The year ends, but a future waits…

Here we are now right at the cold, wet and dull end to 2015. While right now things may be grim and dreary outside, there have been a number of entertaining and suprising events, books, films and more over the months.

What have been some of the film/book/game highlights for you?

There have been the huge event films including Avengers:Age of Ultron, Mad Max, Jurrassic World, smaller challenging films including Ex Machina, Chappie. Many of us might probably agree that the cinematic turkey came very early this year with Terminator:Genisys. After several long years and a final parting with original director, Marvel’s Ant-Man made it onto the big screen and was thankfully and surprisingly overall a great fun movie. One of the most anticipated huge sci-fi cinema events was the return of Ridley Scott to the genre with his adaptation of The Martian which pleased a great many.

With new books in genre we had a return to his known loved science fiction style from cyberpunk legend William Gibson with The Peripheral. Serious hard SF author Stephen Baxter continued on with his Proxima/Ultima series, Adam Christopher gave us SF Noir Made to Kill, Neal Asher has his Dark Intelligence-book 1 in paperback in September, as well as recent returns from Jeff VanDerMeer, Gary Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Ramez Naam, John Scalzi, John Meaney, Richard Morgan, among many other in the SF genre.

The horror genre was the master Stephen King offer us more besides the now regular detective noir thrillers and mystery tales he has put out over recent years. Sarah Lotz Three, David Wong’s Futuristic Violence and Fancy suits. Can we still class Dean Koontz as horror? If so, he has, as usual been putting out his well crafted thrill-rides tales. Thankfully there has been real new horror work from the UK legend Shaun Hutson, Ramsey Campbell. The other cult horror author from these parts Graham Masterton has moved away from horror for a while but is now putting out very successful thriller novels on fine form. There is good, more varied horror fiction outthere but a reader possibly really needs to dig around and hunt it down sadly.

With fantasy books, one of the top reliable authors Robin Hobb has continued to put out a new series, we had work from Trudi Canavan, Jim Butcher continued on with his well established and loved urban fantasy tales, Brandon Sanderson, Raymond E. Feist, Joe Abercrombie still establishing his strong fantasy style, Terry Goodkind.

The videogames highlights of 2015 included Halo 5, Fallout 4 in recent weeks, new Tomb Raider, Assasin’s Creed, Witcher3, Destiny built upon the initial established world, the almost perfect Batman game series ended with Arkham Knight.

What made your year, and what are you waiting for from 2016?

 

DOCTOR WHO: HYBRID GAMES…

So have you seen the final episode in the second series of Capaldi Doctor Who?

We had Clara leave the show a couple of weeks ago, but of course, things would not be so straight forward as all that would they?

After the real slow-burning challenge of the previous episode-Doctor going very mad all alone, existential episode of tragic adventure. We get the return to Galifrey with a vast space-opera set-up to start with. Some great dialogue again, which had been a regular blessing. So this final episode was taking the Doctor to find out the real truth and danger connected to the Hybrid. Where was this creature? What was it capable of doing and when?

But then there was much more going on around and between this main plot. Besides what many Whovians and casual fans think, has Clara really died? How did this really affect the Doctor and this final story?

I was personally really delighted to see a great space-opera landscape of Galifrey. A good few visual nods to films like Dune and Starship Troopers, chronicles of Riddick. Some fine actors were involved as the Doctor put these threatening characters on Galifrey to rights, before the big reveals and really mind-boggling next stages of the story. Did this all end the series in a good way? Will it be far too radical and baffling for some? Has Moffat pushed his luck way too much this time?

I think it did pull together a few great points, some great lines and brilliant visuals to end the series. Does it all seem right? Maybe not. Is it what we expected or hope to see? Possibly.

From right now, we can look forward to the rather wild and funny Christmas special in a few weeks time.