In the 2180s, humankind has finally reached the stars and taken their place in the galaxy amongst a variety of alien species. A lot of the background lore of the Mass Effect series is influenced by other sci-fi, but the world feels unique enough to stand on its own. You play as the hero of the piece, Commander Shepherd. Shepherd can be customised to the desire of the player not only in appearance, gender and background, but through the choices that they make. Paragon (goodie two-shoes) or Renegade (bad-ass) paths are taken through choices in dialogue options. Mass Effect 1 established Shepherd as a galactic hero by saving the government from a Reaper, an ancient race of living AI starships. Mass Effect 2 revealed the Reapers’ plan to purge all life in the galaxy. In Mass Effect 3 the Reapers execute their plan, which sees Earth itself being invaded and its population enslaved. Attacks occur simultaneously around the galaxy. It is up to Commander Shepherd to rally each of the alien races and fight the Reapers.

The Reapers weren't happy about being left out of the Olympics.

The vast bulk of your time in ME3 is spent in ground combat, shooting up enemies with a multitude of weapons, issuing orders to your AI teammates or laying waste to them with biotic (or other) powers. A number of changes have been made to the combat system from ME2, though the changes aren’t as drastic as the combat shift between the first and second games. The changes further enhance Mass Effect as an action shooter in the mould of Gears of War but blended with an RPG bent. Some changes, like the ability for any class to carry any weapon in the game, may not please players who are after a more pure RPG experience. But more freedom equals more choice, and choice is what the Mass Effect series has always been about.

I personally liked the combat refinements, as the amount of hours I spent in this mode would have been hell if it wasn’t fun. Combat is highly driven by the character class you choose, so pick a class that matches your play style. Like in Mass Effect 2, you are able to choose your character class even if you import a character from previous games. My character was a soldier in both ME 1 and ME2 and I was thankful I could mix it up for ME3 with the awesome melee based Vanguard.

The single player campaign of Mass Effect 3 is supposedly 15 hours long if you don’t count side quests. I’m a mega completionist and spent almost 60 hours in this game, going through every side mission I could find and maximising all the stuff I could collect. Collect is the operative word here because the whole point of the game can be considered to be built around collecting. You collect money, loot, model starships, weapons, war assets and more. War assets, like squad members in Mass Effect 2, are the central driver towards achieving the best end game outcome in Mass Effect 3. The more effort spent grinding out the collection of as many assets as possible supposedly will result in the best possible game ending for Shepherd and the galaxy. This grind did get tiring at times but the main story driven missions are varied and well paced enough to make you forget the grind.

You want a piece of my blue glowing hand?

Each of these major sections focus on a major race/faction and each feature beloved characters from previous games (if they survived ME2…). If you have followed the series since the start then you will enjoy the NPC’s dialogue as much as the gameplay. On more than one occasion I felt sadness or joy (or both) as the events of the game played out. If this is your first venture into the Mass Effect galaxy then some of the references may be lost on you and I thoroughly recommend playing through the trilogy from start to finish. Don’t let me scare you off though, ME3 is still a great game to play stand-alone and enough help is provided to ease you into the Mass Effect galaxy.

This game is the first in the series to feature multiplayer. Bioware has come under some criticism as playing the multiplayer mode is the fastest way to boost your single player score and produce the best ending. The only way to play is co-op survival mode, where you and up to three other human players take on successive waves of increasingly harder and more numerous baddies. The character classes available and gameplay are similar to the single-player mode. One of the biggest drawcards is the ability to create alien playable characters. You receive in-game credits while playing missions which allow you to purchase weapon and equipment packs. The cycle of earning cash to buy gear and then repeat is addictive. Bioware deserves credit in their implementation of this mode. Like many fans of the series I was highly skeptical at first but found that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve come back to this mode even after finishing the single player.

Nerd hearts will break at the ending

With all the controversy this game has produced in gaming media, I have to touch on the ending. Many nerds out there weren’t happy with it and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed with it. Some aspects of the game can be tedious. Scanning star systems for war assets and other trinkets replaces planet mining from ME2 (a welcome change) but it’s still pretty annoying. It can also get very confusing trying to track the modifiers your gear and upgrades have applied to your abilities for combat. The paragon/renegade system is also less effective, with both types of choices rewarded with reputation points that add up to a central meter. This unlocks certain interactive options in dialogue but it makes the concept of choice a rather flimsy one compared to previous instalments.

