My friend Shawn just celebrated his birthday the other week, and this is the cake his wife got for him. It is always a good thing to be appreciated for who you really are; happy birthday, Shawn!
Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be in theaters on April 4th, and not a moment too soon in My book. This latest trailer just makes me more aware that I need to be in the theater that day. I pretty much feel that way about any portion of the Marvel franchise that Disney cranks out, and the folks generating the Spiderman films are doing just as good a job.
In the fall of 1965 I received the latest copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the mail, and found inside it a story by Roger Zelazny, an author I had never heard of before. The story was . . . And Call Me Conrad, renamed to This Immortal when it came out in book form the following year, and it blew me away. I must not have been the only one, since it won a Hugo for Best Novel at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention (Zelazny won a total of 6 Hugo’s and 3 Nebula’s in his career) which it shared with Frank Herbert’s Dune. Earth was devastated by a nuclear war, and only a few million humans survived when the aliens invaded the planet, taking it over. Among the people fighting for Earth’s freedom was the god Pan, or perhaps just a long-lived mutant with mortal children. That was only the first of many masterpieces, which included Lord of Light, Isle of the Dead, Today We Choose Faces, Doorways in the Sand, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, and so many more. Besides all the other awards he won, I should probably mention that A Rose for Ecclesiastes was included in Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars, a DVD on board the Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008.
But if he had a single body of work that stood out above the rest, it had to be The Chronicles of Amber. In this multiverse there are only two true worlds: Amber, and the Courts of Chaos. All the myriad worlds between them, including our own version of Earth, are but shadows reflecting combinations of aspects of those two. The royal families of those two realms hold the power to walk the shadows, find the world that holds closest to their heart’s desire, and use the peoples and technologies/magics of that parallel timeline in the ongoing war for supremacy over all existence. Even with the amazing scope of the reality posited for the premise behind the location of the story, at its core this is still all about the relationships between all the people and gods involved with the struggle, and how they change and evolve over time. You should grab all 10 volumes of the original series (from your library or from your bookseller doesn’t matter, as long as you get them) and read them from beginning to end. I suspect you will decide it was time well spent once you do, and if you want more there are some additional works available.
There are no genre entries I have found this week, but the Veronica Mars big screen outing could be fun. It is one of the first mainline motion pictures built from a Kickstarter Project I am aware of, which kind of makes me interested in seeing how well they did with the amount of money they raised.
The only genre movie this week is a parody, The Hungover Games, making fun of The Hunger Games, The Hangover, and Ted, to name just a few. I also have to mention Lost in Thailand, which came out on DVD a week or two back, and is pretty much the Chinese version of The Hangover.
In TV, while there is no genre releases, the BBC series Vikings is a look at what was really driving the repeated Viking raids on the British Isles over the course of several centuries (800 to 1150, give or take 30 years at each end).
In Anime Accel World: Set 2, the combat continues as the Brain Burst Linker’s vie to see who gets to rule the Accelerated World. If Arita can not defeat the new menace he could lose everything and everyone that he cares about.This ox set includes the 12 episodes of the second set, plus 8 mini-episodes of associated silliness. Ikki Tousen: Xtreme Xecutor is the 4th round of battle-induced clothing malfunctions as the Dragon’s Powers determines who wins and who loses. This series gives a whole new meaning to school rivalries, as the street brawlers meet for some reincarnated mayhem.
Justice in Psycho Pass is based on the Dominator, a futuristic weapon that can read minds and assess the probability that a citizen will turn criminal. This tool is wielded by the Enforcers and Inspectors who have replaced police, judges, and jury with heavy caliber instant justice of the extreme prejudice kind. At the other end of the social spectrum, The Pet Girl of Sakurasou: Collection 2 is all about the care and feeding of the terminally unworldly.
DOLL＄BOXX is a five to seven woman rock band from Japan (some members seem to be there intermittently as other projects draw them away), formed when the band Gacharic Spin joined forces with Fuki, the lead singer from Lightbringer. Both bands continue to record and tour separately, and both are very good, but I really like the music they created together. The first track is their song Take My Chance from 2012, the second is 2013’s Ｍｅｒｒｉｌｙ Ｈｉｇｈ Ｇｏ Ｒｏｕｎｄ.