#Imagine Michael Caine somewhere off to the side

[m0srael]

The Fourth Rule

A late submission, 1.3k for the @drarrymicrofic prompt: Bullet. Did I have a fever dream about stage magicians last night and immediately wake up to write this? Yes. Read on Ao3. Part 2.

The beery air in the small pub was stale and heavy with the stench of bodies packed too tightly. It was late--the crowd, whiskey-soaked and gin-drunk, were shouting and heckling them before they even stepped on stage.

Potter and Malfoy’s first few tricks were received with a barrage of insults and empty bottles. The pub’s patrons had no interest in simple card tricks or disappearing handkerchiefs. No, tonight Potter and Malfoy would have to pull out all the stops if they hoped to get paid.

Malfoy, whose back had been to the audience for some time, whirled around quickly. “IS THIS WHAT YOU CAME FOR?” He shouted over the cacophony of boos, waving a revolver in the faces in the front row. His brows were pinched in anger, eyes glinting dangerously in the low lamplight. Potter reached slowly into his jacket for his own firearm and watched as the crowd shrank back. A gasp, then a hush fell over the room.

“Well, who will volunteer?” Malfoy asked more quietly, his arms thrown wide, revolver pointing toward the ceiling. The room remained silent.

Potter and Malfoy paced around a small wooden table in the center of the stage, as if sizing each other up. They opened the chambers of their revolvers to show each other and the audience they were unloaded before setting them down on their respective sides of the table.

“We’re going to move a bullet from this side of the stage,” Potter said calmly, pointing to his right, “to that side of the stage,” he pointed to his left. “We’ll move a second bullet from this side of the stage,” he continued pointing to the left, “to that side of the stage,” he finished, swinging his finger back to his right.

“Without crossing,” Malfoy interjected, laying a length of rope down to bisect the stage where the little table stood, “this line.”

“We need two volunteers from the audience, please,” Potter said again, scanning the faces he could see with a detached expression. Finally, hands went up across the crowded room.

“You sir, what’s your name?” Potter pointed to a small, wiry gentleman just behind the first row of patrons. “Jones,” he replied. Potter approached the man with his palm outstretched, several bullets resting on it. “Jones, pick a bullet, any of them will do, they’re all the same. Give them each a thorough inspection if you like.” Malfoy did the same on the other side of the room, approaching a young woman whose name was Rose--she looked terrified to be singled out. The volunteers each selected their bullet.

Malfoy produced three differently-colored felt-tip pens from his breast pocket. “If you please, choose a pen and write your three initials on the tip of the bullet--one on each side and one on the very tip,” Malfoy instructed, extending his arm so the wiry gentleman could also take a pen. “Write clearly and boldly, the next time you see those bullets you may be a little...out of sorts.”

“Very good,” Potter nodded as the volunteers complied, “Jones, Rose, why don’t you show those bullets to your neighbors, let them see what you’ve written.” They did as instructed. “Now, I’d like you each, using that same pen, to draw a symbol on the shell of the bullet--ah, the body of the bullet, miss,” Potter gestured toward Rose without crossing the line.

Potter and Malfoy each took the bullets back from the volunteers, holding them up between thumb and forefinger so the crowd could watch them closely. “Rose, have you ever loaded a gun before?” Malfoy asked, chuckling as Rose shook her head quickly. “That’s alright, I reckon you gentlemen have,” he said, nodding toward the men surrounding Rose. “Rose, if you please, place the bullet in that chamber there--excellent, you’ll see that it is the next round to be fired,” Malfoy said as Rose pushed the bullet home with the tip of her forefinger. Potter guided Jones to do the same, encouraging his neighbors to gather around as he did so.

Slowly, Potter and Malfoy walked backwards onto the stage. They remained on their respective sides of the rope, holding their revolvers up and out to ensure they were in view the whole time. After replacing the loaded firearms on each side of the small table, they moved in sync to the back of the stage.

“Many people are frightened by handguns, and for good reason,” Potter said casually. The crowd was silent, hanging on his every word. As rehearsed, Potter and Malfoy slid out of their jackets at the same time and rolled up their sleeves. “There are four rules for handling a firearm that, if universally followed, would ensure no one was ever accidentally injured by a handgun again.” he finished.

“One,” said Malfoy as they each picked up a pair of goggles, “always treat every gun as if it were loaded, unless you’ve checked for yourself.”

“Two,” Potter said, as they both slid into thick, protective vests and fastened the ties behind their backs, “always be very aware of your target, as well as the area around and behind it.”

