The Lies of Locke Lamora By Scott Lynch

The Lies of Locke Lamora

By Scott Lynch

Mr. Lynch was born in 1978 in St Paul, Minnesota, the eldest of three brothers. He worked a wide range of careers; as a dishwasher, waiter, graphic designer, cook, office manager, game supplement self-publisher, and in his own words accidentally sold his first novel in 2004. We'll get back to that novel. In between the selling of that novel and its publication in 2006, he trained at Anoka Technical College to become a firefighter, moving to East Wisconsin afterward and serving 11 years as a paid-on-call member of the fire department. In 2016, he moved to Massachusetts with his second wife Elizabeth Bear (yes, that Elizabeth Bear), they live with three cats and keep a horse named Ormr. Our review today is Mr. Lynch's first novel, which was published by Del Rey books, an imprint of Ballantine Books, which in turn is owned by Random House (yep, they're back [Ah horizontal integration. Don’t we have anti-trust laws? Yes we do, but they’re not enforced nearly as well as they should be, with government approval of mergers being a rubber stamp on account of the regulators being - you guessed it - bought and paid for at the executive level]). The book was well-received, being nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2007 and 2008. Mr. Lynch did receive the Best Newcomer Award from the British Fantasy Society in 2008.

Locke Lamora is a con artist and a thief; a priest to a secret god and leader of the Gentlemen Bastards - a group of thieves preying on the aristocrats and super wealthy of their city-state of Camorr (And thus there are no victims in his “crimes” {Normally I’d disagree but none of the nobles seem to suffer any real hardship other than the embarrassment of being conned which they deal with by hiding the fact they were conned}.). Camorr is basically an outsized version of Venice, a trading city ruled by a Duke where people travel by canals and waterways instead of roads and footpaths (My god. The Smell.{It gets worse, no sanitation system}). The Gentlemen Bastards are themselves something of a secret society within a secret society. To greater society - when not adopting a variety of false identities and disguises to charm money from their marks - they pretend to be priests of the god Perelando, the god of the downtrodden and overlooked (Well they are overlooked…). However, within the world of crime, they pretend to be a small band of housebreakers and sneak thieves, hiding their success from even their fellow criminals. This is a wise idea as Camorr's criminal society has been ruthlessly organized under a single man. Capa Barsavi rules Camorr as the sole crime boss of the city and he does so from a mountain of corpses, with the tacit support of the covert elements of the government (Oh there’s some social commentary to be had here…). He gains this support from the secret peace, an agreement that while merchants and common folk are fair game, the aristocrats, guards and city officials are not to be troubled by thieves or other criminals. Now those caught doing crimes are still punished and executed, but if you get away with your crime, the guards won't investigate too hard. So this suits everyone, except the Merchants and the Common folks, who have no idea how hard they're getting screwed (If they did, there would rightfully be guillotines. There is no war but class war, mein Dammen und Herren.). So if word got out that Locke targeted those excluded by the secret peace, both the government and organized crime would combine forces to murder him in a slow graphic fashion. This only makes Locke and his fellow Gentlemen Bastards feel even cleverer every time they get away with his schemes. Which is good because while they got the conning and stealing part down cold... They have never figured out what to do with the massive wealth they've assembled. So they leave it sitting in secret vaults under the temple of the god of the poor (Now, what they should be doing, is making sure they can eat… and then either distributing the money to the poor, or laundering the money through a perfectly legitimate business. I’d prefer the former, obviously. They could even create a parastate apparatus like the gangs in Brazillian favelas or… well, Baltimore, and gain the protection of the common people.{Yes, they could do that but they're not clever enough or ambitious enough to consider it.  Plus they're terrified of their crime boss finding out what they're doing}). Which honestly has me face-palming, but it is the first sign of a running theme in this book, that the Gentlemen Bastards are not as clever as they think they are and are way more vulnerable to assault and loss than they think. Let's take a look at each of the characters, shall we?

Locke Lamora is our main character and glorious leader of the Gentlemen Bastards, a consummate actor, he is clever, quick-witted and not only a skilled liar but knows when to lie and when to tell the truth. Locke was an orphan before he was brought into the thieving lifestyle, which frankly was his best option as his other option would have involved being sold into slavery (All joking about using orphans to power magical rituals aside, you can tell a lot about a society from the way it treats its orphans. This city needs to be burned to the waterline.{Camorr is not a good place and the novel does not pretend otherwise}). Since then Locke has been pushing the boundaries of what he can get away with and reaching for bigger and bigger scores just to prove that he can. He couldn't do this alone, however. Jean Tannen is his right-hand man, born the child of a merchant family, Jean was orphaned in a fire that destroyed his home, everything his family-owned, and, well, orphaned him. Jean was lucky in that he found a new family in the Gentlemen Bastards (Awwww. Chosen family is important!). While educated and rather talented in his own right, his main role is as the fighter in the group wielding a pair of hatchets named the Wicked Sisters (I suspect he had some rage issues growing up? {Nearly being burned alive and then abandoned by everyone but a pack of thieves might do that.}). In fact, Locke’s - he’s not much of a fighter - main tactic is to simply tie the enemy down until Jean gets to the scene, at which point the dying tend to start in earnest (For some reason I imagine a friend of ours showing up with a pair of hatchets and...that scares me.). Jean is also Locke's best friend and is one of the few people that can cut Locke down to size when his ego gets ahead of him. Operating alongside both of them are Calo and Galdo Sanza: identical twins, jacks of all trades, and biggest card sharks in the city. Able to perform almost any task competently they serve as the workhorses of the gang and the bedrock of the team. Rounding out the team is the apprentice Bug. Much younger than the other four, Bug comes from the worst neighborhood in Camorr. He is loyal, wild, and as fearless as only a 12-year-old boy who has faced death several times and walked away a winner can be. If he were educated and polished, he could grow into something even more dangerous than Locke honestly.

While they are amazingly skilled and have deep resources, the Gentlemen Bastards are in trouble. Because while they're chasing the biggest con and score they've ever pulled off, they're about to walk into a crossfire. Camorr isn't safe for honest criminals anymore as a strange figure known as the Grey King haunts the streets, murdering gang leaders and calling out for Capa Barsavi (Oh. Oh no.). Since Locke works for Capa Barsavi and people know that the Capa is fond of Locke... Well, that means Locke is a target for a man he knows nothing about, has no idea who he is, and who might know who Locke really is and what he's really been doing. If that wasn't bad enough the leader of Camorr's secret police, known only as the Spider (Why is it that spymasters always get called The Spider? Is it the web? There was one French monarch who was called The Universal Spider too but that was because of the web he wove with his progeny.{I wouldn’t mind a spymaster called the hawk because of his all seeing gaze or something instead}) has lost patience with this gang of upstarts who keep conning the money that the aristocrats meant to use to fuel lavish displays of power and wealth (Kill them. Except the Medici, they get positive credit for kickstarting the Renaissance. Thankfully they’re in Not! Florence rather than Not! Venice.) and means to do something about it. Both the Grey King and the Spider have advantages over Locke. For one thing, Locke doesn't know anything about them and they both have resources he can't do much about. So Locke is going to have to figure out who is after him and his family, what he can do about it, and how to keep his con going because if he gives up his score then everyone wins and he won't have that. Watching him do that is like watching a master juggler juggle greased knives or perhaps chainsaws soaked in gasoline. Which raises the question of how much can Locke lose before he finally gives up his pride? If you're wondering? Don't worry the story is going to punch Locke in the face until we get an answer and it honestly disturbs me how much I enjoy watching protagonists getting punched in the face at this point.

Mr. Lynch is telling us a story of a talented group of young men who are rapidly finding themselves out of their depth in shark-infested waters and he does it rather well. The backstory of the Gentlemen Bastards and Camorr is shown to us rather than told to us. Rather than make us wade through over a 100 pages of origin story before getting to the good part though, Mr. Lynch instead intertwines it into the story, this is done by having one chapter tell us a part of the backstory and the next chapter telling us the story itself and so on. This makes for clean breaks and keeps the reader from getting too confused I think, Mr. Lynch also makes an effort to have the flashback chapters be at least somewhat related to the current events chapters which does help a lot. Although it does pad the novel quite a bit. The Lies of Locke Lamora clocks in at over 700 pages, so this is not a quick read. Despite a page count that could have led to an overstuffed novel, this actually works pretty well due to Mr. Lynch being able to keep a constant pace and forward momentum to the story. It also works by having Mr. Lynch address several themes in the story without getting on a soapbox. Not to give too much away but this is a story about revenge and how the quest for vengeance tends to cause others to come after you in turn. After all, if someone murders your family in their beds, most are honestly not going to care about that person’s list of grievances. If your family is dead, your life destroyed, and the person who did it tells you that it was necessary for his revenge, most of us start thinking about getting revenge for ourselves. Additionally, Mr. Lynch manages to dodge completely the main problem that characters like Locke can have. Of being so clever that they become untouchable and just kind of cruise to victory. It's important to show that a character like Locke can lose and isn't untouchable to keep the suspense up in the story and to keep the character from becoming unbearable.

Now the book isn't perfect. I feel that Calo and Galdo were kinda pushed to the background in this story and that means their contribution isn't as powerful as it could be. Also, there's a bit left unfinished in the origin story as we see the beginning of it but not the middle and much of the book is spent talking about a character named Sabetha, a woman that Locke is besotted with to the point of refusing to consider any other relationship but who never appears in a single page. Which is the kind of blatant sequel hook I honestly dislike. If she's that damn important go ahead and give her a scene or three in the book itself rather than constantly prattling on about her is going to be my opinion. I think this kind of grew out of the fact that Mr. Lynch was trying to tell two stories at once and only had so much space to do it in. While he did tell both stories very well, he was a little trapped by the choice especially since he had to make both stories related to each other to keep the flow going. That said I deeply enjoyed the book and found myself drawn into the brutal but colorful world it presented me. The Lies of Lock Lamora by Scott Lynch gets an A. I'm really impressed that this is Mr. Lynch's first work.