While this game has had its share of controversial reactions, it doesn’t detract from the incredible experience of Mass Effect 3. It is one of the most memorable game and science fiction worlds I have journeyed through. My nerd heart is heavy with sadness at the reality that it has finished.

That’s the character development of Katniss Everdeen in the final installment of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy.

SPOILER ALERT – if you haven’t read book three, stop now.

After surviving the arena for a second time, Katniss Everdeen finds herself homeless when the Capital destroys District 12 in retaliation for her rebellion. Along with Gale and her family, she is taken to live in the underground bunkers of District 13, where there have been people all along (surprise surprise). It’s a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, except everyone’s forgotten their Who records in the post-apocalypse. District 13 want to use Katniss as the face of the revolution. The Mockingjay.

While Katniss poses for the cameras as a hero, she toys, yet again, with the feelings of Gale and Peeta. You’ll start tearing your hair out at the indecisiveness of this girl by page ten. How long can this go on for? Any normal person by now would have asked for a bit of space, but no, not Katniss. Despite losing her home and being in the middle of a war zone, she continues to make out with both Peeta and Gale. I just don’t get it.

Collins doesn’t even put Katniss in the position where she’s forced to make a choice between the two. She just slides into life with one, without a thought for the other. I do agree with her choice in the end, but the last few pages of good writing are not enough to make up for a novel plagued by bad pacing and laziness.

The main problem with Mockingjay lies in Collins’ inability to write major action sequences into the story. Whenever an epic fight or chance for archery appears, Katniss hunkers down, falls asleep, curls up in foetal position, gets knocked unconscious or locked in a room. Where the first two books never backed down, the third is like running away and waving a white flag. Katniss gives up.

Peeta’s description of Katniss perfectly captures the confusion about her character in Mockingjay:

Friend. Lover. Victor. Enemy. Financee. Target. Mutt. Neighbour. Hunter. Tribute. Ally. I’ll add it to the list of words I use to try to figure you out.

As readers, we don’t want our heroes to wig out. We want them to find the courage within themselves to persevere and fight the good fight. Above all, a hero needs to conquer their self doubt. It’s easy to write a scene where a character does nothing. It’s hard to plot a taught and frantic thriller. The lack of build up leaves the ending empty; the deaths in the book are made less meaningful as a result.

Haymitch’s character never evolves past the drunkard next door; even when he is forced to sober up in District 13, he’s blissfully wasted by the end of the novel. Katniss and Haymitch spend most of the novel fighting, which does little for their father/daughter relationship developed in the first two books.

The side plot about Peeta being hijacked by the Capitol is ridiculous, like some kind of Manchurian Candidate Lite. If only Collins would follow through her ideas. What if Katniss had to kill Peeta on live TV? Wouldn’t that bring the story full circle and create a powerful ending? Even the ending she chose would have worked so much better if we’d seen more of Prim during the novel, instead of a few brief words at the start. What I’m shocked at is that all these structural issues made it past an editor.

While the scenes involving the “cracking of the nut” and the race to the Capitol are some of the most entertaining, they’re too short and underdeveloped. Finally, I thought, here she goes with that amazing bow. And before you know it, Katniss is back to being locked in a room, contemplating suicide.

The movie version of Mockingjay may be a chance to restructure the failings of the novel. This is one case I hope they don’t stick to the story.

Based on the 1960s TV show, Dark Shadows, directed by Tim Burton, is the story of a 19th century vampire who wakes up in 1972 and pays a visit to his family. Barnabas Collins, played by Johnny Depp, is appalled when he finds the family business in ruins at the hands of a local witch. With his contemporary descendants and some vampire tricks, he reinvigorates the local business. But the witch ain’t happy.

It’s these interactions of the old vampire with the new world that are most entertaining. There’s a great scene where Barnabas Collins sits down in a hippy circle and starts quoting Love Story. Or  his hilarious encounter with the golden arches. For the first half of the film, these interactions provide some fantastic laughs. But the film loses its way when it stops making jokes.

