Welcome to the Escape Velocity Collection!
We are an opinionated group of friends reviewing all sorts of fantasy and science fiction media. Don’t forget to get to know the curators and visit our curated Collection, where we discuss the stories that never cease to transport us to another world.
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LATEST POSTS:
- Movie directed by J.J. Abrahams
- Starring Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and others
- Released 14 December 2015
- Runtime: 135 minutes
- 7th episode in the Star Wars Series
In this Disney reboot of the Star Wars universe, scavenger Rey gets tangled up in the workings of the Resistance against the newly risen First Order when a deserter falls out of the sky near her home on the desert planet of Jakku.
Ah, the Disney Star Wars Trilogy – that’s a can of worms to open. I’ll just go ahead and give my opinion, and I’ll try not to let the internet outrage influence me too much.
So, some background – I grew up with Star Wars. My dad was in his early twenties when the original Star Wars was released and he’s been a big fan since. I probably watched the movies first when I was about seven years old, and their visual style has imprinted on me too. I am not, however, on the scale of Star Wars fans, a particularly big Star Wars fan – I’ve seen most movies, played a couple of video games and own some cool lego sets, but I’ve never delved into the extended universe or read novels.
I saw The Force Awakens with my dad in the cinema, and I was very excited to go. It is not every day that you get to experience the reboot of a franchise this big, and there had been teasers and trailers all year long. When the opening crawl finally floated across the big screen and the theme music plays, there was a special ‘yes’- feeling you get at being there to actually experience it in cinemas this time.
The movie itself did not disappoint. It is a movie that oozes Star Wars. I loved the visual styles of the new ships and droids and stormtroopers, I loved the re-introduction of old favourites like the Millenium Falcon and the beautiful dogfight scenes we get with her early on. I especially loved Daisy Ridley’s performance as Rey, who I thought was a great, witty, charming heroine without the overwhelming need to present her as sexy.
The movie oozes Star Wars so much that perhaps… it feels like they just took a lot of the plot beats from A New Hope and re-used them for The Force Awakens, from a nobody from a backwater desert planet falling in with Han Solo to the secret plans revealing the weak spot of a large moon-like base that is assaulted in the final act. But honestly, it didn’t bother me. I came to the cinema to watch the rebirth of Star Wars, and something very Star Wars is what I got.
That is not to say that the movie doesn’t have its misses. I liked John Boyega’s performance, but I didn’t really like his character. That is mostly because he ended up as a comic relief character that was killing stormtroopers left and right, even though his arc was set up as putting a face to a nameless crowd of enemies that turn out to be literal child soldiers. The movie fails to knock down that set up miserably. Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren was never going to be as iconic as Darth Vader, but in trying to find the balance between unstable and terrifying, I think the writers erred on the unstable side, making him appear more as a child and less as an antagonist.
In the end, though, I thoroughly enjoyed watching The Force Awakens. It is not particularly refreshing or unexpected, but it is Star Wars the way I like it.
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- TV show created by Laeta Kalogridis for Netflix
- Based on Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
- Starring Joel Kinnaman, James Purefoy, Martha Higareda and others
- First released 2 February 2018
- 2 seasons
In a violent cyberpunk future in which your consciousness can be downloaded into a machine in your neck and bodies have become interchangeable, convicted rebel and terrorist Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in prison, sleeved in a new body, 250 years after the rebellion in which he took part was crushed. He is released to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, a man rich enough to have survived his own death.
This review pertains to the first season only.
I have a rule for myself: read the book first. With Altered Carbon, I failed. I didn’t know it was an adaptation of Richard Morgan’s book, so I watched the first season of the series. Of course, I’ve got the book now – it sits on my shelf of shame, near the top of the list of to-reads (though I say that of everything on that shelf). When I’ve read it, I’ll come back to this review and see how the show stacks up against the book.
So, this show is not easy to watch. Right from the start of the first episode, it is filled with violence and nudity – bullets spraying, blood on the screen, breasts every five minutes. If that is not your thing, Altered Carbon might not be for you. Normally, it’d be a ding against the show for me as well. But in the case of Altered Carbon, it fits so well with the premise that it drew me in instead.