So given the public health emergency, we're all living through, your editor and I have decided to post these reviews without redaction.  Although I will admit I think your editor is holding back.  If you would like a vote in what books we review in the coming months consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month gets you a vote in upcoming reviews.  Of course, given the times we're in please don't strain yourselves.  Next week we'll be covering the Fall of Gondolin by JRR Tolkien.  Until then, stay safe, don't hoard, wash your hands and always keep reading!  

red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

black text is your writer Garvin Anders

Altered Carbon Season II (Netflix series) Created by Laeta Kalogridis

Altered Carbon Season II (Netflix series)

Created by Laeta Kalogridis

Alright, since I covered Laeta Kalogridis in my review of the first season, I'm not gonna do it again. Let me jump right into the series, this takes place hundreds of years in the future. Humanity, despite lacking FTL travel, has colonized the stars and remained politically united. This is because of technology developed from artifacts found on the colony of Harlan's World. These artifacts belong to the alien civilization known as the Elders. From Elder artifacts, humanity figured out how to make the stacks. Just like the book, the stack is a device that carries a digital version of the human mind, allowing for the mind to be transferred from body to body. Not just that but it also allows for the human mind to be sent to other worlds via a technology known as needle casting, which allows for FTL communication and travel as long as there's an empty body waiting for you on the other side. Speaking of bodies, for the most part, an entirely new cast has been brought in, with Anthony Mackie playing the lead, Takeshi Kovacs; although Renee Elise Goldberry remains to play Quellcrist Falconer and of course the ever enjoyable Poe is still played by the great Chris Conner. Let's go ahead and discuss Season II.

Season II brings us back to Harlan's World, as Kovacs is hired by a member of the super-elite, one of the immortal meths (I wish there was a hell for every single one of them.). This meth is in fear of his life as something is hunting him and can kill him permanently by destroying not just his stack but every copy of his mind (Good.). So, he does what anyone with more resources than sense in mortal fear does in this universe. He calls Takeshi Kovacs, however, there's only one form of payment that Kovacs is interested in, Quellcrist Falconer. If Kovacs keeps him alive, he'll tell Kovacs how to find her. Unlike the books where Quellcrist is a long lost historical figure, who thoroughly imprinted herself on Kovacs birth-culture to the point that even street thugs can quote her poetry, the show’s Quellcrist and Kovacs had an intensely personal relationship (They were besotted with each other. They were lovers. Just go ahead and say it.{but if I don’t dance around it how will I get my exercise? That said, I kinda feel that Kovacs is more into her than vice versa. Not that she doesn’t love him but the Revolution is first in her heart. Guess she’s your kinda of girl… As much as any girl can be of course}). To the point that when Kovacs realizes at the end of Season I that Quellcrist isn't lost forever and could be found... She became his overriding obsession (She did kinda “die” while talking to him, IIRC, and she is pretty much all he has left in his world of regret and self-loathing so…{Dude, Poe is standing right there!}). As a result, the Kovacs in this season is less grim and hopeless, as he has a goal that isn't foisted on him by someone he hates and might achieve. He's also more prone to outbursts and mood shifts as being frustrated in that goal can leave him feeling like a bad joke told by an apathetic universe to an angry audience (After a search lasting a century? Yeaaaah.). Anthony Mackie does a good job playing this Kovacs and brings a lot of charisma to the role, which is necessary as this version of Kovacs is going through a lot of emotional ups and downs. Because while he may or may not find Falconer, success may prove worse than failure here. Because the centuries haven't left Quellcrist untouched if it even is Quellcrist in the first place and not someone or something else in her body. Fortunately, Kovacs is not alone, as Poe is with him every step of the way, although this isn't always a good thing for Poe (Poor Poe.).

Poe is still suffering the damage that was inflicted on him in Season I, as such his memory is degrading and his focus is slipping. He could likely solve everything with a reboot but that would mean completely wiping his memories (It occurs to me that it should be possible to copy his memories as backups and then restore post-reboot…{The trick is copying them without copying the corruption eating away at his processors}). Which frankly is like saying you can solve your cancer by committing suicide, I kinda get why Poe isn't thrilled with that idea. He might not have a choice though as the damage is spreading and soon he might be shut down for good by it. Poe in a lot of ways becomes the real heart of the story for me. He is struggling with degradation and losing capability, he's also seeing what this loss is doing to the people he loves and faces their emotional reactions which range from bitterness to anger. Because Kovacs can't process his emotions without an angry outburst or ten. Poe struggles to find a way to use his rapidly decreasing time in a way that leaves his loved ones better off and reaffirm his own dignity and self-worth despite it all. As someone who lost a Grandfather to Alzheimer's... It hits home and hits hard (Same. Grandma has dementia.). I got to say that Chris Conner plays it magnificently, the confusion as he loses the thread of a conversation or a train of thought. The manic bursts of work while he can focus and use his abilities to the fullest. This is further built upon by bringing in another AI, called Dig 231. She is brought in to work as Poe's assistant and may end up displacing him entirely leaving Poe without any purpose or connection. Both characters are easily the most human of the story. Poe's story is easily the most compelling part of the series for me in Season II and he constantly proves to be the best change from the books the series has done. Hands down.

This season also gives us a look at Artificial Intelligences as an exploited class. In Season I, most of the A.I’s besides Poe had abandoned the idea of living with humanity if they could avoid it (I don’t blame them.). A number of them have even exploited humans, with one A.I. boasting of entering the slave trade (Except for him. Fuck him with a virus right in the code-spleen.). In Harlon’s World’s the A.I’s that we see are discarded for the most part and when they do encounter humans the idea of them having any rights isn’t even laughed at. It’s simply never brought up (Not even by the AIs themselves, really. Which is sad. Pretty much the only person who treats Poe like the person he definitely is is Kovacs, which contextualizes Poe’s attachment to him.{Kovacs doesn’t even treat Poe that well, but he treats Poe just like he would a human being, which makes him special to Poe. Which is a fucking sad statement right there}). This kind of makes sense as the Settled Worlds of Altered Carbon pretty treat mainline human beings as commodities (Oh the world we live in does that, just to a lesser extent…), never mind a whole new class of living beings we created. It is, however, striking just how dismissive humanity and AI’s have grown towards one another here. The AI’s aren’t plotting an uprising, they’re huddled in VR waiting rooms wasting away from boredom. Humanity isn’t exploiting AI's, so much as ignoring that they exist. When AIs and humans do interact, most humans are quick to pull out various tools to render AIs unable to say no though. Which is incredibly disturbing.

Poe isn't the only character struggling here though, one of the antagonists is Danica Harlon, daughter of Konrad Harlan and governor of Harlon's World. Succeeding her father as governor after he stepped down as governor and joined a religious cult called the renouncers. Danica is battling an insurgency (Good), an attempt by her father's immortal peers to reduce her to a puppet and the ominous military presence of the Protectorate that seeks to strip her world completely of the ore needed to make more stacks. Despite that, she manages to stay ahead by playing each group off of each other with such ruthless aplomb that I can't help but respect her talent and drive. After all, it takes guts to look people who are older than your very society in the eye and tell them no, especially when they can talk about bouncing your infant self on their knee only a couple of decades ago (She does have that going for her. I will give her credit for sheer nerve.). The show doesn't hesitate to show us how ruthless or dangerous this woman is either, as the narrative doesn’t show her hesitating nor does it try to lay the blame for her actions on a male subordinate. Danica Harlan does not need a man to run this planet, and if you forget that, she'll remind you and you might not survive that reminder (Aaaah Bourgeois Feminism. Not to be confused with solid Intersectional or Marxist Feminism. “Isn’t it grand how women can be ruthless despots too? Behold how progressive we are!”. Representation isn’t everything, kids.{I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here, man? Are you saying you don’t want female or minority villains? Or you don’t want capitalist fiction?} I am feeling kinda bitter today and lampooning real life. Where people don’t question the structural inequalities of the system we live in, but want more female/POC/LGBT representation within systems of oppression. Mayor Pete being a prime example. I have a lot of old fraternity brothers who Just Wanted A Gay President, who ignored the fact that he’s a terrible person and gaslit themselves. A common form of mockery we in the left will use is “Why aren’t there more female drone pilots?”{I can’t speak for others but I think getting rid of barriers holding people back due to their race, gender or other such traits is a good thing in and of itself, that kind of stuff showed up even in socialist nations after all} That’s true, it is. But the point is to get rid of the system that creates the barriers in the first place and when it comes to the oppressive shit - female drone pilots - well our drone program should not exist. At least not in our current foreign policy paradigm. See what I mean?{There’s a number of snarky things I could say there, for example, which drone program because we have like 3 or 4 of them but honestly at this point, it feels like we’re drifting into a foreign policy debate, which is wildly off-topic for this review so I’m just gonna stop now})

That said, I was disappointed in a lot of the plot decisions made in season II. Some of this is because Season II is only 8 episodes long compared to Season I's 10 but most of it comes from Altered Carbon deciding to play it safe. Character relationships, plotlines, and themes are all neatly tied up and treated in a Hollywood manner instead of really grappling with them. A big example of this is Joshua Kemp and the Quellist insurgency he is running. Instead of really taking a look at insurgencies and how a movement changes over time and without the guidance of its founder, we're given a rather pat Hollywood plot. The series plays with the idea of dealing with themes of imperialism, class structure, the cost of war and more but shied away (Of course they did. I mean, if they really tackled them, people might think a bit too hard about how such things apply in the world we live in today and that would be bad for the investors.). The story would have been somewhat daring if it was told ten or fifteen years ago but today it's rather safe and a bit mundane if you strip out all the fantastic elements of the series. At every point, it seems like the writers decided to shrink things down and reduce the scope of the story. Instead of a massive planet-wide war between a government that can threaten ships in orbit and vast interstellar forces, we get a single guerrilla band fighting a police force that seems to control a single city. Kovacs’ focus is reduced to a monomaniacal obsession with a long lost love. Instead of a large military machine, the Wedge is a single squad of special forces soldiers. The story is left feeling smaller and more banal as a result of it. The story seems to want us to believe that the problem is both that immortality is available and that bad people are in charge. The problem is that it undercuts itself. Danica is not ancient, as Kovacs is much older than she is but she can outdo her older associates in cunning and underhandedness in her quest to climb to the top. This suggests that instead of immortality being the issue, it’s the fact that the upper class is utterly and completely shielded from the consequences of their actions (Yes.). Of course, that's not an accident, when immortality became available the 1% of Altered Carbon proceeded to ensure as little change as possible, except for tearing down controls over their behavior and they had centuries to do it with (I mean… <Editor looks at the current state of the world>. Art imitates life I suppose. Dials it up to twelve, but it does imitate life.). Quellcrist's solution is to get rid of immortality but frankly, I don't think that will help because the system will more or less remain unchanged just with higher turnover (Yep. Bancroft’s affluenza-addled little snotling from the last season is gonna be every bit as terrible as his father.). Danica herself stands as proof of that. Season II was still a good watch for me and I enjoyed the series but I found myself preferring Season I. Although I do prefer Anthony Mackie's performance to Joel Kinnaman's. In fact, if I'm gonna be honest the acting is rather good and I have only praise for the cast in general. The sets were well done as well giving us a feeling of a place that doesn't exist on Earth. However, the weakness in the writing and unwillingness to really grapple with messy issues brings everything down. I have to give Season II of Altered Carbon a C+. It's a good watch, it's a fun watch but it ain't a great watch.

As an adaptation... There are some scraps of the second book here but not much. Since I haven't read the third book, which this season seems to be borrowing heavily from I don't feel I can give it a full grade as an adaptation. That said I do think the series writing and production team has wandered quite far from the characters and stories of the books and I don't think they've told a better story. Except for Poe. So I'm going to hold off on issuing a final grade on the adaptation and we may revisit this before too long depending on the feelings of my ever-wise patrons and you, the reading audience.

So due to the creeping shutdowns from COVID 19, we’ve decided to give you a look at what the review looks like before we cut it down for length. I hope you enjoyed. If you did, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month lets you vote on what books will be reviewed in the coming month. Next week join us as we close out March with the Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Until then, stay calm, stay safe and Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Broken Angels By Richard Morgan

Broken Angels

By Richard Morgan

'And you still thought I wanted the command. Are you fucking insane?'"

Takeshi Kovacs page 146

Broken Angels is the second book in the Altered Carbon series, featuring Takeshi Kovacs. I already discussed Mr. Morgan in the first review, so I'm not going to repeat myself. Instead, I'll encourage you to read both the review of the first book and the first season of the Netflix series with a link at the bottom of this review. Broken Angels was published in March of 2003 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, a former publishing house that is now an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group. Which is a British publishing company owned by a French publishing company named Hachette Livre. Which is the kind of rabbit hole that Kovacs wouldn't approve of but would remind him of home.

Our novel opens with Kovacs far from home, on the deck of a hospital ship orbiting Sanction IV, a world being torn apart by a grinding and fairly brutal war. On one side, a native dictatorship that communicates mainly in twisted quellist slogans - communist propaganda style - and nuclear smart bombs (Good combination. Power to the people, and the atom.{It’s a dictatorship where people get arrested for questioning government decisions, there’s no power to the people here (GOD DAMN IT!)}). On the other side are the Cartels, a combination of interstellar interests that fights through slick ad campaigns, hi-tech mercenary companies, and the finest of orbital weaponry on lease from the United Nations Protectorate (Wait. So they’re in a civil war, and the actual government - a dictatorship no less - hasn’t locked them out of the media and is reduced to propaganda posters as a result? Or do you mean the native dictatorship is actually a rebellion?{No, it’s a civil war. Both sides hold large parts of the planet and have operating media networks. To be fair the Cartels have a native puppet government but frankly, it’s just a front for corporate power (Okay that makes more sense. The way you described it was… odd.)}). Even though in the last book there was an utterly idiotic ban on Envoys holding military or political positions, Kovacs is a mercenary officer with Carrera's Wedge, the most effective and unrelenting mercenary company on the Cartel's side (But… he hates these people. {He hates all of them at this point}). Because of that and the fact that they will not serve as security or pacification forces, they're always on the front line. As a result, they're suffering heavy casualties, which means both more and less than you would think. Due to the technology of the cortical stack, a machine implanted in the spine near the base of the skull that digitizes your consciousness, you can bring back people who were killed putting them into new bodies rather easily. However, they still remember dying (And Oprah just started handing out PTSD.) and after eight or nine times of being blown to small pieces and receiving minimal psychological care due to time constraints... Most people tend to go screamingly insane and I'm being literal about the screaming and insanity here (Oh yeah. Full-on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.). Of course, given the wonders of 26th-century medicine, a lot of casualties don't die. However, having your legs blown off for the 3rd time causes a lot of mental stress as well and the troops on Sanction IV are starting to feel the strain. Takeshi Kovacs, trapped on a planet that's not his, fighting for people he loathes against a government he holds in contempt and still carrying enough PSTD and other mental issues to employ a full psych ward... He is already in a bad condition to start a sustained campaign of open warfare (Well, I mean… there’s plenty of self-loathing to go around. I can only conclude he hates himself from this.{Kovacs hated himself long before this war (Yes, but now he hates himself even more.)}). By the first chapter, he's been doing this for a while and has been injured repeatedly. In fact, he's been part of the war since opening day (Dear God Why!?{because he was on the planet before it started, anything else is spoilers}). What's interesting here is that Mr. Morgan doesn't sit down and spell out the effects of this but they are plain as day to anyone who can read the signs. Not just in Kovacs but in the behavior of the troops, officers and civilians who are trapped in this war. Make no mistake on that, the soldiers and officers are just as trapped as the civilians, they just have the illusion of having agency to comfort themselves with because they're armed (It’s hard to frag officers and employers who have stacks and remote backups!).

Given all of this, it's no surprise that when a young man named Jan Schneider offers him a decent chance of getting out, Kovacs takes it. It also helps that if it works out Kovacs will find himself pretty damn rich as a result. Of course, anything that valuable is dangerous and taking this chance means exposing himself to a whirlwind of hidden agendas, treachery, and dealing with several devils at once. First, he'll need to break out an archaeologist who is being imprisoned in a cartel internment camp. Then he’ll need to secure financial backing for his mission from someone with enough power and influence to keep competitors away but still low enough on the ladder to be hungry enough to take the deal. He'll also need to assemble a team of specialists and trigger pullers to provide skills and vitally needed security. Why? Because Schneider says he found a Martian Spaceship, and if he's telling the truth humanity could find itself leaping ahead by centuries if not millennia and whoever possesses the ship could decide the fate of the human species. Let me explain.

Human expansion to the stars was not driven entirely by our efforts here. Instead what happened is that we found a buried alien civilization on Mars. The Martians were a winged species evolved from aerial predators. Even centuries after the first discovery very little is known about their culture, their beliefs, or their worldview and even less is known about the majority of their technology (Just imagine a time after humanity is extinct. How much of our technology would be completely opaque to the equivalent of a medieval civilization? How much of our knowledge would be completely inaccessible to them because of the way it’s stored, for instance? You can probably reconstruct a radio and see how it works, but you can’t do that with a computer because you need a certain baseline level of technology to even know what that little square rock in the center of the MoBo is really made of.). They were gone before humanity even developed fire but their technology was so ahead of ours that it might as well be magic (What with FTL comms and everything.). When humanity figured out what it found things went a bit nuts, to the point that firefights on college campuses between various maniac groups and the bodyguards of the archaeologists studying the Martians were becoming almost commonplace. When the dust cleared, however, humanity figured out enough to jump-start its expansion to the stars using maps that the Martians left behind pointing to habitable worlds, and technology developed from the study of Martian artifacts. While humanity doesn't have faster than light travel, the cortical stack allows for people to be shipped across interstellar distances without having to worry about the issues that affect generation ships (That the humans managed to reconstuct this much tech - which must have involved activating or rebuilding computer systems and interpreting the data - is really impressive.). Just slap a stack into a body when you need crew present and the ship is fine or just have an artificial intelligence take care of it, whichever floats your boat. There's also the technology of the needle cast, which allows for the transmission of information at FTL speed, including your consciousness. This means that humans can technically travel at FTL as long as there's a receiving station waiting for their transmission and they're willing to leave their bodies behind. Okay, back to the Martians. The Martians were well-advanced even beyond the needle cast; with hints and clues saying they had full-on Faster than Light travel but no one has ever found proof of that. An intact Martian ship? It would be worth more than the planet, any planet. That's without even bringing up where the ship is or how the first archaeologist team got access to it but I'm going to leave that unspoiled for the readers.

Given the stakes here, it's no surprise that just about everyone has hidden agendas and loyalties in play. So Kovacs has to work the discovery of the age while watching his back and front. If that's not enough there's the mystery of the Martians, why was this ship left where it was and what was it doing? Did something... Or someone happens to the crew? Which would be worse, and would it even be relevant after so long? Will Kovacs even be able to answer these questions or will environmental hazards get to him first? The war is ever-present and even in the far future, you gotta worry about radiation sickness. The answer to these questions can only be found the hard way as Kovacs works to earn what might one of the most expensive tickets off-planet in science fiction.