Dark Shadows is difficult to categorise. It doesn’t know what sort of film it wants to be. The starting comic elements gradually slow down, until the conclusion loses the humor completely. It works best as a camp romp, with secret macrame rooms and ridiculous sex scenes. When it’s funny, it’s a brilliant film.

The story feels rushed; some characters have very little development, or their backstory is thrown in as an aside. Vicki, the vampire’s love interest, isn’t convincing in her affections for Barnabas. Burton jumps straight into the declaration of love without any scenes to assure us of their attraction to one another. All it would take is one extra scene, a touch or a smart piece of banter. The whole film suffers from this “by the way” narrative technique.

Depp’s comedic spark propels the film through the first two thirds of the film. On an aside, apparently there’s a Hollywood conspiracy that Johnny Depp is a vampire in real life. I had been wondering why he never seems to age in film and now I have a perfectly logical reason. My co-viewer suggested that perhaps he has had plastic surgery, but I am more inclined to believe the vampire theory.

Michelle Pfeiffer is miscast in her role as Elizabeth Collins; there’s no warmth of affection for her children in her performance. She’s very bad in this film, I mean, practically awful, almost like she’s replaying the evil mother from Hairspray in a vampire film. Pfeiffer should have swapped roles with the in house psychiatrist, played by Helena Bonham Carter in a shocking orange wig. Bella Heathcote plays Vicki, the doe-eyed beauty who wanders around pointing her big doe eyes at everyone. Only Chloe Moretz brings some real spunk to her role, playing T-Rex records in a 19th century dining room.

Visually the film is stunning. Tim Burton’s attention to detail is evident in every shot of the film. His background as a designer lends itself to the sumptuous worlds of the Maine fishing town, as well as the kooky characters that inhabit it. The costumes, designed by Colleen Atwood, are not overly 70s camp, but complement the fantastic elements of the film. The porcelain skin of the witch is a unique and beautiful effect. Barnabas Collins’ makeup is reminiscent of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, and the closing cinematography reinforces Burton’s tribute to German expressionism, a nostalgic, hazy scene in the water.

Danny Elfman’s soundtrack is not used effectively in the film. His compositions seem absent, where in other Burton films like Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice in Wonderland and of course, Edward Scissorhands, Elfman’s music became a character in the film. While this was a conscious decision by the director, I got to the end of the film without being aware of any music having played, apart from the brilliant use of 1970s songs.

Dark Shadows is one of those “if only” films. If only the script had gone through one more revision, if only they’d put some songs in it, if only they’d cast this person instead of that. I hate seeing potentially great films fall apart because of bad decisions. But Dark Shadows is just not camp enough for the vamps.

The Road is a book that cannot be read without emotion. With the most austere language, McCarthy manages to convey meaning in a world where meaning is lost. Through the ashen wasteland, he whispers such prose that resounds as an echo in emptiness. He writes ‘All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.’ And it is this pain that holds father and son together, and it is their pain that holds us to their eventual grace and beauty.

As the author of the Oscar winning No Country for Old Men, McCarthy is well known for his visions of the modern cowboy. Here he tackles similar ground – the loneliness and solitude of America – yet transposed to a post-apocalyptic world. There are still the same desperate characters, yet coupled with the urgency of survival, McCarthy pares down man to the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  The Road has the atmosphere of a horror novel, yet in removing the typical supernatural elements, it hints those most capable of horror are our fellow men and women. It confronts us to our true fears, that if we were left with nothing, what would we do to survive? Would we still abide by a universal moral code, or would we excuse ourselves from morality in favor of survival?

It is almost impossible to review a book that is so well respected, and already well acknowledged as a contemporary classic. If you have read The Road, you have wept silently for its nameless heroes. If you have not read The Road, then you must, for you too will weep at its beauty.

Have you read The Road? What did you think? Post your comments below.

The film starts with a glowing blue cube of doom proclaiming the end of earth. Cut to some guy who looks the Emperor’s brother with gingevitis telling a slightly balding Viking god to take over the planet. Loki has borrowed Nicolas Cage’s hair plugs for the role. He zaps to earth using the blue cube of doom and starts prancing about with a magic wand. Yes, this film’s plot hinges around a magic wand. Yet despite their experience with magic wands, neither Harry Potter or Gandalf were invited to join the Avengers. Instead they turn to a man with anger issues, an egomaniac, an all American goody-two-shoes, another Norse God with better hair and Samuel L Jackson.

