Nice review today of my Abyss & Apex story, Next in Tangent Online:

The suspense is maintained from start to finish, and true sympathy is generated for the tormented protagonist. A masterful tale and the pick of this issue.

Thanks to Jason Fischer for the review.

I was nervous as to whether anyone would get this story, as it's quite different from the other stuff I've had published. I'm glad at least one person did!

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I was struck back down by the evil virus again on Friday and only managed to stagger back to work yesterday. I get very fed up being sick, so as soon as I feel slightly better, I tend to jump right up and plunge straight back into things, and then make myself sick again. I can't stand to be lying around, though.

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We went to see Kingdom of Heaven. We were both feeling a bit tentative about going as all the reviews we'd seen had been negative, but in the end we thought it was a great movie, not at all like the reviews. Great photography, good acting, good story, really good battle scenes, believable characters, and, amazingly in the current climate, very balanced in its portrayal of the crusaders and Saracens.

I think a couple of factors contributed to the bad reviews. Firstly, if you're invested in seeing either the Muslims or the Christians as bad guys, you're not going to be satisfied by this movie. As I said earlier, the film goes to great lengths to treat both sides fairly. On both sides there are fanatics hoping for war. On both sides there are those struggling to keep the peace. The movie is certainly not "Osama bin Laden's version of history" as one Cambridge academic put it. Nor does it fit the image of Muslims as being uncultured savages. And the society that it portrays as existing in Jerusalem at the beginning of the movie is a wonderful model for peace between religions in the Middle East.

Secondly, it seems to me that sometimes movie reviewers get it into their heads that they are going to try to destroy a movie. They seem to think that a certain actor or director is getting too big for their boots and needs to be brought down a peg or two. I'm not sure whether the reviewers had it in for Orlando Bloom or Ridley Scott, but I wouldn't be surprised if both have been seen as too successful and due for a bit of a kicking. Hopefully, this will fail, because this is a really good movie, and you should see it.

The movie isn't historically accurate, of course. It portrays real events with mainly real characters, but the characters have been assigned dramatic rather than historic roles, and events have been shifted and reimagined for the sake of drama. For myself, I don't have a problem with this. It's a movie, not a history documentary. A historically accurate movie would have been, well, dull.

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I finished up Stephen King's Dark Tower series while I was ill. The books really are great, certainly among the best things King has written, if not the best. I shouldn't have finished the last book just before bed, though. The ending is hard and harsh for Roland. It disturbed me more than I thought it could, and I didn't sleep easily. That made me respect King all the more. He puts Roland through so much in the series, and when you are forced to reflect on that at the end, you realise how great King is at constructing stories. I recommend this series if you haven't read it already.