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Review: Valley of the Soul

Valley of the Soul
My rating: 5 out of 5.

My first introduction to the world of Faldorrah came about 2 years ago. AWelkin knew the author and had an early copy of the first book, Ghosts in the Snow. My wife and I were over at AWelkin's house for a visit, planning to watch some anime. However my wife picked up Ghosts in the Snow and was lost to us for the evening, as she wouldn't put down the book for anything. I got my chance to read the book later that weekend and was hooked myself. That first book in this series combined elements I really enjoyed from a variety of genres into one book and it was fantastic. Then last year, Threads of Malice, the sequel was released. It was a good read, I found the second book to be too dark disturbing for my tastes. At the end of this month, the third book will finally be released. But having "connections" helps, as AWelkin was kind enough to provide me with an advanced reader's copy. Fortunately, I'll have to give it back and go out to buy my own copy.

Yes, you heard me right. I am quite happy to return this free copy so I can go out to buy my own copy. No, I've not lost my mind or been replaced by one of the pod people. While I tend to keep a grip on my spending money; this book is definitely worth buying to support the author. This third book in the series is probably Ms. Jones best work yet.

This time around Dubric is out of the castle investigating some gruesome¹ animal killings. All of the characters who survived the Threads of Malice are still around but have definitely been psychologically scarred by their experiences. It's really good nice.... Hmm, it's horrible the sorts of things these characters have been put through but it's great that Ms. Jones continues to build on her previous work, rather than just ignoring how her characters would react after living through something like that.

While Dubric is out in the field, he almost gets his first ghost of this book. I say almost because it's just the head, the rest of the ghost's body is missing. This is something new and disturbing for Dubric. The reason behind the ghosts showing up in parts² was a surprise but one that fits nicely into the world Ms. Jones has created. In a sense there are multiple villains in this book and Ms. Jones kept me guessing throughout the book. Basically, if you like Ms. Jones's other works (particularly her first book) then I'd highly recommend you pick this one up as well.

¹ Not nearly so gruesome as the 2nd book in this series, but still rather unpleasant.
² If you think revealing that there will be multiple ghosts in this book is some kind of spoiler, than you must be completely unfamiliar with Ms. Jones's work.

Tags: Books, Reviews

Dear Liption, Your Tea Sucks

Dear Lipton Tea/Pepsi Partnership/Unilever¹,

Recently, my wife asked me to swing by the pet store and pick up some cat food. I did so after work and then stopped at a nearby convienence store to both fill up my gas tank and get something to drink. Desiring something that was not loaded down with sugar or the American favorite "high fructose corn syrup", I checked out the cold cases and found I had 2 options: plain water or Lipton Unsweetened Iced Tea. Seeing how it was late in the day and I have feeling tired, I picked the caffinated option. Dear god, I wish now I had choosen to stick with water.

The marketing blurb on the side of the bottle claims you brew tea straight from hand-selected tea leaves. If that blurb is accurate then the people you have hand selecting the leaves must be sadistic, tea-hating bastards who desire to inflict maximum pain and suffering on their fellow man. But then if one continues reading the information printed on the bottle's label; one will find you feel the need to add citric acid (for tartness) and caramel color. That kind of blows away the theory that they're really hand selecting the tea leaves for their customer's pleasure. I mean if you were hand selecting good leaves to make tea for the consumer then why do you feel the need to put additives in the tea? After all Ito En is capable of making an entire line of bottled teas containing nothing but water and tea² without coloring?

I'll grant that Ito En is brewing green teas, not black. However since you do not appear to produce an unsweated green iced tea; I cannot make a direct comparison. Still this bottle of your tea was easily the worst tea I have ever had³. Hell, even Nestea was better than this! Until you learn how to brew some proper tea, perhaps you should take this crap off the market.

Sincerely,
Mark

¹ If you carefully reads all the text on one of their bottles, you'll see Lipton Tea produces their Iced Teas in cooperation with Pepsi and that they are a Unilever brand.
² I had to change my argument slightly as after checking a bottle I'd not thrown out yet, I found Ito En adds Vitamin C to their tea.
³ Yeah, I drank it all. I was hot, thirsty and had to drive home yet.

Tags: drink, Reviews, suck, tea

Review: X-men, The Last Stand

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Yesterday, the wife and I headed out to watch a matinee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was planning on writing up a review of it for MovieComment¹. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he'd already written his own review. And not surprisingly², we have completely different opinions on both the current X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Ratner was selected as the director for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy working on Superman Returns. Unfortunately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the character development which made the movies interesting. Mr. Ratner even went so far as to make the battles flow as much like a comic book battle as he could. This was a horrible mistake as the differences in the two mediums do not allow the flow of a comic book battle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audience accepts that the artist cannot draw every detail of a battle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imagination. With movies, we have a long history of war movies which show that the filmmaker can show significantly more detail. So when we have multiple scenes in the middle of battles where nothing is happening; it's just boring (e.g. dozens of mutants supposedly leaping to the attack and all we get is them leaping over the rubble).

Additionally, I have to take issue with MovieComment's claim that Storm looks especially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* flying *quote* scenes are without argument the worst special effects in the movie. I haven't seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stupid swinging around on that rope. Then there's the whole "wheee! I can spin!" crap they came up with for Storm. For crying out loud, this character is theoretically supposed to be the human mutant equivalent of Mother Nature and they've got her spinning around like a f'ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren't too bad. Pretty much, any of them focusing on Wolverine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) and the Juggernaut was really good (the end of that sequence was particularly funny).

The addition of other characters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shadowcat and Colossus³. Bad in that they did not really do anything with their characters and they failed to continue developing some of the other characters from the previous movies. Most notably, Rogue's storyline was pretty much dropped and converted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn't play well on the screen.