The team assembled, they delve into deep philosophy asking “How do I cope with my super strength?”, “Why am I so angry all the time?” and “How do you keep your hair clean in battle?” The heroes go through enough breakups and makeups to fill a romantic comedy. Finally, when the epic climax comes, the world is about to break down, what attacks earth? Fans of Discworld, you may pee your pants laughing in the final battle…

There are some good bits in the movie. Like Iron Man. In fact you could really have turned this movie into Iron Man and Friends. Just like Captain Jack Sparrow’s rogueish charms, Robert Downey Jr prances his mischievous way around screen. Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner ain’t so bad either, and he certainly gets the best scene in the movie. His backstory is explained in an intriguing way, as a kind of Slumdog Millionaire meets the Hulk. Unfortunately I couldn’t gather whether he was an MD (as indicated by his opening scenes) or a PhD (as indicated by his expertise in gamma radiation).

ScarJo has some good action scenes, but overall she is the pretty redhead who is making up the equal opportunites board at SHIELD. And then there’s Jeremy Renner, who failed his audition for The Hunger Games and had to step into The Avengers instead. I don’t even remember his character’s name, only that he spends half the movie looking like an extra from Dune. And I like Jeremy Renner. He really should play Nate Drake in the Uncharted movie.

Do you think we'll meet girls here?

The pacing lags in the first half of the film, which could surely have been explained in a five minute montage. Oh here, we’re at the boxing ring, let’s recruit Captain America, dissolve to ScarJo kicking butt, dissolve to Thor landing on earth etc. But no. Joss Whedon has to give us backstory to some of the most cliched characters in film. Superheroes. Superheroes are difficult to make complex, because most of them were invented in the 1940s and 50s, when people still believed in heroes. Post Watergate, with the emergence of new journalism and post-modernism, we can’t take hackneyed cardboard versions of heroes. No, they have to be complex.

I’m not going to jump onto the Joss Whedon hate him/love him bandwagon. He’s done some brilliant stuff, like Firefly. I appreciated Buffy, but even that had it’s ups and downs. Mr Whedon is a better writer than director, and I can’t wait to see Cabin in the Woods. What I don’t get is why everyone lauds his complex characterisation? Apart from the Hulk, there’s hardly any depth to the characters. Iron Man already had a very established character which continues consistently through the film.

The thing is, you either have to go all one way or all the other. Take the Rock for an example. When you pay the Rock to make a film, things are going to get broken. He’s not a complex guy, he’s there to beat things up, flex the muscles, gun down the bad guys. Not to recite Hamlet’s monologue. And it’s OK!

On the other end of the scale, Christopher Nolan plus Batman… now that’s characterisation. Maybe because Batman is an eminently more complex character; he’s made the transition from weekly comic to dark and artistic interpretations. It’s harder to do that with someone like Captain America, who stands for Truth, Justice and the American Way, without completely deconstructing his identity. And you’d need a whole film for that about Captain America, not just the Love, Actually of superhero movies. Oh wait, there was a whole film about Captain America.

And finally there’s Loki, played by Tom Hiddleson. In Norse mythology Loki is the god of chaos, similar to the Joker from The Dark Knight, whose anarchist persuasions wreak havok on Gotham City. The modern trickster is truly unpredictable. Loki’s just annoying. He’s the little brother of Thor who hates being in his bro’s shadow all the time. Like I’ve never heard that line a zillion times before. Freakin emos are everywhere in the universe.

So there’s my semi-review-rant on The Avengers. More than anything I hate hype. The Avengers isn’t a great movie but it is fun. So take your boyfriends and nerd amigos, just don’t take it too seriously.

PS Don’t get me started on the Aussie Thor. Despite his best efforts at the posh Shakesperian accent, all I want to do is offer him a beer and shout “MAAAAATE!”

The dialogue is superb and the characters are given real depth, all the more impressive considering the show is bereft of a story arc. There’s no overarching narrative in this show, each episode is standalone and can be taken at its own terms. The serial aspect also pays homage to Batman’s comic book roots.

