My Ranking of 2015's Science Fiction Movies.

As I have done the last few years, here is my review of the science-fiction films I caught up with last year. Compared to 2014, last year was a massive letdown for science fiction. In 2014, there was the wonder of Interstellar, the cleverness of Predestination, and the action-packed thrills of Edge of Tomorrow. All of them are better films than anything released in 2015, except for perhaps the one that topped my list.

2015 was the year of the sequel, and only one of them was good: Star Wars: The Force Awakens. To my surprise, a tear nearly crept into my eye when the Star Wars logo hit the screen to the fanfare of the original music. But gee, wasn’t the film derivative of the first film and thus very predictable? I knew what would happen as soon as Hans Solo stepped onto that bridge. Still, with all its similarities to the first film, I found it fun to watch.

Of the other sequels, Jurassic World was okay because all I was expecting was dinosaurs chasing stupid people, and this is what I got.

I saw Mad Max: Fury Road primarily because it was sought of Australian made, and I hoped it would return to the world-building and character development of the original. I never thought much of the second and third movies. I am not much into car chases, especially when they are computer-generated and look fake. My main memory from the movie is wondering how eleven or twelve people fit onto five motorcycles, especially when Max and his saviour got their own bikes. I really could not have cared less whether Max or anyone in the truck survived, as what was the point of their survival? In 2014, Australia made four science fiction movies – Predestination, Infinite Man, The Rover and These Final Hours –  that were, in my opinion, much more original and, therefore, much more interesting and fun to watch than Fury Road.

The last sequel was Terminator Genisys, a film I struggle to remember. It was a pathetic attempt to wring more money out of the franchise.

For most of last year, Chappie was easily the worst movie of the year. It was a childish story with childish acting. The story was suitable only for tweens, but then they swore a bit and had a bit of violence and had to give it an MA rating. So its director, Neill Blomkamp, has now made an all-time classic in District 9, an okay film in Elysium, and a turkey in Chappie.

But near the end of the year, I finally watched the CGI mess Jupiter Ascending. It was a film that hoped its many unconvincing CGI battles would distract the viewer from the stupid plot, stupid ending, and cartoonish acting of Eddie Redmayne.

I thought there were two stand-out films for the year. The Martian was what I have been wanting from science fiction: a story of survival and discovery. But it was a bit predictable. To up the ante, I just knew that something was going to happen to his potato crops, and I knew the crew of the ship would turn back as soon as they found out about his survival. But to watch an astronaut use science to survive was engrossing.

Just before the end of the year, I finally saw Ex Machina. I had been really looking forward to seeing it, but the local cinema did not put it on. It’s about a computer programmer who wins a prize and goes to an out-of-the-way laboratory to test an AI to see if it is sentient. At one stage during the film, I wondered if the guy doing the testing was an AI himself, which the film did a great job answering. The ending surprised me. It was not a predictable film. And there was not an explosion or laser pistol or alien in sight. It’s a thoughtful film. This is the type of film I would like to see more often. It was my pick of the best science-fiction films of the year.

This is how I rank what I saw last year:

1. Ex Machina
2. The Martian
3. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
4. Jurassic World
5. Infini
6. Project Almanac
7. Self/Less
8. Wyrmwood
9. Mad Max: Fury Road
10. Terminator Genisys
11. Jupiter Ascending
12.  Chappie.

 

The first three are must sees.

 Post Views: 35

My Writing Efforts in 2015.

2015 is over. I won’t miss it. It was a year when tiredness had me questioning, more than usual, my writing abilities. I had a bit of a writing breakdown in April when I realised my writing was going nowhere slowly. I simply wasn’t writing enough. I still don’t, but my word count did go up after April, at least until I finished writing the first draft of a novel in October. After that, it was onto redrafting, editing and proofreading.

I wrote about 113,000 words for the year, an average of 300 or so words per day. At the beginning of the year, my goal was to average 500 words a day, and if I had just been writing first drafts and redrafting, I might have come close. I wrote on all but nine days of the year.

I wrote a 6,000-word short story for a Christmas anthology for the Australian Writer’s Forum. If you want to read it, there are links to the free ebook in a previous post.

But my major writing effort was finishing the first draft of a novel called Branded. I originally wrote its first two chapters for a writing for young adults subject in my masters and then put it away for eight years. I pulled it back out for 2014’s National Novel Writing Month, and about 130,000 words later, I finished the first draft in October. I am currently about a quarter of the way through redrafting it, and so far, I have added an extra chapter.

Critiquing.