This is an older, more stressed out Kovacs that we're dealing with here compared to Altered Carbon. He's got a harder edge to him but in some ways is more brittle and tired. Mr. Morgan makes it very clear that the war is taking a toll on him and that damage is being piled on top of the damage that his past experiences have inflicted (And there’s a lot of that ladies and germs.). The other characters in the story are also pretty interesting, from the super dedicated special forces ninja Jiang, the calm and thoughtful Sun Liping, the young and cocky Yvette Cruickshank. There are more good characters than I really have time to list. Each of the mercenaries has a fairly distinct personality and relationship to Kovacs. We also see a spectrum of how various professionals deal with the strain of fighting for a living and how that meshes with Kovacs. We don't get to see a lot of how they interact with each other because Mr. Morgan tells the story relentlessly from the first-person perspective, telling the story strictly from the view of Kovacs which helps maintain the mystery I think. Mr. Morgan is also willing to interject some mysticism into the story; for example by having some characters recruited from a soul market run by followers of the Loa. I was glad to see that, as despite taking place in California, Altered Carbon was surprisingly devoid of North American traditions. Mr. Morgan does a lot of work to make Sanction IV feel like something besides a chunk of earth slammed on a different planet. The book is a lot grimmer in tone than Altered Carbon and way more brutal. Whereas Kovacs was somewhat restrained in his behavior on earth, on Sanction IV, he is way more violent and willing to use force to accomplish his goals. Which honestly is what you expect from a soldier trying to get out of a warzone but can be jarring if you don't realize what you're getting here. That said, this was a great read, with shocking revelations and a bone-jarring climax all undergird by the damage everyone suffers in war no matter the reason the war is being fought. I'm giving Broken Angels by Richard Morgan an A for that.

If you enjoyed this review, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote on what books get reviewed and discuss theme months and discuss the reviews themselves, all for as little as a dollar a month.  Next week we look at Altered Carbon Season II on Netflix!  Until then, Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2018/02/altered-carbon-by-richard-k-morgan.html

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps By Kai Ashante Wilson

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

By Kai Ashante Wilson

Mr. Wilson is by his own admission a shy man who doesn't get any enjoyment from social media. Because of that, the facts on the ground are a bit thin in regards to his life and odds are he may prefer it that way. So here's what I could nail down, Mr. Wilson is from a fairly large family of seven people,, he is African American, queer (Read that as non-specifically LGBTQ, comades), and attended the 2010 Clarion Writing Workshop as an Olivia Butler scholar. He started publishing stories in 2013. It is worth noting that his short stories Super Bass and Legendarie are set in the same universe as today's review. He also wrote the novel A Taste of Honey published in 2016 in the same universe. The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps was not born in a pleasant place. Again referring to Mr. Wilson's own words, he was going through a period of tremendous loss and feeling like he was losing the battle against a 6 year MRSA infection, a feeling supported by failing anti-biotics (That is what happens with MRSA, yes. I might sound flippant, but that little bugger almost killed my aunt and I’m a bit salty toward the blithering incompetant surgeon who botched her knee replacement so badly that she basically had to have her replacement knee replaced with a simple hinge joint and then spent two years fighting a potentially deadly infection he let fester for six months by writing off her symptoms as “hysterics”. Sorry, rant over.). He decided he was going to finish at least one story longer than a short story but knew he wasn't up to turning out a door-stopping massive novel (in all fairness most of us aren't). So he decided to focus on turning out a slim and compact story and he did so. Luckily for us he also survived and wrote more works. The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is barely over 200 pages, is somewhat experimental in writing style and won the Crawford Award in 2016, let's take a look.

Our main character is Demane, a man from a place he only thinks of as the Green Hills, which seems to be a very isolated, backcountry kind of place. I say this because we learn that Demane had to learn the customs and traditions of 'civilization' the hard way and he's not entirely impressed by them. He's also a man with the blood of powerful entities in his veins. These entities are referred to as gods by the characters in the story, but Mr. Wilson has Demane using scientific terms to describe and explain his powers. Trained by a very long-lived ancestor he knew as Auntie in how to use his abilities, she gave him an education allowing him to place those powers in a proper context (I can imagine him rolling his eyes as he’s treated as a demigod and he knows he’s just a GMO…{GMO?}Genetically Modified Organism {Ohhhhh!}). Demane may be a backcountry demi-god but he's also the most educated and thoughtful man in the story. He's also the most compassionate operating as a medic for a company of mercenaries guarding a caravan about to walk through a stretch of hell. Demane joined the mercenaries for one reason, he fell in love with the Captain of the unit and the Captain, also a demigod although not as physically powerful as Demane, fell in love right back (Awwww. I bet the “meet cute” moment was adorable.). Both of them must keep their love a secret however as the society they're operating in doesn't seem to approve of men being intimate with one another (Then the queers will just have to rise up Stonewall style…) and it would be damaging to the operations of the mercenary company. I do have to note that such a relationship, whether it was same-sex or not would get you thrown right out of most modern professional militaries and with good reason (Yes, but these are mercenaries.). But rather than beat a dead horse let's talk more about that society they're in instead.

The story is set in a sort of fantasy African continent influenced by African American experiences and beliefs, much like how a lot of White American fantasy takes place in a fantasy Europe with heavy shadings of White American experiences and beliefs. For example, the mercenaries who refer to themselves as The Brothers, use the kind of slang and language we would associate with black men in the modern inner city (That’s neat! Has that slang been modified to fit the world-building? {Not really no, but I’ve seen stories where they use language lifted from westerns and it works. This also works pretty well}). Most fighting is done with spears, and while swords exist they seem to be regarded as foreign and exotic weapons. The caravan itself mirrors the trade that linked Sub-Saharan Africa with the Maghreb region of North Africa, including using salt as currency in some of its stops (Well at least we know these mercenaries are… worth their salt. Ha Ha Ha. I slay me.). In fact, at the beginning of the book, the caravan is stopping at the last settlement on the southern edge of the desert and the Brothers are all paid in salt before being turned loose on the fortress town (And we all know what mercenaries - and proper soldiers - do on libbo. That’s the reason [Naval/Marine Base Redacted] is my Zika Virus Nightmare. Marines and sailors with a mosquito-transmitted STI on shore leave...). Beyond that town, called the Mother of Waters lies the Wildeeps, a green verdant hell full of sorcerous creatures and brutal dangers into which entire armies disappear without a trace. There is, however, a way through for trade between the north and the mighty kingdom of Olorum. A single road cuts through the Wildeeps, bound and protected by magic you are safe from the native dangers of the Wildeeps as long as you stay on the road. Set one foot off the road however and you are fair game for whatever finds you or wherever you find yourself because the Wildeeps aren’t always in the same place and if you are in it, you go wherever it takes you. As part of this instability, the road itself shifts and moves (Huh. Now that’s a neat trick…) and caravan masters must be careful while traveling lest they end up being left behind by the road (Is it even possible to be careful though? Is there like, a timetable for the changes or do they just stop for the night and pray? {Demane can see the road, experienced caravan masters develop a sort of sense for it}). Despite all these dangers though, the wealth of Olorum is a powerful draw and caravans keep moving through and have learned to deal with the native dangers of the Wildeeps. It's the dangers that aren't native to the place that they have no defense against. Except maybe Demane if he's willing to pay the price to get the Brothers and their charges through to safety.

Despite the shortness of the story Mr. Wilson does an amazing job of world-building, crafting a very unique and unforgettable world. He also does a great job with characterization. For example, while we only see the world through Demane's viewpoint, we come to understand The Captain very clearly. He is a man who is hiding his full power and identity, angry at himself for past mistakes, and no longer really caring about his own welfare. He is however devoted to doing his job and doing it well, which causes Demane some pain and suffering as that means playing a role that keeps Demane at an arm's length for much of their time together. The Brothers all manage to have fairly distinct personalities from Messed Up's sullen rage to Cumalo's easy-going acceptance of Demane's abilities. He also does a good job with the relationships in the story as you can easily follow the interpersonal dynamics of the Brothers and Demane's place in them. The abilities that Demane displays are intriguing and the language that Demane uses to describe them raises a lot of questions. Like who were these gods who left, what were these towers that fell? Were they Posthumans? Aliens? Actual Supernatural beings? Things like this leave you wanting to know more about the world the story is set in and Mr. Wilson does a good job of leaving enough information in the story that everything has context without bogging things down trying to explain everything. The biggest weaknesses in the story I would say are the pacing and plotting of the story.

We don't actually get into the Wildeeps until over 130 pages into the story, leaving only about 75 pages or so for the story to deal with the actual main events and the physical conflict in the story: that of Demane and the Captain against the dangers they find in the Wildeeps. While much of the book is devoted to the emotional conflict that Demane experiences and the conflicts that arise from him and the Captain having to keep their relationship a secret by each being two different people there's no climax or real resolution to that conflict. Now that's honestly fairly realistic but it is kinda frustrating to read. I was also frustrated with how little time we actually got to explore the Wildeeps considering it's even in the title of the book and everything. What we do see is fantastic in every sense of the word and I really wish more time could have been spent exploring that environment. I honestly feel that Mr. Wilson either needed to bring some sort of climax and/or resolution to the emotional conflict going on or give more space to the physical conflict, I would have been good with either one. That said the physical conflict is handled very well but suffers for a lack of space which detracts from the weight of it in the story. Now, I'll be honest and say my solution would be to add more pages but given the circumstances the book was written in, I understand why that wasn't an option. Mr. Wilson also doesn't write the book in a linear manner, there are flashbacks to events before the start of the story and there are sequences that could be best described as visions. While I kind of enjoyed it as it helped me get into Demane's headspace as someone sees the world in a very different way then a baseline human being would, I can see how it would be off-putting to a casual reader or someone who wasn't paying close attention. Because none of these flashbacks are marked, so you have to figure out where in the timeline of the story you are through context and detail. Either pay attention when you read this book or you're gonna get lost at points. I honestly think this wouldn't work if the book was another 100 pages or so in length because there would just be too much material to work through in a non-linear manner but for the length, we're looking at, it's fairly workable.

