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A collection of 14 fantasy and sci fi stories based around the simple premise: what if the evil overlord actually read one of those huge lists of things they should and shouldn’t do.

Sounds good, right? Scope for funnies, perhaps even more. Well, let’s just say there’s a reason this was only fifteen bucks at Unity. Yes, there are a couple of good, interesting stories (“Daddy’s Little Girl”, “A Woman’s Work…”, “Art Therapy”, “Ensuring the Sucession”, and “Geordie Culligan vs. Dr Longbeach & The HVAC of Doom” are all fairly good and smart), but most of the ones trying to be funny fall… flat. Very flat. Basically, a third of the stories—the ones I just mentioned—are good. Most of the rest are meh, and a couple are crap: “If Looks Could Kill” would embarrass a bad Livejournal, and “Loser Takes All” is MAKING A POINT in a way that suggests the author is an over-ernest teenager.

At $15 I don’t feel ripped off, but I didn’t get a bargain, either. At full paperback price I’d be feeling cheated.

I have a generalisation about science fiction and fantasy genre fiction; the former tends to be written by people who have interesting ideas but indifferent abilities to develop characters, to tell stories, to engage the reader. One often slogs through pages of mediocre prose in order to enjoy the little gems of speculation therein.

Fantasy, on the other hand, is afflicted by legions of writers who are perfectly capable of sketching an interesting character, of encouraging a reader to keep turning pages, but devoid of anything resembling an original idea, preferring to crib from the few giants of the genre, wrap their characters in silly names, churn out trilogy after trilogy, and get very rich indeed.

Steph Swainston is a fantasy writer. She is also producing the best, most interesting, and most importantly, original fantasy I have read in the 20-odd years since I started with Lord of the Rings. Since then I have read a reasonable chunk of fantasy, and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is the only work even in the same ballpark; The Modern World is the third book in a series.

Many of the central questions of The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time are to do with immortality: if immortality can be granted and revoked by one man, what would you do to gain it? What would you accede to in order to keep it? And how, then, once you won your prize, would you live with it? The Modern World continues with that theme, starting years after No Present, with Jant off drugs, away from the parallel worlds they give him access to, and back to his core job of fighting the hordes of insects invading his world.

It seems a step back from the previous novels in terms of complexity for much of the story; we are reset back almost, it seems, to the start of In The Year of Our War; the subjugation of Tris is barely mentioned. The only thing throwing us from an orderly, simple, boring, heroic fantasy piece is the simple task of retrieving a lost daughter.

Ahh, such a plain start I feared the promise of the series was fading. I should know better.We are again off at breakneck pace. In a few pages Swainston can cram idea sketches that would give a less able novellist the basis for a whole novel, a whole series, a whole career.

I cannot praise this series highly enough. It is, quite simply, the most engaging fiction I have read in years.

This paen to cricket opens with a scene worthy of Douglas Adams: a scratched-together cricket team on the Ross Shelf, observed by Leopard Seals, with players fighting the attentions of Skuas and penguins—and, as the title says, losing to the last.

It doesn’t hurt that the tale is told by someone who could stack up to Adams, either. I was giggling through page two and three, and stayed for more.

Imagine that you always wanted to play cricket. Badly. But that your first chance came at university. And that chance came, not through an established team, because no-one wants an adult player who’s never taken the field before, so you decide to get a bunch of equally hopeless players together and get beaten around the local pitches by teams of players who (horror!) actually know what they’re doing.

Along the way, you discover a number of things. One is that there’s a fundamental tension between two types of crap player. One crap player will happily play like shit and still work their arse off anyway, because even if your best isn’t good enough, isn’t giving it a go the main thing? Others have a different view; if you aren’t likely to win anyway, do badly; take pride in how crap you are. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hell, snatch crushing defeat from the jaws of honourable loss.

The author called his team the Captain Scotts because he has a soft sport for glorious, did-my-best failure. As one might imagine, a certain amount of the book involves the tension between the club members who subscribe to that idea, and those who take pride in being no-hopers (and resent any effort to, well, make one).

The meat of the book, though, is the travel: the club ends up going abroad to India, and, ultimately, arranging to play cricket in all the continents. Most matches are lost, of course, but there are victories, and the doing is the thing. Harry Thompson is a good writer, and his highs (a victory here, bonding with opponents there, a sublime time in Argentina) and lows are wonderfully told; we are with him in wishing to sink into the ground when some of his team members forget, as he puts it, that it is no longer 1932 and Indians are under no obligation to cope with the appalling rudeness of random white people who show up in their country. It is witty, well-written, and more complex than one might expect; descriptions of the countries and the reaction of the players put me in mind of the best bits of P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell.

I’m not sure how accessible the descriptions of cricket are to anyone who has a less-than-casual aquaintence with the game.

I cannot, above all, stress how funny parts of the tale are. I was in hysterics reading parts of it. I highly recommend it if you have even the faintest interest in cricket and a love of good writing.

Just one word of warning: the end will tear your heart out.

What proportion of my body needs to be covered in baby food before I can be considered part of one or more food groups?

When this brings tears of laughter to my eyes, is it because it’s really, really funny, or because my brain has been remapped to find it so?

Actually, I’m pretty sure with lines like:

Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape?

…I can be confident I would have found it hilarious pre-parenting.

Apparently the ability of a baby to suck nutrients from the mother is the fault of the father.

This was… awful. The comic was a mixed bag; Frank Millar’s love of one of the nastier societies of the ancient world (does anyone reading this really need it explained to them that the Spartans were not exactly representative of the best of ancient Greece? I mean, when your treatment of slaves is crap compared to ancient Athens, you’re pretty shit) and incredible gaffes (Athens are boylovers, hurf, durf. You can write all the defences of that line you like, Frank, but it’s monumentally stupid in the context of Spartan and ancient Greece generally) was balanced by his usual good art.

The movie has no real redeeming features.

The heavy metal soundtrack and sub-Gladiator fight sequences, the painfully unnecessary slow, lingering shots of nothing in particular, the mediocre acting (can Leonidas keep a consistent accent? I think not!); all these things combine to make it one of the worse films I’ve seen in a while.

I took Ada out for a walk around Mount Vic this morning and managed a few interesting photos on the way:

(Gadget bit: All shot with a Canon 350D and a Canon 55-200mm lens.)

Not the short story; instead, a 2005 exercise in retro film making. This is a silent black-and-white gem of a movie. A faithful adaptation, it’s wonderfully lit, has a fine soundtrack, and was actually pretty gripping for all 47 minutes.

The retro special effects are surprisingly effective; the ‘non-Euclidian geometry’ so beloved of Lovecraft makes some novel appearances toward the end. Thoroughly recommended.