I particularly enjoy the noir touches, the no nonsense gritty dialogue, the dark tone and strong reflections on characters constantly in reflection. The noir genre throws up ambiguity around good and bad; the villains in the show are generally depicted as evil and needing to be stopped, although their reasoning for doing what they do is thoroughly and satisfyingly explored. There are no easy answers. This is not straightforward good and bad, black and white. Batman by nature is an ambiguous character.

The show was created and released in the early nineties, cashing in on the interest in Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns. The show goes through all the Batman villains – Joker, Riddler, Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Two Face – who reappear through the four seasons as they go in and out of Arkham Asylum. Batman occasionally teams up with Robin, but more often works alone in the shadows.

Despite knowing the general formula which gets repeated each week, the show manages to draw you into the action incredibly well as Batman yet again finds himself in a Houdini situation. I found myself wondering how he’s going to escape again and again.

Another outstanding element is the music, perfectly composed and delivered in this show. It really is a knockout punch. The voice acting is superb, with Mark Hamill as the Joker (best known as the goodie-two-shoes crop-dusting universe-saving Jedi Knight from Star Wars). While Hamill did not continue his success on the silver screen he has moved onto voice acting and gaming projects with much talent and integrity.

Since the show’s creation, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has reinvigorated the Batman franchise. The Dark Knight brought in over a billion dollars in ticket receipts and the final instalment this July is likely to have similar returns. Batman is alive and well, no doubt helped by the many brilliant artists who have perpetuated the legend in amazing and original ways. We acknowledge that the Batman and Robin film may have fallen slightly short in this respect!

The myth lives on, the legend lives on. Shows like Dexter lie in the vast shadow cast by the caped crusader who remains perched over the anonymous dark city, our protector fighting another night.

The City and the City delves into new territory for the author, deviating from his previous fantasy worlds, Bas-Lag and Un Lun Dun. It takes a fantastical setting, two cities that live on top of one another, and sticks them squarely in the real world of eastern Europe. A murder has been committed, and so enters Detective Tylador Borlu and the Extreme Crime Squad to investigate. The murder is not as simple as first thought and Borlu must cross the boundaries of language and space to solve it.

China Miéville, for those who are familiar with his work, has a very distinctive voice, a beautiful, lilting combination of ethereal prose and nuances, daring monsters and stunning plot developments. As much as I love Miéville’s previous books, his choice to step back from his traditional style left an absence in The City and the City. (There’s no monsters either, in case you were wondering. No sound golems, no badass nighty bat things, no jelly blobbers. Nada.) His grasp of language is one of the prime reasons I read his books; you won’t find another fantasy writer with a vocabulary bigger than a dictionary. As a reader I revel in beautiful language, and rightfully I miss it when it is not there.

There are moments when his voice breaks through the sparse prose, such as this great description, a prime example of Miéville at his best:

‘The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel-continental and middle-history brickwork of Beszel**, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Beszel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing.’

But for the most part, it’s a parched novel, and the story suffers as a result. There’s not a lot of world building, and in an existential, make-believe world, it takes away from the conviction of these places. It just seems like an ordinary crime novel in an extraordinary location.

The crime aspects of the novel seem too generic; while he claims to be inspired by Dashiell Hammett, there’s little of that punchy noir dialogue and witty exchanges. The only similarity is the handy MacGuffin that keeps Tyador Borlu wandering through the streets of Beszel. It bears the most comparisons to Philip K. Dick’s style, but it reads more like his lesser known works like We Can Build You. You know it’s by a great author, it’s just not his best book.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

Raymond Chandler

His main character, Tyador Borlu, suffers from chronic inaction and a lack of personality. There’s a few moments when you think ‘Hey, he’s going to grow some balls, break down some doors and do something,’ but then they go and speak to another fricking academic and it’s another yawn moment. Even the plot seems to suffer from personality issues; there’s hardly any surprising moments. I found the book less of a crime novel and more an examination of flânerie, a style of writing popularised by Charles Baudelaire. A flâneur being “a person who walks the city in order to experience it” (not a creator of flans). Viewing the novel in this light perhaps adds more to the complexity of the novel, but I doubt your average layman has read Les fleurs de mal.