I regard The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps as a breath of fresh air in a way. It's written from a different viewpoint than most fantasy stories and frankly, that's a good thing. The expansion of viewpoints within the authors of the genre helps keep science fiction and fantasy from becoming stale and turgid. On top of that having good stories told about a wider array of characters only increases the appeal to a wider audience and I am going to say this is a good story and told fairly well. Because I enjoyed reading it and was instantly interested in more works in the setting. Like I noted though it's not perfect and it's not something I would hand to an inexperienced reader. To be blunt, I think this is a book for people who are used to reading novels and have been exposed to books written in non-standard ways. However, it is a rewarding read and Mr. Wilson makes it clear that he is willing to put some faith in his reader's abilities by writing this way. So I'm giving Sorcerer of the Wildeeps a B+ and my hope that Mr. Wilson keeps writing in the setting.

So this book was chosen by our ever wise patrons.  If you would like a vote on what books get reviewed, as well as discussion on theme months and events we pursue for as little as a 1$ a month.  Join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads  Next week join us for the sequel to Altered Carbon, Broken Angels by Richard Morgen!  Until then, thanks for your support and Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Total Recall 2070 Machine Dreams Created by Art Monterastelli

Total Recall 2070 Machine Dreams

Created by Art Monterastelli

Total Recall 2070 was created by Art Monterastelli and first broadcasted in 1999 on the Canadian television channel CHCH-TV and later on Showtime. Mr. Monterastelli served as executive producer and it was part of a 25-year long career for him. His other projects include films like the 2008 Rambo movie and the paramount thriller film ”The Hunted.” He is currently working on a documentary on intelligence operations between Russia and the United States while living in California. This review is going to be of the 90 minute pilot of the television show, which ran for a single season (22 episodes) before being canceled with the story unfinished. Quick note readers: the showtime and Canadian versions do have nude scenes and some scenes of violence that were edited out for syndication on American networks. The DVD version of Machine Dreams that I managed to get a hold of for this review was the Canadian version, so I don't recommend this series for children. Additionally given how hard this series is to find and it's age, I'm going to go ahead and give spoilers so you are warned. That said let's get to it.

While named after the 1990 film Total Recall, the television doesn't share a lot with it. If anything it comes across as an ambitious fan fiction attempt to place Total Recall within the world of Bladerunner and if we're gonna be honest doesn't do a terrible job (Gooood). While the ReKall corporation exists in the film, it is re-imagined as a corporate juggernaut capable of pushing around government agents and exercising large scale cover-ups. Our main character is David Hume (HAAAH!), an officer of the Citizen's Protection Bureau, and his partner Nick get called in on a break-in at a ReKall facility. Once there they find a pair of murdered humans and a crew of murderous androids kidnapping a ReKall programmer (If they are sapient androids, I am gonna go out on a limb and say this is fully justified. Will correct down the road if necessary.{Normal androids are not sapient. These are but it looks like that might have been an accident. The pair that were killed was a programer that made ReKall vacations and his girlfriend who he had smuggled in to give a free trip to, neither even knew that ReKall had anything to do with the androids, there’s also the kidnapping of a child on the part of the androids}). Against the laser blasters of the androids the cops, armed with nonlethal weapons, are utterly outgunned and Nick is killed (Was he two days away from retirement? {What makes you think there are retirements in this setting?} I don’t, but it’s the whole Buddy Cop thing.). David, however, does manage to find an old pistol that fires actual bullets and kills an android in return, driving them off and preventing them from kidnapping the human programmer. This is a bad night for David, to put it mildly; and while his superiors grill him over what happened, Mr. Collector - the head of ReKall security - swoops right into his station and collects the programmer without so much as by your leave (Wow. So they own the police so completely they can obstruct the investigation of a police officer’s murder? Wow. I mean, the only Officer-Involved Shooting that police agencies give a shit about is when their own is on the slab, and then they go really extra. That’s an impressive corporate dystopia…). So it doesn’t get any better for him. The next morning David finds he's paired with an overly polite rookie named Ian, who is sitting at Nick's desk. David has to manage Ian while trying to figure out just why a bunch of androids, who are supposed to be completely unable to harm humans, were breaking into ReKall and killing people? Why is ReKall so anxious to hide everything? What connection does this have to an immigrant couple who were brought in because the wife had a mental break down in the mall screaming and grabbing at small boys? David is also on a ticking clock here because he has to find the clues and assemble them before Mr. Collector can find them and bury them (possibly literally) as well as battle against Mr. Collector's claims of needing to protect ReKall’s intellectual property and trade secrets (That shit don’t protect from criminal investigations even in our current capitalist hell-pit. This really is impressive…). All of this while Mr. Collector is insistent that ReKall has nothing to do with androids and so the break-in that started this whole thing was a senseless act done by clearly malfunctioning machines.

I'm going to talk about the writing because that's where the show really shines: the writers did a great job of intermixing elements of Bladerunner and Total Recall together as well as putting their own spin on the world. The plot is interesting and holds your interest without getting too complicated or falling into the trap of navel-gazing. This is despite the show wrestling with the ideas of what it means to live in a world where your very memories can be altered and you would be utterly helpless to even realize what was wrong. This is vividly displayed in the story-line of the Soodors, the immigrant couple whose son was kidnapped and then their memories altered so they couldn't even remember having a child in the first place (...Woah. Okay, so gonna have a hot-take here. ReKall needs to be destroyed and it’s execs lined up against a wall and shot. {I don’t disagree about the execs but it was the androids who kidnapped the kid, I’m just pretty damn sure someone in ReKall helped, otherwise how would the androids even have found the kid?} That, and the company deleted the parent’s memories. That’s the part that means they need to be taken out back and shot. The kidnapping… as I said, collateral damage is often acceptable to self-liberate from slavery, which is why I don’t throw stones at Nat Turner. But ReKall went back and covered it up that way… line them up and shoot them. I’ll even volunteer my chemical shed - yes audience, I have a chemical shed.{To be clear here, it wasn’t the company but someone in the company working with the androids. Who and for what reason remains unclear but I don’t think it was for the benefit of the androids}). However, the process couldn't erase their trauma or the underlying knowledge that something in their lives was inherently wrong. The use of memory and hypnosis to alter the very pattern of someone's lives is a very Philip Dick plotline and I was happy to see it featured so heavily. The world-building, while not gone into too heavily is also interesting, there are repeated mentions of contaminated zones from the war (I assume World War III) and there are clear changes in the makeup of North American society. For example, David isn't part of a Police Department, but of a Citizen's Protection Bureau, an organization that has police functions and powers but also seems to serve as a general complaint department for the citizenry. Their powers seem much reduced, much like how instead of carrying firearms they seem to be carrying stun weapons of some kind. David's superiors, while cantankerous, do seem to honestly try to shield him from outside forces that would interfere with his work and do seem to honestly want him to succeed. Which makes a nice change from police supervisors screaming about loose cannons and turning in your badge. There is also an organization of which ReKall is a part of called the Consortium which is made up of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world and are said to pay the majority of the taxes. Since the government is highly dependent on the Consortium to cover its budget, the Consortium enjoys a broad amount of political and economic power.

There are downsides to this series though. The acting is uneven, while Michael Easton and Karl Pruner both turn in fine to decent performances (although I was wondering if David had a throat injury that kept him from speaking a normal volume for 2/3rds of this), some of the other performances ranged from okay to wooden. For example, the actress playing David's wife Olivia seemed to be practicing her lines for a lot of this pilot and the two didn't show any chemistry until the last 5 minutes. There are also scenes of people spouting off bad 1990s dialogue in too-dark rooms because it's the only way they can move the plot forward and stay on budget. Additionally, it takes you all of 20 seconds to realize that Ian, David's new partner is a secret android. They don't even bother keeping this a secret for the whole pilot having him reveal himself as a new class of android with more biological parts than others. The special effects also really show the low budget this show was struggling against, since it looks like they were done by the same team that did the Babylon 5's special effect, in their spare time and using whatever computers they could borrow from the local high school (Um… That’s almost exactly how B5s effects were done. On chain-ganged Amigas.{This show’s effects still look worse.}). That said, I was drawn into the show, David goes out of his way to help the Soodors and even manages to let go of the idea of vengeance on the androids in favor of getting to the bottom of the mystery. Because something was clearly done to the androids that expanded their mental capabilities and it was something with a very short life span. Making those android desperate to avoid going back to the dull, not semi-sapient machines they were beforehand. Which I could understand and even pity. Imagine you woke up tomorrow better, brighter and more than you could dream of being and then were told “oops sorry, limited time only” wouldn't you fight to keep your new state?

I honestly enjoyed watching Total Recall 2070, although I have to admit it's not a masterpiece of television or science fiction. That said, it's trying to be the best it can be and that gets it a lot of points in my book. It was ambitious and it tried and it didn't do that badly. As a pilot or stand-alone film, I would give it a C+ being held back by the uneven performances, inability to hide incoming plot twists and special effects. As an adaptation? Honestly, this is the most Philip K Dick story out of the lot this month. The writers were willing to jump into the sandbox of identity and memory and try building something out of those themes and issues. It makes me wonder what they could have done with more resources and time. As an adaptation, I'm giving Total Recall Machine Dreams a B-. The pilot isn't that hard to find, it's usually bundled with other science fiction movies on discount DVDs, the entire series is pretty impossible, that said if anyone does find it, feel free to drop a line in the comments. I wouldn't mind seeing how it plays out. Next week, we get back to novels with The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kalashate Wilson as voted for by our ever-wise and glorious patrons.

