M3GAN

Directed by Gerard Johnstone. Starring Allison Williams, Jenna Davis, Violet McGraw and Ronny Chieng.  

Cady (McGraw) is left an orphan when her parents die in a car crash, and she’s sent to live with her aunt Gemma (Williams) who is well meaning but whose job as a roboticist for a high tech toy company leaves her little time to spend with her niece. In desperation Gemma resurrects a project that was shut down by her boss, a life sized humanoid doll with an AI brain.

Cady immediately bonds with M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android) and pretty soon Gemma’s boss sees the potential to make millions, but as time passes Gemma becomes concerned about the strength of the connection forming between Cady and M3gan, and the question arises, just how far will M3gan go to protect Cady?

Maybe it’s because I didn’t go into this with high hopes, but I had a lot of fun with M3gan. It’s incredibly flawed, and you can’t help thinking there was a better film squirreled away somewhere, but I was never bored, it flew along at a clipped pace and it made me laugh.

The central dynamics are nicely done. Williams is great as Gemma, a woman who wants to care for her niece but who has no idea how to look after a child, ironic given she works for a firm making toys, and is an avid collector of toys herself (which aren’t to be played with.)

McGraw (who it took me ages to realise is young Nell from the Haunting of Hillhouse) is excellent as well, angry and petulant at times, but wouldn’t you be if your parents had died and you’d been sent to your aunt who then wouldn’t let you play with all the toys she has in her house? She and Williams have a great dynamic that evolves over the course of the film.

Similarly McGraw’s dynamic with M3gan herself is nicely done. Part animatronic, partly though it was actor Amie Donald for the things the animatronic couldn’t do. Davis provides an eerily cheerful yet threatening voice as well.

M3gan herself looks wrong, but then that’s probably intentional. Looking eerily like a Gerry Anderson puppet (sans strings) at times she does seem a little too mobile but if you watch a film like this I think you have to just go with it.

The main problem with the film is that it leans a little too much towards comedy and isn’t remotely scary, or in fact gory. M3gan doesn’t kill that many people, and her kills aren’t that vicious, all in all it feels a bit tame and you can’t help feeling they toned things down to get a lower rating which means more people would watch it. And while it did make me laugh, especially one scene featuring Gemma’s boss Dave (a delightful Chieng), it isn’t exactly a laugh riot.

Diverting enough that I’m more than up for the inevitable M3gan sequel, and it does at least have something to say about the perils of parenting by device, but you can’t help feeling there’s a less sanitised version left on the cutting room floor.

Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 3: Cygnus Alpha

Cygnus Alpha follows on from Space Fall, but not directly. Our opening image is monks on the surface of Cygnus Alpha. The use of CSO isn’t terrible and you definitely get the feeling this isn’t a great place to wind up. The dialogue about new souls for the faith implies the prisoners have got religion.

Back on the London Leyland makes his report to be sent back to Earth (and in the process gives us a handy reprise of what happened last episode). Artix meanwhile is still going on about his bloody promotion prospects!

Meanwhile on the alien ship they’ve commandeered Blake, Jenna, and Avon are exploring. They find a rack of what appear to be weapons, though the ship only allowed them to take one each, cue Avon pointing a gun at Blake early on, eerily prescient that!

In another chamber they find something that Blake and Avon determine could be a teleporter, this based on both having worked on a related project for the Federation. I can believe this of Avon but Blake? There’s never any indication he’s especially technical, maybe he was in admin? Back on the flight deck and when Jenna tries to fly the ship she finds her hand frozen to the console and her mind invaded by an alien presence. Next thing you know the ship’s computer introduces itself as Zen and refers to the ship as the Liberator, a name Zen took from Jenna’s mind. Blake gets Zen to set course for Cygnus Alpha.

Meanwhile on Cygnus Alpha Vila and Gan, plus several characters who definitely weren’t on the London last episode, find themselves greeted by Pamela Salem’s Kara, who is immediately taken with Gan. Kara then reports back to Vargas, the religion’s mild mannered leader portrayed with understated panache by noted church mouse, BRIAN BLESSED.

Blake teleports down in search of men from the London, but things aren’t going to prove as easy as he might think, back on the Liberator Avon and Jenna discuss whether they shouldn’t just take the ship and run…

I was going to say that Cygnus Alpha is the first episode where we don’t meet a new member of the crew, but of course that’s false. We meet Zen, voiced by Peter Tuddenham. Zen is perhaps at its most enigmatic here, volunteering little information and, when asked how the teleport works, replies simply that “knowledge must be earned.”

