son being the closest she comes. Again, I suspect this angle may be further developed down the road. There’s enough promise shown here to keep the door open to continuing the series. But I should probably read On Basilisk Station first, as I suspect one series of pseudo-aquatic sci-fi is probably enough!

Author: J.A. Sutherland
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Alexis Carew series.

Curvature

  By

★★★
“Time out for fun.”

Helen (Fonseca) is struggling to come to terms with the sudden, unexpected death of her scientist husband, who was engaged on a top-secret project with his partner, Tomas (Morshower). Then things get truly weird: she experiences the mother of all blackouts, missing an entire week, and shortly afterward, Helen receives a phone-call warning her to get out of her house… from herself. It turns out, husband and Tomas had come up with a limited form of time-travel. As a result of this and subsequent events, there are now two Helens running around this point in. And future Helen appears to be considerably more militant. She leaves present Helen a sniper rifle as a gift, as well as stocking up on things like pressure cookers – and you can safely assume she’s not preparing a nourishing casserole. Present Helen decides future Helen needs to be stopped. But the more she uncovers, not least about the circumstances of her husband’s demise, the more she understands why future Helen is intent on carrying out her take on Project Mayhem.

I love me a good time-travel movie, and this is just that – a good time-travel movie, rather than a great one, like Retroactive or Run Lola Run. It manages to keep its two heroines in the air, revealing information at a decent rate, and also to balance brain and brawn. To the latter end, the heroine has to solve puzzles left behind by her other self to clue her in – without doing so to Tomas or the others seeking to shut the Helens down. On her side is work colleague Alex (Avery), though to be honest, he seems there mostly as a proxy for the audience, so Helen can explain stuff to him. Against her is Kravitz (Lanipekun), a crypto-federal agent – for it seems the defense industry has its own plans for the technology in question. That said, if it were really all that important, you’d think more than one guy might be sent in pursuit. Whatevs….

A bonus point is awarded for gratuitously casting Linda Hamilton in a small role as Helen’s former mentor. For, of course, Hamilton was part of the original “Going to the past to save the future” franchise: Terminator. Here, she doesn’t get to do much; it’s still a nice nod to one of the film’s influences. However, it feels as if the film couldn’t quite work out how it wanted to use time-travel. There’s a nice get-out which explains why future Helen didn’t come back and prevent her husband’s death. But beyond that, it’s more mildly engaging than deeply engrossing, as one Helen gradually closes in on the other Helen, and Kravitz closes in on them both. To be honest, I’d rather have focused on future Helen, since she seems the one actively involved in changing the world, rather than reacting to it, as present Helen does. Though scripting that version might have caused too many headaches – both for the writer and the viewer.

Dir: Diego Hallivis
Star: Lyndsy Fonseca, Zach Avery, Glenn Morshower, Alex Lanipekun

The Rizen

  By

★★½
“Tunnel of love-craft.”

This is about the third Lovecraftian film I’ve seen with a heroine in the past year or so, after Black Site and The Creature Below. While I’m not sure it’s still quite a trend, it’s notable, considering I’ve only seen three Lovecraftian films over that time. It certainly stands in sharp contrast to the original author, for whom women were very rarely the protagonists. However, this equally provides clear evidence that this isn’t enough, on its own, as a guarantee of quality.

It’s 1955, and Frances (Swift) regains consciousness to find herself being dragged through an underground tunnel by a half-human monster. She bashes its head in with a convenient rock, and starts trying to figure out what’s going on, since her memory is all but gone. She encounters a scientist (Tajah) and then a handcuffed soldier (Knowles) – neither of whom can remember much either – and more of the monstrous humanoids. As the trio make their way through the complex, fragments of flashbacks reveal this was a NATO project, using captured Nazi occult research with the aim of getting a Cold War edge. However, this has backfired, and control over things has been lost. With emphasis heavily on the “things”…

It’s one of the most blatant and annoying cases of amnesia as a plot device I’ve seen of late, with characters conveniently remembering things at the precise moments needed by the story-line. However, even to get to that point, you have to endure painfully repetitive meandering through dark corridors for what seems like forever. It feels like a bad RPG, in which the heroine picks up largely useless sidekicks to follow her around, in the expectation that they might eventually serve some purpose. Indeed, the whole thing resembles an unofficial adaptation of Resident Evil, made by people too concerned about loyalty to the game, rather than an entertaining movie.

