Killed in a smiling accident.

Last night I headed for the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith with PJ and the only other 548 people in the world who’d ever heard of This Morning With Richard Not Judy. Or 547, one person did shout out when Richard Herring asked if there was anyone who’d never seen the programme. Maybe 546, someone we overheard on the stairs during the interval didn’t seem very sure who Stewart Lee was, though it could’ve been the same person who shouted earlier. Anyway. It was a late 90s comedy series, and several of the participants were back together at one of Richard Herring’s comedy nights at the Lyric.

The evening started with Trevor Lock, he of Trevor and Natalie, they of being easy on the eye, who never spoke on the programme but fortunately didn’t reprise that role, instead delivering an odd set, a bit like a downbeat early-era Harry Hill, barely pausing, chucking weird images out and rapidly morphing them in even weirder directions. Few jokes as such, but a constant stream of quite-funny-ness.

Stewart Lee was up next, a total contrast in style, masterful, calculated pacing, timing and delivery even with a creeping flesh disease. An absolute great.

After the interval, host Richard Herring took the t-shirt slogan “Give Me Head ‘Til I’m Dead” to it’s logical conclusion, then a long way past, in luridly Herring-esque detail, before demonstrating his superpower (as he pointed out, easily enough to earn him a place in the third series of Heroes) of having small hands, and outlining how he’d use such a power for good. They are small hands too, you have to wonder if it hampers his Guitar Hero playing.

Speaking of guitars, following Herring was TV’s Emma Kennedy with her band, performing funked-up kids TV themes with dance accompaniment from a red-lycra clad gimp/ninja, concluding with a contractually obliged spot-on rendition of the TMWRNJ theme tune leading into what much of the audience had been waiting for, a brief Lee and Herring reunion.

Maybe it was driven by a wave of misplaced nostalgia, but even after seeing the original routines, and the Tedstock versions on YouTube, the two of them are brilliant together, and just as things seemed to have reached a moon on a stick-based peak, Paul Putner’s Curious Orange emerged, resplendent in full Davros regalia, for a truly magnificent finish.

The only minor disappointment was the lack of The Actor Kevin Eldon, he of Simon Quinlank, Rod Hull and Pause for Thought for the Day, and it would’ve been lovely to see everyone on stage together, maybe doing Sunday Heroes (ahhh!), but that’s being terribly churlish, it was always made clear everyone would be doing their own material. A fantastic night, roll on the next ten years, apart from the inevitable and massively depressing ageing it brings…

(Addendum: Richard Herring’s write-up is, weirdly, much better, almost like it was written by someone who was actually involved.)

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has been going for 25 years, as a little sticker proclaims on the front of the latest paperback Making Money, which is an impressive run. Though I no longer rush to buy the books as soon as they’re released it’s rare that they disappoint, and Making Money is no exception. It’s not Pratchett’s best, but like a comfy old pair of slippers the setting is immediately familiar, there are no wild surprises as Moist von Lipwig, central character of Going Postal, is put in charge of the Bank of Ankh Morpork and the Mint, hijinks ensue, and everything concludes most satisfactorily. The appearance of the mint hinted for a moment at Isaac Newton’s role at the mint in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but didn’t really develop in that direction.

Making Money continues the evolution of Discworld as concepts from our universe emerge, in this case paper money, and also includes an analogue of an analogue computer (as it were). Previously we’ve seen computers come to Discworld in the form of Hex, somewhat reminiscent of the other book I’ve just finished, A Computer Called LEO.

I’ve been fascinated by early computers, originally from military history and their role in cryptography, then more generally at university in the history of computing. Among pioneering machines LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) is often overlooked, possibly because it was the first business computer, working on payroll and stocking rather than “sexier” projects, but Georgina Ferry’s book redresses this, covering the history of Lyons, a somewhat unlikely hot-bed of business computing, the development of LEO, and, as with many post-war British industries, decline and inevitable government-driven mergers. Most interesting.

