Blue-3425 is going to die. He’s okay with it too, because he’s signed on to be a Holehead. The Holeheads are expendable troops fitted with psychic tumours that transmit everything they see back to Earth. In return for this brave action, and, of course, their deaths, any surviving members will receive a large payout. Holeheads can be terminal disease cases, criminals, lunatics or in the case of Blue-3425, an idiot with a broken heart. The Blister, where they go to die, is a nightmare, an otherworldly war zone where combustibles don’t work and near silent battles are fought with clockwork guns.

But no one told Six Gun Gorilla that.

Si Spurrier has patiently been carving a name out for himself as one of the most interesting comic writers on the planet for years now. His work on Crossed: Wish You Were Here is uniquely intelligent, complex and horrifying whilst in X-Men:Legacy he led the charge that’s seen the Marvel Now! X-books become some of the most fun titles on the market. Now, he’s turned his attention to something more unusual, with Six-Gun Gorilla.

This book is a puzzle, and the process of reading it is also the process of solving it. We land in the same place Blue-3425 does and at the same time, meaning we learn at the same pace and are invested in his fate the moment his boots hit the ground. The Blister is a memorably horrific warzone and Jeff Stokeley’s slightly frantic, detail heavy art really goes to town in showing you just how awful a place it is. This is also where Spurrier’s trademark sense of invention comes in as, in short order, we’re introduced to the Holeheads, the clockwork weaponry that is the only thing that will work on the Blister and the huge, living trooper carriers that are used there. There are wild west trappings, clearly, but there’s also a deep, well thought out world underneath them. The book never feels gimmicky, and the war is both very real and very dangerous. Andre May’s colour work really comes into its own here too, drenching the Blister in blood red and orange until you can almost feel the heat.

As the book progresses, Blue-3425 does his job, showing both us and the people back on Earth, the war through his eyes. He’s even given a mission that tugs on the heartstrings, a dying general asking him to return a watch to his wife on Earth. Blue-3425, having had his heart broken recently, refuses to do it. Blue-3425, being an incurable romantic, then takes it back and sets off. The only problem is, the watch isn’t for the General’s wife, it’s something of desperate strategic value. It also makes Blue-3425 a target, even more so than before, and by the end of the issue he’s up to his neck in trouble.

Enter Six Gun Gorilla, stage left.

The absurdity of Six Gun is off-set by his sheer size. Stokely and May combine to give him incredible physical presence, which only makes his actions more impressive. Six Gun wades through soldiers without seeming to be bothered by them and the violence is casual, brutal and fast. As the book ends, Blue-3425 has a mission and a protector and no idea about the true nature of either. There are intriguing hints though, with Blue-3425’s past job, as a pulp fiction librarian hinting Six Gun may be a figment of his information. For the moment though, he’s a colossal, polite, impossibility and the only thing standing between Blue-3425 and the death he thought he welcomed. It’s a beautifully done reveal at the end of an opening issue full of them. From the first time we meet Blue-3425 to the first time we see the Blister, and Six Gun, this is a beautiful, feverish comic book about stories, idiots, heroes, war and a Gorilla with a gun. Bring on issue two.

Six Gun Gorilla is published by Boom! Issue 1 is available now from all good comic retailers and Comixology. Further details of the book can be found on Simon’s tumblr, here.

Nights of the Round Table, the new webseries from Redshirt Films is set on gaming night for a group torn asunder. Mille (Jennifer Jordan) needs four players for her games to work and she only has two; Max (Arron Dennis) and Harmony (Amelia Tyler). Max is a supermarket shelf stacker with delusions of competency; Harmony is a rampaging monster with a fondness for psychological destruction whilst Millie is the nicest human being on the planet. Until, of course, she reaches for the little hammers…

Thrown, completely against his will, into all this is Sam (James Rotchell). Sam and Max were best friends in school but drifted apart, Max to the wonderful world of shelves, Sam to the wonderful world of having his heart broken, stamped on, burnt and fed to him. Oh and being a Barrister. Now, back in town, Sam is invited to the group for game night. But who will be their fourth? Why is Max so proud that he cooks his own cooking? And what leads to the opening NERF-gun execution sequence set many weeks after the main plot?

Writer and director Jamie McKeller is best known for his work on the excellent I Am Tim and there’s the same rapid-fire visual wit here. McKeller throws everything at the screen the way Sam Raimi does when he’s invested, switching film stock, tone, breaking the fourth wall and throwing in nods to everything from Scott Pilgrim to Miller’s Crossing and of course Spaced. There’s the same joke every five seconds pace to it and they range from good to great. The pay-off for the character introduction scenes is my favourite.

The cast clearly get the joke and each one of them raises the script every time they speak. Amelia Tyler’s cheerfully unpleasant Harmony is great fun, as is Jennifer Jordan’s quiet, polite, nice Millie. Both get a chance to really cut loose around the halfway mark of this episode and Jordan’s delivery, along with Tyler’s wide-eyed lunacy really drive the point home.