Speaking of bits which didn't play well on the screen, the climax of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolverine blew serious chunks. To anybody who liked this scene, I apologize but Famke Janssen's performance just did not pull off the seriousness of the moment. Maybe with a better director she could have done it, but I guess we'll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director's cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very interesting. Overall, I'm glad I went to see the film (for the new characters) but I'm extremely glad we went to maintee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seriously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you're reading this review prior to watching the movie; stay in your seat until after the credits. There's one more scene after the credits are over which you don't want to miss.

¹ A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
² He has consistently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the funniest he's ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhorrent piece of utter excrement.
³ My particular favorites.

Tags: Movies, Reviews

Review: Old Man’s War

Old Man's War
My rating: 5 out of 5.

For a while now I've been despairing of finding new science fiction authors I like. I would go through my local bookstores and the only ones that didn't seem like pure twaddle were either books I've read previously or by authors I was previously familiar with. Authors who usually are very old or already dead. Oddly this problem only seemed to be happening with science fiction. Fantasy, horror, mystery and so on all are fine right now. I just haven't for the longest time been able to find any decent science fiction by an author who wasn't all corpsified (or close to being so). This has concerned me as I misspent much of my youth blasting around the universe on the dread rocketship Imagination fueled by the works of many fine authors. I wish to continue to doing so, but the fifth or fifty-fifth time you read a book it does not always generate as much juice as the first time.

All that being said, I am pleased to say I have found a new science fiction author who writes something worth reading! A while back, I was reading Doug Stewart's blog and he mentioned getting a particular book for his birthday. Interestingly enough the author of Old Man's War, John Scalzi, stopped by Doug's blog and wished him a happy birthday. I thought that was pretty cool of him. Given that Doug described the book as a gift that should "warm any decent sci-fi fan's hardened heart"; my interest in this book was peaked.

I followed the link from the author's comment to his website and noticed he had a free, sample chapter of the book online. I read through the sample and quite enjoyed it, so I added the book to my list¹. A few weeks later, the wife and I stopped in a Barnes & Noble to rest our weary feet and grab a coffee from their café. Before we went into the café, we looked around the store for some reading material. I still remembered wanting a better look at Old Man's War, so I hunted around and found a copy of it. I thought the plan was to simply browse through the material while having our coffee but I was overruled and she bought the book with the coffees. As we sat down, I started to flip through the book but she wanted to look at it. Since she hadn't found anything to look at and I actually had several books at home I was in the middle of; I let her have it. That turned out to be something of a mistake on my part, as I didn't get it back until she finished it the next day. Since I didn't get it back right away, I stuck it into my stack of books to read. I held off a couple of days before I broke down and yanked it out of the middle of my stack. I read it cover to cover in a single evening and loved it. I just read it again (since I've been home sick for a week) and still loved it. But enough about me, you probably want to know something about the book other than I loved it.

Right, Old Man's War is set in the future. How far in the future is not explicitly stated but it seems to be the not-too-entirely-distant future. In this future, humanity is living and fighting amoung the stars. It turns out while there are numerous stars & planets out there; only so many of them are of any use to us and to the other races we've met. That's right, there is alien life out there and it ain't friendly. Human space is protected by the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) which boasts the oldest army ver fielded by man. The CDF's infantry is entirely made up of the elderly. People, like the main character (John Perry), cannot even join the CDF until they turn 75. The elderly are joining up in droves because they all know the CDF must have someway to make them young again. After all at 75 years on Earth, humans are not exactly in the ideal condition for fighting a war.

The book starts with Mr. Perry visiting his wife's grave and then joining the army. From there it's a fast sprint through the rest of the story. Mr. Scalzi's writing is easy to read, in part because he does not bog you down with tons of details about the new technologies used in the future. Also the characters are very likable and easy to relate to. But the book is not without its flaws.

The CDF is an independent entity from Earth and has more power than any goverment on Earth, but there's nothing in the book telling us how this came about. Mr. Scalzi hints at it saying that the CDF isolated Earth from the rest of space² and then used technologies it developed or stole from other races to maintain its monoply on humanity's spaceflight. The actual details of how the CDF managed the initial isolation and how they continue to keep Earth from building more skip drives³ and sneaking off planet. Also the plot covering John Perry's rescue by the Special Forces and subsequent interactions with his rescuers seems.... a bit too deus ex machina. Mind you it was fun to read but it stretches the believability more than just a little and no I won't tell you exactly why as that would require me to reveal big spoilers of the plot. Hopefully some of this will be cleared up in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades (due out next week according to Amazon.com).

¹ The list of books in my head that I need to buy when I have the money and am in a bookshop. It fluctuates depending on how good my memory is, how empty my wallet is, how often I'm visiting any given bookshop and how big an impression a book or an author makes on me.
² Due to an outbreak of an alien disease that sterialized all but 1/3 of Earth's men.
³ The skip drive is the FTL drive in Mr. Scalzi's universe.

Tags: Books, Reviews, Scalzi

Review: Deception Point

Deception Point
My rating: 2 out of 5.

This started off as a fun book and for a long time into it I was able to suspend my disbelief to enjoy it. It read something like a weak Tom Clancy novel. At least up until a certain point in during the climatic finale of the story. At that particular point in the story, my disbelief slipped into overdrive and suddenly I felt I like was reading a bad movie script. *sigh* And it was so looking better than

To avoid spoiling the book for those still interested, the scene in particular will only be described after cut. Even there, I will try to avoid spoilers as much as possible but if you wish to read the book completely spoiler free; go read it before you read the rest of this article.
› Continue reading

Tags: Books, Reviews