Altered Carbon takes place in a cyberpunk sci-fi world where your consciousness is saved to a stack, a small machine in the neck. Unless the machine is also destroyed, your body – derogatorily called a ‘sleeve’ – can die, but you will survive. The result is a complete shift in the way people – especially rich people – view bodies. The richest never die, resleeving in clones if their bodies age. The poor lose or sell their bodies to the rich. Grandma can come back from the dead, resleeved in a rented body for Christmas. The possibilities are endless and the show does a good job of exploring that premise and showing how it affects the characters.
The plot is perhaps a bit too complex for the show to fully capture (which makes me believe it might be a faithful adaptation of the book). The plot twists and turns, which is engaging but dizzying at times. At its core, Altered Carbon is an action-packed detective story, with plenty of time spent exploring the main character’s motivations. It is surprisingly thoughtful at times, though it is not exactly high art. The acting and production values are great, but there are so many storylines that some are bound to turn out worse. The flashback story about Kovac’s former life, for example, is not as well fleshed out as the main story, and just looks a little less good on the screen. Again, I haven’t yet read the books, but if the show would have been written for television I’d advise them to cut some of the storylines.
That doesn’t take away the fact that I thought Altered Carbon is a great show. Overall, I would recommend the show to both (i) fans of action-packed television and (ii) people whose interests are piqued by the interesting sci-fi concepts and can stand the violence and nudity.
I’m back again!
I promised to update my review once I’d read the book, so here I am.
Perhaps surprisingly, I liked the series better than I liked the book. I am sure this is heresy to some, but as I explained in my review of the book, I couldn’t bring myself to like book-Takeshi Kovacs much. I have seen people online complain about Joel Kinnaman’s acting, but somehow, he sold the character to me in a way that the book couldn’t.
Looking back, the show’s writers definitely made some interesting (and ‘interesting’) choices. I feel vindicated in criticising the flashback story, since most of that never appeared in the book. The show left out one of my favourite book character for no reason that I can discern. But I did actually like what they did with Reileen and Takeshi’s background, braiding together a few vague references in the novel into a more coherent and character-defining backstory.
Overall, a good adaptation. Apparently, I shouldn’t watch the second season, however…
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- Video game developed by Failbetter Games
- Directed by Alexis Kennedy
- Published byFailbetter Games
- Published in 2015
- Survival/exploration, Rogue-like, single player
- Playing time: 10-100 hours
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One;
Sunless Sea is a steampunk rogue-like game in which you steer a small ship over the vast procedurally generated Unterzee, encountering islands, port cities, dangerous Zee-creatures and other ships with which to interact. With writing that borders both on horror and on the bizarre, the atmosphere harkens back to the writings of Coleridge and Poe. As you set sail, beware of your supplies running out, but if you return safely to Fallen London, you are sure to be rewarded by the admiralty for your news from distant shores and your reports on the plans of the Khanate.
The gameplay of Sunless Sea is rather simple: top down, you view your ship sailing the Zee, steering through the mist toward the islands you see appearing on the edge of your screen. There is combat, but it is limited: you have an indication of your broadside range and a button for ‘fire’, and that’s about it. In port, you can play through quests and interact with shops and officials through simple text and conversation menus with little tidbits of charming art.
Sunless Sea has many elements of a traditional rogue-like game, where you start with very little and are encouraged to slowly build up skills and resources over multiple playthroughs, with each character passing on certain aspects to their successor after their death. Each new character faces a completely new layout of the Zee, though many of the islands and places you’ve seen before will be out there again.
Whilst the game’s atmosphere is amazing and the stories are fun, I found that the game is very slow-paced, causing me to put on a podcast as I was sailing around. I thoroughly enjoyed my first playthrough (though I stranded fuelless somewhere on the dark waters). After the first one, however, I found that I encountered fewer and fewer new islands and stories, while actual progression towards a better ship, a faster engine, or increased skills was painfully slow. I found that I would have rather played the game without constraints, sailing and exploring until I had found everything there was to be seen, than grind my way through the progression system by ferrying passengers or goods back and forth between the same ports for a slight profit ten times.
