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This has been an oddly exhausting year, although it feels like I haven’t done as much as usual.

Partly that’s because for the first time in two decades I have spent most of the year without publishing contracts or other writing commitments, so there’s been less external pressure to slog on through stuff. Plus I dug deep and eventually found the good sense to walk away from a potential project. And I also had to pull out of three conferences  (one for political reasons, two for health reasons) but in each case did so early enough to steer the replacement invitations to others every bit as, if not more, qualified than me, apart from not being middle-aged white guys.

Also, everything slowed down and became more complicated because we had builders working on the house for nearly four months, and then in November my still-undiagnosed-after-a-decade seizures returned, with a longer tail of fatigue and sludgy cognitive processing. (To add to the fun, NHS Wales has no access to NHS England records, so they know nothing in terms of the results of previous neurological and cardiological investigations. Which means I am right back at the start of the whole process, with a slew of hospital visits to look forward to in the new year.)

But it was also the year in which we got a pair of Indian runner ducks, Sarah Jane and Servalan, who lived in the house with us from the age of five days until their feathers came through properly six or seven weeks later, shitting everywhere and insisting on trying to stand on our shoulders to make us look like particularly crap pirates. With duck crap down their backs. (Thanks Dave and Daisy for bringing them home to us, and for unexpectedly turning them into a housewarming gift from the world’s oldest continuously operating video store.)

And it was, as that parenthesis skilfully foreshadows, the year in which we belatedly had our housewarming party.

It was also the year in which, in the same week, I got to introduce a 50th anniversary IMAX screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and to meet John Sayles and Maggie Renzi (sort of). Oh, and we went to a party with Keanu Reeves (sort of, but in a different way).

Thanks to an invitation from Sarah Lohmann to speak about cinema, time-travel and sf for the Speculative Temporalities Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquim at ETH Zürich, we got to spend an April week in Switzerland, during which I could have died on an alp from my own stupidity and we saw, an hour later in an unrelated incident, an avalanche.

Thanks to a bunch of invitations from Jaak Tomberg (initially via David Hartley), we got to spend a May week in Estonia, mostly Tartu, where I: 

• gave a paper on 150 climate fiction short stories at SFRA 2024: Transitions (the above-mentioned wisely abandoned project I’d backed myself into for the conference I ended up pulling out of for political reasons)
• hosted an event with Cory Doctorow on the enshittification of the internet (for The Grand Futurological Congress literary festival)
• gave a reading from The Anthropocene Unconscious and, embarrassed by quite how long I’ve been dining out on that book (whether counted from the 2016 Cardiff keynote where I first started talking about the Anthropocene or the 2018 Liverpool keynote where I first presented a version of the book’s key idea to a room full of people), also read the first three paragraphs, written that morning, hopefully my next book, Climate Monsters (for Translation Agency, the guerilla programming running alongside the literature festival)
• was interviewed, along with Amy Cutler and David M. Higgins by the Estonian equivalent of the BBC (at least, that’s how it was described to me)

And thanks to María Abizanda Cardona, I spent a couple of October hours in Spain (sadly only virtually) in conversation with the Association for American Studies/ Sociedad española para el estudio de los Estados Unidos de América Young Scholars Reading Group at the University of Zaragoza.

Late 2023 and early 2024 were taken up with line-editing, copy-editing and proof-reading a pair of edited volumes with old friends, both of which were then published within a couple of months, which is freakily swift and rather disorienting for academic publishing:

• with Steven Shaviro, This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook (Goldsmith Press/MIT Press 2024), which should be available open access from February 2025
• with Andrew M Butler and Sherryl Vint, The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Routledge 2024); thanks to the funding arrangements underpinning her research, Josefine Wälivaara’s chapter on Disability Studies is open access.

I suspect the latter is the last book I will ever do with a for-profit academic press – Routledge have always been okay to work with apart from the outrageous exploitation of authors/editors and the sometime shoddy subcontracting of production work, but I’m just so fed up and disgusted with the whole sector’s naked profiteering and increasingly obvious lack of interest in the content of what they publish. So I’m kinda done with that, I guess.