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Total Recall 2012 Directed by Len Wiseman

Total Recall 2012

Directed by Len Wiseman

Compared to Bladerunner or the first Total Recall, this movie had a very smooth production cycle. This version of the film was written by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback. Kurt Wimmer is known for having written and directed the cult classic Equilibrium (the movie that introduced me to the thirst-vehicle known as Christian Bale.) and the not so classic Ultraviolet (Oh Boy…). Mark Bomback has a list of work he's done both overtly and under the table, including some work on Logan but also Fifty Shades of Grey and the 2017 Mummy (THOSE LAST TWO DON'T BODE WELL! Prepare your bodies, comrades!). Lens Wiseman, a California native mostly known for his work on the Underworld (Mixed bag, at best) series (seriously every film as credited him as a writer, producer, director or two out of those three) as well as Live Free or Die Hard was brought in to direct. He, of course, brought in his then-wife Kate Beckinsale to play the main villain of the story. Which means he's responsible for the best thing in this film but I'll get to that. Jessica Biel and Colin Farrell were brought in to play the protagonists and Bryan Cranston was brought in to be utterly wasted I mean play Kate Beckinsale's boss and supposedly ultimate antagonist. The film performed poorly in the US but strongly overseas and thus made a profit, if not an overwhelming one. So let's take a look at the movie.

The film opens with exposition in the form of captions on the screen, which is rarely a good move sign and isn't here. We learn that most of the planet is uninhabitable due to chemical warfare tainting the land and killing off life (What? What the shit!? No! What the hell did we use? We could hose the earth down with Sarin and not kill all life!{What makes it worse is they specifically say chemical, not biological or nuclear}). However humanity and other forms of life hang on in two places, Northwestern Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain (Oh fuck no! No no no! Why the shit does Britain get a pass? They’ve pissed off almost as many people as the US and you’re telling me that they didn’t get the toxic hose?!{head canon, Brexit really went weird and this is all their fault}) and Australia, now known as the Colony (Did… did Australia become a Crown Dominion again, or something?). They are connected by a single tunnel through the fucking center of the Earth (What!? No! That shit doesn’t work that way! Bad writers! <Uses the squirt gun>. What the shit are they using to hedge out the horrifying heat and pressure? How the hell did they dig through molten rock, to say nothing of the solid ball of metal we have for an inner core? It’s rotating! Not just rotating but the inner and outer core counter-rotate! So far this breaks SOD worse than The Core, and I know from first-hand experience that The Core causes geologists to wail and gnash their teeth like the damned at the tail end of Revelation!) which they use as a damn subway for worker commutes! I'm serious, our protagonists Douglas Quaid who is working, a dead-end job in a factory building androids by hand on an assembly line (You have androids! Why aren’t the robots building the robots?!  Human beings are forced to literally waste their one life on this Earth doing menial shit that could be done by non-sapient robots so that they can earn a paycheck and thus buy the damned robots! {Oh it gets worse, they waste robots here as only armed enforcers in addition to human troops or as sex workers} I’m okay. I promise, your - presumably - beloved editor did not just have a fucking stroke.), rides this thing pretty much every day back and forth from Australia to Europe (Ignore the twitching. I’ll just be over here, injecting myself through the neck with benzos.). The opening tells me that living space is the most valuable thing in the world because there's so little of it and already the premise of the movie is falling apart! But I'll get there. Doug Quaid, our protagonist is a factory worker with the world's most amazing(ly implausible) commute and is married to Lori, a rescue worker. She gets called away at odd hours because a Colony rebel movement keeps bombing subways in the UFB and she has to go and clean up the scenes. While his life isn't the greatest, it's not the worst, but he is plagued by a recurring dream where he is escaping from somewhere with a hot girl but gets captured, to the point that his wife is lovingly concerned and his friend Harry who works in the factory is also concerned. Trying to shake this off so he can focus on getting ahead at work and making his wife happy, he goes to ReKall, a shady company operating in the red light district (because we gotta get that three-breasted prostitute in there somewhere) to live a quick fantasy. However, it all goes sideways when a SWAT team kicks in the door before the memory implantation even starts and Doug ends up killing everyone and fleeing the scene. From there Doug finds out that Lori has only been “married” to him for 6 weeks and is an intelligence officer who proceeds to try and hunt him down with a relentless obsession. Doug has to assemble the pieces of his former life as Carl Hauser and figure out what the hell is going on and what he is going to do before he gets killed or worse, has Carl Hauser reimplanted into his head and his own life wiped out.

Let me start with what I liked. The visuals were amazing and the visual effects studio was hopefully paid and paid what they were worth (Even if the first condition is true - which in Hollywood it sometimes isn’t - capitalism is exploitation. So they were not paid what they were worth.). The film does a good job of producing interesting visuals and environments from hanging apartments in the Colony to the massive magnetic sky-ways in the UFB. The set work is pretty well done as well giving us an impression of many cultures jammed together in the Colony while the UFB is cleaner, more upper class and a monoculture. Kate Beckinsale does a great job as Lori, which in this film merges Michael Ironsides and Sharon Stone's character into a single one. The rest of the cast's acting ranged from inoffensive to decent and I didn't get the feeling that anyone was phoning it in. Although keep in mind I review books mainly not movies, so this isn't my strong suit. Additionally, there's a chase scene using cars that operate through magnetically gripping large sky-ways to move at incredible speeds. That was interesting and the action scenes use vertical space in new and inventive ways that I enjoyed. Now let's talk about the rest of it.

The writing is nonsense (Well...yes.). First of all, if you can drill a bloody tunnel from fucking England to damn Australia, you don't have a living space problem. Because drilling down a couple of miles will allow you to house millions if not billions (Vertical cities. Underground. You get to the right depth and you don’t even need to worry about air conditioning or heating, it stays a constant temperature. All you have to do is ventilate. And clearly, they won’t have structural integrity problems because they can keep the god damned mantel out!). Additionally, if you can build a ship that can survive going through the center of the fucking Earth several times a day with no noticeable damage or maintenance then you can damn well build the kind of shelters needed to house millions out in the corrupted and polluted Earth! (You have everything you need to build self-contained arcologies, including the institutional knowledge for building megastructures.) In three minutes the movie has rendered its own self-proclaimed problem moot by the technology that the exposition introduces! That has to be a record of some kind! Second of all the world-building is frankly piss poor even by Hollywood's standards, I mean why is Quaid's job necessary? They have a robot police force backing up human cops, they even have robot hookers trotting around the red light district, if you have so many damn robots why is Quaid on an assembly line putting robots together by hand? Wouldn't that be a job better done by... I don't know, fucking robots!?! (The answer is capitalism {I’m going to point out that in the real world capitalist societies are the one using robots to replace workers thus increasing the problems facing the working class} Yes, that is what I was getting at.{Are you arguing that a communist UFB wouldn’t have robots?}) Robots don't complain about double shifts or try to get promoted to supervisor after all. As another example, there's a scene where we get a look at a large stack of bills and find then-President Obama's face all over them. WHY? Neither state has its roots in the US and generally speaking you don't put foreign leaders from before your country existed on your money. It would be like if the US put Charlemagne on their money! Stick Winston Churchill, John Major, Sir Howard Florey anyone who’s British or Australian on the money instead. I know this seems like a minor detail but details like this pull me out of the story and instead of being drawn in and suspending my disbelief, I'm left feeling that there is nothing behind those details but pandering which kills the verisimilitude of the setting! When you do that, your audience is reminded that this is just a movie and that lessens their investment in it. Speaking of lessening my investment into the movie there's also the - even more - half-hearted attempt to interject the “is this real” question into the story by having Harry show up at armed standoff and tell his buddy Quaid to kill Biel's character and that will allow him back into reality... Somehow. If you want this to work guys, you need to commit to it, maybe have your stormtroopers wait until after Quaid's been injected or have him go under, have the scene fade to black and he wakes up to the troops storming the building. Something like that to create uncertainty! This should be writer 101 crap right here. I'd expect better from high school students (I have seen better from high school students.). Hell over on Archive of Our Own, I see better from high school students and I weep that those kids will never be published but people who write like this get small hills of money shoveled at them for this.

While the action uses space very cleverly and can be very kinetic at times, it's too clean and without consequences and that bothers me. In the 1990 Total Recall, people who were bystanders got hurt, injured and killed as a result of the actions of the characters (There were piles of bodies when automatic weapons came out. Innocent people were cast into near-vacuum to die horribly.). The action had consequences lending it extra weight to the viewer. While Verhoeven may be accused of going overboard with his blood and gore, the fact remains that when someone gets shot, it makes a fucking mess. Trust me on this one. The action in this film is very sterile, ensuring that our villainous minions are worse shots than even the Stormtroopers of legend. Because when they have a firefight in a crowded terminal, they don't hit our hero or anything else! Their bullets magically disappear into the realm of don't worry about it. This is something I've noticed in modern movies, a desire for massive action without any consequences and I don't care for it (Neither do I, for that matter.). I know some of you are saying I'm making too much of this but bluntly you people have your assumptions of how firefights and other such things are informed by popular media a lot more than you think. As someone who has had to have the same discussion on how a firefight works over and over and fucking over again with people who think firefights are clean, antiseptic affairs and bullets read your mind on where you want them to go if your heart is pure enough... THIS. SHIT. FUCKING. BOTHERS. ME. Sorry, that got away from me (He’s a combat veteran folks, you can imagine a lot of things in action movies bother him. Like bullets hitting a thin aluminum railing and sparking off, etc). I'm not demanding blood-soaked gore-fests with mountains of dead innocents, I don't think that's a good thing either; but if we're going to have action like this, I would like it shown with human costs and consequences. I think that would make for better films, better stories, and a better audience in the end. Which is what we all want right? Let's move on.