One of the issues that really concerned me in April was the need for more critiquing of my writing. I did get two and a bit critiques of my short story. No one said they loved it, but that has rarely happened in all the years I have been writing. So either my writing sucks, or my story plots and themes are crap, or my writing fails to connect with the average reader/critiquer. The story I wrote could have a better ending, which I will add if I ever think of one.

I do hang on to the positive responses to a few bits of my writing from lecturers in writing courses. I received one such positive response for the first two chapters of the novel I am working on.

In an effort to find more writers on my wavelength, I joined The Australian Writer’s Forum and rejoined Critters.org, and started critiquing for both. From May, I critiqued 20 stories and a 66,000 word novel for critters.org, and three stories for the anthology for the Australian Writer’s Forum.

Reading.

Did I mention I was tired? I started the year tired, and then, in about August, another dose of one of my various chronic illnesses made me even more tired. From August to the end of this year, I read three-quarters of a novel. Before that, I had read about seven books for the year.

Divine.

In April, grumpy me had a hissy fit when my editor at Divine dared to do her job, and asked for changes to an article so it would conform to government guidelines (Divine is funded by the Office For Disability and hence the Victorian State Government). Fortunately, I pulled my head in and edited the article. After a two-month break, I wrote another four articles for Divine and I and currently working on the first for the new year.

My Writing Goals for 2016.

I need to get more sleep. If I can get on top of my chronic tiredness, the quantity and quality of my writing should improve, as well as my general demeanour. I have been a grumpy bastard all year. And I also am going to spend less time on Facebook and more time writing or learning about writing.

Female Heroes

Reading a bit about female heroes coming to the fore in science fiction because of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road. I reckon female heroes have been around for years, but it does depend on your definition of what a hero is. Here are some that I think fit the label:

Ellen Ripley - The Alien movies
Sarah Connor - The Terminator Movies
Sarah Connor - The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Dana Scully - The X-files
Purdey - The Avengers
Major Samantha Carter - Stargate
Gwen Cooper - Torchwood
Myka Bering - Warehouse 13
Elanor Arroway - Contact
Aryan Sun - Farscape
Katniss Everdeen - The Hunger Games
Oliva Dunham - Fringe
Echo - The Dollhouse
Sarah Jane Smith - The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Starbuck - Battlestar Galactica
Ellie - Tomorrow When The War Began
Sarah Walker - Chuck
Dr. Ryan Stone - Gravity
Charlie Matheson - Revolution
Sarah Manning - Orphan Black
Elizabeth Shaw - Prometheus.

There's no doubt that female heroes are hugely underrepresented in science fiction, as they are in other genres, but to say that due to two recent movies there is a sudden trend of an increase in the number of female heroes in science fiction movies and television is clearly wrong. 

Christmas Anthology

Hi all,

I have gift for those who read this blog. A Christmas anthology, containing a fantasy story written by me. I have just fixed the epub and pdf file links as they did not appear to be working.

epub file 
mobi file
pdf file  

It has a diverse range of stories written by writers from the Australian Writers' Forum.   

Merry Christmas. 

My writing efforts in November

The graph to the left shows a drop in my word output in November, suggesting I spent much less time writing. That is not the case. My word output dropped because I was proofreading/editing and redrafting. I continued redrafting a novel and spent a week trying to finalise a long short story due for submission for a Christmas anthology at the end of November.

I ended up writing about 5820 new words of fiction for the month.

Critiquing.

I received three critiques of my story for the Christmas anthology during the month. One was a very useful full edit; another was just a comment agreeing with the suggested edits of a previous critique, and the other… Well, first, some background.

I did a copy edit/critique of one of the other stories written for our Christmas anthology. It was a non-fiction story about a Christmas spent in an indigenous community. I really enjoyed the story. I found it informative and was interested in reading about life in an indigenous community written by someone who had lived in one. I made a fair few edits to the story, many for what I thought were repeated grammar errors.

The writer was not happy with my critique or the other one he had received. He said that as his writing was not good enough, he would withdraw his story from the anthology and quit our writing group. I wrote back to him that it was a shame he was withdrawing his story, as I thought it would be a worthy addition to the anthology.

He also said this about my story:

“I printed it out and commenced reading but was unable to finish it…….without saying anything I gave it to my wife to read. She couldn’t finish reading it either and her ‘critique, was summed up in two words, …….”It’s weird.””

As you can see from his comment, one of his various writing problems is the overuse of ellipses.

But I did not take his comments to heart as they appeared to be written out of spite. I also don’t think my story is that great, and I am still changing it.