I also

• wrote my first ever introduction to a graphic novel, the English translation of Kateřina Čupová’s adaptation R.U.R.: The Karel Čapek Classic (Rosarium 2024)
• published a review of ‘Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies’, Transnational Screens 15.1 (2024): 118–119
• drafted a chapter on contemporary dystopian cinema, with which I remain deeply dissatisfied but hopeful that my editor and fellow contributors can help me figure out why it doesn’t work – and how to fix it
• examined Tom Andrews’s PhD, Climate Change in Anthropo-Temporal Quasi-Fantasy and New Weird Fiction (Anglia Ruskin University 2024).

I have also been a guest on three Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever podcasts – on King Kong, Flash Gordon and The Creature from the Black Lagoon – and am currently sidling up to doing prep for a different podcast series to talk about Solaris and for my first ever DVD extra, where I will be talking about…oh, wait, I’m not supposed to tell anyone about that yet…

On 17 May, I introduced Georgiy Daneliya’s bonkers Kin-dza-dza! for Forbidden Worlds festival at Bristol Megascreen, and on 21 July Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Dale and Tucker vs. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Double Bill of Hicksploitation Classics for Horror Without End/Forbidden Worlds at Bristol Megascreen (21 July) – and just four days later (25 July) I finally met John Sayles. Sort of.

I was supposed to meet him back in the late 2000s for a TV thing back when I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star but that fell through. And then I was supposed to do a live on-stage event with him for the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of Matewan, but Covid hit and he caught it and the festival was cancelled for lockdown anyway. But now finally, albeit via Zoom, I was going to interview him and Maggie Renzi for 15 minutes at the Cinema Rediscovered festival at the Watershed directly before the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of Lone Star (the first of his films I actually saw in a cinema, back in 1996).

So I’m sat there, at the front of an absolutely packed cinema, with half a minute to go, when the tech guy comes down for one final check of my mic, and says ‘You know he’s still not there, but Maggie’s happy to go ahead with it anyway’.

Reader, this was the first I’d heard of John’s absence. Apparently, he was out playing basketball (he’s 73!) but was on his way back and would join us – and no sooner than I’d been told this than it was time to begin.

Fortunately, I’m so fucking woke I’d already planned for my first question to be for Maggie. Who was beyond fabulous. And we had fifteen minutes of fun. The crowd loved it. And then sadly it was time to wrap up.

And I was just about to say “Sadly, it’s time to wrap up” when suddenly John appears in the background in a basketball shirt and the kind of tiny tiny shorts you see him wearing in photos back in the 1970s and 1980s, prompting some discussion later as to whether he was actually wearing any. I’ve checked the footage: he was, but it was all a bit Basic Instinct, especially when – 16 minutes into a 15 minute interview – he Will Rikered over the back of the chair next to Maggie. There was just time to ask one question: while you’re still obviously active as a writer, it’s been 11 years since Go For Sisters, so is there ever going to be another John Sayles movie?

Which is when, at Maggie’s prompting, he told us about the western they hope to start filming in February. Based on a pulp story from the 1920s (presumably unearthed while researching his new novel, To Save the Man, due out next month). Shot on Leone’s old sets in Spain. With Chris Cooper. All they needed was a saleable name to play the younger cowboy and the money would fall into place…

The New Routledge Companion is, apparently, due out on 13 June 2024.

It complements rather than replaces The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, which Andrew, Sherryl and I co-edited with Adam Roberts, who had to pull out of this one.

When Routledge approached us around Easter 2019, they were clearly thinking along the lines of ‘drop a few chapters, update the remaining ones and add a few new ones’. I hate those kind of second editions, since they are basically a scam to milk University library budgets while maximising income for minimum outlay. So instead we suggested a New Companion. There was a compromise around a larger number of new chapters, and then somewhere in the shuffle and churn of Routledge editors we basically commissioned an entirely new volume. Adam’s chapter is the only one carried over from the original Companion, with just a couple of others appearing in revised versions; the other 50+ chapters are entirely new (and the old Companion will remain available electronically).

