Ranking the Orson Welles films

A non-film student's philistine opinions on some of the Greatest Films of All Time® after a single watch-through (in most cases), based on fickle whims rather than years of research and contemplation.

Here are my The Top 13 Orson Welles Films. Does not include co-directions, unfinished films, trailers, narrations to camera or amateur home movies of student plays, I'm not obsessed.

Alrightreads: Space Bars

Sub-genres get quite specific sometimes.


Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

1973-77 (collected 1977) / Audiobook / 170 pages / USA

***

Callahan's can (allegedly) be found on Long Island, not Alpha Centauri, but it still attracts the occasional introspective extraterrestrial among the reluctant psychics and real-time time travellers. I'd listened to some of these tales before, and while they hadn't stayed with me, the congenial atmosphere had. These character-driven narratives must have been a bit jarring for Analog readers between the space battles and robots, especially as they don't always feel obliged to include sci-fi staples to stay on brand.

Faves: 'The Time-Traveler,' 'The Law of Conservation of Pain,' 'A Voice is Heard in Ramah...'

Worsties: 'The Centipede's Dilemma,' 'Just Dessert,' 'The Wonderful Conspiracy.'

Steven Brust, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille

1990 / Ebook / 223 pages / USA

**

Rather than tall tales, this is a comedy sci-fi romance novel about a folk band's adventures across time and space in a TARDIS-like bar that keeps being mysteriously targeted for arson. These barely curious Sliders would rather drink, jam and be merry than bother investigating what's going on, and this lack of interest was sadly infectious.

Jerry Oltion, Star Trek: The Captain's Table – Where Sea Meets Sky

1998 / Ebook / 263 pages / USA

****

Pocket Books' Star Trek paperback crossover event for 1998 involved sending each series' captain to the pub to relate a space shanty. I only read the Picard trezer-hunting one at the time, which was one of the few Trek novels on my bookshelf that I actually made it all the way through. This one appealed to me too, since I've always been fascinated by what might have been if the series' (great) original pilot had been better received and we'd got more of the dour and introspective Captain Pike.

It's probably the best Trek lit I've ever read, not that the bar's set particularly high there. This grim tale of cyborg space whale carnage would be out of place in any of the proper series (pre-Discovery, anyway), but it fits in nicely with this hypothetically darker lost era. Pike > Kirk

Larry Niven, The Draco Tavern

1977-2006 (collected 2006) / Audiobook / 316 pages / USA

**

Larry's been doing these as long as Spider, but his tales from the watering hole tend to be more abrupt, less congenial and more straight-up SF: all presumably reasons why they didn't build the same following or inspire real-life imitations and a graphic adventure game. 

Most of these are just a few pages long and can't help feeling like filler as the bartender and his exotic patrons briefly discuss some aspect of alien culture. The better ones are when then go outside.

Faves: 'Smut Talk,' 'The Slow Ones,' 'Playhouse.'

Worsties: 'Grammar Lesson,' 'One Night at the Draco Tavern,' 'The Missing Mass.'

Alrightreads: Art Books

A picture is worth a thousand words and much quicker to read.


Patrick Woodroffe, Mythopœikon: Fantasies Monsters Nightmares Daydreams – The paintings, book-jacket illustrations and record-sleeve designs of Patrick Woodroffe

1976 / Ebook / 147 pages / UK

***

The psychedelic LP and sci-fi paperback cover are two of my favourite artistic mediums, so it's always nice to see those overlooked artists represented. I've come across this guy a few times, but can't say his work has ever stood out, apart from a daft Budgie album cover I found quite funny but it turns out was supposed to be serious.

A budget career overview rather than a lavish coffee table book you can pore over, you can still rip it up to decorate your walls.

Faves: 'Triptych: The Thousand-Year Roundabout,' Michael Moorcock covers.

Paul Scanlon, Michael Gross and artists, The Book of Alien

1979 / Ebook / 112 pages / USA

****

Alien is one of several films from this era – along with Blade Runner, Star Trek I and Conan the Barbarian – that I really like, but mainly as worlds to get immersed in that occasionally get annoyingly interrupted by a plot. In devoting itself almost entirely to production design, this vintage making-of classic is right up my disconcertingly organic alley.

H. R. Giger's biomechanical designs are the obvious stand-out, but they've been widely reproduced elsewhere. I was more pleased to see Chris Foss' prelimary tramp steamers and "frustrated engineer" Ron Cobb's pragmatic interiors, both of which would be satisfyingly ripped off in Red Dwarf.

Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV

1990 / Ebook / 192 pages / USA

*****

Barlowe's infernal and extraterrestrial art has made for decent desktop backgrounds in the past, but reading these extensive 'notes' to each painting – in the form of speculative evolutionary fiction tying all of these fantastical fauna together in an extensively detailed ecosystem – is really enriching context.

It's my favourite bit from Cosmos expaned to book length and rendered like the dinosaur paintings that captivated me as a child. First-rate sci-fi world-building and even better art, all done by the same guy.

Faves: Emperor Sea Strider, Groveback

Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

2017 / Audiobook/ebook / 600 pages / USA

****

This best-selling biographer knows how to economise a life and its works just right. I could do with less of the former, really – reading about the visionary genius murdering animals so he could draw them better and buggering teenage apprentices in his downtime is complex characterisation I didn't crave. I was here for the painting commentary and flying machines.

Fave: Lady with an Ermine > Mona Lisa.

Alrightreads: Old New Borrowed Blue

I've wanted to read more Gene Wolfe for ages, but committing to another dense tetralogy I might not be sufficiently invested in has been putting me off. Better to go with a themed smorgasbord.


Gene Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel

1967-88 (collected 1988) / Ebook / 331 pages / USA

****

I prefer my Gene Wolfe brief, concentrated and to the point, even if that point is often elusive and more about atmosphere and justifying a pun title. Most of these tales, specifically chosen for their obscurity, are less than 10 pages in length, making this the perfect no-overlap companion to the longer shorts of The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. There's even a fourth doctor/death/island permutation as the author continues to stubbornly mine that seam and still finds gold.

Faves: 'Slaves of Silver,' 'Westwind,' 'To the Dark Tower Came,' 'A Solar Labyrinth,' 'On the Train.'

Worsties: 'Continuing Westward,' 'The Packerhaus Method,' 'A Criminal Proceeding,' 'The Choice of the Black Goddess.'

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

1987 / Audiobook / 372 pages / USA

***

This was the last book I read in a year when I read a few too many books, but it was oddly one I had absolutely no memory of. Particularly strange, since I made it sound incredibly appealing.

Listening again, I can see how it blurred into the rest, but it might be my favourite of the series just for being more exotic. Twice through and I still don't really understand what's going on. I should stick to junior sci-fi.

Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man

2015 / Audiobook / 304 pages / USA

**

I'm all for a good convoluted excuse to blend genres, but this future noir is only appealing in style rather than substance, and not very appealing at that.

The premise of cloned authors being loaned out in a post-book society is too bizarre to be credible, and since only literate nerds are going to be reading this in the first place, it doesn't need the patronising explanations to excuse the corny in-character narration, in case we thought Gene can't write.

Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

1999 / Audiobook / 384 pages / USA

**

I'm sure it has its devotees, but this wasn't my sort of thing at all, so I'm glad I didn't commit to the entire Book of the Short Sun as planned.

As a sci-fi fan, I appreciated the strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations, but downgrading from a spaceship modelled on a boat to an actual boat, and bringing in actual mythological creatures (or the Clarkeian next best thing) was too much standard fantasy for me, dismembered cyborgs excepted. The chronicler's a lot less likeable than Severian too, which is some achievement considering the other guy tortured people for a living.

Alrightreads: Rural Gothic

Green and unpleasant lands.


William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul

1789/94 (collected 1794) / Ebook / 56 pages / UK

****

I was too innocent and inexperienced to really appreciate Blake's classic double album when required to study it for A-level, but he still left more of an impression than any of the poets I studied at university, Milton aside. Maybe it was the pretty pictures.

I get it now. Admittedly, some of the Songs of Innocence are overly infantile, dependent and Bible-thumping, but others paint mournfully nostalgic scenes before Experience comes stomping in with the weight of years. It's the fearful symmetry that makes it.

Sarban, Ringstones

1951 / Ebook / 139 pages / UK

***

A latecomer to the Machen/Blackwood tradition of folk horror before the '70s brought its infatuation with techno-henges, this slow-burning novella is filled with pleasant Northumberland scenery, encyclopaedic digressions and ominous foreboding.

It's quite rare for these nerdy folkloric tales to be female-led, but with its oblivious and inept protagonist and bridled women pulling chariots, it's not exactly a step forward.

Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home

1973 / Ebook / 401 pages / USA

**

More Twin Peaks than an American Wicker Man, this pastoral soap opera takes its sweet time getting to the horror and a point. If you're daydreaming of a rustic escape, you might not mind that as much as I did.

Manly Wade Wellman, What Dreams May Come

1983 / Ebook / 175 pages / USA

***

I haven't read any of Wellman's other John Thunstone stories, and the fairly generic occult investigator hasn't charmed me into seeking out more.

A distinctly retro tale by this point, I preferred to imagine it was the novelisation to the non-existent '70s BBC serial I'd rather be watching, shot on low quality film stock with a Dudley Simpson soundtrack.

Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

2017 / Ebook / 368 pages / UK

****

That's more like it. Hurley's popular debut novel was a superb Gothic revival fringed by a bleak coastline, but this follow-up ventures deeper into the unforgiving landscape and is one of the scariest books I've read in memory.

A Devil isn't required to explain the various atrocities and general grim hopelessness, but the option's there if you prefer the comfort of laying the blame on the Owd Feller to the alternative. Full of nature and seasonal symbolism to keep lapsed English lit students happy, while crying.

Alrightreads: Me

My childhood dream that I was always too lazy to realise has come true. I'm finally a published... photographer?

The author of a book on Coastal World Heritage Sites asked permission to use one of my photos of South Korea's Jeju Island. That was nice, she could have just stolen it like the BBC and everyone else.

I've reproduced the extract without such permission: