Matters of Planetary Importance

I managed to wait a whole week before I picked up a copy of the third Planetary Trade, but now that I've got it, I can pronounce it every bit as good as it's predecessors despite, or maybe even because of, the three year gap.

Anyone remember the end of The Fourth Man, which ended with Memory Cloud, where Snow successfully removed Dowling's blocks and recovered his past? Well, now Snow is back up and running on all cylinders, we finally get to see some of the things that have so far only been hinted at by apparently random flashbacks or odd one off incidents. To that end, the trade kicks off with Century which details Snow's visit to Baron Frankenstein's castle, complete with a Whaleseque lab full of the Baron's horrors, followed by some incites into his decision to found Planetary.

The second story, Zero Point features the first proper appearance of Kim Suskind, previously only seen during the initial introduction of the Four, in a story that seems very influenced by the X-Files Movie, what with the antarctic research base, big honking UFO and Dowling's nasty experiments on Elijah. Creation Songs, the third story, details the Four's attempt to invade the Dreamtime and from their to take over all of creation. While not my favorite of the stories, there are still some nice bits including Snow and Wagner's visit to Ambrose Chase's widow.

The next story, Hark is very heavily influenced by Crouching Tiger, kicking off as it does with a stunningly drawn fight between Hark Al Lien and an assassin. It then jumps back to Anna Hark's office in New York, where Snow proposes an alliance if she agrees to drop her links to the Four. With Opak-Re we're very much in Tarzan/Quartermain territory, with the story detailing Snow's search for a hidden super advanced city in the jungle. There are some nice artistic moments, including a flight with a big snake thing and the disappearance of the city, as well as some insights into the origins of Jakita Wagner. The final story involves a set of early astronauts who, Jules Verne like, used a giant gun to shoot themselves into space. Inevitably the Four are interested in it, so Wagner has to give William Leather the necessary smacking - there are interesting hints that Leather 's goals have started to separate from the others - before Planetary end up with chance to examine the very first space craft.

In summary: Planetary - slow baked to comic book perfection.

Physickal Philosophies?

I've just heard about a book in which the author attempts to interpret the concepts of modern physics using the principles of dialectical materialism - I guess some people just have way too much time on their hands.

I think that in future, when I'm next at a conference, instead of avoiding all the tedious application talks that people tend to give to justify their attendance, I'm going to seek them out and subject them to furious philosophical and political analysis. For the sake of variety, I don't think I'll bother about Marxism (it's just so passe), I think I'll probably go with hardcore Cartesian or something instead. Yeah, that sounds good: "Excuse me, but could you tell me how your computational study of protein folding can be reconciled with the obvious problems that it presents, in terms of interaction with the self and questions of consciousness?"