We subscribe to the full Sky “six billion channels of stuff” package, and every now and again look to see if it’s worth trying to save a bit of money by removing a few channels. The expensive bits are sports and movies, but there’s enough rugby and NFL to keep the sports channels, and if you’ve got those, it’s not much more for movies; about the same price as a cinema ticket, or membership of a DVD rental scheme (but without the hassle of walking all the way to a postbox). It’s quite handy, then, for films that you wouldn’t mind seeing, but don’t seem worth a full cinema trip. Case in point, Run, Fat Boy, Run.

Run, Fat Boy, Run is a totally formulaic film. The most remarkable thing about it is that it’s actually simultaneously two totally formulaic films, the Sporting Underdog and the Romantic Comedy, specifically the lovable slacker (Simon Pegg) winning his ex (Thandie Newton) back from the seemingly-perfect new boyfriend (Hank Azaria). Sorry if I’ve given away the entire plot there; towards the beginning I thought it might actually subvert the form slightly and have Azaria be as nice as he initially seemed, but no, quelle surprise. It’s very much, as Mark Kermode would put it, a “tab A into slot B” film, ticking on to its inevitable conclusion. Within those parameters it works well enough mostly thanks to the cast; not a bad way of spending a brain-dead evening when too zonked to even log in to a game, and a couple more like that in a month justify the movie channels.

So the European Warhammer Online beta didn’t quite go entirely to plan, as covered in far more detail elsewhere (particularly Book of Grudges, doing a splendid job with news and updates, plus cute skunks). It’s a bit of shame, I’d rather hoped to have a bit of a potter around on Sunday afternoon, but such is life.

On the plus side, I got to catch up with a few other things, so some brief reviewlets:

UFO: Enemy Unknown was my main gaming diversion, having just picked it up via Steam, still a wonderful game. No server problems or anything either, though the “fifteen year rule” is possibly a slightly extreme extension of the “three month rule”. I briefly fired up XCom: Apocalypse, but where the gameplay of UFO is somehow engraved in my brain I couldn’t quite remember what all the Apocalypse buttons did, so I’ll leave that until I can be bothered to dig out the PDF of the manual (or possibly the original paper manual, if I still have it in my Pile O’ Manuals).

Doctor Who: Logopolis, recorded from a SciFi Doctor Who weekend a while back. What in the name of buggery sod was that all about? Block Transfer Computation, mumbling weirdos holding back entropy to save the universe, a vital component being a replica of an earth computer circa 1981? Baffling, though enjoyably Doctor-Who-y.

Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn. I still have a big list of comics from the past ten years to catch up on, and somewhere around the top is “everything by Brian K. Vaughn”. Finally got around to the first volume of Runaways, and it was great. The story of a group of teenagers who discover their parents are supervillains, I’d been slightly hesitant about picking it up in case it was a bit Marvel: The Hollyoaks Years, and I really wasn’t sure I’d warm to the characters at first, but a few issues in I was hooked. Really effective ending as well, I’m looking forward to borrowing the second volume to see where they take it.

As I mentioned in the previous comic catch-up, I picked up Paul Cornell’s Wisdom mini-series, and it’s really rather good. It’s very Marvel in style but with a distinctively British voice, an American art form with an English accent, like rapping about tea. Featuring fairies, Martians, Jack the Ripper(s) and a shape-shifting Skrull who’s adopted the form of John Lennon it’s far from po-faced, with some glorious one-liners dotted around the place (a couple of my favourites being “Mr Thompkinson, have you succeeded in finding S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Yellow Pages?” and “In my day, we only had the one universe. Now it’s like satellite telly, there’s billions of ‘em. And they’re all shite.”) There’s also plenty of big fights, though, and some touching moments, particularly the end. Great stuff, and I’m looking forward to Captain Britain and MI13.

Following Zoso’s post regarding the freebies available for a short time on Tor, I took the opportunity to grab a couple of the books on offer and have myself a bit of a read. Unfortunately the books listed didn’t have any descriptions listed alongside, and being the lazy bugger that I am I couldn’t be bothered to research each one on Amazon. So I went for the <voice style=”reverb: on; volume: booming; pitch: low”>random click of destiny</style> and hoped that I’d picked something I could get in to.

The first book was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a decent enough space romp with a slightly different take on the ‘downloadable personality’ theme as seen in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and elsewhere. Scalzi has created a universe that is both interesting and believable, with compelling races and individuals that leave you wanting to find out more about them, and although the main story is a little uninspiring, the secondary storyline - based around the main character himself, his history and the moral dilemmas he faces as life as he knows it is turned on its head - allows the reader to really engage with the book as a whole and to be immersed in the ideas and themes that Scalzi presents. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, as mentioned earlier, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, so if you enjoyed either of those two books then you probably won’t be disappointed with Old Man’s War.

The second book was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire, a really rather excellent fantasy story that pleasantly surprised me with its well presented world, its likeable-without-being-mawkish characters and the real star of the show: Allomancy.

Allomancy is the system of magic that Sanderson has created, and instead of having it as some innate unseen power that requires hugely bearded men to sit hunched over dusty old tomes for years on end to achieve, Allomancy instead manifests itself as more of a mutation that is powered by various metals that the Allomancer must ingest and then ‘burn’ to activate the power. There are a number of known metals that can be used in this way, each giving the Allomancer a different power when they burn the metal, but they gain this power only for as long as the metal lasts since it is consumed as the Allomancer uses the power, hence the term ‘burning’ to represent the use of the power. Unlike magic in many other books though, the art of Allomancy is still not entirely understood, and this leaves the door open for things to be twisted around and for plenty of surprises to be unleashed on the main characters and the reader.

The world of the Final Empire is one of a class of nobles who rule over an underclass of slaves known as Skaa, all of whom are presided over by the Lord Ruler, the hero of a past age, who is now immortal - a shard of God - and controls the land with an iron fist. The lands themselves are a depressing affair, with what little vegetation that manages to grow under the ash-filled sky being nothing but dull brown; nobody knows what colourful plants look like, although it is hinted that they did exist in the time before the ascension of the Lord Ruler.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary, with the standard framework of the underclass rising up to overthrow their oppressors through the efforts of a select band of unlikely heroes, but it does throw some nice twists in along the way. However, there is an undercurrent of another story which is not fully expounded upon, and The Final Empire clearly leaves the door wide open for the second and third books to sate the reader’s desire to find out more about the trials of the Lord Ruler a thousand years ago: what was this Deepness that he faced? And if he succeeded in defeating it as we are led to believe, why did the land change so much for the worse afterwards? There are some answers in the first book, just enough to whet the appetite and keep the reader wanting more as the main story of the first book comes to its, perhaps inevitable, conclusion.

I could best describe Mistborn: The Final Empire as having a strong bouquet of Eddings, with a light fragrant sensation of Jordan on the palette and subtle undertones of Lynch and Gemmell.

It’s a credit to Tor, and hopefully in its own small way encouraging to authors and publishers out there, that I’ve already ordered all three books in the series, and I’m certainly keen to find out what the story is behind this fascinating world that Sanderson has created. I bought the first book because, although having read it, I’d like to give the author the sale, and there’s nothing like having a paper copy of a book, the creased and wrinkled spine and loose well-fingered pages a simple testament to one’s enjoyment of the story within. So putting a free copy of the first book in the series on to the web has resulted in at least one new fan, and a few sales, and more importantly I’d like to think that I’m not out of the ordinary in doing so. Not only that, but it has also inspired this little reviewlet which I hope, in turn, might turn some of you on to the idea of trying this excellent little trilogy yourselves.

Well done Tor for seeing the advantage in this sort of marketing strategy, and I hope it works out well for the authors involved.