Use an army of tiny soldiers to take down the undead in Army Corps of Hell on PlayStation Vita.
Images: Square Enix

CHIBA, Japan — Did you enjoy Nintendo’s action-strategy game Pikmin but wish that it had more blood, guts and heavy metal music? Then Army Corps of Hell may well be your game.

Square Enix will launch this game when the PlayStation Vita arrives in Japan on December 17. As soon as new owners of Sony’s new portable game machine start this launch game up, they’ll be reminded of Pikmin. Both games put you in the role of a leader of a small army of tiny critters that you fling around at enemies and food items, watching them attack and eat while protecting them from harm. Where Army Corps of Hell breaks from its inspiration is that the game takes place in the underworld, with gore-splattering fights against all kinds of grotesque creatures.

Of course, there are some tweaks to the gameplay that make it more than just a clone. As you’re flinging your tiny followers onto an enemy, a counter will start to go up. Once it fills (usually when you’ve got a round 10 or 20 of the little buggers chomping away), it’ll light up and you can press the attack button with good timing to make them jump off the enemy and raise their swords up in unison, then stab them back down. It’s pretty easy to get the timing down and do extra damage.

Otherwise, the gameplay demo at Tokyo Game Show was pretty simple — use the Vita’s two analog sticks to walk and control the camera, strafing around your enemies and making sure to avoid their attacks while chipping away at their energy. After an enemy dies off, you can set your crew of soldiers to eating their corpse to get bonus items and extra health. If you need to raise your health up, you can use a potion to play a mini-game in which you “drum” on the Vita’s rear touch pad to boost your spirits with percussion.

If your soldiers are hit, they’ll fall down and a white skull will appear over them. If you can walk over them before the skull turns black and fades away, you’ll revive them. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until you come across a cage, in which you can trade in the red gems you’ve picked up for more followers.

The end of the level featured a fight against a large boss creature, which was somewhat more complex; I had to attack his legs to make him drop to his knees so we could get stabbing access to his head.

Square Enix has not unveiled any U.S. launch plans for Army Corps of Hell as of yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it arrive here very close to Vita’s launch.

‘The Bennie Railplane was a form of rail transport invented by George Bennie (1891–1957), which moved along an overhead rail by way of propellers. It was intended to run above conventional railways, separating faster passenger traffic from slower freight traffic. A prototype ran over a 130-yard (120 m) line at Milngavie near Glasgow in the 1930s, but Bennie was never able to secure funding for further development and went bankrupt in 1937. The line was demolished for scrap in the 1950s.’

- Wikipedia

…

Thank you to Dewi Williams

All images by William Vandivert

…

Thank you to LIFE Archive

‘Lillian Bassman is an American painter and photographer. From the 1940s until the 1960s, Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper’s Bazaar’

- Wikipedia

Many thanks once again to everyone who donated – We hope you enjoy the books!

- Daily Mail

…

Thank you to the Daily Mail

This week's Mind Meld question was suggested by James K. Thanks, James!

We asked our panelists this question:

Here's what they said...

I'd have to say Neil Gaiman and Rod Serling.

Neil Gaiman because he brings a texture and richness without it ever seeming forced or contrived, and his characters are quirky without becoming caricatures. (Perhaps like an acrobat he only makes it look easy and there's a huge amount of time and conscious technique behind the façade, but damn, he does it well.) And the late Rod Serling because he was such a prolific writer and so able to look at the most mundane situations and see the fantastic.

I imagine Michael Swanwick sitting at his type writer cackling like a mad scientist when he writes. And it is a type writer in my imagination, his furious fingers banging out the letters on clacking keys. He makes writing appear so effortless that I almost forget that which I know better, which is that achieving his level of mastery requires years of hard work. Or not. Maybe these compelling visions leap from his brain unbidden. He showed me his dream diary once (yes, he had such a thing) and it was like staring into a font of creation, a churning anti-abyss.

Robert Silverberg has always had a clean, precise, and engaging style that communicates what he wants in exactly the right amount of words, never more never less. It's hard to articulate, but his prose flows past my eyes at precisely the speed I read. Every Silverberg offering is a joy to read.

John Scalzi might be a contemporary, science fictional Mark Twain in the way his books make you feel you are sitting around with friends in a circle, possibly at a camp fire, possible in a comfortable drawing room. Do people still have drawing rooms? They aren't for drawing are they? They must be for listening to Scalzi's tall tales.

James Enge writes like I imagine Doctor Who would sound if it had only ever been a book series and never a TV show. He has nailed that wonderful quality of being able to lace humor and horror, pathos and bathos, the absurd and the sublime, the mundane and the weird. He can make you laugh, make you cry, make you retch, and make you laugh again in the span of a page, a paragraph. I love swimming in his sea of words.

I'd say that being a 'natural storyteller', that is making the audience feel that they've hardly glimpsed the architecture of a story, but instead have had what feels like a natural experience, is very, very hard work. The hard work goes into hiding the hard work.

The absolute master of this is probably Kurt Vonnegut: not a word out of place; a tone of voice that's like someone speaking gently into your ear. To write so few words takes enormous effort. This craft is a nation the borders on the more modern state of the bestseller, the country of airport novels, of authors who are keen that the reader shouldn't have to work too hard on prose. Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein were the masters of that in their day, and two recent books that achieve that seek to bring that 'natural storyteller' feel into the modern era are Heaven's Shadow by Michael Cassutt and David Goyer (a very exciting attempt to do a J.J. Abrams style modernisation on the style of Arthur C. Clarke) and This is not a Game by Walter Jon Williams. The condition of being a 'natural storyteller' is, I think, what most writers seek. It's often a career-long search, and not many find it.

My first reaction to this question is that I have no clear idea what a "natural story teller" is, although I admit it calls up pleasant images of a grizzled old coot in trapper furs regaling a campfire circle with blatant lies. I suspect the term has gained so much currency from blurbs and promotional materials and even the occasional review that it sounds as though it has some sort of consensus definition, but I doubt that's the case. It's probably simply shorthand for writers whose work we find congenial, fluid, fairly easy to apprehend, and compelling at the fundamental what-happens-next level of story.

If that's what it is (and at least that's what I'm working from here), I'll start by claiming that a fluid, "natural" storyteller is not always necessarily a good writer, and a good writer is not necessarily a natural storyteller. Danielle Steel or Dan Brown can keep you turning pages, but the ease with which those books flow through your system like colonoscopy preparations doesn't necessarily make them worth revisiting later. Ulysses or Anathem or Dhalgren may be heavier lifting, but can repay the effort several times over.

Skilled, effortless storytelling in this sense may be a talent, but it isn't necessarily a virtue, and it's as subject to misuse as any other talent. By way of examples (and to name names, which is really what the question asked), let me offer two contrasting examples of SF writers whose work I've heard praised for its natural storytelling sense: Orson Scott Card and Connie Willis. There's not a lot in common between them other than their ability to spin compelling tales with ingratiating characters.

Card is certainly a skilled storyteller in this most obvious sense of the term, yet his talent and his stories are increasingly put to use in the service of viewpoints that I once viewed as distasteful, and are fast moving toward repugnant. Willis, whose sane, humanistic views I find much more amenable, doesn't make much of an effort to openly flog those views in her stories, and the result, at least over the last several years, has been better stories.

Or, to complicate matters further, let's consider Tim Powers. Reading a Powers novel is pretty generally a delight--this guy seems like a natural storyteller, right? -- but once you realize how much intricate, agonizing work he may put into a novel over a period of years, you have to wonder how "natural" it all is.

The point is, we the readers are in the position of trying to identify a "natural storyteller" on the basis of end products that may in fact be the results of painstaking and painful drafts, revisions, rewrites, and restarts, sometimes with the assistance of wise agents or editors or writing group colleagues. There may indeed be "natural storytellers" in the SF field, and I'm sure there are, but as readers we don't really have much of a clue as to who they are and how they work. All we get is the story.

When people use the term "natural storyteller" what they really mean is that the author in question is not a very good writer and they can't explain his or her success and/or appeal. It's a sop, mealy-mouthed praise aimed at someone who doesn't deserve it but manages to shift units at an enviable rate. Science fiction has -- and has had -- more than its fair share of such writers. Their prose is bland and clumsy, their characters are paper-thin stereotypes, and their world-building consists of little more than the world in which they live plus a handful of inelegantly-coined neologisms. And yet their stories sell, their novels get published, people read their books. Some of them even appear on lists of "classic" or "best" sf novels.

Writing is about telling stories -- yes, even non-fiction or journalism. A writer who cannot tell a story is, by definition, not a writer. But good writing is so much more than just that. It is: prose which evokes mood or place, or both; characters which feel like real, living people; a world -- or an entire universe -- broad and deep enough to hold far more than just the story and everyone who appears in it. It is not just the right words in the right order, it is also the imagery those words. Good prose should impress the reader.

When we as genre fans venerate those "natural storytellers", those bad writers, when we insist that the qualities they display are what we consider to be important in writing, when we claim that, as a result, the genre should not, and cannot, be judged by the same rules as other modes of fiction... then we're only making ourselves look very foolish. We're telling people that not only do we know science fiction is a genre characterised by bad writing, but we're so stupid and contrary we actually think bad writing should be admired.

So, please, let's have no no "natural storytellers" in science fiction. Let's have good writers and bad writers, good books and bad books. And let's not base those opinions on our childhood memories of said books, let's be adult about them. After all, it's long past time science fiction grew up.

The award honors outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.

[via Science Fiction Awards Watch]

• Lightspeed (Jeff Lester) interviews Lois McMaster Bujold.
• Lightspeed (Robyn Lupo) interviews D. Thomas Minton.
• The Functional Nerds interviews Lev Grossman (podcast).
• Fantasy Author's Handbook interviews Alan Dean Foster.
• Innsmouth Free Press interviews E. Catherine Tobler.
• Suvudu Q&A with Terry Brooks (video).
• Jim C.Hines interviews Marie Brennan.
• Emily C.A. Snyder interviews Vera Nazarian.
• TrekWeb interviews Brannon Braga.

• 2011 WSFA Small Press Award Finalists.
• Clarkesworld Looking for Slush Readers.
• Tu Books Call for Submissions.
• Phoenix Picks' new Stellar Guard book series (which pairs a novel with a related story by a different author) kicks of with Kevin J. Anderson's Tau Ceti which is paired with a a sequel novelette by Steven Savile.
• On sale Wednesday, September 21st: SFX #214.
• One in Six Americans Now Use e-Reader with One in Six Likely to Purchase in Next Six Months.
• Study: E-Readers Make People Buy More Books.

• Chuck Wendig on 25 Virtues Writers Should Possess.
• Nicole Kornher Stance on Another languagepost, this one a bit different.
• Kate Eliott on Authenticity and Authority.
• Jamie Todd Rubin on The romance of science fiction serials.
• T.N. Tobias on Long Novels: Captivating or Captivity?
• Mark Charan Newton on Author Productivity.
• Jo Walton on Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Haunted House" Books.
• Salon.com asks Has Neal Stephenson become too accessible?
• Paul Di Filippo reviews Reamde by Neal Stephenson.
• Lev Grossman reviews Reamde by Neal Stephenson.
• Cory Doctorow reviews Scott Westerfeld's Goliath.
• Josh Evans on The Alternative To Science Fiction Novels: Short Fiction.
• Slate Magazine (Ken Jennings) on A history of map monsters.
• Gilt Taste on Food and Fantasy in Game of Thrones.
• Win Scott Eckert on Contents announced (revised) for Tales of the Shadowmen 8: Agents Provocateurs.
• Marvel.com on John Carter: World of Mars.
• Nick Mamatas lists Top Ten Japan All Time Best SF Novels. [via The World SF Blog]
• Newsarama lists 10 Great Comic Book Moments From the 1990s.
• Flavorwire on 20 Amazing Reimagined Book Covers.

• 25 Cool Cyberpunk Concept Artworks.
• Wolverine: Comic Book Inspired Artwork.
• Stylized Illustrations by J.S. Rossbach.
• Creative Artwork,Beautiful And Creative Art Pictures For Art Lovers.
• @Distracted By Star Wars: "Steampunk Echo Station" by Chris Kawagiwa.

• The Milky Way from the top of the world.
• Doctor Who T-Shirt: The Ood Couple.
• AT-AT Pancakes.

A fabulous film score composer, whose work has helped me through countless hours of writing. One of my favourite pieces from Waltz With Bashir can be heard 2 minutes into the clip. You can hear more of his music here.

Keyword-matched posts:

1. Modern Composers
2. Guillemots—Made-up love song #43
3. Waltz With Bashir

ALIEN LIGHT | "Full Moon Aurora" by Francis Anderson with Saville Entertainment, via Flickr.

An idea dreamed up between two of the country’s best known crime writers over a bottle of Prosecco moved a step closer to reality yesterday with the announcement of Scotland’s first international crime writing festival.

The Bloody Scotland festival, to be held in Stirling next September, will feature authors in the genre from overseas along with some of Scotland’s finest crime writers.

At the event’s launch in Stirling’s Smith Art Gallery and Museum yesterday, Lin Anderson and Alex Gray, the writers behind the idea, outlined their plans to build a crime writing festival to match, if not surpass, anything south of the Border--where they already exist at Bristol, Reading and (the biggest of them all) Harrogate.

Plans are already afoot to bring top-flight international guests to join Scottish crime writers Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Val McDermid, Stuart McBride, and Louise Welsh on a programme that will be announced in the spring.

Next year is also auspiciously full of anniversaries that could be linked to events at the inaugural Bloody Scotland festival, which will take place from 14-16 September. It is 125 years since the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes’ story, 35 years since William McIlvanney’s hugely influential novel Laidlaw--and 25 years since the first publication of Ian Rankin’s own Rebus novels.