Category Archives: Reviews

Strangely Familiar – Under the Skin

Under the Skin channels Kubrick's disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerising the viewer in a vouyeristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansenn's character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

Under the Skin channels Kubrick’s disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerizing the viewer in a voyeuristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansson’s character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

I caught a showing of Under the Skin recently while visiting my nephew Jon at college in Austin. On the one hand he wasn’t in love with the minimalist science fiction flick, despite the exposure of Scarlett Johansson’s titular assets, but after walking back from the art house we saw it at to the co-op he’s living in, he allowed that it had managed to provide an hour’s worth of discussion. So that’s something.

Set in Scotland, both urban and rural, amidst pervasive mist and rain, Scarlett Johansson’s alien wrapped in human flesh prowls the streets, backroads, and beaches looking for unattached males to entice back to her place. When you put it that way, it sounds more like a serial killer movie than science fiction, and you can look at it that way too, because the challenge presented to the audience is to get inside the creature’s head to understand what’s going on. There’s no FBI profiler explaining the parameters that lump her victims into a tidy package which exposes the psychological underpinnings of the killer offered up. Instead, the script gives us as little information as possible, forcing us to watch the glacial flow of scenes intently so as not to miss the little clues. You will, by the way. Continue reading →

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley
John Clay is a Navy geek working out of the Pentagon who gets a call to look into how a nuclear submarine could find itself suddenly fifteen miles off course while cruising in the Caribbean. Alison Shaw is a dolphin researcher working on machine translation to provide communication between us and our flippered friends. He’s not having any luck figuring out why that area is causing weird things to happen to ships, robots, and the ocean itself, while she’s having unhoped for success with her research, which maps the dolphin’s motions and sounds in situational context to enable two way communication. He’s Navy. She has a bad taste in her mouth from the last time the government appropriated her research, not to mention the Vietnam era dolphin bomb project. Naturally he winds up turning to her and her team to help figure out what’s at the bottom of the mystery. And why the ocean level is dropping, despite global warming. It’s not a bad read, and it’s not really mil sf, mostly. Call it a techo-thriller. Fans of Startide Rising (David Brin) and anything by Clive Cussler will like it pretty well. I gave it a 3 out of 5.

Samsung GALAXY Camera 2: TouchScreen, WiFi, and More

galaxy2frontInnovation in digital photography doesn’t trickle down from professional DSLRs, it bubbles up from point and shoot cameras that are more interested in offering features than ultimate image quality. More’s the pity.

Samsung’s GALAXY Camera 2 (GC2) is a case in point. It’s got a list of brilliantly innovative features that goes on and on, starting with the use of the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system which allows you to take advantage of Android apps and WiFi connectivity, and a beautiful 4.8 inch display, but its image quality is only pretty good.  Continue reading →

SFRevu Review: Honor’s Knight by Rachel Bach

In Fortune’s Pawn, the first book in the Paradox series, we met Devi Morris, the space-going mercenary who seems to live in her custom-made powered armor, and who’d signed on for a tour as security on a notoriously dangerous trading ship to get the resume bullet she needed to be considered for the most elite force in Paradoxian space, the Devastators, the King’s hand-picked armor troops. But that was a whole book ago, and by now we know that the Glorious Fool isn’t really a trading vessel, that the cook isn’t really a cook, and that Devi’s been infected with something that lets her see the invisible alien menace that’s been reducing planets to rubble for the past seventy odd years. We know that, but Devi doesn’t, because at the end of Fortune’s Pawn she got a memory wipe of all the interesting bits, none of which she was cleared to know.

Including the part about falling helmet-over-spaceboots in love with the “cook.”

Now Devi’s wandering around the ship wondering what the hell happened during the last attack on the ship, the one she evidently beat off before blacking out, and why she can’t stand the sight of that cook.

The cook in question is Rupert, and like the captain he’s part of a secret project to stop the spread of planetary destruction caused by the invisible creatures. Devi’s encounter with an alien derelict left her infected with an experimental virus that gave her the ability to see the phantoms, which are composed of psychic energy, and grown to full size cause matter to destabilize, resulting in quakes, or ultimately the creation of an asteroid belt where a planet used to be.

Up till now, the only defense against the phantoms has been to use the “plasmic” energy of a girl called Maat to destroy them Maat was the product of earlier experiments by the aliens that infected Devi, and her energy gets channeled through a host of girls that she’s psychically imprinted to be extensions of herself. They didn’t volunteer for the job, but were kidnapped as soon as they showed psychic ability, similar to Halo’s Spartans. Their usable lifespan is measured in a handful of years at best…when their former self starts to break through and they have to be killed before they go berserk and turn their energy on their handlers.

It’s a dirty business, but the “daughters” of Maat have the ability to kill phantoms, and nothing else can touch them…at least until Devi got infected. A few lives taken to save a few billion seems like a fair deal to the handlers, but not to Devi, who is starting to understand what’s going on and why her memory went missing.

She’s also developing her own “plasmic” powers, and though various factions want to use her as a pawn, or possibly even a knight, she doesn’t like any of the options she’s being offered. Offers, as they say in certain quarters that are “too good to refuse.”

Throughout the book Devi struggles with eluding those that would turn her into their weapon at the cost of her freedom and possibly even sense of self. Striking off alone while there’s a universe to save isn’t really an option, so she’s going to have to take her pick of strange bedfellows, assuming she doesn’t get snatched by aliens, rebels, or the gang she’d originally signed on with. She’s also going to have to come to terms with her feelings for Rupert, who she’s been brainwashed to loathe, despite being in love with him.