I want to say that my two-and-a-half star rating here is very personal – I can easily imagine someone else rating this game five stars and I would completely understand. But I am in a position where I like the content in my video games to be more condensed – and Sunless Sea simply does not offer that experience. I did really enjoy the atmosphere during the 10 hours that I played, and I would recommend this game to people looking for a laid-back exploration experience with the time and patience to build your way up through the game’s slow progression system. I’m convinced the developers have hidden some gems of stories behind higher-level places like the Cumean Canal, where stories of The Surface run down into the Unterzee…
Sunless Sea was recommended to me by a friend. I played it for about 18 hours in total, which consisted of three or four ‘playthroughs’. Although there were certainly elements I enjoyed, I found I was somewhat disappointed on the whole.
Like Peter also concisely describes in his review of the game, Sunless Sea’s gameplay is fairly simple, but also very slow-paced. I liked the exploration aspect, travelling through fog to discover new islands and stories, but quickly tired of the resource management that was required of me. Ferrying between the same islands for a tiny profit felt more like a chore than a pleasure. A life of commerce is apparently not for me…
However, after some grinding I was able to obtain a mansion, a will and a faster engine. I experienced some gripping tales – one involving a scary Santa Claus and a melting child, another left me with a Hesperidean Apple, which felt like a worthy achievement? – that were the highlights of my playing time. The storytelling and (cosmic horror) atmosphere of this game are its strong points.
I’m sure I have many stories left to uncover in the Unterzee. However, last time I played, my patience for the endless sailing had run dry. I might pick it up again in the future, though. People who don’t mind a little grinding, might find this game right up their alley.
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- Video game developed by Red Hook Studios
- Directed by Chris Bourassa
- Published by Red Hook Studios
- Published in 2016
- Turn-based dungeon crawler, single player
- Playing time: 100+hours
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One;
Darkest Dungeon is a progression-based role-playing dungeon crawler, in which you recruit and equip teams of heroes to crawl through dungeons where they will encounter turn-based combat, random events, boss battles, hunger, and darkness. Mixing elements of traditional fantasy with the writings of Lovecraft and Poe, the setting has you slowly progress through the story of your decadent ancestor as painstakingly cleanse his manor of the occult corruption that he has left behind. The game is ruthless, so expect your prized heroes to die, for good, especially when you are tempted by the prospects of carrying more loot…
Darkest Dungeon is a great game with a relatively simple core gameplay loop: you recruit heroes, equip and train them, and send them to crawl through a procedurally generated dungeon. When they return (if they return), you can use the loot to upgrade the facilities at your camp and equip more heroes, to send on new and more dangerous missions. The combat is turn-based, with each hero able to perform abilities on the basis of their position in the group, damaging or poisoning enemies, healing or de-stressing your allies, or shuffling your enemies’ positions to get their vulnerable stress casters within range of your bounty hunter’s axe.
Though the gameplay looks simple, it is kept engaging by the large number of different heroes, each with different abilities depending on their position in the line up, and the vast range of enemies with different strengths and weaknesses.
The game’s strength is in its ruthlessness, and in the way it keeps tempting you. The game knows no mercy: dead means dead, and there is no way to resurrect your favourite hero or even reload a save. Things can go downhill very quickly, especially once a hero’s stress meter is maxed and they starts spreading despair to your other characters. A single poor decision can cause a cascade of failures that sees the entire party die or go insane. At the same time, you are constantly tempted to clear another room, or attempt a dungeon in the total dark, increasing difficulty and reward in equal measure.
The only reason I’m not rating this game more highly is because, even though I realise it is literally the point, it can feel a bit disheartening to lose a hero or party as a result of a couple of bad rolls. The game is unfair at times (though that is advertised as a feature), and recuperating from the loss of a prize hero can take a couple of hours. You really do need to be able to stomach painful losses and spend the time to slowly grind your way up to the tough boss battles. I found that after a couple of bad crawls, I didn’t feel like sinking in too much more time – though writing this review has motivated me to pick it back up. Perhaps I’ll clear another dungeon tonight!
