Movies

Yesterday on Ujima – Films, Muslim Women & Hugos

~ Cheryl

I ended up doing a bonus show yesterday. As I had to go into Bristol for the TV appearance, and I have nothing else urgent on that day, I figured I might as well spend some time in the studio. That meant putting together a show at short notice.

The easiest way to do that is with phone interviews, though it does mean using Skype which can mean very variable quality. I badly need an alternative means of doing phone interviews, especially as the latest versions of Skype actively prevent the use of third party call recorders. (Why anyone would produce a digital phone system and now allow call recording is a mystery to me.)

Anyway, there were people I could interview. In the first hour I talked to Jake Smith of Tusko Films. Jake was the directory for Talking LGBT+ Bristol, the film about the city’s LGBT+ community that we made for Bristol Pride. I figured that if Jake and I were going to be on TV for 3 minutes in the evening, we should have a longer chat about the film as well.

I also recorded an interview with Rivers Solomon because there has been some really exciting news about their next novel project. Getting to write a novel with clipping has to be a dream come true.

The Listen Again system appears to have been fixed, so you can listen to the first hour of the show here.

I did manage to arrange one live interview. On Tuesday there was a flash mob demonstration in the city protesting Boris Johnson’s appalling comments about Muslim women. I was very pleased to have Sahar from Muslim Engagement & Development (MEND) to explain about the different types of headgear that Muslim women wear, and why they wear them. She was joined in the studio by Lisa from Stand Up to Racism.

I had half an hour to fill so I rambled on a bit about the women’s cricket, and about this year’s Hugo finalists. You can listen to the second half of the show here.

While the show is available on Listen Again I won’t put it up on the podcast. But once it has fallen off those interviews will appear there (and in the case of Rivers on Salon Futura). I will try to get an old interview or two up on the podcast in the meantime. And if anyone would like to become a patron of the podcast I would be very grateful. We only need 8 more people at $1/month to cover costs.

If you would like to know more about the Jimi Hendrix album that I was playing tracks from, you can find some details here.

The full playlist for yesterday’s show is as follows:

  • Jimi Hendrix – Jungle
  • Jimi Hendrix – Woodstock
  • clipping – The Deep
  • Bootsy Collins – May the Force be With You
  • Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up
  • Santana – Riders on the Storm
  • Janelle Monae – Sally Ride
  • Jimi Hendrix – Georgia Blues

Trans Pride Happened

~ Cheryl

I appear to have had one of those weeks in which I had lots of good intentions to blog about Trans Pride, but ended up too busy or too tired to actually do so. Certain issues with Worldcon might have had something to do with this, not to mention some UK politics.

Anyway, Trans Pride in Brighton (the original, and still the biggest) happened last weekend, and give the state of the world I went along to show solidarity. It was great. The march appears to have had between 4,000 and 5,000 people, and Brunswick Gardens was buzzing all afternoon.

My favorite stall in the park was one being run by a group of midives from the local NHS trust. They were keen to help any trans guys and non-binary folks who wanted to get pregnant, and even had advice for trans women on breastfeeding. The things that can be done these days are just amazing.

One important announcement came from Jane Fae. On September 8th there will be a conference in London called We’re Still Here. There will be workshops on all sorts of interesting things. It looks like it will be very interesting.

I, however, won’t be there, because the date clashes with the Women’s Equality Party conference, and someone has to be there to defend trans rights. WEP has been fairly heavily targetted by the anti-trans brigade in the past, and I’m sure they’ll see this conference as an opportunity to futher their attempts to turn all cis women against trans people.

Life, it keeps coming at you. But sometimes it is fun, as proof of which here is the My Genderation film from last weekend.

Bristol Pride Happened

~ Cheryl

To be fair, it has been happening for a couple of weeks now. Daryn, Freddie and the rest of the crew have done an amazing job putting on a whole festival of LGBT+ goodness. However, this weekend was the culmination of all that, and it all began on Friday night with the city’s first ever official Black Pride event at City Hall. The photo above shows some of the organizers, along with the Guest of Honour, Lady Phyll Opoku-Gyimah.

The event also saw contributions from the Deputy Mayor, Asher Craig (Labour), and the Lord Mayor, Cleo Lake (Green). Cleo (shown above) got totally into the spirit of things with some amazing hair.

