It’s the very last day of the 2023 Sci-Fi-London (boo) film festival but we’ve had an absolute blast (read our reviews of all the films that have taken place here) and not only that, but the festival is finishing with a bang with the UK Première of Gabriel Foster Prior’s The Bystanders, which stars Seann Walsh, Scott Haran, Georgia Mabel Clarke (yay!).

Read our review here…

The Bystanders (2022) Closing Night UK Première, 6 June, Rich Mix Cinema

Peter Weir (Scott Haran) – a former child genius at chess who is now an inconspicuous office drone – is recruited precisely for his anonymity to become a Bystander, a kind of empowered guardian angel tasked with watching over, and invisibly helping, an individual Subject. Peter is trained by jaded Bystander Frank (Seann Walsh), who out of boredom proposes that they swap Subjects, so that Frank now has ‘middle-class girl from Kent’ Sarah (Georgia Mabel Clarke), and Peter has feckless loser Luke (Andi Jashy), whom Peter hopes to transform into a winner so that Peter himself can win the award for Bystander of the Year, and make up for losing a chess contest decades earlier. Hilarious rivalry ensues, as misanthropic Frank, who can only see the world through ‘Frank-tinted glasses’, sets about, purely for the lulz, undermining Luke’s – and Peter’s – newfound success.

Gabriel Foster Prior’s feature debut reconfigures Wings Of Desire or The Adjustment Bureau as a London comedy of meddling manners, full of boozy nights, poltergeist pranking, workspace satire, and personal development for both the barely living and their ghostly counterparts. It is sweet, funny and schlumpily humane – and finally explains why we are always losing our coat and wallet, or finding the traffic lights against us, when we most need things to runs smoothly.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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The 23rd incarnation of Sci-Fi-London is back to planet earth this week, spread over several cinemas in Central London, and boasting 13 new features, and 19 shorts.

The eclectic programme includes films not just from the US, Canada and the UK, but also from Sweden, Bulgaria, Turkey, Denmark, Spain and Guatemala – and all are out of this world.

Day six of the film festival sees the Festival Première of Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi’s near future sci-fi, Remote. Our review…

Remote (2022) Festival Première, 5 June, 8.30pm, Prince Charles Cinema

In a world of the near future, Unoaku (Okwui Okpokwasili) lives a life of routine (exercise, work, reading, meals) alone in her state-of-the-art apartment during a Covid-style lockdown. Her favourite part of the day is watching Rainbow Panda, a relaxing live webcast in which Eun-ji (Joony Kim) grooms her dog Soju online. One day, though, Unoaku notices a glitch in the programme, which leads her to find the only other four people (Nikita Tewani, Pooya Mohseni, Yvette Mercedes, Antonia Predovan) scattered across the globe who also seem able to see this ‘anomaly’.

As these five women – all speaking different languages, all living on the sixth floor of their respective buildings – investigate, together but remotely, the mystery of what unites them, directors Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi carefully elaborate a simple-seeming scenario of female companionship and solidarity that ever so gradually assumes a more surreally cosmicomic aspect. Charming and increasingly weird, this exposes our place in an occasionally buggy universe that is beyond human comprehension – if perhaps not beyond human connection.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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The 2023 Sci-Fi-London film festival is taking place from 31 May – 6 June 2023  at four cinemas in central London: the Prince Charles Cinema, the Picturehouse Central, the Garden Cinema and Rich Mix.

Sci-Fi-London has always showcased the very best of independent science fiction and this year is no different with a brilliant programme for everyone to enjoy.

It’s day five of the festival and today’s showing is the UK Premiere of Javier del Cid’s The Eye And The Wall. Our review…

The Eye and the Wall (2021) UK Première, 4 June, 6pm, Prince Charles Cinema

Elite fascist authorities use violence and fear to rule over Gabbahn City, an immured urban slum that is also a surveillance state and a closed system, while its inmates, amid constant shortages and poverty, struggle to survive and occasionally to resist. Alba (Cecilia Porras) wishes to stay with her family and continue helping the sick, but both her rebel boyfriend Abdel (Alexandre Alzate) and her aunt Lucre (Yolanda Coronado) are making separate deals to have her smuggled outside to an unknown freedom. As the authorities come down hard in pursuit of a stolen MacGuffin, a bleak drama plays out involving endless negotiation, exploitation and sacrifice, with the very faintest glimmer of hope on the other side.

