Skull Island

 Oh the many things we enjoy as family (well, as father and son) on Netflix. You might remember that I blogged last year about an animated series freely based on King Kong.Since then, Wolfie has developed a fascination for big apes in general and King Kong in particular. We were happily surprised to find out this year a new animated series called Skull Island, apparently based on Kong: Skull Island, which I haven't seen. As Wolfie and I are always in need of monkey action, especially with giant apes (gorillas?), we watched it and pretty much binged it in a week or so. We enjoyed it a lot. I was hesitant at first, because some of it is surprisingly gory for a kids show, but Wolfie didn't get scared and wanted to see it all. And we did. Sadly, the first season ends on a cliffhanger with lots of loose ends. And there is no second season in sight for now. Apparently the second season has been scripted, but I have no idea what will be the release date, if there is one. Still, we have enough to keep us busy: I have yet to show Wolfie the original movie.

How to hunt an invisible man

As you might remember from one of last month's posts, I have rediscovered H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, a classic of science-fiction. Something that struck me in the novel is how meticulous Wells is about showing what would happen if it was possible for a man to turn invisible. And, if he had decide to turn evil (as of course he does), what would he do, and finally what would need to be done protect people against him and to hunt him down. One of the novel's chapters is titled The Hunting of the Invisible Man and explains exactly how to, well, hunt the Invisible Man. Among the tricks, use dogs, as they can smell him and detect him, even though they cannot see him. Keep in mind that his digestive system will remain visible for a while after he consumes food and drinks. Hide weapons and anything that the invisible man could use as a weapon. And also, as he goes around naked, put powdered glass on the roads. Learning about the last one, one of the characters, a police officer, gives some protest: "It's unsportsmanlike." That made me laugh when I reread it. I thought it was the Englishest thing someone could say. You have an homicidal maniac running wild, and the police officer worries about being unfair to him. Anyway, thanks to Wells, we now know what to do if an invisible man goes on a rampage.

The village of Iping

As you may remember from a recent post, I have been (re)reading H.G. Wells' s The Invisible Man, which I had read more than 30 years ago. I noticed something I had not paid attention to the first time I read the novel: a lot of the plot is set in the village of Iping, where the Invisible Man is first, errrr... seen? I checked quickly online and it turned out to be a real village, not a made up one. I thought it was pretty neat, it gives Wells' tale a veneer of authenticity. It also means that an obscure English village got its name immortalised in a classic work of sicence-fiction. And that is pretty cool. Now we don't live near there, so we will not be visiting any time soon, but it could be interesting one day. I wonder if there is anything to see there since its most infamous visitor showed up (sort of showed up). Maybe some H.G. Wells fans? Academics perhaps? If you know anything, please let me know in the comments.

Rediscovering The Invisible Man

I read very little science fiction. It is simply not my literary genre. When I do, it mostly has a lot of horror elements in it. But I do enjoy reading the father of science fiction, English writer H.G. Wells, albeit I read fairly little of his work. The very first book I read of him was The Invisible Man, when I was 12. I had barely started discovering old British classics and I remember my mum suggesting I tried this one when we found it in the local library. I was not expecting much of it, but ended up reading it in a few days and loving every page. Maybe because I was already an Anglophile, I don't know. Surprisingly enough, it took me decades to read more of him. But a few days ago, I decided it was time to revisit The Invisible Man, this time in the original language. I am surprised that I remember quite a lot of it, so it must have made a sreally strong impression on my young mind. I also find it surprisingly violent. I knew it was, but I had thought it had been mostly my impressionable young mind. I love how Wells never shies away from the more sinister implications of scientific discovery. The novel is subtitled "A Grotesque Romance" and this is very fitting.

Kong: King of the Apes

Sometimes I try to convince Wolfie to watch something different, just so I can enjoy watching it with him. And sometimes we thus make happy discoveries. I stumbled on an animated series on Netflix, Kong: King of the Apes, freely based on, well, King Kong. It was a short lived series, lasting only two seasons from 2016 to 2018 and I understand it was neither popular nor critically acclaimed, that said we did enjoy it. It is not without its flaws, it might even be bad: the animation is not great, the story is very derivative and cliché ridden, with an environmental message that is hammered in with no subtlety whatsoever. But hey, it's a children cartoon and it has a giant gorilla fighting mecha monsters and so on. And the giant gorilla is freaking King Kong, so it cannot be all that bad. It's just like perfect matinee fun. I know this is not the only Kong cartoon and I hope to watch them all with Wolfie. Eventually, I will show him the original movie.