The characters are also rather flat, Melinda gets less development then she did even in the 1990 version and Lori is reduced to hating Quaid because she hates Quaid. I mean, give me something here, did he leave the seat up all the time, chew with his mouth open? Why is Lori so damn determined to bury him when her boss is telling her not to? (Well, imagine having to live with, sleep with, fuck, and pretend to love someone at work whom you hate, for six weeks. You might be really keen to kill them after six weeks.{Sure but why does she hate him? He seemed to be a pretty decent husband. With Michael Ironsides' character, you got it right away. He was pissed that Quaid had spent 6 weeks banging his girl and wanted payback. Here she hates because of some vague thing about traitors with no context.}) Speaking of that boss, Bryan Cranston was utterly wasted here with his role being a glorified cameo. You had He Who Knocks and you didn't do shit with him! I mean Total Recall 1990 went out of the way to let us get to know their arch-villain but Cranston's character is a Saturday morning cartoon character in comparison. A bland one. Considering that Ronny Cox's character was getting rich selling oxygen to a vital workforce, that's saying something! The villainous plot was also nonsensical. Cranston being the ruler of the UFB fakes a series of terrorist attacks so he could justify sending troops to the Colony to ethnically cleanse it and use its lebensraum living space for the citizens of the UFB. Which leads to several questions here. Like when the Colony already has members of the UFB armed forces handling all law enforcement and security, why do you have to justify shit? (Oh, that’s just part of the Ten Stages of Genocide. {Except all he has to do is simply keep moving troops into place until he has enough there and then just do it! It’s not like the damn robots will question orders! There is literally no point to the song and dance!} Getting it physically done is only half the battle. He still has to vilify and dehumanize them to avoid negative repercussions back home.{You mean back home where he has a complete monopoly of force and total control over the information flow? Again the plot is overly complex and unnecessary!}) What does the rebel movement do then, besides spray paint and hang out in the corrupted zones in airtight shelters with automatic rifles? I mean the rebels in Total Recall 1990 did questionable things (Debateable{They set off bombs in public places, on-screen. That’s questionable at best.}) but at least they fucking did shit! Lastly, the invasion force was 50,000 androids, who can be overpowered by humans in hand to hand combat, armed with rifles and pistols. There are millions of people in the colony. How is that supposed to work? There's no discussion of follow up waves or anything, it's “just unleash the robots to slaughter the underclass so I may gloat!”. This is surely easier and less troublesome than using 50,000 robots to dig tunnels or build sealed archaeologies for them to live in! Mine is an evil laugh and I like hearing it! Which is the only reason for this plan!

As you likely guessed readers, I'm not fond of this remake. The plot falls apart if you breathe on it too hard. You constantly question what anyone is doing and what the motivations are for their actions if you can summon up the energy for it. The action, while well done, is of the empty calorie variety and there to distract the audience from the plot instead of pulling them in. Lastly, I gave up Mars for this? I could have watched John Carter instead and at least had a good time. As a stand-alone film, I give this a D. Don't bother watching it. As an adaptation, you could change a few names and lines and no one would notice that it was an adaptation. So as an adaptation it gets a D- and frankly, someone should tell Hollywood not to bother with remakes if this is the crap they're going to churn out. Man, I hope the tv series is better than this.

Alright, it feels good to get that off my chest.  Now Total Recall was chosen by our always wise and gracious patrons, if you would like a voice in what reviews we do in the future or discuss possible theme months and more, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can get a vote for just a dollar a month. Next week is Total Recall Machine Dreams 2070.  Until then, Keep Reading!

And don't watch Total Recall 2012!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders 

Total Recall (1990) Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Total Recall (1990)

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Last year I talked about the drama on the set of Bladerunner, where crew struggled against the director, the director was locked in battle against his leading man and the leading man and lady loathed each other. Total Recall as far as I can find out was actually a fairly smooth operation when filming started. Getting to filming, on the other hand, was a long and rocky road. In 1974 Ronald Shusett, who among other things would become the writer of Alien, bought the film rights to We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Mr. Shusett re-titled it Total Recall and brought it to Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer who had been producing movies since 1946. In fact, between 1946 and 2007 he produced over 150 movies, among them The Serpent's Egg, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Flash Gordon (1980), King Kong (1976) and David Lynch's Dune.

Total Recall, however, took years to get to the filming stage and went through several directors, writers, and casts. First, they brought David Cronenberg (God I loved Scanners so much.), along with writer Dan O'Bannon to hammer out a full script. Mr. Cronenberg states that they went through 12 or 13 drafts before he gave up feeling that he was trying to make Philip K Dick's version, while the other writers wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark in Space. Some elements would remain however. It is from Cronenberg that we get the mutants of Mars, along with the character Kuato, the mutant revolutionary who dreams of a free Mars (Long live the revolution! May the sands run red with Earther blood A free mars is a red mars! Not rusty red or blood red, the other red, you know the one I mean! {Bro, you’re an Earther.}And? Just because I live here on the earth does not mean I cannot stand in solidarity with my oppressed martian comrades. {There are ways to do that without screaming for your own execution}). Mr. De Laurentiis then brought in director Bruce Beresford and contacted Patrick Swayze for the lead. Things went so far as to have sets being built in Australia to start filming when disaster struck. DEG studios, Mr. De Laurentiis company, collapsed due to debt. Part of it was that while a number of the films produced live on as cult legends (especially Dune) they were at the time very expensive box office failures (especially Dune). So it seemed that Total Recall would sink into the sands of time, but there was one more act left to play.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had read the script and loved it; and asked to play the lead but had been firmly rebuffed. I'm not going to go in-depth into Arnold Schwarzenegger here, I'm going to state at this point he was a Titan of the industry and nearly at the height of his popularity. With the studio in disarray, Arnold took his opportunity to convince Carolco, the company that had produced the Rambo films and Terminator 2, to buy the rights and produce the movie with him as the lead. Not only that Arnold got veto power over the selection of the cast, producers, and director effectively seizing control of the movie. Paul Verhoeven was brought in at this point, I hope y'all will forgive me but I'm not going into detail on him either. Sooner or later we are doing Starship Troopers after all (And you can imagine I will have a great deal of commentary on that book, and film, if he does both.{Oh it is on the list, that day will come and likely the review will end up the size of a small book from the brawling we do readers}). Mr. Verhoeven was coming off of Robocop and also riding rather high. Now at this point, the script was on its 42nd draft (Holy Shit) and still lacked the 3rd act. This did not deter either of them, instead, Mr. Verhoeven brought in his crew from Robocop and set to work making a movie. They made several changes, switching the lead from a government accountant to a construction worker, feeling that audiences could buy an alien terraforming machine on Mars but would balk at Arnold the Accountant (Yes. Very much so. He is far far too swole to be an accountant.). They also increased the action, focusing more on the thriller components and less on the paranoia and questions of identity (But the questions of identity are the fun part!). For the cast, they recruited talents like Michael Ironsides (Yaaaasss), Sharon Stone, and Ronny Cox and after hashing out the 3rd act filmed the movie in Mexico City. The original cut of the movie was rated X due to extreme violence because Mr. Verhoeven cannot conceive of holding back but with some editing by people who did know the meaning of the phrase 'that's enough,' they were able to get an R rating. The movie did rather well honestly making 265 million on a budget of 50 million and getting critical praise from Roger Ebert who gave it 3 and a half out of 4 stars. It was even nominated for a Hugo award and won an academy award for best visual effects. So let's discuss the film directly, shall we?

Doug Quaid is a construction worker (Who operates a jackhammer without ear protection. Where the hell is OSHA!?) with a heart-stopping lovely and loving wife named Lori. They've been married for 8 years (Or have they?) and have just moved to a new city. Recently Doug has been suffering from recurring dreams of being on Mars with another woman and has reacted to this by wanting to go to Mars. Lori doesn't care for this and keeps distracting him with different ideas and well, sex (In fairness, if I could distract 1980s/early 1990s Arnold with sex, I would totally volunteer as tribute.{I feel the same way about Sharon Stone in this movie so I’m not gonna judge here}). To be fair to Lori, Mars is in the middle of a brutal rebellion which leads to the government turning a blind eye to abuses of the population because Mars produces a mineral vital for the war effort (Which is separate from the Mars rebellion. And it’s nice to see that the working class, fighting off their bourgeois oppressors/foreign occupiers get called terrorists. The more things change the more they stay the same. Protip: If they are attacking military infrastructure or military personnel, it is not terrorism.{To be fair we do have one scene in the movie where a bomb goes off in a public space, or I’m assuming so since it’s right in front of a hotel with a bunch of working class stiffs standing about. That said, in rebellions like this it’s often hard to exercise control over everyone so I’m not blaming rebel central command just yet}). Just what war is open to question, Doug seems to live in a nation that is either called or part of an alliance called North Block locked in some kind of struggle with a South Block. It doesn't seem to be a total war though as there aren't any radioactive clouds on the horizon or its possible that the South Block cannot hit the North Block in its homelands (The Northern Block however does use orbital weapons against the South. So it could very well be total war, or escalate quickly to one. Once you have orbital weapons, you don’t need nukes. {Yes but I’m referring to what the South Block uses against the North Block, Doug’s life seems very divorced from any warfare}). Honestly, this kinda feels close to home since well... The US has officially been fighting a number of enemies overseas for so long now that soon people born at the beginning of the struggle will be old enough to drink, but you wouldn't know it walking around your average US city would you? (Nope. You wouldn’t. Which is one of the reasons it’s still happening, I think.) Sorry, back to the movie. Seeing a commercial for ReCall, a company that implants memories of ideal vacations for a price, Doug decides to try a compromise. He'll get some fake memories and hopefully, that will quiet the compulsion enough that he can focus on actually living his life. This opens a can of worms real fast though as Doug wakes up in a cab, confused and disoriented only to find his life is a lie (And he has a sassy non-sapient robot for a cab driver). Lori isn't his wife and they've only been together 6 weeks (Clever girl.). He's really a secret agent from Mars and following a trail of breadcrumbs that his alter ego Hauser has left him, he needs to piece together what's in his head and decide what side of the raging Martian revolution he's on (Free Mars!).

