Ron Perlman returns as HELLBOY

Ron Perlman has - briefly - returned in the role of Hellboy. Perlman was recruited by the Make-a-Wish Foundation to suit up and meet Zachary, a young boy suffering from leukemia.

Not only did Perlman make a fan's wish come true, it seems the experience has gotten him fired up about playing the role again. At Comic-Con, director Guillermo del Toro confirmed that he and Perlman have now decided to push for a Hellboy III to conclude the story begun in the first two movies.

Duke Nukem reads FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

Jon St. John, the excellently-named voice actor best-known for his portrayal of supermacho action hero Duke Nukem in the games of the same name, reads from Fifty Shades of Grey. Needless to say, not safe for work, or possibly your sanity:

On a related note, voice actor Gilbert Gottfried reading the official audio book*. Even more needless to say, not safe for work or probably anywhere public:

* Note: not actually official.

Cover art and blurb for Guy Gavriel Kay's RIVER OF STARS

Via Risingshadow, the cover art and blurb for Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars, his sort-of successor to 2010's excellent Under Heaven.

In his critically acclaimed novel Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay told a vivid and powerful story inspired by China’s Tang Dynasty. Now, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author revisits that invented setting four centuries later with an epic of prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman battling in her own way, to find a new place for women in the world – a world inspired this time by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.

Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life — in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later — and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles towards the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north.

Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor — and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has.

In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.

River of Stars will be published in April 2013.

New cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's NIGHT'S DAWN TRILOGY

Via Walker of Worlds, Peter F. Hamilton's superb Night's Dawn Trilogy is getting some new UK cover art, courtesy of new artist Steve Stone:

The rejacketing of the books should be complete by the end of the year. To be honest, I'm not that impressed by the covers. Compare them to the existing, original cover art by Jim Burns:

If Stone was depicting different scenes - and there are literally dozens of scenes in each novel which could serve for interesting cover art - I could understand the reason for the change. As it stands, he's painted the exact same scenes - the space battle over Lalonde, the Edenist habitats and ships near Jupiter and a Kiint floating city - but in rather less-interesting ways. Totally redundant. At least the cover art for the limited edition Subterranean Press versions (by Tomislav Tikulin) went with different scenes and a different style:

Disappointing, and a bit of a missed opportunity, it has to be said.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

2044. The climate is wrecked, oil resources have been depleted and the world economy has still not fully recovered from the excesses of the turn of the century. Wade Watts, like millions of other teenagers, escapes the real world by playing in the OASIS, a computer programme that has combined the old Internet and numerous MMORPGs into a virtual reality existence. Five years ago the founder of the OASIS died, leaving his multi-billion-dollar fortune to whoever can solve an elaborate puzzle he left behind in the game. Millions have tried and failed...until Wade stumbles across a key clue. Suddenly a race is on: Wade and several fellow gamers competing with one another and a sinister corporation to be the first to win the prize.

Ready Player One is the debut novel by writer Ernest Cline, whose previous genre credit of note was co-writing the 2009 movie Fanboys. Ready Player One, like that movie, is a geek-centric, nostalgia-heavy paean for the past. In this case, Cline references early video games, 'classic' movies of the 1980s and various TV shows and bands as he creates a cultural landscape which Wade must delve into to solve the puzzles left for him and millions of fellow gamers.

The book is mostly set within the OASIS, with the world outside described fairly perfunctorily. There are allusions to ecological catastrophe, peak oil, climate change and the breakdown of society, but these elements are not developed very far at all. Within the OASIS things are more engaging, with Cline creating worlds dedicated entirely to 1980s video games or to fantastical environments where the rules of nature are twisted. It's basically Second Life meets Tad Williams's Otherworld with a dash of EVE Online and World of WarCraft on top and is described vividly and energetically. However, the creations are usually built on cultural references with Cline contributing little that is original.