It’s easy to laugh at the effects, but even 45 years later the Liberator flight deck remains impressive. A big, cavernous space with seats for everyone (handy) and convenient couches, as well as an armoury and Zen’s visual display. It’s a wonderful set that allows for a variety of shots to create a different look depending one what’s needed. It’s also very obviously alien, as are the Liberator handguns. Blake asks if they’re weapons and Avon tartly replies that they’re a bit elaborate to be toothpicks. I mean obviously, Kerr, but they could still be curling tongues…

Having Zen read Jenna’s mind is a great way to save time, I’m still curious as to why Zen immediately accepts its new owners so easily? Maybe it responded to what it saw in Jenna’s mind? Probably a good job it didn’t read Avon’s…

Leyland’s message is a handy reminder of Space Fall, but when it’s repeated  it feels like padding.

On Cygnus Alpha Gan is taking something of a leadership role, while Vila is being Vila, suggesting other people go first then rushing to catch up when everyone leaves him behind, and dropping killer lines like “the architectural style is early maniac.” They find a corpse staked out with a sign on it saying “So perish unbelievers” remember this went out at 7pm, no watershed back then! We now have Arco and Selman, at one point considered as extra crewmembers though this was quickly curtailed. You do have to wonder where they were last week?

One hopes Pamela Salem’s Kara isn’t the only woman on the planet. She immediately falls for Gan in the way only women in science fiction shows of a certain era do.

Blake risking the teleporter is a bit mad, and would you really want to leave Avon up there on the Liberator?

Got to love a last minute teleport and we get one early on when Blake narrowly avoids death (yet still goes down again.)

The curse of Cygnus is a wonderful McGuffin in two ways, it helps explain the hold Vargas’ religion has over the prisoners, and also helps explain why the prisoners aren’t so pleased to see Blake. It’s only let down when the ‘medicine’ appears to be extra strong mints!

Vargas is quite mad, but I do like the history of the planet that he regales Blake with, there’s some good world building here and some great dialogue: “Human souls are the only currency here, our God is bankrupt without them.”

Meanwhile up on the Liberator we see two sides to Jenna, her discussions with Avon about potentially leaving Blake are wonderful, and again paint her as someone as cynical as he is, yet someone who wants to believe in something better, even when Avon points out that Blake can’t win (again somewhat prescient!).

This is slightly undercut by her then prioritising finding the wardrobe and getting a new outfit. She tells Avon to check out another chamber where he finds all the ship’s costume jewellery which apparently in the future will allow you to buy a planet!

Down on Cygnus Alpha Gan is chosen to be sacrificed but it’s all a cunning ruse (although Blake leaves it to the last second to make his move). There’s a big fight. Arco and Selman die, Kara unconvincingly takes a spear for Gan (she must really fancy him) and Vila stabs someone in the back, we get to see the bloody knife and everything. Strictly speaking I think this means Vila is the first of the main cast to kill someone (Raiker’s death was a trifle more accidental after all.)

And then we get an odd scene. Blake teleports up to find Vargas is already there on the other side of the teleport chamber. Did he teleport up and then move aside? Was there supposed to be a second teleport pad that we’ll never see again? It’s a trifle messy, and the only thing that lets this episode down. On the plus side Blessed gets to turn himself up to 11 shortly before Jenna teleports him into space for one of the best B7 deaths ever!

All in all another great episode of Blakes 7. Blake has a ship, but you can’t help feeling there’s still an empty seat on the flight deck…

Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 2: Space Fall

Space Fall picks up where The Way Back ended, with Blake strapped into his chair. Already things have changed though, we get a different camera angle and we see some new faces, there’s Gan and Avon, and some other people who I’m pretty sure weren’t on the London last time (don’t worry there’ll be new faces next episode who weren’t on the London this time.)

The prisoners are shuffled into another room by Sub-Commander Raiker (a wonderfully vicious turn by Leslie Schofield) who then has a chat with Blake, asking why he’s restrained, the animosity between the two is immediate, and it’s nice that Raiker mentions Blake’s child abuse conviction, although I’m pretty sure this is the last time it’s mentioned.

