Reviews and Comments

Maybe four stars? But the sheer audacity of it, the throwaway ideas and scenes that would be enough for a hundred silver-age DC stories, the proto-cyberpunk - tiger tattoo, burning man, radioactive scientist/special agent, a retro-future not unlike Cordwainer Smith's, psionics, technically enhanced human bodies, grisly high-speed open-heart surgery (well, heart removal, actually), seeing outside the visible spectrum - all this makes me honour this with all five stars. It is a perfect example of what it is.
Flaws: The ending, too fast. The main character's growth, too fast. The story calls out for 800+ pages, but I'm still glad I got to take the 250-page-rollercoaster. (Definitely more a six-part tv series rather than a single film.)

A re-telling of The Tempest in modern form, with quite a clever conceit as its base: After years of professional exile, a de-throned theatre director secretly gets to produce one more play in favourable conditions with his rascally former colleagues and usurpers as a captive audience. It is, of course, The Tempest.

I kept wondering what to expect. Would he go full Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood on them? Would his own plans be crossed by other players? In the end, the central performance reminded me of the final episode of The Prisoner: weird. And after the end, there are long in-world analyses of the play and its characters, and a summary of the original play. I was surprised by this pacing, but didn't mind it; I'm interested in literary theory anyway.

A fun read.

Memoir-anecdotes of a Victorian-Edwardian surgeon. I read it for the famous Elephant man account, but stayed for the vivid writing - two stories could easily pass for ghost stories, the rest is atmospheric, only very occasionally melodramatic, and told me lots of things about early hospitals that I didn't know.