In March, I read two books. I finished reading Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer, and I started and finished reading Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie.
I watched five movies. The Man Who Would Be King and Star Trek: The Motion Picture — which I’d actually never seen before — weren’t great. But the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was genuinely very creepy, like a ’70s political conspiracy mixed with a ’70s zombie movie. And Zardoz…god, Zardoz will fuck you up. I don’t regret watching it, but…it’s not something you can ever un-see.
The fifth was The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I’d actually forgotten until just now, as I was editing this post, that I’d seen. It’s decent Hitchcock, but not remarkable.
I read thirty-eight short stories in my continuing endeavor to read at least one a day. The best of them, I thought, were:
- “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon (Apex)
- “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed)
- “Sickly Sweet” by Evan Dorman (Lakeside Circus)
- “Sing Me Your Scars” by Damien Angelica Walters (Apex)
- “Where Monsters Dance” by Merc Rustad (Inscription)
- “The House in Winter” by Jessica Sirkin (Apex)
- “Wild Things Got to Go Free” by Heather Clitheroe (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
- “The Good Son” by Naomi Kritzer (Lightspeed)
I went to a meet-up of a local sci-fi club, where we watched a bunch of Star Trek in tribute to Leonard Nimoy — you know who was terrific? Leonard Nimoy — and I won a Spock glass. That (and the mint juleps) made me quite happy.
Oh, and I turned thirty-mumble-mumble-mumble. Thirty-eight. It was an okay birthday, far as those go, I guess.
Otherwise, it was a pretty ordinary March. More wintry than I would have liked — a snowstorm on the first day of spring — and a couple of other meetups unceremoniously canceled.
I’m still writing, still reading and editing for Kaleidotrope, still doing the unable-to-find-an-apartment-why-am-I-living-in-New-York thing.
And I listened to some music:
Onward to April, I guess.
Ah, Star Trek: The Motionless Picture! The thing about that film is that I’m pretty sure there’s a genuinely decent Star Trek movie buried in there, screaming to get out. But it’s buried pretty deep.
And everyone should watch Zardoz once in their life. Just once. Although what I find most interesting about that movie is not how weird it seemed to me, but how familiar. In my youth, I read a heck of a lot of experimental 70s science fiction novels, and that movie captures the feel of those things flawlessly. Although whether that’s a good thing or not… Well.
I’d seen most of the first Star Trek movie — enough to know the big reveal — and I certainly knew its reputation. But yeah, it spends a lot of time not being a Star Trek movie and drifting lazily past models. The influence of Star Wars is all over it — the film almost certainly wouldn’t have been made without Star Wars‘ success — but so is 2001: A Space Odyssey. And it wears neither of those influences particularly well.
And Zardoz… words still kind of fail me. It’s one of those rare movies where, once you watch it, you feel like you exist in a state of time where you’ve always been watching it. If that makes any sense. It’s just such a mishmash of ’60s and ’70s stoner science fiction and fantasy, but through the lens of an art film.
It’s like an ultra-violent, semi-pornographic version of The Prisoner. I don’t not recommend it, but I stand by my caveat: Zardoz will fuck you up. 🙂