On the boy’s side of the table, Arron Dennis turns Max into a Bizleyian tower of barely contained ego. He’s clearly in control of his life (But does he launder his own laundry as well as cook his own cooking?), clearly the smartest person in the room and clearly utterly delusional. Just like Tyler and Jordan, Dennis is one half of a great double act, with James Rotchell rounding the cast out as Sam. Rotchell is the control, the ‘normal’ person but never, ever the straight man. Many of the best jokes are his and his constantly polite, slightly confused response to the group’s lunacy is really rather sweet. Although I give him less than two more episodes before he’s as crazy as they are.

Four people sitting round a table, waiting to play a game. The best comedy often comes from the simplest premise and this is no exception. Funny, fast and too clever for its’ characters’ own good, Nights of the Round Table is brilliant. It’s Friends for the Savage Worlds generation, Spaced with iphones and thanks to the wonders of the intertubes, here it is!

That got away from me but my point is this; soup is not a food you would ever look at as…exciting. Vibrant. Pulse-pounding. At no point, at all, would Hugh Jackman walk away from a bowl of soup in slow motion as it exploded behind him. Soup, ladies and gentlemen, is the British film industry. Desperately enthusiastic, endlessly hard working and with the odd exception (The movies of Edgar Wright and most of Guy Ritchie’s work), frequently a bit dull.

I know, I know, scandalous blah blah look at Harry Potter (that’s actually a fair point) blah blah Colin Thing at the Oscars in 1723 yelling ‘Verily, the British doth come!’. But here’s the thing, British movies are terrified of being liked by people. The natural reticence of the national character is carried over to our culture and as a result, so many British movies feel the need to apologize for existing that they actually forget to be exciting.

As film so soup. But fear not! For Our High Lord Jamie

(We lug in his name)

Walks amongst us and he sees our pain! He understands our need! He lives here so he realizes the frequently pissing miserable weather means soup is a big deal! And he knows, he knows that when you look in your bowl and, on occasion, see something that looks a little like an unusually sad cup of tea with some grumpy onions in it, that is not good enough. He is here to help, he has come to save soup for us all and his principle ingredient is…

RICE!

What, really? VICTOR! The suspects!

So what do we have here? Well:

-Olive oil

-Basmati rice

-5 big Portobello mushrooms

-An onion

-Some garlic

-A stock cube

-Single cream

-And lurking shamefacedly off shot, some Camembert, an apple and a Ciabatta loaf made from breadmaker mix.

Let’s talk about breadmakers for a moment; I love them to tiny little pieces. Firstly because they enable my ‘WHAT’S THIS DO?!’ school of baking where I’ll throw a thing into another thing to see if it tastes like a third thing. Secondly because they’re fast and simple and thirdly because every now and again buying a pack of magic bread dust, adding it to the Breadifier 5000, adding some water and coming back an hour and a half later to find you have dough to play with is just really good fun. The apple and Camembert were, I don’t know…checking Twitter. Yeah, let’s say that.

So, first off, chop the Portobellos (And other mushrooms if you want, as I apparently did), garlic and the onion and fry them off for a while.

When they’re soft, put them, along with 100g of Bastmati rice, in a big pan. The volume of soup constructed will seem to work in directly correlation with the amount of soup produced. I know that has a lot more to do with volume of ingredients rather than pan but hey, this is why my Master’s Degree is in Contemporary English Literature, not Advanced Soupology.

Anyway, add a liter of stock and put it onto boil with the lid on. If this is starting to sound familiar, then guess what? It is! Because isn’t there something else we’re waiting for?

Nope, still not done.

Whilst this is boilerfying (A word now), make up the toastlets. Normally I would have sever issue with anything that implied a cap on my bread consumption like the suffix ‘-let’ does but here it works. I went for ciabatta in a box but French bread works too, as, I would imagine, would drop scones or modified pancakes, weirdly. The point here, weird as it is, is not the bread. The point is that this is a one or two bite adjunct to the meal. Ciabatta’s ideal for this and so I went with that but this whole section of the meal has a huge EXPERIMENT WITH ME neon sign over the top of it so please do.

Then, add the secret ingredient. As this photo shows, that ingredient is clearly apple. I used a Mandolin to slice this, hence it’s wafair-theen nature. The Mandolin and I have danced several times since then and it has tasted my blood just as I have…touched it’s…plastic. Regardless the thing’s huge fun but remarkably stabby and I don’t have photos of it this time round.

So, place the wafair-theen apple on the toastlet, then place the Stinky Cheese Du Jour on top of that, like so:

Then check to see if the Squash is done?

Of course not.

The soup, however, is!

But still requires Soupification. To do that, pour it into a blender:

And blend it like it’s DAMNED or, at least, until it’s a thick, but liquid, consistency. This is the secret of the recipe, the Basmati breaking down under heat and its starches thickening the soup so you’ve got a lot of fluidity but a lot of flavor with it. It will, I warn you, take a while. I blended this for about two straight minutes and even then there were detectable rice grains. A couple of weeks later, when we unfroze the leftovers, we actually blended it a third time and that got it to a decent consistency. Experiment with it, cut or add liquid as needed because the beauty of the recipe is the flavor stays pretty solid whatever you do.

Then, pop the toastlets out of the oven and plate them, put the soup in bowls, add a dash of cream across the top and take the photo from entirely too far away!

Hurray!