Raiker proceeds to tell the prisoners that it’s eight months to Cygnus Alpha and that they’d better toe the line. He then advises Jenna that there are no special arrangements for female prisoners but that he might be able to swing some special treatment for her in a ‘you scratch my back’ kind of way. The old charmer him. Jenna tells him where he can stick his offer.

Blake is introduced to Kerr Avon, as Vila describes him the number two computer expert in the Federated worlds. Who’s number one? “The person who caught him of course.” Avon is initially sniffy, and it’s implied that the crew of the London could save themselves a packet if they dumped the prisoners overboard, if only they had a computer expert who could falsify the logs? Luckily Avon realises his best chance lies with Blake rather than the London’s crew and soon enough Blake launches a plan to seize the ship, coincidentally the London finds itself on the edge of a space battle, taking damage from shockwaves, pretty soon the London will also come across a bloody big spaceship unlike anything anyone has ever seen…

Space Fall is fairly unique as one of only two episodes of Blakes 7 to pick up immediately after the last one (the other being Powerplay unless I’m remembering wrong) as in every other instance of the show following on there’s definitely some passage of time.

The big news is that we’re getting closer to our seven. Blake, Jenna and Vila we’ve already met, now we’re introduced to Avon and Gan. Well actually that’s not true, we’re introduced to Avon, Gan’s just kinda there. Paul Darrow is great from the off as Avon, snarky and cynical and already at odds with Blakes world view. Wealth is the only reality, he says, before adding that everyone has the same chance that he does, which surely he’s intelligent enough to realise isn’t true. Blake is appalled at Avon’s cold-bloodedness, Avon in contrast is disgusted by Blake’s idealism. It’s a great set up for the two of them, diametrically opposed yet soon enough they’ll come to rely on each other more than either would like to admit. By contrast David Jackson as Gan gets to be big and threatening, though his line to the guard that they only need his hand is nicely delivered, somehow friendly yet menacing at the same time.

Knyvette gets good material again, and Jenna remains (for the moment at least) pretty bad ass, though telling us that the sealant foam goes hard in seconds while she’s still got it all over her fingers is a trifle silly, they could have made that work, ‘it goes hard in seconds in a vacuum’, for example. It isn’t like they didn’t have time (more on that later.)

Keating gets some good stuff too. It’s amusing when the dishonest Vila refers to Avon as immoral, and his reaction to the idea that Avon might conspire with the crew to kill them all is to suggest they kill him first. Then there’s his reluctance to enter the maintenance shaft. “I have this condition. There’s a medical name for it,” he says. “Cowardice?” smirks Jenna. Wonderful stuff. And finally there’s him dropping his gun when Gan tells the guards to drop theirs. “I got confused.” Keating’s delivery is never less than wonderful.

Despite how good this episode is, and it is very good, there’s a fair bit of padding, though as is often the case in Blakes 7, even this padding serves to make the episode better. In another show the crew of the London might be little more than ciphers, but the episode spends enough time with them that we get a pretty good fix on their personalities. Leyland is the weary captain who just wants an easy life, probably close to retirement. By contrast there’s young Artix, desperate to pass his exams so he can get away from this ship, and then there’s Raiker, cruel and violent, a bully who’s found the perfect position to exploit people. Leyland’s words to him to “be discreet” suggests Jenna isn’t the first female prisoner Raiker has had his eye on. Yet again a show that aired in an early evening slot goes to some dark places.

And there’s Liberator. I think I forget just how big she is, but she dwarfs the London. She’s simply one of the most beautiful screen spaceships ever (and yes when I first saw a picture as a seven year old I did think the ball was at the front, but I wasn’t the only one.)

Blakes ability to see past the Liberator’s onboard defence system is nicely handled. Seems Federation brainwashing is useful for some things. Not sure Jenna’s mum or Avon’s brother will ever be mentioned again. I’m usually loathe to mess with the original cut of something, but damn, slipping Anna Grant in there would be something, wouldn’t it?!

And in the end Blake and co make off with the ship, and Raiker gets a suitable comeuppance.

All in all a great episode. Yes there’s a fair bit of padding, and yes the death by shaving foam is as silly as it is horrible, but some of the dialogue is wonderful.

“They murdered my past and gave me tranquilised dreams!”

“Your troops bumble around looking for someone to surrender to.”

And I like the fact that in many ways Jenna is just as cynical as Avon, the difference is she wants to believe in Blake. It’s a nice distinction between them.

Blake now has a ship and the London is back en route to Cygnus Alpha, I wonder if they’ll meet up again?

