I found New York City labyrinthine and intimidating when I went there for some TV interviews in 2010. My unease would have tripled had I found myself among the ghosts, ghouls and goddesses of Spektor, Manhattan’s undead district – but I’m not Pandora English.

The Spider Goddess is Tara Moss’ second paranormal thriller, and it sparkles with even more imagination and wit than its predecessor, The Blood Countess. As a plucky journalist with psychic tendencies, Pandora is instantly likeable, and her escapades make the readers laugh and their skin crawl, often simultaneously. Her romance with the long-dead soldier who haunts her apartment and her crush on a thousand-year old sanguine (“vampire” is considered an offensive term) are teasing, heart-warming and heartbreaking all at once.

With knowing jabs at the fashion industry and an encyclopaedic knowledge of myths and legends (Pandora scatters grains of uncooked rice to distract the obsessive-compulsive sanguines, who can’t help but count them) the book is also steeped in New York’s rich history. In one of the more unnerving scenes, Pandora looks up to see a burning ghost suspended in the air, who hurled herself from a window during the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 and has been plummeting ever since.

I consider myself a firm sceptic. I don’t believe in ghosts or psychics. Just the same, I expect to feel even more unsettled the next time I end up in Manhattan.

(Source: whisperingsweetnothings)

Why is Blade Runner so well-regarded?

It’s not my intent to anger anybody. I just want to understand. How did this movie become one of the top ten sci-fi films of all time, according to The Guardian and the American Film Institute?

I saw Blade Runner quite recently, and I wanted to like it; I’ve spent my life writing dystopian sci-fi novels, and my favourite things include detective stories, action movies and Phillip K. Dick. (If you think it’s unfair to describe Phil as a “thing” rather than a person, you might not know that he was turned into an android whose whereabouts are unknown. Seriously.) But the film struck me as superficial, pretentious and dull.

You can’t make statements like that without backing them up, so I will – but be warned, spoilers follow.

There’s no question that the filmmakers involved were talented. Ridley Scott directed Alien. David Peoples wrote Twelve Monkeys. Harrison Ford starred in Morning Glory. But evidence of their talents is absent from Blade Runner. The excruciating tension of Alien is missing in action. Ford, whose character arc in Morning Glory was surprisingly nuanced, flatlines here as a prosaic, alcoholic womaniser. (The picture above may appear romantic, but in the movie it looks a lot more like assault.) And the matryoshka-doll of plot twists from 12 Monkeys are nowhere to be found.

You could argue that the simplistic plot is not the fault of the filmmakers, since the movie was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. But you would be wrong – an adaptation should outgrow the source material, not redact it. The plot of DADOES is as follows:

In a depopulated world where animals are so revered as to fund an industry of fakes, Rick Deckard is paid to hunt androids who, but for their lack of empathy and short life-span, are identical to humans. Gradually, he realises that humans often lack empathy too, including himself, and he wonders if there is a meaningful difference between his victims and their executioner.

Meanwhile, the plot of Blade Runner can be summarised thusly:

In futuristic Los Angeles (just like present-day LA, but with flying cars), Rick Deckard is paid to hunt androids who, but for their short life-span, are identical to humans. Later, it turns out he, too, is an android. Credits roll.

Opinions differ on how many twists constitutes a plot, but I’m pretty sure “one” doesn’t quite cut it.

Critics will argue that the story wasn’t the point – Blade Runner was stylistically influential. That’s true; The Fifth Element, for example, was probably inspired by it. But Blade Runner wasn’t in TIME magazine’s list of the 100 “most influential” movies of all time. It was listed as one the 100 “best”. And there’s a reason that “style over substance” is usually cited as a bad thing.

Perhaps I’m not looking deep enough. Perhaps the movie has some symbolic or thematic importance that I’m missing. Is that right, Blade Runner?

Blade Runner: Yes! Like, at the beginning, there’s a close-up of an eye, right?

Jack Heath: Uh-huh…

Blade Runner: And then, Deckard’s machine focuses on the eyes to tell if someone’s an android!

Jack Heath: And then?

Blade Runner: And then an android gouges someone’s eyes out! See? Eyes!

Jack Heath: That’s great, but it’s not really a symbol or a theme. It’s just a motif. The phrase “See? Eyes!” has just as much artistic merit as all that stuff in the movie.

Blade Runner: Okay, well, what about Roy Batty?

Jack Heath: What about him?

Blade Runner: He’s Jesus.

Jack Heath: Because he dies at the end?

Blade Runner: Because he sacrifices himself for Deckard, despite being cartoonishly evil up to that point. And he sticks a nail through his hand.

Jack Heath: Why does he do that?

Blade Runner: Because he’s Jesus!

Jack Heath: No, I get the symbolic reason, but why did he think he was doing it? What was his motivation?

Blade Runner: I… uh… did I already mention the eyes?

Jack Heath: You did.

Blade Runner: Listen, I’m sick of your cheek. It doesn’t matter if I have proper symbolism. I’m classy. I’m film noir.

Jack Heath: Oh, that genre which is impossible to define? How convenient.

Blade Runner: Every scene takes place at night. And there’s a femme fatale.

Jack Heath: The first thing you said is a plot-hole, and the femme fatale stereotype is about sixty years out of date.

Blade Runner: Cut me some slack! I was made in 1982.

Jack Heath: Oh, sorry; thirty years out of date. You know what we call female villains these days?

Blade Runner: What?

Jack Heath: Villains.

