Review: Deep Breath

Spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

Deep Breath, the first episode of series 8 of new Doctor Who, starts off with a bad case of Did Not Do The Research by writer Steven Moffat. The story begins in Victorian London, with a ludicrously big Tyrannosaurus Rex having been accidentally transported there after getting the TARDIS caught in its throat like some sort of time-travelling toffee. This ridiculously large dinosaur is shown close to the height of Big Ben, or 315 feet (nearly 16 stories). In reality, T Rex was large, but not anywhere near that size: 13 feet tall, not that much bigger than the TARDIS itself.

The opening credits have been reworked. Gone is the wormhole through space, in its place we now have clockwork gears and a spiral marked with Latin numerals like the face of an old-fashioned clock, rather suggestive of H.G. Wells' Time Machine. I thought that the look of it was quite good, although I haven't made up my mind about the theme music. If this is an indication that the Doctor is going to return to his old-fashioned Hartnell-esque roots (only, you know, better), I look forward to it. Unfortunately there is no sign of it in this episode. The newly-regenerated Doctor, played by the talented Peter Capaldi, spends most of the episode behaving erratically. He's unsure of who or what he is, uncertain why he has the face he has, and confused beyond measure. Even when he recovers he's not quite the Doctor. He's just some guy. Although he does have possibly the best line in the show:

It's spreading! You all sound all...English. No, you've all developed a fault!"

I'm not familiar with Capaldi as an actor, but Mrs Impala has followed his work for many years and thinks very highly of him, which made this performance all the more disappointing. She tells me that this is the first time that a new Doctor has failed to "sell" the role in the opening episode, and considering what the BBC made Colin Baker do, that's saying something. I have to say I agree: whoever Capaldi was playing in Deep Breath, we haven't yet seen him play the Doctor.

It's always fun to watch the Paternoster Gang, Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, and it would be awesome if they got their own spin-off. Strax in particular is always good for a few laughs, although I really hope that the writers don't continue to make him nothing but a buffoon. He is, after all, a Sontaran officer, smart, strong and dedicated, and if he's acting like a clown it's almost certainly to lull his foes (i.e. everyone who isn't a Sontaran) into a sense of false security.

Despite the impressive visuals of the opening, the T-Rex plays no real part in the story, existing only to show off Team Who's rather large budget for special effects. There are a few wise-cracks about the dinosaur, and a complete failure to consider what a cranky and hungry tyrannosaur is likely to do in the middle of London (all you can eat buffet comes to mind). There's a brief interlude where the Doctor (who apparently "talks dinosaur") makes a moving translation of the Rex's roars, and for all of five seconds I can almost believe the T Rex is a sentient being. And then it spontaneously combusts, thus neatly providing the hook for the Doctor to begin investigation and solve the problem of what to do with such an unfeasibly large carnivore. Ultimately, the Rex was nothing more than ridiculously implausible and unnecessary plot device.

The main plot of the episode was a weak re-hash of The Girl In The Fireplace, right down to the Doctor rushing off on horseback (although not by crashing through a mirror). Clockwork robots seeking to return to "the Promised Land" rebuild themselves with human body parts. The Girl In The Fireplace was charming and beautifully made, but in Deep Breath Moffat displays one of his major weaknesses: returning to the well after it's dry. He has a real talent for ideas which drip style and imagination, but don't stand up to a second look (e.g. the Weeping Angels), and then returning to them for a second or third look. And so it is here: clockwork robots stealing body parts are cool once but the concept is not strong enough to survive a second look. We're expected to believe that these robots have the knowledge and dexterity to somehow plug human body parts into their clockwork mechanisms and keep them alive and working indefinitely, but that they aren't able to make replacement gears. Oh rly?

There were a few genuinely suspenseful moments, like the restaurant scene, but I felt that the rest of the episode fell flat. The fight scene between the Paternosta Gang was disappointing, Vastra and Jenny seemed stilted and clumsy, as if they hadn't rehearsed their action scenes. The Doctor makes a big production over the "axe of my grandfather" paradox, insisting that it is not the same axe (or in this case, broom). I hope that Moffat intended it as an ironic counterpoint to the episode's theme that this is still the same old Doctor even though he no longer looks like, acts like, or sounds like the previous Doctor, but the cynic in me fears that the writing team simply failed to notice that the Doctor's remarks apply to himself. Or, for that matter, everybody else.

And then we come to the epilogue. In it, we are introduced to "Missy", a mysterious and obnoxiously saccharine Mary Poppins like character. Missy claims to be in heaven, and describes the Doctor as her boyfriend. Presumably she will be the Big Bad antagonist of the series, or at least the red herring to distract us while Moffat sneaks in a completely different Big Bad. Some fans have speculated that Missy is short for Mistress, and she is a new, female, regeneration of the Master. I fear that she will turn out to be some sort of lame-duck character like the Celestial Toymaker or the Master of the Land Of Fiction. Either way, it gives a dark hint that the series 8 story arc is going to be even more cringe-worthy than the "silence will fall" arc turned out to be. I hope to be proven wrong, but the epilogue feels like fan-fic of the worst kind. Overall, despite a few good moments, I think the episode was a failure, and can only give it a single star.

Deep Breath, series 8 episode 1:

Review: Players

I was late to discover Doctor Who: there was no hiding behind the sofa at age 10 for me, I didn't even know Doctor Who existed until I was 14 or so, but once I did, for the next three or four years I devoured all the novelisations I could get my hands on. I remember coming home from the library with my schoolbag jam-packed with as many books as the library would allow me to check out at one time, eight or ten I think, and given that they were hard covers my bag was overflowing. A few years ago, I tried re-reading a few of my favourites, and found them almost unreadably bad. I also borrowed a more recent Expanded Universe novel from a friend, and simply couldn't get into it. So two weeks ago when Mrs Impala spotted Players by Terrance Dicks at the local library and suggested we borrow it, my expectations weren't terribly high. I'm very glad to say that the novel blew those low expectations away.

Players is a Sixth Doctor Expanded Universe novel first published in 1999. In 2013, it was re-published as one of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection, and it's the first full Doctor Who story I've read since those glory days in my teens. Back in the 1980s, my interest in Doctor Who was already tottering on a knife edge due to the ridiculous stories and obnoxious personality of the early sixth Doctor, and then killed dead by the mess that was The Trial Of A Time Lord. But after seeing Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and the delightfully tipsy Katy Manning (Jo Grant) reminisce live on stage about their time on Doctor Who, I've been a fan of Baker. Both he and McCoy are consummate showmen and raconteurs, and it broke my heart to think of what they could have done as the Doctor had the BBC given them some quality material to work with, instead of childishly bad rubbish. It was a true pleasure to see Dicks take the sixth Doctor out of the ridiculous clown suit and give him some dignity, and Players demonstrates that Dicks can actually write well when he is freed from the shackles of the TV novelisations.

The novel tells of the Doctor meeting Winston Churchill and saving him from an assassination attempt. Not the Churchill of "blood, toil, tears and sweat", but his younger self, during the Boer War. We briefly revisit Patrick Troughton's Doctor, post The War Games, shows us another side of King Edward (Dave to his friends) and Mrs Simpson, and introduces a mysterious group of ageless, jaded time travellers calling themselves "the Players", who meddle in human history as part of some great game. In the latest round of their never-ending Game, the Players have decided to see what will happen with Churchill dead and a pro-Nazi king on the British throne. Players is not great literature, but it is well-written, with Dicks doing justice to both the Sixth Doctor and Peri. He captures their voices perfectly, although the Second Doctor perhaps not quite as well. The characters are engaging, the story interesting, and the villains are believable (if not quite chilling). I don't hesitate to recommend Players and give it a solid, workman-like three stars.

Players by Terrence Dicks:

Deathless prose

This piece of deathless prose is worthy of winning a Bulwer-Lytton Award:

"Had it persevered - if awful chance had decreed that it escape from the quicksand as nightfall closed in over that foetid marsh, neither Colonel Jameson or Jim Tressidy or anybody in Horton's Crossing or camped in the adjacent hills would have survived to greet Lieutenant Wade Castro when, shortly after dawn the next day, he reported, red-eyed through lack of sleep, to the officer who had received instructions to accompany him in the spacious helicopter waiting on the hard-core, clambered aboard, took the ungainly seeming machine to tree-top level, and, half an hour later, brought it down skilfully in the deserted town's main street within yards of Sheriff Regan's office - just as Colonel Jameson had instructed."

-- Victor Norwood, 'Night of the Black Horror'
(Quoted in "Ghastly Beyond Belief", by Neil Gaiman.)