Finally, the game’s simple but beautiful art, and absolutely MAGNIFICENT voice acting deserve mention: if ever you are looking for an atmospheric gothic horror game, this is it!
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- Board game developed by Mike Gnade
- Illustrated by Declan Hart
- Published by Rock Manor Games
- Published in 2016
- Deck building card game, 2-5 players
- Playing time: 30m-1h per game
In this steampunk themed tabletop deck-building game, you take control of a corporation, build your deck from lowly clarks and construction workers by recruiting skilled employees and blueprints for powerful airships and useful buildings, and battle your opponents for the ever-diminishing pile of brass in the center of the table!
Brass Empire is a relatively straightforward deckbuildinger: you start with a small deck of relatively weak cards. You use them to acquire better cards. After you’ve used your entire deck, you shuffle it and the newly acquired cards together and start drawing it again. As the game goes on and your deck improves, you’ll be able to buy even better cards and buildings to add to your deck. It is then that you start thinking about removing the weaker cards from your deck so you’ll draw the better ones more often. And then, you’ll try to overpower your opponent and destroy their factories by playing tanks and airships, earning brass victory points along the way.
Sometimes when you finish a board game for the first time, your first instinct is to immediately shuffle the cards and try again, because you feel like you learned so much in a single playthrough. Brass Empire is like that. When you first start it all feels complex, but a couple of turns in you start seeing the patterns, and as you upgrade your deck and start drawing your upgraded cards, there is great satisfaction in feeling your power grow. By the end of the game, you’ll be sad that it’s over, but also hyped up to try again and outdo yourself.
The game’s steampunky theme is cool, but the card art, whilst it has cool steampunk inspiration, is very much hit and miss. For example, this game doesn’t look near as good as Scythe, a game with a similar theme.
In addition, while it shouldn’t matter too much for friendly games, I feel the game is not exactly balanced. Two factions stand out: the faction that draws more cards and therefore cycles through the deck quickly and the faction that removes the weaker cards from your deck, makes its smaller, and therefore allows you to get to the stronger cards more often feel a lot stronger than the others.
I enjoyed the game a lot the couple of times that I played it, but I have to admit that I am not very familiar with other games in the genre – I know that Dominion is both the genre originator and a fan favourite, so I’d have to play that one at least to compare. Take what I say with a grain of salt!
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- Book written by Adriaan van Dis
- Published February 2021
- Standalone
Set in a future Netherlands, where the King has been sent packing and the government is controlled by a climate-change denying populist president, this is the story of Jákob Hemmelbahn, son of Hungarian refugees that fled the communist regime, but grew up in the Netherlands. As storm-induced floods wash away the lives and livelihoods of his outcast neighbours, he is dragged out of political apathy and turns to his keyboard to find a way to resist.
Listened to the audiobook with Van Dis himself. Well-read.
Adriaan van Dis is a living giant in Dutch Literature (with a capital L), and to be honest, I never yet liked anything he wrote.
To give you some context, Dutch literature is mostly about: (i) the Second World War; (ii) how colonising Indonesia made Dutch people Sad™; or (iii) sex. Preferably some weird amalgamation of the three, but honestly, mostly sex.
If a Dutch literary novel features sex, it will be graphic, plastic, lust- rather than love-driven, will make all those involved Sad™, and will make you feel somewhat like a voyeur for reading it (or, alternatively, Sad™ yourself).
Additionally, Dutch literature tends to deify the banality of day-to-day life, seeking endless depth and meaning in people doing really normal things.
With that out of the way, you can imagine none of the reviewers on this website are particularly partial to Dutch literature. Maybe you can also imagine that when Van Dis dropped a book titled ‘KliFi’, my brain short-circuited. I don’t like Van Dis. But there was no way I was not going to read that.
