No, it's not SNAFU cashing in on the medical problems plaguing the planet at the moment. It's actually a mix of reprints and original stories re-released for a good cause.

Many people will be familiar with author James A Moore. As well as writing great books like the Serenity Falls trilogy he has also been a regular feature in the SNAFU series of military horror anthologies.

​Unfortunately James has been doing it tough recently. And Geoff and the team at Cohesion Press have stepped up to produce SNAFU:Medivac.

Authors have donated their stories free of charge and all proceeds will go towards helping James out with his medical expenses.

It's available for pre-order now. Just click the photo for the Amazon link.

Well its not as bad as I thought it would be. 

I was ready to dislike this movie. I'd heard all the spoilers and watched YouTube analyses and on that basis I couldn't see any way in which this film would be a satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker saga. And it isn't - not really. But it's not the disaster I was expecting.

Imagine you are playing chess and at the start of the game you decide that white will win by a back rank checkmate with the opposing king obstructed by his own pawns. The game then starts and, as things often do, circumstances start to work against you. So, in order to maintain your original plan of the back rank mate, you start to bend the rules a bit... then a bit more. Now this bishop can move like a knight, now pawns can move backwards... 

That's what this movie feels like. JJ Abrams knew what needed to be in place for the finale: a personal triumph from the movie's heroine set against an epic backdrop. But in order to get there he needed to push a lot of pieces around in ways that felt decidedly un-natural.

I'll leave the spoilers to another post, but suffice to say that whenever a character needed to know some information, they just did. Whenever they needed to find something, they simply stumbled across it. I would usually call this lazy writing, but there is nothing lazy about this movie. In this case it was a series of desperate shortcuts taken in order to reach a destination which could not, under any circumstances, be missed.

That it hangs together at all is a tribute to the fact that filmmaking is at least as much art as it is science. On paper this movie should not work. If it was a scientific formula, the experiment would fail. But it doesn't fail, not quite. 

The problems it has are all structural and related to the plot and the work that needed to be done to make a functional trilogy from the point Rian Johnson left it at the end of the Last Jedi. How much those faults will affect your enjoyment of the film will depend on how much stock you put in that aspect of filmmaking. 

It has a few things going for it: a universally uplifting message that is hard to go against, pretty graphics and decent performances from a likable cast. 

I still can't believe the utter lack of coordination between Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams and the consequently jarring middle movie of the trilogy that necessitated all this rough carpentry.

I'll shed no tears over the death of a franchise, for that is not what this is. But I will mourn what could have been: a beloved original trilogy, universally timeless themes, an extant and well-realized aesthetic; an original cast still vital (at least at the start of this new trilogy). In the end they took Wagu steak and made it into a cheeseburger. I guess we should be thankful. It could have been a lot worse.

SNAFU: Last Stand

​When I was working in Singapore, there was a phrase in Singlish that always stuck with me. You’d say someone was “blur” or “blur like sotong”. Sotong means squid in Malay and to say they were “blur” like a squid meant they had that same dull, glassy-eyed expression that you saw on those hapless molluscs in a fish market. If you were blur, then you were obtuse, oblivious to everything around you; you weren’t in on the joke or up to speed with current events.
 
Anyway, I’ve been so blur recently that I didn’t even realise that Non-Zero Sum had been nominated for an Aurealis Award, and only found out when I got tagged in a Facebook post saying it had made the shortlist!

t’s an open secret that writers are their own worst critics. By and large we have no idea how stories are going to be received. Occasionally you get a good feeling about a story. Something about it just gives you an expectation that other people are going to like it just as much as you, but that feeling is rare. Here’s where I should say that I had just such a feeling about Non-Zero Sum, but the truth is I didn’t. I liked the central idea: that nuclear explosions rip open a gate between worlds and allow things to come through.  I liked the characters--a military HAZMAT team sent to a nuclear accident to gather data and then running into supernatural, monster weirdness--the action scenes were fun (imagine if HP Lovecraft had grown up playing Doom and Quake), but the story never jelled for me. I always felt I could have done more with it.
 
Shows what I know... Told you I was blur.
 
Non-Zero Sum probably won’t win. It’s up against some stiff competition, and this style of fast-paced action stories may not be to the judge’s taste. But what the hell… it’s shortlisted and I’m running with that and slapping a big “Finalist” sticker on this post anyway. 
 
Thanks to Geoff Brown, AJ Spedding and everyone at Cohesion Press. You guys are the best!