(Thanks to Mrs Impala for digging this one out for me.)

Buffy Season 8

As people might have noticed from previous posts, I'm a huge fan of Joss Whedon's work: Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity. I liked Fray, although I didn't go into raptures of ecstasy over that one like some people. Even Alien Resurrection, which was as horrible and deformed a monstrosity as the Ripley/Alien hybrid itself, nevertheless showed signs of Whedon's talents. Beneath the horrible, drool-covered grubby fingerprints and suspicious stains, one can just barely detect the faintest signs of an actual good story and interesting characters.

Particularly given the goodness that was Fray, I was hoping for fireworks from the comic book series of Season 8 of Buffy. Alas, it was not to be -- the first four issues haven't impressed me. The story itself is okay, but I expected better than okay from Joss. But it feels simultaneously rarefied and compressed: there's not enough happening, but what is happening happens too fast, if that makes sense. Perhaps that's a limitation of comic books compared to television, I don't know.

But the killer for me is that I just don't think the artist is good enough. There seems to be a tradition now for comics to have really good artwork on the covers and shockingly incompetent artwork inside. Take this example of somebody who supposedly is Giles:


Take away the cup of tea and he could be any guy in glasses -- take away the glasses and he could be any guy. It's not just Giles either -- the artist hasn't really captured the look of any of the characters from the series.

The characters faces are terribly inexpressive. They're supposed to be talking, and yet their mouths look like they're glued shut. There is little sense of kinetic motion in the artwork either: apart from action scenes, most of the time people look like badly-posed wax dummies.

I'm disappointed, and will have to think long and hard before buying any more of the series.

The Doctors

Following up from the Doctor's girls and the Doctor's boys, mimi-na has given us all ten Doctors in one long image. Please visit her page to see the original, or go direct to the picture.

Or enjoy this remixed animated GIF:

Well, that bites. Blogger, it seems, deletes all the layers in animated GIFs except for the first. Boo hiss to them. Looks like I'll be looking for a image-or-file hosting service...

Update, 15/07/2007: And here's the animated GIF, thanks to free hosting by File Den. (Their Account Registration page sucks, but so far the rest of the service seems reasonable.)


Click for larger version; if the picture isn't animated, you'll need to tell your browser to allow animated images.



Update, 2007-11-12: oops, had a broken link there. Now fixed.

The Doctor's night out with the boys

mimi-na from Deviantart, the artist responsible for the Doctor's Girls, has now got the Doctor and the boys down at the pub enjoying a few drinks:

(Click image for full view.)

From left to right:

• Adric


• Dr Harry Sullivan, Doctor 10 and Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart


• Jamie McCrimmon, Captain Jack Harkness and Vislor Turlough


• Ben Jackson, Ian Chesterton and Steven Taylor


• The two tin dogs: K9 and Mickey Smith

Go to mimi-na's page to see the original in context, or straight to the full sized image.

By popular request, mimi-na has put up LJ icons of unobscured Ben, and what a young Doctor (before "borrowing" the TARDIS and running off to Earth) might have looked like.

Biology and science fiction

When it comes to science fiction, I try not to let shoddy science get in the way of enjoying a good story. Sometimes, though, the suspenders of disbelief are stretched past all credibility. But even if they don't quite snap, why have a good story with bad science if you can have a good story with good (or at least good-ish) science?

Biologist PZ Myer has a lament about physics snobbery, especially as it relates to science fiction. I feel his pain -- biology is much more complicated than physics. Rocket science? Bah! Getting a rocket to fly is easy compared to growing a kidney. So why do physicists and engineers treat biology as the soft option?

Biology professor Michael LaBarbera has a look at the biology of some classic sci-fi B-movies, and explains why the best weapon against giant ants would be a strong throwing arm with a house-brick, and why the giant octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea was so lethargic and passive. He also explains that Stephen Spielberg did a remarkable job of getting the biology of E.T. and Jurassic Park believable.

Truly alien aliens would probably make for truly boring stories, but I don't think it is asking too much of writers that they treat biology with at least as much care and respect as they do physics. (By Wodan's one good eye, that's little enough!) I'm not asking for total scientific realism -- where would SF be without faster than light travel, time travel, aliens that look like humans, and other fantasy elements? But it would be nice to see a little bit of plausibility in SF biology from time to time.