When the New Companion was contracted in December 2019, we imagined delivering the manuscript around Easter 2021 delivery.

So only two-and-a-half years late on this one.

Table of Contents
Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler and Sherryl Vint, Introduction
Part I. Science Fiction Histories
1. Sinéad Murphy, North African, Middle Eastern, Arabic and diasporic science fiction
2. Adam Roberts, The Copernican revolution
3. Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado, Indigenous futurisms
4. Andrew M. Butler, Art as science fiction
5. Arthur B. Evans, Nineteenth-century western science fiction
6. Rubén R. Mendoza, Latin American science fiction
7. Brittany R. Roberts, Russian-language science fiction
8. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, South Asian science fiction
9. Nicola Hunte, Afro-diasporic speculative fiction
10. Emily Midkiff, Anglophone print fiction. children’s and young adult
11. Rone Shavers, Afrofuturism
12. John Timberlake, Science fiction illustration
13. Baryon Tensor Posadas, Japanese science fiction
14. J.P. Telotte, Science fiction film, 1895-1940
15. Wu Yan, Chinese science fiction
16. Patrick B. Sharp, Anglophone print fiction. the pulps to the New Wave
17. Robin Anne Reid, Anglophone science fiction fandoms, 1920s-2020s
18. Christos Callow, Jr., Science fiction theatre
19. Karen Hellekson, Radio and podcasts
20. Michael Goodrum, Comics from the 1930s to the 1960s
21. Lincoln Geraghty, Science fiction film and television. the 1950s to the 1970s
22. Dan Byrne-Smith, Video, installation art and short science fiction film
23. Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Anglophone print fiction. the New Wave to the new millennium
24. Martin Lund, Comics since the late 1960s
25. Dan Hassler-Forest, Transmedia and franchise science fiction
26. Sharon Sharp, Science fiction film and television. the 1980s and 1990s
27. Sunyoung Park, South Korean science fiction
28. Barry Keith Grant, Twenty-first century film
29. Sherryl Vint, Twenty-first century television
30. John Rieder, Anglophone print fiction. the new millennium
31. Taryne Jade Taylor, Diasporic Latinx futurism
Part II. Science Fiction Praxis
32. Jordan S. Carroll, Advertising, prototyping and Silicon Valley culture
33. Glyn Morgan, Alternate history
34. Anna Maria Grzybowska, Animal studies
35. Sherryl Vint, Biopolitics
36. Melody Jue, Climate crisis and environmental humanities
37. Christopher T. Fan, Critical ethnic studies
38. Elizabeth Callaway, Digital cultures
39. Josefine Wälivaara, Disability studies
40. Jonathan Alexander, DIY science fiction
41. Hugh C. O’Connell, Economics and financialisation
42. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Empire
43. Rhys Williams, Energy humanities
44. Rebecca J. Holden, Feminisms
45. Paweł Frelik, Game studies
46. Amy Brookes, Geography, urban design, and architecture
47. Gerry Canavan, Marxism
48. Anna McFarlane and Gavin Miller, Medical humanities
49. Alison Sperling, New materialism
50. Veronica Hollinger, Post/trans/human
51. Beyond Gender Research Collective, Queer and trans theory
52. Brooks Landon, Science fiction tourism
53. Shelley Streeby, Social activism and science fiction
54. Erik Steinskog, Sonic studies
55. Katie Stone, Utopian studies

This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook is due out on 6 February 2004.

It ispart of a new series conceptualised as being for graduates contemplating a return to education (and other general audiences). The first two sections, mostly by me, contain 500- or 1000-word introductions to critical/theoretical approaches and genre history; the third section, by brilliant and lovely others, pairs a 500-word introduction to a critical idea with a 500-word introduction to a key contemporary novel (plus a 50-word introduction to a key contemporary film by me).