For those of you familiar with the work of China Miéville, you’ll recognise similar themes to his novella The Tain, about a parallel London taken over by reflections. The City and the City is filled with innovative ideas, and there are few authors writing today who could make the subject matter comprehensible and interesting. There is an underlying theme examining the problems of unification within cities divided by politics and cultural difference, an issue that arises in many modern conflicts; the Middle East, Ireland and Berlin. Miéville’s PhD in Marxist politics meanders through this book like the dark shadow of Breach itself.

I’m all for writers trying new things. Authors should never be pigeonholed. But you’ll spend the first one hundred pages of the The City and the City trying to figure out the complete mindf*** that is Breach, the second hundred meandering like a tourist around Ul Qoma, and the third in your average Hercule Poirot point the finger youdunnit moments. The City and the City promises so much, but in the end doesn’t deliver on it’s bold promises of Kafka-esque glory.

Footnotes

*It’s Mi-eh-vil NOT China ‘Bloody Herman’ Melville as everyone I know calls him.

** I’ve got no idea how to pronounce ‘Beszel’, it’s got an accent aigu on the z.

Gorgeous photo of the city detective mural by Untipographico (on flickr)

And so begins The Hunger Games. The post-apocalyptic USA is divided up into 12 districts. A male and female representative from each are selected in a “reaving”, then primped, preened, fed, trained and sent to battle. Twenty four teenagers enter the arena, one person leaves. But Katniss Everdeen, the coal miner’s daughter, has skillz. Ninja skillz. The first scenes establish how good she is at hunting, archery and finding good looking men in the forest. The rest of the scenes show how awesome those ninja skillz are and how compassionate she is not to use those skillz on everyone in sight.

While the premise is a variation on a theme (kill everyone, you win), the film also deals with the role of the media in a totalitarian state. As a man with big hair says, “This is a TV show.”

Jennifer Lawrence’s performance as Katniss adds a gravity that would not be present had a Hollywood starlet been cast. Fresh off her oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone, in which a young woman also struggles for survival in a harsh landscape, Lawrence never overplays the role. Teenage girls will swoon and sigh at the two male leads, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth, as they both bravely deal with the game of death in different ways.

Woody Harrelson cuts a fine figure as the drunk mentor and has some of the more laughable moments in the film, as much as you can laugh in a film where people are constantly trying to kill each other. Fashion stylist Lenny Kravitz looks like he got lost halfway through the chorus of American Woman and found himself in the future wearing gold eyeliner. And Donald Sutherland is always Donald Sutherland, gruff, presidential and Donald Sutherlandish.

Fans of the book will be pleased with the almost identical adaptation. The Avox girl has been left out, as has Katniss’ school friend. But in sticking so closely to the source material, viewers don’t gain anything new from watching the film. The only additional scenes are some cutaways of the districts as they wait for their children to be slaughtered and essential character building for President Donald Sutherland.

The Hunger Games‘ biggest distraction is the constant use of wobblycam. Is it too much to ask for some well constructed action scenes without getting sea sick? Curse you Michael Bay! There is something to be said for Jackie Chan action films. He knows how to stick the camera in one spot so we can actually see that great roundhouse kick someone took to the face. Not so with The Hunger Games. In the dystopian future, no one owns a tripod.

Where Battle Royale captured the Lord of the Flies + Japanese schoolgirl atmosphere, The Hunger Games loses some of its tension in order to keep a PG rating. Battle Royale is the superior film, with it’s Tarantino-like plot and incredible fight scenes, but you can’t really show an R rated film to a bunch of bored thirteen year olds in English class without getting fired. And so The Hunger Games fills the void for a death match film suitable for younger audiences.

In a recent survey I conducted with five Korean school students, they enjoyed The Hunger Games because of the “Everyone Die Die”. Which pretty much sums up why you should go and see it. Now to the objective. Kill everyone. You win.

Lady Alexia Maccon receives a mysterious note (aren’t they always mysterious) from the Alexandria vampire queen, requesting a visit from Alexia and her daughter, Prudence, now a good two years old. While not to give away any of the other books, as it would be difficult to come straight into the fifth book without reading the others, Prudence has a rather unnatural ability to cause chaos wherever she goes. With husband, acting troupe and inventor in tow, Lady Maccon struggles to come to terms with her father’s not-so-good behaviour, and the coordination of travelling by donkey.

