The Singularity Sucks

Stop Using Superpowers to Steal my Fiction Ideas

2012-01-19T13:55:00.001Z

I am getting mighty tired of certain 'writers' and 'artists' using telepathy and clairvoyance (possibly time-travel, but we all know that's impossible) to steal my fiction ideas before they ever make it to print!

Time and time again I have stumbled across works containing characters, settings or concepts that were uniquely my own, and sometimes these works were produced years, decades, or even centuries before my seminal idea. Sometimes the similarities are so obvious that even names are similar (or are once translated back to English from Sumerian or whatever), they've made no effort to cover their tracks!

This is happening far to often to be a co-incidence, it is clearly a conspiracy. To these perfidious rogues I say "Stoppit, or there'll be trouble! You know who you are." For now I am applying a new tinfoil-hat writing regime.

I'm going to Satellite 3

2012-01-16T10:41:00.001Z

So I'm going to be going to Satellite 3. This is a smallish Sci-Fi con taking place in the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow. You might think I'd be put off by 'small' after Novacon, but I'm struck by how much effort the Satellite people are putting into their con. They've been promoting it at both Eastercon and Novacon and presumably other places that I didn't go. They plan on running two streams of programming, (Novacon was only one) and have some events lined up already, including multiple talks and panels. And at the end of the day it's in central Glasgow, so if I'm not a fan of the con (and I admit I'm hard to please) I can just explore the city. Also, these people are the major bidders to run Eastercon 2014, so they're clearly serious folks.

2011: Goodbye to all that.

2012-01-16T00:38:00.003Z

So, everyone's doing this, look back and ask 'how did we do in 2011'. For me the answer can only be 'not good'. Although I started the year with a swift and surprising sale (I only submitted 'Inconstant Nature' to one place, Daily Science Fiction, and they took it straight away) I only managed to sell three stories in the year, "Inconstant Nature" to Daily Science Fiction, "Interview with a Robot Heresiarch" to the "Dead Robot's Society's" "Explorers" anthology, and "The Taking of IOSA-2032" to Ian Sales' "Rocket Science" anthology. I also received some brutal rejections, much worse than I've ever really had before. Either I'm getting worse or... I don't know.

I was published in "Daily Science Fiction" in February, with my story "Imaginary Enemies". Feedback from readers was very positive, and this story garnered me my first professional rate payment, which was something of an eye-opener. I gave all the money away to other publications whom I thought were either deserving or struggling.

My story "Pink Ice in the Jovian Rings" was also published in Coeur de Lion's Anywhere but Earth anthology, the first time I've appeared in an actual book, as opposed to on a website. This really impressed people around me: say what you will about digital taking over, dead tree format is still what's "Real" to most people. The one review I've seen of the anthology (reviews are scarce, because there's so many stories in the 700+ page anthology that it will take a long time for most people to read them all) cited my story as one of their 'top six'. This is probably the publication I'm most proud of so far (although I dislike the cover art, but ho-hum). The story is the first to be set in my "Warring Moons Period" milieu, and I know there will be many more. I don't want to just write those, mind you, but when something as complex and varied as the Warring Moons pops into your head, you say "thank you" to whomever you've sold your soul to, and run with it.

I was published in "Jupiter SF" issue 32, with my story "Guardian Angel". It seems so long ago since I wrote this, I guess it was 2009. The story was originally inspired by an effort to come up with stories that featured just two female characters who mostly cannot meet in person, because a friend (who has now sadly moved on to other things and lost contact) was in a film-making collaboration with someone at a distant location. Incidentally, this challenge also gave me 'Imaginary Enemies'. I like Jupiter, it's heroic one-man-band in the uk. I'll send something else there one day.

Bards and Sages published my story "The Creation Myth of The Dynak". I think most people don't get this story, because they don't lie awake at night thinking about the immensity of the universe and wondering "But why is there so much of it? Why? WHY??" But clearly some do.

I also got into the 'Rocket Science' anthology with my story "The Taking of IOSA-2083". I was very pleased about this for many reasons, it was a feather I particularly wanted for my cap. Firstly it's a UK anthology, and there are not so many of those. Also it was hard-sf. Also I managed to get a 'bagpuss' reference into a very dark story. Also I've wanted for a long, long time to write a story titled "The taking of XXXXXX", I'm out to write as many stories with stolen titles as I can. Also it's a peripheral 'Warring Moon's' story, and I'm glad to see that I can come up with other fictions in the same setting and maximize the literary equivalent of 'code reuse'.

A large part this last achievement was down to the editor, Ian Sales, who provided constant feedback on what he was receiving in this slushpile, thus allowing me to tailor my submission to what he wasn't getting, but wanted. This is the future of anthologies, using the net to provide a higher level of information both to readers, and to writers, to ensure the best product. Without this kind of feedback writers are writing blind, and if editors find they're basically sent the same story by hundreds of people, well, if you haven't given feedback on what you're getting then you only have yourself to blame.

I didn't get into the three other anthologies that I had my eye on, Innsmouth free press' "Future Lovecraft", "Trust and Treachery" and "Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations". I got into the 'Hold' pile for 'Future Lovecraft', but didn't make the final cut. For 'Dark Tales' I was swiftly rejected. "Trust and Treachery" received hundreds of submissions, and I basically decided that the odds were against me there, and I'd do better focusing my attention someplace else (Rocket Science). I also tried for 'Machine of Death', and didn't get in, but didn't expect to, the guidelines for that one were very tight, and it became more of a challenge to just produce something that would fit, than any hope of really getting in.

My writing group, the "Hopefull Monsters" (yes, with an extra 'l', don't ask) continued to be an excellent support network, and one of us, Dwayne Minton, broke into the professional markets with sales to Asimov's, Lightspeed, and Daily Science Fiction. Another of us, Tracie McBride, scored lots of sales throughout the year (although she was already doing that before we head-hunted her, She's too 'big' for us really). Richard Zwicker sold too (although, again, he was doing that before 'Hopefull Monsters' was a twinkle in the eyes of Dwayne and I). Alas, we lost a member, but added two more. Hopeful(l)y 2012 will see us all make progress.

During Q1 of 2011 I went to my first SF convention, "Eastercon", and it was rather good, dispelling many of my fears about what a sci-fi convention might be like (I'm one of those geeks who's afraid of being too geeky). I am signed up already for next year's one. Later I went to Novacon, which I have to say, was a major disappointment, although it had its highpoints.

We shall see if I do better in 2012. I confess that my enthusiasm took a bit of a knock in 2011, but I'm hoping to recharge that at "Satellite 3", the Glasgow sci-fi convention (if this one proves disappointing, I'll just check out Glasgow).

Movie Review - The Princess Bride

2011-12-24T00:53:00.001Z

Okay, I've just seen a movie that I've been wanting to see for a while. "The Princess Bride" is the movie that gave us that pop culture meme "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" and it served as the source text for 'Shrek'. I've heard many people speak of this movie with affection and respect, including Mark Kermode, who's opinion on such things I normally have a high regard for (though, he's had a lot of strikes against his name recently, truth be told I think he's losing it) so I've wanted to see it for a long time.

Let's get this over with quickly. One word sums up this movie, and that word is:

FAIL.

This movie is beyond bad, beyond terrible, this movie is like being trapped in a broken lift with someone who thinks they're cute, clever, funny, and charming, but who is none of those things (and probably drunk). I admit I've seen worse, 'Chocolate' was worse, but this is certainly up there. What's more, this is a movie that I went into not with high expectations, but with a degree of goodwill. Early on Peter Falk turns up, and I think "Hey! It's Columbo!" and the goodwill rating goes higher. Really, this movie didn't have to do much for me to think "Well, it's not all that, but it's alright," yet it pissed all its goodwill away.

Which raises a very mysterious question, why would the near infallible factory of awesome that is Pixar choose to remake this awful movie? I think I know why, we'll get to that later.

Of course people are going to say that my response to this movie is because of what's happened in movies since. This movie's been remade, and it's been remade better. Times have moved on and 'you can't understand it if you didn't see it back in the day', blah, blah, blah. I'm going to use ample evidence from within this movie itself to prove that this is not true, to prove that the movie is bad, and that it's makers knew it was bad.

Let's examine what we have here.

The movie opens with a sick kid in bed playing video-games. His granddad turns up to read him a story from a book, the rest of the movie is that story.

Stop. Why the frame? Why does this movie need a framing device? Why don't we just go straight into the main story?

Simple, the main story is poorly scripted, unengaging, rather woodenly acted, and has third-rate special effects. The producers knew this, and slapped the frame device around it because it allows them to say "Ah, but it looks that way because we're acting out a story from a children's book! Clever huh? It's all postmodern and ironic and stuff."

No it isn't, it's just annoying. All the way through this movie has this smug feeling of "Doing satire" of being a self-referential send-up of the Errol-Flynn movie magic. It's ironic fan-fiction. If it were a genre of music, it would be Filk.

The jokes are completely unfunny. You can tell they're there because the cast deliver them with such gusto, convinced that each turkey is gold-dust. Consider this:

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line"!

That stuff about 'a land war in Asia' is supposed to be funny, you can positively hear the movie saying:

"eh? eh? You see what I did there?"

"Yes. It wasn't funny."

"Nah, you just don't get it. I just broke the fourth wall, 'cause you didn't expect-"

"No, I totally got it, it's not that hard to understand, it just wasn't funny. What else have you got?"

This is the tone of the whole movie. It didn't make me laugh once, but remained smugly convinced of it's own comic brilliance. I understand jokes fade with age, but there should be some afterglow, some hint that they were once funny.

Then, there's the characters. Early on we meet the leading lady and leading man. Initially they are completely, mindblowingly, dull. I did not give a hoot if they lived or died, but I figured things hadn't gotten moving yet. I was right, later we get to know them in more detail, and they move from dull to annoying.

The leading man, Wesley, turns up later pretending to be a pirate, and behaves like a bit of a git. We later discover that he's just pretending to be a git, but by then it's too late. You see, Wesley is a colossal Mary Sue (yes, I know I've railed against the whole 'Mary Sue' thing in the past, but even a stopped clock is right some of the time). He's always confident, and better than everyone else in everything, and he thinks he's charming, but he's just kinda... cardboard. The taint of 'smug git' that he brings on himself won't wash off, because there's not enough character there to supplant it. It's like my mother used to say "If you pull faces like that, the wind will change, and you'll be stuck that way". Wesley pretends to be a git and it becomes the lasting impression, because when he takes off his git mask there's nothing underneath.

But worse than the leading man is the leading lady.

Stop, exhibit B. Something is missing from this movie. Normally in a film like this there's a Good Girl and a Bad Girl that the hero has to choose between. Now, I always have an issue that the hero generally choses wrong. The Good Girl is normally a little frumpy and dim and whiny, whereas the Bad Girl is sassy and smart, a provocative dresser, obviously good in bed, and has her own interstellar battle-cruiser (and two helmets). However there's normally *something* about the Good Girl that lets me maintain some shred of belief and respect for the hero's decision.

"The Princess Bride" features no Bad Girl. In fact it features no other females of reproductive age that have names or a single line of dialogue. I think we see some peasant girls in a crowd scene, but that's it.

Why do you think this would be, eh?

Well, in a scene involving "Rodents Of Unusual Size"...

"You thought we'd say 'Giant Rats' but that wouldn't have been funny! Eh? Eh?"

"It wasn't funny."

"No, you just don't get it, you see-"

"I got it. It wasn't funny. What else have you got?"

... in this scene involving giant rats, the hero is downed and savaged by one such rat. His sword lies on the ground some distance away. The princess stands with her mouth open, watching the love of her life get molested. Surprisingly Wesley at no point cries "Oi! Princess! A little help here?!", but then when she finally does realise she should act, you understand why he didn't ask for her help.

The princess, after watching Wesley get rat-raped for and extended period of time, finally realises she should do something, and picks up a stick.

A stick.

There's a sword on the ground, and she picks up a stick.

She then proceeds to fall over in her high heels. The rat turns on her (not sure why, she didn't hit it or anything), and she kinda pokes at it, misusing the stick.

Now, I don't want you to think I'm coming at this from a feminist perspective. I'm coming at this from a biological perspective. This stupid bitch doesn't even know how to use a stick. A STICK. What did she evolve from? Monkeys know how to hit things with sticks! Monkeys aren't even apes! And what kind of human being has a choice between a sword and a stick, and thinks 'I'm going for the stick, that's advanced weaponry that is?'

Wesley, you're a bit of a git, but still I'm speaking to you as a friend. You plan to marry this... this.. creature? I understand you feel sorry for her, I do too, it's a shame, but if your children are lumbered with her genes then they're toast! She's pathetic! She needs protection in some kind of institution, but for heaven's sake not the institution of marriage!

This is why there's no other females in the movie. It would be egregious of Wesley to marry this simpering dimwit if he had any other choices at all. If there was a scene where so much as a milk-maid had a line of dialogue the audience would be screaming "Marry her!"

So again, they knew the film was bad, they had to take out all the other women to hide how poorly realised their lead female character was.

And then it's back to the awful jokes. Here's another prize witticism.

Sonny, true love is the greatest thing, in the world-except for a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe

In fact, go to the imdb quotes page for this movie, and you can read more and more of them. Are any of them funny? Can you imagine a scenario, a world, a situation in which they would be? Would they be funny if you were twelve? Would you think the 'Don't get involved in a land war in Asia' thing would be funny if you were twelve?

And periodically we flick back to Granddad and the kid, the kid sitting with his video-game joystick set aside (always clearly in view). Improbably the kid seems to find this turgid rubbish engrossing. No real kid would.

You see, this claims to be a movie for kids. It isn't. It's a movie for grandparents that declares the superiority of the paper-based media that they grew up with, that's real culture that is, and one day the kids will realise and turn back to it. There was a lot of this propaganda in the 80s against anything computer generated or electronic. Rockers with electric guitars turned into their parents, complaining that the new music was 'just soulless noise'. Video-games were derided. Cyberpunk was dismissed as 'not real science fiction' by the lovers of phallic silver space-rockets.

And this solves the mystery of Pixar. Pixar is a company full of those poor kids who were forced to see this movie. They knew it was propaganda by the older generations trying to discredit the culture they were growing up in, the culture of pixels, not paper. Well, revenge is a dish best served at the box office. The kids at Pixar knew that their artform had been dissed, and that this would not stand. The plan was simple, they would meet this insult to the computer artist by demonstrably producing a better product. CGI-characters made of pixels would act cardboard 'human' characters off the screen. Their hero would be likeable, their jokes would be funny, the clever bits would be clever, and the princess would be a woman worth fighting for. They would remake and BURY this second-rate, amateurish piece of book-fetish propaganda. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

And they did. Shrek isn't just a better movie, it's orders of magnitude better. That's how you know who's won the fight, last one standing, and the winner is Pixar.

Some More Movie Reviews

2011-12-07T13:07:00.004Z

Some movie reviews, just because it's been a while since I've done them. Hopefully these will be less sweary that some previous reviews have been (you know, time used to be when I wouldn't dare use a naughty word, but then some time in my early twenties something went 'pop' in my head).

Chocolate

A Thai martial arts flick and contender for one of the worst films I've ever seen (I'm sure I've seen worse, I just can't think where). Let's just consider the plot synopsis:

An autistic girl who can quickly learn martial arts mostly just from watching others must fight to get back money owed to her wrong-side-of-the-tracks mother, as it's needed for the mother's cancer treatment.

Now, if you're thinking "Well, I don't know, that sounds pretty awesome!", well, I'd agree with you. How could you fail to deliver with a pitch like that? I mean it has everything: the protagonist's struggle to find a place in a world they can't understand, the mother forced to accept that she can no longer protect and care for her offspring, guilt, tragedy, pathos, and kung fu! (Probably mostly Muay Thai, but really (and I say this on the grounds that my Wing Chun teacher probably ain't reading my blog) it's all pretty much the same stuff, people kicking each other in the head) Well the people who made this movie have somehow managed to snatch failure from the very jaws of success.

How did they do this?

Simple, they threw out all the emotional stuff, and just decided to make the move about fighting. Lots of fighting. Endless, endless fighting. Interminable fighting. Fighting without end. The problem is, if you don't care about the combatants, then fighting very quickly gets boring. If you care about the characters, then watching them bicker at the breakfast table can be mesmerising. If, however, you blasted through the character's emotional development to get to the fighting, then we can't really relate to them, we don't really care about them, and thus watching them fight is like watching someone else playing a video game.

And the fights aren't particularly differentiated. There's only so many ways you can kick someone in the head. It often feels a lot like we're watching the same fight over and over and over. And over. AND OVER. And then some.

There's a scene where the protag, who has been watching Bruce Lee movies, suddenly starts aping Bruce, making all the weird noises. Now I have to admit that I was thinking "Well, this is might be pretty accurate, given that she's autistic, I don't know for sure but I understand that people with the condition are very good mimics", but alas it didn't work. It came over as ridiculous. And that scene sums the whole movie up, it's a great idea, but it needs a little subtlety and scaffolding to make it work, and the film-makers decided they didn't have time for all that, let's just cut straight to fighting.

I was also very uncomfortable about some of the characterisations. There's a 'Lady boy' gang in the movie, but they're all cast as villainous characters. I felt that if you're going to have transsexual characters in a movie then fine, and if some are villainous, then fine, but there should be one positive one in there to show that you're not linking transsexuals and villainy. Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but it made me squirmy.

But that's a minor detail compared to the crushing ennui of the endless fights. Worst of all, a character who has just been savagely beaten by the protag will often get back up after having had a brief lay-down to catch their breath, resulting in multiple "What, this guy again?!!" moments. So not only are there endless mooks, but they recharge back to full fighting ability after fifteen seconds of downtime. By the end of this movie I was screaming "Stay the f*ck DOWN! Please, just stay down!" at the screen and telling the protag "Pick up one of the fallen guns and start shooting the m********k**s in the head, then they won't keep coming back!" This is a movie where, when one of the villains falls to their certain death (surely they can't be tough enough to come back from that?! Oh, thank god, they're not) you cheer not because it's the delivery of righteous justice upon the wicked, but simply because that's one down and you're a little closer to the end.

This movie is not a good advert for Thai cinema. I'm sure there are other movies out there that are, but this one ain't it.

Monsters

I really liked this movie, though I still can't say why. It's "Before Sunrise" crossed with "Apocalypse Now" crossed with... I don't know, something else, something with giant alien squids. "Before Sunrise" and "Apocalypse Now" are two of my fave films, but I wouldn't have expected their hybrid offspring to be this fit.

Basically Mexico has been invaded by building-sized alien animals that look a bit like a cross between an octopus and a spider, and an American photographer is entrusted with safely escorting a rich tourist girl back to the USA through the 'infected zone'. Meantime the Americans are randomly bombing everywhere to try and deal with the threat (once I might have said this was insulting stereotyping, but now we know it to be truth-in-celluloid). That's about it, plot wise, the film is just us watching their relationship grow as they wander through Mexico meeting people and seeing wonders. There's really very little else I can say about it, it's really a very simple thing but it was mesmerising to watch.

The aliens are wisely kept just off screen most of the time, but when they do make their final appearance they really work. This isn't a monster movie, I'm not even sure what kindof movie it is, it's almost its own genre.

Only a couple of criticisms spring to mind. One is that the girl was just a little too vulnerable and girly. I know this is probably just how we tourists are when we've wandered from the safe roads, but I just didn't see how she was in a war-zone to start with. How had her rich daddy let his beloved little girl run off to such a place? It's a bit like finding a toddler wandering about in the middle of a riot.

The other issue I had was that we frequently see downed American aircraft littering the streets and jungles of Mexico. How are the octopuses bringing down F22's? Do they have some form of biological anti-aircraft capability? They can't just reach into the sky and pluck them down, surely? I would have accepted almost any plausible, hand-wavey explanation for this, I just wanted something to hang my hat on, but nothing was ever forthcoming, and thus this question bugged me all the way through the film.

But those are small churlish complaints about what was, overall, a very good movie.

Source Code

Duncan Jones' second directorial outing, and one that confirms that 'Moon' wasn't just luck.

A man awakens on a train, but doesn't know how he got there, who the people around him are, or who the person they think he is, is. He quickly discovers that he's in some kind of simulation, that there's a bomb on the train and he has to find it, but it's clear from the outset that things aren't quite as simple as all that (I'm trying to avoid too many spoilers here).

This is a tight movie with only two or three sets that it uses over and over again (in this regard not so different from 'Moon'). When he's not on the train the protag is in some kind of 'capsule' where his only connection to the outside is through a female military officer at the end of a video-link (who has, I have to say it, distractingly hot lips. I don't know why I had to say that, but I had to get it off my chest).

It's a workmanlike offering, clever ideas, well acted, very well paced. It's not earth-shaking, it's not going to make you think anything you didn't think before, but it's a satisfying and enjoyable watch.

There's really not to much I can say about 'Source Code', or 'Monsters'. They're great films to watch, but they aren't particularly deep, but they're not 'lacking' depth because they're not supposed to have depth. They're supposed to be fun movies with some nice ideas, and in this they succeed.

The American

I'd heard mixed things about this movie, but it may be the one I liked most of all recent viewings. George Clooney is a man who makes weapons (and sometimes uses them too) for some... organization that does... something (presumably killing people). His past is catching up with him, and he goes to small Italian hill-town to hide out, but he must complete one last job-

Yes, stop me if you think you've heard this one before.

It's riddled with cliche, but that's kindof the point. It's one big homage to 1960's European crime/spy thrillers. Despite being American and playing an American character Clooney looks like a contemporary of Alain Delon or Marcello Mastroianni as he wanders the town and countryside, or drives across countries, or sits brooding in cafes. He's a figure from a Europe that probably never existed outside of those 60's thrillers in which all the spies really knew how to dress, and how to look good driving a Saab or Citroen through the Italian countryside, and Europe was beautiful, mysterious, modern and hip, and most of all perfectly lit. There's a look to those old movies that this film captures exquisitely. Some reviews complain about the way that this film is so preposterously beautiful. The town is beautiful, the countryside is beautiful, the women are beautiful, and Clooney himself is beautiful, there's something about the way he looks that means you can set him in a room and it's instantly an iconic image. The film does look like a Patek Phillipe advert, but that's a good look.

Another thing that people have complained about is the pacing, this is a movie in which nothing happens for a long time, no car chases, no explosions. Instead there's just a steadily mounting atmosphere of dread as a kind of invisible box closes around Clooney's character.

This movie contains cliches because it re-runs an old story, and finally does things *right*. I've seen movies like this, where the brooding gangster, spy or assassin is confronted by the worthlessness of his own existence, and realises he has lost in some Faustian gamble. As he drives around in his flash car through beautiful places, bonking beautiful women and eating in the best restaurants, we are led to believe that his life is lonely and unsatisfying. Few, if any, movies pull this ridiculous claim off. "The American" does. Early on it punches you in the face with the fact that the protag is in hell, a very well-appointed and designer hell, yes, but hell nonetheless. At no point did I doubt that Clooney's character was suffering and paying the price for the bargain he had made. The film does somewhat beat us over the head with this point, having one character actually tell Clooney that he's living in hell, but it does it artfully and I think it gets away with it. In some ways it's a critique of modern consumer culture, as here is a character who has money, can go to exotic places, can live La Dolce Vita, except that he can never stay in one place for any length of time, can trust no-one, sees threats in every shadow or strange comment. Thus, the good life is always in view but just out of reach. He hasn't the time, or the trust, to stop and enjoy it, and no-one at all to enjoy it with. He's a modern Tantalus, and for this he has sold his soul. What's the point of having an omega watch when there's no-one to be impressed?

There's a few things in this movie that would normally annoy me a little. There's a lot of gratuitous female flesh and sex scenes. I'm always uncomfortable sitting in cinemas with mixed audiences when the director decides he'd better put some naked girls in the script 'for the lads' (although on the other hand, where else am I going to get an eyeful? But the point is that these films are made for general audiences, it's the same issue I have with covers of SF mags). Also sex scenes are usually cases of "Let's stop the plot and bonk", but what's the point of watching someone else do it? I don't watch film of other people eating, it's not fun to watch someone else play a video-game, so why do filmmakers think we want to watch other people (pretend to) have sex?

However, in this movie these elements somehow work. The naked women (mostly local prostitutes) are... kindof illusionary pleasures that the protag can have for a while, but which must then fade away. I felt the sex scene was telling us something about the protag, but I must admit I didn't know what, but I felt that it was there, I just couldn't grasp it.

Clooney puts in a fantastic performance here. Normally when an actor has a 'schtick', something they do well, they just keep doing it. Jason Statham keeps doing the Jason Statham thing, Sean Connery was always Sean Connery. Clooney's schtick, from what I've seen, has been that smiling rogue character, a touch of Han Solo and a touch of Thomas Crown. In this film Clooney completely throws that away, rarely ever smiling, and often coming across as somewhat unpleasant. He does facial expressions fantastically, and in many scenes you can read his mind (or his character's mind) straight off his face, and boy does his face have a lot to say.

Respect is also due to Thekla Reuten, who plays the (of course) beautiful assassin that Clooney is making the gun for. She doesn't get much screentime, but for the time she gets she really lights up the screen, or maybe she darkens it. She's astoundingly creepy as a woman who at first seems ingenue and vulnerable, and then turns it around on both the viewer and the protag. When first we meet her we (and George, judging from his face) get the impression that she might be a young woman trying to right some wrongs or be a one-woman-army-of-revenge. We've seen George in movies like this, and probably he's going to have to step in and help her out, like a modern-day 'True Grit', right? But the second time we meet her she quickly takes control of the situation, setting George on the back foot and making him realise that he's either misread things, or been deliberately misled. George, paranoid at the best of times given his past, is increasingly spooked as the woman shows all the signs of being a highly trained killer. She's told him there's only one 'target', but asked for a rapid-fire weapon with lots of rounds, some of them explosive. When we thought she didn't know what she was doing, we might just smile and shake our heads, now that it's evident that she very much knows what she's doing, we have to ask "Why would you need all that for one target?"

As she tests the weapon George's face becomes more and more perplexed about what she wants the gun for, what is she going to do? Admittedly, given that he's made a living of handing guns to random people it's a bit late for him to start asking questions now, but somehow Clooney and Reuten make the scene convincing despite that. One feels that Reuten is preparing to commit some manner of atrocity beyond anything else that Clooney has been involved in before.

Cinema has given us a number of beautiful lady assassins, some more convincing as others, but Reuten's stands out. I found her very convincing, whether it was the ice-blue eyes or the clipped way she spoke, or the polished-diamond perfection of how she dressed, or just the way George's face changed when she was around, you bought her as a deadly, almost inhuman thing. She fits the film perfectly, like a component in the gun George is making. She's another beautiful thing that you wouldn't want to be around, a glamorous, dressy woman that you'd cross the street to avoid. Thus she epitomises the way that Clooney's life has given him all the things he wants, but tainted them with evil so that they are no longer desirable. When, in for me the defining moment of the film, she unexpectedly starts making romantic advances to Clooney you can see he doesn't like it, and it's completely believable because Reuten's character is so... well... creepy. You wouldn't want this scary bitch coming onto you either, no matter how well she dresses and how beautiful she looks.

It seems to me that she is as trapped as Clooney, and her advances are an attempt to reach out to another of her kind who might be able to accept and connect with her. Although, after their fake picnic excursion to test the gun, her voice is mocking when she tells Clooney she had a wonderful time, one suspects that she goes home to her luxuriously swish apartment and cries herself to sleep (well, no, she wouldn't do that, but she'd sit silently suffering, reading books until the phone rang with her next 'job'). So maybe spending time with another human being testing a gun to be used in a murder really is the highpoint of her day. That's how low these beautiful people have sunk.

One thing that I liked, that again other people have sneered at, is that every time we meet Reuten's assassin, her hair looks different. Different color, different style. One reason I liked it was that it's about the only infusion of humor in an otherwise dark movie, and I enjoyed predicting what her hair would look like in her next scene. I wondered too what her motive was: Was she seeking a style that would attract Clooney? Or was she a lonely person who pretends to be someone else every day? Was it another symbol of empty consumerism, wherein you can make yourself over any way you like, but there's no-one to tell you your hair looks good?

Clooney, of course, eventually tries to escape his deal with the devil, and of course that's not possible. This movie runs on roads that are worn by the tracks of other traffic, but it goes through the motions better than some of the source material. "The American" is strongly similar to Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai", but in some ways it actually hits the mark better. Alain Delon's hitman was somehow glamorous, someone you could fantasise about being, and thus the whole deal-with-the-devil thing wasn't quite so believable with him. Clooney's character is someone you wouldn't want to be under any circumstances, possibly the first time that I've seen glamorous damnation convincingly done on screen. In managing to portray that, this film aims high and succeeds where a lot of other movies have failed.