If you buy the book, start with the final section; you can hear me banging on about stuff any old time.

When first approached about This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, I imagined a quick and dirty 4–6 month project that would be over by Xmas 2021, so eighteen months wasn’t too bad.

Table of contents
Introduction – Steven Shaviro
How to use this book – Mark Bould
Part one: theory
1. Genre – Mark Bould
2. Defining science fiction – Mark Bould
3. Estrangement – Mark Bould
4. Extrapolation – Mark Bould
5. Alterity– Mark Bould
6. Historicising the present – Mark Bould
7. The language of sf  – Mark Bould
8. Spectacle – Mark Bould
Part two: history
9. Scientific revolutions – Mark Bould
10. Imperialism and colonialism – Mark Bould
11. The French roman scientifique – Mark Bould
12. The British scientific romance – Mark Bould
13. Nineteenth-century US sf – Mark Bould
14. The US sf magazines – Mark Bould
15. The New Wave – Gerry Canavan
16. Feminist sf of the 1960s and 1970s – Katie Stone
17. Ecological sf of the 1960s and 1970s – Sarah Lohmann
18. World sf – Mark Bould
Part three: key concepts
19. Afrofuturism – Aisha Matthews
20. N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015) – Aisha Matthews
21. Alien Encounters – Joy Sanchez-Taylor
22. Nnedi Okorafor, Binti (2014) – Joy Sanchez-Taylor
23. Alternate history – Glyn Morgan
24. Nisi Shawl, Everfair (2016) – Glyn Morgan
25. Animal studies – Sherryl Vint
26. Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (2015) – Sherryl Vint
27. Climate fiction – Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Col Roche and Elena Walsh
28. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017) – Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Col Roche and Elena Walsh
29. Contagion – Anna McFarlane
30. Ling Ma, Severance (2018) – Anna McFarlane
31. Cyberpunk – Anna McFarlane
32. Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (2018) – Anna McFarlane
33. Disability – David Hartley
34. Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep (2017) – David Hartley
35. Dystopia – Sarah Lohmann
36. Leni Zumas, Red Clocks (2018) – Sarah Lohmann
37. Gender – Katie Stone
38. Kameron Hurley, The Stars are Legion (2017) – Katie Stone
39. Globalisation – Hugh C. O’Connell
40. Malka Older, Infomocracy (2016) – Hugh C. O’Connell
41. Hard sf – Sherryl Vint
42. Sue Burke, Semiosis (2018) – Sherryl Vint
43. Latinxfuturism – Taryne Jade Taylor
44. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019) – Taryne Jade Taylor
45. Neurodiversity – David Hartley
46. Dora Raymaker, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit (2018) – David Hartley
47. Postcolonial sf – Hugh C. O’Connell
48. Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (2019) – Hugh C. O’Connell
49. Posthumanism – Chris Pak
50. Tade Thompson, Rosewater (2016) – Chris Pak
51. Queer sf – Katie Stone
52. Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes, The Deep (2019) – Katie Stone
53. Space opera – David M. Higgins
54. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013) – David M. Higgins
55. Time travel – Glyn Morgan
56. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (2019) – Glyn Morgan
57. Utopia – Sarah Lohmann
58. Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day (2020) – Sarah Lohmann
59. Weird – Roger Luckhurst
60. Catlín R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland (2017) – Roger Luckhurst

(A little earlier than usual this year cos I ain’t planning on doing nothing else before 2024.)

On 6 November, I arose well before dawn to catch the first of the four trains necessary to ensure I would be at Fulham Palace before 10am, as the call-sheet demanded, for makeup. Once the top of my head was dusted down to reduce the glare of reflected light, I had a quick catch up over coffee with the producer, and then commenced the interview.

It turns out there are boisterous school trips to the palace, which is on a Heathrow flight path, and while the Bishop’s library makes for a great setting, the Diocese has never sprung for soundproofing. There were other issues.

The perfectly charming and lovely producer/interviewer was still early in the process of figuring out the content and shape of this four-hour/four-episode documentary series on sf (for SkyArts, to be broadcast early next summer). So he was not entirely sure what he wanted, and the questions he asked didn’t really match up with our preparatory discussions. Nor could he actually formulate questions, leaving me to figure out which bits of his of beatings around the bush I could respond to. But I’m a trouper, used to thinking on my feet. During the interview, I helped him evolve several plans to ensure he had at least some of the material he needed. But he couldn’t stick to a plan: let slip anything even mildly unanticipated and he was off like a greyhound who’s sighted the hare.

All of the notes I’d jotted in advance stayed in my bag, useless. And my answers got longer and longer, careering wildly between generalisations and specificities. I forgot names and titles, got details wrong, launched into examples that partway through I realised wouldn’t work, backtracked, foraged, scavenged and dredged as beneath the hot lights I became increasingly panicked and delirious.

For five hours.

(With a short break for lunch).

Afterwards, as I walked to the tube, I realised I could recall nothing at all of what I’d said, only the things I’d meant to say but knew I hadn’t.  

On the trains home, I couldn’t concentrate to read. But when my mind tried to go back over what happened to flagellate itself, there was nothing: just hysterical blankness. Exhaustion.

The whole year’s been a bit like that.

A long slog, often at fever pitch but never with any sense of consummation: work; industrial action that petered out despite obvious and egregious institutional/sectoral dishonesty, recklessness, incompetence, unconcern and contempt; and editing, so much fucking editing.

By late spring/early summer, Steve and I put This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook to bed (due out 6 February 2024), and right at the end of November, Andrew, Sherryl and I finally delivered the manuscript for The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (due out 13 June 2024).

Various contingencies, mutual agreement and a certain amount of falling on my sword/control-freakery, meant I was the main editor for the former, and line-edited all 55 chapters of the latter (from roughly 320,000 words down to 275,000). They are two very different books, described here and here.

Both fell foul of Covid and its long ongoing tail, and of the ever-increasing workloads and ever-deteriorating working conditions of academics everywhere, including the editors.

I actually enjoy editing. Partly it’s a way to carve out time to keep on top of the field, including finding new voices and perspectives, partly it’s the problem solving: how to wrestle pieces down to word-length, while clarifying meaning and without sacrificing content. Such focused work is probably the only area of my professional life where I feel any sense of control.

But it is massively time-consuming labour (and completely unvalued by HE institutions and systems). Also, I’m tired of participating in my own exploitation, and enabling the exploitation of others, by commercial academic publishers. The ones I’ve worked with have treated me well enough, apart from the fact that their immensely profitable existence depends on not paying authors and editors for their actual labour. Hence, these two books may very well be the last things I edit.

In just a few days’ time, I stand down as a co-editor of the Studies in Global Science Fiction series, which I’ve been involved in since the original 2015 pitch, leaving it in the-hands-far-more-capable-than-mine of Anindita Bannerjee and Rachel Heywood.

I am also in the process of standing down as a co-convenor of the BAFTSS SFF SIG (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Science Fiction and Fantasy Special Interest Group), which will take a few more months as Craig and Stacey and I ease our replacements into place.

And I’ve already stood down as Film Studies Programme Leader after my latest seven-year stint (I’ve been PL or acting PL for more than half of my 21 UWE years, which are like dog years but in reverse).

Hopefully, this will all free up some time for doing nothing.

Fat chance.

In 2024, there will be builders (and Routledge proofs) during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking.

For stupid self-inflicted reasons I have to read 200 climate change short stories before May (i.e., during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking).

I really need to do the formal proposal for the sequel to The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture.

And I’m still toying with the idea of a short book (30,000 words-ish) on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but I need to find a publisher who will trust me to write it in a couple of months in the early- and mid-summer, and who I trust to publish it before the end of the 50^th anniversary year.

And I need a proper holiday of some sort.