As she writes:

She who has not travelled in the company of ten actors, three toddlers, a werewolf, and a French inventor cannot possibly sympathize with such torture.

Ms Carriger writes with a trademark wit, making The Parasol Protectorate one of the few genuinely funny steampunk series. The children add welcome entertainment with their well timed statements and ablutions. As do the ever entertaining acting troupe, led by Ivy and Tunstell in their direction of The Death Rains of Swansea, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Pyramis and Thisbe.

With Timeless being the last book there are a few plot contrivances even beyond the series’ general silly nature. And I say silly with the highest respect. How could you not laugh at a woman who wears hats in the shape of fruit bowls? It does feel a little strained at times; one plot point is revealed with a “Oh, didn’t you know?” And there’s a pretty obvious ending. But as it’s the last jaunt of Lord and Lady Maccon we can forgive a few loose threads. Especially in Egypt.

Because of the location it was difficult to bring all the characters together for one final adventure; unlike previous books in London, where the characters can intermingle, Biffy, Professor Lyall and Lord Akeldama are left on the home front, while the Maccons, Ivy and Tunstell and Madam Lefoux are in Egypt. With the characters intercontinental, some of the narrative strands became a little messy. Lord Akeldama and Madam Lefoux, whose personal interests often drive the movements of the Lady, make moderate appearances in the book. But do not despair! It seems Ms Carriger is writing a continuing series – The Parasol Protectorate Abroad – set at a later date with different but “related” characters.

What fate will befall Lady Maccon as she travels into the desert? Or will she simply be defeated by the tiresome infant inconvenience (now child) and the woes of travelling with actors? Actors you say? How reprehensible!

In 1976, Dana, an emerging African-American writer is married to Kevin, also a novelist. While they are moving into their new apartment, Dana is overcome by dizziness and is transported through time and space to 1800′s Maryland, a state of slaves and masters. She is pulled between the past and the future multiple times, each in longer intervals. Each trip is tied to her ancestor Rufus, a young white boy who grows up over the space of the novel. Dana believes she is sent to protect her ancestor from dying before producing the daughter that would become her great-great grandmother.

I was the worst possible guardian for him – a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children.

When Dana and Kevin are first pulled into Maryland, they assume the roles of slave and master. But as Butler progresses the story, Dana comments that she is no longer acting, she has taken on the role of the slave. Butler compares the role of fear in developing subservient behaviour to that of the Nazis in World War II.

Like the Nazis, ante bellum whites had known quite a bit about torture – quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.

Dana is eventually faced by a choice: to become fully indentured as a slave and protect the lives of many or protect herself and risk the life of the slaves on the plantation. Both a feminist and African-American novel, the choice she eventually makes demonstrates the importance of protecting her individual identity when the society of the time dehumanizes her.

What is most interesting about the book is Butler’s exploration of whether or not you can create a slave, taking a strong woman of the 70s and displacing her into history without even an explanation for her travels. While the lack of explanation for her time travel is disconcerting, the book breaks down how easily a person can be indentured to hard work by torture. The torture of the pre-war South is vividly described; Dana suffers not only the backbreaking work in the fields and home but whippings, beatings and physical abuse. What is a matter of years for the plantation owners is only hours and days for Dana; her wounds are not allowed to heal before she is transported again.

Dana’s urge to help her ancestors turns when she realises that Rufus is torn between his love for a black woman and his role of plantation owner. In Rufus’ character we find a dichotomy of the desire to change but the impossibility of adopting 70s racial values in a world where whipping blacks is considered fair. The relationship between Dana and Rufus changes as the boy grows into a young man; he plays power games in a bid to gain control over someone who, despite color and gender, is more educated and intelligent than he is.

I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

Kindred is an important story; Octavia Butler is an important novelist. While she is most well known for her science fiction, having won both Hugo and Nebula awards, Kindred is a “grim fantasy” and one of only two novels she wrote about the past. As I walked around the plantations in Louisiana, I could not help but imagine Dana and the characters of Kindred wandering the grounds, sleeping on the floor of dirt ridden cabins, fighting illness and avoiding the punishment of the slave drivers. While the story is fantastic in nature, it illustrates the nature of slavery and the way power can be used to indoctrinate someone into subservience.