This is a film that it seems to me has been very misunderstood by critics who can't see past its surface features. It has style, and thus people think it's all style and no substance. It has cliches, and thus people think it's simply derivative. But this is a film that finally says convincingly some of the things that it's ancestors were trying to say, but didn't quite manage to. It's a homage to those 60's thrillers, but it also closes the book on them by finally doing things just right.

Who is Jon Cockle? (More trance music)

2011-11-28T23:49:00.002Z

In a recent post I pointed to some of my fave places to find 'trance' music online. One of these was "John 00 Fleming's Global Trance Grooves". Well, November 2011's episode of this podcast is a stormer, so I thought it was worthy of mention. It features a mix by a guy called 'Jon Cockle' that I think is an example of what young people today call 'Banging'. At least, if this isn't what they're talking about then I can't imagine what they do mean, because this goes off like a string of firecrackers in an echo chamber.

Hear it here:

http://www.john00fleming.co.uk/mixes/podcasts/Nov08/JOOF-GTG-November_2011.mp3

So, that was Novacon

2011-11-13T13:36:00.002Z

So, Novacon.

Firstly I should admit that I went to Novacon with an ulterior motive. I had a plan for getting a Birmingham (or perhaps West-Midlands) writers group going. The major reason I wanted to do this was to get a group together to brainstorm our half-formed ideas. Critting finished works is already admirably covered by the 'Hopefull-monsters' online group that Dwayne Minton and I started last year. I had an idea that face-to-face meetups might allow a greater cross-polination of ideas and information, as it's hard to get that 'round table brainstorm' effect going with online groups. However, I've been to 'writers workshops' where, as far as I could tell, almost no-one actually wrote, many were still looking for the 'right software' for doing the job (I use vi ) and of those that wrote, none had achieved any paid publication, so I was looking for people with some publication credits under their belts. I tried posting to 'gumtree', but got only one response, not enough to support a group. I've now abandoned the idea, they just aren't out there.

I turned up yesterday at 9:30, fearing that I'd have missed the first items on the programme (I didn't know because full programme wasn't available online, or sent to me by email). Reception was closed, and the people I met in the hotel bar told me that it started at 10:00, and that reception should be open soon(ish). Indeed, when I asked them "Have I missed the first programme item?" they rather looked at me like I was mad (people looking at me like I'm mad was to be a lietmotief of Novacon). To be fair, everyone was getting breakfast in the hotel restaurant at this time, and my memories of Eastercon starting earlier might be inaccurate. Eastercon felt a lot more 'organized' than Novacon, and thus I guess I've come to 'remember' that it started at 8:00 am start with Reveille being broadcast through the hotel's P.A. system at 7:30. I suspect that didn't really happen.

The first item on the programme was a science talk on the subject of Dark Matter by Dr Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham. This was excellent, Dr Gray was an animated and accomplished speaker, and her lecture focused on the exploration of dark matter,
what's led us to think it's there, and how experiments are done to probe its nature. Up till this moment, I'd never really had a 'handle' on dark matter, because everything I'd read about it basically said 'well, we think there's a load of stuff missing from the universe, because the experimental results imply it', and that was pretty much it. Dr Gray went into the details of why we think there is dark matter: galaxies 'lens' objects more than they should, and spiral galaxies don't rotate like they have a dense core (which visibly, they do) but rather like they have an evenly distributed spherical mass, implying that there's more stuff there than we can see. At this moment it was obvious to me that the missing mass was alien dyson spheres, but Dr Gray crushed this hope by pointing out that we have a good theory for how much 'normal' matter should exist in the universe (personally I'd be happy to throw this theory over if it got us dyson-sphere aliens, but the scientific community lacks my radical 'can do' approach). I then figured "Ah! It's 'rough space', we assume spacetime is smooth because it seems that way at the small (stellar) scale, but at a galactic scale, it isn't". As though reading my mind Dr Gray went on to describe and experiment that showed that the effect was tied to galaxies, so was likely some form of matter rather than just a random warping of spacetime. At this point I gave up formulating theories, as she was clearly one of those negative people with an objection to everything.

Anyways, a good start to the con. But then it kinda went downhill. The thing is, Novacon is small, despite supposedly being one of the biggest UK cons. It's not really a convention about science-fiction, it's more of a social meetup for a bunch of people who've known each other for years and as it only has one stream of programming if you're not one of the 'Novacon veterans' and aren't interested in the current item on the programme, you can find yourself at a bit of a loss. Also, very little of the conversation was about SF, it was mostly people catching up with each other. It was less a con, I felt, than a reunion. Thus even eavesdropping proved to be somewhat uninteresting as I didn't know the people being gossiped about.

The other thing about Novacon, is it's OLD, and I say that as someone who's 42 himself. Almost everyone was my age or older, many had silver or grey hair. I don't mean to be ageist, but looking about one had to wonder 'How much longer can Novacon run?' Many people I spoke to said it was very much 'The same people every year'. Well, when those people are finally gone, what's left? The handful of people under 25 that I saw there looked hopelessly lost and lonely. In many ways Novacon is, I feel, a metaphor for modern science fiction itself: it's not doing anything for the younger generation, and no-one minds that, it's become a nostalgia club for the 'die hards', and when they die and it dies with them, well, what of that?

Still, I don't want to get too down on Novacon, it's problems are the universal demographic and image problems of science fiction, and I still found stuff to occupy me for most of the day. The dealers room, though small, was good because there was someone in there selling old paperbacks for a quid a shot. I'm someone who doesn't normally buy books at cons, but I found one or two unusual items (a collection of Samuel R Delany's short stories) and you can't balk at that price. As I was browsing a hand whipped out and grabbed a couple of 'Women's Press SF' books with the focused determination of a mantis seizing its prey. I instantly knew who was standing next to me. I turned and said "Excuse me, are you Ian Sales?" Thus, the man who recently brought my story for his 'Rocket Science' anthology was the second person to look at me like I was mad. (I should, in retrospect, have done the opening line differently. I should have simply said "Ah, Ian Sales I believe," without looking up from the books, then turned to face him. This would, of course, be terrifying, but THAT'S THE POINT. If people are going to think I'm mad, they should at least think I'm mad and able to read minds!

Anyways, I had a brief conversation with Ian during which he recomended many books from those on the table, all of which I turned down. I had only a tenner in my pocket, and I've got more books than I could ever read, so I was trying not to buy. I learned that someone else in 'Rocket Science' had set a story in the Kuiper belt, and railed somewhat that I'd wanted to set my story there, but just hadn't been able to come up with a plot that I really felt fitted the location. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that I didn't, because I'm not sure Ian would have gone for *two* Kuiper-belt stories.

Next I encountered Ian Whates at the Newcon Press stall. What I discovered here was that Ian is a remarkable salesman with an answer for any objection. I wound up buying a 'Solaris books' anthology that he'd edited, and count myself strong-willed to have come away having only bought that. Ian did not look at me like I was crazy at any point while he was selling to me.

However, my mission to hook up with other writers wasn't really going anywhere. I had expected there to be legions of them, so I could interview prospective members for the group, and select those who seemed to have good ideas, knowledge, or otherwise fit in with my conception of what I wanted the group to be. However, Novacon was mostly full of consumers of SF, not producers, and those producers that were there seemed too 'big' for my little group, (I'm not about to try to recruit Charles Stross or Dave Langford). I decided to take a more aggressive approach, and ask people directly whether they knew any aspring writers, or whether anyone else was already doing this kind of thing.

The overwhelming answer seemed to be 'No'. Everyone I spoke to forwarded me on to someone else. Some people said that the 'Brum SF group' had a writers workshop, some people said it didn't. Eventually I got referred once again to Ian Whates, because people said that as an editor and publisher he should know lots of aspiring writers. But he looked at me like I was, perhaps, a little crazy.

In the course of all this I did pick up hints about online resources that I could be using, like http://little-details.livejournal.com/ and this has led me to very much question the whole idea of a 'face-to-face' group, as there's online solutions available that I didn't know about, and it doesn't seem like I'm likely to find many other writers, we are a rarer breed than I thought.

Finally, I owe an appology to Dave Langford (he of 'Ansible'). Not knowing anyone at Novacon, and spotting him as a name I knew and thus had an 'in' to start a conversation with, I bought myself a half-pint of 'Black Sheep' and sat down with him. Unfortunately, about half-way through the conversation, something happened in my brain. I'm not a big drinker, and hadn't eaten anything that day, but even this is not an explaination of how, after only a quarter of a pint, I was suddenly pissed. It happened very suddenly too, like a switch being turned on. Thus, poor Dave was subjected to a kind of 'stream of conciousness' rant on my part, most of which I can barely remember, wherin I lectured him (a long time observer of SF) on "what's wrong with the genre" and god knows what else. He graciously put up with this for a long time. I should be more wary of alcohol in future.

Overall I quite enjoyed my day at Novacon, but a day was enough. In future, I think I'll save myself for the larger and more varied 'Eastercon'. Indeed, I do wonder if all the smaller cons suffer from the 'same faces every year' issue that I encountered here, and whether they really offer anything for the casual visitor.

SciFi Music, Psytrance, Dark Ambient, etc

2011-11-05T01:15:00.002Z

Whether I'm writing code or fiction, I find it really helps to have some appropriate music to block out the world and help you focus. When writing fiction, the music can also set the tone for what you're doing.

Recently I discovered internet radio. It'd been out there for years, I'd just never realised. Internet radio stations are basically just webservers set up to push an endless mp3 file to anyone who connects. Prior to this, some time back, I came across a few podcasts of dance music. At that time I was something of a dance music skeptic, indeed I'd been 'off' electronic music since being a childhood fan of Jarre and Vangelis, as the NME-reading mafia of my youthful days had managed to convince me that the only 'real' music was shoegazing kids mashing electric guitars; but of course free material gets anyone's attention, and they've gradually brainwashed me into becoming a trance-head.

I've never seen a genre of music as fragmented as modern electronic music. Every subdivision subdivides further upon inspection, it's kindof fractal. I've been drawn to a grouping of styles broadly called 'trance', and also to 'ambient/chillout'.

Trance is generally 'dancey' high-BPM music, and contains a subdivision known as 'psychadelic' or 'goa' or 'psy-trance'.

Psytrance is all about dancing yourself into a quasi hallucinogenic state and tends to be gleefully trashy and unrestrained, it's not afraid to seem a little ridiculous if there's fun to be had. This shows in the samples which are often from sci-fi B-movies, children's tv shows, anywhere (but especially 'Dune'). If it were a sci-fi genre, it would be space opera.

There's also 'progressive' trance which has a particular structure, a 'build up' where the BPM or other 'energetic' aspects of the music gradually increase (often, it seems to me, by layering on more and more components, much like Tabla players start off with a simple beat, and then layer beats over it until it becomes complex), until things get to a climax, where a 'cool down' occurs (a section that lowers the BPM and lets everyone get their breath back, (I first remember encountering this in the KLF's "America: What time is love?") and then a final stage that involves restarting the refreshed audience for a mad sprint to the final climax.

Progressive trance is somewhat more snooty than goa/psy and concerned with technical excellence and achieving an 'orchestral' sound. Samples will be more 'high-brow', from commentary and communications during real space missions, for instance. If it were a sci-fi genre, it would be Clarkian Hard SF.

One style that always pops up is 'Dark'. If there's anything, music, fiction, gateaux, there's always someone going to stick 'Dark' in front of the name and instantly create a new subdivision. So yes, there's dark trance, which tends to be aggressive, and sounds rather like being pursued through echoing tunnels by rampant sentient drum-machines, pissed as hell and armed to the teeth. Sci-fi samples will tend to be from dystopian sources (Bladerunner, for instance). If it were a sci-fi genre, it would be cyberpunk.

There's lots of other styles of trance, or at least lots of other names, but these are the only ones I've had any real success in identifying. Of course, as with all things, any particular track will tend to sit across these definitions and resolutely refuse to get in an appropriate box, preferring instead to keep all eight legs in territories belonging to different styles.

Then there's ambient/chillout. This is very low-tempo music with a laid-back or 'droney' feel. I listen to three strands to this:

A loungy 'chillout' style that's kindof like a soundtrack for the yuppie iphone generation (I don't mean that to sound as sneery as it does, I just mean that it's music you could imagine young, rich, beautiful people listening to as they sip designer cocktails in sushi bars). If it were a sci-fi genre it would be cyberpreppy or 'optimistic sf', or 'Star Trek'. Hmm... that sounds even more sneery.

'Space Music', which is very dreamy, cosmic-sounding music full of wonder and majesty, but definitely upbeat, optimistic. It generally has no samples, as these human noises would detract from the timeless wonder of the cosmos. If it were a science fiction genre it would be... hmm, I can't think of one that fits. The closest I can imagine is watching a cgi-heavy BBC 'Wonders of the Universe' documentary narrated by Bryan Cox after having just taken ecstasy.

'Dark Ambient', which is what Space-Music will sound like when the stars are right. The full horror of an uncaring cosmos in which we are less than gnats, and where cyclopean intelligences lurk in the timeless voids of space the mere sight of whom will make our sanity run out of our noses, is captured here in convenient .mp3 format. If it were a sci-fi genre, it would be Lovecraft crossed with Dick and 1984. Samples will tend to be of people screaming and crying, which sounds simply awful, but it's generally very well done. This is creepy, sinister stuff, not for dancing and not music you should be listening to while tripping.

Then, of course, there's breakbeat, drum-n-bass, tribal house, etc, etc. More styles of electronic music than one can count. Interestingly though, much of this music shows strong Sci-fi influences, particularly in the use of vocal samples from sci-fi movies played over the tracks, yet I perceive that there's little crossover between this music and written sci-fi. The people who read/write sci-fi seem to have no connection to the people who play/listen to it.

So, where can you find this stuff?

In no particular order:

Dark Ambient Radio: http://www.darkambientradio.de
Stream: http://sc7.spacialnet.com:22018/listen.pls

I must admit, my fave station. Mostly it's sinister 'droney' music, think 'Cthulhu's windchimes' occassionally yoou'll hear things like 'Lux Aeterna' (The choral 'Monolith' music from 2001) and occassionally something loud and aggressive, rise-of-the-demon-possessed-drum-machines.

Global Trance Grooves Podcast: http://www.john00fleming.co.uk/mixes/podcasts/Nov08/podcast.xml

John '00' Fleming's fantastic showcase of mostly progressive (as far as I can tell) trance. Tends to include a 'deep mix' (which is less 'progressive' and more leaning towards ambient, though still dancable) and a 'turbo mix' (high energy progressive).

Favorite episodes are:

July 2010 For two tracks that lean in the 'dark ambient' direction, Dark Soul Project's remix of Kay-D's "My Dreams" and Bart Claessen's "Hartseer".

September 2008 for a great mix by 'Nicholas Bennison', with my fave track being "Hertz - Big Bang (Bryan Cox) remix"

October 2011 an astounding deep mix that ranges from near 'darkish ambient' to an incredible and uplifting finish, with a reworking of a golden oldie from thirty years past.

Digitally Imported has channels and channels of electronic music in many different styles. Of particular interest are:

Space Music Soaring ambient with a sensawanda.

Ambient Soundscapes that are perhaps slightly less wonderous than Space-music.

Chiptunes You couldn't make this up: A channel devoted to music made with the sound chips from games consoles and early 8-bit computers. Some startling results, and some nostalgic bleeping from zx-spectrums.

http://www.di.fm/breaks.pls Breaks/Breakbeat. A style of music that seeks to use complex beat structures that 'break' the expected pattern, but still manage to stay musical.

Tribal House As the name suggests, a lot of drumming and influenced by traditional group drumming/call-and-response singing.

http://listen.di.fm/public3/goapsy.pls Goa/Psy trance.

http://listen.di.fm/public3/progressive.pls Progressive Trance.

http://listen.di.fm/public3/chillout.pls 'Chillout'

http://listen.di.fm/public3/chilloutdreams.pls More chillout

http://listen.di.fm/public3/psychill.pls Psytrance/Chillout fusion.

Radio Schizoid operates out of india, and has a great 4-channels of programming.

Goa/Psytrance

Chillout/Ambient

Progressive

General Electronic Dance Music

On a less trancy 'house' tip, there's http://www.groovelectric.com. This podcast series by Steve Boyett alternates between episodes dedicated to different styles. 'Drum' mixes are 'Tribal House' (involving a lot of drumming). 'Drone' mixes lean more towards an psytrance, in that they're just about pulsing a hypnotic baseline till you get in a groove. Other styles that pop up include the startling 'Swing house', which remixes 'Big band' music from the interwar years.

These are so consistently good that it's hard to pick favorites, but:

Favorite episodes:

The Swing Set Swing House. Whatever will they think of next? Features a great section with samples from 'Superfly'.

Lucid Drumming Fantastic 'Drum' mix, with added politics.

Califunkya when Boyett speaks of "The New Old FUNK" this is surely what he means.

Oblivion Express 'Drone' mix, starts slow and hypnotic, then builds.

Hit Factory another 'Drum/Tribal House' mix.

Drumnation another 'Drum/Tribal House' mix.

The Concrete Jungle House has a love for producing fake 'gospel sermons' about itself, this Drum mix contains something a little different, a New Labor style political speech about how house can 'stand still, or go forwards'.

Tunnel Visions Contains one of the aforementioned 'sermons' ("And yea though I walk through the valley of House, I will fear no groove, for thou DJ is with me!"). What always impresses me is how these fake preachers manage to nail the delivery and vocal trickery of the real thing. Also has the wonderfully sinister song 'Unprepared' by Marco V.

Smokefilled rooms Another eclectic mix that defies catagorization.

Conducting Thunder Excellent Drum 'n Bass mix.

Hit The Funk Pretty much does what it says on the can.

Fifth Down Distinctive, eclectic mix of allsorts from everywhere, including a mix of Dan le Sac VS Scroobius Pip "Thou Shalt always Kill", which was tongue in cheek before being remixed, but now the commandment "Thou shall not make repeatative generic music" sounds very ironic with a drum-machine beat under it, and a startlingly successful mashup of The Prodigy and Enya.

Swimming in the ruins dark atmospheric progressive house.

OMFG bouncing, funky mix, my fave is the 'Missy Eliot' track near the end.

New York, Vegas, and Mars goovey, dancey mix.

Flow A good 'drone' mix for getting in the zone at work. No complex lyrics to distract your brain, this just pulses along, and so should you. One track uses a startlingly familar sample at a little over half-way through the mix.

Gloves Off. Breakbeat and dubstep.

Some 'New Anthologists' that I forgot

2011-10-30T21:55:00.001Z

There's someone I forgot in the list of the 'New Anthologists', and these might be the ur-example. In 2009 husband-and-wife team Leonard Richardson and Sumana Harihareswara published the creative commons anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments (but they didn't publish me, instead giving me one of my earliest experiences of rejection. Well, of literary rejection anyways.) The thing that makes them one of the 'New Anthologists' is that they published an appendix of information specifically intended to help others produce their own anthologies. And yes, there's graphs. If the new anthologising is about anything, it's about free sharing of information and leading by example.

As Leonard himself puts it:

This appendix shows how we did it. It was not difficult but it did take a lot of time spread over four months. I write this appendix in the spirit of the old Whole Earth Catalog, in the hopes of inspiring other people to put in some time and money and produce their own anthologies of the fiction that tickles their fancy. We also hope that we have interesting data to present about the state of the market.

In the appendix Leonard goes into extreme detail about how they did each step of the process, including estimations of time spent, money spent, and descriptions of technologies used, turning 'Thoughtcrime Experiments' into a genuine 'Anthology Howto'.

They didn't, as I recall it, use the net as a means for 'encouraging and shaping' what was being written-for/sent-to the anthology, as "Historical/Future Lovecraft" and "Rocket Science" have done, but they are doing the 'new anthologising' as regards blazing a data-trail for other anthologists to follow.

It's going to be interesting to see if this new approach is adopted by more editors. I'm actually surprised that it hasn't become de riguer already, but it does lay quite a bit of extra work on the editors, and I suppose that's why it hasn't. To me this seems to be the start of a new wave, and soon all anthologies will be made this way. But only time will tell.

I'll be going to Novacon, Insh'Allah

2011-10-26T12:25:00.001+01:00

I should be going to Novacon on the 11-13th November, at the Park Inn in Nottingham. I say 'should' because recently life has not been playing ball, I should have been going to the 'Waveform' electronic music festival, but events conspired to prevent me getting there. However, 'Waveform' was in somerset, Nottingham is really just up the road from me, so I should be able to get there. I mean, this is the 21st century, right? I'll just strap on my personal jetpack and up, up and AWWWAAAAYYY!!

Yeah, right.

Cossmass No More

2011-10-26T08:08:00.002+01:00

Alas, Cossmass Infinities, the British Spec-fic podcast, has ceased publication. Events overtook the editor, Paul Campbell, as they do so often for all of us, and he couldn't keep doing it.

It's a real shame, because any form of literary spec-fic output is getting rare in the UK. All I know of that we have is 'Interzone', 'Jupiter Magazine' and 'Starship Sofa'.

And, of course, it's a real shame because they published one of my stories, and they did a really good job of it. A number of people have commented favorably on Stefanie Gallacher's readings of my story and Ripley Patton's "Sister of the Benevolent Gods", I hope she does some other readings someday, as talented female readers are rare on spec-fic podcasts, if I'm brutally honest.

Ah well, maybe Mr Campbell will be back one day, when the stars are right.

Calling non-fiction writers with something to say about rockets/space/hard-sf

2011-10-17T11:55:00.001+01:00

Can you write non-fiction on technical space-related matters, or on aspects of 'Hard SF'? Would you like to be published in an upcoming anthology?

Ian Sales' Rocket Science anthology coming out from Mutation Press (that's the award-winning Mutation Press) hasn't had enough non-fiction submissions, he says he's "Desperate" for them.

He's also had nothing like as many submissions from women as he'd like, either of fiction or non-fiction.

'Call for Submissions' is here

Know something about rockets/space/hard sf? Want to tell the world about it? This is your chance.

Remember, remember the 5th of November. 'Anywhere but Earth' launches.

2011-10-17T10:05:00.001+01:00

5th of November is the launch date for Cour de Lion publishing's "Anywhere But Earth" anthology, featuring my "Warring Moons Period" story, "Pink Ice in the Jovian Rings".

"Anywhere but Earth" is an anthology of stories set 'anywhere but earth' (mostly on other worlds, I suspect). It's a monster, featuring 29 stories over 728 pages, so there's got to be something in there for everyone.

Alas, I won't be at the launch party, as there is a planet in the way between me and it, and all those promises of cheap hyper-sonic transport to anywhere in the world in a couple of hours that SF made to us in the 70's, never came to pass.

The launch party will be at at the "NSW Writers Centre Speculative Fiction Writers' Festival in Rozelle, Sydney".

Has anyone else noticed that Australia is the new pulsing heart of speculative fiction?

So, in the not too distant future, people will own a book with something I wrote in it!

Rise of the New Anthologists

2011-10-15T01:06:00.001+01:00

I've been watching the progress of a number of upcoming spec-fic anthologies, and I think that we are seeing the rise of a new approach to Anthologies. The new approach is characterized by the use of the web to provide information to writers, readers, and other anthologists about an anthology and the process of creating it.

The basic approach of anthologies up till now, it seems to me, has been to announce a call for submissions, and then when the deadline passes maybe post a table of contents, and then have a launch party. Many people are still working to this model, where the first sign that an anthology is happening is the call for submissions, and then there's a long silence until it appears on the shelves.

However, nowadays editors have blogs, and a number of them have been blogging about the process of producing an anthology. This has the effect of making an anthology into an ongoing 'happening' rather than a book that just appears a year after the call for submissions. Not only is this a good marketing idea, building anticipation for the anthology before it is released, but it makes the anthology into a datasource from which we can learn things about who is writing, what is being written, and what the process of producing an anthology is like. Perhaps most importantly, it can be used to feedback to writers to tell them what they should, or should not, be submitting. How many editors in times gone by must have lamented "If only I had some way to tell people to stop submitting stories set in (?) where a (?) has to (??) in order to (?) their (??), if I see one more like that, I'll scream!" Well, now you can, you can use a blog to report story types or features that you are just seeing too much of. Suddenly, you've got a tool for making a better, more diversified anthology.

Not only does this new approach help writers and assist in marketing the anthology, but it also assists other editors who are coming into the 'anthology game' for the first time. Blogging about the process of making an anthology leaves a footprint that allows other anthologists to see what they are letting themselves in for, and what pitfalls they might face.

So, the anthology editors who are doing this new thing, from what I've seen so far, are:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia for 'Historical Lovecraft' and 'Future Lovecraft'

Ryan North Matthew Bennardo and David Malki for 'Machine of Death'

Ian Sales for 'Rocket Science'

Now, before you think that I'm just promoting editors who are going to publish my work, I can tell you that only one of these anthologies has accepted work from me. Silvia Moreno-Garcia rejected my genre-changing-work-of-utter-brilliance (so one can't be a visionary in all things!) and I don't expect to get anywhere with 'Machine of Death', which has received almost two-thousand submissions. Only Ian Sales has accepted my work (clearly recognizing me as an upcoming genius, or perhaps just as a potentially vengeful lunatic who lives on the same small island as him). Furthermore there are other anthologies that have accepted work from me, but which I don't feel are quite doing this 'new thing' that I'm seeing.

So, what do the 'New Anthologizing' look like?

Silvia Moreno-Garcia simply used her own blog to post status reports about her anthologies, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO WHAT SHE WAS GETTING IN THE SLUSH. I say 'simply', but I don't see a lot of other anthologies doing this, and it's groundbreaking.

http://silviamoreno-garcia.com/blog/2010/10/historical-lovecraft-an-update/

That post might not look groundbreaking, but it's real-time feedback to writers thinking of submitting to the anthology telling them "We've got too much of this, and not enough of that. You can maximise your chances of acceptance by doing the other". This is important because no-one can be utterly sure what the slush is going to consist of. Imagine you were, for instance, like Ian Sales, building an anthology of hard-SF set in space. What do you think most of the submissions will be? Well I'd have thought 'Space war' might be a common one, but from what I can see he's getting little of that. Perhaps this is because many people are trying to avoid the obvious, but they wind up all going for the same idea as a result. How many people might be thinking "Hey, I bet no-one else will send a heist story!"? Suddenly the editor finds themselves unexpectedly drowning in heist stories, but they can now do something about this, they can blog-post saying 'Enough of the Ocean's Eleven knock-offs!'

However, the real game-changer for me was this post:

http://silviamoreno-garcia.com/blog/2010/12/slush-stats-crunching-numbers/

Yes, everything's better with pies.

This allows people to see what's really going on with submissions, and it just looks cool. Graphs illustrate things in a way that simply saying "we've only had 20% submissions from women" doesn't really achieve.

The Machine of Death anthology is trying all kinds of things, (podcasting, side-competitions, etc), to promote the book. They are really trying every way they can think of to leverage the web for marketing. That alone, however, wouldn't really count as being part of this 'new wave' I'm seeing. But, they published a very important graph:

This graph is important because it shows an aspect of the submissions process, and one that other anthologists might want to know about. If you're working on your first anthology, then it's very useful to know that you're going to see submissions rates pick up SHARPLY towards the end of the reading period. This tells editors not to panic too much if the submissions rate is low at the start of the period, and to not get too complacent about the work load through the early to middle run of submissions, and to gird their loins for a major uphill struggle towards the end.

Finally, and for me so far the ultimate expression of this 'new wave' (probably just because it's the most recent, and it's still ongoing) is Ian Sales' "Rocket Science" anthology. Like 'Machine of Death' Ian has created a dedicated website for rocket science, but unlike the other members of the 'New Anthologists' he's posting every week on what he's seeing in the slushpile so far. For my money the most important graph he's produced is this one:

Why this one? Well, this is real-time feedback to writers concerning an important aspect of the slush: What type of stories are coming in. From this one can instantly see that 'First Contact', 'Family Drama' and 'Fix problem or die' are overdone, and that you'd probably be wise in trying something else.

I personally used these graphs of Ian's, as I described in a previous post, to write a story that got accepted at 'Rocket Science'. The method I used was simply 'Try to put a new slice on every pie-chart', i.e., try to contribute something new in every aspect of the stories that Ian is charting.

Ian is going way beyond anything that I've seen anyone else doing in terms of analyzing the slushpile. Just look at:

And all of this is accompanied by his commentary on what he's seeing, what he's seeing too much of, what he'd like to see more of, etc, etc.

But, even though Ian is doing the most I've ever seen anyone do, I think there is more that could be done. There are so many different datapoints that people can use to guide the submissions process. What about antagonists, for instance? If, for instance, everyone is writing stories featuring Asian antagonists, then we might want to know that, because it's more than a little creepy if one group of people are always getting put into the antagonist role. Now, I don't want to imply that writers are doing anything 'wrong' if that's the result that comes out (though you'll find there are lots of people who will) it's entirely possible that you've got 'accidental' trends, where everyone unintentionally winds up doing similar things (any writer knows just how often they discover that others have thought of an idea that they thought was unique to them). However, even if such trends are unintentional, they will tend to look kinda bad if all lumped together in an anthology, so it's good for the anthology to spot such things early on and guide people away from making the same choices as everyone else.