“Three,” Malfoy continued, “Keep your finger off the trigger until your target is in your sight and you are absolutely ready to fire.” They walked together to the front of the stage.

“Four. Never, and I mean never, point a gun at anything...unless you intend to destroy it.” Potter finished, making eye contact with every audience member he could see.

The room had fallen so silent that they could hear the clatter of carriages as they passed on the street above. The lamps on the walls winked and flickered, casting long shadows across the faces in the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Potter and Malfoy’s...Magic Bullet Catch” Malfoy announced, imperiously. They bowed deeply.

They turned to face one another across the little table, reaching for their revolvers at the same time. They held the guns before their chests, muzzles pointed upwards. As if on cue, they spun on their heels and began pacing slowly to either side of the stage. “Fair warning,” Potter said, not taking his eyes off of Malfoy as he spun back around, “this will be quite loud.” Each man extended his arm, aiming his loaded revolver at the other.

Every time they performed this illusion--at least a hundred times in rehearsal and a hundred more on stage so far--Harry couldn't be confident that Draco hadn’t swapped out the trick bullets for real ones. Every time, Harry locked eyes with him from across the stage and searched his steely gaze for any indication if this would be it. If this would be their final performance. Harry had never been able to tell. That never stopped him from raising his gun and aiming for Draco’s head, keeping his feet planted as Draco did the same.

The sound of Harry’s breath was loud in his ears as he and Draco stared at one another over their revolvers. Harry tried to communicate to Draco with his eyes that if this was it, if Draco had finally done what he’d threatened to do after their very first performance, it was okay. Harry loved him, he understood why Draco had to do it. He was still here, wasn’t he? He allowed his mouth to fall open as Draco did the same.

The simultaneous shots echoed riotously around the small pub. Rose screamed shrilly and the rest of the crowd burst into shouts and jeers of disbelief. For a moment the room was hazy with gunsmoke, heat, and crackling energy.

“Jones, my good man,” Draco shouted jovially, removing the bullet from between his teeth, “tell me, are these your initials here?”

Not this time, then, thought Harry as he lifted his hand to his mouth.

[niennavalier]

LUCIFER SEASON 5 TRAILER YAAASSSS FINALLY

Oh boy I’m excited and have thoughts and now I can finally put them somewhere and yaaaay

So I’m honestly really excited to see that they’re bringing in Michael - I don’t know that much about him (in terms of from the Bible or the comics) but between doing a little bit of reading about the character, and seeing his name crop up on occasion when people were speculating about this show, I’m super down to see what they do with him. Especially cause this seems like a very different version than the comics? Again, not well versed here and basing it off of Wikipedia, but he seems far more antagonistic, and in much more of a classic ‘villain’ type way, than in the comics.

Which makes me wonder even more at the fact that they gave us the reveal in the trailer? I mean, as opposed to the Cain reveal halfway through season 3. So now...what’s their plan for the season? Having the reveal before the season drops at all makes it seem like maybe, Michael is just a really small subplot that’ll get wrapped within the first few episodes (my brother’s opinion), just since you can’t drag out the mystery. And I agree, the confusion over this not being Lucifer won’t last long, but I also think that’s not a bad thing? I mean, for one, it’d be sorta weird to have Lucifer be completely gone for a significant amount of the show (even though Tom Ellis is still on screen regardless), but that’s just an opinion. But mostly, I really hope that means some great character development for Michael?

By which I mean, I hope they follow something like what they did for Eve last season - dropping her character in the trailer but having the big plot thing be something only tangentially related, and instead writing a whole arc for her - and not like what the Flash writers did with Savitar in season 3 or whatever.

Jumping fandoms, but for peoples who followed me during that period of Flash (because I actually jumped ship from that show a few seasons ago), maybe I mentioned that I did not like the Savitar reveal, and the subsequent writing choices. Because the reveal was obvious and SUPER LATE in the overall season. So they basically made a character and gave us these tantalizing hints of something really interesting to develop that character into...and then followed through on none of that, probably in part because there was just no time left to really do anything of note. Waste of a character, in my opinion.

So I’m hoping Lucifer goes the opposite way? Giving us the Michael reveal up front, because holding out on the reveal would get tedious, and also then keeping him around for whatever else happens in the season, giving him the time and space to breathe and develop as a character. Because, I mean, Lucifer’s twin brother, two sides of the same coin in the comics from what I was seeing, the brother who I guess fought against him in that War, but who seems to harbor a lot of resent toward Lucifer for reasons we don’t know? And acts more morally questionable than it seems like he does in the comics (probably because the show gives us such a sympathetic version of Lucifer but what do I know, I haven’t read the comics)?