To that Jovovich-shaped end, Swift is one of the film’s better elements – a stuntwoman, with a good physical presence which is (to some extent, deliberately) far better than those of her male co-stars. However, only to some extent: it doesn’t excuse the painful nature of Tajah’s performance, for example. This stands in awkward contrast to the “name” British actors whom we see in the flashbacks, including Bruce Payne, Ade Edmondson and Sally Phillips. Clearly the budget could only stretch to bringing them in for cameos, though it just emphasizes the gap in ability. The main problem, though, is a structure where the viewer spends the first hour with no clue what’s going on – and with little reason to care, either. There’s only so much slinking around dark corridors I can take. This movie delivers all of that quota, plus an extra 30 minutes for good measure.

It’s a shame, since if they’d started with the explanation, we could perhaps then have gone along with the characters on the journey. As is, we alternate for most of the running time between bored and confused. When everything eventually makes sense, it was good enough to leave me somewhat intrigued, on reading there is a sequel in production. Pity that intrigue comes an hour too late.

Dir: Matt Mitchell
Star:Laura Swift, Christopher Tajah, Patrick Knowles, Bruce Payne

Reset

  By

★★★½
“Run Xia Tian Run”

China seems to have discovered SF in a big way of late, most recently with The Wandering Earth, the biggest blockbuster you’ve probably never heard of. At time of writing, it’s the #7 film at the world-wide box-office this year, though 99% of its tally came in its home country. A couple of years earlier, this film made much less impact, yet for me is superior. It’s a time-travel piece, not dissimilar to Run Lola Run, with a triptych repeating the same events in three different ways, as the heroine strives to achieve a satisfactory outcome.

Xia Tian (Yang) is a research scientist working on time-travel for a corporation. She’s got to the point where they can send things back 110 minutes, though the process is imperfect for organic material. This attracts the attention of a rival company, who send Tsui Hu (Huo) after Xia. He kidnaps her son, Dou Dou (Zhang), as leverage to force her to hand over the research data. After Dou Dou is killed at the handover. Xia decides to use the time-machine to send herself back, effectively getting a do-over. And when things still don’t go as planned, it’s back for another attempt.

There are two main differences to Lola. Firstly, we have multiple heroines all occupying the same time-line, so there are three Xia Tians running around simultaneously, trying to save Dou Dou. Secondly, due to the imperfections of the process, they have different personalities, becoming steadily more aggressive. If you’ve seen Michael Keaton’s clone film Multiplicity, you’ll understand the idea. This is a result of the time-travel actually being hopping across parallel universes, a bit of a needlessly confusing detail, which we could have done without. Just handwave on the specific process – or, as Lola did, omit them entirely.

Yet there remains plenty to enjoy here, not least Yang’s performance as Xia #1, #2 and #3. It’s the kind of thing which could become horribly confusing, yet the subtle differences in the three versions of her, help them remain distinct, right to the end. Unsurprisingly, this site was particularly fond of the final iteration, which prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. However, all three have their moments, whether it’s driving at speed through a dockside obstacle course, of whipping up an impromptu smoke-bomb in an elevator, from a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.

The production values here are equally impressive, slickly depicting a future China (2025, to be precise) which is so clean you could eat your dinner off it. The set-pieces are particularly effective, such as Xia’s escape from the towering facility which houses her research, climaxing in a near-fall into the Garbage Disposal From Hell. There are elements which require the suspension of disbelief e.g. Xia surviving a car-crash into the bottom of a gorge, then being right back at her office in the next scene. It’s still a fresh and original concept, exactly the kind of thing which Hollywood desperately needs in the genre of late.

Dir: Chang
Star: Yang Mi, Wallace Huo, Chin Shih-chieh, Hummer Zhang

The Zemlya Conspiracy by Cameron O’Neill

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

Zemlya is a gigantic closed city, in the middle of the Arctic tundra, its ten million inhabitants entirely cut off from the outside world. Indeed, there may not be an outside world: no-one knows, for the authorities hunt down and terminate anyone who tries to leave. One of their hunters is Kate Thorsten, an E-type agent, who has been brought up, and biomechanically enhanced, to be a ruthless tool of the state. She’s recalled from the tundra to go undercover in one of the Zemlya’s slums, her mission to take out a rebel base. However, an encounter with a young girl triggers a series of events which cause Kate to question everything she has been told. But are her new-found doubts genuine, or is she still being manipulated to serve the agenda of others, such as her department’s director, Matthew Wingett?

