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| | | Emergency by Daisy Hildyard review – a dark pastoral | | by Sarah Moss May 4, 2022 | | Humans and ecosystems are intertwined in this meditative, beautifully sustained novel about coming of age in a globalised world Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, was lyrical and haunting and brought well-deserved critical success. She followed it with a book of essays on climate change and human relations with plants and animals, The Second Body. In Emergency, Hildyard develops the strengths of her first novel and the concerns of her nonfiction. There isn’t exactly a plot but there are spiralling, intricate meditations on plants, animals, humans and ecosystems, gracefully told through an approximate coming-of-age story set in a village in a nondescript part of northern England. Emergency begins with the narrator “old enough to be outside and alone”, sitting above a quarry, watching a kestrel and a vole who have not yet seen each other: “We all waited to find out who would move first.” This incident leads to the memory of playing with the children next door; then to a pet rabbit that ate its young (“Even today, she seems to me very human in the way her principles forced her to self-destruct”). We move on to an uneasy relationship with an eccentric elderly neighbour; then back to that moment in the quarry, which produces “gravel that was sent all over the world, the requirements of Norwegian motorways and new cities in China determined the shape of the quarry and the size of the shape it left”. The narrative touches on a neighbour’s work in the local abattoir; watching foxes in the garden at night; the arrival of the first computer in the village primary school, where one of the teachers usually carries bruises and fractures from her husband’s assaults. Continue reading... | | | | | Citizen Sleeper review – an evocative cyberpunk survival sim | | by Lewis Packwood May 4, 2022 | | PC, Mac, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Fellow Traveller
A decaying cyborg with a human mind struggles to survive aboard a space station in a superbly written, if not exactly original, slice of scuzzy sci-fi If your brain were copied and placed in a robot body, would it have human rights? That’s the thorny issue at the heart of Citizen Sleeper, a game set on a run-down space station called Erlin’s Eye in the far-flung future. In this reality, AI is strictly controlled and artificial beings that achieve sentience are hunted down and destroyed, Blade Runner-style. But “emulated” humans known as sleepers offer a loophole, being neither fully artificial nor fully human. Nefarious megacorporations will pay desperate volunteers handsomely for the right to emulate their brain. The person’s memories are then excised before their cloned mind is pitched into a robot body and worked remorselessly. Sleepers are a classless entity owned by a corporation, who have no idea of who they once were yet retain human feelings. Citizen Sleeper is out on 5 May; £17.99 Continue reading... | | | | | The Adventures of Maid Marian review – historical clunker with a boyband Robin Hood | | by Cath Clarke May 4, 2022 | | Almost comically unmedieval, this new take on the legend lacks the budget and acting chops of previous Hollywood versions ‘You heard me, yeah?” That’s Robin Hood, back in Nottingham after three years away on the Crusades, trying to persuade Maid Marian to finally marry him. Sticklers for 12th-century accuracy look away now. Bill Thomas’s historical clunker takes its cue from the Guy Ritchie approach to ye olde times authenticity, but without the studio budget to pull off the action scenes. This is the legend of Robin Hood told from the perspective of Maid Marian, with bit of female kick-assery standing in for feminism. It opens with Marian (Sophie Craig) hiding out in a convent while Robin is off fighting. Pretending to be a novitiate called Sister Matilda, she is dying of boredom. Her one hobby is sneaking out past the mother superior to poach deer for starving peasants (and lamping soldiers who get in her way). Continue reading... | | | | | |
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