I know ‘Check out my bowl of awesome grey goo’ doesn’t exactly sound like the Michael Bay explode-a-thon I implied soup needs to be at the top of the meal but trust me it actually works. It’s incredibly tasty and the toastlets are stunningly good, the wafair-theen apple transferring it’s sweetness to the bread and the saltiness of your Stinky Cheese of choice wrapping around them both. If this soup was a movie, it certainly wouldn’t be a blockbuster but it would be a cult movie that people could quote from years after they saw it. And let’s face it, that’s a step up.

Things I learned;

-Blending takes time. Make sure you give it enough.

-I am dreadful at remembering ingredients for the group shot. Either that or I need to ban my ingredients from checking Twitter.

And that’s mushroom soup, as well as a restart for this column. There’ll be another this week, covering my first recipe from the Bread Book of St Paul Of Hollywood and then all sorts of stuff. Whoopie pies, Brioche, more soup, guest recipes, it’s all coming down the line and it all tastes great. See you then.

Anyone who tells you any form of writing is easy either has no idea what they’re talking about or is lying to you. There isn’t a genre, sub-genre or field on the planet that’s easy to work in, not one. Hell, even bad writing requires diligence and hard work. Every single genre is difficult, every single genre is different and every single genre is already so stuffed with writers that getting noticed isn’t quite impossible, but definitely has a similar postcode.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that nothing is closed to you. Put a writer in front of a keyboard and give them thinking time and they can change the world. It may just be their world they change, the warm glow of satisfaction at finishing a project lighting their day. It may be something much, much larger. You don’t know until you start. Until you look at the mountain in front of you and start climbing it.

That brings us to Mur. Mur Lafferty has spent the last decade or so patiently doing two things; writing some of the best contemporary fantasy on the planet and helping other writers learn how to find things a little less difficult. She’s the host and creator of I Should Be Writing, a podcast about process and progress and everything that comes in between. Mur’s a student not just of the game but of how the game is played, constantly willing to try new avenues, approach her work in new ways and constantly push to a be better writer and a better editor. Every project she does she tries something new and every project is worthwhile. I can especially recommend the Heaven series, a blisteringly inventive set of novellas that open with the main characters being killed and dive into one of the most intelligent, open-minded approaches to every form of spirituality I’ve ever seen.

That brings us to Zoe, the heroine of Mur’s latest novel. The Shambling Guide to New York City. Zoe is a travel writer and editor, and a good one too. Returning to New York at the end of a bad relationship, Zoe’s running on fumes when she sees a job for a travel editor at a publisher she’s never heard of. She makes contact and is told she wouldn’t want the job. She pushes and is told the same. She pushes again and finally, Phil, her prospective boss, show her the truth. The job is for his publishing company, run out of a refurbished New York theatre and staffed entirely by supernatural creatures. Phil is a vampire, Morgen is a water sprite, John is an incubus and the rest of the staff include a Welsh death goddess and a variety of zombies.

Phil expects Zoe to run. Zoe doesn’t. She gets the job and the moment she does, she finds herself viewing the city in an entirely different light. New York is full of life, all forms of life and the only reason she hasn’t seen the other kinds before is she hasn’t thought to look. Now she’s paid to not just look, but write about and for them, and they’re all she can see. Along with the demented old lady who claims to be a former CIA assassin and Arthur, her new next door neighbor of course…

Mur makes three very clever choices in how the book is built and they all pay off. The first is to put Zoe through the wringer. There’s no hint of the usual wide-eyed rabbit-in-headlights wonder and endless curve balls that urban fantasy authors use as excuses to carpet bomb you with exposition. Zoe comes in hard, hits a vertical learning curve and falls, frequently. She never stops getting back up, never stops trying and never stops having a hard time. This is really smartly observed writing, taking the normal steep learning curve every office job has and adding monsters, supernatural politics, cannibalism and underground night clubs to it. The mild antagonism Phil shows towards her gives Zoe something to push against and gives the book a base line of conflict that really drives it along. No one’s giving her a break, no one thinks to make allowances for the human in the room and Zoe never stops working around it. You want her to win, as much to wipe the smile off Phil’s face as anything else.

That uncompromising view of Zoe is carried over into every aspect of Coterie, or supernatural, society. This isn’t a cuddly group of refugees hiding out from humans, but rather a series of connected fiefdoms, small groups who mostly keep to themselves are content to either hide from, or feed from, humanity. One of the book’s best sequences sees Phil take Zoe out to dinner to a restaurant that doesn’t cater for humanity. Zoe’s gradual realization of just where she is combines with Mur’s atmospheric writing to hit you with the same sensory overload as she is. This is a world where blood is drawn by age and nationality like wine and zombies have friends in the local morgues who sell them brains. The danger is constant, not out of malice, but because for Zoe, the ecosystem of the city has changed. She’s a lone human surrounded by creatures that could kill her in an instant, and at least one of them wants her work done on deadline. They’re not evil, most of them anyway, it’s just who they are. These are nuanced monsters, characters rather than thinly veiled pieces of research and each of them has their own agenda and own way of life. Zoe, as a travel editor, gets to find this out and so do we, excerpts from the book Zoe’s writing appearing as chapter breaks in the book. This is where Mur really cuts loose, and the sheer invention on display here is amazing. My personal favorite is the reveal that the pigeons in the city are a group mind and a neutral party, favored by everyone for their fierce business acumen.

