Spaced

Out today, issue 217 of Interzone, which includes my story 'Little Lost Robot' (aka the big space robot story) as well as stories by Karen Fishler, Paul Tremblay, MK Hobson, Suzanne Palmer and Jason Sandford.

I was going to write something about WALL-E, which I saw last Sunday, but a bit of Googling will reveal a myriad indepth reviews. So I’ll just say that the first forty minutes is one of the best bits of SF cinema I’ve ever seen. The candy-coloured satire of the second half is less successful (and contains a gaping plot hole) but the odd-couple romance between the infinitely curious and engaging WALL-E and the advanced probe EVE carries the day, with a definitive Tinkerbell moment that had the small children in the audience gripped. Increasingly, SFX-rich movies seem pointlessly noisy and frenetic*; WALL-E shows how the same tools can be used in a rich and painterly fashion.

*mind you, the first five minutes of the new Batman movie look great.

Current reading: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

And Junot Diaz has an excellent take on the sandbox game where I’m spending rather too much time shooting cops, mafia hoods and flying rats.