The book is nothing if not surprising. It is an actually quite well-constructed near-future sci-fi dystopia where the Netherlands has 40-degree Celsius summers, hurricanes hit the North Sea, and a populist pretend-intellectual is in charge, claiming climate change is not real, smashing abstract art in museums, and deporting non-ethnic Dutch people by the hundreds.
In this bleak world, the main character, Jákob Hemmelbahn, a child of refugee parents, witnesses a flood that sweeps away a settlement of illegal residents in a river’s floodplains. The government’s response is to cover up the damage and deport the residents – and Jákob wants to act.
Van Dis, being a writer himself, figures that this character’s urge to do something is best translated into … writing a book about it. So we follow along as Jákob sets to writing, struggling with his inner demons, balancing between telling the truth and his book passing the test of the censors.
The book shares some of the pitfalls of other Dutch literature – notably the completely unnecessary horniness of (and towards) its 84-year-old protagonist and the absolute worship of the supposedly ‘normal’ survivors of the flood. But if you can overlook those quirks, it is an interesting take on the cli-fi genre, a warning against apathy in the face of climate denial and populism, a vivid picture of a Netherlands-that-could-be, and a nicely manageable piece of well-constructed prose.
It is not the Netherlands’ 1984, but I can imagine it becoming a staple of Dutch literature classes in the future.
It has only appeared it Dutch so far, but for our Dutch readers, it is an easy recommendation because it is only about 200 pages long – an easy way to venture a few careful steps out of our comfort zones, a way to get our more literary focussed friends and family to try a different genre, and an interesting conversation starter at worst.
When we started this website, I never would have thought we would end up reviewing a book by Adriaan van Dis in this genre. As Peter explained, he is a famous name in Dutch literature, and absolutely not one I would associate with either fantasy or science fiction.
Perhaps that is why this book felt so strange to me: it has the tone of the Dutch classics that I remember having to read in high school, but it’s themes are those of today. Climate change, xenophobia, refugees and the rise of populism all take central stage. While this might sound like an interesting recipe for a book, sadly I found I did not love it. I did not hate it either, mainly because it is so short that by the time you grow tired of it, you’ve already finished it.
The main character Jákob is not particularly likable. He spends most of the book being very angry about everything that is happening, and yet somehow I never got the feeling that his outrage resulted from a place of true empathy towards the refugees. His ‘activism’ felt mostly like the equivalent of someone posting angry and self-righteous comments on Twitter.
On the whole, there just were not enough elements that really pulled me into the book, and so I found it hard to care very deeply about what was happening.
While the book brought up some really important issues, it did not deal with them in a way that felt particularly new or inspiring to me. However, for people who are fans of Adriaan van Dis but are less familiar with dystopian fiction, this book might be a good introduction to these themes.
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Review: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens – J. J. Abrahams
7th episode in the Star Wars Series – In this Disney reboot of the Star Wars universe, scavenger Rey gets tangled up in the workings of the Resistance against the newly risen First Order when a deserter falls out of the sky near her home on the desert planet of Jakku.
Review: Altered Carbon – Netflix
In a future in which your consciousness can be downloaded into a machine in your neck, convicted rebel and terrorist Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in a new body, 250 years after being caught, leased to solve the murder of a man rich enough to have survived his own death.
Review: Sunless Sea – Failbetter Games
Sunless Sea is a steampunk rogue-like with elements that harken back to the writings of Coleridge and Poe, in which you sail your dapper vessel across the vastness of the underground Unterzee in search of riches and fame.
Review: Darkest Dungeon – Red Hook Studios
Darkest Dungeon is a ruthless progression-based role-playing dungeon crawler, mixing elements of traditional fantasy with the writings of Lovecraft and Poe in a merciless grind through the manor of your ancestor.
Review: Brass Empire – Rock Manor Games
This steampunk-themed deck builder sees players compete for the services of the best employees and the most powerful blueprints in a battle for the pile of brass coins in the centre!
Review: KliFi – Adriaan van Dis
In a future Netherlands, the government is controlled by climate denying populists, and Jákob Hemmelbahn witnesses the result of the government’s negligence when a storm washes away the houses of the less fortunate.