Long story short: I really hope the early Michael reveal means some solid character development for him and everyone because I can imagine a lot of opportunities there

(Oh and side note, but 1) Eve wasn’t in the trailer but IIRC, Inbar Lavi was announced to be coming back? And her story was left so open ended, hopefully we’ll see her, if not in part 1, then in part 2. And 2) if you haven’t seen the Netflix Asia trailer, please watch it. It might be my favorite part because Lucifer and Chloe are adorable, fight me.)

[sagarbiswas]

#MAR #MAKAUT #lockdownactivities #MandatoryAdditionalRequirements Name of Activity: Review a Movie Name of the Movie: Interstellar

My Review: To infinity and beyond goes “Interstellar,” an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director’s ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside “The Wizard of Oz,” “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Gravity” in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.

We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point shortly, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for several radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot was first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

And oh, what dirt! As “Interstellar” opens, the world — or at least Cooper’s Steinbeckian corner of it — sits on the cusp of a second Dust Bowl, ravaged by an epidemic of crop blight, a silt-like haze hanging permanently in the air. (Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the “witness” segments from Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”) And as the crops die, so the Earth’s atmosphere becomes richer in nitrogen and poorer in oxygen, until the time when global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepards as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

The mission itself is a relatively intimate affair, comprised of Cooper, Brand’s own scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and the excellent David Gyasi), and a chatty, sarcastic, ex-military security robot called TARS (brilliantly voiced by Bill Irwin in a sly nod to Douglas Rain’s iconic HAL 9000), which looks like a walking easel but proves surprisingly agile when the going gets tough. And from there, “Interstellar” has so many wonderful surprises in store — from casting choices to narrative twists and reversals — that the less said about it the better. (Indeed, if you really don’t want to know anything more, read no further.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret, and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

On the one hand, the movie marvels at the brave men and women throughout history who have dedicated themselves, often at great peril, to the greater good of mankind. On the other, because Nolan is a psychological realist, he’s acutely aware of the toil such lives may take on those who choose to lead them, and that even “the best of us” (as one character is repeatedly described) might not be immune from cowardice and moral compromise. Some people lie to themselves and to their closest confidants in “Interstellar,” and Nolan understands that everyone has his reasons. Others compensate by making the most selfless of sacrifices. Perhaps the only thing trickier than quantum physics, the movie argues, is the nature of human emotion.

Nolan stages one thrilling set piece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. VFX supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain

Popular Culture (DVS Press): If you needed more proof that the obsession with fictional corporate franchises has a religious overtone to it, here is a major filmmaker advertising just that. When my viewers were upset about the corporate destruction of Star Wars, calling the franchise a cultural institution, I thought it a bit hyperbolic – after all, these are just stories, and you can’t uncreate what George Lucas did. I see things better now. Star Wars is part of the religious reverence for popular franchises.

RPG (Matthew J. Constantine): Way back in the 80s when I was a wee lad and just getting into tabletop RPGs, I used to see Space 1889 on the shelf at a local game store and I thought it looked pretty cool. Somewhere around there, my father picked up a copy, and I used to thumb through it a bunch.  There was something in the setting that really hit a lot of my buttons. I was an Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne fan, so that was probably enough. But the setting had something that drew me in.

Comic Books (ICV2): Marvel Comics announced Conan the Barbarian: Coming of Conan, the first volume of collected Conan books restored for The Original Marvel Years Epic Collection, for release into trade in June 2020. Conan’s adventures would become legend, but before he became king, he was Conan the Barbarian. In this new trade paperback, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith bring Robert E. Howard’s barbarian to four-color life, and have restored the art to match the epic majesty of their original editions.

Cinema (Amatopia): So this Birds of Prey movie didn’t do so hot. The usual suspects are blaming misogyny among the movie-going public. The other usual suspects are blaming a marketing campaign that specifically told men that this movie was not for them. Now, both are apocryphal, as I have not found men telling other men not to see this movie because it features women, and I have also not found people involved with the making of the movie telling men “This movie is not for you.”

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): we now know that Tolkien was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature at least three times: in 1961, when he was nominated by C. S. Lewis. in 1967, when his name appeared on the (alphabetical) long list as #58 of 70 nominees. In 1969, when he was #90 on the long list of 103 names. So far as I know he did not make the short list any of these times.