Like a lot of middle books, Honor’s Knight gets to do a lot of work but doesn’t get to enjoy a happy ending, or really, any ending at all, just a pause before the next book picks up the story. Devi does manage to resolve a lot of issues, but the larger conflict with the phantoms looms over the horizon, and there’s still no shortage of people, aliens, and psychic monsters eager to get their hands, claws, or ethereal tentacles on her.

Of course, if she can work things out with Rupert, getting his arms around her might make up for a lot of it. If he can get her to take off that damn space armor.

Review: The Ophelia Prophecy by Sharon Lynn Fisher

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empire of the ants

Not the cover, more’s the pity.

Don’t ask me why I decided to read an sf romance novel. I’m nowhere near being the target audience. Maybe I missed the last line in the helpful burb that might have steered me clear; “With their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other’s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance…” Really, that should have done it. But even though I’m not the audience, I’m pretty sure there is one out there for this carapace-ripper of a chimeric-biotech romance fiction. And I respect that, sort of.

Asha is one of a thousand or so survivors of a once proud people (genetically unmodified humans), now living in the city known as Sanctuary in the middle of the (Utah) desert whose boundaries are patrolled by their (chimeric mantis-human hybrid) conquerors. When her (computer hacker / archivist) father is taken by the enemy, she concocts a plan to follow him and do what she can (it gets muddy here) to save him. After having her memory wiped by hypnosis, she engineers her own capture by the enemy on patrol, who turns out to be their ruler’s son, which makes him the prince, who immediately falls head-over-carapace for her. Of course he does. She’s a twenty-something librarian from a small town in the Utah desert, which makes her totally hot. Well, totally con-hot at the very least.

Mankind created a host of human-animal crossbreeds a generation or two before the story opens, the most successful of which are the manti, a cross between the praying mantis and homo sap. It’s not clear that humanity actually tried to exterminate their creations, though they did round them up and dump them in Africa, which evidently pissed the bug-eyed-mansters off enough to wipe us off the face of the planet, with the exception of a small population in Sanctuary, and the few that didn’t get caught. And why, exactly are they letting the human city of Sanctuary survive? Not out of the kindness of their chitinous little hearts, I assure you.

Typical of many oppressed or formerly oppressed populations, the Manti work very hard to maintain their human characteristics. Their insect genes are dominant, so strict breeding control has to be maintained in order to keep the whole race from turning green and biting off each other’s heads during sex. The only thing keeping the manti from going totally buggy is regular breeding with genetically pure humans. Mwah ha ha.

Prince Pax  isn’t a bad guy. Sure, he’s been brought up to think of humans as glorified cattle, or breeding stock, but like any post-apocalyptic-oppressor progeny he’s come to think of them as almost human, or manti, as the case may be. Pax really wishes his hard-liner father would accept that there was room in the world for both races. The prince’s bug-like characteristics are pretty much invisible, by the way, except for his green eyes, incredible musculature and well, this is a romance novel, so expect some notable tweaks here and there. What either is or isn’t useful, depending on your point of view, is that some of the genetic tweaking in the manti leads to a very strong sex drive, one it would take a prince’s honor to sublimate.

Taken captive and without memory of how she went from archival researcher to girl on the run, Asha is whisked away by Pax in his AI controlled Scarab scoutship, and rather than heading back to bug central, like he’s supposed to, he heads for somewhere quiet where he can find out how both he and Asha’s memories are scrambled, and what to do about the whole biological mating drive thing.

For her part, Asha is going through all sorts of prisoner psychology stuff, really anxious to escape on the one hand, and more than a little attracted to the prince on the other. When they stumble across a renegade collection of humans, Ash has to make up her mind which side she’s on. Unlike the reader, she doesn’t know her mind was made up the moment she saw Pax, and keeps stumbling over herself trying to figure things out.

Ultimately, the pair will confront their inter-species attraction, as well as the fate of both humans and manti, but not without fighting it at every turn.

Time out for a little gratuitous etymology. No, not entomology, etymology.  I’d like to say a few words about the main character’s names, which is technically Onomastics, but who’s ever heard of that? First we’ve got Asha, “derived from Sanskrit (asha) meaning “wish, desire, hope”. Though I’ve found references to “truth,” as well. That’s obscure enough to be clever. Prince Pax, on the other hand, translates all to easily as “Prince of Peace,” which fits all too well. Snug as a bug in a rug for a guy who’d like us all to get along.

As I said, it’s not my cup of tea, and I can’t get over the feeling that it the author had made it either an Arabian Nights sort of fantasy or a hard-core biotech tale it would have had more credibility, but as it is the book relies on postponing the protagonist’s per-ordained passion to keep the plot going, and it’s just not enough to do the job.
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Our world is no longer our own.  We engineered a race of superior fighters–the Manti, mutant humans with insect-like abilities. Twenty-five years ago they all but destroyed us. In Sanctuary, some of us survive. Eking out our existence. Clinging to the past. Some of us intend to do more than survive. Asha and Pax—strangers and enemies—find themselves stranded together on the border of the last human city, neither with a memory of how they got there. Asha is an archivist working to preserve humanity’s most valuable resource—information—viewed as the only means of resurrecting their society. Pax is Manti, his Scarab ship a menacing presence in the skies over Sanctuary, keeping the last dregs of humanity in check.But neither of them is really what they seem, and what humanity believes about the Manti is a lie. With their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other’s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance from Sharon Lynn Fisher, author of Ghost Planet
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