When I first heard about Marvel’s crazy idea for a multi-film franchise I thought it was one of the silliest ideas I had ever heard. But somehow, without really trying to, I have managed to see all of the prequel films that build up to this film’s main event, so I guess full credit (and box office returns) must go to the producers – the whole thing has been managed rather well.
For those keeping score at home, here is what I thought of the prequels:
Iron Man – excellent.
Iron Man 2 – disappointing.
The Incredible Hulk – not terrible but forgettable, I preferred the Ang Lee version.
Thor – extremely loud and silly, but watchable.
Captain America – even more silly, but took the premise and ran with it to entertaining ends.
Astonishingly, none of these films were aggressively stupid in the way that even the best superhero franchises tend to become after a while. So I had high hopes for The Avengers.
Hopes that turned out to be completely justified! The Avengers tells the story of all these guys finally meeting and eventually (spoiler alert) teaming up. As an adaption it is a great success, I am not sure the plot follows any particular existing story but it adheres much more strongly to conventional comic book structure than the typical film plot. All the explanation of who these characters are and where the came from has been neatly dealt with in previous films so The Avengers can get straight down to business.
The script is clever and Iron Man’s quips are as witty as ever. The story is simple, but appropriate for the material. Personally, I could have stood to see more Hulk (the new guy playing him nails it, but there isn’t enough time to flesh out the changes he is going through), and less Captain America however these are minor quibbles. Almost every detail is perfect.
Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing.
Somewhere in South London, a gang of inner-city youph are out mugging passers-by when a meteor crashes into a nearby car. When they go to nick whatever is in the busted open vehicle they discover the meteor was inhabited by a strange dog-like creature. So they kill it. 
After fighting in the American civil war (on the wrong side), cavalryman turned prospector John Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars, arriving in a time of great calamity. War is raging here as well, can Carter’s presence change things for the better?
Summing up the plot of The Quantum Thief is not easy. There is a lot going on, several different factions are working to their own ends, characters are often allied but secretly sabotaging each others efforts. The setting itself is a dazzling series of fantastic locations moulded by transhuman societies. For instance, most of the action takes place on Mars, where everyone’s perceptions are modified to include gevulot, a mechanism to ensure privacy by simply not allowing actions or events to be perceived unless the viewer has been expressly given the right to see and remember them via a private key system.
The Fuller Memorandum is the third in the Laundry series, but this is my introduction to the books. It is based on the amusing-but-not-quite-original conceit that all the things that Lovecraft and his ilk wrote about actually exist and the British government has a agency dedicated to defending humanity against them and their cultish minions. 
But most of the Known Space stories were written 40 years ago, and collaborations between aging science fiction authors have a (shall we say) uneven track record. It was with a sense of dread that I picked up Juggler of Worlds, but how bad could it be?
This biography is a bit of a strange beast. It is incredibly detailed in some respects, going over each show (and sometimes individual episodes) with the kind of meticulous scrupulousness that only the British can muster. 
A relatively recent book on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, including information straight from the man himself. I got this hoping for an exciting and twisty crime story about a master criminal, but it turns out the Madoff’s scheme was stupidly simple – he lied about some stuff and keep lying. He wasn’t even very clever about it, but somehow managed to keep the house of cards upright for decades.
Plait runs the popular 
A mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing. 
Another collection of Scifi short stories, this time by 
A while ago I read The Bounty by Caroline Alexander, a modern account of Captain Bligh’s famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons expedition to Tahiti aboard The Bounty. It focused mainly on what happened after everyone got home again. This book is the tale told by the man himself, compiled by Bligh from his logs kept during the voyage and it is a fascinating read. Even if there wasn’t a (spoiler alert!) mutiny, it would make for a cracking story as Bligh has an eye for both nautical detail during the voyage and a keen interest in how Tahitian society (very different to the English system) worked after The Bounty arrives.
This early novel in the form of a diary purports to be a day-to-day account of the life of a young London man during the 1665 outbreak of the black plague as people were dying in their thousands. Defoe did actually live through the plague but he was only 5 at the time, so the story is fictionalized but obviously carefully researched. Defoe uses the experiences of the narrator to highlight how various aspects of society (the rich, the poor, etc) reacted to the plague, maintaining a detached tone while horrible things are occurring on all sides. The thing that struck me the most was the general atmosphere of resigned bewilderment that permeates the book – nobody in pre-germ theory London really understands what is going on but society continues on as best as it can while people are dropping dead and whole streets worth of houses are empty or contain only corpses.
A young man named Johnny comes into possession of a large cache of papers written (or dictated) by a elderly, blind and recently deceased man. The papers make up a nearly complete book, and Johnny devotes his live to putting it all in order. The book the old man was writing is an analysis of a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about the strange goings on in a family home that is much, much bigger on the inside than its exterior walls can possibly encompass.
Sometime in the near future humanity invents the “bobble”, a device that generates a perfect stasis field, time does not pass inside at all. Totally impervious, Bobbies can be used as weapons, shielding, long-term storage, or as a one-way time machine into the future. Far into the future in an unpopulated Earth, a small collection of people who (for various reasons) have bobbled for immense amounts of time decide to collectively bobble again for 50 million years. 
Jackie Chan was one of the biggest film stars in the 80′s and 90′s, famous for his face-paced and deliberately silly action films filled with incredible stunts. This autobiography was released in 1998 and covers his life up until his Hollywood breakthrough (Rush Hour).