SFX Best Ten SF movies - part 2

Continued from Part One:


#5 The Matrix might not have invented bullet-time, but it certainly popularized it, and rightly so. Unlike the sequels, The Matrix hadn't yet devolved into a computer game, nor was it drowning in Zen psycho-babble and Dickian mysteries, although the early warning signs of wankery were there. But it was visually impressive, had an exciting plot, and didn't let the Zen philosophy get in the way of a rollicking good story. My rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.

#4 Planet of the Apes. I speak not of the recent remake, which was abominable and entirely without merit: the ridiculous interspecies marriages, the pointless and nonsensical "shock ending", the absurd battle scene where knuckle-walking gorillas out-raced horses. But the original was an entirely different thing. The shock ending of the original was, at the time, actually shocking and not just stupid. Viewed as a mere action SF movie, Planet of the Apes was quite good by the standards of the late sixties, and I believe it has held-up well even by today's standards. But it actually had something serious to say about humanity, self-destruction, and what it means to have the shoe on the other foot. Even after losing points for getting the psychology of the great apes so badly wrong (it should have been the chimpanzees who were the killers, and the gorillas the tree-hugging peace-nics) I give the movie a better-than-average rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

#3 Blade Runner is a movie that polarises both SF fans and critics into those who love it and those who hate it. If all you've seen is the Director's Cut, I can understand you hating it: Ridley Scott managed to take a movie already easy to dislike, and make it more pretentious, unengaging and confusing. I often say that unless you've seen the original, you won't be able to make head or tail of the Director's Cut. But the original is a spaceship of a different engine: although it is slow-paced and quite dark, it also has a harsh, dystopian beauty, and explores a number of literary themes. Being based on a Philip K Dick story, naturally it questions what it means to be human, but in this case it does it well, unlike (for example) the awful Screamers. The sound track, by Vangelis, is hauntingly beautiful, and the rooftop death-scene of the Replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), dying in the rain, is both haunting and wonderful. My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

#2 Star Wars is one of the most loved and most viewed movies of all time, not just science fiction, but across all genres. It is a wonderful, innocent, rollicking good adventure -- more space opera than science fiction, but it did more than anything else before it to make science fiction acceptable to the mainstream. Yes, Star Trek may have paved the way, but Star Wars build an interstate superhighway. George Lucas virtually created modern special effects, and if some of the effects don't look quite so seamless in 2007 as they seemed in 1977 when we saw them for the first time, who cares? Star Wars was, when you get right down to it, merely Flash Gordon with state-of-the-art special effects and a marginally better script. The movie barely had an original line in it: Lucas copied, sometimes scene-for-scene and even word-for-word, from Japanese samurai movies, Flash Gordon serials, The Dam Busters, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and even Nazi propaganda films. But it was done with such panache and style, and it contained so many memorable characters, that the movie goes beyond its origins as a homage to the Saturday afternoon serials. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5.

#1 If Star Wars invented the "used future" SF movie, Serenity made it real: You Will Believe A Spaceship Can Fly. Far from space opera, Serenity combined characters you can believe in and care for with a fantastic story. It contains Joss Whedon's trademarked clever use of language, humour, tragedy and action. I don't always agree with Orson Scott Card, but on this, I agree one hundred percent: Serenity is a great movie. It explores questions of sin and belief, paternalistic government, and the freedom to make choices, whether good or bad -- and without the over-powering shadow of Uncle God that too often gives inane answers to these questions. My rating: 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

A Tale of Two Peters

Some weeks ago, Mrs. Impala and I went to see the latest Spiderman movie. Afterwards, I asked her if she wanted to go home and watch the (then) latest episode of Heroes, and she replied "No, I don't think I could deal with watching Peter Parker playing somebody who isn't Peter Parker immediately after watching Peter Parker being played by somebody who isn't Peter Parker."

Peter Parker playing somebody who isn't Peter Parker.

Peter Parker being played by somebody who isn't Peter Parker.

I don't think Tobey Maguire is a terrible Peter Parker, but he just isn't quite right. Milo Ventimiglia, on the other hand, was born to play Peter Parker. Let's hope that if there is a Spidey 4, Maguire is indisposed and the producers have the sense to turn to Ventimiglia.