Text that opens Javier del Cid’s feature debut states that the film is “in honour of all Latin-American immigrants”. This ensures that what we are watching, though clearly influenced by the dystopias of Orwellian allegorical fiction, is always grounded in, and extrapolated from, contemporary structures of oppression that are entirely real.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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Taking place from 31 May – 6 June 2023, the Sci-Fi-London film festival is taking place at four cinemas: the Prince Charles Cinema, the Picturehouse Central, the Garden Cinema and Rich Mix (buy your tickets here).

Day Four of Sci-Fi-London offers an eclectic mix of sci-fi movies for cinemagoers, here are our reviews of each of them…

The Great Glitch/Children of Paradise (Det Store Glitch/Paradisets Børn, 2023) World Première, 3 June 9pm, Picturehouse Cinema

“A film is always born from a wish,” says a voiceover at the beginning of writer/director Søren Peter Langkjær Bojsen’s feature, announcing that we are watching a fiction whose characters are products and playthings of a writer’s imagination. Here those characters – youth lost over one summer in Copenhagen – are similarly driven by desire. Rune (Joos Støvelbæk) longs to be a part of a meaningful revolutionary movement, but has no idea what that would involve. His weed-addicted friend Søren (Lukas Gregory) falls hard in love with Franka (Leonora Saabye), but she reciprocates only half-heartedly. And just as Rune and Søren go by their respective nicknames (Ronja and Serb), and the film comes with a double-title, Franka too has a doppelgänger in the altogether cheerier Esther (also played by Saabye), who starts hanging around with Søren.

As these three (or is it four?) post-millennial slackers succumb to freak infestations, wild conspiracies, unexplained disappearances, unrestrained binges and uncanny glitches in the system that express themselves in the very texture of the film’s artefacting, jump-cutting footage and warping soundtrack, this “cross-eyed and sometimes kind of ridiculous fairy-tale” (as the narrator puts it) follows their dazed rites of passage though a world that never fully makes sense, in search of love. It is a triumph of vibe over reason, capturing a generation dazed and confused in a fantasy of someone else’s making. Do not miss the mid-credits coda.

The Elderly (Viejos, 2022) UK Première, 3 June, 6.15pm, Prince Charles Cinema

After his elderly wife Rosa commits suicide, retiree Manuel (Zorion Eguileor) reluctantly moves in with his adult son Mario (Gustavi Salmerón), Mario’s teen daughter Naia (Paula Gallego) and Mario’s new, newly pregnant wife Lena (Irene Anula). Yet as the temperature rises to record levels, and the city turns into a sweltering hell on earth, family tensions bubble to the surface, while Manuel and the other elderly start behaving very strangely and portending inescapable doom.

Co-directed by Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez (The Passenger, 2021), this gerontophobic apartment horror hints only obliquely at what is coming. There are impressionistic nods towards the ghostly, the apocalyptic, the psychological or the extra-terrestrial, with even casual words in the background contributing to our impression of what may be unfolding – but at the same time the film clearly allegorises society’s shifting attitudes towards the elderly as all at once valuable repositories of history, conduits of familial tradition, wizened objects of abjection, and reminders of humanity’s universal destiny.

Wintertide (2023) UK Première, 3 June, 3.30pm, Prince Charles Cinema

In John Barnard’s sci-fi horror, co-written with Carrie-May Siggins, Beth (Niamh Carolan) struggles to disentangle her dreams from reality, and viewers may well share the feeling. For in a future world of permanent winter, where a disease, staved off only by medication, has left towns depopulated and the uninfected lonely (and horny), it is hard not to recognise our recent, all-too-real experiences under Covid being reflected through a dream-like fiction.

In a zombie-like lethargy, diseased ‘strays’ have until recently been largely non-aggressive, even as their numbers keep growing – but as Beth goes off her meds, searches for her missing father (John B. Lowe), and sees anyone with whom she forms a connection succumbing to the illness, she starts to wonder if she herself, or at least the vampiric double that she keeps seeing in her nightmares, might be a Typhoid Mary. Or maybe she is herself one of the infected, experiencing their dissociation and depression from the inside while dreaming normal life through a glass darkly. Either way, this is a disorienting, dispiriting tale of humanity left behind.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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It’s day three of the 2023 Sci-Fi-London film festival, which is taking place over several central London cinemas between 31 May – 6 June 2023 (there are still tickets available and you can buy them here!).

Here are the SciFiNow reviews from Day Three of the festival…

Once Upon A Time In The Future: 2121 (Bir Zamanlar Gelecek: 2121, 2022) UK Première, 2 June 8.30pm, Picturehouse Central

The very title of Serpil Altin’s feature debut is also a statement of intent for this fairytale set in the future. Here families, forced underground by ecological disaster on the surface, are dependent on a System whose once revolutionary nature has led to built-in strife. Here, amid constant scarcity, Younger Generations are idolised, Middle Generations are tolerated for their labour and childrearing, and Older Generations are disposable, with the eldest member of a family killed and harvested for organs every time a newborn arrives.

When a woman (Selen Öztürk) has an unplanned pregnancy, her husband (Çagdas Onur Öztürk) and daughter (Sukeyna Kiliç) are rather more delighted than the grandmother (Ayseni Samlioglu). In her youth, grandma had helped set up the System, but now her only hope is to pass on her own spirit of rebelliousness to her daughter and granddaughter, even if they have, to differing degrees, become indoctrinated by a regime that will ultimately murder them. Think Logan’s Run, in subterranean bunkers, surreally allegorising the inter-generational tensions in any ‘happy’ family. Meanwhile the apple with which the film opens and closes marks this underground world as both hermetic Eden and entrapping dystopia where true happiness lies beyond the bounds.

Ozma (2023) World Première, 2 June, 5.45pm, Prince Charles Cinema

“Every night I wake up, or something wakes me up, and I have that same sense of disorientation.”

Jeff (Ferdy Roberts) conducts this imaginary conversation with his late wife Chloe (Alice Margaroli), from whose loss he is still reeling – but in the wee hours of this night, Jeff will wake to find, outside his East London home, a ‘hyper-evolved shape-shifting jellyfish’ called Ozma (and voiced by Eva Magyar) who, having commandeered Jeff’s internal monologue via telepathy, asks him to transport her to the Thames before her alien pursuers (Jun Noh, Victoria Moseley), disguised as police on bikes and armed with cucumbers, can seize her.

Writer/director Keith John Adams’ monochrome feature debut tracks our unlikely hero as he, still in his dressing grown, cycles across nocturnal London – or at least dreams that he does – on a surreal mission that is accompanied by various impossibly intradiegetic musicians playing instruments as varied as the krar, the dulcimer and the shakuhachi, as well as more traditional jazz combos. It is all at once city symphony, Egyptological noir, oneiric odyssey and heady tale of psychic healing,

The Warm Season (2022) UK Première, 2 June, 8.30pm The Garden Cinema

Little girl Clive (Mia Akemi Brown) is taking photographs in New Mexico, 1967, when a stranger calling himself Mann (Michael Esparza) appears in a flash and asks her to look after a glowing blue stone until his return. He is then taken away by men in black. 25 years later, Clive (Carie Kawa) is married to Mitch (Daniel Dorr) but still waiting for her Mann, and unable to move on from the rundown motel where she looks after her ageing mother (Cynthia Mace).

