Mortal Engines - my remote control

The other night I had big plans. BIG PLANS. I was going to hire a DVD (Mortal Engines) and go home and watch it! I wish you could have seen my super excited face. So I ventured to the local Hoyts Kiosk – OLD SKOOL!, where a non-human machine thing dispensed the DVD into my hand in a cold, hard business transaction; just the way I like it.

Mortal Engines was released in early 2019, and I missed it at the cinema, and I’m up to the last book of the Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve, so have been mega keen to see the series come to life.

Anyway, anyway, my Mac is the one made of Air and thus does not allow things to be stuck in it, so I headed to my DVD player, which I haven’t activated since 1908, and the ‘child safety lock mode’ was on, with no remote to be seen for many, many miles. 

I turned my lounge upside down looking for that damned thing, getting more and more frustrated, the way you do when the world Zuckerberg created helps to turn you into an inpatient, demanding jerk who can’t just ‘be in the moment’ with a lost remote.

My lost remote is all very hilarious actually in this context, because the main character’s job in Mortal Engines is as an ye olde world historian who hunts down and trades in old tech to survive. Maybe he could have found my lost remote. Maybe that can be the second movie. 

Mortal Engines is a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities are mounted on wheels and drive around preying on each other and, let me tell you, I’m gonna kill my bloody remote when I find it.

So after lots of button pressing and holding, it quickly became apparent that I needed another way into the machine. Professionally trained ‘child safety lock mode’ defusers get paid a lot of money to do this job with a remote. One small mistake, and you’re dead.

So, I turned to the Googles to help me dismantle the 'child safety lock mode' sans remote. Unfortunately, I immediately ended up in one of those tech help forums, where the answers to questions create more confusion than the questions themselves. And then, before I knew what was happening, information technology folk starting peppering me with questions via a bot called Bob. I didn’t care for it, so I left the theatre of war, and took sanctuary IRL.

In the end, much like in the movie, the device wasn’t infiltrated, someone was mortally wounded in a sword duel, the crash drive was destroyed with an old tech nuclear warhead, and no-one lived happily ever after.

Scarecrow creator

I recently met my second fave author, Matthew Reilly, when he came to Canberra for a book signing to promote his new novel, Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves.  Serial killer thriller writer Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta series, is my number one, but number two is pretty good, given that I don't particularly care for Reilly's action-adventure-thriller genre.

To be honest, I have been avoiding his books for years.  I admit I have been swayed at times by the rave reviews, but not enough to get me to pick one up and read it; although curiousity kept them on my radar.

Alas, a few months ago, I found myself a little bored one Saturday afternoon, so after years of saying NO THANKS to his crazy town works of fiction, I picked up Ice Station, Reilly's first novel in the Scarecrow series, and didn't really put it down until I got to the other end.

The bastard hooked me in right from the get go, and before I knew it, I had read my first completely improbable, multi-plot, non-stop-action roller coaster thriller ride of a narrative.  It was a brilliant read.  Loved every second of it.  Was rabbiting on about it for weeks.  This guy could write about paint drying on a wall and turn it into an exciting, unputdownable thriller.

The hero of the Scarecrow series, Captain Shane Scholfield, or Scarecrow - his Marine call sign - is relentlessly subjected to the vicissitudes of commando life. One minute he is standing around looking splendid in his flash-free ray bans, the next minute he is fleeing from a mutant, overgrown elephant seal the size of Sydney's Centrepoint Tower or a rogue British SAS commando that suffers from numerous and varied psychological and personality disorders. 

In the ensuing month, following Ice Station, I read all of the Scarecrow series and all of the Jack West Jr series, which meant I spent a couple of weeks dreaming and hallucinating of kick-arse commando units, maghooks, the arctic, antarctic ice shelves, the freakishly indestructable halicarnassus, mutant nuclear radiation-generated elephant seals, and claustrophobic, health-hazardous Egyptian tomb deathtraps.  Thanks a bunch, Matthew Reilly.

The best thing about Reilly's novels is that he doesn't interrupt the action and jabber on with detailed descriptions of how the wind stirred the branches of the damned trees, et cetera, or boring, space-filling conversations between heroes and villians.  He keeps the momentum going for the whole book.  A full-on proper action-adventure thriller.  His novels need to be made into movies; I just hope Hollywood doesn't completely ruin them with their cheesy, trashy, sleazy ways. 

Area 7 Absurdity

I have just finished reading my second Matthew Reilly crazy action / thriller - Area 7 - and all I can say is what the hell was that? Where does this guy get his imagination from?  I am now definitely a fan of the Shane Schofield / Scarecrow series, even though the plots are the antithesis of how I usually like my narratives to unravel.  Meaning action novels are not really my thing.

I do, however, like how Reilly turns classified government information on its head.  If governments don't want to divulge their secrets to the populace, I am delighted that authors with insanely active imaginations take the basics of weaponry and espionage and then just make up a whole lot of shit to fit their storyline.  And governments can't say the storyline isn't true because they can't defend classified information one way or the other.  Love it. 

Postscript:

Just finished Reilly's third novel in the Shane Schofield series - Scarecrow - and it's just as farfetched and captivating as the other two.  Now onto Hell Island.  Sounds delightful.

Crazy Town Narratives

Last weekend, after years of saying NO THANKS to Australian author Matthew Reilly's crazy town action / thriller works of fiction, I picked up Ice Station and didn't really put it down until I got to the other end. The bastard hooked me in right from the get go, and before I knew it, I had read my first completely improbable, multi-plot, non-stop-action roller coaster thriller ride of a narrative.

And I've been dreaming and hallucinating of kick-arse commando units, maghooks, Antarctic ice shelfs (shelves?), mutant nuclear radiation-generated elephant seals and killer whales ever since. Yes, that makes for a quite a daunting dream. And I don't always live through it either, so clearly I am not the leading man / super-marine superhero that I think I deserve to be in my own dream.  Perhaps my subconscious has self-esteem troubles like the rest of my brain.

The hero of the series, Captain Shane Scholfield, or Scarecrow - his Marine call sign - is relentlessly subjected to the vicissitudes of commando life. One minute he is standing around looking splendid in his flash-free ray bans, the next minute he is fleeing from an overgrown elephant seal the size of Sydney's Centrepoint Tower or a rogue British SAS commando that suffers from numerous and varied psychological and personality disorders. Ain't nothing mundane about being a kick-arse marine.

I've decided that my life, perhaps, would be more exhilarating if I too could own a maghook like Scarecrows. The maghook  is a small, albeit powerful, cylindrical electromagnet that can be used as a grappling hook. The magnet is activated and deactivated by pushing a button on and off, or some such. 

The maghook is guaranteed to get you out of any sticky situation, and it had its heyday during the Star Wars years.  But where does one purchase such a device? I doubt it's something you can pick up from K-Mart, or even Bunnings. Perhaps an army surplass store stocks what I want. Imagine how your life could change with a spiderman-esque gadget of this nature?

If you find yourself in a meeting that doesn't meet your exacting requirements for timeliness, efficiency or interest, you could simply excuse yourself briefly and maghook your shit out of there. Work would become most exciting; or, at least, like a Bond movie starring a plank of wood as the antagonist.  Or maybe that's just the bad guys in my workplace.