This level of invention is one of the things that sets Shambling Guide far above its peers. Mur has put huge amounts of thought into not only how the Coterie operate but the effect they have on the city and why they can exist side by side with humanity. The book excerpts are the first real hint of this level of detail but as the book goes on it gets explored through each group Zoe meets and, in particular, Public Works, the human organization who police the Coterie. No one’s life is quite as simple as they think it is, and everyone is, initially, secure in the assumption that it is. Zoe’s arrival, the book and everything that follows shakes New York society up in a way which feels absolutely real and lays the groundwork for some major changes in the sequel.

The third, and cleverest, thing Mur does is choose Zoe as her lead. Starting her from a position of emotional injury, Mur walks her through everything talked about above and more. In the space of one novel Zoe learns how to fight, puts those skills into action multiple times, saves people’s lives, endangers her own, talks down something no one in the city has recognized let alone seen before and still delivers the book on deadline. She gets hurts, physically and emotionally and never, once stops, even though she really wants to. This is a story about a character defining her life, taking control of it one day at a time and that’s so universal an experience that anyone reading this will find themselves relating to Zoe. It helps that she’s funny of course. Mur’s deadpan sense of humor shines through in the book and, yet again, is used with real intelligence. The jokes aren’t here for the book to lean on, they’re here as a defense mechanism for Zoe against the increasingly demented circumstances of her life.  Given that she starts off trying out for a job and finishes up fighting for the life of the city against something impossible is pretty understandable.

The Shambling Guide to New York is about difficulty. It’s about how hard it is to write, how hard it is to adjust to a new job and most of all, how hard it is to make your life your own. That last is the thing that Zoe and her colleagues have in common, a constant need to take control of their life and feel comfortable and at home in their city. The fact they succeed, and that the journey is so entertaining, is testament to both Zoe and Mur’s skills as writers. No form of writing is easy and urban fantasy is no exception, but when it’s this good? No form of writing is more fun.

The Shambling Guide to New York is available now from The Book Depository and Amazon.

Sorry I’m not around much at the moment. It’s not so much that I’m writing ALL THE THINGS as it is I am writing a very large thing that takes up most of my time. I’m coming up on deadline so hopefully I should not only be able to talk about the very large thing but it’ll be finished and I can write some other, smaller things.

Anyway, in the meantime, here’s some a thing you should be aware of. SFBuzz is a short SF fiction magazine founded by Brian Edwards of SciFind. Brian is one of the hardest working, most constantly enthusiastic and engaged people I know and SFBuzz plans to build to on that. The magazine is set to feature articles covering the genre and short fiction, with Sam Stone and Ruth Wheeler already confirmed for stories. The team includes good friends Helen Armfield,  a tech, magic and music journalist amongst her numerous talents and Alan Baxter, author of over 40 short stories, two novels and the only Kung Fu instructing heavy metal author I know. Oh, and me. They’re great people and the project deserves to succeed. It has 12 days to go as I write this and can be found here.

This is taken from The Heist, the largely extraordinary first full length album by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Years ago, on Band Aid, Bono was described as singing like he’d just been released from prison. Macklemore raps the same way, especially this, a tribute to legendary sports broadcaster Dave Niehaus that had such an impact when it was first played in Seattle, the station had calls from Mariners fans who pulled over to the side of the road to listen.

I’ve never played, or seen, a full game of baseball but I love this. It’s quietly, politely, one of the oddest rap numbers I’ve ever heard. Firstly, it’s about baseball. Secondly it’s about Dave Niehaus.  Thirdly, it’s about Macklemore’s childhood and fourthly? Fourthly it’s about America. Or rather, an idea which is very important to America.

Listen to that piano line under ‘We had just made history.’ There’s a lump in my throat just writing about it. It’s perfect, image, lyric and music combining to hit you not with aggression or posturing, but joy. The message is obvious;

Everyone gave up on these guys.

They made it anyway.

So can you.

‘My Oh My’ is about the passionate love America, one of the original underdogs, still has for the underdog ideal; coming from behind, winning against the odds, making something of yourself.  It’s an idea Macklemore embodies. This is a man who dragged himself through rehab not once but twice and, instead of covering it up or putting it behind him, nails his past to the table and dissects it so he, and we, can learn from it.

It’s an extraordinary song, one that wraps the romance of the underdog, and the basic, cheerful assertiveness that’s one of the best aspects of America’s national character in childhood reminiscences, Macklemore’s trademark humour (Look at how happy he looks in the video) and one of the best pieces  of production Ryan Lewis has ever done.  But where it really shines is the third verse. Listen to how it builds and builds and BUILDS, that quiet, slightly mournful horn line that’s somehow proud and tired and mischievous all at once, underscoring Macklemore throwing himself harder and harder at the words. There’s one line in particular that hits me right between the eyes;

And compete against the fear that is in me that’s my only barrier and I swear I’m going to break that

That’s the moment where the two men tie it all together; baseball, Seattle, the underdog, the possibly celestial voice of Dave Niehaus, their impossibly unlikely careers, success, failure and everything in between. It’s a mission statement and an ideal, a life line and a target all at once. It’s amazing, an extraordinary piece of music near the end of an extraordinary album and one which, despite never having been to a baseball game, means a huge amount to me. The sheer love for what he’s doing, what Dave Niehaus’ voice means to him, for the story of his life wrapped around the story of what was, for a while, a magnificently dreadful baseball team all comes belting out of him. It’s a song about heroes, written by a man who can’t quite see that his actions are themselves heroic. It’s also your Sunday moment of Zen.