SFX Best Ten SF movies

Earlier, I blogged about SFX magazine's poll for the best ten science fiction movies. In reverse order, here are my thoughts about each movie:

#10 Back To The Future deserves to be in any list of classic SF movies. It is a wonderful example of good old-fashioned entertainment: action, adventure, comedy, great music and sympathetic characters. It brightened the lives of millions of fans and gave people a simple introduction to the paradoxes of time travel. The time-travelling DeLorean has become iconic, so much so that when the Doctor needed to explain to his latest companion, Martha Jones, the dangers of time paradox, he simply reminded her of Back To The Future. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.

#9 The Terminator gave people a dystopian future with no hope but endurance, and a more sophisticated time travel paradox than that from Back To The Future. It also launched the careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron into the stratosphere. The Terminator too has become iconic. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5.

#8 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of those movies that, in my opinion, people love for what it represents rather than what it is. What 2001 represents is "grown-up science fiction" as literature, not mere entertainment. What 2001 is, on the other hand, is mostly dull, pretentious and infused with a religious mysticism that says nothing and goes nowhere. It is significant that the only memorable, sympathetic character in the movie is the murderous computer HAL. As a movie, it has some good moments: the use of classical music is stunning, and there are some iconic scenes, like the spinning antelope bone becoming a space station. 2001 tries hard to be faithful to a realistic view of space travel, but it succeeds far too well to make for a good movie. But for all of 2001's pretensions to hard science, it then turns into some of the softest, most nonsensical mysticism ever put into a movie. The mysticism of the movie doesn't even say anything: Stanley Kubrick, in particular, has virtually invited audiences to interpret the end any way they like. The problem with human film-makers trying to portray incomprehensible events is that they have to cheat: it isn't that the end of 2001 has meaning beyond human understanding -- if it were, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke couldn't have written it, being only human themselves. The only way for human writers to portray something beyond human understanding is to make up nonsense and wrap it in pseudo-significance. So any attempt to make sense of (e.g.) the fetus in space is simply projecting his or her own hopes and beliefs into the movie. A fetus in space is mystic? So would be a chicken egg, and just as silly. 2001 is a study of contrasts: ape-man and space-man, the cold harshness of space and the richness of the classical score, the ultra-realism of the hard science and the ultra-dippy weenieness of the mysticism. The end result is some magnificent minutes but also some tedious hours. My rating: it might be a classic, but it isn't a good classic. 2 out of 5.

#7 Forbidden Planet is a bit of a mystery to me. I have seen the movie, perhaps twenty years ago or more, but I don't remember enough about it to give it a rating. I'm awfully suspicious though: virtually every review of Forbidden Planet mentions that it is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. I guess that makes it "literature", and science fiction which has been treated as literature is, generally speaking, overly serious and not terribly good.

#6 Alien is more horror than science fiction. We might go to the stars, it says, but the Nameless Horror in the dark will have got there first. Scary and intense, with one of the most memorable and unique monsters in all of fiction. 4 out of 5.


Continued in Part Two, coming right up.

Serenity poll

This is very squee-worthy... SFX magazine has just published the results of a poll of science fiction fans for Best Science Fiction Movie of All Time... and Serenity won. Woot!!! Take that Star Wars! How'd you like them apples?

Quoted in today's MX newsgossip-paper, SFX editor Dave Bradley said,

The TV show may have been cancelled, yet the Serenity universe clearly struck a chord with fans, thanks to its likable characters, witty dialogue and amazing special effects.

The poll wasn't an open-ended poll: the ten movies were pre-selected by SFX, and naturally no Internet poll can be trusted as reliable. But even so, we have to take our little victories for good taste and sense however we find them.

The SFX top 10 movies are:

1. Serenity (2005)


2. Star Wars (1977)


3. Blade Runner (1982)


4. Planet of the Apes (1968)


5. The Matrix (1999)


6. Alien (1979)


7. Forbidden Planet (1956)


8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)


9. The Terminator (1984)


10. Back To The Future (1985)

Putting my serious hat on for a moment, these polls are, by their very nature, biased towards recent and well-known movies. But then, I would hope that recent movies build upon old movies, giving them better ideas, better scripts, better acting, better effects... the alternative is that modern movies are going backwards and getting worse rather than better.

Actually... I'm not at all sure that we can say that recent movies are generally better than their forerunners. Looking at that list, it is obvious that the great bulk of the best SF movies are decades old. I'll have more to say about those ten movies shortly.