Weird Fiction & Appendix N (Goodman Games): Without August Derleth (1909-1971), you probably wouldn’t have that Cthulhu bumper sticker on your car, that Cthulhu for President poster, and certainly not that Plushie Cthulhu you have staring down at you from your geek-memorabilia shelf.  Not that Cthulhu would not exist, but he (it?) would be just one more forgotten character in a series of stories by an author unknown except to the most ardent of horror literati. Howard Philip Lovecraft’s greatest creation and most if not all of his fiction would have passed into obscurity if not for August Derleth’s founding of Arkham House publishing.

Fiction (DMR Books): These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant. I first read Ray’s fiction in the doorstopper anthology The Weird by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer which reprinted his stories “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street.” Reading these stories, I felt like I did when I first read Lovecraft. They were tales of cosmic horror of immense power and imagination. I decided I would seek out more of his fiction.

RPG (Black Gate): For twenty years, the folks at Privateer Press have been creating games, primarily set in their Iron Kingdoms steampunk fantasy setting. They began with a series of RPG volumes, including an award-winning trilogy of adventures from 2001. These adventures, later collected into The Witchfire Trilogy, was built on the D20 System from Dungeons and Dragons 3E. Then Privateer Press really came into their own with the introduction of the Warmachine miniature wargame, focusing on armies that control massive metallic warjacks, one of the iconic creatures from their Iron Kingdoms setting.

T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When I was in graduate school, one of my

favorite television shows was Highlander.  I’d seen the first and second movies, and while I’d enjoyed them, it was the TV show that really captured my imagination and made me think about immortals and immortality. A movie is limited to approximately two hours. By contrast, a weekly show has a lot more time to develop characters, backstory, plots and subplots, and story-arcs that can last for months or even years.

Fiction (Epoch Times): In 1907, the man who composed these verses won the Noble Prize for Literature at the remarkably young age of 41. He also wrote hundreds of short stories and several novels. Many of these were made into films in the 20th century, among which were “The Jungle Book,” “Kim,” “Gunga Din,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” “Captains Courageous,” “Soldiers Three,” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” (Reader, if you haven’t seen this last film, starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer, treat yourself to a great movie this winter.)

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): A couple of years ago, Superversive Press announced a series of 12 volumes each containing short stories based on the classic planetary system. 9 were based on the planets, and two were based on the sides of the moon. Each volume would contain stories science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, with everything in between. No genre style was off limits. All that mattered was matching tone and theme. As a themed series of short story anthologies, it was quite ambitious.

Retro-Science Fiction (25 Years Later): There are two closely-knit, though not necessarily always interchangeable, subgenres of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Raypunk, or in architectural design circles referred to as Raygun Gothic, is the retrofuture with an eye for a bright future. Atompunk generates dystopian vibes and warns of a dreaded future in which the atomic bomb desecrated all humankind. Atompunk is bleak and afraid. Raypunk is quite excited for what tomorrow has in store.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): Bollywood often gets bandied about as an alternative to Hollywood fare by those cut back on consumption of it’s anti-American resentment.  Taken in by the flashy colors, the obvious national pride of the productions, and for some strange reason the song and dance numbers that break out on the regular, they seek solace in alien spectacle.  Personally, I find the sheer foreign-ness of Bollywood off-putting in much the same way I find anime incomprehensible. . . Enter Furious, the Russian made story of 17 brave warriors who stood up to a full Mongol horde.

Art (Down the Tubes): The Windsor-Smith Studio announced the completion of Monsters, the long awaited graphic novel by Barry, last December, and that the project is on track for a mid-2020 release, but a publisher was not revealed. Assuming it will be launched through traditional distribution routes and not solely through the Windsor-Smith Studio official web site, you’d expect a solicitation through Diamond Previews might soon be in the offing.

Fantasy Fiction (Superversive SF): To both spend time with my children and give them literary food to build their minds, I recently read to them THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. For them, it was the second reading, but they were too young to remember the first. This time, they were begging for me to read more each night. The stories of Taran and the companions, Fflewddur Fflam, Gurgi, and Eilonwy not only filled their imaginations with adventure but taught them how dragons can be slain (paraphrasing of G.K. Chesterton).

Tolkien (Tentaculii): In August 1955 L. Sprague de Camp reviewed new Conan books and The Fellowship of the Ring, in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1955. Worth reading right across the spread, as it’s ‘all of a piece’. For those who have somehow not yet enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, note that his review has plot spoilers for the first volume. At that time the second volume was not yet published. Camp must surely have here been the first to draw the comparison between the modus operandi of the ring in the Conan novelette “The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932) and The Lord of the Rings.

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/