Adapted from the PD James novel, the story centers on Theo Faron. Theo is a former activist turned bureaucrat approached by his wife, Julian Taylor, to acquire transit papers for a young woman. What Theo discovers in short order is that Julian is part of the Fishes, an immigrant rights group and that Kee, an immigrant, is pregnant. What makes her unique is that this is the first pregnancy for 18 years. What makes her dangerous is that the UK is one of the last stable nations left, and has only survived because of a right wing extremist government cracking down on the thousands of immigrants flocking to the country. Pursued by elements of the Fishes as well as government forces, Theo races to get Kee to the Human Project, a scientific team in the Azores working on curing the global infertility crisis.

It’s an extraordinary movie, not least for the central performances from Clive Owen as Theo, Julianne Moore as Julian, Claire-Hope Ashitey as Kee and a heartbreaking cameo from Michael Caine as Theo’s friend Jasper. Cuaron builds on those four central performances, as well as excellent supporting turns from Pam Ferris, Chiwetel Eijofor, Danny Huston and Charlie Hunnam to create a movie which stares the end of humanity square in the eye for it’s entire run time. He does this through vast takes, locking the camera off for minutes at a time to create long sweeping tracking shots that drag you into the action and deny the audience the luxury of distance. A flamboyant circling shot around a moving car becomes the agonizing record of a major character’s final moments, whilst a desperate attempt to jump start the same car later in the movie is unbearably tense. However, the technique is best used in this sequence;

A lesser director and scriptwriter would have had the religious awe the soldiers view the baby with as an emotional climax, a moment of catharsis that leads to the eventual healing of society. Cuaron and his fellow writers (Timothy J.Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby and apparently an uncredited Clive Owen too) ere  more realistic than that, with the fact hostilities break out again almost as soon as the baby is clear tells you everything you need to know about the movie’s approach to human nature. Unflinching, clear eyed, never looking away even when we’re at our absolute worst.

Or maybe, just at our most absolute. Which brings us to low-Earth orbit, and Gravity.

Reportedly the opening shot, although not actually done continuously, is designed to appear to be a single, 17-minute long take. The idea of those long takes that he excels at being used for a story about the ultimate form of isolation isn’t just fascinating, it’s honestly a little disconcerting. That last shot, of the astronaut spinning end over end, in the center of nothing but endless black is going to be chilling on a cinema screen let alone an IMAX one, and the idea of using space, negative or otherwise, and time to tell the story of what seems to be the last few hours in these people’s lives, is something that Cuaron is uniquely suited for.

What’s really got my attention though, are the hints of something deeper, such as;

-There are at least two shots in there showing Sandra Bullock’s character without a backpack. That’s where the oxygen in a spacesuit is stored and I’m curious as to whether or not that’s simply an unfinished shot, or if she has to take the pack off at one point.

-There’s what seems to be an orange and white cloth or inflatable structure on the space station. It looks like it could be a flag, but there’s also a hint of structure to it as though it were an inflatable module of some kind.

-There are two shots in there of a woman in a Russian spacesuit. It’s dark rather than white and they go by too fast to see if it’s Bullock’s character but there definitely seems to be something different about the suit. As an aside, my spaceflight geek is positively giddy about the fact the technology looks right. The space station clearly has a Soyuz lifeboat (Maybe that’s where they got the suit?), the shuttle looks right, the suits look right. Everything looks contemporary which, in manned spaceflight, means everything looks a little dated.

To say nothing of the unanswered questions; what causes the catastrophic failure not only of the shuttle, but the space station? Is there going to be an in movie explanation for the space shuttle (Which has now been mothballed) being put back into use? What sort of work are the astronauts carrying out? What consequences does the station falling have for the world below? There’s the potential for Cuaron to tell a massive story using just two people, to tell a story of humanity at its most absolute, on a massive canvas. Gravity‘s released in October meaning I should have enough of a run up to see it in IMAX without the vertigo being too bad.

It’s available as a wallpaper, and a print, and I would very, very strongly recommend you pick it up because, well, look at the thing. Dean has packed that so full of the greatest characters in modern pop culture and genre fiction that I actually lose count. Even better, he’s placed them in ways that suggest stories we’ve not even seen. John Constantine hanging out with Morpheus, Jack O’Neill and Pete Venkman clearly having a droll off in the bottom right hand corner and Lois Lane and Barbara Gordon, two of the driving forces of the DC universe, front and centre by the console. Then there’s Wesley Crusher hanging out with Harry Potter (And is Wesley holding Indiana Jones’ hat?), Mal and the Crow in the middle distance, Sherlock and Indy and Lion-O and He-Man standing shoulder to shoulder, the list goes on and on. Then there’s the subtle little character beats that focus on the child in the centre of the image; 11 greeting them a little formally, Superman, ever the farm boy, giving a big friendly wave and Batman, his arm quietly, definitely, around the kid’s shoulder. The message is in their actions as much as it is in the title; You’ll be Safe Here. It’s an astonishing piece of work by an astonishing artist who’s clearly as desperately fond of what happens when you combine stories as I am. After all, Dean also produced this;

I would watch the living hell out of that show.

