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Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
2018 | Action, Sci-Fi
Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat.



After having rewatched the first offering from this franchise I was fully up to date with my rip off Transformers. For those of you who don’t remember the first one, they’re man operated robots that think they’re a combination of your favourite superheroes with almost power poses, and almost hero landings.

You don’t have to worry about not having seen the first one. It's very accommodating to show you what you missed... World was bad. World had a war. World won! There are bits that would benefit from the original knowledge, but you can glean what happened from what's going on.

There's certainly entertaining action, and a few moments where they seem to have a little laugh at themselves. It will pass the time relatively easily... as long as you ignore the very out of place montage in the middle.

I'm glad they brought new elements in and it didn't end up just being a resurgence of the Kaiju and "oh no, let's get the band back together".
  
When the Tripods Came (The Tripods #4)
When the Tripods Came (The Tripods #4)
John Christopher | 1988 | Dystopia, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult (YA)
7
8.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Fourth books in trilogies are inherently inelegant and awkward beasts; Christopher's final Tripods novel is unsurprisingly no exception. 1980s Earth is visited by alien invaders, who (initially at least) are easily repelled. But it turns out that your mum was right when she said that too much TV was bad for your health...

A bit dated, but that's the least of the book's issues. A prequel to the main series was really not required, and the main catalyst for writing it seems to have been the Tripods TV show which was broadcast three or four years earlier. (The TV show the Masters use to take over the world bears a suspicious resemblance to the TV adaptation of the first two books.) It's not really meta, more sort of peeved: peeved at critics of the show's shortcomings, but also peeved at the makers of the show for not doing a better job. As well as being dated, the relationship subplots of the book feel a bit proforma, but the depiction of the world slowly sliding out of human control and the end of modern civilisation is vividly presented in the usual compelling fashion. Whether it should all feel a bit more downbeat and bleak is probably a question of personal taste; Christopher's prose retains its good manners as well as its readability.
  
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    Bicycling

    Bicycling

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    Bicycling is the world’s leading cycling magazine, covering all corners of the cycling world....

Station Eleven
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel | 2015 | Fiction & Poetry, Science Fiction/Fantasy
10
7.9 (29 Ratings)
Book Rating
There's a good reason this book has been appearing on so many of this year's best lists. It tells the tale of our world in the not too distant future, after a major flu outbreak has all but wiped out humanity, something which is all too possible and portrayed here with frightening realism. A few survivors are followed throughout the story, as they struggle to survive, both before and after the catastrophe. The prose is beautiful and the characters wonderful, the plot may seem to meander at times, but it all comes together in the end, to show how the actions of one can have an effect on so many, and even the most seemingly inconsequential events can have such great meaning over the course of time. A literary masterpiece, and easily one of the year's best books.