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Our friends the Mosses are having a big library sale at their house in Quezon City. On sale are over a thousand books, hardcover and paperback, at 20 pesos each. Most of the books are now hard to find, and there are lots and lots of collectible Penguin Classics.

We went there this afternoon chanting, “We don’t need more books, we just want to see what you’ve got. No, really, we don’t need more books.” An hour later, we had filled up a box with 25 books by Georges Simenon, Shirley Jackson, Jan Morris, V.S. Pritchett, Nancy Mitford, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lawrence Durrell and Pauline Kael. And we were already exercising maximum self-control. Total expense: 500 pesos, less than the current retail price of one trade edition.

If you’d like to go to the library sale, email us at saffron.safin@gmail.com. We’ll reply with details and put you on the list. The sale is until July 30 only.

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UPDATE: As of 6pm on Monday, 20 July 2015, there are no more books available from the Moss Library. Much as Jason enjoys entertaining guests, you’ll have to wait until he opens a bar (We would invest in that).

Thanks to everyone who attended the library sale and provided new homes for those books. We know that bibliophiliacs like to crow about their acquisitions, so tell us what titles you found in the stacks.

Of course we like Ant-Man, like it enough to worry about whether audiences will accept Paul Rudd as a superhero. He’s adorable, but there are disadvantages to being adorable—superheroes are by definition tough. It’s not that Paul Rudd isn’t aging, but he’s aging backwards so now he looks like a younger brother of Chris Pratt.

Ant-Man 2.0 is Scott Lang, who has just finished serving a prison sentence for hacking into an evil corporation’s systems and giving people back the money it stole from them. The original Ant-Man is Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas, and the 80s version of Michael Douglas is the movie’s best visual effect. In the comics Pym was not a nice man—in the Avengers reboot we read, he was an abusive husband and general asshat. In the movie he’s estranged from his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who kicked him out of the tech company he founded and now runs it with his former assistant, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). But then Cross discovers the shrinking technology that Pym had tried to conceal, and now he wants to sell it to the military so Pym and Hope recruit Scott to steal it back. Scott is aided by his friends, including Michael Pena as the ex-con Luis, whose breathless storytelling skills provide the movie’s best gags.

The movie is clever, funny and entertaining, and the fathers-and-daughters theme gives it just enough emotional ballast so it doesn’t sink into sappiness. Ant-Man is considerably more low-key than the typical Marvel product, but whether it will be allowed to stay that way once he joins the Avengers is doubtful.

Yes, there are cameos by other regulars in the Marvel Universe. There are two stingers: The first shortly after the closing credits begin, the second after the credits have ended and the cleaners are waiting for you to go away.

P.S. Does anyone know the title of the science-fiction story in which the protagonist keeps shrinking and falling into different universes, each smaller than the next? We read it once in an anthology but cannot find the book.

If you watch Magic Mike XXL expecting nonstop abs and crotches bumping and grinding, you will be disappointed. Magic Mike XXL is not about male strippers, but about humans who are friends who happen to be strippers. It puts them on the road and gives them actual lives, with hopes, disappointments, desires and fears. Whatever is the opposite of objectification, that’s what this movie directed by longtime Soderbergh assistant Gregory Jacobs and shot by Steven Soderbergh himself (as Peter Andrews) goes for. It’s also very canny and respectful about female desire—the women hooting and throwing bills at the dancers are not drooling lust-crazed freaks but, again, humans owning their sexuality.

As we know, recognizably human characters equals disappointing box-office. Some women actually walked out of the screening so they missed the grand finale in which Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Matt Bomer (if that’s his real voice we’re impressed), Joe Manganiello and Channing Tatum each get a solo production number. Donald Glover (Troy from Community) shows up as a rapper-singer, Jada Pinkett-Smith as their guest emcee (Matthew MacConaughey went from playing Dallas to Dallas Buyers Club and left), Elizabeth Banks as the organizer of the male stripper convention, Andie MacDowell as a wealthy divorcee whose party they walk into, and Amber Heard as a photographer Mike gets interested in.

Klingon was the chosen language for the Welsh government in its response to queries about UFO sightings at Cardiff Airport.

While English and Welsh are the usual forms of communications in the Senedd, it opted for the native tongue of the enemies of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

Shadow Health Minister Darren Millar had asked for details of UFOs sightings and asked if research would be funded.

A Welsh government spokesman responded with: “jang vIDa je due luq.”

The Welsh government statement continued: “‘ach ghotvam’e’ QI’yaH devolve qaS.”

In full it said it translated as: “The minister will reply in due course. However this is a non-devolved matter.”

It is believed to be the first time the Welsh government has chosen to communicate in Klingon.

vIDa majQa’.

Read it at the BBC.

The danger of Science-Fiction Week is that you may feel like abandoning other genres altogether, they seem so staid and predictable in comparison. We saw Alex Garland’s excellent Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander as Ava the artificial intelligence, Oscar Isaac as her creator, and Domhnall Gleeson as the programmer chosen to administer the Turing test. Garland got his SF cred from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, in which a team that includes Cillian Murphy and a bearded Chris Evans embark on a voyage to turn the sun back on. He also wrote the novels The Tesseract, set in the Philippines (reportedly he wrote it in Quezon), and The Beach and the screenplay for 28 Days Later.

Alicia Vikander, like Oscar Isaac, is in every other movie that opens this year, and she’s so good we cannot begrudge her Michael Fassbender assuming they’re still together. We loved Domhnall Gleeson in About Time, in which he was part of a family that used their ability to go back in time to read Dickens over and over again (there are worse ways to use time). And Vikander and Gleeson were by far the best parts of Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (they were Kitty and Levin), except possibly for Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s moustache.

In Ex Machina, the tech billionaire behind the world’s most popular search engine—we think of him as Larry/Sergey—creates AI and gets one of his employees to test her. Lonely geek becomes emotionally attached to a program: it’s Spike Jonze’s Her, minus the whimsy, romance and the high-waisted pants. Ex Machina challenges the viewer to define what “human” is, and the results are uncomfortable. It makes us think that the singularity isn’t near, it’s already here and Asimov’s Laws no longer hold. The movie is chilly, and it’s supposed to be, so the sudden disco break is welcome.

Then we saw Alicia Vikander in James Kent’s Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain’s memoir of World War I. Vikander plays Vera, and she’s surrounded by some of the most adorable young British actors today, including Kit Harington (or as we call him at home, Christopher Darling), Colin Morgan (from the TV series Merlin, which makes us very angry because it takes painful myths we love and makes them cute), and Taron Egerton (from Kingsman). If you still haven’t recovered from the season finale of Game of Thrones, see Jon Snow clean-shaven here.

Testament of Youth reminded us of Joe Wright’s Atonement, no surprise since Brittain’s book is cited by Ian McEwan as one of the sources of his novel. Vera is a young woman who falls in love and gets accepted to Oxford in the same year—she’s all set to go to university with him when WWI breaks out and everything goes to hell.

Sapiens, available in hardcover at National Bookstores, Php1255

Seveneves got us to thinking about the survival of the species, so we picked up Sapiens, a history of the species by Yuval Noah Harari. We’re on chapter 4. It’s a fascinating book that makes leaps of logic that academics may scoff at, but we have no problem with.

The first part tries to answer the question: How did a species in the middle of the food chain suddenly vault to the top? We’d always thought that Homo sapiens descended from earlier versions of the species, Neanderthals and so on, but Harari points out that a mere 70,000 years ago there were six human species on the planet and sapiens basically won out. The competition was bigger and stronger, but sapiens could work together towards one goal, thanks to their ability to imagine things that did not exist, and to tell each other stories that bound their community together. In short, their weapon was fiction. So all you people who don’t read fiction, you’re doomed.

Immortality is not what it used to be. Once a quality desired by humankind, it is now regarded by popular culture as problematic. Vampires are depressed because they live forever and never age, while their mortal sweethearts are subject to the depredations of time. The deathless warriors in Highlander went to great trouble beheading each other because “There can be only one”—couldn’t they just learn to get along? Whatever their grievances, surely they could forgive and forget after 500 years or so.

And yet it should be noted that vampires could end their suffering easily enough by walking outdoors in broad daylight or, if they were the sparkly emo kind, sky-diving onto flagpoles. The Highlander guys could’ve taken naps using train tracks as their pillows. But they didn’t do it, because you know why? Because if you have your health, your looks, and your wealth (Even the most inept immortal could get rich by opening a savings account—even at low interest rates, savings pile up in 100 years), you don’t really want to die. At least not yet.

Read our TV column The Binge in BusinessWorld. This week we explain why the 2014 series Forever starring Ioan Gruffudd and the 2008 series New Amsterdam (the start of our completely unilateral relationship with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) are the same show.

Study for Baron Harkonnen from the great science-fiction epic never made, Jodorowsky’s Dune

Dune is set in a far future, where warring noble houses are kept in line by a ruthless galactic emperor. As part of a Byzantine political intrigue, the noble duke Leto, head of the Homerically named House Atreides, is forced to move his household from their paradisiacal home planet of Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis, colloquially known as Dune. The climate on Dune is frighteningly hostile. Water is so scarce that whenever its inhabitants go outside, they must wear stillsuits, close-fitting garments that capture body moisture and recycle it for drinking.

The great enemy of House Atreides is House Harkonnen, a bunch of sybaritic no-goods who torture people for fun, and whose head, Baron Vladimir, is so obese that he has to use little anti-gravity “suspensors” as he moves around. The Harkonnens used to control Dune, which despite its awful climate and grubby desert nomad people, has incalculable strategic significance: its great southern desert is the only place in the galaxy where a fantastically valuable commodity called “melange” or “spice” is mined. Spice is a drug whose many useful properties include the induction of a kind of enhanced space-time perception in pilots of interstellar spacecraft. Without it, the entire communication and transport system of the Imperium will collapse. It is highly addictive, and has the side effect of turning the eye of the user a deep blue. Spice mining is dangerous, not just because of sandstorms and nomad attacks, but because the noise attracts giant sandworms, behemoths many hundreds of metres in length that travel through the dunes like whales through the ocean.

Have the Harkonnens really given up Dune, this source of fabulous riches? Of course not. Treachery and tragedy duly ensue, and young Paul survives a general bloodbath to go on the run in the hostile open desert, accompanied, unusually for an adventure story, by his mum. Paul is already showing signs of a kind of cosmic precociousness, and people suspect that he may even be the messiah figure foretold in ancient prophecies.

Pirate spaceship. Artwork by Chris Foss for Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Read the piece by Hari Kunzru.