This is Ready Player One's key weakness. The book is a nostalgia-fest, a romp through 1980s video arcades, ancient home consoles, old-skool Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and repeated viewings of movies like Ladyhawke and WarGames. For those who get the references, it's great fun. For those who don't, the book struggles a little. Being born seven years after Cline (and the creator of the OASIS in the book), I got a lot of the references but others, particularly to the very earliest days of home gaming, were unfamiliar. Cline, to his credit, does try to explain each reference in as concise a manner as possible, but this has a tendency to slow down the narrative whilst not necessarily helping very much (my visual imagining of Joust was very different to the reality of the game when I finally looked it up online).

The characters are straightforward archetypes, veering very little away from the standard. Main character Wade is an awkward, non-confident nerd living with an unsympathetic extended family and being irrationally blamed for their misfortunes (when we get a glimpse of Wade's home life I was half-expecting him to be sleeping a small cupboard, Potter-style). Cline shows a rare burst of imagination in suggesting that in the future, trailer parks will be overcrowded to the point of having trailers stacked on top of one another with supporting framework and these will sometimes collapse, to no-one's particular interest. The other characters are likewise standard: Art3mis is the cute-but-determined geek girl, Aech is the loyal best friend and two supporting Japanese characters are awesome with swords and much-concerned with honour, which is an unfortunate stereotype. There are a few surprises given that we only know these characters through their online avatars and their 'true' selves turn out to be rather different, but again there are few real surprises here. The villains are, well, snarling caricatures of evil whose motivations are unconvincing and whose chief representative, Sorrento, is a laughable cartoon character at best.

So, we have a book which contributes little of its own to the genre, competently-executed protagonists and awful antagonists. Normally this would be enough to consign a book to the mediocre pile, but Ready Player One still manages to rise above this. Cline's narrative has pace, verve and energy. His ideas are standard but they are handled well, and some of Wade's less laudable activities raise issues about how healthy it is to live your life online or in computer games. Cline is celebrating nostalgia but certainly not advocating dedicating your life to it. The determination of some characters to 'change the world' with the prize money whilst others dream of building a spaceship and escaping also opens an interesting debate about maturity and dealing with consequences rather than running away from them.

Plus, the book is so much damned fun. There's spaceship and mecha fights within the OASIS, antimatter bombings, a puzzle based around the D&D module Tomb of Horrors, a 3D recreation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and laughs than you can shake a stick at. At one point, as he ascends the levels and achievements of the game, Wade chooses as his vehicle the DeLorean from Back to the Future with a Knight Rider-style front grill and Ghostbusters logos on the side. Whether you find that amusing, eye-rollingly inane or merely unimportant will determine how likely you are to enjoy the whole book, but certainly, as a child of the 1980s, I found it fairly entertaining.

Ready Player One (***½) makes up for deficiencies in characterisation and originality with its fast-moving plot and engaging cultural references. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. A film version is in development.

Game of Thrones: Season 2

War has gripped the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. As Robb Stark, the King in the North, leads his armies into the Lannister homelands, so Renly Baratheon leads a vast host out of the Reach, planning to take King's Landing and depose the boy-king Joffrey. A new player has also entered the game, with Renly's older brother Stannis claiming the Iron Throne and gathering allies to his banner. As the Seven Kingdoms slip into chaos, the Night's Watch mounts a large expedition into the lands north of the Wall, investigating reports of wildling forces gathering and White Walkers on the march. Thousands of miles to the east, Daenerys Targaryen and her newly-hatched dragons seek refuge in the fabled city of Qarth, but there finds betrayal and deceit waiting for her.

The second season of Game of Thrones picks up where the first season ends and - somewhat loosely in places - follows the events of the second novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Clash of Kings. For those who enjoyed the first season, it is possible to thoroughly (but not unreservedly) recommend the second. The standards of acting, set design and production values remain stunningly high. The original castmembers continue to do superlative work (it seems redundant to say it, but Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister is fantastic throughout) and the new additions make an immediate impact. Most impressive is the addition of Stephen Dillane as Stannis Baratheon. If George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire to be unfilmable, he wrote Stannis to be uncastable: an uninspiring martinet who nevertheless commands loyalty. Dillane knocks a tricky role out of the park and nails the character from the novels brilliantly.