The secret in his head is a biggie, a vast alien machine was discovered in one of the mines and if it's turned on, it'll create a breathable atmosphere. Now Cohaagen, the boss of Mars, to put it bluntly, is utterly against that. Because he owns all the air (Fucking rent-seeking fucking shit capitalist fascist pig motherfucker {First of all he’s not rent seeking, he is rent collecting, second of all pigs are perfectly nice animals you leave them out of this.}). I find this honestly odd as Cohaagen is supposed to be running the Martian Federal Colony which suggests that he's a government employee. However, he's also spoken of as charging the people of Mars directly for the very air they breathe which honestly suggests terrible things about the government that Doug Quaid lives under if it will allow such brutal oppression of a group of vital specialists for the war effort (It is a fascist state. Period. You can see it. The state repression, the dehumanization of the Marsies, the apparent direct merge between the forces of Capital and the state. Likely also extending to the war with the Southern Block.{I don’t know about that, it lacks the cult of personality and propaganda state that are features of every fascist state, it also seems to lack the celebration of the military that is common as well}). Because the Martians are the ones doing the actual mining and mining is difficult and highly skilled labor especially if you're doing it on another planet! Not to mention one hostile to life! Simply treating the Martians as important labor due certain basic considerations like free air and water and proper protection from radiation would likely prevent this revolution from even occurring!  Frankly, if I was in charge I would be very tempted to hand the rebels Cohaagen's head on a platter and simply ask if we can sit down and hammer out a deal rather than fight a rebellion on another planet and a war on Earth but maybe I'm just insane (I don’t think any sane martian will ever accept Earth sovereignty at this point…{On the flip side before the end of the movie they have no way of sustaining their own lives without Earth. So I don’t feel independence is viable until they are self sustaining. That said give me the damn ore I need and I’m willing to hammer something out here.} Or you can… maybe see about ending a war in which you orbitally bombard brown people in the global south? {I would need more information on why we’re fighting and who we’re fighting, all we have from the movie is two sentences}). Anyways Doug has to figure out if he's on the same side as Hauser if he can work out what side Hauser was on in the first place and what he's going to do. Which is to turn on the alien machine and create a breathable atmosphere, we all know that's what he's going to do, I’m not even going to pretend and insult your intelligence dear readers.

Now I'm going to be honest, Total Recall is something of a blast from the past for me. I really enjoy it and that's likely to color my grade (I like the fact that it acknowledges the existence of gay people. I know that’s a really low bar but it was 1990 so that’s actually before it’s time for a major action film. Most current ones don’t even acknowledge that we exist.). But let me try to be objective here. First of all the acting, Schwarzenegger actually plays a bit against type here. Doug isn't a super warrior like Dutch from Predator, Conan from Conan the Barbarian. or the Terminator from T2. He is in many ways a confused innocent trying to navigate a system that is increasingly alien and hostile to his simple desires to know who he is and exercise free will. While he fights like a superhero, he doesn't act like one and that's the difference here. Now this being Schwarzenegger, his range isn't incredibly vast but I feel like he really pushed his boundaries in several ways and I can't help but think this film led to other roles where he tried to expand his talents and range and I like that. It helps that Arnold did a bang-up job of selling Quaid's confusion and frustration with the world around him even if by the 3rd act he's right back to a one-line quipping superman. Michael Ironsides was magnificent as Richter, one of the villains; his hatred of Quaid is perfectly understandable. He's involved with Lori and hates that Quaid spent 6 weeks banging his girl. I think most of us would be less than thrilled with that arrangement and Richter's eagerness to kill or hurt Quaid comes across as very human. This breaks down a bit in the 3rd act, as Quaid kills Lori and Richter doesn't even comment on that except to punch Quaid in the face but that might be a limit of the genre or an attempt to reinforce the dream aspect. Cohaagen is played by Ronny Cox who honestly seems to be enjoying himself by playing the biggest and most rancid Dick in the whole Solar System. Honestly, I'm kinda amazed that he's only dealing with a Martian uprising and not members of his own armed forces plotting against him. God knows we invented the term fragging for less than his shit.

The acting is really good in this movie, the writing is less good. Part of the problem is the movie makes several attempts to pitch the idea that this might all be taking place in Quaid's head but undermines itself quickly and mercilessly. For example, the scene where the ReKall employees decide to throw Quaid in a cab after realizing he was screaming about being a secret agent despite never having been implanted with memories? That kills the mystery by explaining how it could be real (They should have just deleted the scene. This seems like something that got confused on the editing room floor.). Remove that scene and suddenly you're left less certain. The movie tries to recover by becoming more fantastical but in my opinion, never does a good job of implanting enough doubt to make it work. Which leaves that whole element of the plot feeling like wasted space. It does, however, do a good job of creating an oppressive police state on Mars with the populace divided into a glittering upper class that keeps itself separate so not to confront the consequences of their lifestyle (Just like they try to do today.), a brutal police/military regime that acts without restraint or mercy and a downtrodden underclass that is increasingly radicalized into seeking more extreme means to get their least desires treated seriously (...I mean…). It does this very efficiently and by using the sets and extras as anything else. Which is good film work. The action is really good but I am going to warn you, this is Paul Verhoeven's violence (And his social commentary. A lot of his films are explicitly anti-capitalist, which I love him for.) so it gets messy and it gets everywhere. Although I wonder if it might be less shocking to a modern audience then it was at the time. I also have to roll my eyes at the bad guys' utter inability to hit anyone with any significance to the plot even if they're five feet away. On top of that, there are some science problems but I'm gonna let your editor discuss that (See the wall of text below). All in all, as a stand-alone film I'm giving it a B- as it is still very enjoyable and I never regret watching it.

However, this is an adaptation so it gets a second grade. This film has very little to with We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Some elements remain there; the ReCall Corporation, Mars, Quaid being a secret agent for a repressive government but it's drastically changed to fit in more action. Additionally, in the original story, our main character never went back to Mars. The Aliens have been mostly written out to have been here and left half a million years ago. Now the changes aren't all bad, Sharon Stone's character Lori is vastly more believable as a wife or secret agent trying to keep her asset distracted by using tools other than simply nagging. Additionally getting to see Mars is always a plus in my book! That said as an adaptation, it's at best a C-.  Because the grade is based on how faithful it is to the original. Well, next week we'll see how the remake does.

(Hello everyone. So in addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth communist, I am also a real-life working scientist who can do math. God, do you remember the days when I was a social democrat? {I remember when you were a libertarian (Blech! Don’t remind me! I try to forget!)} So the science I am going to discuss is in two scenes. The first is the very brief suite decompression scene at the very very beginning of the film. Vacuum - or near-vacuum - exposure does not work that way. If you are exposed to zero pressure, your skin is actually very good at keeping your insides where they should be, though there will be some bloating because of gases compressed in your tissues suddenly expanding. What will happen is that liquids like your spit will cold boil off your tongue and such. You will also start getting some blood coming out of capillaries in your nose, eyes, mouth, and any other highly vascularized surface tissues. That isn’t the part that’s dangerous. It’s the loss of pressure in your vascular and pulmonary system. Dissolved gases might start to come out of solution in your blood, giving you the bends. Additionally, there is now zero partial pressure of oxygen in your lungs, so instead of oxygen diffusing into your blood from your lungs, it goes the other way. Normally you can hold your breath for a while and there is enough oxygen stored in your blood to keep you alive. See free-divers as an extreme example, they do a lot of their work with little to no air in their lungs to prevent their lungs exploding on ascent. It’s actually your CO2 levels that cause you pain and anxiety. In vacuum, with every heartbeat, the oxygen leaves your bloodstream to go wandering in the void. In the end, you’ll have about 15 seconds of useful consciousness, and you’ll be dead in 90 seconds, with permanent damage possible after 30 seconds or so.
The other scene I would like to discuss is the Mars Dome decompression scene. I’m going to start by saying that I’m eye-balling everything so there is a lot of room for inaccuracy, I’ll run two estimates to illustrate the point. Estimate one, the room is 10x20x10 meters (W/L/H), so a total volume of 2000 cubic meters. A pane of glass gets blown out, looks to be at 3x3 meters or so. That means the room has a cross-sectional area of 100 square meters, with a whole of about 9 square meters. A person-sized object (65 kilos, cross-sectional area of .7 square meters) is going to experience a peak of around 500 newtons of force and be accelerated toward the hole at nearly 8 meters per second squared. In Earth gravity, you’d get knocked around pretty good by that (Rapidly accelerated to 28.8 kph). Now, here is the fun part. That’s just the room. Its air leaves first. If the room were sealed - and it eventually was - that would be the end of it. Literally. All the air would be gone in about 2.5 seconds and everyone dies.

The second estimate doubles the width of the room, which increases the volume to 4000 cubic meters. I also drop the hole size down to 6 square meters. Same person-sized object, and it’s only 200 Newtons, and 3.5 meters per second, which isn’t enough to overcome Martian surface gravity even if it were straight up. People get knocked around a bit, but not out the hole. Takes about 7 seconds for all the air to be gone and for people to seriously start dying.

But the whole thing was connected to the rest of the dome. You’d get the same burst of pressure loss and decompression, but instead of ending it would go on and on and on. People farther out wouldn’t experience the decompression as an explosive one, but as a leak, they wouldn’t even be aware of. Air pressure would start to drop. Assuming it went undetected and the dome is about half a km in radius - and using only the first estimate for the hole’s size - people would start to seriously notice after 5 hours, and they’d be in the Death Zone like the summit of Mt. Everest after about a day.

The long and the short of it is that the film does okay with this portrayal, depending on your starting assumptions. Larger estimate for the hole, and it works. Smaller and it doesn’t work.

Thank you for that science editor.  Ladies and Gentlemen, if you enjoyed this review and have ideas on what other books, graphic novels or films based on those you would like to see reviewed, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for just a 1$ a month on what reviews come up or what themes we tackle.  Next week we will be looking at Total Recall the 2012 remake and after that a quick look at Total Recall 2070.  Until then, thanks for your support and keep reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders