SFXJune 2018的目錄

Hello there, SFX reader! As SFX reaches the milestone of its 300th issue (that’s well over 35,000 pages of sci-fi and fantasy goodness over the last 23 years), we’ve put together our biggest mag since issue 200 back in 2010, a truly epic package packed to the gills with the sci-fi/fantasy goodness we know you love. You guys were there before the rest of the world realised what we’ve always known – that sci-fi and fantasy are the most vibrant, most exciting genres on the planet. Since the days when Tank Girl, Bugs and Highlander: The Raven graced SFX’s front cover – and a new season of Star Trek: Voyager was a big deal – we’ve seen our kind of stories take over the mainstream, as The Lord Of The…

Was it fun to make an apocalyptic genre show in Denmark? We have done a lot of crime shows, so I hope we’re trying something new! I watched Stranger Things when I got the script for The Rain, and I was like, “Wow, this is so cool!” I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan; Stranger Things was the first one that I got really addicted to. I shot a Swedish drama before The Rain, so it was fun to go from the drama and then get thrown into this universe. It was all action, running and falling and trying to survive. What really grabbed you about the show? For me it was the young people that you follow. I thought it was so beautiful that these survivors have lost everything. They…

How far would you go to save the life of someone you love? Henry Ian Cusick, Lost’s Desmond, plays Dr Peter Quint in Chimera, a new science fiction thriller from first-time director Maurice Haemms. Quint is determined to cure his children of the disease that has already claimed his wife. To do so, he begins experimenting with fetal stem cells – a practice outlawed in the United States… “I got this rather unusual script,” says the Lost star. “It was very compelling and I didn’t know what to make of it.” He signed on and spent five weeks making the film in an abandoned warehouse in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. “It was a real find – freezing and uncomfortable, but it looks great.” The film also reunited him with Kathleen Quinlan, who…

After setting both of his past two series in the same fantastical kingdom, Mark Lawrence is exploring new territory in his current trilogy, The Book Of The Ancestors. Like its predecessor Red Sister, second instalment Grey Sister features a predominantly female cast, although the Bristol-based author insists there is no specific game plan behind his choice of characters. “It’s the story it is,” he tells Red Alert. “There’s no statement being made here any more than concentrating on male protagonists in my previous work was a statement. The main characters in The Broken Empire and The Red Queen’s War were inspired by characters in books written in the 1960s – A Clockwork Orange and Flashman – but Nona (the main character in The Book Of The Ancestors) has no conscious…

Having started out for kids, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic will be going back to its roots on Free Comic Book Day with a special issue for all ages. Along with a Tharg’s Future Shock and Henry Flint’s Chet Jetstream, 2000 AD Regened will feature the younger incarnations of Prog stalwarts Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog, though don’t expect too many links to past adventures. “The decision of where to place my story started with the readership, which in this case wasn’t hardened Johnny Alpha fans,” says Alec Worley, who along with artist Ben Wilsher will be chronicling how the S/D agent first earned his badge. “I was writing for eight- to 12-year-olds who know nothing about who he is, so I had to come up with an action sequence that…

PICKING UP THE PIECES “The start of season three directly follows the season two finale. There’s no time jump, so Holden has just been hit with a few tough realisations. His mission to stamp out the protomolecule has failed, his partner/lover/crewmate and confidante has shattered his trust, and his leg is crushed. He’s not doing great. Meanwhile, the Roci crew find themselves, literally, in the middle of a war zone, so there’s no time to hash any of these issues out.” MORAL MAZE “Holden has become less ideological as time’s gone on. The chain reaction of events that follow the Canterbury being destroyed shake Holden loose from his black-and-white notions of right and wrong and, as a result, his moral compass works in shades of grey… Season three is another…

FILM & CC CARDIFF 12-13 May It’s a jamboree of genre peeps as folk from Doctor Who, Star Wars, GoT and Harry Potter all descend on the Motorpoint Arena. www.filmandcomicconcardiff.com MCM LONDON 25-27 May Expect more stars than you can shake a stick at – including Felicia Day and Walking Dead survivors – at the annual bank holiday bash at London’s ExCel. mcmcomiccon.com/london HEROES & VILLAINS FAN FEST 26-27 May If you head down to the Olympia London this weekend, expect to see stars from the Arrowverse, Torchwood and Gotham. heroesfanfest.com/london SUNDANCE LONDON 31 May-3 Jun VIP and festival passes are now on sale as the Utah favourite returns to London – highlights include hot new horror Hereditary. picturehouses.com/sundance TOLKIEN: MASTER OF MIDDLE-EARTH 1 Jun-28 Oct Experience JRR’s genius first-hand…

THIS MONTH’S COMMUNICATIONS MONITOR NICK SETCHFIELD, FEATURES EDITOR It’s not every day a magazine celebrates 300 issues, so we’re indulging ourselves this month with your memories of SFX. Y’know, back when we started, letters would arrive pinned to the backs of trilobites – it was all so different in the primordial dawn, waiting for evolution to bring us Babylon 5. We kinda miss the humble trilobite. As ever our pick of this month’s inbox bags a book from our pals at the Black Library – this month we’re giving away Wolfsbane by Guy Haley. Guy used to be an SFX staffer, of course. It’s all connected, you know……

“A LAND OF BLACK SAND, SHEER CLIFFS AND STEAMING CRATERS” Around 10 years ago, when I was hammering the keys as an arts journalist, I found myself in Iceland to interview crime writer Arnaldur Indridason. I’d visited before, but the otherworldly landscape of the place was assaulting my senses all over again. With a bit of time before the interview I randomly wandered into the Culture House, the country’s national museum, in downtown Reykjavik. There was an exhibition on Surtsey, the volcanic island formed off the south coast of Iceland during a prolonged eruption in 1963. I was mesmerised by the dramatic footage of lava explosions, the huge plumes of steam and smoke rising into the sky, the volcanic lightning storms caused by ionisation of the atmosphere. Iceland was otherworldly,…

Did you have a brief for Lando when you first got the part? I took two ideas to start with. I took the idea of the cape and the idea of the name Calrissian – the “-ian” is Armenian, and I thought to myself, “Oh this is interesting I can really play around with those two ideas”. The cape was the key to the swashbuckling. The characters in Star Wars are bigger than life and very much a part of the full spectrum of colours. Was it as fun playing Lando in Return Of The Jedi when he was less roguish and more heroic? I think with good heroes there’s always something dubious about them. I think it’s always interesting to have a character with a lot of aspects. All of it…

Taking a lead from Fighting Fantasy and 1980s 2000 AD spin-off Diceman, Al Ewing will be taking the Merc with the Mouth’s fourth wall breaking to a whole new level in You Are Deadpool, an interactive five-issue weekly miniseries that literally allows you to participate in one of Wade Wilson’s madcap adventures. “Deadpool is tailor-made for stunts like this,” explains Ewing. “If it was Hulk or Thor, it’d be more po-faced, but with Deadpool, you can josh with the reader and retain a sense of fun and play.” Originally conceived as a time travel story, each of the five issues explores a different decade of Marvel history. “The first issue is a quest to steal a Time Hat from a Roxxon black site and once you’ve got it, you have…

What did you know about 1970s punk or Croydon before you started this? I didn’t really know anything about it, I have to say! Obviously I knew punk and the culture of it. But I wasn’t aware of the 1970s punk in Croydon! John [Cameron Mitchell] is like an encyclopedia about it. He knows everything about that time, every punk band and everybody’s influence. Did it matter that you didn’t know much about the era? To me it was timeless. It didn’t matter when it was set for my character. Her thing is that they’ve been in all different lifeforms. She’s once been a star, she’s once been a bacterium… and in her alien form, she probably looks completely different. But this is just her as a human. How would…

So who’s Priya? She works on the Rakesh Sharma, the Indian space station, and is one of the longest standing cops in ISPF. What does she bring to the series? She’s always trying to move the game along. It takes a while for her to come out of her shell, initially. I think she wears her uniform as a way to not be judged by who she is. Sometimes people just talk all about work so they don’t have to show who they really are. I think she has a bit of that going on. What’s it like working with the original cast? You can tell by listening to them that it’s so special to them. They remember so much of the filming and storylines. They were saying how remarkably…

By his own estimation, Raymond E Feist is the author of “the world’s longest fantasy trilogy”. By this he means the 33 stories of the “Riftwar Cycle” that have taken up most of his professional life since the publication of The Magician in 1982. Nonetheless, all good things must come to an end – or at least be put on indefinite hiatus. So it was that when Feist finished Magician’s End (2013), he had mapped out the five Riftwars he had always envisaged writing about and, when people asked him what happened next, he simply didn’t know. It was time to start something new. “I felt it a good jumping-off place for a different world with different rules,” he says. Which is how, in his early seventies, Feist is speaking…

Also making her debut in Action Comics #1, Lois Lane has been a consistent presence in Superman’s life throughout his eight decades of existence. “Lois comes in in that first story and was very pivotal to the success of Superman,” says Paul Levitz. “As for Jimmy Olsen, there’s an unnamed office boy at The Daily Planet, who appears in a couple of panels of Action Comics #6. But it was the radio show, The Adventures of Superman, that really brought Jimmy to life in April 1940. Because it was radio, Clark Kent needed someone to talk to, and he needed to talk to that person in a different way to how you’d talk to someone you’ve got a budding romance with, so Jimmy then became the perfect foil for Superman.”…

In 2018, it seems like a no-brainer that superhero movies make money. Just look at Black Panther, which, even as we write this, is shooting up the chart of all-time highest-grossing movies like the mercury inside a thermometer planted in a pool of lava. But it wasn’t always this way. Superhero movies were often synonymous with either huge financial losses or critical derision. Only a few shone brightly: 1978’s Superman: The Movie, for example, or Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Eventually, after years of flops and failures – from Catwoman to The Shadow – the X-Men hit screens in 2000; Sam Raimi rebooted Spider-Man in 2002 and Batman Begins, er, began in 2005. Superheroes were back, baby! Suddenly there was blood in the water, drawing sharks from all directions. One of…

SUPERGRAN In Ready Player One’s opening sequence, a lucky punter gets to scale Everest with Batman, but for the ideal Himalayan experience surely you’ve got to take a trip with Scotland’s top geriatric superhero? METAL MICKEY There must be a deleted scene somewhere where OASIS creator James Halliday explains how watching Metal Mickey as a child inspired his entire worldview, encouraging him to work with computers so he could create his own robotic chum? JET SET WILLY The movie’s arcade game task could have been rendered nigh-on impossible by pitting players against the tricky-as-hell Manic Miner sequel. Cue most being crushed beneath a giant foot. GILBERT THE ALIEN Among all the iconic spaceships, there’s no sign of the Millennium Dustbin from Saturday morning TV’s Get Fresh. Escaping puppet presenter Gilbert’s…

RELEASED 11 MAY (Also on Sky Cinema) TBC | 99 minutes Director Andrew Niccol Cast Clive Owen, Amanda Seyfried, Colm Feore, Mark O’Brien Like Minority Report set on the streets of Mega-City One, Andrew Niccol’s dystopian thriller takes place in a society where everyone’s fitted with a chip known as the Mind’s Eye, leading to a complete lack of privacy and the apparent elimination of all crime. Clive Owen plays grizzled cop Sal Frieland, who finds himself on the wrong side of the law after encountering Amanda Seyfried’s enigmatic hacker The Girl – the Anon of the title – who somehow leaves no online trail. There’s an evocative, old-fashioned pulpiness to the film’s unnamed metropolis, which contrasts deftly with the ever-present infographics that offer facts about everything from the identity…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 106 minutes Director Anders Walter Cast Madison Wolfe, Zoe Saldana, Sydney Wade, Rory Jackson Fearsome giants attacking towns, unseen by adults, battled only by one young girl with the skills and knowledge to defeat them, never believed by those around her… This is a story we’re all familiar with. We’re used to rolling our eyes at the ignorant grown-ups who just won’t believe. But in reality, if a child came to us and said she saw monsters, would we believe her? Or conclude that weapons aren’t the help she needs? Madison Wolfe plays Barbara Thorson, who creates lures and traps for the giants around her town, carrying a hidden and powerful weapon in her heart-shaped purse. But something’s definitely wrong at home. Her desperate sister…

Were you a Star Wars fan before The Last Jedi? What’s funny is I didn’t grow up with it. Obviously I was aware of it, but I completely missed the boat on this big pop culture thing. I think that helped me get the role in the end, just because I was able to create a character without putting this huge expectation on it. Did you have a crash course in Star Wars when you got the role? I didn’t want to make this person something in response to how prevalent the franchise is in pop culture – I wanted to be honest to the writing, and to who this character was. At the same time, I did binge watch the movies! I wanted to know what they were like in relation to who Rose…

RELEASED 30 APRIL (Out now on download) 2017 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/3D/standard)/DVD/download Director Jake Kasdan Cast Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Jack Black Eyes practically rolled out of their sockets when the follow-up to the 1995 boardgame-unleashes-chaos adventure was announced. So long after the original? Starring The Rock and Kevin Hart?! Turns out the vitriol was misplaced, as Welcome To The Jungle is a fun, knockabout action comedy that plays to the strengths of the cast, while including some winking references to videogame quirks (especially with Karen Gillan’s character). Four teens get drawn into the game – which we’re almost shocked hadn’t evolved into an app by now – and take on the quest to… Look, it’s really not all that important. What matters is the chemistry between…

RELEASED 30 APRIL 2018 | 15 | DVD If watching movies about humans screwing aquatic monsters is your thing, wow, how lucky are you this year? Arriving in the wake of The Shape Of Water, this tougher tale follows two men stuck on a remote island in the South Atlantic who find themselves under siege from an army of humanoid sea creatures. Whether you take it as a thoughtful parable on humanity and hatred or a simple horror, Cold Skin is a handsome companion piece to Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-guzzler. Extras None.…

RELEASED 14 May (Also in cinemas from 11 May) 2017 | 15 | DVD/download Director David Freyne Cast Ellen Page, Sam Keeley, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Stuart Graham There’s a promising premise at the heart of this gritty post-zombie movie, the debut feature from David Freyne. It’s set in Ireland after a widespread infection causing aggressive psychosis has swept the country. A cure for the epidemic has finally been found, which is effective on 75% of the afflicted. Though the worst of the horrors may be over, new dilemmas have arisen, including what to do with the incarcerated 25% who may still be dangerous and infectious. Meanwhile society is at odds, with violence erupting between “the cured”, the military and those protesting against reintegration. The Cured is ambitious, playing with themes including…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Can Evrenol Cast Ergun Kuyucu, Muharrem Bayrak, Görkem Kasal, Fatih Dokgöz “Not everything has an answer,” someone says partway through this Grand Guignol Turkish horror. It’s a phrase that echoes in your mind once it really gets into its stride. It follows some cops on the night shift, who crash after responding to a call. Exploring a deserted former police station, they find what might be a Satanic temple, or a gateway to Hell – a place of sexual degradation and shocking violence. Director Can Evrenol wears his influences on his sleeve: films like Hellraiser, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Sentinel. The synth score apes John Carpenter; the red and blue lighting is pure Dario Argento; and the surrealist excess…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1944 | U | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) Director Basil Dearden Cast John Clements, Googie Withers, Raymond Huntley, Renee Gadd The words “Ealing Films” tend to conjure up a petit-bourgeois world of cosy realism. But that’s doing the quintessentially English studio a disservice. Ealing also dabbled in fantasy – not only horror anthology Dead Of Night, but films like 1943’s The Halfway House. This 1944 effort, which looked forward to the Britain a Labour government would later build while war was still raging, is another example. A symbolic piece, based on a play by JB Priestley, it sees nine characters transported to a limbo-like space, where a doorway leads to a fantastic city. We never observe said city, only their reactions to it. Safe to assume…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 496 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Bryan Camp Publisher Titan Books Gods of luck, death and trickery; poker games played with tarot cards; a man with the ability to find anything that’s been lost; and a city still reeling from tragedy… There’s a lot going on in this debut novel, but author Bryan Camp does an excellent job of holding it all together and weaving a compelling narrative along the way. Jude Dubuisson – half human, half something – has always had the ability to feel loss around him, something that flipped from a gift to a curse when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and everyone was struck by more loss than he could bear to feel. A summons to a poker game filled with gods and monsters…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Authors Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon Publisher Harper Voyager It pays to persevere. The opening section of this fantasy novel is underwhelming. People you haven’t grown to care for yet are shagging or executing each other; the prose is unexceptional; the tropes familiar. There are present-tense dream sequences that feel forced. And you’ll witness an overload of characters and a propensity to drop the f-bomb, sometimes for comic effect at the end of chapters. But once you’re through the scene-setting, the story demonstrates a satisfying pace and the second half is genuinely exciting. Blood Of The Four tells of a royal family’s ambition, and of a slave rebellion, both aided by forbidden magic. It unfolds in a world, Quandis, where church and state have…

This month’s big paperback is Stephen King’s team-up with his son Owen, SLEEPING BEAUTIES (, 3 May, Hodder & Stoughton). It begins with women all over the world falling comatose, wrapped in cocoons; if anyone tries to break into them, the women go killer zombie… We said: “There’s far too much chaff here that should have been cut. But the main problem is the slightly embarrassing bleeding-heart liberalism. All credit to the Kings for trying to write a book apologising for the ills men have inflicted on women, but they feel cringingly right-on at times.” Andrew Caldecott’s ROTHERWEIRD (, 3 May, Jo Fletcher Books) is a puzzle narrative, set in a Gormenghastian small town of obscure rules and rituals, with a population of eccentrics and a strong taboo against investigating…

RELEASED 26 April 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Heather Child Publisher Orbit At the moment the friendly AIs in our lives are confined to just a few names – Siri, Alexa – and exhibit all the personality of your toaster (barring the odd weird chuckle from the latter). But what if your AI tech took on the persona of your sister, using their online data footprint – a sister who vanished years beforehand? And what if it seemed to know all sorts of things about her, including the kind of stuff she’d probably be doing today if she hadn’t disappeared? This is the fascinating premise of Heather Child’s debut novel, as bored shopworker Freya searches for her lost sibling, Ruby, in a near-future, tech-obsessed London that includes VR worlds and…

So many books, so little time… Titles we couldn’t quite fit in include RF Kuang’s debut THE POPPY WAR (3 May, Harper Voyager), the first in a military fantasy trilogy inspired by Chinese history. It follows a peasant-girl war orphan at an elite military school, who discovers she has an unearthly power… Mark Lawrence’s Book Of Ancestor series continues with a second entry, GREY SISTER (17 May, Harper Voyager), which once again follows Nona, novice at a convent where the sisters train people in the art of killing. Our reviewer loved book one, Red Sister, awarding it. THE TESTAMENT OF LOKI (17 May, Gollancz) is a new follow-up to Joanne Harris’s 2014 retelling of Norse mythology The Gospel Of Loki; we called that “delightful”, praising its “chatty, cheeky style”. The…

MATT BIELBY DEBUT: ISSUE 1 FAVE SFX MEMORIES The fact we got to do it at all was quite a thing – SFX was a risk for a company that did videogame magazines and hobby stuff. GENRE HIGHLIGHTS Buffy, the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, Game Of Thrones. HOPE FOR THE FUTURE It doesn’t look bad. Really, we’ve never had it so good. MJ SIMPSON DEBUT: ISSUE 1 FAVE SFX MEMORIES Interviewing John Landis in the kids’ section of McDonald’s. Using fake invites to crash a Star Trek press screening. Meeting Ray Harryhausen at the Independence Day preview. GENRE HIGHLIGHTS Hitchhiker’s radio cast reunited for the live stage show. HOPE FOR THE FUTURE Global ban on 3D movies. LISA DAVIES (NICHOLLS) DEBUT: ISSUE 3 FAVE SFX MEMORIES Simon Pegg buying me a drink…

SUITING UP! MEN IN BLACK Meet your new galaxy defenders. Proving there are equal opportunities for Asgardians, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are set to reprise their Thor: Ragnarok chemistry in Sony’s reboot of Men In Black. Fate Of The Furious’s F Gary Gray directs from a script by Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, who wrote the first Iron Man movie. “It’s so rare to get to the end of the script and know you’re holding a movie in your hands, but Art and Matt have written a spin-off that somehow is true to the core of the MIB world and yet expands the franchise to a fresh new place,” says producer Walter F Parkes, shortly before a neuralyzer wiped all knowledge of his involvement with the film, denying us…

#300 ISSUES OF SFX Michela, email At the beginning it was because of Buffy. Of course. I love all your well-informed, insightful, in depth articles, I love the variety of genres and media you cover, I love the humour (so much fun!), I love the passion you show, the numberless reviews, I love your readers’ letters, and the special issues on anniversaries and the like. So thanks for all the fun and priceless news and precious reviews! Keep up the good work! Wish you at least 300 more! Gaspar Garção, email The first time I bought SFX was in 1997, in Coimbra, Portugal. It was the Alien: Resurrection cover. Since then, I have a Master’s degree in Journalism (so that I could even better understand the irreverence of your incredibly…

Samuel R Delany’s 800-page epic Dhalgren may be science fiction’s most baffling million-copy-selling cult classic. The book follows a character (“The Kid”) who can’t remember his name or his past into a city cut loose from the rest of America. He’s on a mission, but we’re never quite sure what it is. There’s tons of kinky sex of the straight and gay varieties. There are long rhapsodic poetic interludes. The enigmatic title might answer one of the book’s most haunting questions – but then again it might not. (Imagine Citizen Kane ending with a character saying, “Maybe Rosebud’s a sled, I don’t know.”) Reading it for the first time, I kept asking myself, “How is this book so popular?!” Dhalgren does have a storyline – there’s a solid plot summary…

Was it high pressure stepping into a role that Peter Mayhew established? A little bit because you had so many fans waiting to see Chewbacca after so many years – after the prequels and after the original trilogy. So when we started making The Force Awakens it was really a lot. But now, there’s so much new stuff coming up in the new films I was sort of focused on getting those scenes right so that I didn’t have to be afraid of the reception, because I was so busy thinking of the ways to portray this character in these new situations. How long did it take you to get the walk and mannerisms down? Have I got it yet? I don’t know. Every day it’s a constant [battle]. It…

What did you relish about writing Han? Han is a fun combination of reckless and thoughtful. He cares deeply about a lot of things, including his family and the galaxy as a whole, but he’s still got that rogue smuggler trying to work its way to the surface. Plus, he and Lando are both wry, sarcastic trash talkers and those are always my favourite characters to write. What was the hardest part of writing him? The weight of him being THE LEGENDARY HAN SOLO was something I had to get past. I grew up loving Star Wars, so writing a character I’ve loved for so long – it loomed large. But you have to unmoor yourself from that. Fortunately, Han himself has to grapple with being THE LEGENDARY HAN SOLO,…

WHEN SENSE8 WAS ABRUPTLY cancelled by Netflix after its second season last year, there was an outcry at the prospect of its many plotlines remaining unresolved. But now the eight-strong Cluster of Sensates is returning for a two-hour special that will bring their battle with the evil forces spearheaded by the nefarious Whispers to a definite conclusion. With filming taking place in Berlin, Paris and Naples over a hectic six-week period, Sense8 remains extremely popular judging by the huge crowds that gather in the narrow streets outside the old church that is director and co-creator Lana Wachowski and her cast and crew’s headquarters in the northern Italian city. “It felt like it was just going to leave this dark, unfinished hole in all our lives,” reflects Brian J Smith, who…

*In no particular order. 1 DOCTOR WHO “ROSE” RUSSELL T DAVIES TALKS TO IAN BERRIMAN ABOUT REVIVING A SERIES THAT, 13 YEARS LATER, IS STILL GOING STRONG BACK IN SPRING 2003, DOCTOR WHO, as TV drama, was dead as a dodo. Over 13 years had passed since the final episode of the original series; nearly seven since a Paul McGann TV movie. Fans had lost hope. Then the miraculous happened… Despite being a lifelong fan, Russell T Davies was tentative about taking on the commission. “I tend to give interviews saying, ‘I leapt at the opportunity!’,” he admits, “But it meant going to work for the BBC in-house, which is something you just don’t do, as a freelance writer – career-wise, it’s the wrong move.” With Davies initially busy on…

“When the script for VII came over JJ said, ‘Don’t turn to the end! Read it from page one, all the way through…’ Now that should have been the tip-off right there. But I dutifully followed his advice. So when I got Episode VIII, I turned right to the end and started going backwards. So that sentence ‘Luke Skywalker dies’ was the first thing I read. First off, I said, ‘I asked them to wait until IX.’ I wasn’t upset. I just thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting, he’s on a rock, there’s nobody around, seems kind of dramatically inert…’ Usually there’s someone around to say, ‘They got Charlie!’ Then I went to the beginning and started reading it all the way through. “The whole movie is pushing me into areas I…

RELEASED 4 MAY U | 103 minutes Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi Cast Ruby Barnhill, Kate Winslet, Jim Broadbent, Louis Ashbourne Serkis Looking amazingly like a Ghibli film, this anime fantasy is from a new studio called Ponoc, but involved many Ghibli animators and artists. The director, a protégé of Miyazaki, previously helmed Arrietty and When Marnie Was There. Based on a 1971 children’s book, the film presents a splendidly painted Shropshire. Mary, a perky but insecure young girl, finds a broomstick that whisks her over the clouds to a magic school. It’s more flamboyantly fantastical than Ghibli’s recent films, with a terrific high-speed prologue full of fire and flying. After that, some viewers may find the ensuing story too slow and subdued, but it builds very well, threaded with a strong…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 107 minutes Director Brad Peyton Cast Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman There’s one terrible, groan inducing moment in Rampage that sums up everything you need to know about the film. It’s the scene in which a government agent, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan inexplicably channelling his inner cowboy, drawls this line to Dwayne Johnson: “When science shits the bed, I’m the one who changes the sheets.” Ouch. Is it funny? Yes, but in all the wrong ways – just like the movie. Unable to decide if it’s a gory horror or a family film and ending up as neither, Rampage reimagines an ’80s arcade game without wondering whether anybody wanted such a thing in the first place. The plot sends Johnson’s…

RELEASED 25 MAY TBC | 79 minutes Directors Richard Claus, Kaarsten Kiilerich Cast Jim Carter, Rasmus Hardiker, Amy Saville, Alice Krige First came a series of children’s books; then there was a flop 2000 movie starring Jonathan Lipnicki (and several actors who reprise their roles with voiceovers here); now there’s this animated adventure, a German co-production. You’d think, given the fact people keep creating works around this story, that it must be something special about it… but if there is, we’re buggered if we can see it. This tale of a little kid helping a bunch of friendly vampires avoid a nasty vampire-hunter isn’t just clichéd, it’s also unnecessary. The animation isn’t bad given a European (rather than Hollywood) budget, but the script never stands still for a minute, lurching…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1975 | 12 | Blu-ray Director Hua Shan Cast Danny Lee, Wang Hsieh, Terry Lau, Yuan Man-tzu Lock a dozen eight-year-olds in a room with crayons, crates of sugary drinks, and instructions to brainstorm the perfect movie, and you’d end up with something like this barmy mashup of kaiju film and superhero action from Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios. Clearly influenced by Japanese TV series like Ultraman, it sees a Science Headquarters operative transformed into a bionic superhero to battle demon princess Elzebub and her army of monsters, who’ve awakened after millions of years in hibernation. Everything about it is hilarious: Inframan’s powers, which include a rockets-in-his-feet “lethal kick”; the monsters, which look like the results of a Blue Peter competition; the mayhem they cause (at one…

RELEASED 14 May 1996 | 12 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT There are other movies far more worthy of a HD restoration than this piece of space trash, but hey, we’ll take it. As long as you accept the fact that this tale of an interplanetary rig-driver who hauls a dangerous cargo to Earth is supposed to be terrible, there’s a lot to enjoy: from lines such as “Welcome to the Scum Cluster!” to Charles Dance talking about his electric-powered wang. The killer robots are well-designed, too. Extras New interviews with the director, composer and art director.…

RELEASED 14 May 2016 | 15 | DVD Creator Max Landis Cast Samuel Barnett, Elijah Wood, Hannah Marks, Fiona Dourif Anyone expecting a faithful adaptation of Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently novels should look away now, because this BBC America show bears little relation to the source material. Even so, Max Landis’s take is a fun (if slightly out of control) ride, and a detective show like no other. Dirk (Samuel Barnett) still uses the interconnectedness of all things to solve cases, but this is the only familiar element about a show that plunges him into a tale involving time travel, soul transference and a lot of stupidity. Like its hero, the show has a veneer of chaos underpinned by something cleverer – Dirk Gently throws plotlines and ideas at the…

RELEASED 7 May 1983 | TBC | DVD Director Robert Young Cast Richard Heffer, Barbara Kellerman, Richard Morant, Ed Bishop Truth be told, maybe SFX shouldn’t be covering The Mad Death, as though it has a speculative premise (imagining a rabies outbreak in Britain), the one it depicts is pretty smallscale. Don’t expect nationwide carnage along the lines of James Herbert’s The Rats. Still, if you grew up in the ’80s, there’s a good chance images from this three-part drama are seared into your memory: a foam-mouthed fox hurling itself against a car window; the hallucinations of the first victim; a Land Rover full of marksmen tearing through a shopping centre in pursuit of a rabid Alsatian. They still pack a punch. What might surprise those ’80 kids now is…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 433 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Stephen Lloyd Jones Publisher Headline For a book which begins with a girl in a house who’s just killed one man and is about to be attacked by another, Stephen Lloyd Jones’s fourth novel is awfully slow to get going. A high-concept tale, the entirety of it is based around a long chase which takes place across Britain and Europe. Resourceful but isolated young woman Mallory is being pursued by a Turkish gang led by her furious counterpart Aylah. Although the narrative is a cat-and-mouser, the slowly revealed backstory and mythology is where the meat of the story lies, and where it crosses over from crime noir into contemporary fantasy. It’s not until just before the 200-page mark, though, that things really…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 189 pages | Paperback/ebook Authors Joshua Winning Publisher Unbound Books Joshua Winning’s Young Adult novel throws the reader straight into the action, opening with someone being interrogated via a hammer to the face. His heroine, Rumer, believes she’s cursed. Everyone she’s ever loved met a sudden death, all because her late mother, once London’s most feared assassin, passed her sins onto her daughter at birth. When a mobster abducts Rumer while looking for the location of a mythical weapon, her mother’s misdeeds return to haunt her. The pace never dips below frantic as Rumer charges from one bruising encounter to the next. Winning’s writing is energetic and his prose snappy – “A thousand questions cram into my mouth and I can’t chew them into any order,” is…

Neil Gaiman and Fringe vet Akiva Goldsman to produce new TV adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. BBC’s new Victorian-set adaptation of HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds starts shooting. FX orders pilot for Brian K Vaughan’s post-apocalyptic graphic novel Y: The Last Man. American Gods’ Michael Green on board as co-showrunner. The CW orders new seasons of Arrow (season seven), The Flash (five), Supergirl (four), Legends Of Tomorrow (four), Black Lightning (two) and Supernatural (a remarkable 14). Inhumans’ Anson Mount to play Captain Pike in Star Trek: Discovery. Kathy Bates to return for American Horror Story’s eighth season. Creator Ryan Murphy says he’s also “throwing in” Joan Collins. Jay Ali joins the Daredevil cast as FBI agent Rahul “Ray” Nadeem. “DON’T QUOTE ME” “I DECIDED TO GIVE MYSELF 40 ADDITIONAL CHALLENGES, LIKE…

What exactly is a “biggerer”? A “biggerer” is a being that’s very big (bigger than bigger) and a “littler” is something that’s much smaller than very big! The term littler refers to mini-humans who are kept by their normal, adult-human biggerers as pets. What sparked the idea? The Biggerers is about how the capacity to communicate vocally (or not) can create an imbalance of power and lead to oppression. My cat triggered the idea. The fact that I was physically bigger meant that I could pick him up or put him outside as I pleased. I wondered if that would change if he could simply ask me not to. I then thought about a world in which humans had that role of “pet”: small, naked and mute. How long did…

Respected theatre actor Ian McDiarmid claimed his place in sci-fi’s hall of fame back in 1983 when he was cast as Emperor Palpatine in Return Of The Jedi. It was a role he reprised throughout the prequel trilogy and, thanks to George Lucas’s ongoing tinkering, the 2004 DVD of The Empire Strikes Back. Recently he continued to embrace the dark side in Star Wars Rebels and you can currently see him as King Pellenor in Sky Atlantic’s Britannia. Would you like to play the role again? Yes… if it ever came my way. Of course I wouldn’t want anyone else to do it. He’s dead, of course, as far as the big movies are concerned. But there are so many other movies going along at the same time so I…

Regular SFX contributor Joshua Winning went down a slightly unconventional route when he wanted to publish new novel, Vicious Rumer – once the book was picked up by publisher Unbound, he then had to crowdfund to get it out into the world. “Vicious Rumer is a bit of an odd duck,” Winning tells Red Alert. “It’s a genre-bending thriller about curses and gangsters that scared off most of the agents I approached!” In a shift from more traditional publishers, Unbound’s model sees production costs like editing, design and marketing covered by readers pre-ordering the book – “The onus really is on the author to sell, sell, sell until the book gets funded,” explains Winning. As for Winning’s secret for drumming up enough cash for his book to see print? “Aside…

DATE 5-6 May LOCATION Portsmouth Guildhall It’s hard to believe that Portsmouth has never had its own Comic Con, but all that is changing this year, as the town launches its first ever festival of comics. “The north of England is well-served by the likes of Thought Bubble and The Lakes,” says organiser Joel Meadows, “but the south lacks a definitive comics and genre show that is immersive, international and professional to the level of the other shows mentioned.” Portsmouth Comic Con promises to deliver that, and more. As well as a Superman exhibit, there’ll be cosplay competitions, workshops and displays, plus a frankly rammed guest list. Comic artists and writers including Walter and Louise Simonson, Frank Quitely and Russell Walks will be in attendance, alongside a VR experience that’s…

Fox pushes back release of next X-Men movies until 2019: we’ll see Dark Phoenix in February, with New Mutants due in August. Guillermo del Toro signs new development deal with The Shape Of Water studio Fox Searchlight, including new horror, sci-fi and fantasy label. Sci-fi and fantasy shows pick up nominations at the Bafta TV Awards… Black Mirror episode “Hang The DJ” is up for Best Single Drama, while star Joe Cole is up for Best Actor and “USS Callister”s Jimmi Simpson is up for Best Supporting Actor. Elsewhere, The Handmaid’s Tale is nominated for Best International Drama, ITV2’s Timewasters for Best Scripted Comedy, and the Thirteenth Doctor’s reveal is up for Must-See Moment. Black Panther overtakes Avengers Assemble to become biggest ever superhero movie in US. Michelle Ryan to reprise Lady Christina role in Big…

Natalie Portman playing an astronaut in Pale Blue Dot… Alfie Allen joining Milla Jovovich in Paradise Hills… Thor screenwriter Ashley Edward Miller bringing Red Sonja back to the screen… Matt Damon reportedly passing on playing the villain in next Spidey movie… Ready Player One’s Zak Penn writing ROM for Paramount… Colin Trevorrow directing Jurassic World 3… James Wan teaming with IT producer Roy Lee for an adap of Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers… Annabelle Wallis starring in time loop tale Boss Level… Kevin Bacon starring in David Koepp’s supernatural thriller You Should Have Left for Blumhouse Productions… Clark Gregg reprising Agent Coulson in Captain Marvel, alongside Lee Pace as Ronan The Accuser… Spice Girls rumoured to be voicing an animated superhero movie based on themselves… John Cho joining the reboot of The Grudge for Sony… Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker reportedly writing Spider-Man spin-off Nightwatch… Michael Bay helming Robopocalypse……

TAKE A LOOK AT US NOW Happy 300th to SFX, the primary voice in sci-fi fantasy and horror since 1995. I must say, though, 1995 was hardly a prime year for fright flicks. Check out issue one and you’ll find slim pickings including a set report on Brit horror Proteus and reviews of terrible Stephen King adap The Mangler. Compare that to where we are now, where a fantasy monster movie just won Best Picture and a debut horror comedy took Best Screenplay at the Oscars, and it looks like we’re in a new golden age. Since 1995 we’ve lived through Scream and the self-conscious meta-era; Ringu and the J-horror boom; Saw, Hostel and the torture porn era; Switchblade Romance, Martyrs and the New French Extremity; the found-footage boom; the…

So who’s Paul? He was an undercover cop for the London Met. He got his cover blown and he thought he was going to spend the rest of his days in an admin job, but Nathan offered him a job as one of the Star Cops and he’s not too sure whether he’s delighted. I am, though! What defines him? Basically he’s lived undercover for a year, with a gang. He’s lived and breathed the life. He’s kind of a macho hard man. He’s still got a lot to learn. He’s a great character to play and I’m loving it so far. He’s got a bit of scope where he can go off the rails a little bit. Did you go back and revisit the old show? I’ve actually ordered…

is Laura Hawkins What drives Laura to work on the Dryden Commission, campaigning for Synth rights? I do think there are just different types of people, and some people are preoccupied with the rights of others – I’m not suggesting she’s heroic, just that she’s driven to do the right thing. I think she also is privy to information that other people aren’t privy to and she can see the bigger picture, which is that if they don’t do something it’s going to be all-out war. Mattie changed the world by making the Synths conscious. How’s Laura dealt with that? It’s actually a bit mindblowing, but if you were going to be really philosophical about it, every single person changes the course of events with every single action they ever…

With its striking picture of Superman hefting an automobile above his head in a show of breathtaking strength, the cover of Action Comics #1 has become one of the most memorable comic book images of all time. “It’s just great composition,” says Paul Levitz. “It’s very easy in the 21st century to forget that cars weren’t omnipresent in 1938. A car was a big heavy thing, and relatively speaking it was a new technology in most people’s lives. Maybe a circus strongman could pull a car but at that point, you hadn’t yet seen characters that were strong enough to actually lift one. We’re now used to special effects in movies, and characters blowing up entire buildings or cities. But by the standards of the time, it was a very…

This must have been fun to write… Yes, though what I think would be really fun is doing a new story, because about five pages in I thought, “I’ve written all this before!” So to keep myself interested, every piece of dialogue has something new. And with a lot of stuff I didn’t look at the original, and riffed on how I remembered it happening. You’ve made lots of additions. Were they all new ideas? The only proper remnant of the first draft was having a second copy of Mickey in the Nestene lair. There’s a moment in the story as transmitted where the Autons grab the Doctor and take his anti-plastic, which is a bit simple. In the original script they don’t know about it: a fake Mickey gets…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12 | 140 minutes Director Steven Spielberg Cast Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, Lena Waithe Plenty of directors can do drama, but there aren’t many who can get you on the edge of your seat with ripples in a glass of water. So for all the critical acclaim that has accompanied Steven Spielberg’s more “serious” movies, it sometimes feels like a waste of cinema’s greatest entertainer when he steps away from the blockbuster arena. The Beard’s latest, Ready Player One, is unlikely to trouble Oscar conversations next year, but it does see Spielberg truly back in popcorn territory – and it’s his most unashamed crowd-pleaser since Jurassic Park. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Considering this had the potential…

RELEASED 18 MAY 15 | 103 minutes Director John Cameron Mitchell Cast Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp, Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson Based on a Neil Gaiman story, this coming-of-age sci-fi is a return to the anarchic spirit of Hedwig And The Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell’s early work. Alex Sharp plays Enn (short for Henry). He and two punk pals run a fanzine, trash talk the Jubilee (the film’s set in 1977) and denounce The Clash for selling out. Following a gig hosted by punk queen Boadicea (Nicole Kidman), the trio stumble across a decrepit house and discover a whole world of weirdness. In each room a different set of humanoids are dancing in ways that only make sense if it’s your first day on Earth – which it is…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 97 minutes Director Michael Sucsy Cast Angourie Rice, Justice Smith, Owen Teague, Maria Bello What’s it like to be a spirit who inhabits the body of someone else each day, swapping out every 24 hours? Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett has a good idea, but in Every Day, it’s A, a wandering personality, who alights in the frame of Justin (Justice Smith), boyfriend to Rhiannon (Angourie Rice) and falls for her. After some confusion and needed exposition (which is delivered without the plot grinding to a halt), she returns the feelings, and the stage is set for a complicated romance. Adapting David Levithan’s 2012 YA book, writer Jesse Andrews and director Michael Sucsy wrestle with a concept that prompts more questions than the film has answers…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2017 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/3D/standard)/DVD/download Director Rian Johnson Cast Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, Laura Dern, Kelly Marie Tran Divisive isn’t a strong enough word for Rian Johnson’s first turn in the director’s chair for a Star Wars film, judging by audience and fan reactions in particular. But while some have called for his head, it remains an excellent example of a creative filmmaker coming in and breathing fresh life into an old story. Johnson announces his intentions early on, with Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker tossing aside the lightsaber proffered by Daisy Ridley’s Rey and grumpily sticking to his belief that the Jedi should be allowed to fade into history – at least, until he realises that acting as a symbol…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2017 | 15 | DVD Teenage angst never looked more terrifying in this slight but effective modern folk tale starring Nicole Muñoz as a goth girl who summons a demon to kill her mum in a fit of pique. The Walking Dead’s Laurie Holden plays the single parent who forces her daughter to move away from her friends and faces the ultimate tantrum. More insightful than it initially sounds, scarier than it looks, at just 84 minutes long it’s a tense, taut gem with an unexpected killer finale. Extras Interviews; Making Of.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1991 | 15 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT Ever wondered what a John Waters zombie film would be like? This cultish horror may be as close as we’ll ever get to finding out. It sees a bunch of characters trapped in a run-down coroner’s after three zombie children revive. The giggling kids are impressively creepy. Veteran comedian Phyllis Diller is a hoot as wild-haired battleaxe Mrs Poopinplatz. And who can dislike a movie that climaxes with a gorilla-sized mutant poodle? Barking mad. Extras Commentary; three interviews; trailer.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Sam Liu Cast Christian Slater, Tara Strong, Vanessa Williams, Liam McIntyre DC’s expendable, morally bankrupt troubleshooters reconvene for an animated mission and, as shady backroom supremo Amanda Waller declares, “This one’s off the grid.” Aren’t they all, ma’am? Like 2016’s live-action movie, the plot throws the team into a supernatural milieu. This time they’re chasing down a Get Out Of Hell Free card, an occult artefact with the power to save a soul from damnation. Who wants it? Waller herself, naturally. It feels like a counter-intuitive choice for characters who function best amongst the murk and grit of the black ops world. The animation’s thinly detailed while the script – by longtime DC toon scribe Alan Burnett – makes no concessions…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2015 | 15 | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) Director Sion Sono Cast Megumi Kagurazaka, Kenji Endo, Yûto Ikeda, Kôko Mori Sion Sono’s low key sci-fi is a minimalist masterpiece. In the future, following a string of disasters, humanity is an endangered species. Robots with AI now represent 80% of the population. Rather than the relationship between the species being antagonistic, however, they co-exist in quiet harmony. Yoko Suzuki (Megumi Kagurazaka) is an android postwoman making deliveries for the Space Parcel Service. There’s no conflict here, barely any drama at all, unless you find a man getting a can stuck to his shoe especially stressful. But despite its potential for tedium, The Whispering Star is captivating. Sono captures the endless repetition of life alone in space by…

SANTA CLARITA DIET SEASON TWO (out now, Netflix) proves that the zombie comedy series is no one-trick pony, delivering even more laughs, awkward moments and gross going-ons. The Hammonds are still trying to balance keeping zombie Sheila (Drew Barrymore) in brains and being good neighbours, and while they don’t always get it right, their unconventional family life is hilarious and heartwarming. After Annihilation, another Natalie Portman genre film skips UK cinemas, as THE SUMMONING (7 May, DVD) – previously known as Planetarium – lands on shiny disc. Portman and Lily-Rose Depp play a pair of American spiritualist sisters in Paris who get involved with a guy who wants to catch a spook on film. The movie looks stunning, but in storytelling terms it’s a bit of a mess. Four stories…

RELEASED 3 May 468 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Sally Green Publisher Penguin Books Rather than focus on one character, The Smoke Thieves weaves the stories of five characters together. Covering the experiences of a princess, a fugitive knight, a servant betraying his king, a petty criminal and a demon hunter in three different countries means that Sally Green conveys the politics of her fantasy world without lengthy exposition, and has no need to show the more mundane aspects of life, as the story can jump between critical events. George RR Martin is, of course, the master of this sort of narrative structure, but all his characters are capable of surprising the reader, and events can be genuinely shocking. In The Smoke Thieves none of the characters feel particularly complex or…

SLAYER STATS RELEASED OUT NOW! 126 pages | Hardback Authors Simon Guerrier, Steve O’Brien Publisher Insight Editions Self-explanatory subtitle: The Complete Infographic Guide To All Things Buffy. (Though it just covers the TV series.) The same square-eyed researchers previously brought us the Doctor Who-themed Whographica. New artist Ilaria Vescovo’s designs aren’t quite as attractive as Ben Morris’s work in that. Includes all the number-crunching you’d expect, like on-screen dustings (161). There are some witty choices, like a spread showing all the times that Giles was knocked unconscious (18!), and another charting all the damage to Buffy’s house! Other highlights include a mind-fryingly complex “relationship map” for the major characters. Some of the facts conveyed don’t really seem like a natural fit for infographics, though, like seven pictorial depictions of “big…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Sam J Miller Publisher Orbit Science fiction literature is full of novels in which the true star is the setting. Such is the case with Sam J Miller’s debut novel, Blackfish City. But that’s mainly because the floating Arctic metropolis of Qaanaag has little competition from its sketchy bunch of characters. In this post-climate wars ecopalypse, Qaanaag is a chilly melting pot of the displaced. It’s governed by numerous conflicting software systems designed to eliminate human error and corruption, but which have, in fact, led to crime syndicates taking advantage of the grey areas. A new sexually transmitted disease that infects people with unwanted memories is spreading through the lower classes, and a member of a legendary race whose nanite tech enables…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 254 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Rachel Armstrong Publisher NewCon Press Feel like the average science fiction story is a bit too comprehensible? Tired of the bourgeois trappings of conventional novel-writing, like characterisation and plot? Believe that, fundamentally, any book could be improved with four pages on the digestive systems of hair-eating transgenic goats? If you answered “Yes!” to all these questions – but particularly the last one – then Origamy just might be for you. As may already be apparent, it’s not a book you can easily synopsise. Mobius is a being who travels the galaxy, weaving spacetime with chopsticks and generally encountering strange things. Occasionally her parents – who rejoice in the science fictionally foundational names of Shelley and Newton – turn up to deliver gnomic…

RELEASED 8 May 617 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Roger Levy Publisher Titan Books Two boys grow up together on the fanatically religious planet Gehenna: Alef is an autistic maths genius, capable of solving any problem by breaking it down into numbers, while Pellonhorc is the psychopathic son of one of the galaxy’s foremost gangsters, desperate to earn his father’s respect. Meanwhile, Bale is a policeman on the industrial planet Bleak, where his investigation of an apparently random killing spree attracts the attentions of Razer, a journalist who specialises in true-life stories. If this sounds like two separate, unconnected worlds, that’s only one of the problems plaguing the novel. Roger Levy spends so long setting up his backstories and building his universe that he leaves it far too late to start…