When the alien is released by a renegade government agent (a show-stealing Gregory Jbara), Clive must relocate the stone, work out her small but significant place in this cosmic confluence of events, and contemplate what kind of future she wants now that she can finally let go of the past. Even as Janet Grillo’s desert-set slow burn tracks Clive’s spiritual and psychological journey, it also cynically suggesting that her problems can be solved by money – while subtly anticipating further apocalypses to come where no amount of money can help.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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Sci-Fi-London lands on planet earth on 31 May-6 June 2023, taking place in several cinemas in Central London, and boasting 13 new features,19 shorts, and a special retrospective screening of Peter Watkins’ post-nuclear faux documentary The War Game (1966) with a new live score.

Here we review the movies showing on day two of the festival…

Phi 1.618 (2022) Uk Première, 1 June, 8.45pm Picturehouse Central

“Where is it? Where has time gone?”, asks Krypton (Deyan Donkov) in animator Theodore Ushev’s feature debut.

Certainly time operates mysteriously in this post-apocalyptic retrofuturist sci-fi. Timepieces are used to create chronic disorder (the ‘Chaotic Clock’), or to assassinate (the ‘strangle watch’). Krypton himself defies the ravages of time, as one of 666 immortal, all-male ‘bio-titans’ engineered for a fascist mission to leave the dying planet. As the countdown for liftoff ticks away, Krypton joins Gargara (Martina Apostolova), the embodiment of a forbidden book, to gather scattered ingredients for a magical drug that will reawaken Phia (Irmena Chichikova), a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ abducted and preserved in ‘timeless’ cryostasis as the sole female specimen for the space mission’s archive.

Combining modern filmmaking methods with the inter-titled stylings of Metropolis-era dystopia and Soviet agitprop-aping animated sequences, this eschatological fairytale sends Krypton on a quest for a happily ever after where ephemerality brings its own timeless bliss.

Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023), International Première, 1 June 6.45pm and 4 June 8.45pm, Prince Charles Cinema

“Am I dreaming?”, asks Tim (Eric Lum). “Where am I? What just happened?”

Tim is a patient in a run-down mental hospital whose renovation the messianic, superpowered philanthropist Cade Altier has agreed to finance. Meanwhile Cade’s estranged, ailing twin Cale is helping to abduct and traffic patients for illegal gene editing experiments, in exchange for access to the results. Both brothers are played by Neil Breen, even as Cade occasionally splits into multiple versions of himself to even the odds in fights. Breen too is a polyhyphenate artist, serving all at once as writer, director, DP, editor, producer and many other rôles, in a film where dualisms and divided realities reign.

The viewer will share Tim’s confusion about what is real, as characters are green-screened not just into sub-Matrix battles, but even into the most banal of locations. There are weird cutaways, jarring sound drops, unmotivated freeze frames, oddly recurring lines, bizarre dance sequences, a randomly appearing white tiger that transforms into a ghostly woman in white (Jennifer Estrella) – and it all comes with the dissociative, dislocating feel of a drawn-out dream, or perhaps of a parable of the endless, interdimensional conflict between good and evil.

Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences (2022), UK Première, 1 June, 8.30pm The Cinema Garden

“So my friends and I have a bet.” says Rudy (Rudy Dejesus), as he approaches a peculiar woman wearing pink rubber gloves in a bar. “They said you’re a robot. Are you a robot?”

Grace (played by Michi Muzyka, voiced by Meredith Adelaide) is a robot, due shortly to be sent into space as a ‘representative of human nature’ – but before she goes, she wishes to engage in conversation with a real live human like Rudy. Grace wants to talk about performer Cory McAbee (also the film’s writer/director, and a regular guest of Sci-Fi-London since his 2001 feature debut The American Astronaut) and his associates, and so her discussion incorporates several of McAbee’s live performances, whose humour, poetry and profound questions also permeate this film.

Encompassing the distinction between hard scientific facts and romantic truths, artificial time travel, transdimensionalism, and the way that ideas (including the many ideas thrown into the air by this film itself) can take root and be realised, it is a thoughtful, reflexive, funny series of standup routines, palatable lectures, faux advertisements and eccentric songs, as well as an impossible love letter full of hope for humanity in a vast universe.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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Sci-Fi-London is back to planet earth once more. Its 23rd incarnation, spread over several cinemas in Central London, boasts 13 new features,19 shorts, and a special retrospective screening of Peter Watkins’ post-nuclear faux documentary The War Game (1966) with a new live score. The eclectic programme includes films not just from the US, Canada and the UK, but also from Sweden, Bulgaria, Turkey, Denmark, Spain and Guatemala – and all are out of this world.