Sure, we had a ten-day trip to Amsterdam (and to Utrecht to hang out with Marta and with dreamboat Dan), but I went down with a week’s worth of norovirus on day two, and we also had to survive the worst summer storm and hottest day Amsterdam has experienced since records began.

And I did manage to visit a friend in Cornwall just before term started up again. It was only three days but it was the first break since Xmas 2021 where I’ve not gone sick with something.

Unless I get my act together in the next three days and make some actual fucking headway on this piece on contemporary dystopian film, the only thing I’ve managed to write this year is:

‘Horror and Class’ for Roger Luckhurst, Stacey Abbott et al., eds, The Routledge Companion to Global Horror (forthcoming)

But I did see a handful of things published, the first two written during 2020’s lockdown:

‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban SF’, Science Fiction Film and Television 16.3 (2023): 251–275

‘Cli-Fi’ in J.P. Telotte, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas (Oxford UP 2023), 52–70

‘Post Production: Screening Futures – From Scarlet to Ebon’ in Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie and Tom Nienhuis, eds, American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021) (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), 263–276 (my first ever postscript to someone else’s book)

‘Transitional Demands: John Rieder, Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present’, Science Fiction Studies 150 (2003), 271–75

‘Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods, Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk’, American Literary History Review 35.2 (2023), 1107–1110.

‘When the Cup of Endurance Runs Over’, Verso Blog (21 April 2023)

I was also the subject of a really long interview

‘Criticism and Not: An Interview with Mark Bould by Marta Olivi’. lay0ut 1 (2023); an English-language transcript of the original rambling interview here.

I delivered two invited research presentations:

‘Strategic Realism, Techno-Utopianism and Environmental Apocalypticism: Key Tendencies in Cli-Fi/Sci-Fi Cinema’, Cardiff Environmental Cultures, Cardiff University, 1 November 2023

‘Three Tendencies in Sci-Fi/Cli-Fi Cinema’, St Andrew’s University, 13 March 2023

and one conference paper:

‘Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the Anthropocene’, BAFTSS 11^th Annual Conference, University of Lincoln, 3–5 April 2023

I also banged on and on (and on) about Free Guy as a podcast guest:

Fantasy/Animation, Episode 124: Free Guy podcast (July 2023)

And I found a new niche for myself in Bristol film exhibition ecology as the bloke you bring in when you want your audience to be reminded how shit, fucked up and weird the 1980s were, introducing:

Albert Pyun’s Cyborg for Bristol Bad Film Club, Bristol Improv Theatre, 16 February 2023

John Badham’s WarGames for Horror Without End/20^th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 24 September 2023 (in a double bill with Threads called ‘ThreadGames’)

Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours for Forbidden Worlds/20^th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 22 October 2023 (the second half of this was a bit harder to pull off as I am no fan of Scorsese – but I did trick a mostly baffled and increasingly angry audience into a massive round of applause for Teri Garr)

This is the first year since 2006 that I have not examined at least one PhD.

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Ambulance (Michael Bay 2022) is not the hilarious overuse of drone cameras or the odd shot pretending to be in infrared that accidentally recapitulates something of Tony Scott’s much more interesting chaos cinema stylisations in Domino (2005) or the hilarious series of endings offering redemption to characters – rather, ‘characters’ – no one could possibly give a fuck about in slow motion so as to help to drag out the run time to almost twice the length of the Danish film Ambulacen (Laurits Munch-Petersen 2005) it’s based on – though that could partly because Los Angeles is a lot bigger than Copenhagen – no, the best thing about Ambulance is that is finally fucking over and, should I choose to continue to subject myself to Michael Bay films even though Nick is no longer my student working on Michael Bay films, it will be a few years until his next one (Robopocalypse, stuck in pre-production hell) rocks up to make me question my life choices….

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Bullet Train (David Leitch 2022) is remembering those first half dozen episodes of Martial Law (1998-2000) when Sammo Hung (as Sammo Law) and Kelly Hu (as Chen Pei Pei/Grace) regularly put David Leitch in his place…