Geek of Oz

For a book about a woman who's purportedly an excellent shot, Gunslinger Girl  misses more often than it hits. In a future America that's equal parts Westworld , Borderlands  and Red Dead Redemption , Serendipity Jones is a girl with few things, including a pair of asshole brothers, a controlling (and likely childbeating) father, her late mother's twin six-shooters and a lyrical name that can be, unfortunately, shortened to Pity. After suffering one familial humiliation session too many, Pity and her friend Finn decide to leave their two-bit town and head for Columbia, beacon of civilisation and city of adventure. En route, Pity gets waylaid and redirected to the much seedier settlement of Cessation, where she unwillingly falls in with a troupe of performers from the Theatre Vespertine, famed in Cessation as a premier source of entertainment. Except sometimes, the Theatre performs a Finale, and that's where Pity starts to have problems. A sci-fi western set in a nea...

The following contains spoilers for Red Rising, Harry Potter  and Scrubs. --- The series we must now refer to as the Red Rising Saga  - as opposed to Trilogy - is the very definition of a mountain work: its peak is in the middle and its slopes are either side. It starts simply enough: in a near-future dystopia, where society is ordered into a hierarchy of Colours, young Martian mining expert Darrow is a lowly Red. With his fellow labourers, Darrow mines valuable gas for the war fleets of the Golds, the top of humanity's new privilege pyramid. Having dreamed of toppling the hierarchy and bringing his downtrodden people up into the light, Darrow is offered a chance to do so through a risky process of death and rebirth, shedding his Red identity and being surgically altered into a Gold. Inducted into the system of humanity's elite, Darrow must then survive the wilds of Mars in a long, bloody trial to determine which House he'll be placed with, which will then deter...

A few years back, I watched The Godfather : a timeless classic and a cinematic tour de force, noted for many film awards and a ton of quotable lines. I really didn't enjoy it. Part of it was that some aspects of the 1972 film had dated by the mid-2010s when I saw, but it was also because I was left underwhelmed given the immense praise the film had been heaped with. It certainly wasn't bad, but I didn't engage with it the way all my fellow cinemaphiles seemed to (Stu, if you're reading this, please don't hit me). The critical acclaim turned me off what would have otherwise been a pretty competent crime film - or an above-competent one whenever Marlon Brando is on-screen. Certainly not a bad film by any stretch, but definitely not for me. I think that's the same problem I've encounted with Ann Leckie's work. Her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, was certainly thought-provoking and a departure from garden variety sci-fi, winning every award under the...

Way back in 2010, celebrated video game critic, acerbic host of Zero Punctuation and permanent cynic Yahtzee Croshaw released Mogworld . His first published novel through Dark Horse Books, Mogworld was a delightful, parodic send-up of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft coupled with a surprisingly emotional "what measure is a man"-style plot about the life of a video game NPC. This welcome debut was followed two years later by Jam , a black comedy involving a bunch of everyday schlubs who had to navigate government conspiracies, a devastated inner city Brisbane and a flood of carnivorous, man-eating strawberry jam. Both books had heart, even if the jade-coloured glasses were still wrapped around them like cars on oak trees. Yahtzee's third novel, Will Save The Galaxy For Food , is a decent enough successor to the above two novels. The book's - and, by extension, the author's - cynicism, however, is a bit off-putting. In a future where instantaneous space travel ...

Allow me to take up a minority position on a sci-fi book you've probably not read. Revenger  is the latest yarn from noted British author Alistair Reynolds. It reads as an ungodly fusion of the best bits of Firefly , Pirates of the Caribbean  and The Aeronaut's Windlass . Or, rather, it reads like the best bits, but thrown together into a blender full of drywall and beige paint, mixed at setting 11, then served beside a glass of milk and a Woolworths rocket salad. Which is to say, in flowery terminology, it is really disappointing because it is so very, very boring. I'm honestly a bit baffled as to why critics have raved about the book over on Goodreads. Normally I avoid other detailed opinions on books until I've good and digested the 600 pages of sci-fi/cyberpunk/epic fantasy/Brandon Sanderson masterwork which I've just read. This time, though, I made an exception. I read reviews during my time with Revenger – which took nearly three weeks of stop...

THE SHORT VERSION Much like my assessment of Lian Hearn's recent work , there are times when my critical and subjective opinions clash. On the one hand,   Deus Ex: Mankind Divided  is a solid, visually luscious and intricately-detailed action-RPG that nonetheless could've done with a slightly meatier runtime and some more engagement in the main story arc. On the other, though, it's a beautiful cyberpunk game that puts me back in the stylish trenchcoat of one of my favourite video game protagonists ever. There are call backs to the previous game, call forwards to the future ones, and all of it wrapped within the same immersive,   Blade Runner -esque experience that made   Deus Ex: Human Revolution   such a joy to play. So take this review for whatever it's worth. I am a sucker for   Deus Ex  and the cyberpunk genre, and was thus able to overlook a few of   Mankind Divided 's deficiencies (minor though they ultimately are). As a ga...