The big concern about Saturday was that there would be some sort of attempt by anti-trans extremists to disrupt the march, as happened in London the previous weekend. Daryn and the LGBT+ Group of Avon & Somerset Police worked hard to make sure that we would be prepared in the event of an attack, and they kindly kept me informed throughout the process. Thankfully everything went quietly, or at least as quietly as any Pride event can be. The March was led by the folks in the picture above. That’s the Elected Mayor, Marvin Rees (Labour); the Independent Police & Crime Commissioner, Sue Mountstevens; Asher Craig and Cleo Lake. They carried the front of the enormous flag though the whole parade. Here we are temporarily halted while the police cleared some buses from the road ahead.

And finally, durign the afternoon the big screen in Millennium Square provided the first public showings of the Talking LGBT+ Bristol film produced by Bristol 24/7. The film is now available online, so you can all watch. My thanks to Caragh, Connie, James, the folks at Tusko Films, the Heritage Lottery Fund and all who made this possible. My OutStories Bristol colleagues, Charlie and Robert, are superb in this.

Film Preview Night #LGBT247

~ Cheryl

Some of you may remember that the lovely people at Bristol 24/7 have been working on a film project about LGBT life in the city. I got asked to be it in, as did many of my friends. Tonight at the Arnolfini there will be a preview screening. I think there are still tickets left if you are interested. And if you can’t make it, the film will be screened a lot on Pride weekend.

Here’s a sneak peek.

The TransGeek Movie – Coming Soon #TDOV

~ Cheryl

Way back in 2012 I was interviewed (in the lovely surroundings of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights) for a project called the TransGeek Movie. In 2015 there was a Kickstarter campaign to fund extra filming and production. Now at last the film is done, and it is being offered to film festivals around the world.

With any luck some big ones will take it and you’ll hear a lot more about the film, but either way once the current round of festivals is over it will be made generally available. I’m hoping we can do something for Trans Pride in Bristol this year.

As I am in it, I got sent a link to a preview screening. Good timing meant that Kevin and I were able to watch it together. The bits with me in are not too embarrassing (though the interview is almost 6 years old so I can’t enthuse about April Daniels as I would have done had I been talking today). More importantly it contains contributions from Julia Rios and Alicia E. Goranson, from Naomi Cedar, from Jennell Jaquays and Becky Heineman, and from many other well known and successful trans people. If nothing else it is a fabulous piece of oral history. I hope you get to see it soon.

My #IWD2018 Ujima Show

~ Cheryl

A day early for International Women’s Day, I devoted most of my show yesterday to feminist issues. However, I started out in Australia by welcoming film critic, Tara Judah, to talk about Sweet Country.

Tara is from Melbourne originally, so we had a lot to talk about. However, we did our best to keep the discussion to matters of race relations in Australia. Things continue to be pretty bad there, and I very much hope that this film shines a necessary spotlight on the situation.

After the news I started playing the interviews that I had picked up at the International Women’s Day event put on by Bristol on Saturday. They included comments from Penny Gane, Eleanor Vowles, Leonie Thomas, Rosa Taggert, Sian Webb and Elizabeth Small of Ra Cultural Consultancy.

Normally I would tell you to go to the Listen Again feature for all of this, but for some reason only 10 minutes of the first hour recorded. It is still worth it for a few minutes of Tara who is an amazing guest, but the IWD interviews are not there. Thankfully I still have the originals, and I hope to post them as a podcast at some point.

The second hour kicked off with more IWD interviews featuring No More Taboo, Sandra Gordon and Alex Raikes. The singers that Alex refers to are Pitch Fight, the Bristol University a capella group, whom you can find more about here.

The African Queens project that I talked about with Sandra is a project photographic Bristol women of color cosplaying famous women from African history. It was done for Black History Month last year. You can find out more about it here.

Finally I was joined in the studio by a couple of people I met on Saturday. Charlotte Murray is a young student who was interested in finding out more about radio, to I invited her into the studio. Jane Duffus is the editor of The Women Who Built Bristol, a fabulous collection of stories about the famous, and not so famous, women from the city’s history. If you are interested in buying the book, please order it through Bristol Women’s Voice because if you do all of the proceeds go to the charity.

Thankfully the second hour recorded correctly, and you can listen to it here.

The music for the show was as follows:

  • Walking the Dog – Jackie Shane
  • Natural Woman – Aretha Franklin
  • Make me Feel – Janelle Monae
  • Independent Woman – Destiny’s Child
  • Our Day Will Come – Amy Winehouse
  • We Are Family – Sister Sledge
  • Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
  • It’s Raining Men – Weather Girls

Sadly I had to cut off Janelle after a minute or so because I did not want to bleep out the swears. Once I have a copy of the clean radio mix I will be playing that song regularly.