Spinning Plates (Music, Men, Motherhood and Me)

By Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Daughter of a Blue Peter presenter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor came to most people’s attention when she added vocals to DJ Spiller’s track Groovejet, though she’d already had some success as lead singer of the band Theaudience. The success of Groovejet propelled her to another level of stardom and more singles and albums followed. As well as touring the globe she found time to get married, have five kids, and reached the final of Strictly Come Dancing, and during Lockdown she found a new audience, and provided some much needed distraction, with her online Kitchen Discos. A best of album followed and so did this autobiography, named after her successful podcast Spinning Plates.

As a quick shufty through the books I’ve read over the years will show, I’m not big on autobiographies, but this was a present, and I’ve always been a fan of Sophie Ellis-Bextor (and I hasten to add, and apologies should Sophie ever read this, a fan of her mum) so I thought I’d give it a read.

And on the whole I enjoyed it, though I think my enjoyment waned towards the end. I don’t know if she worked with a ghost-writer, but it doesn’t feel like she did. There’s an honesty to the book and it genuinely feels like her words. Many people have a certain opinion of Sophie. They think she’s posh and perhaps a little bit snooty, but what comes across quite vividly here is that any hint of standoffishness is likely more down to anxiety or self-doubt on her part, certainly in her younger days.

And it was her younger days that I found most interesting I have to say. Though a few years younger than me there’s enough crossover that some elements of her childhood were very familiar. Her time with Theaudience is interesting, as is her initial success with Groovejet. This isn’t some whitewashed, only happiness allowed story however, and there’s some dark stuff in relation to men which wasn’t always an easy read, luckily there’s a happy ending when she meets her husband and has a baby, and another baby and…well you get the idea. Even Sophie realises that this section might get a tad repetitive so after going into some detail re her first two children, the other three get somewhat lumped together!

As a fan of Strictly Come Dancing her remembrances of the show are interesting, and she’s honest about the positives and negatives of her time on the show.

What emerges in the end is a story of a hard-working woman who perhaps doesn’t always believe in herself as much as she should, someone for whom family is perhaps the most important thing in the world and someone who’s only just getting started in her forties.

A great read for fans of SEB or anyone interested in the reality of the music business.

Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 1: The Way Back

On January 2^nd it was 45 years since Blakes 7 began on the BBC, 45 years since 7 year old me first met Blake and co, first encountered scary Federation troopers. At first this made me feel very old, but then it prompted me to consider something I’ve meant to do for many years, an in order rewatch of the show (much like my in order rewatch of the Bond films). Since there are only 52 episodes it’s possible I can do this inside a year if I just watch one a week. We shall see, but since I’m going to do it, I figured I might as well write about it.

For those who don’t know, Blakes 7 was a science fiction show that ran for four seasons between 1978 and 1981. It was created by the legendary Terry Nation and featured a gang of outlaws fighting an oppressive intergalactic federation. Though low on budget (supposedly it had the budget of Z Cars spinoff series Softly Softly) it became, and remains, incredibly popular, in part due to its dark, sardonic scripts and its wonderful cast of characters. Long before Joss Whedon came on the scene Blakes 7 shoved a bunch of snarky, immoral characters onto a spaceship and forced them to rely on one another. Characters who borderline hated each other, characters whose default setting was sarcasm, characters who on occasion weren’t necessarily that much better than the people they were fighting. A show that gave us one of the greatest villains of all time (Supreme Commander Servalan) and one of the greatest antiheroes of all time (Kerr Avon) plus of course my own favourite both as a child and an adult, cowardly thief Vila Restal.

And it all starts with The Way Back. An episode that predominantly features just one of the characters we’ll grow to love (though we do get introduced to a couple of others) and tonally an episode that’s a little bit different than what will follow. Barring a few moments at the end it’s set entirely on Earth.

Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas) lives inside of a domed city and believes himself to be a fairly ordinary man. When friends tell him to stop eating and drinking he goes along with it, even when they take him outside the city to a series of ruined tunnels, where he meets a man who tells him that he isn’t an ordinary man, in truth Roj Blake was an agitator, a man who demanded political change, a man people flocked behind, a man so dangerous that the Terran Federation brainwashed him into renouncing his political ideals and then brainwashed him into forgetting even that. He’s told that the food and drink citizens eat and drink is laced with suppressants, and he’s told that the family members he believes have relocated to outer rim colonies are actually dead.