Most of the other new castmembers are also impressive: Liam Cunningham makes for a likable Davos Seaworth, Natalie Dormer brings her Tudors-honed skills of political conniving to the role of Margaery Tyrell and Oona Chaplin makes a good fist of a somewhat cliched character with Talisa (more on her later). Even the minor roles are compelling: Tom Wlaschiha's Jaqen H'ghar, Patrick Malahide's Balon Greyjoy, Michael McElhatton's Roose Bolton and Simon Armstrong's Qhorin Halfhand are all superbly-played, with the actors getting across their characters' personalities in just a handful of scenes apiece.

Production wise, the show has stepped up in the second season. CGI is more plentiful and more artfully employed, with some excellent establishing shots (one of Harrenhal towards the end of the season is particularly evocative) and some great shots of the direwolves (now real wolves matted into the shots and enhanced) and dragons. That said, the show continues to be inexplicably reluctant to have shots of marching armies, continuing the first season's fine tradition of showing us twenty extras and claiming there's another 99,980 blokes just standing out of shot, which is more than a bit unconvincing.

The second season does have some issues, however. The pacing and tightness of the story feels off compared to the first season. Some of this is because of the source material: A Clash of Kings is less well-structured and focused than A Game of Thrones. However, the TV series does increase these problems beyond those of the book. In the novel the absence of Eddard Stark as a central protagonist is somewhat alleviated by Tyrion Lannister taking on this role. Whilst Tyrion does step up to the plate in the second season, a lot of his scenes and subplots (such as the infamous chain sequence and the build-up to it) have been eliminated, reducing his role considerably. Whilst understandable from a production standpoint, it does make the second season feel a bit more aimless and disjointed than the first.

A core criticism from some quarters revolves around the second season's faithfulness to the book. In fact, some of the changes for the second season were necessary. The chain storyline would have added layers of complexity, time and expense to the Battle of the Blackwater that were best avoided, painful as it was to lose them. The much-criticised relationship between Robb and Talisa is actually a change for the better, in my view (note: I appear to be the only person on Earth to think this). Having Robb disappear for a whole season and reappear with a new wife out of nowhere would have been nonsensical (the sort of thing you can do in a book but not in a visual medium) and following Robb's off-page story on the screen would have been fairly dull, forcing him to spend most of the season parked at one castle. The changes mean we get to know and (hopefully) feel some sympathy for Talisa rather than wondering what the heck was going on and why did Robb make such a silly decision.

Other changes also work. Keeping Tywin at Harrenhal for most of the season simplifies the tactical movement of the war (again, something you can do in the book with a map to hand which is harder to get across on TV) and allows for some excellent scenes between Charles Dance and Maisie Williams's Arya Stark. There's an interesting feeling of amiable menace in these scenes. Unfortunately, the writers over-use the idea a little with too many scenes saying the same thing, and under-play the idea of Arya reminding Tywin of a young Cersei, which could have been milked further (this idea should horrify Arya, but she doesn't really react to it).

Other changes are much less successful. Having cast the excellent Simon Armstrong as Qhorin Halfhand, it's then a monumental waste to change the climax of his story in the novels (an iconic moment which ranks amongst many readers' favourite scenes of the entire series) to something more confusing and less well-motivated. Non-readers will find the scene a bit off, but for readers the knowledge it could have been far superior by simply sticking to the page is extremely frustrating, especially as what we get instead (Jon Snow running around in some snow for two whole episodes in a row) is so inane. The same is true of Daenerys's storyline, which is even more inexplicable. The decision to bulk out the Qarth storyline with the addition of a political thriller storyline is actually a good one, but is completely wasted because between the 'twist' (Dany's dragons being kidnapped) and its resolution (in the House of the Undying) we only get a couple of scenes of Dany looking worried and talking with Jorah Mormont. It would have been better to have cut out the interminable Red Waste scenes at the start of the season, gotten her to Qarth faster and given this storyline more depth. Instead, what we get is notably inferior to the novel (alleviated by some excellent visual imagery in the changed House of the Undying sequence) which, given this storyline's slightness in the book, is an impressive achievement.