Return of the King

~ Cheryl


It was great to have T’Challa in the last Avengers movie, but giving him his own movie was always going to be a whole new level, and one Marvel could easily have botched.

I can’t pretend to understand all of the political issues that the film has to deal with. Africa is not a country, and African-Americans are not the same as Africans. I could see some of that being played out, and I know it will be impossible to please everyone. From my point of view, as a Black Panther reader from way back in the Don McGregor days, and a cat person, this was a fine movie. I also understood and enjoyed the parts where it made comment on wider political issues.

The film isn’t perfect. I’ve been seeing people online complaining about lack of queer content. But all things considered it could have been so much worse. Or it could not have existed at all, which would have been terrible. I very much hope that other people enjoy it as much as I did.

Oh, and stay right to the end of the credits. You always do that in Marvel movies, right?

A Disturbance in the Force

~ Cheryl

As numerous sites have been posting spoiler-filled reviews of The Last Jedi I assume that it is OK for me to do the same. My apologies to those of you who haven’t seen the film.

Like many people, I found the film interesting as long as you make allowances for it being a Star Wars movie. You really don’t expect any of it to make sense. Adam Roberts does an excellent job of pointing out some of the more egregious plot holes over at Strange Horizons.

Of course not all of this can be blamed on the mythic nature of the Star Wars universe. Some of it is required by the nature of the beast. For example, Leia could have made a much better job of disciplining Poe, but to do so she would have had to make him confront the cost of his recklessness more closely. That would doubtless have been deemed too dark for a family film. In Star Wars death is sad, but everyone gets over it quickly.

Sometimes sense is sacrificed for the sake of plot. Admiral Holdo might not have seemed so incompetent had it not been necessary to make her seem so in order to sucker the viewer into the misdirection of her being a traitor. A better script might have helped, but there was probably no room. Even at 2.5 hours there wasn’t enough room in the film for all of the story that they tried to cram into it. This is by no means an unusual problem with modern Hollywood. I can understand the temptation to want to cram in more and more story, but the result of that is that the script gets pared down so ruthlessly that we have to rely on our semiotic intuition to fill in the gaps left by missing dialog and poor acting.

All of which brings me to the Canto Bight episode. I gather that lots of people have been complaining that it was a waste of space. Over at Tor.com Molly Templeton makes the case that it was necessary to show ordinary people resisting the First Order. The return there at the end of the film underscores that. But Templeton is wrong to dismiss the few lines of dialog about morality as comparatively inconsequential.

As is often the case these days, some of the best analysis comes from the LA Review of Books. Dan Hassler-Forest goes through the usual points about foregrounding female power at the expense of toxic masculinity. But he then goes on to look at the significance of Canto Bight and how it completely undermines the entire Star Wars narrative.

The lesson of Canto Bight is that both the First Order and the Resistance are being played by rich oligarchs who sell weapons to both sides and encourage them to fight. They are the real power in the galaxy: not the Jedi; nor Snoke, Kylo and their petulant, entitled pawn, General Vox.

There’s a serious political point being made here. Rian Johnson is asking his audience to forget about political tribalism and follow the money. That’s where you’ll find the real enemy. Whether the message will get through is another matter. The people who most need to learn that lesson are the people blithely voting for the First Order because they’ve been told that the Resistance are a bunch of dangerous SJWs who will destroy their European Heritage and Masculinity. But maybe once the enormity of the tax bill takes hold they too will learn that they need to stop fighting those they hate and start saving those they love.

Of course the chances of this message being carried through into Episode IX are not great. The people in charge of merchandising at Disney will continue to try to pretend that Kylo Ren is the hero of the story. Changes in plot direction may well be required of the next director. After all, misdirection is a staple tool of Star Wars plotting.

Which brings me to the question of Rey’s parents. Does anyone really believe that they were nobodies? Yes, it would be great if they were, because that would further undermine the dynastic theme of the franchise. But all of that can be changed. My bet for Episode IX is that it will be revealed that Rey was vat-grown from tissue stolen from Han and Leia when they were prisoners of the Empire, and Kylo will be redeemed because he can’t bring himself to kill his sister.

Yeah, that sucks. But at least we will have had The Last Jedi, and once again the middle part of the trilogy will be the one everyone says is the best.