It could be that my standards are too high. I’ve definitely seen worse movies than Blade Runner. But in this instance, I felt betrayed, because Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was a beautiful novel. It made me chuckle, it made me weep, and most of all, it made me think. There are few things as depressing as watching your favourite characters reduced to action figures, and seeing the philosophy of a book wiped out to make room for special effects.

No doubt some readers are keen to inform me that Phillip K. Dick really liked Blade Runner, but in reality, he only saw the trailer. And do you know what else Dick liked? Amphetamines.

…

…phew! Glad I got that all out of my system. From now on, I promise to leave the film reviewing to my brother.

(Source: alabasteretard)

On page five of Heartsick, Gretchen Lowell says she’s “prepared something special”. On page six, she hammers a nail into the ribs of her screaming victim, and the reader realises she’s right. This is serial killer fiction like you’ve never seen it before.

Besides the self-destructive protagonist and the darkly imaginative plot, the best thing about this book is the author’s gleeful disregard for convention. Instead of using childhood trauma, mother issues and psychosis to make Lowell realistic, Chelsea Cain focuses instead on making her scary, with a body count in the hundreds and viscera by the bucket-load. This is not a window into the mind of a predator – it’s a portrait of the terror felt by her prey.

And yet, Cain keeps the audience at a careful distance. My own crime novels tend to explore the protagonist’s every thought, but Detective Archie Sheridan, like Phillip Marlowe before him, plays his cards close to the chest. It’s not until the final chapter of Heartsick that he starts to share his secrets with the reader, and when he does, you’ll be itching to read the sequels.

(Source: elusivebravery)

“Get thee behind me, demon,” says Brutha. “I am behind you,” the tortoise replies, and so begins one of the 20^th century’s finest satires.

In my own novels, I’ve always been careful when criticising organised religion, but Terry Pratchett is much more daring. Where I would use a scalpel, he uses a machete, and where I would use a machete, he drops a nuclear warhead. The gods are pompous, the worshippers cowed, and the priests violently closed-minded. Yet the tale is never heavy-handed, thanks to Brutha’s sincerity and some deftly comical plot twists, as well as all the levity that comes from picturing an angry God trapped in the body of a tortoise.

Small Gods will appeal to the cynic, the chuckler and most of all, the philosopher in every reader. If you’ve never read Pratchett before, do yourself a favour; start here and never stop.

Never grow up is a song about how we waste our youth clawing towards adulthood, only to discover that being a grown-up is lonely and hard. I caught myself getting choked up while listening to it the other day, before I remembered that childhood is awful.

“To you, everything’s funny,” the singer declares. “You got nothing to regret. Don’t you ever grow up, it could stay this simple…”

“Funny” and “simple” are not the adjectives I would choose to describe my adolesence. There were occasionally jokes, simple ones, but they are drowned out by the memories of being held down and forced to eat ants, or having rubbish bins thrown at me. Being laughed at because of my clothes, or when I changed them, my hair, or when I changed that, my voice or my name or my grades (good or bad).

As a child, everyone is bigger than you, no-one believes a word you say, and the illusion of safety that adults live in has not yet taken hold. I remember being convinced I would wind up homeless and hungry, because my only skill was fiction writing and everyone said you can’t turn that into a job. I remember my science teacher and guitar tutor and kickboxing trainer and tennis coach all telling me I had to “get my priorities straight,” each with a different idea of what those priorities should be. I remember the girl who stole my pencil case, the boys who stole my locker key, the four girls who stole my heart and broke it, without enough time to put it back together in between. I remember the girl who tried to kill herself when her friends called her a slut for being with me. I remember the boy who threatened to cut my eyeball out with his pocket-knife.

Perhaps worse than all of that was the suffering I inflicted on other people. I try not to think about it now, but there’s no escaping the fact that I was the bully at least as often as I was the victim. I made fun of students and teachers for being fat, or poorly dressed, or stupid (even when they weren’t). I did irreperable psychological damage to at least two girls whose only crime was to like me. The memory of almost everything I did in my adolesence is accompanied by an adrenaline-shot of guilt. (If anyone who met me in school is reading this, please accept my sincerest apologies. I promise you I will never stop torturing myself over the things I no doubt said to you.)

For me, the closest thing to happiness was distraction, which may be the reason I spent most of high school either reading escapist fiction or writing it. The toxic air, the walled-in city and the hordes of hostile soldiers in The Lab made my problems seem petty by comparison.

My friends seem to have much fonder memories of school than mine, so it could be that I had it worse than most. But I think while many people only remember the happy moments (strawberry ice cream, school holidays), everybody suffered at the time. This is the reason readers identified so readily with The Hunger Games; “As a tool of practical propaganda, the games don’t make much sense,” says book critic Laura Miller. “You don’t demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience… If, on the other hand, you consider the games as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, they become perfectly intelligible. Adults dump teen-agers into the viper pit of high school, spouting a lot of sentimental drivel about what a wonderful stage of life it’s supposed to be. The rules are arbitrary, unfathomable, and subject to sudden change… Everyone’s always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your friends and obsessing over whether you’re having sex or taking drugs or getting good enough grades, but no one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything.”

The central theme of Never grow up is still valid. People shouldn’t waste their childhoods wishing they were adults, since being an adult has its own hardships. But nor should they waste their adulthoods wishing they were children. Those who do are probably forgetting what it was like.

(Source: saywhattheysay)

If Tony Abbott tweeted like he talks. Source.