Here be aliens, ghosts, pandemics, unworldy invertebrates and artificial intelligences, oppressive dystopias, unnerving apocalypses and glitchy alternative universes, lost youth and the discarded elderly. My personal top picks are Cory McAbee’s Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences and Søren Peter Langkjær Bojsen’s The Great Glitch/Children of Paradise, but really every carefully curated title on offer has something rich and strange for lovers of genre – and of whatever lies beyond genre.

Sci-Fi-London starts off Victor Danell’s UFO Sweden, here’s the SciFiNow review…

UFO Sweden (2022) Opening Night Gala, 31 May, 7pm Picturehouse Central

It is 1996 in Norrköping, Sweden – eight years after Uno Stjärne (Oscar Töringe) disappeared, leaving his research group UFO Sweden, friend Lennart (Jesper Barkselius) and young daughter Denise in the lurch. Now Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) is a delinquent teen hacker in foster care – and when Uno’s empty car plummets through the roof of a remote barn, she is determined to prove right Uno’s wild theories about weather patterns and wormholes, and to discover his fate.

Denise’s quest for daddy, or at least for family, aligns with UFO Sweden’s sceptical search for anything out there – and so Victor Danell’s good-natured retro adventure, complete with car chases, corporate infiltrations, and a red Saab 90 in place of a DeLorean, lets a disparate ensemble of dreamers look to the stars, leap through time and find each other. “We foil-hatted freaks stick together,” Denise will tell Lennart, in words that will ring true for any sci-fi-festival audience.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.

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The story follows Alex Campbell, who is a Canadian musician struggling with a conflicted identity, a tragic past and repressed supernatural abilities. She is a primed time-bomb in the making. Orphaned at a young age, life has never been easy and is about to get a lot worse. Following the inheritance of a decaying 19th century London house from a mysterious ancestor, she moves to Britain, hoping for a fresh start and a better future.

Soon, her renovation plans are being thwarted by agents of a shadowy corporation with ancient roots and a malevolent agenda. While fighting against their mounting hostility, Alex makes some shocking discoveries about her family and herself that alters her grip on reality…

The Panharmonion Chronicles is the debut novel of British writer and designer Henry Chebaane and has been illustrated by veteran British comic artist, Stephen Baskerville (Spider-Man, Transformers, Judge Dredd), with extra art pages by guest artists Michael Montenat (Hellraiser) and Fabio Jacomelli (Hachette) with colours by Vittorio Astone (These Savage shores).

The Panharmonion Chronicles will be introduced at this year’s Sci-Fi London film festival on Sunday 4 June (find out more here) and we sat down with Henry Chebaane (pictured above) to discuss the first book in the trilogy, Times Of London…

The story is set in both Canada and the UK, across two distinct time periods, what drew you to these times and places?

I have visited Canada multiple times for work, particularly Toronto and Montreal. From my first visit, I was struck by how much cultural legacy Britain and France have respectively left on each city and their region. What also surprised me is how much of this historical (and colonial) impact is still structurally present today.

This resonates with me because I’m both French and British. I have studied history through the optic of both cultures. These observations led me to compare this legacy with other parts of the world that I’m familiar with: USA, Africa, India, Australia and South-East Asia.

While European colonial endeavours span many centuries, the 19^th century is a compelling period to me because the development of mechanisation and resources extraction produced an exponential growth in political and military power. This in turn had a compounding effect on scientific research and technology.

However, all this ‘progress’ did not translate into social, ethical, environmental and moral benefits for any species and populations. Quite the contrary. I would postulate that much of our post-modernist angst has its root cause in the 19^th century failing to align technological progress with social benevolence.

So, I began a thought experiment: “what if…”knowledge” had been made widely available across all genders, all classes, all ethnicities, all nations?” What would our world look like today? What new problems would this create? In a quest to start answering some of these questions, The Panharmonion Chronicles came to my mind.

There’s a lot of alt-history blended with some real history that isn’t widely known about here in the UK. What kind of research did you do? Was it important to you to shed light on these more overlooked times in history?

Your question makes me realise how far back this research takes us. Perhaps, since I was able to read, then travel the world. But to keep the answer simple, let’s stay on the last few years. I’ve bought dozens of books focussing on various aspects of the 19^th century, trawled the British library archives, and visited many locations myself. I’ve also lived in Scotland for three years and I am very fond of Edinburgh, so that part was straightforward.

To know more about Canada and its first nations, before starting on the first script, I had completed two on-line courses, which I would recommend to anyone interested in such matters. One is “Aboriginal worldviews and Education” from the University of Toronto, the other is “Indigenous Canada” from the University of Alberta. Both courses are taught by indigenous educators and the interactions are as insightful as the curricula themselves.

We, humans, use history to tell a story about ourselves. To make sense of who we are, individually and as a society. This ‘history’ is often revised, altered and edited to suit political agenda and consolidate power structures. It is also often altered to confirm world views and cognitive biases that we might have acquired through generations.

I think this human trait is shared by everyone on the planet. It’s not just a “European issue”. Every society has its origin stories, foes (real or imagined), heroes, rituals and mythos. That’s why we find storytelling so intrinsic to whom we are as a species. I would posit that we, apes, are more “imagining” than “thinking” beings.

So, as a thought experiment, I found it useful to blur boundaries between “official” history and imagined alternatives. This can create all sorts of questions within the reader’s mind and hopefully some insight might come from it.

If any, what (or who) was the inspiration for the main character of Alex? She’s a very unique heroine!

Alex is unique. And ubiquitous. There is a part of her in each human who lives today and has ever lived. For me and hopefully for many readers, Alex is the archetypal hero. She also symbolises our individual and shared reality: multiple, complex, confusing. I wish to let each reader to extrapolate further but through her there is certainly a lot to think about what it means to be “someone from somewhere”.  Does it even mean anything?

The story is incredibly layered and each peel-back reveals a whole new aspect to the mystery at its core. How did you go about planning the series and do you know the ending yet?

Thank you for commenting on this. This story is my own attempt at making sense of who we are and choose to be as humans. The layers are multiple, because nothing in life is “black or white” and “reality” itself is only the perception we have of it, through our rather limited human bandwidth.

I’m an avid student of Quantum Physics because it helps me navigate the frustrations of daily life and see wonders in the mundane. It has also tremendously raised my awareness of the multitude of probable causes and effects about any observation I make about anything.

I wrote the outline of the story first as a novella, when taking online courses with University of East Anglia on fiction writing. Then, I tried it as a film script, and a TV pilot. Finally, I settled on the graphic novel medium because this was the most satisfying way to manifest this complex world and, hopefully, give the audience the pace to unpack the layers of meanings.

I’ve planned the story as a trilogy to give readers a first arc, but like all epic saga it can continue for a long time to come, exploring the many facets, characters and nations of this world.

What would you say were your biggest influences in creating the aesthetic of the world, both the 1800s and modern London?

I’m also a professional interior designer. Serendipitously, while I was researching the novel, I was also working in Kings Cross on the renovations of two boutique hotels. I spent months investigating the industrial past of the area. By some strange mental juxtaposition, both creative processes started to blend into each other.  So, now readers have the unique opportunity to be able see features in the book that can also be visited around Camden.

Music and sound plays a pivotal role in the story. Is there anyone you were particularly listening to while writing? Anyone we should tune into?

Personally, I have such a wide range of musical tastes that I could not isolate one. So, this book is dedicated to all music makers and lovers on the planet. If I was to choose one type, though, it would be electronica. I just truly love it in all its forms, from early Chicago House and Detroit Techno to European Trance and Balearic Chill.