Up On the Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

It is that time of year when the Aqueduct Press blog blossoms with posts from Aquedistas talking about things that they have enjoyed reading, seeing and hearing over the past year. Today it is my turn. Obviously I can’t talk much about fiction because of the Tiptree judging, but I still managed to go on rather a lot. You can read my post here.

Aotearoa Futurism

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As some of you will have seen from Twitter, I rather enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok. There are a lot of fun aspects to the film, but one I particularly enjoyed were the references to Asgard as a conquering empire that then rewrote the history of the Nine Worlds to make Odin and his people seem much more glorious than they had actually been. There was a metaphor going on here that should not be lost on British people.

In fact there was a lot more than I realized watching the film. I’m not going to give you spoilers here, but if you have already seen the film I recommend this article by Maori SF fan, Dan Taipua. The director of the film, Taika Waititi, is also Maori, and he has left a whole bunch of Easter eggs in there for his people, and for their indigenous Australian friends.

Dan got in touch with me on Twitter and pointed me at two Radio New Zealand podcasts in which he and colleagues apply the ideas of Afrofuturism in a specifically Maori/Polynesian context. You can find them here and here.

I’m delighted to see this sort of thing happening in the South Pacific, and I’m hoping to learn a lot more about Aotearoa Futurism if/when Worldcon comes to New Zealand in 2020.

Wonder Woman – The Extras

~ Cheryl

The Blu Ray disc of Wonder Woman promises more than 2 hours of bonus content. That’s small by Lord of the Rings standards, but quite impressive otherwise. So what do you get in all that?

To start with there is all the usual stuff. The Director, Patty Jenkins, talks about her vision for the film. There are extended scenes, and a blooper reel. The main thing you learn from this is that Gal Gadot has an absolutely amazing smile that she doesn’t get to use much in the film. We also got some contributions from Greg Rucka and Liam Sharp, who were the creative team on the comic when the film came out. I’ve known Liam for a long time and it is great to see him doing so well, and producing such amazing art.

But there are other things too. There’s a section on the training that the Amazons went through. I had no idea that many of the people playing the Amazons were top-class professional athletes. That didn’t excuse them from a formidable training regime. Just watching all of those women working to get themselves to a peak of physical fitness was hugely impressive.

Then there is a segment called “The Wonder Behind the Camera”, which is partly the creative team on the movie talking about their work, but also follows a group of teenage girls who want to get into the movie business when they have a day on the set. It is inspiring stuff.

My favorite segment, however, is one called “Finding the Wonder Woman Within”. It is a series of interview snapshots with a bunch of high profile women: women from Hollywood, women writers, women from NASA, sports stars such as Sloane Stephens and Danica Patrick. All of them talk abut what it means to be a wonder woman, and the theme is very much one of the battle for equality. Nothing is actually said about the child occupying the White House, but it is very clear that everything he stands for is under fire here. All of this is set to a backdrop of some amazing poetry from Mila Cuda, who is the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate.

I’m not quite sure what I expected from this disk, but I’m damn sure I didn’t expect to find terms like “gender identity” and “non-binary” being bandied about in the extras for a superhero movie.

Well played, women of Hollywood. Well played indeed.

I, Replicant

~ Cheryl

Well, BladeRunner 2049 was interesting. It is visually stunning though, as has been noted elsewhere, very white and rather full of naked boobs.

What struck me most about it, however, probably won’t strike most of you as important, because you haven’t spent your entire life being told that you are not “real”.

I felt rather sorry for Joi, even though she’s a manufactured stereotype virtual sexbot. I don’t suppose I would have fallen in love with Ryan Gosling, because he has all of the emotion, charm and charisma of a congealed lump of lard in the bottom of a roasting tin waiting to be washed up. He seems to have taken the idea of playing an emotionless, baseline replicant very seriously. But I certainly related to her desperate desire to be real.

The main point, however, is that trans people are replicants. We look like humans, we feel like humans, we bleed like humans, but we are constantly told that we are not “real”. We live among you, and most of the time you can’t tell one of us from one of you. Yet many of you hate us, claim that we are dangerous, and want to get rid of us. If we do ever come to the attention of the authorities, we are probably doomed. And we don’t have super powers to make up for it.

I miss you, Roy Batty.

Arrival – The Extras

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Arrival winning the Bradbury on Saturday has reminded me to tell you that if you don’t have a copy of the film on disc then you should go get one, because the extras are great.

First up, of course, there’s an interview with Ted. This makes me absurdly happy. His stories are so good, and he deserves some time in the limelight.

