Vacuity (2013)

Vacuity, dir. Michael Matzur. Montana State University, 2013. Starring Michael Steppe. 14 minutes.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

Vacuity is a beautifully-made short SF film that functions both as a thoughtful character study and as a suspenseful thriller. Shot on a very minimal set, with a single camera and a nonexistent budget, Vacuity nevertheless manages to pack more story into its 14 minutes than many films ten times its length.

Alan Brahm (Michael Steppe) works as an engineer on the XOEH space station. As the story begins, he awakens in an airlock where he had been preparing for an EVA. His computer terminal displays error messages: hydraulics, pneumatics, airlock systems. Alan soon discovers that the station has suffered catastrophic damage, his teammates are dead or unaccounted for, his suit is damaged, and he is trapped in the airlock—with the computer stuck in its decompression sequence.

Strange Frame (2013)

Strange Frame. Directed by G.B. Hajim. Island Planet One production, 2013. Starring Tim Curry, Claudia Black, Tara Strong, George Takei. 96 minutes.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

Strange Frame is almost certainly the world's premier animated lesbian sci-fi rock musical. For many, that one sentence will tell them all they need to know to decide if they want to see it. But this complex and visually enthralling tale resists easy categorization. Featuring an array of beloved genre performers and a groundbreaking animation style, Strange Frame presents a story of obsessive love and the seductions of fame set in a gritty posthuman future.

Bestiary (A cappella Zoo #10, 2013)

A cappella Zoo: A Magazine of Magic Realism & Slipstream, Issue 10: Bestiary: The Best of the Inaugural Demi-Decade of A cappella Zoo, Spring 2013 (March). Pp. 330. ISSN 1945-7480. $9.00.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

A cappella Zoo is a journal of magic realism and slipstream fiction and poetry, currently edited by Amanda Lyn DiSanto and Lisa McCool-Grime. Founded in 2008, A cappella Zoo has made a bit of a splash with imaginative and evocative stories of the fantastic. The tenth issue, titled Bestiary, is an anthology of the best work from the magazine’s first five years. The defining characteristic of magic realism is the introduction of fantastic elements into a familiar, everyday environment; the story typically draws its energy from the reaction of ordinary characters to a bizarre situation. Often, the overarching mood of the piece is one of yearning—the longing of people in our mundane world for the escape and meaning symbolized by the supernatural, and conversely, the desire of the fanciful character at the center of the story to be “normal”. The guest editor for this issue, Oregon writer Gina Ochsner, talks in her introductory interview about “the primal need for narrative in which the otherworldly, the strange, the supernatural is … allowed to visibly collide with the known ‘real’ world.” Her selections for this special issue demonstrate a variety of aspects of this collision.

Flynn, Messiah Game (2012)

Tom Flynn, The Messiah Game: A Comedy of Terrors Part I. See Sharp Press, 2012. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-1-9372760-4-1. $11.95.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

Part I of The Messiah Game: A Comedy of Terrors presents a complex and fascinating interstellar society with a rich and little-understood history, and uses it as the backdrop for a cutting satire on religious belief. The author, Tom Flynn, is a prominent figure in the atheist and secular humanist movements, as executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of Free Inquiry magazine. In this book—previously published in 2002 as the first part of a single novel, Galactic Rapture—he uses many of the standard tropes of science fiction to ruthlessly skewer religious leaders and believers of all types.

2 Hours (2012)

2 Hours, dir. Michael Ballif. 2Hoursthemovie.com, 2012. Starring Josh Merrill, Brooke Hemsath. 26 minutes.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

2 Hours is an unusual and exciting little horror film, only 26 minutes long, that brings a fresh perspective to the well-traveled territory of the zombie movie. This film, made on an infinitesimal budget by Utah filmmakers Michael Ballif and Josh Merrill, tells the story of a victim, already infected, who goes searching for other survivors who may have a cure—while fighting his slow transformation into one of the living dead.

Indian SF #1 (2013)

Indian SF, issue #1 (Jan-Feb 2013). Online: http://indiansf.wordpress.com/

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

With Indian SF, a new online magazine, we have a promising new conduit for the spread of science fiction and fantasy from India. The first issue, available for free download, contains a small but pleasing selection of Western and Indian stories, as well as an interview with a prominent Indian comic-book team and a pair of reviews of Indian genre novels. Its creator, Geetanjali Dighe, is a digital marketer and science fiction fan based in Mumbai, who hopes to showcase the Indian writers she loves and expose them to the wider world. Despite a few rough edges in the editing, and half of the stories not being Indian in origin, this is a very promising start to a new publication.

O’Rourke, Pieces & Stems (2011)

Stephen O’Rourke, Pieces & Stems: Stories by Stephen O’Rourke. Stephen O’Rourke, 2011. Pp. 303. ISBN 978-0-615-54300-0. $11.95 print / $7.20 Kindle.

Reviewed by Brian Eisley

Over the last forty years, the postmodern trend in literature has upended long-standing notions about the basic assumptions of the writing process itself, such as the boundaries between author and reader, between reality and fantasy. In Pieces & Stems, Stephen O’Rourke explores these strange new worlds in a variety of ways, creating fascinating self-referential scenarios despite some severe technical deficiencies in his writing.

A surrealist author based in New York, O'Rourke has previously written four unpublished novels and a poetry collection. Now, in his first collection of short stories, O'Rourke makes extensive use of magical-realist situations and imagery to examine these conceptual issues to a far greater extent than many writers. Repeatedly, O'Rourke's characters find their worlds folding in on themselves, often swallowing their own tails like the famous Ourobouros.

An example is ‘The Cadaver and the Scholar’, in which an arrogant young student is writing a story by this title, in which a student much like himself is writing a similar story; the inner story is meant to illustrate some aspects of nihilistic philosophy. As the reader is led to expect, the outer story unfolds in much the same way as the inner story, but the ending provides a final twist that subverts the student’s argument. The student characters in both the inner and outer stories appear to be loosely based on O’Rourke, and so he appears to be using the act of writing as a device to examine these philosophical ideas just as his characters are.

In another piece, ‘Wrong Number’, the necessary distortion of reality involves time, rather than stories within stories. Here, the protagonist encounters a mysterious woman at the same time as he is bothered by a series of wrong-number phone calls; through a complex chain of events, he discovers that the caller is none other than himself, and that the woman plays a central role in the mystery. O’Rourke effectively conveys the character’s frustration as events become more complex and inexplicable.

In addition to these self-referential tales, there are several stories that provide a range of nicely surreal imagery. ‘Secret Sentient’ posits a tradition in which the bodies of the dead are preserved and displayed in their descendants’ homes, silently observing the flow of life around them; O’Rourke illustrates here the secret lives of the objects we carry with us. ‘A Bad Day for Bob’, one of the most successful stories, features a man convinced that his wife and neighbors are intelligent mannequins; this short, surprising story effectively describes a most unusual world. And the final tale, ‘The End Never Means THE END’, revisits all the characters of the other stories, along with a thinly disguised O’Rourke, and brings them together in a bizarre apotheosis that recalls Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’.

The ideas on display are engaging and intriguing, and O’Rourke shows much potential as a storyteller. Unfortunately, however, it must be said that his writing suffers from a number of flaws. For instance, O’Rourke often breaks the widely known rule of ‘show, don’t tell’; instead of presenting dialogue, he might describe what was said during a conversation, or he might end a story by telling what happened to the protagonist, taking the reader out of the story. Additionally, his tone is generally quite flat and descriptive, and this dispels any sense of empathy for his characters; they often feel more like experimental subjects. Given his postmodern approach, it is possible that this alienation is intentional, but this doesn't make the stories any easier to read.

Also, O’Rourke sometimes has little sense of when to end a paragraph and begin a new one. Many of his paragraphs stretch for a page or more and may combine plot, exposition, and descriptions of character interaction substituting for dialogue. Finally, the volume as a whole is badly in need of editing to weed out spelling and grammatical errors.

Whether these problems completely spoil the book will depend on the reader. There are fascinating ideas here about the interconnectedness of fantasy and reality, and about the ways in which art reflects the obsessions and prejudices of author and audience. O’Rourke also shows that he can create complex yet economical plots that delve into these connections. Given his distracting technical issues, some readers will likely feel that Stephen O’Rourke is not quite ready for prime time; but those willing to look beyond these flaws will discover an interesting mind just beginning to develop its powers.

[Editor's note: author's biography corrected in paragraph 2 above. We apologise for the error.]

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