I found this piece on tumblr, via morganoperandi. Morgan’s post about it is, well, it’s perfect. Morgan talks about geek culture, why it should be an incredibly positive force, what happens when it isn’t and what we can all try and do to change that. It’s short, simple, inspiring and, frankly, essential reading. This amazing infinite toybox we all have access to is, far too often, a pretty depressing place to be. One day it’s the pain of something you love being cancelled, the next you’re being shouted down because you haven’t been a fan as long as someone else has and, for some frankly bizarre reason, that means you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Then there’s the causal marginalization of your gender, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your body type or the growing fear that if you say anything it’ll either be ignored or, worse still, noticed. Let’s face it, there are open brushfire wars in a lot of areas of fandom, pretty much all the time, and the offhand bullying that can go hand in hand with them drives people away even as others run towards it yelling ‘FIGHT!FIGHT!’. We can, and should, be better than this. We can, and should, all be safe here. Thanks to Dean and Morgan for providing such a powerful reminder of that.

There’s an image I’ve had on my desktop for a while now. It’s a piece of concept art from Dead Space 2 and it shows Isaac Clarke, surely the most unlucky hero in modern science fiction games, boosting out into hard vacuum. Behind him, a nightmare of bony swords and skinned bodies is erupting from the ship Isaac’s making his escape from. The Necromorphs, the warped, stretched creatures that take a human body and turn it into something designed to kill as horrifically as possible. Isaac is flying backwards, aiming down his body at them and firing as he goes.

What he’s firing is, of course, an arc welder.

That image, for me, sums up everything I love about the Dead Space games. Science, and specifically, engineering, versus a particularly twisted kind of faith, the sort that rewards belief in it with a prolonged death. It’s a perfect, almost binary image, the two competing schools of thought in the game wrapped up in one piece of art.  But the real kicker, for me, is the arc welder. The fact that Isaac constantly has to use his ingenuity to defend himself far more than the traditional parade of firepower you get in games like this. Isaac Clarke isn’t just an astronaut, he’s an engineer, a man used to solving problems with the best tool he has, his brain. Like I said in a previous post, Isaac Clarke, is Dave Lister in hell.

Which brings us to Dead Space 3, the most recent and, in some ways, least loved of the franchise. The game opens with you walking through the snow, centuries in the past, on a world called Tau Volantis. You take the role of Tim Kaufman,a soldier, sent to retrieve something from a downed spacecraft for Doctor Earl Serrano. It’s slow going, you have no ammo, no real idea of where you are without triggering the direction marker and when you do, it leads you to the shattered, broken-backed wreck of a just-crashed shuttle.

And there’s ammo outside.

That’s enough to key you in on the upcoming attack but it’s not enough to prepare you for what follows. After retrieving the item you were sent for, the ship crashes down a mountainside around you, as you frantically try and avoid the larger pieces. Finally, you make it to the bottom, hand the item back to your commanding officer and he thanks you, kills you, then himself.

It’s an immersive, grim opening chapter that subtly keys you into two things; firstly, that this isn’t just about Isaac’s experiences on the Ishimura and the Sprawl, and secondly that the tone here is slightly different. Dead Space 3 is the Aliens to the previous two games Alien, something which becomes apparent very quickly. The chapter immediately following brings you to Isaac. hiding out in one of the cities on the Moon, when, as is always the case, his hand is forced. The Unitologists rise up and, as Earth and the Moon burn, Isaac is rescued by the last surviving members of an EarthGov military unit, Captain Robert Norton and Sergeant John Carver. and taken by them to Tau Volantis. Ellie Langford, introduced in the previous game and Isaac’s former love interest (Presumably his tendency to look blankly into space was a turn off), took a team there to follow up on rumours that it was the Marker homeworld. Barely escaping before Jacob Danik, the head of the Unitologists, triggers a Necromorph outbreak on the Moon, the men travel to Tau Volantis to rescue Ellie and shut the markers down once and for all.

Except, this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple.

Dead Space 3 has the most fluid, varied plot and mechanics, all of which change depending on which of the game’s three primary locations you’re in. The first, and arguably, most memorable is the shattered, centuries-old fleet that you jump into above Tau Volantis. This is the point where game mechanics and plot combine perfectly, as in short order the ship you’re on is destroyed, you have to run protection on the only capsule to make it out, dock it with one of the ships, clear it of Necromorphs and work out how to get to the surface. It’s classic Dead Space gameplay but with the volume, and budget, turned all the way up. There’s still plenty of dark corridors and Necromorph stomping, but the sheer, cold, beauty of the graveyard, and the array of things you can do in there is amazing. I had a nasty tendency, once the game opens out and gives you a skiff to zoom around the place in, of just walking out onto the airlock hatch and looking around. A dozen broken ships, countless hundreds of pieces of debris and a cold, dead, beautiful world hanging in the sky, in a view which is so extraordinary it’s been used in a lot of the game’s publicity material. For me though, that view says a lot about Isaac’s character. He’s an engineer, and one who works in space, because the puzzles there may kill you if you get them wrong, but there’s nothing more beautiful in the universe. Each objective here makes sense, from clearing the escape capsule to locating and repairing the centuries-old shuttle that may hold together long enough for you to get to the surface. They’re all engineering problems, and all play out against the backdrop of the last human fleet that came here and the countless fragments of tragedy they left behind.