There are also interviews with Stephen Wolfram whose software was used to create and display the alien language, and with the linguist who worked as a consultant on the film. Of course a whole bunch of the film crew are interviewed. I was delighted to hear that both Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner signed up immediately on reading the screenplay.

The topics for the interview range over linguistics, the nature of time and the complications of making science fiction movies.

The extras also made me think about how the film is put together. It has an actual infodump (Ian’s “what we know about heptapods” voiceover), and uses Dos Passos techniques in the TV news clips.

Finally it occurs to me how appropriate it would be for a film about language to win a Hugo at a Worldcon in a non-English-speaking country.

Today on Ujima – New Year, New Presenters plus Movies and Smoothies

~ Cheryl

With Paulette having retired, we need to put things in place to ensure the continuation of the Women’s Outlook show. I can’t do it myself because I have too many work commitments. But today I was delighted to welcome to the studio three women who are interested in working on the show as presenters. They are Isadora Vibes, Kamaljit Poonia and Esme Worrell. I spent the first hour getting them to introduce themselves and talk about one of their areas of experience.

Isadora is a poet and has been on the show before. She talked about the forthcoming In Between Time Festival, which looks amazing.

Kamaljit has a long career in equality and diversity work. She has been involved in the Bristol Race Manifesto project (which parallels the work Berkeley and I have been doing on an LGBT Manifesto) and she gave an update on that project.

Esme is, among other things, a stripper. We chatted about sex work, which as you will know is a topic of great interest to trans activists because so many trans women can’t make a living any other way.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

The second hour began with a visit from Gabriela Staniszewska who is an award-winning director of short films. She’s based in Bristol and I was delighted to find out that she specializes in science fiction and horror. We got on famously.

Finally I welcomed my friend Russell Thomas who runs the Ground and Burst cafe in Bristol that majors in smoothies. Russell is trying to get people to eat more healthily by eating fruit rather than processed sugar. I was very hungry by the time I had finished talking to him.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Here’s the playlist. Obviously there was a Bowie song on it.

  • Alicia Keys – Superwoman
  • Chaka Khan – Through the Fire
  • Mariah Carey – Don’t stop
  • David Bowie – Sound and Vision
  • Diana Ross – Theme from Mahogany
  • Janelle Monae – It’s code
  • Shalamar – I can make you feel good
  • Pointer Sisters – I’m so excited

I’m not entirely sure what will be happening for the next few weeks while folks get trained up. I have some work engagements on Wednesdays that I can’t get out of. But I will definitely be back on February 15th with an LGBT History Month show.

Today on Ujima: More Music

~ Cheryl

Yes, I know it isn’t Wednesday. This week’s Women’s Outlook show should have gone out yesterday in the usual time slot, but once again technical gremlins intervened. So instead the show was run in the 10:00-12:00 slot this morning. You can listen to the first hour here, and the second hour here.

As with last week, the show is entirely music, but it is great music. Here’s the playlist:

  • Chaka Khan – I’m Every Woman
  • Afro Celt Sound System – Whirl-y-Reel 1
  • Guillemots – Sao Paulo
  • Eddy Grant – Living on the Front Line
  • Maria Muldaur – Midnight at the Oasis
  • Zoe Rahman – Shiraz
  • Sylvester – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
  • Stereo MCs – Fever
  • Donna Summer & Barbara Steisand – No More Tears
  • Janelle Monáe feat. Esperanza Spalding – Dorothy Dandridge Eyes
  • John Coltrane – Blue Train
  • Tracy Chapman – Fast Car
  • Dreadzone – Tomorrow Never Comes

The Janelle Monáe song is, of course, there to encourage you all to go and see Hidden Figures when it is out in your area.

Up On the Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

My annual Year in Review post as gone up on the Aqueduct Press blog as part of their Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series. So if you want a condensed version of what I have been up to, entertainment-wise, you can find it here.

Better still, you should just go to the blog and read all of the entries. Other contributors include Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston and Lisa Tuttle. More will be added in the coming days.

Civil War on Disc

~ Cheryl

The DVD and Blu Ray versions of Captain America: Civil War came out on Monday so naturally I rushed out and bought a copy. For those of you who care about such things, I got the Steve cover, because regardless of the issues if you ask me to choose between Steve and Tony I’ll pick Steve every time. I am, of course, Team T’Challa, but you couldn’t buy a cover for that.