During the three years, while writing this book, I mostly listened to the entire catalogue of Carbon-Based Lifeforms and Solar Fields when outlining. While writing action sequences I would listen to Markus Schulz, Tritonal, Cosmic Gate and some folk/dark metal acts like Saor and Dzö–nga.

While writing the book, I also wrote a few songs and produced tracks released under alias “LX8”. It’s the same alias as used by Alex in the story. It’s just a creative experiment to see if I could manifest her presence outside the book, in the “real” world.

The plot seems to hinge on a unique scientific technological idea about the properties of sound and matter. Did you do much research into this at all? Do you think this could be possible?

Yes, in some form or another. From my understanding of the quantum nature of our universe everything is wave or particle, a field of probability that “collapses” into one state, one location, when “observed” or interacted with.

Sound is “perception”. It requires an “observer: our individual physiological response to vibrations of air molecules, skin, bones, synapses and so on.

Music is a kind of mathematical “language”, a progressive and recursive geometry that produces energy in motion (emotion) and the strangest of responses in all beings. Not just humans.  Just ask my dogs. So, who knows what else music could do?

This is very much book one. What can we expect from the rest of the series?

Much more action, drama, blood, twists, insights and revelations.

If any, who are your literary and artistic inspirations and how would you say they have influenced the book?

How long do we have? Ok let’s make it short: H.G.Wells and Jules Verne in 19^th century writing, Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury in 20^th century writing, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron and Ridley Scott in film-making. I’m indebted to them and many more, for creating works that inspire me every day.

When will the next book in the series be released?

It’s already been written. The illustration process is a lengthy one because of the detail I write into each panel. I will have a better idea at the end of the year. I intend to also explore the world of The Panharmonion Chronicles in Games and other media. So, stay tuned.

The Panharmonion Chronicles will be introduced at this year’s Sci-Fi London film festival on Sunday 4 June, with Henry Chebaane in attendance. Find out more here.

The post The Panharmonion Chronicles: Interview with author Henry Chebaane for steampunk graphic novel appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Listen up sci-fi fans! Our favourite sci-fi film festival, Sci-Fi-London, is back this May and will be taking place at new central London locations.

Taking place from 31 May – 6 June 2023, the festival will be at four cinemas: the Prince Charles Cinema, the Picturehouse Central, the Garden Cinema and Rich Mix. Find out more about the locations here.

Sci-Fi-London has always showcased the very best of independent science fiction and this year is no different with a brilliant programme for everyone to enjoy.

Check out what’s showing at this year’s festival…

The post Sci-Fi-London: Genre film festival returns with new central London locations appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Watch the trailer here and check out the programme in full below…

The Innocents 

Opening night – Thur 19 May, 8.40pm

From the director of The Worst Person In The World, this is not for the faint-hearted.

During a bright Nordic summer, a group of children reveal their dark and mysterious powers when the adults aren’t looking. In this original and gripping thriller, playtime takes a dangerous turn.

Unlike in Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, these kids are not ganging up on their adult carers. At times reminiscent of the more teenage Chronical, the simplicity of the sparingly deployed effects adds realism that will haunt your imagination long after watching.

Rani Rani Rani 

UK Premiere – Fri 20 May, 7pm

Rani, played by Tannistha Chatterjee (Brick Lane), lives in an almost-abandoned Indian village. For Rani, it’s another ordinary day populated by her feckless husband, his brother and ruthless sister-in-law, all fighting about money.

While Rani is seeking out some peace and quiet she happens upon some guys demonstrating an experimental device to a potential buyer. They ask Rani if she will be their guinea pig, and she’s lured into their machine. She emerges seemingly unscathed, but something has changed, the device has created another version of Rani… and that’s just the start of her problems.

Manfish

London Premiere – Fri 20 Ma, 9.10pm

Terry, a downtrodden middle-aged loner, spends his days down on Canvey Island beachfront collecting seashells for his failing jewellery box business. However, his world is turned upside down one morning when a mysterious humanoid sea creature washes up on the shore.

With the help of his foul-mouthed and abusive girlfriend Tracey, they take action and do what any self-respecting Essex couple would do – knock the creature unconscious, take it home and work out how to make money from it. So… to chop it up and eat it or sell it to a zoo; that is the question?