Houseplants of Gor

Ellerol Elvish writes a fine parody of John Norman's Gor books, the Houseplants of Gor:

"You do not dare to water me!" laughed the plant.

"You will be watered," said Borin.

"Do not water me!" wept the plant.

"You will be watered," said Borin.

I watched this exchange. Truly, I believed the plant would be watered. It was plant, and on Gor it had no rights. Perhaps on Earth, in its permissive society, which distorts the true roles of all beings, which forces both plant and waterer to go unhappy and constrained, which forbids the fulfillment of owner and houseplant, such might not happen. Perhaps there, it would not be watered. But it was on Gor now, and would undoubtedly feel its true place, that of houseplant. It was plant. It would be watered at will. Such is the way with plants.

The girls of Doctor Who

mimi-na from Deviantart has drawn Doctor Who's female companions:

(Click image for larger view.)

From left to right, the companions shown are:

• Susan Foreman; Vicki; Dodo Chaplet; Polly; Victoria Waterfield; Zoe Harriot


• Dr Liz Shaw; Jo Grant; Sarah Jane Smith; Leela of the Sevateem; Romana (twice!); Nyssa; Tegan Jovanka; Peri Brown; Mel Bush; Ace; Dr Grace Holloway


• The Doctor; Rose Tyler; K9

The original, full-sized image can be found here, or go direct to the image.

Invincible

One of the best science fiction TV programs around these days is Heroes. Despite the derivative premise (sort of a three-way mutant hybrid of the X-Men, the X Files and 24) Heroes is quality television: well-written, well-acted, well-made, with excellent production values and characters you can really care about.

Alas, one thing really grates on my nerves: an egregious mistake in plain English by the voice-over at the start of many episodes. One of the heroes is schoolgirl Claire Bennet, who has the power to regenerate from virtually any physical injury. That makes her invulnerable to permanent injury.

Not according to the voice-over, which describes her as "invincible". As in, can't be beaten or defeated.

I'm not the only one who gets annoyed at this mistake. Wandering teh Interweb more or less at random, I stumbled across this post on LiveJournal:

every time the voiceover at the start of an episode refers to Claire as "invincible", we shout "GET A DICTIONARY, DUDES!" Sure, she's effectively "invulnerable" and apparently, well, ultimately ~coughs~ unkillable. But invincible? No bloody way. All it takes to conquer her, as it were, is Daddy Bennet saying, "Claire, you're grounded!" :P

Fifth of November

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Stories in just six words

Wired has a collection of short stories written by science fiction, fantasy and horror writers. These are seriously short stories: just six words each.

Some of them are actually quite good. But they aren't stories. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end; a story has a plot, and one or more protagonists. These don't have any of those elements, not really. But they do communicate something, perhaps not a plot, perhaps an event or a feeling or an image. In just six words, they paint a picture in words.

Or, to put it another way:

Six words. Not story. Word picture.

The Brokeback Mountains of Madness

Click image for larger version. Original here.

Callgirl of Cthulhu

Safe for work, unless you work for Christian Taliban or Feminist Nazis. (Although the rest of the artist's website isn't necessarily SFW.)



Link.

One of the really impressive things about this statue is that it isn't some dinky 9" statuette, it is lifesize:

Book reviewers

Wandering around the Internet at random, I came across a site reviewing books in the "Alien" and "Alien Versus Predator" franchise. Here are a pair of brief extracts from two reviews. Take note that the reviewers are by the same person, on the same page. Is it any wonder that reviewers have such a low reputation?

Aliens Vs. Predator: Hunter's Planet
[...] A thrilling and compelling story about two alien monsters battling it out [...] An awesome read full of action and twists. If you liked Aliens vs Predator: War, you'll love this.

Aliens Vs. Predator: War
After years of bemoaning David Bischoff's awful AVP: Hunter's Planet, [...]

Sigh. Just... sigh.

Creative Commons success story

Cory Doctorow is rightfully proud of the results from one of his Creative Commons published books:

Last week, I received the most remarkable letter from Jamie, a US Navy seaman stationed on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Because my novels are Creative Commons-licensed, he is able to download them and print them out onboard ship, and pass them around to his comrades. The absence of quality reading material on the ship has turned Creative Commons texts into hot items on the ship:

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey, who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes, and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short, since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's important.