Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Evelyn C. Leeper" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom Subject: MT VOID, 03/15/24 -- Vol. 42, No. 37, Whole Number 2319 Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 11:20:45 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 269 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 15:20:45 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="9ac13e48f58c0e3be7fd4b5ba376d46b"; logging-data="3776010"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/+lr9J2WcJpYhl39nt/GWq" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:BnxfYw0DW1AMdeClhAyA+PWNjfE= Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 13972 THE MT VOID 03/15/24 -- Vol. 42, No. 37, Whole Number 2319 Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net Sending Address: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com All material is the opinion of the author and is copyrighted by the author unless otherwise noted. All comments sent or posted will be assumed authorized for inclusion unless otherwise noted. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send mail to eleeper@optonline.net The latest issue is at . An index with links to the issues of the MT VOID since 1986 is at . Topics: Mini Reviews, Part 21 (INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, THESE FINAL HOURS, SPACEMAN) (film reviews by Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper) THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES by Charles Stross (audio book review by Joe Karpierz) ALEXANDER and Alexandria (letter of comment by Hal Heydt) This Week's Reading (MAO TSE-TUNG ON GUERRILLA WARFARE) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper) =================================================================== TOPIC: Mini Reviews, Part 21 (film reviews by Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper) This is twenty-first batch of mini-reviews. INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023): INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY is the fifth (and please, God, the last) in the Indiana Jones series. It's not that it is absolutely terrible, but between the callbacks of now-elderly stars (Karen Allen, John Rhys-Davies) for the sake of re-creating the characters of their youth, to re-hashing old jokes and tropes (the whip versus guns, eels as watery snakes, a young boy "sidekick", etc.), to actually turning into a true alternate history (in our world Indiana Jones did not ride a horse through the New York Apollo 11 parade), this was made more to cash in on the fan base than because anyone had a good idea for the film. [SPOILERS] Adding time travel to the mix just makes it into something it never was. (And the concern about changing history seems to come a bit too late, since apparently there was already a change.) It is perhaps not a coincidence that this is also the first "Indiana Jones" film not involving George Lucas as a writer or Steven Spielberg as the director. As I said, not absolutely terrible, but not up to the first and third of the series. (Perhaps the less said about INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, the better.) [-ecl] Released theatrically 14 June 2023. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4), or 6/10. Film Credits: What others are saying: THESE FINAL HOURS (2013): The end-of-the-world film THESE FINAL HOURS is basically an Australian take on the Canadian film LAST NIGHT. It is set in Perth rather than Toronto, and in THESE FINAL HOURS we are told what the cause of the end of the world is. (In LAST NIGHT, we never find out what the disaster is, although it seems to make daylight last until midnight.) But I suppose that LAST NIGHT in turn was based on, or at least inspired by, ON THE BEACH, which of course was set in Australia. What goes around comes around. (I will note I am not the only person to see these connections.) One way the Canadians and Australians differ is that (SPOILER) they don't plant a nuke in the asteroid/create a virus for an alien spaceship/plant a nuke in the Earth's core/create a giant space ark/move into mine shafts/... This was often given as the difference between American (U.S.) science fiction and British science fiction: the former was basically optimistic, the latter pessimistic. This may be less true now, and there is also a lot more to even just Anglophone science fiction than that dichotomy. I can't say this is anything special, but it will appeal to fans of the apocalypse sub-genre. [-ecl] Released theatrically in the U.S. 6 March 2015. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4), or 6/10. Film Credits: What others are saying: SPACEMAN (2024): SPACEMAN is an atypical science fiction film, where the basic plot has nothing science fictional about it. It takes place in a spaceship, and there's a giant alien telepathic spider, and there are a lot of dream sequences, but the central idea seems to be that if the main character loved his wife so much, he shouldn't have taken a job that requires him to be away from her for a year at a time. To those of us from military families that seems somewhat insulting. My father had five tours of duty of a year or more each, and we didn't have the benefit of Zoom calls or Facetime. (In the film, the title character is somewhere out near Jupiter, but through technobabble, he is able to talk to people on Earth with no time lag.) [-ecl] Released on Netflix in the U.S. 1 March 2024. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4), or 6/10. Film Credits: What others are saying: =================================================================== TOPIC: THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES by Charles Stross (copyright 2010, Recorded Books, 10 hours and 56 minutes, ASIN: B0032U8OIA, narrated by Gideon Emery) (audio book review by Joe Karpierz) THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES, originally published in 2004, is the first book in the long-running Laundry Series, and contains two stories: the short novel "The Atrocity Archive", and the winner of the Hugo Award in 2005 for Best Novella, "The Concrete Jungle". "The Atrocity Archive" introduces readers to the main character of the Laundry series, Bob Howard (which is a pseudonym, since his real name can be used against him--more on this in a minute), a former I.T. consultant who ends up as a field agent for the Laundry, an British agency which deals with occult threats. If you think Lovecraftian horror, you're on the right track, although the stories do not take place in that universe. Howard got pulled into the Laundry because he re-discovered mathematical equations that would allow contact with other worlds, and the Laundry did not want that running loose in the world. As various characters discover throughout the two stories in the volume, the Laundry quite regularly gains new operatives when they discover people that have some affinity for the occult or magic. The reader also learns that magic, as the Laundry defines it, is a branch of applied mathematics, and thus computers are used alongside spells to combat and conquer denizens of the other (or under) world. Anyway, Howard is charged with finding and protecting one Professor Mo O'Brien (her name is longer than that, but we don't need to get into that here), as the Laundry has taken interest in her work for the usual reasons. As part of his mission--and this is by no means all of what happens, but I certainly find it the most interesting--the two of them get a chance to tour the Atrocity Archive, a classified record of the efforts made and items used by the Germans in World War II. It is one of the most interesting and disturbing collection of curiosities that I've ever read about in a book. We also learn that the Wannsee Conference (the historians and World War II enthusiasts reading this will recognize the Conference as something very real) planned to harness the occult using the mass human sacrifice of the Holocaust (and now we know what the members of the Conference were really talking about). In any event, the upshot of the story is that Mo is captured by a group of terrorists and sent via a wormhole to an alternate universe where the Nazis succeeded. Bob and other members of the Laundry team infiltrate the alternate universe to rescue Mo, but not without cost. "The Concrete Jungle" starts off with the discovery that there are too many concrete cows in Milton Keynes. The whole thing started because a CCTV network that had artificially emulated gorgons installed in them to fend off a potential attack by the Old Ones (a direct reference to Lovecraft, of course) was used to turn a cow to stone. Of course, an unauthorized use of the gorgon-capable CCTV network (I'm not sure I believe I actually typed that phrase) could place the entire country in danger. The whole affair ends up being weirdly convoluted but extremely typical of inter-office politics. It's really kind of tough to delve much deeper into the story without giving much more away, but rest assured that many of you ========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========