At the end of November, I asked Chris, whose book I helped edit, to look at my story. He agreed to do so. But I then realised that I should hurry up and finish it (is a story ever finished?) because it was due for submission at the end of November. Chris did have a look at the first 2,000 words or so, though.

In contrast to the upset I caused the writer of the Christmas story, another writer was very happy with my critique of his 66,000-word novel. It took me just on three months to critique and it was the first volume of what could be a very entertaining and interesting science fiction trilogy. I offered to critique the sequel. I also critiqued another story for the anthology, and again, the writer appreciated my comments.

Reading

Again, I did very little reading for the month.

A New Article on Divine

An article I wrote on an audio description trial on the ABC’s iview service went up on Divine a few days ago. Please have a look, because when your eyesight is failing in years to come, you might need audio description when watching television.

My writing efforts in October.

I finished the first draft of Branded in mid-October. At 135,000 words it is way too big for a young adult novel, so I am going to have to try to cut tens of thousands of words from it. I have already written notes for its sequel set 20 years later. 

I am happy with the story, but the writing is going to have to improve. After a night spent night thinking about whether to go straight into redrafting it or to put it away for a while and go back to another novel, I got up the next day and started redrafting it.

My redrafting is not editing, it is a lot of rewriting. I had hoped to start cutting the novel’s length, but by the end of the month, I had added another chapter and probably about 3,000 words to its length. Hopefully that is only because I now know my characters a lot better and I am just filling in some details at the start that will be cut out later on.

So all up, as you can see from the graph, I wrote about 12,444 words of fiction for October. That’s an average of 401 words a day. On eleven days I got to my quota of 500 words. During the editing phase, I hope to edit for two hours a day at the least. 

Critiquing.

I received my first critique/edit of Shrinking, the short story I have written for a Christmas anthology a few of us Australian Writer Forum writers are putting together. It’s the first critique I have had of my work since finishing my masters, eight years ago. Since my masters, I have mainly spent my time writing first drafts of novels, so there has been nothing to critique. 

The critique was from a writer who I had critiqued and who, according to me, can write well. His critique of my story was positive and found no major problems with the story. His edits will be very helpful.

I critiqued another story for the anthology. This one was non-fiction, so I feel, after working with five different editors for Divine, I know what I am talking about when I suggested many changes to the story. It’s a good story, about the time the writer spent Christmas on an Aboriginal reserve, but I found many things, mostly small, but many repetitive, that I thought could be changed. I hope he doesn’t take offense with all the red ink I put on it. 

I also nearly finished critiquing the novel I started critiquing mid-August. I critiqued about 22000 words of it in four hits in October. It’s a very good novel that I am enjoying reading.

Reading.

Once again, I read virtually nothing for the month, as I was too tired at night to read. I am still halfway through Hugh Howey’s Dust.

My writing efforts in September

Once more, it has been a while since my last post. I have been extremely busy writing and doing other writing activities, as you will see in my update for October.  But this post is about September.

In September, my Ulcerative Colitis decided to remind me of its existence, so I had to take some medicine, which made me extremely tired for just over half the month.

At the beginning of September, I was writing a short story for a Christmas anthology that a few members of the Australian Writers Forum were creating. I finished the story’s first draft on the same day I started taking the medication. At that stage, the story was 9,800 words, 3,800 words over the suggested word limit.

I redrafted the story over the next few days, reducing it to 7,400 words. I then printed it, proofread and edited it many times over the next few weeks. I found a lot to change each time and eventually reduced the story to 7,200 words. On the last day of the month, I finally submitted it to the group for critiquing. I then returned to the novel I had been writing.

One reason I made so many changes when proofreading was that the story was in the third person. I had not written in the third person for a long time, and my tiredness probably had something to do with it, too.

I estimate that I wrote 8,746 new words for the month, much lower than for the previous months (as shown in the graph), but I expected my word count to drop when editing. I averaged 291 words per day. Only on nine days did I reach my quota of 500 words. I proofread/edited for at least two hours on about six days.

Critiquing

Due to tiredness, I only managed to critique about ten thousand words of the novel I am critiquing. Sorry, Peter. Ideally, I wanted to critique about twice as many words.

Reading

I read bugger all due to tiredness. I’m still reading Dust, the third book in Hugh Howey’s Wool series.

Non-fiction writing

I had another article up on Divine in September. It is about smart homes for people with disabilities. Divine has been having computer problems, which has meant my story hung around on its front page for nearly all of September. I also had the second and fourth articles listed on the site for that period. But I did not write any articles in September due to…