The extras on the disc are fairly standard fare: trailers, gag reel, short “making of” documentaries and so on. The only real surprise was a sneak peek at the forthcoming Doctor Strange movie, due out in November. It doesn’t really tell us much new. We get to see more of Baron Mordo and Wong, and we also get to meet the bad guys for the film. There is, sadly, no sign yet of the Dread Dormammu, or his daughter. The villains are a sect of human magicians called the Zealots who seek power from the mystical dimensions. I continue to be rather worried about this film. Still, the Sanctum Sanctorum looks nice, and Benedict Cumberbatch certainly looks the part.

I spent yesterday evening watching Civil War with the directors’ commentary on (which also features the scriptwriters). I do like what they did with this film. The folks at Marvel have very much taken on board the criticisms about endless, formulaic action films and vast amounts of collateral damage. Civil War is very different, and puts a lot of effort into disguising that fact. Some people, I am sure, will feel cheated that they didn’t get a huge slugfest at the end, but so it goes.

Civil War is very much a character-driven film. As the Russo brothers say in their voice-over, the central narrative is all about the personal disagreements between Tony and Steve, and the issues in their lives that drive them to this point. One of the most interesting things about the film is that it couldn’t have worked without all of the backstory that we have got from previous Marvel Cinematic Universe products. Iron Man 2, the previous Captain America movies and the previous Avengers movies all feed into this one. There’s even mention in the commentary of something that Peggy Carter says to Howard Stark in the Agent Carter TV series as being significant to this film.

I guess you can probably watch the film and enjoy it without knowing all of this stuff, but it is better if you do know it. More importantly, given how rigid movie-making has become, there’s no way a Hollywood studio would have let this film be made the way it is without that backstory. They would have insisted on establishing scenes for all of the characters, which would have bogged everything down impossibly.

We don’t get much technical information in the commentary, save for some interesting comments on shooting angles in conversations, but there are quite a few points where the cast get praised for their contributions to the script. My favorite here is in the scene where Tony Stark first meets Peter Parker. An interesting thing about this scene is that we have 18-year-old Tom Holland playing opposite Robert Downey Jr., who is the top paid actor in Hollywood. They are playing a teenage science whizz kid meeting the most famous inventor on the planet. At one point Tony says to Peter, “I’m going to sit here, so move the leg,” and then sits on the bed next to the kid top continue the conversation. What actually happened is that Holland had forgotten the blocking for the scene. Downey improvised a line to remind him where he should be sitting, and it worked so well it got left in the film.

The other technical issue that sticks in my mind is the Black Panther costume. They didn’t have the budget to make it for real, at least not in a way that would have allowed Chadwick Boseman to survive filming. So they made him a much lighter costume for filming, and painted on the panther suit in CGI afterwards. Nice job, ILM!

The big outstanding question has to be where things go next. We know that the blockbuster Avengers movie(s), The Infinity War, are on the horizon, but right now the Avengers are entirely dysfunctional. Several of them, including Cap, are on the run from the US government, and probably quite a few other governments as well. It has been suggested that the natural next step is for Steve Rogers to give up the Captain America identity and become a character known as The Nomad — something he did in the comics back in the 1970s. Well, right at the end of the directors’ commentary there is mention of the possibility of seeing Chris Evans in this costume.

Nomad


Mmmmmmmmmmmmm…

Mike Carey at Waterstones

~ Cheryl

As promised, I have uploaded the other Mike Carey interview to Salon Futura. This is the one that we did at Waterstones in the evening. It is almost an hour long, so we have a lot more time to talk about Fellside. Mike and I go on a little rant about the economics of private prisons. The conversation also touches on films. The Girl with All the Gifts is due for release on September 23rd. Here’s the trailer.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to release this too soon is that Mike would have had to kill me, because during the interview he mentions the possibility of a prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts. That book is now official, so I no longer have to worry.

Inevitably Mike and I talk about the X-Men. Indeed, I suspect that we could have talked about superhero movies all evening had not one or two people been scowling at us from the audience. Obviously I mentioned the Felix Castor novels, which led us on to the idiocies of publisher branding policies. We even managed to mention the Steel Seraglio books, which Mike wrote with his wife, Linda, and daughter, Louise.

The sound quality is rather poor in places, for which my apologies. My little microphone doesn’t cope well with a cavernous shop, and there were all sorts of issues with capturing audience questions. Hopefully it is all listenable.

This event was arranged by the Bristol Festival of Literature. My thanks to Pete Sutton for doing a fine job.

Next week in the Salon I’ll have the full version of my Finncon interview with Cat Valente.