Blake struggles to believe a word of it, but when Federation troopers arrive and massacre everyone he begins to reclaim at least some portion of the man he once was.

The Way Back is about as 1970s dystopian as it can be. The domed city where people fear going ‘outside’ reeks of Logan’s Run, a populace drugged into submission feels very THX 1138. In some ways it’s quite prescient about the future, CCTV cameras are everywhere, and there’s a stark, minimalist feel to the world that feels horribly genuine. Yes it’s low on budget, but high on ideas.

It’s incredibly dark for something that went out at 7pm on a bank holiday Monday, the massacre of the dissidents is brutal, as is the killing of Blake’s newfound allies at the end, but worse still is the way the Federation chooses to deal with Blake this time, they can’t kill him, so they discredit him with falsified charges relating to child abuse. Just imagine that storyline happening today.

Gareth Thomas is superb as Blake and the shift in his tone and mannerisms from almost amused incredulity that anyone would think him a revolutionary leader, to his righteous indignation and assertion that someone has to pay for the horrors that have befallen him, his family and his comrades. By the end of the episode it’s easy to see why people followed him, and you have to admire his single minded determination (which later we might call fanaticism) in the end, strapped into his seat on the prison ship London he looks back and Earth and is told it’s the last he’ll see of it. “No,” he says. “I’m coming back.”

Sure there’s an argument that he’s a trifle posh but I think people forget that often revolutionary heroes spring, not from the working classes, but from the middle classes, so I think that works just fine.

We meet two other main cast members here, smuggler Jenna Stannis and thief Vila Restal. As Jenna Sally Knyvette is excellent, managing to appear tough and unphased by her situation (even if she ruins it a little later on by admitting she’s scared to Blake) but she’s a tough cookie and clearly Blake’s first ally. The character will eventually be watered down but here she’s superb.

Michael Keating starts as he means to go on. The character of Vila could be annoying, he could also be forgettable, but Keating makes the most of limited screen time, and his delivery of the line “Other people’s property comes naturally to me” will only bettered as a character description by his line in several years’ time that “A thief isn’t what I am, it’s who I am.” His comic timing is excellent.

We probably could have done without meeting Jenna and Vila but it’s nice to be introduced early, and means fewer new characters to meet in episode 2. Plus it allows Keating the honour of being the only actor (spoiler) to be in all 52 episodes.

All in all, The Way Back is a fantastic start to the series, laying the groundwork for the show’s lead and the world he inhabits. Less is more though and thankfully from here on the show will be less dystopia and more space opera. I enjoy this episode, but I don’t think I’d have liked a series following dissident Roj Blake skulking around in tunnels quite as much as what’s to come.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Directed by Kasi Lemmons. Starring Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Ashton Sanders, Tamara Tunie, Nafessa Williams, Clarke Peters.

It’s 1983 and Whitney Houston (Ackie) sings gospel in her local church and acts as a backing singer for her mother Cissy (Tunie). She’s also recently met a young woman named Robyn Crawford (Williams) with whom she begins a romantic relationship.

When Cissy spots music producer Clive Davis (Tucci) in the audience one night she feigns losing her voice and gets Whitney to sing the opening number. Davis is impressed and signs Whitney up immediately.

Fame beckons but with the highs will come many lows, and Whitney will find herself at odds with her controlling father John (Peters) and her drug addicted husband Bobby Brown (Sanders) she’ll also have to deal with her own demons when it comes to drugs.

It’s perhaps no surprise that this film was written by Anthony McCarten, the man who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody (and also The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, he certainly likes his true life stories). Thankfully I Wanna Dance with Somebody doesn’t play quite as fast and loose with the facts as Bohemian Rhapsody did, although it does tinker with them (Whitney wasn’t quite the overnight success the film makes out, she’d been on people’s radars for several years and had already been offered record deals).

It’s good that the film doesn’t shy away from Whitney’s relationship with another woman, and it obviously couldn’t ignore the battles Whitney faced when it came to drugs, and while it would have been the easiest thing in the world to lay all the blame at Brown’s door (and he sure as hell didn’t help) the film is honest enough to make it clear that she had issues with drugs before she married him.

Ackie is very good, and nails Houston’s mannerisms perfectly (I watched old videos of some of the performances replicated in the film and her use of her hands and the way she holds herself is spot on) she even gets to sing early on, though for the most part she mimes to Houston’s actual voice. To be fair Whitney would be a hard act to mimic vocally, but I have to be honest, at times I was very conscious that she was miming, and it did lift me out of the film sometimes. The film’s worth the price of admission for Whitney’s various looks and this was quite the trip down memory lane for someone growing up in the 80s like myself.