The season overall, is less compelling than the first. The storyline is more fragmented and, in some cases, the changes from the TV series result in scenes far less powerful and impressive than what is in the novel. I am certainly not a book purist and welcome changes which improve the telling of the story in a dramatic medium, but in many cases the TV series adopts a course which is less interesting, less impressive and less resonant than the books. However, it is notable that the most successful storylines this season - Theon's, Tyrion's and the beginnings of the Brienne/Jaime relationship - are the ones that hew closest to the novels.

The season does make amends for its many faults with the ninth episode, Blackwater. For the second season in a row it's George R.R. Martin's episode which is the stand-out of the season, an epic battle sequence lasting almost the whole episode but also featuring some sublime character development alongside the arrows and wildfire explosions (Cersei, Sansa and the Hound getting more development in this one episode alone than the previous eighteen episodes of the series combined). Absolutely brilliant stuff that restores the faith that, when it pulls itself together, Game of Thrones can stand alongside HBO's best dramas in quality. It just needs to do so more consistently.

The second season of Game of Thrones (overall: ***½) has finished airing but should be available on DVD in February or March of 2013. Season 3 will commence airing on 31 March 2013.

201: The North Remembers (****)
202: The Night Lands (***)
203: What is Dead May Never Die (***½)
204: Garden of Bones (***½)
205: The Ghost of Harrenhal (***½)
206: The Old Gods and the New (***)
207: A Man Without Honour (***½)
208: The Prince of Winterfell (****)
209: Blackwater (*****)
210: Valar Morghulis (****½)

Wertzone Classics: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Shevek is a brilliant physicist from the barren anarchist world of Anarres. His work could revolutionise interstellar society, permitting instantaneous communication - maybe even instantaneous travel - between the worlds of humanity. But, in contrast to the idealism of Anarres, he finds his work undervalued and even repressed by jealous colleagues. Frustrated, he travels to Anarres's capitalist sister world of Urras, hoping to find more tolerance there but instead becoming embroiled in politics, rebellion and war.

The Dispossessed is widely considered to be one of Ursula Le Guin's finest novels and is arguably her most ambitious work. The book asks nothing less than how best should human society function and by what means. Le Guin picks two popular models, that of a semi-communist state and a capitalist one, and pits them against one another. She is not interested in 'proving' the values of one over the other, instead comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of both and also the affect they have on the individual, particularly on the individual who has a great, transformational idea but whom is seen by others purely as a pawn or something to be crushed.

The novel relies on this thematic idea to sustain it, but the actual plot structure is also intriguing. The book alternates chapters between the present-day storyline (Shevek on Urras) and events in his past (Shevek growing up on Anarres). We see the present-day Shevek as being an open-minded, questioning individual and how he has changed from his earlier incarnation as a blinkered man who accepts dogmatic ideas as fact (such as the notion that Urras is a corrupt capitalist state that will one day destroy itself), with later Anarres chapter depicting his shift in belief and motivation. Le Guin constantly has Shevek developing as a character even as she develops her ideas and the setting of the two worlds.

The novel's greatest strength is its depiction of someone who seeks simple answers and is instead rewarded with having his worldview broadened and made more complicated. Shevek sees Urras as the answer to all his problems but instead of the utopia he was hoping for he finds a cluster of nations all feuding with one another (at one point fighting a Vietnam-style proxy war between two superpowers with the rulers acknowledging that nothing will change, only thousands dying for no real goal). Anarres is not rose-painted either: the world is desolate, the people poor and, for all of their freedom of choice, are often forced into jobs and roles they despise and are not well suited-for. The book is sometimes criticised for condemning capitalism and promoting communism/anarchism, but it's more complex than that. Le Guin's argument appears to be that all human societies are prone to dysfunction and corruption, no matter how well-meaning people are.

The novel's ending is intriguing, as Shevek's conflicted views are commented upon by an outsider (an ambassador from an Earth ruined by war and ecological disaster) and her analysis spurs him to reconsider his approach. However, the book somewhat abruptly ends before Shevek's return to Anarres with him not having reached a conclusion. This is presumably because any answer would be unsatisfying and simplistic. Instead we are left with the questions, which are far more interesting.

The Dispossessed (*****) is a thought-provoking novel that does not attempt to simplify complex matters and combines fascinating worldbuilding and character development with a refreshing plot structure and some rich prose. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.