It’s an interesting combination of elements which are familiar from elsewhere: the undercover agent who might also be a double-agent from Total Recall, for example, or the artificially-limited life-span of Logan’s Run. Though the latter aspect – which you’d think would be kind of important – is treated much more as an afterthought than a major plot-point. As depicted, the overall scenario perhaps also poses more questions than answers. There’s an explanation offered for why Zemlya is the way it is. It kinda makes sense, yet with regard to how the city functions, I have some fairly major questions regarding resources. As well as, how was all knowledge of the way things used to be, so effectively repressed and isolation enforced – especially in a technologically-advanced culture. This was a significant impediment to my enjoyment, as I kept finding myself going, “But what about…?”

On the plus side, Kate makes for an interesting heroine. Perhaps keyed by that limited life-span (“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”), she’s very driven, though her hypernatural abilities does make most combat a foregone conclusion. There are probably only two battles where there’s any sense of threat: one in the middle, against another E-type; and then, the climax, after Kate has finally made her decision and committed to a radical course of action. I also liked the lack of romance – she’s highly work-oriented – and the way the motives for everyone, even those you could class as villains, make sense. You may not agree with their actions, yet you can see the logic which led to those choices being seen as appropriate.

It ends in a decent way too, tying up the loose ends while opening the door to future exploration. I genuinely don’t know where the story will go from the point at which it ends here, and am curious to find out. The sequel was on sale for 99 cents recently, and only my large virtual stack of “to read” stopped me from picking it up.

Author: Cameron O’Neill
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Zemlya Chronicles.

Survivor, by Saffron Bryant

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

Nova is a bounty hunter, smuggler and generally survivor of life in the grey areas of legality. In need of a quick buck to fix her space-ship, she takes on the hunt for a couple of escaped fugitives. She locates them working in an archaeological dig being run by the Confederacy – which is odd, since the planet in question was supposedly never inhabited. An unfortunate translation error ends up helping unleash a long-buried race of reptiloid extra-terrestrials, the Ancients – a species with both the inclination and the ability to wage genocidal war on the rest of the galaxy. And Nova is the only one left who can stop them.

This is remarkably gripping for a story which contains little more than two human characters: Nova, and Codon, the Confederacy scientist in charge of the excavations. Everyone else is taken out of the equation quite early; I guess you could marginally include Cal, the Class Four Laborbot, who helps Nova on her ship? Yet it goes to show that, in the presence of a strong story-line, you don’t need a large cast. This pits Nova against the Ancients in straightforward terms, and it seems a one-sided battle – until she’s captured, and is harshly interrogated. The mental torture inflicted on her has a strange effect: I’d be hard pushed to explain exactly what, but it seems to give her some abilities involving the fourth dimension.

It’s not quite time travel: nothing that controllable. Yet it’s along those lines, and is not the only moment at which the story reminded me of an episode of Doctor Who. The whole “one person bravely facing down an alien enemy” is definitely Who-esque. though unlike the Doctor, Nova has no qualms about getting her hands dirty, when necessary. As in any story which plays with time, there is potential for paradox, and I’m not certain this is rock-solid in that aspect. There are a couple of other plot-holes too: for example, the force-field which keeps Nova on the planet, suddenly goes away at the end, for no other reason that it needs to.

Still, it’s a solid page-turner, and I was particularly impressed by the complete lack of any romantic angles. Ok, the only male to be found is Codon, and he’s a bit of a dick, to put it mildly. However, it remained refreshing: I’ve read (and discarded) my share of thinly-disguised romances in action-heroine clothing, thank you very much. Nova, in comparison, seems the real deal. I also enjoyed the sequences where Nova’s reality is on very thin ice: conveying a psychotic break isn’t easy, yet Bryant seems to capture the thoroughly unsettling sense of having no idea what’s “real”. Where will Nova and her uncertain abilities go next? I’m keen to find that out.

Author: Saffron Bryant [a.k.a. “Saff”]
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 10 in the Nova Chronicles. [Amazon calls is 2 of 11, but the first book there is really a prequel, so is #0]