Arriving on Tau Volantis changes the entire tone of the game. The frozen, barren world of the prologue, it’s crammed full of Necromorphs buried in the snow, the temperature is constantly sub-zero and the design aesthetic changes completely. Whereas the first act of the game is very much broken Starfleet, this is the game’s take on John Carpenter’s The Thing. You can rarely see more than about fifteen feet ahead of you to begin with, the danger is constant and, crucially, your suit, damaged in the crash-landing, isn’t insulating you. Stumbling from burning wreckage to burning wreckage, constantly monitoring your temperature is a really smart piece of instant jeopardy to drop you into, reminiscent of the sea floor/no oxygen level in Tomb Raider 2. You’re wounded, off your game, constantly under attack and when you find the outpost from the prologue it gets worse. Necromorphs, something colossal that you only see the passing of at first and the constant need to stay warm mean you’re always running, always juggling one priority with one another. There’s a huge feeling of imminent crisis, of doom just around the corner, and the fact that the outpost is still intact, and infested, only emphasizes that.

It’s also here that you start getting some genuinely nice twists on established Dead Space tropes. The traditional ‘turn the switch using your TK module’ puzzles are now frequently crank handles for generators for example and the skiff that you used in orbit makes a welcome return, enabling you to travel between outlying buildings for optional missions. That in itself is a change, and one for the better, with several areas either an optional single or double player mission. This idea is introduced in the first act and the first one is also one of the most memorable. Aboard the Terra Nova, one of the orbiting ships, you find evidence that there’s a massive stock of ammunition that had been hoarded by one crewmember. When you go to retrieve it, the crewmember’s automated defences, including taunting messages from him and wave after wave of Necromorphs, swarm you. Fighting for your life, whilst listening to country and western music being piped in, you finally battle your way to the ammo dump and find, of course, that he’s dead and has been for centuries. His last message is a confession and apology and you retrieve the ammo and head out.

Which is when his actual last message plays, explaining that for you to have got this far, you have to be infected and he can’t let you leave…It’s a great sequence, the fight just this side of doable and the set up for it giving a personal insight into the horrifying events in orbit. The side missions on Tau Volantis pick up on this, but never quite have the same personal impact as the haunting image of the abandoned control room in the Terra Nova main tower, and the dead body sitting there.

The side missions onworld never quite reach this level of emotional impact. Instead, they’re largely concerned with the crafting mechanic built into this game. In addition to upgrading your weapons yu can build new ones, but that costs resources and the nice juicy treasure chests at the end of the side missions tend to be chock full of them. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that you need those new weapons. This is Aliens at least as much as it’s The Thing, and the increased amount of high power weapons and gunplay hasn’t sat well with a lot of fans. Danik and the Unitologists, naturally, follow you to Tau Volantis and that means you have frequent running gun battles with them. This in itself isn’t too bad, making a welcome change from yet another shrieking Necromorph and adding a human face to the opposition. Where the crafting mechanic hit trouble, for me, was with a specific bottleneck and what I had to do to work past it. There’s a sequence, relatively early onworld, where you’re trapped with the vast creature you’ve only briefly seen prior to this. You have to constantly hack pieces off it in order to drive it away and, without one of the high end weapons you need resources to craft, it’s basically impossible, even on Easy. I ended up replaying the only optional mission unlocked at that point 10 or 11 times in order to get the resources needed.

When I finally did, and got the gun, the fight with the creature lasted under a minute.

The problem with that is, I still had the gun and almost nothing else in the game is as tough as the creature I’d just seen enough. This meant the tone of the game changed drastically for the second half, the horror replaced by full-on action movie gunplay as Isaac marched methodically through location after location, dealing out high explosive destruction along the way. The stealth element vanishes, a good chunk of the horror element vanishes and I can see why a lot of people jumped ship at this point.

The reason I didn’t was because the plot rises up at the exact moment the game’s balance shifts. Once again, you’re assailed by multiple problems; Norton’s romance with Ellie begins to collapse and he blames you, Danik returns, a colossal biological transmitter must be not only thawed out but modified from the inside and, finally, you have to lead the survivors up a mountain to retrieve the Codex glimpsed in the prologue. This section is, like the Fleet, just a perfect combination of plot, mechanic and action. Isaac travels up the mountain on asecender wires, walking up the slopes whilst fending off attacks, dodging rockslides and guiding the others along in a cable car. You’re constantly moving, constantly fighting and when you’re wounded, and you will be, Isaac’s desperate, exhausted stumble has never looked so fitting. Isaac is one of the quintessential put upon heroes and this section you can see him working for a living. Finally, you reach the top, bring the cable car up, relax and…

The creature you saw off when you first got to the compound grabs the cable car, kills someone you’ve spent most of the game trying to keep alive and drags you halfway back down the mountain.