What or who exactly is this humanoid from the deep? What does it want? And why are so many local dogs going missing? 

Doctor Who Am I

World Premiere – Sat 21 May, 4.15pm

Documentary filmmaker, Vanessa Yuille (in her debut feature) follows friend and co-director, Matthew Jacobs (British writer of the 1996 TV movie, Doctor Who) as he is reluctantly pulled back into the fandom that rejected his work 25 years earlier.

The journey not only becomes hilarious and emotionally perilous for the duo but also reveals a touching and quirky face-off between the American Doctor Who fans and Matthew himself.

As they explore the fandom, Matthew unexpectedly finds himself a kindred part of this close-knit, yet vast, family of fans. The documentary deals with the desire to belong to a community, and how people can become nourished and enriched by the experience.

The Deal

Uk Premiere – Sat 21 May 6.30pm

After a pandemic has left the planet devastated with insufficient resources to maintain the human population, the totalitarian governing body, The Bureau, has set up ‘The Deal’. The terms are simple: accept The Deal, and you’ll have work, a home and medical care for the next twenty years. At the end of the time period you must sacrifice your life for the greater good.

Tala took The Deal when she was pregnant and has spent the ensuing nineteen years selflessly raising her daughter, Analyn so that she would never have to take The Deal herself. Just five days before Tala is scheduled to die, Analyn becomes very ill. A life-saving procedure with Tala as a donor is beyond their financial means and so begins their adventure to find a way to avoid The Bureau and keep them both alive.

Soylent Green

Sat 21 May, 8.40pm

Based on the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! by the legendary Harry Harrison, the movie is a cocktail of police procedural and eco-disaster science fiction.

The year is 2022 and the Earth is in trouble.  Millions are hungry and homeless, and the Soylent Corporation are supplying Soylent Green. a high-protein foodstuff allegedly made from plankton, but is it?

Frank Thorn, a cynical NY detective is called in to investigate the death of a Soylent executive, and he soon suspects that it was an assassination. And so begins the hunt for the truth.

Tickets include Soylent red or green cocktails!

A Tear In The Sky

UK Premiere – Sunday 22 May, 3.30pm

We want to believe.. right? But why do most images of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) look like smeary blobs? The team in A Tear In The Sky has sought out something more tangible.

With military personnel, scientists and even William Shatner(!), they attempt to re-capture, in real-time, the US Navy “TicTac” UFOs, using state-of-the-art, military-grade equipment and technology. What they find instead are thought-provoking clues into the true nature of the UFO phenomenon and the very fabric of our space-time reality.

Annular Eclipse 

UK Premiere – Sun 22 May, 5.40pm

In a dystopian future, a cure for Alzheimer’s has given rise to technology that enables near-perfect brainwashing and memory editing.

Two contract killers, Ge and Song, carry out daily executions for the organisation. Ge has become a deeply troubled man, sustaining nightmares and flashes of suppressed memory. On their next assignment, Ge’s flashbacks aren’t ones he recognises; it seems that someone is manipulating his memory and their latest target is someone important from his past. The assassins must infiltrate the Brain Science Corporation to find out the truth.

Deus

Closing Night – World Premiere – Sun 22 May 8pm

Earth is on the brink of an environmental disaster. The population has risen to more than 20 billion and huge areas of the planet are uninhabitable. Against this backdrop, a massive black sphere is discovered in the orbit of Mars. The Sphere begins to transmit a single word in each of Earth‘s languages: Deus (God).

Commercial spaceship, The Achilles is sent to investigate but, on approaching the red planet, it becomes damaged by a strange beam of light emanating from the sphere. Will the crew survive and discover the origin of the sphere and its purpose?

Claudia Black (Farscape) and David O’ Hara (Braveheart) lead a stellar cast in this intriguing and grand looking space drama.

Sci Fi London is taking place on 19-22 May at Picturehouse Stratford. Tickets will be on sale on Friday 5 May. Find out more here.

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