Pandemic (the board game)

Our last trip to John Lewis was a few months ago. We rarely buy anything there, when we do it is generally small things. That said, I love to spend time in their board games section. Last time we went there, I stumbled upon Pandemic, a board game about a world pandemic. It could have looked sci-fi a decade ago, but not anymore. I heard about it in the middle of lockdown back in 2020 and I was wondering if, when things would turn back to normal, it would be worth buying. At the time, I thought it was too close for comfort and we could not play board games anyway. Now that I saw it in John Lewis, I am tempted to buy it. The only thing is, at the moment I have more board games than we take opportunities to play them. But I am very tempted...

Casse-tête cosmique

 Petit loup adore les puzzles. C'est un intérêt qu'il a depuis longtemps, mais depuis que j'en ai acheté un pour sa mère à Noël, il l'a pour ainsi dire redécouvert. Alors donc,  comme il est en relâche cette semaine et que nous n'allons nulle part, je lui ai suggéré de s'essayer sur un nouveau casse-tête. Sa mère lui a acheté celui-ci, que Wolfie a choisi lui même. J'imagine que l'image de science-fiction avec les couleurs l'a intéressé. 200 morceaux, pour les enfants de huit ans et plus. Mon fils n'en a que six. Il l'a terminé en deux jours, tout seul ou presque. Je suis très fier de lui.

Monster Plants (Monstrum)

Monstrum has just released a video on Monster plants. As always, fascinating. Malevolent plants are a common trope of both horror and science-fiction. So you might to check this video if you are looking for inspiration for some Halloween reads, or simply scifi stories with a more sinister element. In any case, it is a very thorough history of the birth and evolution of a modern myth. That said, I am a bit sad they did not mention The Pavillion by E. Nesbit, my favourite horror story featuring a monster plant.

Monstrum of Grays and UFOs

For the amateur of modern folklore among you, Monstrum released a video recently about UFOs and Grey aliens, also called Grays. As always, it is fascinating. I have never been as much into aliens as other "paranormal" phenomenons, even as a child, but this is great fun all the same. I love their animated dramatisations of accounts of alien encounters. It's worth a watch just for them.

How to Put a Duvet Cover On

 Sometimes I find silly but very funny and very true things on the internet. Like this comics. I don't know if like me you struggle to put a duvet cover on, but this is pretty much how it happens every time we change bedsheets and duvet covers. I mean I don't call Neil deGrasse Tyson, but the 5th corner and the ripping of the space-time is absolutely 100% accurate. Or at least it must be, because it takes a lot more time than it should when we put a new duvet cover on.

All About UFOs

I blogged before about All About Monsters and very often about All About Ghosts. There is a third book in the old classic Usborne books series about the paranormal: All About UFOs. My brothers and I did not have that one, for some reason. I think my mum thought it would have exposed us to too much pseudoscience if we had it. She would have been right: the Usborne's World of the Unkown series was not exactly good tool to develop skepticism and critical thinking. But my best friend had it, so I was exposed to it anyway. When I saw that it has recently been reedited, I had to purchase it. It is still as good, or as bad, as it originally was. Not exactly educational, but still gives me a few pleasant chills, the kind a science-fiction story would, when it has a few horror elements in it. I think it may be the weakest book of the three, but I might say this because I prefer horror to scifi. Now if they could only republish the third book, I'd be a very happy man...

Gamma Ray

Sometimes, it's not that I judge a beer by its bottle, its label or, in this instance, the image on its can, but I just want to drink it just because there is something cool about the container and to heck with the content. This is what made me try the Gamma Ray from the Beavertown Brewery. It's blonde and I don't care much about blonde beers. In fact, it's an American Pale Ale and I don't really care about that either, even though the beer itself is brewed in the UK. I tried it for the first time during our holidays in Derbyshire, where our friends offered one to me. And I found it okay. But I bought another can just for the absolutely uber cool image on it. It has a freaking UFO roasting a spaceman (alien or human I don't know) with a death ray, most likely the gamma ray of the title. It is sinister, it looks vaguely gory in a 50s pulp scifi nostalgia kind of way.  Otherwise, the beer is perfectly fine on a hot summer day with a barbecue (it's meant to be a juicy tropical beer after all, according the the Beavertown Brewery website), and apparently it won a prize, but truly buy it for the cool scifi image.

HAL 9000 and Google Assistant

Because I had a few minutes to waste this evening, I asked a few question to Google Assistant on my phone, trying sometimes to make it (her?) fumble. So at some point, I asked who she thought was the best actor, and she replied... HAL 9000. And she added that apparently, he's a real nice person in real life. I don't know if someone who is into Stanley Kubrick at Google made a joke, or if it is based on some algorithms and the Assistant knows what kind of movie I love, but I thought this was both funny and a bit scary.