And something extraordinary happens; Isaac gets mad. And so do you. This stupid, brutal creature has been the bane of your life, it’s killed people you needed saving, wasted ammo you needed elsewhere and this ends and it ends NOW. The mechanics of the fight are massively convenient but the emotion behind it is totally real as you use two harpoon guns and your TK module to literally tear the thing in half.

Then, for good measure, walk over to the corpse and empty a magazine into it. Just to be sure.

It’s a turning point in the plot, not just because you finally get to kill the damn thing but because after this it’s just Isaac, Ellie and Carver. These are the plot, and mechanic, centric characters and if they’re the only ones left, then this is the endgame.

Except this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple.

What follows is arguably the best section of the game, as Isaac (And Carver if you’re working as a team), search for the Codex from the prologue, which holds the key to beating the Necromorphs and Rosetta, the creature that built it. What you find is one of the original inhabitants of Tau Volantis, cross-sectioned, preserved and scattered throughout the lab complex. Once you’ve found, and reassembled, ‘her’, the truth emerges; Tau Volantis isn’t the Marker homeworld, it’s the homeworld of a race that sacrificed everything to stop the Markers, building a city-sized machine to freeze the world before its’ inhabitants could undergo Convergence. Convergence, the holy grail of Unitology, is revealed to be the combination of every living thing into a colossal Necromorph which will then reach out psychically and connect with the others of its kind.

Tau Volantis’ moon is a partially completed Convergence Necromorph.

You’re going to have to kill a small world to finish the game.

And then Danik shows up again.

And Ellie is apparently killed.

And off you go at a gallop once more.

Whilst it’s certain that Dead Space 3 is more a science fiction action game than a horror one by this stage, the plotting is so note perfect you just get swept along with it. The tempo is raised and kept there and then raised even further and by the time you get to the final location in the game, the stakes couldn’t be higher or simpler. Isaac and Carver have had everything taken away from them, will lose everything else if they fail and know they won’t be coming back. They go anyway.

The machine, which is the size of a city, is where the game’s final act plays out. More importantly, it’s where Isaac, the engineer, finally comes back to the fore. The vast majority of this level, aside from the inevitable combat, is about working out what the Machine can do and how to control it. Isaac is, after a full act where he’s an action hero, a scientist again and the result is equal parts tranquil and terrifying. The design work in the city is extraordinary, the Aliens and The Thing references falling away and Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness sloping into view. It’s an engineering triumph, a graceful monstrosity that helped a race euthanize itself and the crystallization of the conflict I talked about at the start; religion vs science, knowledge vs belief.

It makes perfect sense then that this should be the final battleground. It’s just a shame that it isn’t. Instead, after the dangling plot threads of Ellie and Danik are resolved (One well, the other…also well, given that Danik’s a bad guy), you and Carver find yourselves alone on a planet that’s tearing itself apart to complete Convergence. Running back through old locations, fighting off even more Necromorphs, you finally  face the Moon and, in a moment which is equal parts action movie dementia and brutal thematic symmetry, stab it to death by throwing Markers at it. The Moon crashes into Tau Volantis, Ellie tearfully heads for home in an escape shuttle and Isaac Clarke and John Carver are consigned to history as Tau Volantis dies around them.

It’s an odd, slightly lopsided ending, if nothing else because despite the Moon being, well, a Moon, the fight feels weirdly anti-climactic. It makes sense thematically for the plan with the Codex to go wrong but you spend so much time working for it that ‘oh just shoot it until it dies’ feels weirdly flat. What’s even odder is that this is how every previous game has ended yet somehow here it’s a bum note. That being said, the ending itself is nicely horrible, not only though Isaac and Carver’s sacrifice but the fact that, in the end credits, you find out they’re alive. After all he’s been through, everything he’s fought for, Isaac still can’t catch a break. That being said, this feels like the perfect final chapter for the series; Isaac has made his peace with Ellie, Convergence has been prevented, the Moon has been killed and Isaac and Carver lay down their lives for everyone else’s.

Except this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple…

At time of writing, there’s a single piece of DLC for the game which changes the ending completely, and sets up a fourth game. There are also rumours that this game has already been cancelled, which have been denied. It seems weirdly appropriate that Isaac’s fate should be uncertain like this, especially given the ending of Dead Space 3.

However, the fact that this uncertainty is based on the negative response to the game strikes me as a little unfair. This is every inch a continuation of the previous two games and, to return to that image one last time, the central conflict there is the central conflict here. Even the crafting mechanic, much criticised for both the lack of balance it causes and the optional micro-payments (Which are optional by the way. Why do you think I re-did that optional mission so much?) grounds the game, giving you full access to Isaac’s skill-set. He’s an engineer first and a soldier second and for all the action movie beats, Dead Space 3 resolutely keep that to the fore. It’s not perfect by any means, the horrendous bottleneck and balance shift I talked about earlier take some real adjusting to, but it’s ambitious and fun and does something new with the franchise. Not everything works well, but everything works well enough and as any engineer knows, that’s the best you can ever hope for.