Tucci is hugely engaging as Davis, and you have to love his hairstyles. He comes across as a good man, and one of the people Whitney could genuinely rely on—even if she didn’t always take his advice—though it should be noted that Davis himself was a producer on the film, take from that what you will.

I really liked Williams’ performance as Robyn, and she has to display a range of emotions as her relationship with Whitney goes from a romantic one, to more of a friendship (on Whitney’s side at least, though Williams plays it like Robyn continues to hold a candle for Whitney right to the end.)

Sanders could have played Bobby Brown as a two dimensional dick, but instead manages to inject just enough charm that we can see what Whitney saw in him. As Whitney’s parents Tunie and Peters round the cast out well.

Lemmons’ direction is decent but, aside from the film opening and closing from the perspective of Whitney’s iconic 1994 American Music Awards performance, this is very much a linear, by the numbers biopic that’s content to tell the story without need to embellish anything. That’s absolutely fine, and the fact that it’s a respectful portrayal that also doesn’t shy away from the darker elements of her life is to be lauded, but I’ll always prefer a film that does something more inventive with the format, which is why my go to music biopic will always be Rocketman, but  I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a well-acted, perfectly enjoyable watch and whether you’re a fan of Whitney or not there’s much to enjoy here and it’s a good reminder of just how powerful a performer Houston was.

Absolution Gap

By Alastair Reynolds.

(read in 2022)

In the year 2615 a human named Quaiche works as a scout for Queen Jasmina of the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, seeking out ancient technology or other valuable assets. Jasmina is very disappointed in Quaiche’s work and gives him one last chance to impress her by sending him to explore the solar system around the star 107 Piscium. On a moon he named Hela he discovers a magnificent bridge spanning a huge valley (the Absolution Gap) but before he can investigate further, he’s attacked by automated defence systems.

In 2675 on the planet Ararat a group of colonists face with an attack from the Inhibitors, living machines programmed to restrict the spread of intelligent life. Their de facto leader, a pig/human hybrid named Scorpio, has to decide whether they should stay on Ararat or flee in the sentient lighthugger, Nostalgia for Infinity.

In 2727 on a desolate moon named Hela a young woman named Rashmika Els runs away from home in search of her brother, who left to join the cathedrals years before. The cathedrals are huge, mobile places of worship that traverse a path cut into the moon called “the Way” using wheels, tracks and even legs, to constantly keep the gas giant Hela orbits in sight due to it’s religious significance.

Many books claim to be epic, oft times they’re not, but Absolution Gap is a triumph in so many ways, epic in scope and imagination, and also in sheer length as its close to 700 pages and yes, it took me a while to finish, but it was well worth it.

Whilst I’m a fan of Reynolds’ work I haven’t read too many of his Revelation Space stories, and those I have read I’ve read out of order, despite this I found Absolution Gap easy to follow, Reynolds provides you with backstory and exposition without going overboard in case you have read the others. There are a lot of characters however, and the fact the story is split over multiple time periods might prove a trifle confusing, although at least each chapter heading tells you what year we’re in and the planet/moon or ship we’re on, and it won’t surprise you to find that the disparate elements do all tie together eventually.

Reynolds’ imagination really is dizzying though. The notion of slow moving, giant mobile cathedrals in constant motion to ensure they can see the gas giant above (and in the fact the reason they want to keep an eye on the gas giant) is incredible, as is the religion he created for those living abord the cathedrals, but however much of the book is driven by hard science, he never forgets that characters are at the heart of the story.

Scorpio is wonderful, disdainful of humans yet working to save them, brave and single minded and very aware of his own mortality. His thinking is a little simplistic but this isn’t always a bad thing.

Rashmika is a driven young woman, smart and brave, and she hides a secret even she isn’t aware of.

And there’s Quaiche who starts out as a particular kind of character and then becomes something else entirely, someone you pity as much as you dislike.

And there are others, and Reynolds gives them all their own distinct personalities, and more often no one is ever completely right or completely wrong.

As always Reynolds’ prose is superb, and his world (and religion) building second to none. I’d highly recommend this, but perhaps read the books in order, that’s what I need to do next, start at the beginning rather than playing catch up!