Fever

No, no, don't worry, I don't have a fever and I am feeling fine (touch wood). I thought I would give some reading suggestion for this age of confinement, as we should all have plenty of more time to read now. If nothing else, the pandemic would have given us that. So the book I would suggest you to get your hands on is Fever by South African crime writer Deon Meyer. Ironically enough, it is not crime fiction but scifi. You might find it too close to comfort, but it is very topical. After a pandemic that destroyed most of the world's population, Willem Storm and his son Nico try to restore civilization in post-apocalyptic South Africa. It may sound cliché, but Meyer really did his research and it shows. This is very believable, and sadly all the more so these days. But like his other novels, it has soul and heart and in spite of the genre, it is almost devoid of misanthropy. In fact, reading this it somewhat restored my faith in the human race.

Retrouver les Cités d'Or

Je suis en train de revivre un moment de nostalgie comme j'en vis parfois: depuis une semaine ou deux, je me suis mis à regarder à nouveau Les Mystérieuses Cités d'Or. La première fois en vingt ans au moins, plus si on pense au temps où j'ai vu la série en entier. J'ai blogué sur le sujet en 2012, mais c'est seulement maintenant que j'ai décidé de m'y remettre. Je suis heureusement surpris que ça vieillit assez bien, avec un mélange assez habile d'histoire et de science-fiction. D'ailleurs, la plongée dans la science-fiction se fait de manière graduelle et assez crédible. Il en va de même pour les éléments quasi-surnaturels, comme le don d'Esteban d'appeler le soleil. Et je ne le les regarde pas seul, enfin pas tout le temps: Wolfie s'est aussi pris d'intérêt pour la série, ce qui fait encore plus mon bonheur.

"Playmospace"

Once upon a time, my brothers and I had a few Playmobil sets. I was discussing this with my brother PJ recently and we mentioned that the very first one we had was a space shuttle with three astronauts in it, one red, one yellow and one another colour. PJ thought he found it online. I did my own research and it appears that the collection was called Playmospace. I remember this space shuttle fondly. There was one action figure for each one of us (my character was the yellow one), the vehicle and the equipment looked absolutely out there and it became the center of our science-fiction make belief games. At some point, we the shuttle and the astronauts were merely used as reference and we played a live action version of the game. I hope I can find a similar shuttle for Wolfie one day.

"Write what you know"

You probably heard that one before: when you want to become a writer, write what you know. I never agreed with it, and I could write a long essay debunking this claim, but I think this line by scifi writer Joe Haldeman (whom I never read), sums up perfectly in a single one example why this is a rubbish advice: "Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery." That's spot on.

À propos de la Planète des singes

Photo prise à Totnes dans le Devon, afin d'illustrer mon propos. Il y avait une procession dans la ville avec plusieurs chars allégoriques, dont certains avec des personnages de cinéma, y compris César. Les gens connaissent surtout la série de films, mais peu savent qu'elle a été inspirée d'un roman, enfin d'une novella de l'auteur français Pierre Boulle. Je n'ai pas vu tous les films, mais j'en ai vu plusieurs, surtout parce que j'ai toujours été fasciné par l'idée de singes armés de fusils qui règnent sur un monde post-apocalyptique. Ça me faisait peur, mais j'adorais. J'en ai fait une mini obsession, jusqu'à lire le roman original, qui est très différent, mais aussi sinon plus intéressant que la plupart des films. Il faudrait bien que je le revisite un de ces quatre.

Space Raiders

Sometimes I do enjoy some bad stuff, whether it is food or counterculture. And this is why, stopping at the corner shop near work one day, the packs of Space Raiders caught my attention. It's a corn and what based snack that apparently has been in circulation for the last thirty years or so. With the grey type alien face on the package that is a call back to the old B scifi movies, and its very cheap price of 25p, I had to try it. I actually tried every flavour I think. They all taste absolutely vile, but in a very enjoyable way. Like a snack named after aliens from outer space and looking like the head of said aliens would taste. But I'd still eat it. Heck, I will eat it just for that head on the bag.

Arrakis, California

My brother PJ now lives in California, where he's been for a few weeks now. He recently wrote this on Facebook, which I thought was so good I had to share: "So far I have known two temperatures in California: comfortable and Arrakis." I have never been there (in California, I mean), but I can just imagine. I need to find time to read Dune one day. But in any case, what my brother wrote deserves to be a great unknown line.