So, what does all this amount to, and why is it important?

I believe that this kind of constant editor feedback to writers will result in BETTER ANTHOLOGIES. The stories in them will be more varied and surprising. It will produce BETTER EDITORS, because new editors will be able to consult the paper-trail left by those who went before, and learn from it. It will mean BETTER MARKETING, because potential readers will be able to see the anthology forming, and get a clear idea whether they want to buy it or not, and because it's just a way of keeping the anthology 'live' in people's minds. Finally each anthology becomes an HISTORICAL DATAPOINT that people will be able to mine about the state of the genre 'x' years ago. The wealth of information about an anthology (presuming that the information continues to be available) makes the anthology into an important historical document.

I think this is just the beginning of what will be something of revolution. Indeed, I think that in future there will be so much information provided by anthologists that people will have to work in 'teams' with members responsible for slush reading, and others for public communications. Fiction anthologies will become something much larger than just a book, and the internet's contribution to the process will be much more than just 'viral marketing'.

I'm eager to see what they think of next.

I've been Remiss

2011-10-13T23:07:00.002+01:00

I have been remiss in a number of ways.

Firstly, the banner art that I've got at the top of this blog comes from someone called 'Avater' on deviantart. I kept meaning to give them attribution, but kept forgetting to do it. Finally I've remember. Visit their page at http://avater.deviantart.com/gallery/

Secondly my fellow 'Hopefull Monsters' have been scoring sales, and I've not been reporting them. Tracie McBride has been on a remarkable roll, getting into Dagan Books' "Fish" Anthology and into the wonderfully named 'Paisley Stitchington's Speculative Buggle'. ,Dwayne Minton has sold to Aoife's Kiss.

And I'm aware that I don't really promote my own upcoming sales like I should. And I really should do something about the state of the house.

I'm in Rocket Science

2011-10-13T22:27:00.003+01:00

At last, I have some news. Things have been quiet recently because there's not been much going on, writing wise. However, I'm going to be in the 'Rocket Science' anthology, edited by Ian Sales, and coming out from Mutation Press Books.

The story 'The Taking of IOSA-2083' wouldn't have happened without Ian's work on his 'Rocket Science News' blog. I knew about 'Rocket Science' after seeing flyers at Eastercon, but I couldn't think of a story. Months went by, and still no real ideas came. But Ian was producing charts on the 'Rocket Science News' blog showing the state of submissions, and including such aspects as the setting of the story, the type of the story, and the gender and nationality of the protagonist. I decided that a good place to start in writing a story for the anthology, would be to deliberately aim to put a new 'slice' on each pie chart, to write a story that didn't fall into any of the existing story categories.

I knew I had a head start with this, because I normally write female protagonists (and often female antagonists too), I just find them more interesting (do I do a convincing job? Who knows, but at least half the people reading know as little about what's 'convincing' as I do, and anyways most male characters in fiction are nothing like me or anyone I ever met, and everyone seems to think they're convincing.) So if I just went with my normal schtick, I'd be in the smaller slice for 'protagonist gender'. But that wasn't enough, I wanted a slice of my own, so I went for 'ungendered human' (though conventionally considered a 'she', because of their background in the 'Warring Moons Period' milieu, and because I didn't want to battle with ungendered pronouns). Okay, that's one chart dealt with, but there's still 'story location' to deal with. I really wanted to do the Kuiper belt, but the ideas didn't come. Luna, Mars, Interplanetary space, Exoplanets and some of the Moons of Jupiter had been done. The 'Warring Moons Period' would, of course, normally mean Jupiter (you knew that, right?), but as Jupiter's moons were clearly popular, that would be risking winding up in a slice with someone else, and I want one for myself. I avoided Saturn too, and went straight out to Uranus, and used its largest moon, Titania.

'Nationality' was already covered. As my protag was a neut, a person born from a jar to be a 'coffin-dodger' fighting in the wars of the Jovian system, so their nationality was going to be one of those moons. I was surprised to see that no-one else seemed to be submitting stories with non-Earthly nationalities, so I'd have a slice of my own there too.

That just left 'Story Type'. At this point 'mystery', 'rescue', 'fix problem or die', 'first contact', 'alternate history' and 'family drama' were all taken, I wanted a new slice on the pie-chart, so I went for a genre that I've long wanted to do in SF-nal form, "noir/heist". Actually, most of what I write is kinda 'noir', but there are too few good 'heist' stories in spec-fic, a genre that seems well suited to this form. (Indeed, just think for a moment how cool it would be to see a high-fantasy heist piece, not 'Muscular barbarian must battle monsters to get the maguffin' but rather 'carefully selected team of people must steal the maguffin cleverly from a castle full of magical entrapments and security', you don't often see that. And then there's steampunk...)

With this much planned out, the other elements of the story fell into place. I've long wanted to do a bunch of SF stories with 'stolen' titles that reference works outside the genre (too much in-genre reference gets incestuous). For a heist it had to be 'The taking of XXXXX'. But the taking of what? One of the things I'd really wanted to do in my 'Kuiper belt' story (for which I couldn't come up with a plot) was use a powerful heat source to turn comets into rocketships by flash-melting their ice and projecting it behind them as steam (come on, who doesn't want to do this?). Hence, the taken thing would be a comet (that's been turned into a giant icy rocketship).

Next, I looked into comet naming systems, and discovered that they look like this:

10P/Tempel

That's no good, if it's going to be 'The Taking of' then it needs to be 'The Taking of [name] [number]'. Fortunately I'm a spec-fic writer, so I can get around such problems by saying 'In 2082 the Jovian comet registry introduced its own naming system. SHAZAM! Out, out foul and inconvenient fact!' Really, you don't have to be accurate in all details, many things will have changed by the time your story is set, if a fact proves annoying you just need to find a plausible way of disposing of it. This works for people too, but don't say I told you that.

The 'Why' of the heist actually came from one of my failed submissions to 'In Situ'. All of these failed, I tried to write them during a period when other commitments were demanding too much of me to do much writing, and I tried to accelerate time using weapons-grade caffeine. This did not end well. The stories came out like something written by a wild-eyed lunatic under the influence of stimulants. As, at that point, I was a wild-eyed lunatic operating under the influence of stimulants I though they were genre-changing-works-of-extreme-brilliance. Although I have clear and distinct memories of proof-reading and spell-checking them, when the rejections came back I discovered that I'd somehow sent out a confused mish-mash full of spelling mistakes. There's a lesson to be learned here, if it looks like you can't really make a deadline, don't force it (unless you've already been paid to make it), there will always be another anthology along in a while. However, don't throw anything away, your most incoherent scribblings often have the most original ideas hidden in them. The idea I took from one of these failed stories wasn't particularly original, but it was what "The Taking of IOSA-2083" needed. One of the 'In Situ' stories featured people trying to escape from a failing colony at Uranus. This meant that the 'heist' I was dealing with wasn't going to be "Get the diamonds" it was going to be "Fly us to Cuba and no-one gets hurt."

So, down to the business of writing it. Early on a managed to crowbar a Bagpuss reference into what was shaping up to be a pretty dark story. That's when I knew that the gods were with me. This was it, this was the one they'd remember me for (there was a voice in the back of my head saying 'you've been at the Yunan Tea again, haven't you?', but I knew that was the weakness speaking). I fretted a lot over the 'hardness' of the SF, there was one piece of technology, the 'hibernation coffin', that I wasn't sure was really do-able. There's been some conflicting evidence about human hibernation, but we don't *know* that it's doable, so is it really 'Hard SF'? However, everything else...

At this point, I had a startling epiphany. It's entirely possible to write science fiction that looks pretty wild and far-fetched, and yet features nothing that we couldn't do today, or in fact when I was born! This is why much 'golden age' SF is still SF, we just didn't do those things. Moonbases, space-stations, colonies under the sea or on other worlds, I cannot see that these things are anything but do-able, but we just haven't done them. In fact, contrary to what everyone says, and what I've always believed, technological change in my lifetime has been close to zero, we've only seen incremental improvements on things that already existed (If you start talking about mobile phones, I will find you and kill you). Societal change, on the other hand, has been huge. Any reasonably science-fiction literate person lifted from 1969 to 2011 could only be hugely disappointed by what paltry progress we've made, and probably very alarmed about what we've become (on the latter point, I would not be with them, I think we're shaping up okay in many ways, but I think a person from 1969 would be appalled by much of what we hold dear. So it goes.)

Anyways, eventually it was finished. There was much that I was worried about in it, but there's a point where you've got to stop messing about with it and click 'send'.

Seven days later (Seven days?! That's *fast*, that's fast even for an editor who isn't deluged in hundreds of submissions, and that's how it should be) and after I'd already concluded from duotrope response times that I was going to get a rejection (Rocket Science accepts in 4 days on average, but rejects in 11, as Ian is committed to writing full rejection letters, a brave choice that I hope he won't regret) I got the "I'll take it" email.

I'm really pleased to get into this one. You could be pleased to, Ian is still looking for more material, both fiction and relevant non fiction, and there's still 3 weeks left for submissions.

Old Art that Rocks

2011-09-28T19:41:00.001+01:00

I'm often complaining about modern covers that look like they were produced in the 1950's. Here's a cover from the 50's that rocks (or at least it made me laugh, further proof that I'm a bad, bad person).

You wouldn't get away with that on the cover of any of the big 3 today!

Last days at the Edinburgh Fringe

2011-08-29T16:23:00.002+01:00

So, last day of the Edinburgh festival. Things I've seen since last time:

Eric's Tales of the Sea

A fun talk/comedy routine/memoir by a former Royal Navy submariner. It's very hard to know what to say about this one, I enjoyed it, but learned less about life on submarines than I thought I would. It had some genuinely good laughs, and seemed an honest recollection, and such technical details as were needed were sugar-coated with humor to make them go down easy. Not one for all the family though, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Perils of Love and Gravity

This was a very silly comedy concerning the unhappy love-life of a woman trapped in a house that is much narrower at the bottom than at the top. It breaks the forth wall constantly and has the narrator as a character in the play. It was these very features that made me go and see it, as I'm a sucker for that kind of cheap rule-breaking (though it's hardly revolutionary these days). The play was alright, funny in places, well acted, with some interesting ideas, but not all the silliness was as funny as it thought it was.

Unfortunately when it ended I was left with a sense of "So what?" It had the standard "girl meets boy/girl loses boy" plot with an antagonist who wants the girl for himself, etc, etc. These plots always make the hair stand up on the back of my neck a little, because they all basically come down to an antagonist who has ideas above his station. Perhaps he's too ugly to aspire to the princess's hand, or he's too common or uncharismatic to aspire to the rule of the kingdom, and when he attempts to acquire these things, he's damned. These are plots the third Reich would approve of, where the natural order is preserved and those lesser mortals (like, say, Macbeth) who offend the rule of nature by trying to improve themselves are punished. Now, you might say 'No, their offence is *how* they try to get ahead', but I'd say that these people are always shown to be strange and ugly, things are set up so the only way they *can* hope to get ahead is to cheat, because the system is rigged against them from the start. These plays run counter to fairy-tales in which the ugly duckling or poor cobbler can aspire to greatness. I suspect this is because folk and fairy tales come out of the lower classes, whereas more outrightly theatrical work, like that of Shakespeare, comes out of playwrights working for the upper classes, who have a lot invested in the established order.

Swamp Juice

This was a performance that I went to after hearing a word-of-mouth recommendation in a bar (yes ladies, I was that creepy guy butting into your conversation saying "What was that? That sounds good!"). It was a very silly shadow-puppet show about a man who is trying to capture a bird for his pot. Most of the audience seemed to enjoy it a lot, but I have to say that although some of the puppetry was cleverly done, overall I found it tedious until we hit the 3D section. Now, I've never experienced 3D movies, so 3D shadow puppet theatre, done with red/green glasses and red/green lights, was something quite new for me. The 3D effect was very successful, with various puppets and artifacts appearing to be right before my face, zooming across the front rows of the audience, or plunging towards me. My favorite bit was simply soap bubbles blown into the path of the red and green lights, creating an illusion of bubbles raining down on the front few rows of the audience. Basically the puppeteer could have just dispensed with all the narrative, and gone straight to a 3D special effects show, and I'd have been perfectly happy.

In for a Pound

An incredibly silly play concerning someone who needs one more quid to buy a pack of cigarettes, and thus gets involved with an (all female) organized crime syndicate. Unlike all the other silliness I'd seen though, this was silly, and clever and funny with it. This had jokes that you didn't see coming, and which were still funny, some of it was very well observed, and overall the cast did a very good job. The hero's dimwit 'brunette but a little blonde inside' flatmate stole the show, despite being something of a stereotypical 'ditz' character. The only people I could fault were perhaps the crime syndicate, who were good, but I felt could perhaps have pushed their characters a bit further. The hero himself (although he was actually the damsel in distress most of the time) played his part well, though he was actually the 'straight man' to all the other whacky characters, and thus didn't stick in the mind as much as some of the others.

Overall this was one of the shows I enjoyed most, although it got pushed down the ranks the next day.

Wrens

This was well acted and well written, but wasn't entirely the show I was looking to see. It concerned royal navy women faced with the impending end of WWII, and the questions of what their lives would be afterwards. In truth it was a lot like some story set in a convent school, and probably rightly so. You realize that these would generally have been very young women, children really, just as many of the men we sent to war were little more than children, so the bickering and emotionality would have been entirely realistic. However, the whole plot mostly hinged on the discovery that one of the girls was pregnant out of wedlock, and the immense importance that this took on, while there was still a war going on and they could all still be killed by a stray bomb, seemed incredibly surreal. This was a window into another era, and in some ways it's an era that is hard to connect to now.

It was a good play, but in some ways it left me feeling adrift, not because of any flaw in the play, but because the times it portrays are too alien for me to emotionally connect with.

Faust/us

A one-man telling of Christopher Marlowe's tale of damnation. This was an ambitious thing to try and do, and overall I thought he did a good job of it. I could tell the rest of the audience were not enjoying it as much as me (the reverse situation to 'Swamp Juice'), but I liked this. When the first conjuration of Mephistopheles results in a phone call in which the unearthly part of the conversation is just an sinister mechanical drone, I thought that was a pretty original gimmick.

This show confirmed again that I really like Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for it's language, which is a motherlode of gorgeous out-of-copyright lines that are begging to be stolen and reused.

Marlowe's play itself is perhaps a bit weak on plot. Faust sells his soul to the devil and is damned. This isn't really a play, it's a government health warning. Don't mess with demons, kids!

Chaps with Legs

A sketch-based comedy show that I was talked into on the basis of a free ticket. It's a hard thing to say, but this was the worst thing I saw on the fringe, and it wasn't just me that thought so, because there were a gaggle of vocally amused young women on the front row that I assumed were the cast's girlfriends, until half of them bailed on the performance half-way through. I *still* think they might have been the cast's girlfriends.

Piff the Magic Dragon

Another recommended show, magic and comedy in one package. Not bad, but not as great as the full-house turnout implied. Most of the best laughs in this were self-referential and impromptu ones. Worth seeing once, I'd say.

Shakespeare for Breakfast

An absolutely wonderful reworking of Macbeth as a high-school comedy (yes, comedy. The young cast were all superb, and the humor was very clever and off the wall, without ever becoming pantomime. As with the original play the witches are the best thing, even though one of them was a sock-puppet. The obligatory humiliation of those foolish enough to sit on the front row was artfully done. This was the one show that had a Lady Gaga reference that didn't make me groan (I'm as tired of Gaga as I am of Vampires, Zombies and compelling drama about someone coming home from Iraq/Afghanistan). This takes joint first with 'Arabian Nights' as my favorite thing that I saw. So good was this show that I immediately signed up for the other show that this theatre group were doing.

Free croissant for every audience member at this performance, but honestly, that didn't sway my opinion. I'm easily bought, but not *that* easily bought.

This is Soap

Same cast as 'Shakespeare for Breakfast'. Maybe not quite as awesome, but well worth the price of admission (admittedly, I got my ticket for free, but I got it when I was actually intending to pay, but they said 'It's the last showing, have it for free'). This was a supposedly improv soap opera built from suggestions of the audience, but the audiences suggestions frequently got short shrift. No matter, it was still very funny, and the casts rendition of soap opera characters was very well observed (even though I don't watch soaps, so I'm not one to judge, but that's never stopped me before and it ain't stopping me now).

Both these last two plays were put on by the in-house company of the 'C-venues' venue. The venue itself struck me as very chaotic, when I turned up to buy tickets at 9:30 (performances start at ten), they weren't ready to start selling, the cafe (which was a terrible dive) wasn't serving anything, and they'd set things up so there was one queue serving all the shows and venues within the complex. However, if the in-house theatre group maintain this standard, none of that's going to matter, they're still going to get sell-out shows despite everything. "Shakespeare for Breakfast" is apparently a reoccurring series of performances at the Fringe, and thus I'd recommend anyone up here next year to check it out.

At the Fringe

2011-08-27T12:39:00.002+01:00

So, I'm at the Edinburgh festival. This is bigger than I realised, as there's a book festival going on as well as the international one (which is all ballet, opera and worthy stuff like that) and the 'Fringe' (which is what I'm really here for).

I've not come close to maintaining my planned itinerary of several shows a day, it's too easy to get lost watching street performers and not bother with the actual shows. What I've seen so far is:

"I the Dictator" A one-man show that only got four audience members at the showing I went to. I could see that it was pretty flawed, theres an overlong tap-dance sequence and the actor gets needlessly naked at one point. It threw out the accusation that the Nazis offered Chaplin money to make changes to his satire of Hitler 'The Great Dictator', but I've subsequently been unable to find any evidence of this on the net. Perhaps it was just illustrating the pitfalls of compromising your viewpoint (whether artistic or political) as a small compromise today might seem to be a major collaboration in the light of subsequent events. It was better than the turnout implied, but not one I'd recommend.

"Adolf" Another one-man show, starring Pip Utton, who is much lorded as a great talent (at least by the people I met in the queue). It was pretty good (and made me realise how much Davros in 'Genesis of the Daleks' (his only worthwhile appearance) was modelled on Hitler, which you'd think was obvious, but it's even more obvious when you see someone playing Hitler). This was pretty good, but perhaps tried a little too hard to drive home the message that fascism is always at the door of our collective minds, and we only have to let it in. I don't know, that feels a bit like preaching to the converted. This would be something worth telling the local neo-nazis, but few of them are likely to come to a performance. Still, the calm two-facedness of Utton's Hitler was at once amusing, and chilling. One moment he's speaking about his civilian staff as 'idiots' whom he doesn't wan to see, but then he goes to them and delivers a heart-rending speech thanking them for their loyalty and their friendship. I suppose we don't *know*, and that this is just theatre, but Utton's Hitler felt very real, to the point where I was wondering if he was really this two-faced, or whether he had some kind of multiple-personality-disorder. I think when you're wondering about the mental health of a stage-character, (although, this is Hitler, so you're hardly likely to think he was sane) the actor and writer have managed to imbue that character with more than the usual depth.

"The Dumb Waiter" A Harold Pinter play. I think this is the first I've seen by him, and on this basis I wouldn't watch another. It was well performed by the actors, in fact they did a great job. The problem was entirely that the play didn't make any larger kind of sense to me. Two hit-men squabble in a room where they are hiding-out, awaiting further orders. The room contains a dumb-waiter which delivers requests for meals that panic the hit-men into sending up whatever food they have. Though this was in places funny, I didn't see what it was all about. Was the whole thing with people upstairs requesting meals that the hit-men couldn't provide saying something about class, or god, or what? By the end I just didn't care. I suspect this is one of those plays where people would tell me that 'I'm just not clever enough to get it'. Look, I'm a writer myself, and writing in any medium is a means of communication, if you have to have the writers intentions explained to you, or have some study notes to hand to understand the work, then the writer has failed to do his job.

"The Future of the City", this was a book-festival discussion about where cities were going. Some interesting points got raised, but I think it was a little miss-named. One pundit was discussing 'iconic' architecture and how bad it is, where the other one was a poet who celebrates the 'edgelands', the in-between undeveloped places that are let run wild. While both did a good job the discussion was mostly focused on aesthetics, with little debate about what will happen to our cities if the oil runs out, how we're going to deal with the increasing number of old people living in cities, whether we could learn anything from simulations of cities, etc, etc.

"Incoming!" a talk about meteorites. Very noticeable by having an (almost!) all-male queue. Every woman who came up and asked "What is this queue for?" pulled a face when told "meteorites." Meantime, an all-female queue built up alongside us. Unable to contain my curiosity I went over and asked them what their queue was for, and was told that it was an appearance by the authoress of a Victorian class melodrama with lashings of sex. My lecture about "You know, meteorites might be important, you shouldn't take this 'That's a boy thing' attitude" died unspoken on my lips, because by extension I should so some interest in their thing, but Victorian melodrama: no thanks.

Still, this is an important observation, because it underlines something I've encountered all through my life, which is that there are important things that most (British) women just don't want to know about. Now, with meteorites, they might have a case, I mean, how important are meteorites? But this same phenomenon appeared when the first computers turned up. I've written before about how, in my childhood, I knew women were cutting themselves out of the future by rejecting computers, and that when they were under-represented in computing jobs, they'd blame it on men. I've watched it happen exactly as predicted. Similarly they were, in my youth, very under-represented in the Sci-Fi crowd. That sounds unimportant, but it isn't, it directly ties into the fact that they're under-represented in well-paid jobs in IT and engineering, as many of the boys who went into those fields were inspired to do so by Sci-Fi. This is something Fantasy doesn't give you. I've got nothing against fantasy, and personally intend to write some myself, but fantasy doesn't inspire you to interact with the physical world, but rather to flee it. However, at Eastercon I was quite shocked by the number of women there, and even asked a few "How are you here?" Quite a few of them weren't British though, and this links back to the whole story of who "Lt. Mary Sue" was, and the fact that women in the US were writing Trek fan-fiction, while women in the UK were reading Jane Austen. Again, I've got nothing against Jane Austen, but she inspires you to go and do english literature, and wind up as a housewife, rather than go and do chemistry, and wind up earning your own money in biotech.

This 'women don't do techy things' seems very much to be a British thing, which is bad news for Britain. In Britain I once went to a book-club where the women rebelled against reading 'Neuromancer', because it was too techy and made their heads explode. This is in the 2005, when neuromancer was already 20 years old. However, I see a lot of American women blogging about how they loved cyberpunk as girls, and are now working as computer-programmers (Aliette de Bodard, who won this years BSFA award, works in advanced machine vision. Is she British? No.) I DREAD to think what educated Chinese and Indian women are spending their time doing, because I think Britain is moving into a future where everyone else not only has bigger populations than ours, but their productive population is multiplied because their women can also do technical things, whereas ours are good at cookery and art appreciation. Which is not to say that we don't need cookery and art appreciation (I think everyone should be taught more of the former, men in particular, it might help with the obesity problems we're facing), but I just think that when a group of literate women in 2005 balk at Neuromancer something's seriously ***ed up.

Uh, and the talk was pretty good. The speaker had two amusing and amazing stories about meteorites, for instance that the romans were worshipping one for a while, and that one was registered as 'lost property' by British rail, and they refused to turn it over to the British Museum on that basis. I wonder who they were expecting to come by and say "Excuse me, I think I dropped something on your planet?"

"Malfi" A performance of "The duchess of Malfi" with gangsters-and-jazz-club visuals. I was pretty impressed by this, although the language got a little hard to follow in places it was wonderful, and I've downloaded a copy of the text to hunt for it for stuff I can nick to use in stories of my own (we call it 'references', but it's basically theft). The cast did an excellent job, but unlike 'The Dumb Waiter' it was the story that was the star of the show, and the many great-sounding lines that people deliver. The only flaw was the 'everyone dies' ending, which happened so fast as to be a little comical.

Anyways, sometime about now I got a story rejection after being in someone's shortlist for a long time, (look, just reject me already, don't shortlist me and get my hopes up and then do it!) and sank into a pit of despair, hating all and everyone.

"The Arabian Nights". A performance by a (shudder) 'youth' theatre, with (shudder ^ 3) musical performances. The plot concerns a King who, betrayed in love (huh, I should be so lucky! At least he was getting some action before the betrayal) sinks into a pit of despair, hating all and everyone, (he's a king for ***ks sake! Get over it, king! Eat some gold! It's not like you're an ageing writer who just had another story rejection) and so resolves to marry a different girl every night, and have them executed(!?!) in the morning.

I have always had a problem with this story, in that this King kills a thousand completely innocent young women (after bonking them first) and GETS AWAY WITH IT. Apparently a serial killer can deploy the "I lost control after a broken heart, but I'm better now" defence and get away with it, if he's a king.

But anyways, I do love the Arabian Nights despite the moral issues, so I automatically bought a ticket, completely unaware of the aforementioned 'yoof' and 'music'. On discovering these issues after I'd bought a ticket (they had cunningly kept them quiet) I sat with a sinking heart waiting for the awfulness to kick off.

It was absolutely ****ing brilliant. It featured the appearance of a '40-thieves' closely modelled on Rik Mayall's "Alright my lads! Who are we? We're the ****ing SAS!" out of 'Whoops Apocalypse', and the young cast gave truly great performances, all the way through I was peering at them thinking "How *old* are you, that you can do this stuff so well?" (This was a question that got a little fraught during a little belly-dancing action, 'cause I admit I was thinking "I'd like to know how old these girls are before I watch all this dancing and shaking around, please?" But everyone got their turn at a major role (there being so many in the 1001 nights) and everyone seemed really rather good at it.

I left the theatre feeling uplifted. If you see one show on the fringe, go and see this, it's dumb and fun and doesn't require you to study any passnotes before you can enjoy it, and it has good musical numbers too. You don't have to leave your brain outside the door, but if it starts giving you any shit you should certainly threaten if with grounding for a month.

"Fantasmagoriana" A show about MARY SHELLY, progenitor of science fiction and my adopted mother. This was one where maybe the plot wasn't so great, but the actors had a lot more to work with than Harold Pinter hands out, and they went for it like mad people. It was pretty much a scream, all the characters were great. I would like to believe that Mary Shelley (at this point she's "Godwin") was the charming and clever woman depicted here, and in fact all the characters were genuinely likeable. Byron is an idiot and a brat, but he's a likeable idiot and brat. My one concern was that Mary is stealing Percy Shelley from a previous marriage to one 'Harriet', and I wondered what the untold story of Harriet was while these clever people glitter and laugh and write horror stories on the banks of Lake Geneva, and meanwhile back in England...

Other than that, I've spent a lot of time watching street performances and hanging out in bars and cafes. Edinburgh is a bit of a desert for two important things, free wifi that actually works, and decent real ale. I did find one bar that has Bacchus Kriek cherry-flavored beer on tap (Hollyrood No 9) but other than that I've not had much in the way of drinks that lit up my tastebuds. The main thing I've enjoyed eating up here so far is haggis on toast.

The most impressive street performances have all been people who can make music with next to nothing. One guys was twanging out 'twinkle twinkle little star' on a balloon with some elastic through it, hooked up to a guitar amp. Pull the elastic in and out to alter its length and the note, the balloon provides the resonating chamber. 'Twinkle twinkle little star wasn't very impressive though. The he launched into 'Smells like teen spirit', and that was.

Two guys hitting what appear to be three railway sleepers. This doesn't sound very impressive, but they were really moving fast, and creating complex rhythms from the three sleepers, which were different lengths. Once they got going, the sound was really impressive. Must keep them fit too.

But best of all was 'MC Xander' a hippie dude who was beatboxing with a loop-deck that can record and loopback brief snatches of sound, and a bunch of guitar effects pedals. All actual sound provided by his voice. I've seen this done before, but this guy really took it to another level, and he's a born showman too. I saw women in their sixties dancing (and they could dance too!). Once he'd recorded a sound, and it was being played back, it swiftly became impossible to believe that the sound had been produced by his voice. He did a drum-and-bass number that really was quite startling. The police came to tell him he was too loud, and the crowd he'd gathered were not best pleased. If you see a white guy with dreadlocks beatboxing in Edinburgh this week, stop and take a listen, he's worth it.

That's all I've got to report for now!

Olivia ****ing Williams, and the nature of evil

2011-08-14T12:58:00.001+01:00

Seriously, I'd watch this woman in anything. I'd watch her do a gardening programme. I don't know what it is that she's got, but even in small roles she's mesmerizing. She was, for me, the only good thing in 'Dollhouse'.

I've seen her recently in 'An Education' and 'The Ghost Writer', and those are two of the best movies I've seen in recent times.

In 'The Ghost Writer' a she has pretty major role (though it's something of a 'sleeper' role that builds up throughout the movie). I loved this movie, mostly because of its utterly sureal atomsphere, that put me in mind of 'The Prisoner'. There's that drifty, floaty feel to things that I first saw in 'Alien', and the whole thing feels a little like a dream. The lead character is introduced into an environment in which no-one says what they mean or means what they say. Instead they say the strangest things, but these cryptic utterences make more sense as the story is revealed. The dialogue only seems strange because we, like the protag, are being introduced to a world in which everyone else knows something he doesn't, everyone else is in on the game.

Williams is a great presence from the first time we see her, or rather hear her as she's a voice coming from a shadow stood in a doorway. She can convincingly deliver sudden switches of emotion that add to the off-kilter feel of the movie.

If I had to choose, I would probably pick 'An Education' over 'The Ghost Writer' though. 'An Education' is one of those movies that sits on your table for a long time, because you keep watching 'guilty pleasure' action movies instead. You keep thinking that it can't be *that* interesting, given that it's just another BBC drama about class and social norms in 1960's Britain. Then you put it on and it's awesome. Furthermore, it's awesome solely on the basis of what people say, how they say it, and how their interactions play out. You could put this on the stage, it's got no special effects beyond the fireworks the actors put out. No one puts in a duff performance, everyone is on top form. Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams only have smallish roles, but they're both excellent, and for me it was Olivia who delivered the defining line of the movie.

Carey Mulligan is also great, even though her character is far too witty and sharp to be a sixteen-year-old. One thing about Carey in this film, is that she looks real, she doesn't look like the luminous femdroids that hollywood pumps out (I've got nothing against luminous femdroids, it's just nice to see someone who looks like a real person that you might see in Sainsbury's).

And on top of all of this we get Peter Sarsgaard playing (with support from Dominic Cooper) one of the best depictions of smooth, liquid, seductive evil that I've seen since Harry Lime. This might seem a bit of an extreme reading, but there's one scene in particular where Carey's character knows full well that he's involved in some rum stuff, but he charms her back. It's not, in this situation, the scale of what he's done that matters, he's only involved in petty wrongdoing, the question in my mind was _how bad could the revelation have been, and the girl would still come back?_ Peter's character wins everyone over with his easy charm, and I felt that he could basically be eating babies and these mannered, middle-class people would forgive him even that, so long as he could make them laugh and told them their houses looked nice. And, if you think he was only a petty criminal, let's not forget that the whole story is about how close he comes to destroying a young girl's life.

I was uncomfortable with Peter Sarsgaard's character being a Jew though, although it opened the way for some very funny scenes of middle-class guilt. The reason is that this introduced a little element of 'the other' to his character that I felt undermined the depiction of evil by making it 'out there', rather than 'in here'. This leads me to my next subject.

Now, rather jarringly, I'm going to switch to discussing evil as presented in sci-fi and fantasy. One of my hobby-horses is that SF is somewhat fascist. It generally defines evil as 'the other', and spends a lot of time 'celebrating' human nature. The rebooted 'Doctor Who' was particularly bad for this, and this was the major reason I stopped watching (along with the train-wreck ending for season 1 and the departure of Christopher Eccleston). Time and again Doctor Who hits us over the head with the concept that humans are the master race, we have a 'spark' of something special that everyone else wants to have. We're the Doctor's favorite species. In the future we'll have a great galactic empire (and no-one, in the episodes I saw, put their hand up and said "Empire? Do you really mean that word? I mean, that's a bad thing, surely?"). Written SF mostly stopped doing this in the 60's, but it continues to be alive and well in film and TV.

Evil in SF is defined as inhuman, ugly, different, convienently 'out there', nothing to do with decent folks like you and I. Aliens and A.I.s are the Jews of SF, a place that the human master race can 'put' evil, so that they can convince themselves that they're noble and pure volk themselves. Even when evil wears our face, it's because we've been compromised, outside forces have invaded us and corrupted our 'purity of essence' (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Invaders, etc). Now, I don't want to get too hoity-toity about this, like the Bechdel test it's something that's not an issue if it appears in this story or that story, it only becomes important when it dominates an entire genre. There's no doubt lots of good narrative reasons for having 'externalized' evil, I've written stories like that, and will no doubt do so again. However, when an entire genre sends the message that we're all saintly, and that threats can only come from outside, from the 'other' the 'alien', then collectively it's fascist propaganda.

If the human race are so noble and just, then how come our history books are written in blood? They are chronicles of horror and wickedness occuring in all times and all places that anyone ever set pen to paper. We try to deal with this issue by applying the same rule that often caused it, the claim that the people who did this or that atrocity weren't like us. They were different. It was something in their culture, or their genes, or their glands, that drove them to do those things. We dig about in the archaeology of Reichs and Empires looking for the secret of where the evil slipped into the world, and we find nothing convincing, because it's not there. If you're looking for the source of evil, you'd be better looking in a mirror. We all of us carry it around with us every day, and always will, and it's not something that can be surgically removed or bred out.

But this remains an unpopular truth. At Eastercon I sat in a meeting of people who, as far as I could tell, were claiming that white western europeans were uniquely evil (even though most of them were white western europeans) and that this explained the state of the history books. When I tried to argue that evil was a universal human problem I distinctly heard someone say "I think that's just an excuse." We would still rather believe that evil is something that infects some particular group, not everyone. Apart from anything else this makes evil a managable problem, if it's unique to a group (Jews, Witches, Reds, Bankers) then eliminate the group and you eliminate the problem of evil. The fact that it's exactly this kind of thinking that has created some of history's greatest evils shows how evil is always one step ahead in this game.

SF would do well to look to some other genres, and realise that evil isn't externalized, and it isn't ugly. Evil knows that appearances count and that first impressions last. Evil works out and knows how to put on makeup, and how to look good in a suit or a cocktail dress. Evil comes to you as a friend, with a smile, and says "Hello old man, it's me, your old friend, Evil. I've got a business proposition for you." Evil walks beside you always, waiting for you to stumble, so it can step in and lend a helping hand. The common SF depiction of evil is a lie, and something of a dangerous one.

And now, coming somewhat full circle, back to Olivia Williams. Most of the times that I've seen good depictions of smooth criminals, they've been male. I also watched a throwaway movie called '21', in which Kevin Spacy plays the 'devil' character, luring a coterie of young geniuses into the world of card-counting in casinos with his smooth-talking and promises of a better life. So, another male in this role. I think this is because evil has to come from a position of power, because it has to have something it can offer.

Fiction rarely puts women in power-positions, and when it does it tends to make them shrill and brassy, rarely smooth and charming (and often ineffective too, there still seem to be attitudes around that women shouldn't be in authority positions. How often have you seen an effective female commander in SF or Fantasy?) Even Servelan in 'Blakes 7', who I felt was a ground-breaking character, wasn't the same kind of evil as Harry Lime or David in 'An Education'. Servelan is a type of evil that readily resorts to force, not the charming Luciferous evil that comes and offers you the Earth. She's all stick and no carrot. Harry Lime and co are mostly carrot, and the stick only comes out when the carrot isn't working.

I think Olivia Williams would be fantastic in a role like this, but the movie machine isn't, from what I can see, producing this kind of role for women. Perhaps it is and I'm not watching those movies. Her role in 'Dollhouse' came very close to this, but it had a strong element of equivocation, and I suspect that in the end Olivia's character might have done a 'heel face turn' to become the bad-girl-gone-good, I've not seen enough of the series to be sure. It could be claimed that her role in 'The Ghost Writer' comes close to this, but I don't think it's really quite the same thing. Her character in 'The Ghost Writer' is as much a victim as anyone, and the evil in the film is very diffuse, it's in everyone, there's no central 'Lucifer' character.

It's a shame, because I think Ms Williams could nail this role, she could easily be a cultured and charming Luciferess with an implied core of iron that's concealed within the glove. In truth I suspect she could play just about anything, and that this is just one of the roles that the movie machine isn't providing for her. But it's one I'd really like to see her do.

Be even better if it was a Sci-Fi movie.

I am not on Facebook, that's someone else

2011-08-05T09:05:00.001+01:00

I am NOT the 'C J Paget' that's on Facebook with a really scary looking horrid avatar, okay?

That is all.

DO Take your laptop to a coffeshop

2011-08-01T22:18:00.001+01:00

Want to write but the ideas aren't coming? Could be that you need to get out more.

Oh, and John Scalzi is just plain wrong. Do take your laptop to a coffee shop.

Now, it may seem pretty arrogant of me, as a tyro writer with few credits to my name, saying that one of the 'big dogs' is spec fic is wrong, wrong, wrong, (although I suspect those who know me personally will be somewhat unsurprised), but I've got evidence to back up my claim. As noted in previous posts, the writing output has been somewhat in decline. Truth is it wasn't much fun anymore, indeed it had become a chore. However, recent lifestyle changes have boosted the output back up again, and I've got at least one new story on the go that I'm genuinely excited about.

You can probaby guess what said changes are.

Let me say at the start, that I drank the cool-aid. I bought into what Scalzi (hereafter 'The Dark Lord') was pushing. This is unusual because I'm not normally someone who gives a hoot for any form of authority, or even good advice, I prefer to make my own mistakes (and after many, many years of dedicated practice, I feel I can claim that making mistakes is something I'm now pretty good at). I suspect, to be honest, that I was drawn in by The Dark Lord's snarky eloquence, as it's skillset that I aspire to develop myself. "Yes!" thought I, "Those people typing in coffee-shops are poseurs and wannabes. I, a true artist, will suffer at home, staring at walls badly in need of repainting until inspiration strikes." I know this reflects badly on me, but most things do (particularly mirrors).

Funny thing was, inspiration didn't come. Oh, and I kept noticing things like "I really ought to tidy this place up. Yeah, I'll do that, then I'll write." or "Ah, there's that cheque I've got to pay into the bank, I really ought to get and do that." or "Oh, I've still not watched that Futurama box-set I got given at christmas", etc, etc, etc.

This meant, of course, that I wasn't getting the level of writing done that I felt I ought to be. So I had to stay home *more* and stare at the walls *more*. "I should be writing" became an excuse not to do anything else, and as writing happened at home, I had to be at home. Writing became a reason for not going to the gym, for not going anywhere or doing anything.

But strangely, the more I pursued this policy, the less actual fiction got written. The walls gave me no inspiration (maybe if I had the kind of wallpaper you can see patterns in, it would work better. But personally I only ever see skulls, so maybe not). Searching for ideas on the web and in magazines like New Scientist or the Economist yeilded very poor results (though I admit that two of the stories I've actually sold were inspired by articles in those august publications. But that's less than one a year).

I began to hate writing. Writing was a gaoler who kept me locked in my front room, never getting any sunlight, with only spiders for company and barely aware of the passing of the seasons. I began to develop that most telling symptom of burn-out, an almost physical desire not to write, an urge to do anything to avoid the chore. This isn't how it's supposed to be.

The rot set in recently when I discovered that J. K. Rowling, yes the woman who is to John Scalzi what Bill Gates is to Clive Sinclair, (though, if he's the Dark Lord, then she'd have to be... what? Demon Empress of the Multiverse? Hera? Not sure what, maybe we don't have words in our language for the concept. Uh, I'm rambling here...) DOES HER WRITING IN CAFES!!

In fact, I've just googled this, and although wikipedia claims she wrote in cafes because the walk was a 'good way to put her child to sleep' (which seems to imply a degree of 'cafe guilt') on her own website there's a post arguing the case for the coffeeshop writer. In a magazine article I read on her, she said something to the effect that "You have to go to where the inspiration is," implying that being around other people just might give your an opportunity to observe them, and maybe get some ideas from that, you know?

So, I've started going out of the house again, and guess what? Things are flowing much better. I like being in pubs and coffeeshops. I like chai-lattes. I like sunshine (in moderation, I do want to keep my pixel tan). I like the fact that it's summer and the opposite sex are walking about with next to nothing on. I like overhearing jokes, or secrets, or useful bits of information that I'd never have come across without eavesdropping. I like hearing new music on the PA that I'd never normally encounter. And, as now my writing is linked to places I like, I'm starting to like doing that again too.

Coffeeshops isn't enough though. To get ideas, you need to go places you wouldn't normally go, and see things you wouldn't normally see. I just went to an 'experimental electronic music' event, 'Sound Kitchen', and I got myself a great idea for a story there, just came straight into my head almost complete. It's an ambitious one though, I may not be able to make it fly on the page (having the idea is always only the start of the battle). But it's an idea!

More than I found at home.

This post was written in the Starbucks of Tamworth Snow Dome, and anyone who has a problem with that can take a long walk off a short pier.

Duotrope Acceptance Ratio keeps climbing, but I'm doing nothing

2011-07-27T09:35:00.001+01:00

I've been going through a bit of a drought with regard to the writing, and submissions too. Paradoxically, my 'Acceptance Ratio' on Duotrope keeps climbing, and is now at a respectable 18.5%

This is an artifact of having had a long drought of rejections, followed by a sudden glut of acceptances, then not doing anything for a while. As the rejections 'drop off' the yearly report, so my score improves, even though I'm not really doing anything.

So it goes to show, lies, damn lies, and statistics. I was probably doing far better when the score was lower, because I was writing, submitting, and getting rejected. I was being a writer. But duotrope is now rewarding me for sitting on my fat arse watching futurama re-runs (Which I'm not actually doing, because I don't have TV, but you get the picture).

Indeed, I think my last reported even on duotrope was a sale, so if I do nothing until all the other events have dropped off the timeline, I'll eventually have a 100% acceptance ratio to brag about!

Second Sale

2011-06-29T12:47:00.001+01:00

Yay! (And all that)

I made my second sale of 2011, and my second sale to Daily Science Fiction yesterday. A story called 'Inconstant Nature'.

I think this is the first time I've sold to the same place twice, I've tended to spread myself across a bunch of markets, because I felt that would maximise my exposure. But DSF, which pays pro rates, has quick response times, and has a nice website with thousands of subscribers, and which puts me in the company of people like Cat Rambo and Tim Pratt, is obviously a market worth re-visiting!

The story was originally going to be sent to 'Crossed Genres: Science in my Fiction', whom I've never subbed to yet, because to get in there you have to come up with a story that's inspired by a scientific article (and you have to be able to provide a link to said article). For some reason I find that scientific articles rarely spawn story ideas for me, so I was overjoyed when one finally did, because I figured I'd have something a market that at could tick off my 'Never submitted to' list.

But literally as I was about to click "Submit story" on their website, I spotted a clause in their guidelines saying "No end-of-the-world stories."

Damn.

And then there's that question of, 'Do I send anyways?'. But in the end I thought "No, I think this one would fit at Daily SF" who, uh, pay more and stuff.

So, Science-in-my-Fiction will have to wait till another science article triggers something in my head.

Senna

2011-06-25T17:48:00.001+01:00

So, a couple of weeks ago I went and saw Asif Kapadia's Senna. This is a great little movie. Most remarkable for me was the fact that the whole movie is just a load of news and grand-prix footage spliced together with the audio from various sources played over it. There's no narrator, at least not that I can remember, instead the actual people who were there when the events happened are asked about what they remember, and that provides the narration. You wouldn't think from that description that this would be a technique that would work, but it really does. The whole thing is very cleverly put together, and there's an eerie feeling to seeing people walking and talking before the fatal San Marino Grand-Prix, some of whom you know are doomed.

I watched many of these grand-prix when I was young(er), and I never knew the stories that were going on behind the scenes. This film fills you in on things that, if you're my age, you'll vaguely remember, but perhaps never fully understood. It includes footage from behind the scenes, in the pits, in the pre-race driver's mettings, stuff that wouldn't have been released into the public eye when it was happening. All of this makes for compelling watching. It's probably somewhat hagiographic, but all biographies are.

Once again, another great little movie that is far more deserving of your time and money than the latest Hollywood output.

If writing code were like writing spec-fic

2011-06-22T00:42:00.001+01:00

It would be done alone in darkened rooms, staring into blank screens.

You'd send your program off, wait three months, and then get back a slip saying "Sorry, the program failed to run"

Computers would pop into existance, run a few programs, and then vanish again after a few months.

Before your program could be released on the public, it would have to go through gatekeepers who would reject it with random comments like "Can you justify your use of switch/case statements?"

Everyone would be wanting to get back to those "Classic 8-bit systems we grew up with".

Programmers would get very excited by 'personal' bug reports that, instead of saying "Sorry, the program failed to ru
n", said: "Thank you for submitting your program. The basic syntax seemed sound, and the initial variables were set correctly, but unfortunately on further processing, the program failed to run."

People would be constantly exhorting programmers to write programs on architectures they knew nothing about, using novel programming structures that aren't often seen. All these attempts would then earn "Sorry, the program failed to run," responses from the gatekeepers.

Programmers would gather to swap advice like "I hear they're saying switch/case statements are overused."

A program that had failed to run on three previous computers would run on the forth, performing at a level far beyond its design specifications. The programmer would never know why, nor be able to repeat the effect.

People would still be using DOS, Masterworks edition. Hard-case types would reinstall it several times a year, and make claims about how it "just gets more relevant each time."

People would pay extra for signed copies of software, which they'd never use, just keep as an investment.

Program packaging would look the same as it did in the 80's.

News

2011-06-12T15:51:00.002+01:00

Things have been quiet on this blog, because three weeks or so ago, blogger/google broke the API system that I use to post to my blog. They also broke OpenID. But these things aren't broken for everyone, just for a number of users. Over time they've managed to fix the problems for most users, but for me things are still broken. I suspect they always will be. This takes away a lot of my enthusiasm for blogger, and leaves me wishing that I'd started my blogs elsewhere.

And, indeed, this is the second time I've written this blog-post, because a network disconnection caused me to lose the previous one. This is why I write the posts offline, and then use the blogger API to post them. But I can't do that anymore.

And this, remember, is google, one of the 'big boys' of the modern IT world. If they can break things and can't fix them, how can we trust this whole 'cloud computing' thing that's going to change the face of IT, huh? Credibility chasm.

But anyways, here is some news.

I've finally made my first sale of 2011. The Dead Robot's Society has accepted my story "Interview with a Robot Heresiarch" for their "Explorers: Beyond the Horizon" anthology. Yes, I put the robots in to sway their decision. Everyone can be easily bought by robots!

I'm very glad of this, because the whole writing thing is down in the dumps. Towards the end of last year I tried to write entries to a bunch of anthologies all at once and in a very short time-scale, whilst work was consuming sufficient time to make this attempt doubly unrealistic. The result was something of a disaster (though some good things may yet come of it) and left me burned out and discouraged. I think the lesson here is that, if you don't really have the free time to do something well before the deadline, then don't try.

In other news I'm up on Fusion Fragment. It's an old, old story of mine, "I Have Put Away Childish Things". I went over there to read it with some trepidation, it's been so long since I wrote it, what shall I be confronted by? Well, I was pleasantly surprised! They've done a really good job of formatting it too (this sounds like the simplest thing, but I often wind up writing stuff that has, uh, 'special needs' when it comes to formatting.)

I've also heard from Bards & Sages and Coeur de Lion with regard to the stories they are publishing, so these should be out in print soon. I've got three other stories currently doing the rounds, and I'm trying to finish something new (starting is never the problem, it's finishing that's difficult).

But the big news in my writing group, the "Hopefull Monsters" (yes, extra 'l' in Hopeful) is that one of our number "Dwayne Minton", has been accepted for publication in Asimov's. He's having to take a bit of a break from writing right now though, because he has a job that requires him to regularly go and spend our tax dollars doing 'research' on a paradise island.

It's alright for some, eh?

Blogger broken

2011-05-25T21:09:00.002+01:00

This is a test post to see if I can post to my own blog. For nearly 24 hours blogger has been broken with large numbers of people complaining in the blogger google group that they can't post comments on other people's blogs, and can't post to their own blogs. For a while there was a post in the blogger googlegroup admitting that there was an on-going issue, but that post has been removed now, yet my 'blogger api' blog client still can't log in.

I can't prove it, but I think the problem is related to a 'comment spam checking' feature that blogger/google have helpfully turned for everyone without first checking if they want it turned on. Exactly the same mistake that they made with 'Buzz' a while back.

This from google, (who own Blogger) supposedly one of the leading web companies. It's a shocking display of incompetence.

Temple Grandin

2011-05-22T19:26:00.001+01:00

Sometimes, during research for something else, or just during a web-wander, you find something completely awesome.

I was half-thinking of writing an autistic character in a story, but I'm kind of aware that I lack the knowledge or the skills to do that. So I decided to look into it a bit.

Now, previously my whole understanding of autism would have come from something like the 'Rainman' movie, so I'd be thinking in terms of it as being an extreme condition which would make people pretty non-functional. Other stories I've read have also rather supported this viewpoint. I was aware that we are all on a sliding scale of autistic behavior, but I had thought that those who were labelled as autistic would be serverly effected.

But Temple Grandin is a woman who, as a child, was diagnosed with serious autism, yet she's got a degree and a Phd, and even a professor-ship, started her own company, and most surprising of all is an engaging, animated and highly entertaining speaker. Clearly the image of autism that's been portrayed to me in the media up till now is rather skewed.

See her speaking here at these links. Trust me, it's educational.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wt1IY3ffoU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt_G7Zw5I8c
http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html

It's made me very wary of trying to write such a character though, because it's clear that the condition is more subtle and complex than I'd thought (Isn't everything?) and it would probably take years of research for me to get it right. I don't want to add to existing stereotypes, so I'll probably steer clear.

But still, I'm very glad I did the research, even if I'm not going to use it, because there's always something very uplifting when you encounter these people who've succeeded against the odds, and who demonstrate that a lot of what you think you know is wrong.

Beers in SPAAAAAACCE!!!

2011-05-01T22:21:00.001+01:00

There's a real-ale brewery brewing science fiction themed beers!

However, I think the "Black Hole" ale that we had at Eastercon (which was the top seller (first to run out)) might be from these people:

http://www.peakstonesrock.co.uk/products.htm

Still, I'm keen to try these out, just for the novelty.

Eastercon 3

2011-04-26T00:37:00.003+01:00

So, that was Eastercon.

It pretty much overturned all my expectations, except perhaps one. Firstly, I really enjoyed it. I fear I embarressed myself at many of the panels, calling out my weird opinions from the audience (I saw shocked expressions on the faces of panel members a few too many times for comfort).

There was a lot of talk that this con had been saved at the last minute from all kinds of near-death-experiences, and so wasn't in some ways as good as it could have been. I would say the programming was too spread out, trying to run ten streams at once meant that many things clashed, while other times there was nothing on at all. There was a consensus that the hotel was nice, but far too expensive. Most people would rather less luxury and less cost. However, everyone I spoke to agreed that the real-ale bar was the best they'd seen at a con, that the main 'social space' was also the best, and that the division of the schedule into 90 minute, rather than 1 hour, slots, was a good thing becaus it gave a half-hour break between sessions. I guess you get some things right, some things wrong, and that's always going to be the case.

The big surprise for me was the number of female fans, the ratio actually seemed close to 1:1. This jars forcefully with everything else I've experienced throughout my whole life, even in recent years.

On the other hand though, you could count the number of people who weren't white at the con on two hands max. And this in Birmingham of all places. Then again, I don't think I met any other Brummies at the con, it was all Londoners, one Canadian, one Belgian and some Scots. Still, London is also a very racially diverse place, so I wonder why only one racial group goes to SF cons. You'd think that with SF's recent blockbuster presence on the big screen there would be a wider audience, but it seems not.

Though the con was noticably middle-aged, there was a wide range of ages in attendance. However, I was a bit concerned that when I went to the "What you want to see in Eastercon 2012?" meeting, it was mostly middle-aged (me, etc) and older people who were there calling the shots. That said, many of them said "Can we do the LARP again, because the young people all say they really liked the LARP?" so it would seem they have their finger on the pulse in that regard. I just wish that said young people had turned up to say that themselves.

Although politics was generally kept concealed there seemed to be people from all over the political spectrum (well, obviously, not from *all* over it, but from all over the reasonable range).

Something I found shocking, but which apparently is par for the course, is that the meeting to accept bids for running Eastercon 2013 received NO BIDS. Image if that happened to the olympics! If no bid appears next year, then there will be no 2013 con.

And last but not least, I went there to steal ideas and reboot my enthusiasm for writing. I can report that ideas were successfully pilfered, and that enthusiasm was sucked from those with a surfiet of it. So, I guess that's a result.

Eastercon 2

2011-04-25T09:17:00.001+01:00

This should be 'Eastercon 3', but I was too tired to type when I got home last night.

This morning (Sunday, the 3rd day of the con) I awoke and asked myself if I was seriously going to go in for another day of it. It's not that the con has been in any way bad, but on the other hand there's a lot of other things I could be doing, and I have to ask myself if it's been that *good*. I am of an age where one suddenly realises that each day is drawn from an ever shrinking bag, and you can't really just waste days (though of course I often do). In the end, I decided I'd go in.

I'm glad I did. Today was the most productive day of the con so far for me, mostly due to having a larger number of worthwhile conversations. The first of these was with a bookseller in the dealer's room. Upon realising that I'd misread the signs on the books, and that the books I'd collected up to read were signed first editions and just out of my price-range, I said that I couldn't possibly buy them, because I was only buying them to read and throw away. If I bought them I would be depriving someone who would value a signed first edition of the chance to own one (in truth I was just trying to squirm out of the buy now that I'd realised the true price). The seller said he'd have no problem selling them to me even if I were going to throw them away. I asked him if he'd sell the Mona Lisa to someone who intended to burn it, but was prepared to pay a good price. He said he would. I accused him of capitalism, right there in public in front of everybody.

Anyways, by the end of the conversation I'd concluded that one shouldn't really sell things that had a higher value to other people. He didn't agree with this, but felt that you shouldn't sell things that valued themselves (ie, self aware beings) but that anything non-sentient was up for sale. I felt this was an arbitary distinction, because in the end his rules were a modified version of mine, he was saying that you shouldn't sell things that were valued by other people *when the person doing the valuing was also the thing being sold*.

Then I went to a tea-tasting, which didn't have much in the way of teas, though they did have my favorite 'Russian Caravan' from Whittards, and cake. It did seem to be mostly a support-raiser for the 2014 London Worldcon bid. I wound up signing up for this, even though it's three years away. However, the tea-tasting did have the desired effect, forcing people to converse as they fought over the cake. I got talking to a visitor from Belgium who spoke about the way that language divided world fandom, so that you almost never met French or Spanish fans and anglophone cons and vis-a-vis. He said though that at Polish and Romanian conventions he'd been to, the con had supplied translators for visitors. I thought this was a very exciting idea, especially in this day of phones with skype, etc. Maybe over-phone or over-laptop translation could be provided for visitors from the non-english speaking world? Then I got into a long 3-way conversation that rambled about the topic-space so widely that I couldn't now list what we discussed.

I've also been going around asking the women, politely as I can as it's a very loaded question, "How are you here?" I've not yet had my head bitten off with "Why *shouldn't* I be here, boyo?" and the consensus seems to be that "I was atypical at school." One interviewee confirmed my suspicion that things are different in the colonies to Britain as they were Canadian and had inherited a love of SF from their mother, had gotten into roleplaying games, gone on to do programming at school, and had worked on MUDs way back when. However she said that when she'd wanted to do programming (where she proved to be the only girl in the class) the *woman* teaching the programming course had insisted that "Programming is no place for a woman", and her parents had had to fight to get her in. So, things are perhaps not *that* different in the colonies. Also, while most of the vocal debate about sexism is wedded to a narrative in which women are prevented from doing X by men, I'm seeing a consistent pattern where women are prevented from doing X *by other women*. Normally this is being done 'for their own good' by wiser peers who know that going near anything geeky will mean you'll never get a man or something like that, (although, surely if you were seeking a boyfriend a programming class would be a target rich environment? But then, that fact is also a problem if you just want to learn programming, as it's always very intimidating to be the only X in the room). The first and most powerful police-force when it comes to enforcing gender stereotypes appears to be the peer-group at school, who can even override the hard-work of parents. The same is true for boys of course, a boy who shows an interest in something that's traditionally non-male will either need to be secretive, have a will of iron, or be built like the proverbial brick sh**house, otherwise he'll have such tendancies beaten out of him by the other boys at school. Either way, many people I encounter seem wedded to the idea of sexism as a conspiracy of males against females. They'll deny it if you say that to them, but then they'll slip straight back into speaking as though that's the way things are. Even if the idea that 'reverse sexism' of females against males exists it is viewed as 'non-serious', and the sexism imposed by females upon other females, and by males upon males, which I suspect is the most powerful influence of all, is rarely discussed or even recognized. Hence I see many discussions of sexism in IT that focus on the workplace, while their own statistics clearly show that girls are selecting themselves out of the profession at school, and later at college, so the main problem isn't even in the workplace.

This view of gender issues as being a 'battle' between males and females might have had some value once, like Newtonian physics had value once, but has since been superceeded by more accurate models, but I don't think it's very useful now. In fact I think it's counter-productive. The problem is deeper than that, we are all sexist (I know I am. I know you are too. You can't fool me.) and all forms of sexism are a problem, as they feed into and reinforce one another. It's not a battle that we're dealing with here, but a disease that needs to be carefully treated. But battles are glorious, and anyone whose met an old communist will know that fighting the fight is often more ego-boosting than dialoguing with people and actually getting somewhere. I think we need a new generation who can look at things differently and build bridges instead of rattling sabres.

Anyways, I've wandered off-topic. Eastercon.

The panels have been of varying quality. Often there is a gap between what was promised on the programme, and what the panel actually proves to be about. Also the panelists are often less informed and visionary than the audience, although you can't blame them for that, they are just the people who volenteered when no-one else did. But I did find the 'Crimefighting in the 21st century' panel particularly out-of-touch. A woman from the audience (who was later confronted by 'How are you here?') raised the issue of crimes commited in virtual worlds like second-life. This was met with derision by the panel, with one of them saying "People who worry about such things need to get a third life". They only saw acts in second life as being a problem if 'real-world' money was involved. If it was virtual, it was unimportant. This is a very strange viewpoint coming from writers, and since then I've come up with the thought experiment: say that those panel members have just finished the first draft of a work of fiction or non-fiction that they've been working on for five years. I sneak into their house and, on a whim, burn it (it's written in long-hand with no backup copies because I personally find FIRE a more satisfying destructive force than computer viruses). I'm sure they would be very upset, but really they need to get a life, after all what crime has been commited? The murder of fictional people? Killing paper? What? You could say 'loss of earnings', but the same applies to people working in second-life or WoW. The panel seemed unable to grasp any concept of value that wasn't money, for them money was value and value money. But money itself is virtual, it's a consensual economic hallucination. For a sixteen-year-old who meets up with their real-world friends online and arranges real-world events etc, being cut out of their-vituality-of-choice could translate into real-world isolation too. For a teenager their circle of friends is the most precious thing they have, and money is just money. The fact that the panel were of a certain age might have had a bearing on the inability to grasp the value of the virtual, but plenty of the audience were white-haired too, and yet they clearly understood how important it was. Indeed, I suspect that older people with mobility issues may be starting to partake of virtual worlds more, and build important social relationships there.

Among the best panels were the speech on Skylon, the British spaceplane, which I thought was just a pipedream, but which actual research and prototyping is being done for (more focused on the engines than the plane itself), the talk on Infra-red astronomy, and the one on Guns, guns, guns. I think this is because panels on clearly defined things have an easier job than those on abstract or nebulous issues like writing or politics.

Anyways, I'd better get up and get off for the last day.

I'm in Jupiter Issue 32

2011-04-23T01:11:00.001+01:00

Jupiter SF publishes my story "Guardian Angel" in issue 32, out now!

Eastercon Post 1

2011-04-23T01:05:00.001+01:00

So I am/was at Eastercon. Much bigger than I expected it to be, *much* bigger. Also a lot more varied. It is mostly middle aged (i.e., people like me only, amazingly, more so. People who can remember the moon landings and WWII, and look *astoundingly* well preserved for it) but there were quite a few youngsters running around. Also a surprising amount of women, and many of them clearly single (or just at the Con alone) so one can't put it down to them being dragged here by SF-loving husbands. SF is clearly more diverse than I'd previously thought.

Like most of these things the first day mostly consisted of a lot of people wandering around trying to pick up the courage to talk to each other or break out of their friends-and-family groupings. I went to a bunch of panels where I managed to ask questions that made me sound a complete idiot (I am good at this). Worst of all, at the 'Women in SF' panel, I shouted out 'Lieutenant Mary Sue' as a great female character of SF. I wanted to spark a discussion about double standards, as it seems to me that it's only female characters who are expected to be 'well rounded' (i.e. burdened with problems and sorrows). The look of incomprehending shock on the faces of the panel was a thing to behold, and the discussion moved quickly on. I do think that Mary Sue is one of the most important characters if you want to talk about women and SF, but shouting her name out from an audience at Eastercon isn't the way to start the discussion.

I did a little better on a panel about culture and SF, asking swift, simple questions that I think the panel found acceptable. However, I did blot my copy-book when Lavie Tildar said "The future has changed. You know, we starting to see stories in which the UK isn't an important world power." I shouted out "It isn't an important world power NOW!". Now, I was speaking 'from the audience', without amplification and in a reasonably large room, but judging from the startled-deer-in-headlights reaction of the panel I may have overcompensated volume-wise.

Taking a break from panels, someone in the bar (whose name I instantly forgot) graciously invited me into their conversation circle. I made them all introduce themselves, and then instantly forgot their names. Then I started shouting my opinions at everyone, and when we were joined by one young fellow who told us he was in the finals for Writers of the Future, I immediately launched into my "It's those evil scientologists" rant. On coming down from said rant, exhausted and with my ears ringing, I suddenly realised what a prize **** I was being. I was wrecking this guy's dream-come-true. Why couldn't I just say "Well done!" and leave it at that (but then, if we all did that, no-one would ever speak out against anything). Anyways, I bought him a half-pint of the rather good 'Black Hole' ale to make up for it.

So, Day 1 and everytime I opened my mouth, I put my foot in it. But you know what? That's who I am. And I'll never meet any of these people again, so who cares? So, rather than battle not to say the wrong thing, and fail, I resolve that tommorrow I shall do it more!

Overall I'm enjoying it.

Still alive, just.

2011-04-04T10:04:00.003+01:00

The main news is that I'm going to be in issue 32 of Jupiter magazine. This will be my first publication in paper, rather than electrons! I'm pretty keen on the idea of having something I can hold in my hands. I'm old-skool that way. As an SF writer, of course, I shouldn't have this attachment to the physical and tactile, because in the future we won't need hands!

Also, I'm going to this years Eastercon. I've never been to an SF convention, having always been scared off by the idea of a room full of people much like me (and filk music, whose presence at SF conventions is tacitly tolerated by the local police so long as it's small quantities for personal use only). But this year's eastercon is on my doorstep, so I figured it's something to cross off the 'been there/done that' list.

The writing is in remission at the moment. I've sold nothing yet this year, and have written next to nothing. Other things have my attention, and to be honest the sheer slog involved in getting a story written and published isn't much fun. I'd estimate that it's taken me at least a year to place most of the stories I've sold, by which I mean each story has taken about a year from when I finished writing it to when I *sold* it, and then you can add another six months before it's published! Tends to dampen down the enthusiasm.

Why does it take so long? Well, because it's quite unlikely that the first place you send to will accept your work. Or the second. Or the third. And quite a few of these markets take two, three or four months to respond! Send it to four of them, and it can be out for a year.

People who in my experience do well in regard to response times:

Lightspeed: They live up to their name! They've accepted nothing from anyone I know, but they reject in a DAY. This means it costs you nothing to get rejected by them!

Daily Science Fiction: Six to twenty days, which isn't bad at all.

Kasma SF: Four days for a rejection, and the record for an acceptance: one day!

Futurismic: Doesn't like my stuff, but generally says so in 12 days!

Apex Magazine (Not Abyss&Apex, the other one): Doesn't like my stuff, but generally says so in ten days!

Interestingly I've seen a number of other SF writers out there saying "I give a story five submissions, and if it's not sold by then, I throw it away." What's interesting about this is that if I applied their rule to my writings I would have sold exactly NOTHING. I don't know where they get this figure 'five' from, perhaps it's the number of fingers on a hand? Anyways, I think this is based upon an unconscious belief I once suffered from myself: the idea that there is an objective measure of a stories worth. In this belief system a story is simply placed somewhere on a line between brilliant and godawful, and the measure of its position on this line is how much a market is prepared to pay for it. You send it out to the top-selling markets. After five of them have rejected it, that's five votes from the 'experts' that it's awful. So it must be, throw it away.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately if you're able to recover a copy of said story) this theory is hokum. Think of how much stuff you've read in the very markets you are submitting to that you thought was complete drek. Think of the stuff you've seen win awards that you thought was complete drek. Oh! But that makes things worse, right? Your story must have been *worse* than drek!
But hang on, consider your CD collection, you know full well that you have music in there that you think is brilliant, and which other people (principally your parents) think is tuneless garbage. Imagine you are a band, you know you have a good sound, but the labels you send demo tapes to send them back saying 'not for us'. Doesn't mean it's not for someone, you just have to find the right label that's looking for that kind of music.

The major markets tend to be oversubscribed, and they will always pick a mediochre story by a 'big name' writer over a good one by an unknown, and in their position, you'd do the same. A 'big name' on the cover means higher sales, and the magazine will stave off closure for yet another month. Your best time to submit to these markets is probably just after a major SF convention, when the established 'big name' writers will still be recovering from hangovers or being searched for by rescue services/ the police. The rest of the time you're unlikely to get a look-in, as an eleventh -hour submission from a big-name will always squeeze you out.

Then there's the matter that the editor just doesn't like whatever kind of thing you've written. Perhaps it offends their politics or religious sensibilities (which is a good thing, a story that never offends anyone is a story that stands for nothing). Perhaps they don't like steam/cyber/rock/bio/diesel/clock - punk. Perhaps your schtick is just too radical for this editor, or perhaps you're coming from a cultural matrix that's too different to theirs (a problem for British writers, I think, which no-one seems to recognize).

Thus, even good stories get rejected. People turned down the beatles and J.K. Rowling remember, only to rue that choice later. Similarly people gave time and money to Vanilla Ice and that 'Eldorado' soap-opera fiasco that the BBC poured money into back in the 90's, about the same time as it was cancelling doctor who and all the rest of it's S.F. output. Ah, I hope some BBC bigwigs lost their shirts on that one!

Anyways, to these 'Five and out' writers I say, "Don't give up so easy!" A good story won't appeal to everyone, in part because a good story will say something, and saying something always pisses someone off. Also the available markets don't just publish anything, they have specific niches depending on the tastes of the editor. If you've written the literary equivalent of Death Metal, it may be very good, it may in fact be brilliant, but it may struggle to find that outlet that understands what you've done. Get yourself a crit group and listen to what they say, don't try to scry meanings in rejection slips, the market in question might just have spend all that year's budget already and not be able to buy another story, or they might just not get your thing.

My own writerly problem right now is different, it's a lack of ideas. Another reason to go to Eastercon where, perhaps, I can ~~steal~~ exchange some.

Actions Speak Louder than Prayers.

2011-03-14T20:51:00.001Z

I'm seeing a lot of people saying "Pray for Japan." That won't do any good, if God was going to step in, he'd already have done so to stop the Quake/Tsunami from happening. He doesn't have to get a U.N. resolution or anything.

Send money instead. Or send money, then pray, if that's your thing, but send money.

You can donate at any branch of the Red Cross, they will send the money on to the Japanese Red Cross.

To get some idea of just how bad things are, there's some appalling satalite photo comparisons to be found here, here, and here

I'm up on "Daily Science Fiction"

2011-02-07T12:34:00.001Z

Well, on Friday my story "Imaginary Enemies" went out on the Daily Science Fiction mailing list. My first pro-paying publication. What feed-back I've seen from readers is good, no one hated it, many people are saying they liked it. I'd like to thank my friends and family, and Sainsbury's for doing the catering. I'm sure my sudden success won't change me.

Actually, I was kinda hoping it would change me, but no signs yet.

Anyways, in a week or so it's apparently going to get posted to the Daily SF website for everyone to see, even those who aren't on the mailing list, and no doubt then the bidding war for film rights will start!!

A Hopefull Monster is Published

2011-01-27T19:00:00.001Z

Another step towards the "Hopefull Monsters" (i.e. my online circle of fellow writers) conquering the world! One of our members, Richard Zwicker, has a story up in "Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine".

Alas, Labyrinth Inhabitant seems to be closing, so get it while it's hot.

Well, Everything got rejected!

2011-01-26T12:40:00.000Z

Everything came winging back, and I've learned an important lesson: If you can't make a deadline, don't try. The main story I was hoping might get into 'In Situ' was the one I wrote in 3 caffine-filled nights, and sent off almost straight after finishing it, because the deadline for submissions was looming. Since then, I've not dared to look at it. When it was rejected, I finally did...

Well, there's a scene in Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and loathing in Las Vegas" where, during a major drug binge, he experiences an epiphany, and has complete insight into how the world works, and what needs to be done to make it work well, and thus bring about world peace and cupcakes for all. Mindful of what happened to Samuel Coleridge, he immediately goes and writes it all down in a notebook. The next morning, sober and no-doubt in a degree of post-binge pain, he goes to the notebook, and finds it's completely empty, except for one page upon which is written:

KILL THE HEAD, AND THE BODY WILL DIE!

It was like that. There were even, oh the shame, spelling mistakes in there, though I was sure I'd spell-checked it and caught them all.

So I did the only thing I could. I posted it up to my crit group, the "Hopefull Monsters" (and yes, the extra 'l' in 'Hopeful' is down to me, but we're stuck with it now. I tell them it's archaic British spelling, and thus ironic. Anyways, as we're almost a secret society, we can spell our name however we like).

Well, they reckon it's salvageable, though most of the first draft is completely incoherent. "This is what happens when you cut us out of the loop and try to go it on your own!" say the Monsters, and I can only agree and swear not to do so again!

But, I also encouraged the group to submit to 'In Situ', and this bore fruit. Only two other members managed to get something sent in, but one of these got included!!

Dwayne Minton (our man on Hawaii) has a story "Hoodoo" included in the anthology. I confess I've already read Hoodoo, but you haven't, so you should rush out and buy 'In Situ' when it comes out, because 'Hoodoo' was really good.

I'll be buying it to find out what others made of the 'alien archaeology' submissions guidelines. For some reason I found it very, very, very hard to come up with ideas for this that would work. I started many, finished only a few, and none of the few got in.

In other news though, 'Daily Science Fiction' has just announced that my story will be coming up on February the 4th, and the 'Anywhere but Earth' anthology has officially announced the inclusion of my "Pink Ice in the Jovian Rings" (which was not written in 3 days, was critted on hopefull monsters and Online Writers Workshop, but I admit there was caffine involved). They've also announced what the cover art is going to look like. I've got to say, I'm not keen on it, myself. It's too retro, too generic, too 50's. But I have a suspicion they might be pulling our leg. Or maybe I just have weird tastes in cover art, after all, I'm always complaining about it!

So, lots of rejection right now, not a great start to 2011, but it's early days yet.

My Fiction Sales

2010-12-16T21:06:00.001Z

Bards and Sages magazine accepts one of my stories 'The Creation Myth of The Dynak' for their June 2011 issue.

So, I guess it's time to review the state of play as to what I've got out there. I've been resistant to doing this, because I suspected that having a story accepted didn't mean it would get all the way to being published (magazines go 'pop' all the time), and I didn't want to count my chickens before they'd hatched. Indeed, one of my sales seemed to go through exactly this problem when 'Kasma SF' magazine blew up and vanished. However, Kasma is now back, and they've gone ahead and published my story, and this has led to my feeling... less fatalistic, perhaps.

So, here goes

'STORIES ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION'

'Under A Closed Sky.'

This was my first published story, winning the Hub Magazine 'Bootstrap SF' competition and also being podcast on 'Cossmass Infinities', and picking up some flattering feedback :). It's a cyberpunk story set in Congo in a future where a class of hyperevolved 'Orbital' humans are benevolently messing in human affairs.

Point of interest: at one point this story makes reference to a 'world financial crash', so you can date the story by that, right? Wrong. It took so long to get my first sale that while I was trying to do so, a financial crash happened. My first prophet-point scored! That said, I've been predicting a crash since the 80's, (or possibly since I could speak) and the one we got, based on bankers doing insane things in the mortgage market, was not the crash I was looking for!

Read it here: http://www.hubfiction.com/2009/10/issue-100/

Listen here: http://cossmass.co.uk/infinities/9

'The Uploaded'

My second story to be published. This time in Kasma SF. This one was a slight reaction to the whole "Isn't it gonna be great when we can all upload ourselves into cyberspace" thing. Mostly because, to me, there's a certain arrogance in thinking that cyberspace, and all the territories of reality, are just their to serve our needs.
This is an unusual story for me because it has a male protagonist. For various reasons (some good, some no doubt very bad) I tend to lean towards writing female characters.

'Guardian Angel'

Forthcoming in Jupiter SF April 2011 issue.

One of the first stories I wrote. For some reason this one seems to get a very positive reaction from female readers, the ultimate example being when I sent it to a husband-and-wife team where the wife sent me an email singing it's praises and basically saying 'It's in, I just have to clear it with my husband', but said husband came home and nixed it :(
Ah well, at least Mr Redman over at Jupiter is sufficiently in touch with his feminine side to like it!

'Imaginary Enemies'

Forthcoming (somewhen?) in Daily Science Fiction

This one is a Multiple Personality Disorder story. This was a difficult one to write, and I spent a lot of time trying out different angles and approaches. But I got there in the end!

'I Have Put Away Childish Things'

Forthcoming in Fusion Fragment Issue #16, 'sometime around December / January.'

This is another one with a male protag. It's told as diary entries, (which always raises a few eyebrows), and concens a technology that I expect we'll pretty soon have: Selective Neural Depopulation. That is, the ability to alter people's memories and behavior by identifying where in the brain such things are held, and burning them out. Actually, this is something you can pretty much do with a hammer, if you're not too bothered about the 'Selective' bit.

'Pink Ice in the Jovian Rings'

Forthcoming in Coeur De Lion Publishing's "Anywhere but Earth" anthology 2011

This is a more recently written story, set during Jupiter's "Warring Moons" period. This is the first of a bunch of recent stories that just came out of nowhere, and that I felt a little uncomfortable about. I felt uncomfortable about them because the protagonists tend to be somewhat sweary and the stories somewhat... ugly. I do like and generally write that kind of stuff, but I felt maybe I was crossing some lines here. My crit group (The Hopeful Monsters) disagreed, giving me the confidence to send it out. However, after a couple of rejections I was feeling "No, it is too much. Now people have seen this they'll think I'm sick and weird." So, after much soul-searching, I took out one occurance of the 'c-word'. Bingo! The next time I sent it out, publication!!

Of course, it probably had nothing to do with my edit, but you've got some insight into the strange ideas that go through a writer's head when they get a rejection letter. Truth is, everything gets its rejections. You may have written a truely great alternate history story, but if the first two editors you send it to detest the alternate history genre, then you'll get rejections from them.

This one is inspired by a classic horror story, but I'm not going to say what, because I'm curious to see if anyone ever spots it.

'The Creation Myth of The Dynak'

Forthcoming in Bards and Sages Quarterly July 2011

This is a 'quirky' fantasy story about How the Universe Got this Way. The central driver of the story is a question about the universe that has always bothered me. It's one of those questions that most people see as a non-issue, that's just the way things are. But some of us lie in our beds at night, staring at the ceiling and thinking "But... but why? WHY?"

'STORIES OUT FOR CONSIDERATION'

'Pirate Queen of the Jovian Moons: A Lovesong'

Under consideration by Wicked East Press for their 'Cutlass and Musket: Tales of Piratical Skullduggery' anthology.

Bit of a weird one this. I set out to write a space-pirate story. Wound up writing a space-pirate story as a poem or ballad. And furthermore, a poem where the rhyme-scheme gets deliberately broken in a couple of places. Why? No idea. I'd love to see it in the Wicked East anthology though, so fingers crossed.

'The Secret Weapon'

Under consideration at Dagan Books for their 'In Situ' anthology of Alien Archaeology stories.

I've started picking anthology markets, and trying to write for them. This works well, because the market acts as both a writer's prompt and... uh, you know, a market. "In Situ" is the first market that I've targetted this way. The Secret Weapon is the first story I wrote for them, but it came in a few words short of their Guidelines, so it's probably going to wind up somewhere else.

I had a bunch of ideas for 'In Situ', but in the end only three reached completion. Some good ideas didn't fly as stories, or proved too complex to fit under the 4000 word limit, or were just going to take more time to get right than I had available. Still, I have a cache of ideas now that I can come back to, and one day will probably provide me with more stories. Who knows, maybe there'll be an 'In Situ II'.

'What Fools these Mortals Be'

Under consideration at Dagan Books for their 'In Situ' anthology of Alien Archaeology stories.

This is an attempt to do Lovecraft in SPAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEEEE!!!!! It doesn't use any Lovecraftian furniture, but instead tries to capture his philosophy that the universe is essentially uncaring and inscrutable. Lovecraft considered that from a cosmic viewpoint humans were just bugs; we could never understand the cosmos and the major players in the universe didn't give a hoot about us, anymore than they thought anything of ants. I've always thought the scariest stories are the ones where the ending makes no rational sense, where something happens that feels utterly supernatural. For example in Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", the final line of dialogue is a compltely unexpected voice that we don't know who is the owner of (and it's implied we don't want to know). The surprise and weirdness of that ending, breaking the rules of literature and realism, really mades the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. With this story I've tried to do the same thing. We shall see if I succeeded.

'Rough Space'

Under consideration at Dagan Books for their 'In Situ' anthology of Alien Archaeology stories.

I wrote this one in a caffine/alcohol fueled blaze staying up till 3am over 3 nights before the deadline ran out for 'In Situ'. I'm afraid to go back and look at what I wrote. I *think* it's the best of the three that I wrote, but like I say, I'm afraid to look.
It's pure space-opera with power armor, fanatical legions, clones, negligent ancient aliens who've littered the galaxy with abandoned superweapons, etc, etc. I'm sure you figure you've read this one before, but somehow, I don't think you have :).
I had a *lot* of trouble cramming this one into 4000 words though, in truth, it could probably be expanded out somewhat. It's got two technical ideas in it that I'm quite proud of. That said, time was so short that I didn't run it by my crit group, because I'd have missed the deadline for sure, so who knows?
We'll see.

Restate my assumptions: Press Delete

2010-12-14T18:08:00.000Z

So, I've deleted like half my blog posts. Why? Well, because I express opinions in them. Some of them are off the cuff opinions, that I wouldn't want to be held to, others are more thought-out opinions.
That's not a safe thing to do.
The web and the world is changing, and recent events have led me to think that it's unwise to broadcast too much of yourself on line. It's not been one thing, it's been many, both within the world of SF writing, and outside of it.
From now on this blog will be me, me, me. It'll be about writing, and what I write, and not about anything else.

Kasma Magazine Publishes One of my Stories

2010-11-22T15:08:00.001Z

One of my sales is now up online! Kasma Magazine (which disappeared for a while, but is now back with a new look (though they've gotten rid of their iconic planet (Neputune?) which I was rather a fan of) has published my story "The Uploaded".

Physician, heal thyself

2010-11-21T23:34:00.001Z

So, the writing thing plods on. I've got a number of sales (and not-sales, i.e. placements in non-paying markets) to my name now, but I'm by-and-large not declaring them until they actually happen. They're not going to actually happen for quite some time (2011 basically) so even though contracts have been exchanged and all that, I'm not going to announce them until they see print.

Recently though, I got to hear someone read some of my work, and it was a pretty surprising thing.

Okay, I'll come clean, it was the podcast over at Cossmass Infinities, a site you really should check out if you're British and want to support your local brand of SF (even more so if you're Scottish!). Paul Campbell seems to do it mostly, and heroically, single-handed. He does most of the readings himself, and attempts things like portraying the voices of overwrought female children, which I would never be brave enough to try, and I think he gets away with it.
However, for stories told in the first person of the female persuasion, Mr Campbell brings in someone who, I think he would agree, is something of a secret weapon. Stefanie Gallacher. I thought she did a fantastic reading of my work, doing all kinds of subtle vocal SFX to make it come alive. Also, I just like the fact that she's Scottish (I now plan to write more stories with Scottish female leads in the hope of hearing Ms Gallacher read them!) We don't hear many regional voices in SF, and this seems especially true of female podcast readers. They mostly tend to be American, and I would submit they're mostly all a certain kind of willowy, elegant, cultured American voice, whereas I'd love to hear some readers from a working-class background who might be better able to deliver lines like "Get away from her, you bitch!" or "Stitch that, m**********r" with greater aplomb (admittedly, after Ellen Ripley there have been very few female SF characters who convincingly deliver such lines. Maybe I should try to do something about that). Uh... I'm drifting here, time to get back to the main point.

The main point being that, while listening to someone else reading it, I noticed things about my own work that had never stood out to me before. One thing in particular.

It was obviously written by a guy, wasn't it?

At some point, unknowingly, I kinda fell in love (or at least in lust) with the viewpoint character. So when I heard the story read, I found myself thinking "Did I really write that?" Yes, you did. And there's another one. And another.

Now, to some extent it was fair enough, because the viewpoint character is something of a Paris Hilton type, (or not exactly, it gets complicated) so she's going to be quite photogenic, but at some point things might have gotten a little bit out of hand. Just a teensy bit.

Fortunately, only I seem to have noticed, comments on the story have generally all been positive, so really I should shut up about it. On the other hand, the reaction of most people whom I've expressed this worry to has been "Oh, REALLY?! I've got to hear this! Where can I find it?", so I guess there's no such things as bad publicity, and I should talk all I like! And really, I'm only talking about four lines or so here, probably I'm overreacting.

But I'm the guy who's always been complaining about sexist SF magazine covers, and sooner or later someone's gonna put two and two together and tell me to go deal with the log in my own eye first, so I figured if anyone is going to do it, it might as well be me: Paget, get a hold of yourself. No, not like that. More cold showers and bromine in your tea, remember you're British. Pure clean thoughts from now on, okay?

Well, then again, I've always admitted that I really like those covers, but I'm just aware that they might alienate potential readers for lots of different reasons. One of the reasons being that, if the cover is too extreme, it does kinda make it look like you're buying/reading erotica. Now, really, in this day and age we should all be comfortable with being seen with erotica, but often we're not. (Me, I'm British. But e-readers are going to solve a lot of this, because the back of an e-reader doesn't show anything, and presumably you'll be able to turn pictures off in public. In fact, you'll probably be able to select different sets of artwork depending on occasion, allowing legions of fangirls (and I'm sure more than a few fanboys) to have Harry Potter sculpted and clothed to their particular requirements. My god, 'Buff Harry' mods for e-books are going to sell like hotcakes! JK, you better start spending now, or you'll have nowhere to keep all the money!) Uh... what was I saying?

Oh yes, *how did it come to this*? [Rends garments]. How did I not realise that maybe things had gone a little far, and how did my band of merry crit-readers not pick up on the fact and point it out to me? Well, maybe it's only in my head and there was nothing to point out, but I think not. I think the reason is this:

When you read or write a story, you experience something different to when you hear it read to you.

I think that when you read or write, your brain is doing a lot of work to unpack meaning from the words before you. I think one's brain is so busy in fact, that you're not really aware of what you read or wrote just a few lines back. You move through the story like a searchlight, experiencing it line-by-line. As a result, when you go to write something, you might think "Uh, this is a bit of a naughty comment about the leading lady's legs" but you figure "Oh, what the hell, it's just the one! What am I, a monk?! Anyway, the fact she has great legs is an important plot point. Yes it is." But, it wasn't just the one, you wrote another one a few lines back, and another a few lines before that, but you've already forgotten them.

However, when you hear your work read, you experience it like you're a bee flying over a map, you see it laid out before you in all it's grandeur, because you're not doing as much work unpacking meaning, the reader is doing that for you, so you've more processing time to spend on viewing the big picture. And suddenly, you see things that weren't previously clear to you. Individual "It's just the one" comments build up into a kind of critical mass

I now wonder if this might explain some of the SF covers that I've been complaining about too? Probably the artist, upon finishing the work, stepped back and thought "Hey, that's pretty good. But... but I feel something's not right. Something seems out of proportion, but what? Hmm... her spacehelmet? No, no it's the retro look, like in 'Alien', it's supposed to be big. The gun? No, it's a low-gravity planet, she'd be able to heft it no problem. What can it be? Ah, it's probably nothing, and I'm up against a deadline. Time to get this one sent off!" and only when they see the magazine on the news-stand months later do they think "Oh. My. God." But then it's too late.

So, I'm going to go easier on the magazine cover artists now! And I'm going to watch myself a little more closely. I'm not aiming to be a puritan or a saint, anything in moderation. But I'm going to make sure that Mr Superego takes a greater role in the writing process.

Superego: Hmmm. Do we really need to know what she's wearing in such... intimate... detail?
Id: Oh, yeahyeahyeah, absolutely.
Superego: Only, I feel we're burning a lot of words that don't move the plot forwards?
Id: It's character development.
Superego: Really? I fail to see how any of this is relevant to her as a person?
Id: That's 'cause you've not seen what happens in the next chapter. I'm telling you man, it's ****ing art!
Superego: That's what you said last time.

I for one welcome our.... Holy XXXX what is that thing?!

2010-11-16T20:22:00.001Z

Shouldn't there be a bunch of guys firing rockets at this while it eats Tokyo?

Salt: Strike Two

2010-10-03T10:59:00.001+01:00

This is an old blog entry that I forgot to post, so I'm posting it now.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, this post isn't going to have anything to do with Spec-Fic, writing, or any of that stuff.

So, in the days since I saw it, I've become more and more bitter about the disappointment that was 'Inception'. So bitter in fact, that I decided I needed to get a pep of filmic goodness in order to feel that I'd got my money's worth for the seven quid I forked out to see Inception. I think this is generally called "The Gamblers Fallacy", the belief that if you keep betting, and betting, and betting, you're gonna win sooner or later.

So, I went and saw "Salt". Now, there was some reasoning behind this one. 'Inception' is a high-concept film that promises so much it just can't hope to deliver. I went to see "Salt" solely on the recommendation of a negative review on rotten tomatoes:

"The focus here is less on creating a credible set of characters and motives than on manufacturing an excuse to have Jolie leapfrog between high-speed lorries."

Now, when a supposedly negative review makes you stop and think "What's she wearing? Lycra?" I figure you're onto a good thing. I figured that 'Inception' had promised a mind-blowing eye-gasm that would make me question reality itself and redefine cinema as we know it, but had then flopped into delivering a fairly mindless gunfire-and-explosions action movie. I figured that the antidote to this was to go and see a movie that promises a dumb-as-rocks bullet festival starring Angelina "The Pout" Jolie, hopefully with one of those spurious "Angelina must crawl through a laser grid while wearing a skin-tight outfit" scenes. Because, if it promises that and fails, then maybe we'll actually get a mind-blowing eye-gasm that redefines cinema as we know it. On the other hand, if it promises that and succeeds, then I'm still good.

"Salt" sucker-punches you early on. It goes straight into the requisite "Angelina not wearing very much" scene, but gives it to you in a way that makes you feel tremendous self-loathing for having secretly wanted it (or, in my case, not so secretly having wanted it). Then it offers you redemption. It does something in the opening minutes that 'Inception' didn't do in it's entire run. It messes with your emotions.
Angelina is sprung from North Korean gulag, and she looks like hell. That's something new for me in a movie (though I've not seen many recent ones); when Angelina gets hit in the face, she looks like she's been hit in the face. I don't recall seeing that with a female lead in an action movie before, it's rare enough for male leads. It adds a visceral vulnerability to the character of "Salt" that plays well to start with. As the prisoner exchange goes through, Angelina asks her CIA handler (I don't remember the exact dialogue, but it goes something like:

"Why did you come back for me. One person isn't worth risking the operation for. You were supposed to leave me here?"
"Did you marry that guy?" (points) "Only, he's been hounding the agency and kicking up a storm in the media, making us look bad. I figured we had to do something before he decides to invade this rice-paddy country himself."

And, at the end of the bridge is Angelina's husband. He's a geeky looking guy who wouldn't stand a chance with Angelina in real life, but the expressions on husband and wife as they walk towards each other are as convincing as anything I've seen. I don't think they ever, ever say "I love you," to each other in the whole movie, because they just don't need to. Any time they just look at each other, you know it. The movie does beat you over the head with the concept a little bit though, and later on we'll get flash-backs to the first time they met, etc, etc, etc. But these are redundant, in that opening scene, as they walk to each other, you can see there's a force operating between them that's warping spacetime. Before Angelina gets to the end of the bridge, I'm sold on this couple. I want to be best man at their wedding. I don't recall ever feeling like this about an on-screen couple, ever. I really buy that they love each other. I'm misting up and my hopes are rising, this isn't going to be a dumb-ass movie, this is going to be something else.
We learn that the geeky guy is German, and I like that about him. It's time now for us to have some Germans who are untainted by history, and all the male secret agents get a French girlfriend, so it makes sense for Salt to get a German guy. He's an expert on spiders, and I like that about him to. We don't see much of him, but in what we do see he comes across as a kooky, heroic little guy, and if I were Angelina, I'd marry him too.

Then a Russian defector walks into CIA headquarters and, during a debrief interview with Angelina, accuses her of being a Soviet sleeper agent right in front of everyone. Angelina is somewhat embarrassed. The CIA are somewhat embarrassed when, after having dropped this bombshell, the defector kinda defects back, easily slipping out of their clutches. Angelina herself decides to make a bolt for it too, because she's worried that there's going to be some kind of heat come down on her husband. This is when the movie kicks it up a notch. At this point, Angelina is blonde, and she comes across as a desperate, vulnerable woman fighting with her wits as everyone turns against her. When she starts improvising her way out of the situation, she is at her most convincing. I bought her as a highly trained person who is nevertheless in severe danger, and is using every ounce of training she's been given to come up with some crazy, clever shit to save the day.
Next it's onto a car-chase. I'm pretty sick of car-chases these days, but in this one Angelina literally throws herself off overpasses onto the roofs of passing lorries (no, not in lycra). But the end of this she is bruised and battered, but has commandeered a motorcycle, and is fiercely determined to go through anything to put herself at the side of the man she loves. Seeing this I decided that, if I were the little German spider-guy, I'd marry Angelina too.

The plot unfolds and we come to realise that THOSE BASTARDS HAVE KIDNAPPED ANGEI'S HUSBAND!!! Grrrr.... oh, and there was something else too...
what was it now?
Hmm...
hang on, it'll come to me...
Oh yes, that's it, there was some nonsense about a plot to "Destroy America", but really, that's just details, the point is THOSE BASTARDS HAVE ANGIE'S MAN! Grrrrr. But they've crossed the wrong bitch, 'cause Angie's going to use some of that clever secret agent mojo we've been seeing to bring down some RIIIIIGGGGHTEOUS Jason-Borne-Style shit on the heads of the wrongdoers, just see if she doesn't! I expect to hear the line "Get away from him, you ******" followed by a nicely sappy reunion scene where someone says something cute about spiders. Oh shit, why don't they warn you you're going to need tissues for this one? I never carry those things.

And then Angie dyes her hair black, and it all goes to shit.

Literally, the moment she dyes her hair, the movie ploughs into the hillside. The hair-dying moment represents the switch from desperately battling heroine to Soviet superwoman. Suddenly it seems that Angie is a sleeper agent after all, and she starts implementing her phase of "Plan destroy America". Now, obviously, this is going to be one of those cross-and-double-cross things, but the problem is that from now on Angie seems so effortlessly in charge (despite what's about to happen) that you stop caring about her. The spy shit no longer seems clever and improvised, it more seems like she's a microscopic cog in a catastrophic plan, just going through her pre-scripted routine.

Then, having ploughed into the hillside, the movie's fuel-tanks ignite, and it blows itself to bits, and not in a good way. This is a major spoiler, so you might want to stop reading here. But, if this movie were 'King Kong', then the little German spider-guy would be the monkey.

The heart of the movie implodes, leaving an empty space behind. From now on the main drive of the movie is to save the American president from an assassination attempt. Now, I know some of you out there have strong feelings about this, but I don't give a fuck about the American president, they can always vote for another one. America has a rich tradition of presidents who bought the farm, and is not visibly worse off for it. Indeed, given the calibre of some recent presidents an argument could be made that more 'lost' presidents would be a good thing.

In the finale Angie disguises herself as a man, and this allows her to punch people in the face without causing any plausibility issues. This highlights the recent decline of fight choreography in American films. Somewhere along the line someone decided that the way to film a fight was mostly as blurred shadows bouncing around punctuated by unbelievably loud sound effects going "BUUFFFFF!!!" "CRRRIICK!!". You can't see what anyone's doing, but mostly they just seem to be punching each other in the face. In one sense this is realistic, if you see a fight on a Friday night, this is what it looks like, except for the sound effects. However, if I wanted to see a struggle between two clueless drunken bruisers, I'd go clubbing. Given the fact that Angie's female, I expected her to have to use a higher degree of skill and spectacle in order to take down the bad guys, and to be honest I'd far rather watch that. But no, we get to shadows filmed in wobbly-cam with implausible sound-effects.

It's as though this film was directed by two different people, who wanted to direct two different films. The first film was high on emotion and drama and spectacle, and the second one was the product of someone who wanted to produce a three-way hybrid of Modesty Blaise, Jason Bourne, and WWF wrestling, and who managed to get only the superficial aspects of each one. Just like 'Inception', 'Salt' makes big promises at the outset, and then drastically fails to deliver.

So, the question now is should I throw more money away and figure that I'm due for a winner soon? Third time is the charm after all. And 'Toy Story 3' is Pixar, isn't it? Pixar never lets you down.

Or maybe I should just quit while I'm behind and still have cash to spend on food?

It's all her fault, she started it

2010-08-30T13:22:00.001+01:00

This morning Google tells me that it's this woman's 213th birthday. Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein: The New Prometheus" is often credited with lighting the blue touchpaper of modern science-fiction.

When I was a kid, I used to take umbridge at this, because to me 'Frankenstein' was horror, not science fiction. At the time I only knew of 'Frankenstein' as something that turned up in hammer movies, the guy with the bolt through his neck, and I'd no idea that it had pre-existed as a written work. For me, at that time, science fiction was about spaceships and ray-guns, Tom Baker's "Doctor Who", and getting a free 'space spinner' on the front cover of 2000AD. Though I was an early reader I was still digging though 'kids' SF which was heavy on 'gee-whizz' and low on dread (though of course it had Dredd).
But there were lots of things in my reading that should have allowed me to make the connection. Doctor Who episodes like "Genesis of the Daleks" (which I would claim is still very worth seeing today) and "The Giant Robot" had strong Frankensteinian elements, and as my reading began to pick up works like "I Robot" and "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" I began to perceive that Science Fiction was as much about the fear of the future than the love of it. Indeed, maybe more so.

So, these days, I'm with the crowd who believe "Frankenstein: it started here." There were many antecedents to Frankenstein, but to me most of them don't quite add up to the 'Beginning of Modern SF', and one of the reasons why not is exactly the thing that originally made me thing that Ms Shelley's opus wasn't actually SF: Dread.

Ray Bradbury once said something like "It's not the job of a science fiction writer to predict the future, it's their job to prevent it." Philip K Dick said that SF writer's don't ask "What if?" but rather "My god! What if?" (though, I think I might be taking his quote out of context, but that's never stopped me before). In these statements I think there is a clue to an important element in most SF, and that Frankenstein is one of the first places that we see this element:

I think Mary Shelley thought that, just possibly, somehow, somewhen, something like what she'd written might actually happen, and it scared the bejuzus out of her.

Many of the precursors to science fiction lack this element. There are sections in 'The Arabian Nights' and folklore that involve journeys to other planets or time-travel or what have you. But I think that the people who wrote these things very much knew they were completely making stuff up from whole cloth, and never expected to see anything like it come to pass. Yes, people in those times believed in magic and the supernatural, but I suspect they didn't believe that this alone gave their stories much credence.
True, many people in the workshop of modern SF are working in this mode. I'm sure George Lucas doesn't really think that anything too much like "Star Wars" is likely to happen (even though there are elements of Roman history in the fall of the republic), it's just a story, and a lot of the stuff that occurs in it is, actually magic. However, for this reason I've long felt that Star Wars' credentials as science fiction are pretty weak, it's really out-and-out fantasy.

However, Mary Shelley lived in a time when people were doing strange experiments with electricity, and I suspect that it was quite believable to people living in these times that someone might be able to put the 'spark of life' to inanimate or dead matter, and bring it back to life. It had been fifty years already since Volta had done his experiments with frogs-legs and electricity, and new discoveries and wonders had kept coming with increasing frequency since then. Indeed, since the Middle Ages ended, haven't we lived in times of just one-damn-miracle after another? Isn't this why the modern world has SF?

Another aspect that I think is present in modern SF, but which I suspect is generally lacking in previous works, is that of human agency. Now, I don't know enough about pre-modern literature, but I have a strong suspicion that the main agents in tales of wonder were outside forces. Gods, titans, Djinn, the Devil, trolls and giants and the-fair-folk were the real agents to change and disaster in the world. The common people just tried to struggle on getting enough food to eat, finding partners for sex, and trying to bring up the resulting children.
Even magicians are other-worldly entities in these stories, they're not people like us. But with the arrival of modern times the modern analogue of the magician, the scientist, is part of the body politic. He's one of us. The scientists are a wing of our army, they're a branch of our civil service, and the real danger is not what they invent, but how the public will take and use that discovery.
Science fiction then, at least some of the time, presents us with choices, with worlds that might, or might not, come into being depending on what we decide. Sometimes the agents of change are outside, mysterious entities (aliens) but quite often it is society, and the things it decides to do, that drive the story. Science fiction represents a swing from a literature and world-view in which humanity is the victim, buffeted and set-upon by incomprehensible forces, to a world-view in which, when bad things happen, we did them to ourselves. In this, despite the tendency of SF to (quite rightly) present us with frightening dystopias, it is an optimistic genre. The future might be bleak, but if we got our act together, we could perhaps change it. We are not powerless playthings of the gods, we are they gods, and most of the time when things go bad, it's our own stupid fault. We have no-one else to blame.

Hence, for me, Mary Shelley marks the dividing point between a literature of wonders and adventure, and a literature of ideas and choices. So I say that everything that's happened in SF since, is kinda all her fault.

Inception: Disappointed

2010-08-22T17:28:00.001+01:00

Firstly I must apologise to anyone reading for how sweary the following 'Review' of Inception is. I've no idea why it's like this. I'm not this sweary in normal life, honest. I know it's not big and it's not clever. I did re-write it and take all the swear words out, but then on re-reading I decided "Fuck it, I like version 1 better," so, sorry. Maybe I need to wash my brain out with soap.

Anyway, I went to see Inception. I went to see it because of the barrage of "You must see this amazing movie" that I was getting from friends and the media.

And surprise, surprise, it ain't all that.

Maybe it's just that I'm getting old, and have seen a lot of stuff, or maybe it's a price you pay for trying to be a writer, where when the plot is first pitched to you you're thinking "Oh! Oh! I know what I'd do with this idea!" But Inception promises too much, and delivers too little.

Now, don't get me wrong, Inception is very clever, and I like clever. We don't see enough clever in the cinema. But where Inception falls down isn't on its concepts, it's on the dumb-ass stuff, the very stuff that has become too easy in the modern age. The premise of the movie is a gift and a challenge to the SFX department and the writer to push the envelope. But they never do. Inception is a great story-idea that suffers from lack of conviction, ambition and imagination. It tries to be 'The Matrix' but it doesn't come close.

Let's go through the issues point-by-point:

1) The Pitch: The Delivery:
I don't think anything that I'm going to say counts as spoilers, as the issues I had with the film are so basic that I don't need to go to far into the plot. Everyone must know by now that the basic premiss is that of a heist movie, where a team is gathered to break into an installation. But the installation in question is someone's mind. They're going to go in through the person's dreams, and they would normally steal information, but this time they're going to plant an idea instead.

Now, I'm sat there in the cinema, and I'm given this pitch, and I'm thinking:

"Holy fuck."

I'm turning in my seat and grinning at my fellow film-fans and thinking "Did you hear that folks? We're going into someone's fucking MIND! Probably some weird half-insane sicko, if I know how these plots run. Why, the guy's probably Hitler! And not just into his mind, but into his FUCKING DREAMS!!! What are your dreams like? I know I wouldn't want to be trapped in mine every night! Uh... yes, I know I am, but you know what I mean. And remember folks, 'The Matrix' was ten years ago, so this is going to be kicking things up to the next level! Buckle up folks, and take your motion-sickness pills, because it's going to be a bumpy ride!"

And then De Caprio gives us a pep-talk about how they're going to have to layer dreams, entering dreams within dreams, three levels deep. Each level will be more wild, primal, and fragile than the one above. And by now I'm screaming "Yes! Yes! Yes!" more enthusiastically than a faked orgasm (but inwardly you understand. I'm English, so I'm not about to make a scene. You might have seen me tilt my head and smile). But the thing is on that pitch Level 3 is going to be fucking bonkers. It's going to be like 'Altered States' only with a much bigger and better SFX budget. Everyone's going to be staggering out of the cinema with their minds blown, their retinas burnt and adrenaline sloshing around their bloodstream. This is going to be awesome.

And then I sat there waiting for it to get good.

And it never did. Most of the good stuff that you see in the trailers with the city folding back on itself etc, happens during training sequences in which The Chick (more on her later) gets introduced to the world of group dreaming. When they actually go in to 'do the job' almost none of that stuff happens. Instead we get a series of nested scenes that wouldn't look out of place in any Hollywood movie or TV drama. There are occasional surprise 'glitches', especially on level 2, and the idea that events in the next level up influences the level you are on is a clever one but...

Well, here's a thought experiment for you. You probably don't remember many of your dreams, I don't very often. But imagine that you could record your dreams and turn them into a movie. What would they be like?

My dreams would blow Inception away. They're bigger, more dramatic, weirder, wilder, more full of subtext and threat than anything we see in Inception. I think yours probably are too. Throughout Inception, we mostly feel that we're not in someone's mind, we're in a standard Hollywood car-chase, or in an extended homage to 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'. It's a massive let-down given the pitch.

Now, if the pitch hadn't been so ambitious, then I'd probably be saying that Inception was a really great film. But when you tell the audience that we're going on a journey into the subconscious mind, everyone thinks back to that really weird, scary, and shameful dream they had last night and thinks "Oh, this will be interesting..." (or at least I do) and now they're expecting a lot, a heck of a lot. Inception doesn't deliver.

'Does that look like the inside of someone's subconscious mind to you, or like two guys rolling around in a hotel corridor?'

2) The Mooks:
If you don't know, "Mook" means a disposable villain in a film or videogame, like the imperial stormtroopers in 'Star Wars', or the Agents in 'The Matrix'. In 'Inception' the mooks are projections of the dreamer's mind, people they've dreamt up who start to recognize the intruders for what they are and act like white blood cells to expel them. This, like most things, is handled well in the 'training' scenes, where normal people walking down the street start to turn on the 'intruders'. But when we move to the real job, we're told that the subject's mind has been trained to resist dream intrusion, and has been 'militarized'. The mooks are now fairly standard bad-guys-with-guns that you might see in any Hollywood shoot-em-up. They have no character, and no threat. The idea of the people you walk among in your daily life, male, female, young, old, children, whomever, suddenly turning on you is a terrifying one. The idea of waves of James-Bond extras trying to gun you down is significantly less frightening, because it has no connection to real life.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was frightening precisely because of this idea that the people you spend your days with could turn on you. I think a case can be made that this dynamic is at work in zombie movies too. By switching this threat for one composed of by-the-numbers security staff and henchmen 'Inception' takes us away from the primal fear of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' and onto the much more comfortable territory of 'James Bond'.
In "The Matrix" the mooks aren't our fellow pedestrians, so they need something else to give them identity, a gimmick. Their gimmick is their 'G-man' appearance and way of speaking, and it's effective in making them feel like a threatening, weird, inhuman force. The mooks in 'Inception' never feel like this, they're just guys with guns. They have no identity. That sounds good, doesn't it, 'No identity', but it's not. If you wanted to suggest that they have no identity and make it scary, give them no faces. Faceless people pop up all the time in my dreams, how come we never see them in 'Inception'?
Basically, there's never much feeling of real threat to the team in Inception, because the mooks just aren't up to the job. The major enemy that gets the pulse racing seems to be time, as they're doing all this against the clock.

3) The Antagonist:
I have to be careful here, because The Antagonist could be a spoiler. Suffice it to say that The Antagonist, like everything in Inception, is good on paper, but just doesn't go far enough when it comes to the implementation. The Antagonist should have been such a force that whenever they step into the frame, the audience wets themselves; but they're not. Okay, I'm not quite sure how I'd deliver that if I were the writer (though as I write this, I'm starting to have some ideas) but I'm not a Hollywood film-maker with a legion of creatives at my disposal. The Antagonist should have been terrifying, and there are a couple of scenes where they come close, but it's not enough. Boosting them up to a more fear-inducing level would have heightened some of the emotional conflicts in the group, and raised the tension level in the film.

4) The Bullshit:
When The Chick (about whom more later) appears for the first time, De Caprio sets her a test of designing a maze in two minutes that takes more than one minute for someone to solve. The idea is that, when they are doing 'the job' the dream-levels she's created will, in some way, be mazes that only the team know how to navigate. Sounds good, doesn't it? Sounds like The Chick is going to be making some contribution to the team? Sounds like this whole 'maze' idea is going to save someone's ass at some point?
Nope, never happens. All that 'maze' stuff was just bullshit to get your hopes up. We'll never see any evidence of this whole 'maze' idea, nor any evidence that The Chick has done or contributed anything to the job.

'Don't get excited, if you've seen the trailer, you've already seen as much of this as you're really going to get'

5) The Chick:
The Chick is not, I guess, a major problem with the film. The lack of spider-monsters, faceless people, time jumps, weird behavior and disturbing sexual imagery when we are supposed to be in someone's dream; that was the major problem. However, The Chick annoyed me all the way through, and I'm going to have my say here about why (and there will be a lot of say).
The lead character (De Caprio) has to get a 'Dream Architect' to design the dream-worlds they will be entering (It's a group dream, and the crooks design the world, while the 'mark' populates it with imagined people). He visits Michael Caine, who is lecturing in Paris for some reason. Now, let me digress a little, but I'd think that if we were going to Paris, call me traditional, but there should be some French people there. There aren't. During our trip to Paris we don't meet one French person, not who speaks anyway. Indeed you'd think that they only exist as a servant class to an Anglo-Saxon Raj that was occupying their country. Or perhaps the French are pleasure robots, like in 'Westworld', they're only there to wait tables for the Americans and Brits who really own Paris.
Michael Caine tells De Caprio that he knows a dream architect who is much better than De Caprio ever was, etc, etc, etc. Then we get to meet them, and it's a chick, and boy, is she ever a chick. All you feminists are probably grinding your teeth at my use of the word 'chick', but stick around, because I'm with you on this one, honest. Firstly, the girl should have been French. If we're going to Paris to pick up a chick, we should at least get the local product (Full disclosure: I admit it, I think the accent is hot). But no, she's an American student who's studying in Paris. But that's not my problem with her, I can shrug that off. I'm sure the French make movies where all the people in the cities of the world are either French, or stereotype foreigners.
Also, we are told she's an 'Architect', and I assume that that means a dream architect, but then we enter a training sequence where it becomes clear that she's never been involved with the kind of group lucid dreaming that we're dealing with, she's having to learn it all from scratch. What kind of architect is she then? Just a normal architect? Why would you need one of those in dream space, surely dream buildings don't obey physical laws? Surely you need an architect who specialises in dreams and the tricks you can pull in them? But she knows nothing about dreams. Her role never made sense to me. In fact, she didn't seem to do anything much. At one point she claims that the dreamspace offers her the chance to indulge in 'total creativity', but the dream locations she comes up with are, frankly, boring. One of them is a hotel. Not a hotel for monsters or a hotel existing across many dimensions or god-knows-what, just a hotel. Like you could find anywhere. Another level is a car-chase in an American city. There are some reality glitches on that level, but these are accidental, not her work. The story lampshades this by claiming "The locations are places from the subject's past that were important to him" What, a hotel? A hotel is an important location to someone? No, I don't think so. This strongly felt to me like "Darn, we're running out of budget, better scale down our ambitions." There's no sign in all these 'designed' dream levels that The Chick has really done very much beyond ransack Hollywood's standard locations cache.

But my main problem with this character is this:

Now, don't misunderstand me, there's nothing wrong with Ms Page. Nothing that's her fault anyway. She acts perfectly well in the film. She's pretty. I'm sure she has a great career ahead of her.

WHEN SHE GROWS UP!
Look at her! She's fourteen for Christ's sake! Okay, the actress is twenty-three, but she looks fourteen! Not for one second did I buy that she was going to be a hyper-talented anything, she just looks too ingenue. And this film requires her to 'go to sleep' quite often. Whenever she closes her eyes, SHE LOOKS TWELVE!

And as soon as they're in the dreamworld, shootouts break out. The Chick is the only one of the team who NEVER WIELDS A GUN OF HER OWN. Sorry, but to me, if you're going to bring a woman to a firefight, GIVE HER A BLOODY GUN!! It's just bad manners not to! In fact, The Chick never does anything at all (though she has some role as 'Bernadette Exposition', having 'let me explain the plot to you' conversations with De-Caprio. That's not a criticism, you couldn't make a movie like this without some such scenes).
As the team are fighting for their dream-world lives, you can feel the tension of "Fuck, we've got incoming! WHO BROUGHT THEIR KID SISTER ALONG?!" Fortunately all the characters have an 'invulnerability shield' because they're the dreamers, not the dreamed, and The Chick has the strongest invulnerability shield of all. Whenever trouble hits, the camera loses her, completely and utterly. It's like Ms Page is playing Kitty Pryde again, and has phased out of the scene completely. This is not good for team dynamics, I feel:

"Oh, Hi guys. My, you look pretty beat up. Guess some shit went down, hmmm? Don't worry about me, I phased out when it started, been painting my nails on the next level. I mean, a girl's got to look out for herself, right? It's not my problem if you lot get yourselves smeared. Well, it's time for me and Cap' to have another angst-ridden chat, and them I'm gonna phase out and catch some Zeds while you deal with the man-eating spider-monsters in the next scene."

(N.B. there are no man-eating spider-monsters in Inception, but bearing in mind that we are supposed to be entering someone's unconscious, there should have been.)

So, even the camera knows that the presence of The Chick is a problem. She's totally helpless, she's untrained in... well, anything... she's a burden to the team. You understand, I hope, that I'm not saying the problem is that she's a woman. I'm saying that the problem is that she's a chick. She's some teen girl with no skillsets beyond her wardrobe who's totally helpless and vulnerable and unarmed and realistically would have taken a bullet in the face as soon as the shit started flying. She's the wrong character/actress for this kind of film. She never does anything much, why have they even brought her into the dream? All the guys get to do something, drive a car in a chase, shoot a gun, fight mooks in zero-gravity, but the Chick does nothing except look pretty and tell the lead character that he's being irresponsible (which the others do as well, so we don't need her for that).

And this is a big missed opportunity, because in this dream-world all the males are superhuman and invulnerable. You can buy that, because like in 'The Matrix' there is a valid reason for it. But in 'The Matrix' the females got to indulge in the fantasy too. There is a greater believability problem with females doing daring-do on film (although most of the stuff the males do is just as unbelievable, but that's a whole other discussion) but set-ups like 'The Matrix' or the dream-worlds of Inception demolish those issues. This allows the female half of the audience the chance to see one of them do something a little more than the usual "Look pretty, get bonked by the hero, scream, and get murdered by the villain in order to provide the hero with a revenge motive". But, despite that possibility being there, in 'Inception' The Chick never gets to heft a gun:

(sound of gunfire)
"Hey guys, the heat's getting pretty bad, and I'm supposed to be a creative genius, limited only by what I can imagine. Why don't I dream up some kick-ass cyber-armor for myself and start blowing shit up? That would be rockin'. I've always wanted to do that shit, but in real life I'd never be able to."
"No, stay out of this. This is boys only. Just shut up and keep out of trouble until Cap needs a shoulder to cry on again."
(pause punctuated by gunfire and explosions)
"This is because I bailed on the spiders isn't it?"
"No, not at all."
"What gave you that idea?"
"No one's resentful or questioning your commitment to the team."
"Now phase out and for god sake do something with your hair before your next speaking scene."

(N.B. There are no man-eating spider-monsters in Inception. Nor faceless people. Nor anything much that you might expect to find in the land of dreams, so I'm not spoofing the movie it is here, I'm spoofing the movie it should have been.)

In the final 'dream-level' they're all snow-troops and the level is an homage to 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' or 'Ice Station Zebra', and The Chick STILL DOESN'T HAVE A GUN. She has all the other 'arctic trooper' gear, but not a gun. Did they take it off her because she's a minor and not insured, or what?

She's supposed to have designed these dream-worlds, but there's nothing special or even imaginative about them, nor anything that she's put in there herself. Occasionally the whole point of her having designed the levels comes up when:

"Damn! The writer's backed the plot into a corner!"
"What do we do?"
"You're supposed to have designed all this, right?"
"Well, yeah, but I didn't really. I'm just The Chick-"
"There must be something, some secret passageway you put in?"
"No, I was in make-up the whole time. Oh, wait! Eaves asked me to put in network of air ducts!"

Obviously I'm not quoting directly from the film, but watch out for this, the only time that The Chick gets questioned about the 'maze' she's supposedly created, she admits that the only useful element in the design was inserted by someone else! (Someone, incidentally, with a Y chromosome). WHAT IS SHE THERE FOR?

There was another character that should have been filling this role, someone a little more experienced and capable (and maybe French (whooorr j'taime, voulez-vous couchez avec moi, est-que-ce une baguette dans votre...)). There was another actress who should have been playing the part, someone who looks a bit older, maybe a little less pretty, a bit tougher, someone who could convincingly deliver a line like "Eat lead!" or "Get away from her you bitch!"

To be fair, we never see The Chick scream or need to be rescued. However, this is because, when it kicks off and this stock character would normally be screaming blue blazes and wetting herself, The Chick activates her phase-power and is nowhere to be seen.
At the end, in the finale, The Chick is admittedly redeemed a little bit, because she picks up someone's gun and does something. But after all the daring-do from the males, this is a 'blink and you missed it moment', and it's not enough to justify her presence on the team. It's as though DeCaprio had a plan of "Yeah, I know she's a useless kid, but time runs faster in dream-space, so I'm banking on the fact that, just when we need it, she'll exit puberty, turn into a woman, and take some responsibility."
If I were on the team, and this plan were pitched to me, I'd be saying "Does she develop mutant super-powers when she enters adulthood? Does she turn into Godzilla or something? No? Then, might I suggest you get us one of those military-trained Russian rocket-scientist babes instead? I mean, there's loads of them on the market after the Soviet Union collapsed and they have hot accents (yes, it's not just the French) and KNOW HOW TO FIRE A GUN AND STUFF?! Might come in handy, you know?"

So I can't agree with the people who are hailing this as the greatest movie ever made. There's a lot that's good though, you can't take that away from it. The ideas are brilliant, it's just a shame they've been used up on a film that doesn't rise to their level. The performances from the cast are all pretty good, with Cillian Murphy stealing it for me, even though he was playing a fairly secondary character. It's fast-moving and doesn't let up, though it's never actually tense or even that engrossing. It's a good film. But is it a great film? No.

Cossmass Infinities

2010-08-19T01:09:00.001+01:00

Cossmass Infinities has just published Ripley Patton's excellent "Sister of the Benevolent Gods" as a .mp3 audio reading. Cossmass is British, Scottish in fact, and this one was late coming, and I worried that it might be going the way of so many spec-fic websites these days. So, I thought I should namecheck them.

And that's the only reason.

No, really, it is. Honest.

And, I mean there's not enough Scottish spec-fic podcasts out there.

And the reading is really very good, not least because it's a Scottish female voice. There seems to be a relatively small pool of female podcast story readers about, and they're mostly American, and they sound very similar to me (this might be because I don't have an ear for the subtleties of U.S. accents). So it's nice to hear someone a bit different.

And the story's great too, having as it's theme the damage that can be done by good intentions, when the benevolent use of power can become an oppressive thing. Everyone needs to grow up and become their own person, to make their own mistakes and find their own way. But the protagonist of this story is faced with a dilemma, when she seeks to combat the smothering care of people who know what's best for you, she herself becomes just like them.

And that's all there is too it, my reasons are pure and noble.

Okay, I admit it, I have a dog in this race. Cossmass has bought one of my stories, so it's in my interest to support them. But, that doesn't alter anything that I said above.

Incidentally, Kasma magazine and Daily Science Fiction have also gone and bought stories of mine, so check them out too (It'll probably be months before any of the sales actually turn up on the websites though. But I'm not going to be all selfish and say 'Go here because I have a story up', and then switch to 'Forget them now' once it's not on the front page any more).

Anyway, back to Cossmass. Cossmass Infinities has only been going for less than a year, but it's already published a bunch of great stories. Another one that I particularly like is this one: Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range, because of its crazy concept.

British spec-fic outlets seem to be thin on the ground, there's Hub Magazine and in paper form Interzone and Jupiter, but that seems to be about it. These days spec-fic seems to be happening elsewhere for some reason, so if you're a Brit, you supporting Cossmass is your patriotic duty.

Bad Logic: Episode 1 in an ongoing series

2010-07-25T15:25:00.001+01:00

Wandering around the web, I see a lot of cases of what looks, to me, like Bad Logic. I've decided to start documenting them, so here is the first one. I should say I'm not claiming any kind of moral high-ground here, I've a strong tendency to Bad Logic myself, particularly when it involves anything that tastes good, is shiny, or looks like Kristin Scott Thomas. I may also be completely wrong about the Logic being bad in these cases, it just looks that way to me.

Today's example of Bad Logic relates to a critique of Amy Chua's "World on Fire". Ms Chua's thesis is that, sometimes at least, exporting free-market democracy to nations unaccustomed to it, results in racial tension and conflict. She draws examples from her own life as her aunt was murdered in the Philippines, apparently for 'being Chinese'. In the Phillippines the Chinese are what Ms Chua calls a 'market dominant class', they have economic and political success disproportionate to their numbers, and Ms Chua believes that this leads inevitably to resentment and conflict.

I don't think Ms Chua is saying that free-market capitalism is a Bad Thing per-se, but rather that she's saying "Here are some pitfalls to watch out for when applying it."

I must confess that Ms Chua's thesis makes a lot of sense to me, but then I'm no historian, and I've not actually read her book (Sorry Amy, I live in a house of unread books. Take a ticket, get to the back of the queue). But, it has its critics, and it's a comment in a post by one of those where I found an example of what, to me, seems to be Bad Logic.

In this post http://www.johnlocke.org/news_columns/display_story.html?id=1759 George Leef a freemarket advocate with a lot of impressive titles and letters after his name, says the following.

-------------------------- Quote ----------------------------
'The author's contention is that envy-driven violence against *market-dominant* minorities is apt to occur when a nation moves from political authoritarianism to democracy at the same time it moves from a centrally planned or highly regulated economy to capitalism. That combination of changes, she says, leads to rapid accumulation of wealth for a few, but the breaking of the political restraints that had previously held outbreaks of racist envy in check'
-------------------------- Quote ----------------------------

-------------------------- Quote ----------------------------
'... it is easy to find instances of the sort of violence against the economically successful occurring without either of Chua's two conditions being met. She cites Jews in Russia as a case in support of her argument, and while it's true that Russia has moved somewhat in the direction of political and economic freedom over the last decade or so, there was a great deal of violence against Jews by majority Russians for centuries under the autocratic rule of the Czars.'
-------------------------- Quote ----------------------------

This, to me, looks like bad logic. Mr Leef seems, to me, to be saying that because there are lots of places where X happened, but where Y wasn't the cause Y cannot cause X. Here's an example of why I think this is bad logic:

A arrives at the scene of a car-accident. B, who has never been one for public displays of emotion, stands smoking a cigarette. C lies motionless under the wheels of the car.

A: "Oh my god! C is dead! This is surely foul play!"
B: "Dude, he was hit by a car."
C: "Nonsense, thousands of people die every day who 'ARE NOT HIT BY CARS!'"

In short, Mr Leef can find as many examples as he likes of racial violence occurring where Ms Chua's "lethal ingredients" are not present, and it doesn't have one whit of bearing on the claim that, if those ingredients are present, trouble is likely to follow. I can count as many deaths by old age, lightning strike, drowning, bad wiring, experimental cuisine, wild animal attack and failing to read the instructions as I like, and it doesn't change that fact that someone hit by a motor-vehicle travelling at a certain speed, is likely to die.

This is the difference between 'necessary' and 'sufficient' conditions. A 'necessary condition' is something that HAS to happen for another thing to happen. It is the only possible cause for that other thing. So, for instance, sex is a necessary condition for pregnancy to occur in human females (miracles and modern medical science being ignored). A sufficient condition is something that, if it happens, the other thing will follow. But it's not the only thing that could trigger the other thing. For instance, the actions of a competent arsonist might be a sufficient condition for a building to burn down, but the building might have been struck by lightning too (here ignoring the argument of God as competent arsonist) so arson is not the only possible cause, and thus not a necessary condition.

Mr Leef needs to look for cases of Ms Chua's 'lethal ingredients' being present, and her conclusions *NOT* following. I'm sure he'll find some of these too. Unfortunately, there are very few cases of a truly sufficient or necessary condition. We live in a messy universe, with lots of 'buts', 'wiggle room' and 'get outs' so that it's very hard to say anything will be a necessary or sufficient condition. The best one can really hope for is to say that 'In X percent of observed cases, Y has happened, and the mechanisms behind it happening are these'.
On this point of there being so few things that can be absolutely claimed, Ms Chua is perhaps guilty of something. Her book, "World on Fire", is subtitled "How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability", and this is, perhaps, inflammatory. It should, of course, really be subtitled "How Exporting Free Market Democracy can, sometimes, if badly managed and the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, lead to some degree of Ethnic Hatred and Global instability." But the thing is, that's really not a very snappy title is it? I mean, if I was trying to shift copies, I wouldn't want that on my book? What if every author was forced to be painstakingly exact in their subtitles? Newton's "Principia Mathematica" might be subtitled "Being a complete description of the behavior of physical bodies, insomuch as these bodies are of a scale, nature and travelling at a speed that the common man might encounter in his daily life, and guaranteed valid for the next two-hundred years or so, until some German Jewish guy with a bad haircut upsets the whole applecart." And is that really an improvement?

Okay, that's my first 'Bad Logic'. I think this series will run and run and run.

Support Duotropes, Damnit!!

2010-07-20T16:24:00.000+01:00

I use Duotropes Digest to search for markets to submit fiction to, and to keep track of where I'm submitting to. It's an excellent writer's tool.

I donate monthly to it (was £5, recently upped it to £20).

Almost no-one else does.

This month, for the first time in ages, they look like they might actually hit their target. I do wonder if that's because this was the first of my £20 months. I hope not, if I can make that much of a difference, then it really is pretty bad.

Their website says that under 7% of their registered users have donated THIS YEAR. 7 in a hundred people. That means 93 freeloaders for everyone who makes a contribution.

Look, you can as little as donate £10 a year. I don't care what your situation is, you can afford that. If you can't afford that, then you can't afford a web connection, so what are you doing on duotropes?

Support what you use, or, as with so many things, you're likely to lose it one day!

Why I dont enter 'Writers of the Future'

2010-05-31T17:06:00.001+01:00

Many of my fellow SF writers have submitted to the 'Writers of the Future' competition. Many times they've asked me why I don't do the same thing. When this happens, I generally make noises about "Well... um... L Ron Hubbard? Didn't he set up a cult? Aren't they behind 'Writers of the future?'"

The response, overall, has been that I'm being silly about that. Yes, there's some kindof link, but 'Writers of the Future' is all above board and the links to scientology are very distant. And it's how you 'get on' in the spec-fic world.

So I began to wonder if I'm being silly with the whole 'Writers of the future' thing. I started looking into it and thinking about it. Here are my results. These aren't going to be popular, but I think they're important. I'm a bit worried about how friends of mine will take this, because they've submitted to WoTF, but I think maybe they'll read some stuff here that they might not have come across before.

First off, let me state my belief that many people in the spec-fic community are quite principled, and wouldn't want to be associated with dubious or morally questionable enterprises. I'm sure that, like me, they went through that stage of boycotting Nestle, boycotting anything South-African during apartheid, and at least some of them are probably building up to boycotting BP right now.
But we enter the 'Writers of the Future' competition. Why?

'Writers of the Future' is run by "Author Services Inc.", which is a completely owned subsidiary of the 'Church of Spiritual Technology'. CST is, in some complex way, a branch of the Church of Scientology.

The Church of Scientology, as you probably know, is a cult. It's a big, very powerful cult with celebrity members. In its time it has been guilty of:

1) Breaking into US government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, in order to erase/steal documents and records 'unfavorable to scientology'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

2) Planning to get outspoken critics of Scientology jailed on false charges, or committed to mental institutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

3) Planning to seize political control of a major American city.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Normandy

4) Pushing 'medical' treatments that have no scientifically proven effectiveness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter

And planned or actual attempts to take over newspapers, plant false evidence in government agency computers in order to discredit said agencies, set up scandals to bring down political figures, etc, etc, etc, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guardian%27s_Office_operations.

Now, why does the Church of Scientology run this competition? We can never be sure, but I think that, for at least some of its members, the rationale probably runs like this.

'Writers of the future' will attract readers, some of which will be impressionable, to the 'L Ron. Hubbard' brand. Some of those readers will follow up and wind up reading 'Dianetics'. Some of them will eventually join the cult.

The 'Writers of the Future' anthology is always published with L. Ron. Hubbard's name emblazoned in big letters across the top. I would guess that 'Writers of the future' is sponsored for the same reasons that anyone sponsors anything: Advertising.

Or maybe, you know, they're just really big fans of SF? But okay then, lets say that the Klu Klux Klan are big fans of SF too. Because they're big fans, they start up a competition, open to everyone and with no Klan advertising or influence, just funded by them. Would you enter? Do you want to be associated with these people? If not, why not?

Well, there are differences. The Klan espouses racial hatred, and the scientologists don't. And maybe for many people that's the line they won't cross. Everyone draws their lines somewhere. Maybe many don't mind being associated with a group that's tried to frame up members of the public for crimes they didn't commit, but racial hate-speech would be going too far.
However, I think this experiment establishes that there are groups that people wouldn't want to be associated with. I think for most people, if they knew that the Klan were running a science-fiction competition, they wouldn't want to enter it regardless, of whether the Klan were influencing the competition judges in any way.

So, having established that there are some groups you wouldn't want to be associated with, and that you wouldn't enter a competition run by them, let's try to find out where the magical 'dividing line' comes that makes one group okay, and another not okay. That may sound sarcastic, it's not meant to be. Later on I'll give some examples that show this is really a difficult question, and is one of the major questions of ethics: "Where does one draw the lines?" However, I will be arguing that, in this case, I'm very, very, very surprised at where some of my fellow SF writers are drawing their lines.

Imagine that 'Writers of the future' was sponsored by a consortium of powerful drug-dealers. Are you comfortable with that? Do you wonder where the money is coming from, now? I mean, running a competition like this requires cash, doesn't it? Doing anything requires cash. Doing this:

----------------------- Wikipedia---------------------------
All winners and published finalists are invited to attend the annual week-long writers' and artists' workshops and Awards gala at the invitation and expense of the contest administration. Tuxedoes and gowns are worn by the judges, administrators, and winners for the Awards gala (but members of the general public are casually attired), and various Hollywood actors are generally in attendance, in addition to prominent science fiction authors and artists.
----------------------- Wikipedia---------------------------

Must take a lot of cash.

So, imagine that the cash is coming from drug-deals. Does that bother you? Does it bother you that your competition prize might be funded by dollars handed over for someone's latest fix of something that's destroying their life? Or do you just not think about that? Do you just accept that this is something you have to do if you're going to 'get on' as a spec-fic writer?

Ah, but then what if it's sponsored by the tobacco industry? Are you okay with them? Well, it's not so bad now is it? They certainly deal a drug, as do the producers of alcoholic beverages, but at least they're not involved in any real criminal activities. I myself don't really know where I'd stand in this case, and this shows how it's all a sliding scale, and that making these decisions isn't easy.

Well, lots of things are sponsored by the tobacco industry. Or at least, they were. Now tobacco advertising is largely banned because many people are worried about the social effects of this drug. I can't decide from what I'm reading whether tobacco companies would, or wouldn't, be allowed to fund a competition like 'Writers of the Future' in the E.U. They certainly aren't allowed to sponsor sporting events like 'Formula 1' anymore. I wonder what people would make of Formula 1 or the World Cup being sponsored by the Church of Scientology? I don't think they'd stand for that! But the spec-fic community does?

What about if it was sponsored by Goldman-Sachs? What about B.P.? Right now, would you be happy, my fellow SF writers, to be the winner of the "British Petroleum Writers of the Future" award? I think a lot of you would say 'No'. I bet some of you are out there right now trying to save oil-slicked sea-birds, and I don't blame you for that. But you're okay with the Church of Scientology? Why?

It's a difficult question, isn't it? Where do you draw the line? You could argue that BP are guilty of nothing more than being cock-up merchants. Can the same be said of the CoS? You could certainly make the case that the CoS, like the tobacco companies, is pushing a product that damages people, so if you're against tobacco advertising, should you be against cult advertising too?

And where is the money coming from? Scientology is a cult, and we generally frown on cult leaders who have big houses paid for by the contributions of members. However, where did the money come from for the cash prizes that go to winners of 'Writers of the Future'? Where did the money to pay for the gala prize-giving come from?

This is a serious grey area, because that money might have come from sales of L Ron Hubbard's science-fiction works, like 'Battlefield Earth'. So in that case, the money is clean, right?
But is it? Apart from the fact that we don't know that for sure, you can ask who is buying 'Battlefield Earth' etc, and why? How many of them are cult members who are buying it because they're told to; cult collection by other means? Furthermore, it can be argued that the money from those fiction sales would go to supporting the Church, were it not that payments obtained by other means (how is Scientology funded?) free them up to be used to run the 'Writers of the future' competition.

If the competition were run by Bernard Madoff, with funds he'd embezzled from investors, would you be happy to take the prize money? Because, again, it can be argued that cults are giant pyramid schemes, con schemes. (I know, I know, the same can be claimed of the established religions. Well, maybe we should be thinking of that too).

Another point is that Scientology, despite the name, doesn't have a lot to do with science. I wonder what the reaction would be among SF fandom if Creationists were to start an SF prize? Don't worry, they're not going to have any say in which stories win, nor will any proceeds from sales of the anthology go to their church (where do the proceeds from the 'Writer's of the future' anthology go? To fund the gala? But then, we're back to the issues mentioned above with 'Battlefield earth'), they just really love SF and want to fund a competition. Doesn't anyone else think it's a little strange that the science-fiction community, which is full of people who espouse rational thought and scientific accuracy in all things, is willing to get into bed with a religious cult?

Then let us consider the actions of scientologists against individuals. There's a long list of campaigns by the church to ruin the lives of people who criticise it. There used to be a policy called 'Fair Game' that allowed any means to be used to silence them. Not surprisingly, this got the church into hot water, and the use of the term 'Fair Game' was dropped. However, the jury seems to be out as to whether the actual policy has been stopped, or not. Some of the claims I'm finding on wikipedia do seem rather extreme, and I'm wondering if they're really true. This one for instance:

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
An "Ethics Order" dating from March 6, 1968, issued by L. Ron Hubbard aboard his boat the Royal Scotsman, lists twelve Scientologists who were accused of distributing altered versions of upper level materials. Hubbard writes "They are fair game. No amnesty may ever cover them. [...] Any Sea Org member contacting them is to use Auditing Process R2-45."[40][41]
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

Auditing Process R2-45 requires the use of a special piece of equipment, a colt .45 no less. This may have been a joke by Hubbard, but the thing with jokes like this is that there's a tendancy for people to not realise you're joking.

Then again, was he joking?

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
In a 1967 policy titled 'Penalties for Lower Conditions', Hubbard wrote that opponents who are "fair game" may be "deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

If he really wrote that, then it seems that Mr Hubbard has given himself the power to declare fatwas against people. If we are comfortable to go to a party and accept prizes from someone who does that, would we in the SF community have been equally happy to attend parties thrown by other powers who do make such pronouncements?

I'm starting to wonder if I'm really going to post this to my blog. If half of the things I'm reading are true, then the church really is a very powerful organization:

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
the case of a doctor at Harvard Medical School who at one point was regarded as the Church's "Number One Enemy".[37] The Church had persecuted him by stealing his employment records from a hospital, launching frivolous lawsuits against him and tracking down his patients and neighbors. The Citizens' Commission on Human Rights, which Latey described as "a Scientology 'front'", made multiple complaints of misconduct against the doctor
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
According to an American Lawyer investigation, "Fair Game" tactics had been used to force the withdrawal of the presiding judge in an attempt to "throw" the case.
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
In response, Atack's home was repeatedly picketed by placard-carrying scientologists over the course of six days. Eugene Ingram, a private investigator employed by the Church, made visits to Atack, his elderly mother and other family and friends, spreading rumours that Atack would be going to prison. Scientologists also distributed leaflets entitled "The Truth about Jon Atack", implying that he was a drug dealer who only criticised Scientology for money.[50][51][52] Atack eventually went bankrupt due to the cost of defending himself against legal action from the Church.[53] According to Baroness Sharples speaking in the House of Lords, a number of ex-scientologists "have been both threatened and harassed and a considerable number of them have been made bankrupt by the church."
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

Possibly the most sinister of all, 'Operation Freakout', which aimed to silence critic of the church Paulette Cooper:

-------------- Wikipedia -------------------
In the spring of 1976, the Guardian Office leadership decided to initiate an operation with the aim "To get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The planning document, dated April 1, 1976, declared the aim to be "[t]o remove PC from her position of power so that she cannot attack the C of S [Church of Scientology]." [5]
In its initial form Operation Freakout consisted of three different plans (or "channels", as the Guardian's Office termed them):

1. First, a woman was to imitate Paulette Cooper's voice and make telephone threats to Arab consulates in New York.
2. Second, a threatening letter was to be mailed to an Arab consulate in such a fashion that it would appear to have been done by Paulette Cooper (who is Jewish).
3. Third, a Scientologist volunteer was to impersonate Paulette Cooper at a laundromat and threaten the current President Gerald Ford and then the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A second Scientologist would thereafter inform the FBI of the threat.[5]
-------------- Wikipedia -------------------

Perhaps I'm depending too much on wikipedia here. Perhaps, for the first time, I'm going to have to start saying "Well, maybe wikipedia can't be trusted to be completely factually accurate". But if any of this is true, it's some really extreme stuff.

Feeling queasy yet? Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_Awareness_Network

And this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Literacy_Crusade

Would you be happy learning that your child was involved in the 'World Literacy Crusade'? If not, how can you be okay with a competition run by the same organization?

So, to recap, we have a situation where science fiction writers regularly attend a big party thrown by a religious cult. High ranking members of this cult have, in the past, been found guilty in US courts of criminal actions against government institutions. Evidence has also been shown in these courts of actions against private individuals that are pretty shocking. It has apparently threatened the lives of individuals, and is on record as having attempted, in the past, to ruin people's lives. I'm picking my words carefully here because, one of the Churches greatest weapons, is apparently its army of lawyers.

What will they do tommorrow?

Why is the spec-fic world in bed with these people? Okay, maybe they've put the past behind them. Maybe the CoS, like many people, went a bit crazy in the 60s 70s and 80s. But still, why do we need them, and why do they need us? Even if they're innocent of some of the things listed on wikipedia, even if they're innocent of all of them, isn't it a bit odd for science-fiction writers to enter a competition run by a religious group? Would you enter a competition run by spiritualists? What does this say about the science fiction establishment?

But, you know, winning the award could launch your writing career?

Am I really the only one who has a problem with this?

I Won the Hub Fiction Short Story Contest

2009-10-20T09:31:00.001+01:00

So yeah, I won the Hub Magazine short story competition. This was a massive surprise, and obviously, pretty much like christmas come early for me. So, I got 100 quid, plus publication in the webzine, plus publication in the forthcoming anthology. It came at just the right time too, I needed the boost, writing wise.

With regard to Hub's forthcoming anthology, I wonder if they've considered running a similar competition for coverart? Coverart is something of a bee in my bonnet, as anyone can see from this blog. Hmm... I have a modest proposal in that direction... I think I'll get in touch with them.

So, I saw Moon

2009-08-29T23:58:00.000+01:00

So, I went and saw Moon today. It's one of those perfectly good little movies that deserves more attention than it's gotten. The last one of these that I saw was 'The Illusionist', and if I had to chose, I'd say I liked 'The Illusionist' more, but that doesn't take anything away from Moon, they're both great little movies.

I shall try to avoid spoilers in what is to follow, but it's going to be near impossible for me to do that totally, I'm afraid.

Moon doesn't really excite, it's a very quiet movie, that never gets you overexcited, but keeps you interested even though it has a cast of one. Or maybe two. Or maybe three?
The first thing I really loved about this move was the way it looked:

This could be a shot from 'Solaris' or 'Space 1999'. Notice the font used for the '03 BAY' sign. I saw that same font used for the seat-numbers in the terribly run-down little cinema that I saw this in. I suspect those seats date back to at least the 80's or 70's, and at that time this font was considered futuristic. Moon portrays a future I'm familiar with from my childhood in the 70's and 80's. Normally, I'd rate that as a bad thing, but Moon is doing this consciously and deliberately, and thus turns something that would normally be lazy world-building into a clever retro-kitzch theme. However, now that Duncan Jones has done it, I don't think it can be done again.
But, let me say more about that retro-feel. I spotted references to movies like Outland, 2001 a Space Oddessy, Dark Star, and possibly Solaris and Silent Running. There were probably many others that I missed. These are done in a non-obvious and deniable way, and thus you can no doubt argue endlessly if they are really there. I'm pretty sure they were.

The exterior moon-scenes are done with models. Yes, models. You remember them, right? I sat to through the credits to see if I was right about this, and yes, model-makers were credited at the end. It might be that the models were used for mock-up shots, and all the actual stuff we see is CG, but I doubt it. I suspect that models have been used for the things that models do well (moon-buggys and buildings) and supplemented with CG for those things that CG does well (the 'spray' from the moon-harvesters)
Its interesting that the exterior shots look completely convincing, and yet you somehow know they've been done with models. They don't have the hyper-real look that tips you off that it's CG. I actually think that the models look more grounded and real than CG, in some way I can't put my finger on. But then again, this is probably because this tight little film keeps the exterior shots to those things that models do well (setting it on the moon is a good idea in this regard, because there's no annoying plant life or critters that you'd model unsuccessfully).
The film has some wonderful attention to detail. The main character's space-suit is filthy from all the work that's been done in it, something we hardly ever saw even in the otherwise grimy 'Alien'. The harvesters leave tracks of disturbed moon-dust that look like ploughed fields.
I had only two technical peeves. Firstly, we frequently heard sounds on exterior shots, when we shouldn't have. (No air on the moon to carry sound). It's arguable that the sound of hatches banging shut might be carried to the listener via the ground or what-have-you, but there is a long tradition of having us only be able to hear the character's breathing in their suit, and I feel this would have worked better. For one thing, it's got a sinister edge, this disconnection from sound gives everything a dangerously 'floaty' feel, and sets one into a mindset that expects disaster.
The second peeve is that the lower gravity on the moon is ignored. I was happy to ignore this, because it would probably get expensive to portray low gravity, and would be distracting to the viewers. However Moon seemed to go out of it's way to remind me of that it was 'magicking away' the issue. For instance, a game of ping pong instantly had me thinking "The ball will bounce out of control". And at one point, a character skips across the surface like the Apollo astronauts, therefore referencing the low gravity, but when they return to the moon-base, evering is at 1G again. If you look at the interior shots above, there's a sticker on the floor that says "1G", so I guess the movie-makers knew they were breaking the laws of nature. However, it would have been better to drop the ping-pong and moon-skipping, and then I'd have been able to put my physics-geek objections in a box and sit on the lid for the duration of the movie. However, Moon kept disturbing said objections, causing them to burst from the box and throwing me bruisingly out of suspension-of-disbelief.

However, these peeves are small petty things. This is a great little movie that I'd recommend to anyone who wants a break from block-busters that constantly set fireworks off in your face. This is a laid-back, contemplative movie with a quiet emotionality. It's mostly about the interplay between the three characters. The human(s) behave, from time to time, like complete idiots, getting into fights, and generally not handling things well. But then, they are under a lot of pressure, I guess. Gerty, the base computer/robot, who is the third character can be surprisingly effective, even though he exhibits emotion mostly via a 'smiley face' emoticon. One or two simple scenes will pull the emotional levers sufficiently to make your vision mist, and the ending is satisfying and plausible, even delivering a laugh.

It's not a roller-coaster, but it will leave you feeling pleased you went to see it.

Dan Carlin's "Common Sense"

2009-08-17T00:04:00.000+01:00

I've been a long term listener to his "Hardcore History" show, but I've been scared of his "Common Sense" show because it has the p-word in it. Now, let me unpack that a bit. Dan's American, and the image of American politics, at least for me, has sunk so low that I'm afraid to hear it discussed, because I'm expecting it to be frothing-at-the-mouth hate speach.

I don't know what it is that's given me this expectation, it's surely wrong. I didn't know that I felt it until I finally decided to listen to his show, and was surprised at my own surprise of how reasoned and even-handed it was.
Somehow I've aquired a false view of politics in America, that it's all extremist groups (some religious, some not) screaming their heads off, while the "quiet one's" go out into the woods in camouflage gear and practice their shooting for the coming uprising.

Never been so glad to find I'm labouring under a misapprehension.

So, go over and listen to Dan Carlin's Common Sense

Ghosts of the Ostfront III

2009-08-12T20:03:00.000+01:00

I've blogged about Dan Carlin's hardcore history before, but he has part III of his "Ghosts of the Ostfront" series about the eastern front in WWII. The battle to the east is one of those things in history, like the crusades, when things happened that if you wrote them in fiction, no-one would accept them. They would say they were fantastical, made up, that these things would never happen, or, sadly, that people would never sink so low.
Yet, they happened.
When a historical podcast makes you hold your head and shout "Oh god, no!" when you realise what's coming in a description of an atrocity (that was my reaction to the 'Ice Road' in episode 3).
Listen to all three episodes and donate to Hardcore History. It doesn't get any more hardcore than Eastern Front, WWII.

http://www.dancarlin.net/disp.php/hh

Hugo Awards

2009-08-11T12:04:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to say I'm delighted to see that Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" won "Best Short Story" in the Hugos, and also that Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" won "Best Novellette". I must admit, I haven't read/heard all the competition to these two, but both were so good that I think it would have been a crime if they didn't win.

Scratchy Chin Symdrome

2009-07-24T18:32:00.000+01:00

My fellow writers, I bring you a warning. The rest of the world may be fretting about pig-flu, but right now, amidst our number, there stalks a terrifying contagion. Scratchy Chin Syndrome. Go to any writers group that supports images in the profiles, and you will find a few victims of this horrific plague. The ailment is cruely gender specific, almost always effecting males alone, who can be found unsmiling, staring glumly off camera, scratching their chins.
Nor would you be smiling if you were condemned to a lifetime of unrelenting chin itch.
What can be done, I wonder for these poor wretches?

Calling Lieutenant Mary Sue, The Galaxy needs you!

2009-06-24T01:41:00.000+01:00

Recently the topic of 'Mary Sues' came up on one of the writers forums, with a link to one of the many 'Mary Sue Litmus Test' pages that are out there.

I decided to look into 'Mary Sue', who she was and where she'd come from. What I found surprised me.

First, in case you don't know, if you are accused of writing a 'Mary Sue' character, it means that you're guilty of creating a wish-fulfilment avatar for yourself in a story. Mary-Sues are, as the name suggests, generally female. They are also beautiful, clever, competent, talented, noble, sexy, successful, and utterly two-dimensional. They exist solely to allow the writer to engage their secret desire to be popular, powerful, and to... uh... 'body meld' with Spock.

As the Spock reference might imply the term 'Mary Sue' is comparatively recent. Back in 1973 Paula Smith wrote a parody in her Star-Trek fanzine 'Menagerie' in which she took a swipe at a trend she was seeing in fan fiction. The trend was that of very young, rather perfect female starfleet officers, sometimes with a romantically tragic background and always with really great hair, who single-handedly save the day and still find time to reaffirm their membership of the "Warp factor 5 club" with every major member of the ships crew, possibly including yeoman Rand.
Paula Smith's Parody was called 'A Trekkies Tale' and featured Lieutenant Mary Sue ("the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old"). It's short, silly, and fun, and brings attention to these blatent author avatars for the first time. Given her extreme youth, it's probably a good thing that she rebuffs Kirk's advances (is she the only female we've ever seen do this? I think she might be!).

But, reading about all this, one big question stood out for me.

Who was writing these?

Now, it's quite possible that some of these 'Mary Sue' types were being written as 'idealized girlfriend' avatars for young male Star-Trek fans. I think. Hmm...

This is 1973.

You see, things have changed. Nowadays, all we geeky guys fancy a girlfriend who has a Phd in quantum physics and a string to Muay-Thai championship wins (she should also be a lingerie model and an heiress, and have a love of science that will lead her to be understanding and supportive when her man burns down the house trying to build a hyper-laser to contact aliens. (If this is you, please contact me at my googlemail address. I would publish it here, but then I'd get spammed. Anyway, you can figure it out with your 'leet hacker skills, consider it a challenge to prove yourself worthy)) but back in the 70's, I'm not so sure. The idea of what a woman should be probably didn't extend to being an expert kickboxer, or an expert scientist, or an expert at anything. Maybe I'm stereotyping history, though I do vaguely remember these times, and I think the idealised female at the time, from a male perspective, was probably a lot more passive and feeble. I mean, look at the disgraceful bunch of weedy girlies we got in the original Star-Trek series, and yes, I'm including Uhura. I don't remember one of them ever doing anything useful. Whenever there was a woman with a bit of sass about her, she tended to wind up dead. No, I don't think the 'Mary Sues' were idealised females written by men.
Furthermore, I submit it to you, dear reader, that if a male writer is going to create an avatar to fulfill their secret trek desires, it's going to be a male. Okay, nowadays lots of people gender-swap when the play videogames or online roleplay, but back in the 70's? Forget it. No way. And if a male does have secret lustings after everyone's favorite Vulcan hunk, he might write about them, but he's not going to publish it.
And let us not forget that fan-fiction is one of those secret feminine vices like photography, reading gruesome horror and 'slasher' fiction, and chocolate (okay, they've been outed about the chocolate, but the other ones are still not widely known).
I think we have to face the fact that these 'Mary-Sue' stories were written by young girls. When people at the time said that these superwomen were author avatars, I think they meant it very literally.

Now, stop and think about what that means.

It means that back in the 1970's quite a number of young girls were fantasising about being Starfleet officers.

This is amazing on several levels. Firstly I always thought that Trek, and indeed SF in general, was very much a male thing, and the further back you go, the more male I thought it got. But apparently not, because as I've started looking into this, I've seen female names popping up left, right, and center with regard to Trek fanfiction. And of course slash fiction was birthed out of the fevered imaginings of female Trek fan writers.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this seems to me to mean that Star-Trek was an important role model for women in the 70's. These were still times when career choices for a woman were incredibly narrow, and no-one had risen high or fast enough to even discover the glass ceilings yet. It was still pretty much true that you had to bag yourself a man, have kids, and that was your lot. But in the 25th century, you could be a STARFLEET OFFICER!! Okay, they might not let you near the helm or the weapons console, and you'd have to wear a short skirt, but you could be a communications officer, and that's something, right?
Thirdly these girls, and I think a lot of them were teenaged girls (hence Lt Mary Sue's tender age) were imagining themselves as being in charge, as saving the universe, as competent, self-determining, and much as I hate to use a word that has had all the meaning beaten out of it; empowered. They weren't dreaming of being princesses in towers waiting to be saved by some passing hunk, they were dreaming of going out into the galaxy and writing wrongs and taking names. And, as it's Star-Trek, they were imagining themselves as someone who had gotten on in life by hard work and academic competency.

Fathers, compare and contrast, who are the role models your daughters look to nowadays? Paris Hilton? The Pussycat Dolls? How do you feel about that? Oh, I know how you feel, I've listened to you grind your teeth while she airily says "Oh, I don't need grades, I'll just find some man to look after me."

We had this going on, and what did we do? We stomped on it. Oh, and by 'we' I don't mean men. There is no secret chauvanist conspiracy (or if there is, I didn't get an invite) and it seems to have been women who led the charge against the Mary Sues. I don't blame them, I'm sure the stories were terrible, but I do wonder if it wasn't such a good idea in retrospect.

---------------------------- Wikipedia says: -----------------------------

the onus of wishing to avoid being condemned as a "Suethor" ("Mary Sue" author) apparently weighs heavily even on professional authors and sophisticated amateurs, particularly women.
In chapter four of her book 'Enterprising Women' Camille Bacon-Smith includes a subsection on the "Mary Sue" concept. While not denying that such characters exist, with reasonable psychological observations as to why "Mary Sues" exist in the first place, she observes that fear of creating a "Mary Sue" may be restricting and even silencing some writers.
At Clippercon 1987 (a Star Trek fan convention held yearly in Baltimore, Maryland), Smith interviewed a panel of women authors who say they do not include female characters in their stories at all. She quoted one as saying "Every time I've tried to put a woman in any story I've ever written, everyone immediately says, this is a Mary Sue." Smith also pointed out that "Participants in a panel discussion in January 1990 noted with growing dismay that any female character created within the community is damned with the term Mary Sue."

-----------------------------All hail Wikipedia----------------------------

Not good.
It's very interesting that the 'Mary Sue' is generally female. Sometimes Male characters are identified as being 'Gary Stus', like the excreable Wesley Crusher in 'Star Trek the Next Generation', but it's rare. How come?

Can you say 'double standard?'

Because, towering above the whole Trek franchise is the biggest Mary Sue there ever was, a smug hamster-faced colossus of shallow wish-fulfilment gittyness.

I speak, of course, of James Tiberius Kirk.

Kirk doesn't just ping the various Mary-Sue tests that are out there, he causes them to overload and self-destruct in a flash that aliens will be wondering about when they see it in their night skies hundreds of years from now, and note its strong frequency components in the 'smug git' part of the spectrum.

'Interesting' middle name? Check.
Tragic backstory? Check.
Instantly irresistable to members of the opposite sex? Check.
Never loses a fight? Check.
Multi-competent in any field of endeavour? Check.
Only student to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test? Check.
Starfleet's YOUNGEST captain? Check.

He only misses on a few points, like being a half-alien or the last survior of a noble people, although he comes close to this last, being the last survivor of a massacred colony.

But he gets away with it? Why?
Because he's male. In fact, if you start casting about, I think you'll find lots and lots and lots of male characters who are nothing but Mary Sues. They get to bed women and save the day, all the time making smart quips as they go:

James Bond? Undeniably. Ditto Simon Templar.

The Doctor? I hate to say it, but you know, he is now the last survivor of a noble people, and an alien masquerading as a human, and seems (very strangely) to be irresistable to women a fortieth his age, etc, etc.

Superman? Pre-smallville, definately.

Richard Sharpe? I think so.

Sherlock Holmes? Only saved by drug addiction, snarliness, and being possibly gay.

Neo? Hmm... he doesn't feel like one, but when you stop and look at it, well, he does tick a lot of boxes.

Han Solo? Absolutely.

There are lots and lots of them, but no-one ever complains. Boys are allowed to have their fantasies, but it seems women aren't. But the weird thing is, it's other women who pounced on the 'Mary Sues', not some chauvanist conspiracy.

And were they really that bad? Okay, I admit I never read the original works, and in fact I've never read any fan-fiction, and the very thought terrifies me, but, if the accusation is that the 'Mary Sues' weren't well rounded characters, lets have a look at the 'Canon' Star-Trek females from the first season, shall we?

Eeeewwww, pretty bad, huh?
I mean, other than Uhurah, do any of the other female crew-members have names? If you eliminate "Captain's green-skinned squeeze of the week", then the females we see in the original series are mostly ciphers whose only skill is looking good in kinky boots and a short skirt (yah yah, I like those uniforms, but I don't have to wear one). Even Uhura is more about decorating the bridge, than making any active contribution, and she's the best of them!
Did she ever, *ever* say "I've got an idea, let's induction pulse the phasers and use the power generated to jump-start the warp core?" No.
Did she ever yank out a phaser, fire it, and say "Got the bugger!" No.
Did she ever take Spock's lead and try and do the decent thing and seize control of the ship? No.
What did she ever do, beyond pout and say "All hailing frequencies are open?"

The Mary Sues, as far as I can tell, were infinitely more rounded characters than the 'Canon' females. At least they had some drive and motivation to them! Lt Mary Sue generally turned up planning to make some changes "I'm gonna bonk him, and him, and her, and fix the replicators to make decent coffee, get the Romulans to sign up to some peace accords, do something about the rise in piracy, and once I've seduced enough of the crew, take over the ship." And she did, too.

I can't help thinking that if the backlash hadn't come, then some of these girls might have kept writing, learned more about character design, and that we might have more women writing, reading, and portrayed in SF today. Furthermore we might have a few decent role-models around in fiction for younger generations right now.

Maybe Mary Sue wasn't all that bad?

Maybe we should think about trying to raise her on the old sub-space transponder, hmm?

Ghosts of the Ostfront at Hardcore History

2009-06-13T18:06:00.000+01:00

Dan Carlin's excellent "Hardcore History" podcast has a new entry up called "Ghosts of the Ostfront 1". It's the first part of a two (three? four? n?) parter about the Eastern Front in WWII. For those of us in the west, the Eastern front is often forgotten about amidst all the recollections of D-Day. This is a serious oversight, because the Eastern front is where WWII really happened. It was the disastrous 'Operation Barbarossa', the attempt to succeed where Napoleon had failed and invade Russia, that put an end to the Third Reich (though, who knows, if the US air-force hadn't bombed Germany's industrial centers flat, things might have been different, because this was very much a war of industrial production).

More people fought and died here than in all the other theatres of operations in WWII. I found a map on Matthew White's homepage that illustrates this:

I have a morbid attraction to those times in history when things happen that are so mindlessly catastrophic, that one cannot really understand them from the comfort of ones front room, over an internet connection and drinking a cup of tea. There are times in history when large masses of people seem to go completely mad, and one can only think "Thank god I live in a nice, boring, developed country at a time of comparative world peace." When one looks back at the crusades, in fact the whole 14th century, or the destruction of Carthage by the romans (which you can also find a great 'Hardcore History' episode about), well, they're interesting to read about, but you wouldn't want to be there. The eastern front in WWII is one of those places that, if I were given the chance to live in any part of the world at any time in history, would be top of my list of "NOT HERE, thank you."
That said, I wouldn't want to live on the western front either, but if I had to choose, then stick me in occupied Paris!

The ferocity of the fighting on the Eastern Front was terrible. This was a war driven by conflicting ideologies, not just the usual land-grab by one ruling family from another (though grabbing land was an important part of the Nazi plan).
Hitler had declared the Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union to be 'untermenshen', sub-human, and considered the entire nation to be under the rule of a 'jewish bolshevik conspiracy'. The plan was to invade there, kill everyone who resisted, round up and jews and other 'undesirables', and exterminate them. The remainder of the population who weren't exterminated, or forced to move to Siberia (extermination under another name) would be forced into slavery to German settlers, who were urged to have many children in order to gradually out-reproduce the remaining Slavs and make the east part of a greater German racial sphere, Hitlers 'New Order' for the world.
Most agricultural output would be sent to back to Germany (suffering itself from food shortages due to the war), and this would be used to feed the 'Greater Germany' that Hitler envisaged. The planners of 'Operation Barbarrossa' were fully aware that:'

1) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war and
2) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.

Indeed, they saw hunger as another tool in their armory. Starvation sieges are common in warfare, but 'Generalplan Ost', the plan for administration of a conquered east-Europe and Russia was more than that. It consisted of the 'small plan', relating to operations during the war, and the 'grand plan', relating to operations *after the war was won*. It called for starvation, direct extermination, and expulsion into Siberia of the populations of Eastern Europe to allow complete Germanisation of the captured lands. The food production of these territories was to be used to support the extended Germany. Quite simply, this was a plan for the complete destruction of nations. This was war to extermination.
Hitler had also come up with some particularly wicked weasel-words that declared anyone caught 'Behind German lines and holding a weapon' was a partisan, and thus should be shot. As the plan for the war to the east called for massive encirclement operations, this effectively meant that encircled Soviet armies were entirely behind German lines. Hence, there was no need to take any prisoners of war (though huge numbers were taken).

For their part, the Soviet people were labouring under their own monster. Stalin had purged their military of anyone who might be a threat to him, neatly eliminating all its best people and rendering it leaderless. As a result, the Soviet armed forces had just basically lost a war against Finland. Yes, *Finland*.
For unclear reasons Stalin refused to believe that Hitler was going to attack, perhaps trusting in the non-aggression pact that the two nations had signed. At this time, Germany was hemorrhaging information. Members of the old-guard of the german military (who were disgusted at the Nazi regime and had tried to assassinate Hitler) and members of german civil-service were sending warnings to their Russian counterparts announcing that Hitler intended a sneak attack. All these warnings were ignored, perhaps understandably given that they were coming from high ranking officials in the German state, who were betraying their own nation. Stalin declared them all to be part of a 'British plot' to trick the Soviets into a fight with Germany (something Britain badly wanted, but didn't need to engineer, the only person who didn't know this was coming, it seems, was Stalin). When the invasion finally came the all-conquering Wehrmacht fell upon a disorganized and unprepared Soviet union, and it was basically a slaughter.
However, the initial rapid advance of the Nazi war machine got slower, and slower, and slower as it advanced into Russia. The Soviets had announced a 'Great Patriotic War' to defend the motherland, and perhaps news of Nazi atrocities, or some perception of what 'Generalplan Ost' was going to mean, had entered general awareness. Resistance got stronger, stronger and stronger. Where Hitler had said that anyone caught holding a weapon was a Partizan, in Russia it seemed that anyone who *could* stand and hold a weapon, was a soldier. The Nazi's were shocked to find large numbers of women fighting on the Soviet side, and disapproved of this 'unknightly' way to fight a war (apparently it was okay to bomb, starve, rape, and gas-chamber Slav females, but for them to actually decide to pick up a gun and fight back, was disgusting).
German soldiers wrote of their alarm at seeing masses of Soviets marching calmly into machine-gun fire under orders from commanders who had calculated how many men it would take to exhaust the enemies ammunition, allowing them to then attack using the remainder of their troops. They were harrassed by 'Night Witches', women flying antique biplanes on bombing runs under cover of darkness. The expected benefits of captured food hadn't been realised, as the Soviets were burning their own towns, farms and crops as they retreated. As the war slowed and slowed copies of Armand de Caulaincourt's account of Napoleon's own catastrophe were doing the rounds in the German infantry. Hitler had planned for a quick victory. The German forces weren't equipped for the terrors of the Russian winter.
Meanwhile, in the far east of the Soviet Union, factories were churning out arms. The Nazis were aware of this, but when a worrying report of estimated Soviet industrial output was presented to Hitler, he dismissed the figures as 'impossible'. In fact, they were a severe underestimate, Soviet output was far higher than the Nazi's realised. The Soviets were planning for a massive counterattack, and they knew just when to do it too. Asked which generals should be put in charge of the defence of the Union, one commander (Zhukov?) answered "Generals October and November".
At Stalingrad, Leningrad and Moscow the advance faltered, and halted. Moscow and Leningrad were under extensive siege, but it was Stalingrad where the real battle was fought. The Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad to rubble. The defenders fought for their rubble ferociously.
The Wehrmacht expected to just ride into Stalingrad, envisaging little resistance from a city that had been bombed flat already. At the outskirts they were confronted by gangs of teenage girls who had been 'man'ning the Anti-Aircraft batteries, and who now wound their guns to the lowest elevation, and engaged the advancing tanks, which were, in one girl's account 'lined up like on Sunday parade'. Not only did the Panzers have to deal with every last one of these girl-powered AA-guns along their planned route, and suicidal attacks by other Red-army groups, but they discovered that the bombing of the city had been a tactical error. The resulting rubble was such that the tanks couldn't advance smoothly into the city. The advance ground to a halt.
Meanwhile the Soviets were turning the ruins into a fortress. For at least a while tank factories amdist the rubble kept producing tanks. I can't really imagine how you manage to keep producing tanks in a city that's been shot all to hell, but they did. Some of the factory workers would volunteer, and get in it. They'd put just a little fuel in the tank, so it could be driven to the 'front line', which was only a few hundred yards away. Neither it nor its crew were expected to come back.
The average life expectancy of a replacement Soviet soldier being sent into the city was under 24 hours. Units like the 13th Guards Rifle Division were reduced from 10,000 to a few hundred men in a matter of days. But the Wehrmact was finding that there were always more Russians where those had come from.
The Luftwaffe kept bombing. Tanks became utterly useless, unable to maneuver in the rubble, like Daleks confronted by an assault course. The Soviets had adopted a policy of 'hugging the germans', keeping their front lines as close to the enemy that the Germans couldn't use artillery or bombing for fear of hitting their own men. It was pitched hand-to-hand battles for buildings like 'The Red October Steel Factory' or the ' Dzerzhinsky tractor factory', which were pretty much piles of rubble, but they were Fortress-piles-of-rubble. "Pavlov's house" was probably the ultimate of these, a ruined block of flats that had been fortified with barbed-wire, machine gun and anti-tank batteries, and even minefields.
Even the sewers of the city were a battleground, with firefights happening in the dark in what the Germans called 'Rattenkrieg', yes, that's "Rat war". Front lines would exist within buildings, sometimes even with Soviets on one floor and Germans on another, firing at each other through the floors. Soviets would clamber over rafters, break through walls and crawl under the floorboards in order to fight mobile warfare within the fabric of a building itself.
The battle dragged on and on. Food was short for both sides, and disease and starvation took as many lives as did bullets. After months of this 'unknightly' urban warfare the Wehrmacht, used as it was to swift victories, was exhausted. Their supply-lines were desperately overstretched as they hadn't had the expected boon of agricultural output from captured Soviet farms, and the vast lands they'd occupied were, just as Hitler had said, swarming with partisans and resistance fighters. Meanwhile, entirely new Soviet armies were massing for a counter-attack.

And then the winter came, the Russian Winter...

Hear all about it at:

http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh

Why I stopped hitch-hiking, and why I should start again

2009-06-07T18:23:00.000+01:00

I used to hitch-hike. In writing the previous blog entry on 'Wandering Jew' characters, I was reminded of this, and of why I stopped. Doing some research on the web, I see that I'm not the only one in this position.

I used to love hitch-hiking, because you get to have a nice chat with the driver, and because it's one of the few things in life where there is a genuinely altruistic transaction between two people. Drivers pick you up for no good reason beyond the fact that they are the kind of people happy to help others out, and perhaps that they are bored and fancy a chat. It's something between two people that's human, not provided by the daemonic hand of government, or big business, in the way that so much else in life is.
Also, there is an art to it. You get to be able to analyze a spot, and decide if it's a good place to hitch from. You get to be able to 'project' yourself and convince passing drivers that you're a nice, safe person who they want to pick up, it's some kind of low-end telepathy. I used to hitch a fair bit, I once hitched round France for two months. But you know, I don't do it anymore. I wonder why?

In my previous blog post, on "Wandering Jew" characters ('cursed' characters that wander from place to place doing good, like the tv version of Bruce Banner or Kwai-Chang-Kane from 'Kung Fu') I noted that these characters were almost always male, and that one reason for this might be that female wanderers have historically been too vulnerable to assault to make them plausible in folklore (though old men seem to have some magical protection. Hmm.. I guess wondering old men in folklore generally are Shaolin Monks or something). Anyway, I was thinking that, as in my own wanderings I've encountered a fair few 'wandering females', even hitch-hikers, so perhaps this was an indication that our society really is as 'developed' and 'peaceable' as it likes to think it is.

And then I remembered Celine Figard. Celine was a French accountancy student who was raped and murdered while hitchhiking in the UK in 1995. She was only 19. The ages at which some peoples lives get truncated always brings me up short, and makes me even feel a little unworthy of the long-ish lifespan I've so far enjoyed.
It's a shocking thing to think of this happening to someone. More shocking still to think that there are people out there who can carry on with such an act, despite all the screaming and.... I don't know... horror that it involves. I mean, they caught the guy (for once, my tax pounds pay off!) and he was a father of three! Think about that. He has his own kids, yet he can rape and bludgeon-to-death someone else's daughter? Is he unable to make the jump to 'what would I feel if someone did this to my kids?', apparently so.
I've never been able to understand what's different in some people's heads that permits them to do such things, indeed, for a time I imagined that there might be some weird biochemical trigger, and that you wake up one morning, and something goes 'plink!' in your head, and now you're a psychopath. I mean, that made some kind of sense, right? Maybe it's cosmic rays, they hit some perfectly normal people, and break parts of their brains, and now those people can commit evil, and feel nothing? Of course, I used to worry that this might happen to me, as the quiet single male, I fit that stereotype that always results in the neighbors saying "He was always so polite, you'd never have thought it!" while the police are digging up the guy's patio. And, you know, it's always guys, right?
But, in some ways sadly, it's not some freak-of-nature that makes people like this. In Europe, we've had whole nations go bad like this, and I'm not just talking in the 1940's, we've had ethnic cleansing, with rape and mutilation, in Eastern Europe in my lifetime. Whatever is wrong with people, it's wrong with most people, under certain circumstances. But discussing what it is and how such horrors can happen, is yet another blog post, and I'm not sure I want to fill up my blog with debate on this particularly icky subject.

Anyways, when I heard of the murder, something did go 'plink' in my brain, because I stopped hitch-hiking. It wasn't really a conscious decision, though I suspected it was happening. I knew it was an irrational one, because of course refusing to hitch-hike because of one murder is like refusing to fly because of one air-crash. I used to shake my heads at people who wouldn't hitch-hike because 'it's not safe', but they'd happily get into a car as a driver, or with someone they know. This is a patently unsafe thing to do, most of the danger of hitch-hiking is surely the danger of a car accident, and they are already exposing themselves to that quite happily.
But, somehow, the news of Celine's murder changed me, and I wasn't as free anymore as I had been. I became afraid, haunted by unseen terrors. This is strange, because everytime I drive any distance along Britain's motorways, I see are car on it's roof, or smashed to pieces, or burnt out, with emergency vehicles all around it. You have to consider as well that I'm not on the motorway that often, and that if I set out to do a two-hour drive to London, there are lots of accidents that I don't see, because they happen after I pass, or they've happened before me, but are cleared away by the time I get to their location. So, it's basically death-race 3000 out there. But I'm quite happy to expose myself to this, even though I regularly get to see the resulting carnage. But I'm no longer prepared to hitch-hike because once, somewhere, someone was murdered?

Well, it turns out I'm not alone:

Guardian Article
Social Science article on hitch-hiking
The Severed Thumb
Times Article

All these articles cite the Celine Figard case as a turning point for hitching in the uk. Most of them also mention the release of the Rutger Hauer film 'The Hitcher', which implies that a lot of people's 'threat evaluation' is done on the basis of what they see in the movies! (That can't be good). Something that was once a social institution, and something I personally believed in and appreciated, is now pretty much dead.
If you're reading this, and you're a Brit like me, stop and think what this means. Our country is now a place where it's not safe to hitch-hike. How has it come to this? How has Britain declined from the country it used to be, into a place where one can expect to be murdered if one goes out one's front door? Or is this all just the usual media panic? Is this another scare by the people who bought us Bird Flu, Swine Flu and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?

I used to hitch-hike, enjoy it, and believe in it as a cultural institution. Moreover, I used to consider it to be a symbol of the fact that I, as a Brit, and in the larger sphere as a European, lived in a civilised society where I didn't have to fear my fellow man. Indeed, wasn't that kindof what I was paying my taxes for? To live in a civilised society of laws, the envy of less happier lands, from sea to shining sea? Right?

Then the 80's happened, and we became a small, petty, violent nation, it seems. A place secretly proud of it's football hooligans, where the paragon of Britishness switched from being the gentleman, to being the loutish 'lad'. A place that believes 'there is no society, there is only the individual, and the state', and 'get rich, by all means necessary'.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's not true. Maybe people are the same as they ever were, and by and large Britain is a safe place to hitch-hike, a civilised land as I once thought it was.

I think, sometime soon, I must go hitch-hiking again. It's one of the many things that I've abandoned now that I'm working for a living, and this abandonment is just one of the many ways that I've become small, compared to who I once was.

Hmm... I lack a suitable punchline to end this ramble on.

Curses and Gender

2009-06-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

Annette recently mailed me an idea for a character she was working on, this being a woman who is operating under a curse. She was asking what the rational reaction to being in such a situation was, given that you'll never be able to recoup the benefits from anything you do, is it better to just give up?

This got me thinking about cursed characters, and I realised that there is a powerful gender divide with such characters. Her description of her character instantly reminded me of the predicament of two famous TV characters:

1) Bruce Banner.
2) Kwai Chang Kane.

Now, for anyone who grew up in the 80's, 'The incredible hulk' and 'Kung Fu' were two iconic series. I've never watched any of the incredible hulk movies, because I'm quite sure they will all be about the awesome cgi hulk that the special effects budget has been blown on. The tv series wasn't about the hulk, it was about Bruce Banner, a cursed character doomed to wander forever, trying to stay one step ahead of his own demons.
There is something mythic about these two 'Cursed Wanderer' characters. They're complex in some way that I don't have the skills to unpack. They are both essentially good people who are operating under a curse. Every week they breeze into a new town, where they manage to do some good, before being driven on to next weeks episode. They never manage to recoup anything on the investments they make trying to help people, they always walk in with the shirt on their back, and alone, and they leave that way. Furthermore, it seems to me that both characters are being punished in some way. Banner is being punished for messing with nature (and for being stupid enough to experiment on himself, without proper precautions, thus having broken in one go the rules of god, man, science, and common sense), Kane is being punished for the sin of anger.
There are some strong parallels to "The Wandering Jew" from christian folklore here. I'm sure there have been many other characters like this. But something stands out to me about these characters:

It seems to me that they are always male.

I can't think of one female character who does this 'breezes into town, does some good, and then has to leave before her past catches up with her' thing. If a woman is operating under a curse, then she is always entrapped by it. She is static. I think this has something to do with women generally being defined to a greater extent by their social connections and relationships. Maybe it's even considered too cruel to reduce a female character to wandering rootlessness? No, that can't be it, lonely old women turn up often enough in folklore. It must be something else.
Cursed females are always ensnared in the web of the curse. Or locked in a tower. Or held captive by a (usually male) ogre, either a literal or a figurative one. They are not free, like the wandering male characters. Sleeping beauty is cursed, Rapunzel is kindof cursed, even Cinderella is sort-of cursed, she's cursed by poverty and her cruel step-sisters (one instance where the ogre is female).

This means there is an easy payoff to be had here, by writing one of these 'Cursed Wanderer' characters, and switching the gender. Indeed, as a wannabe writer, I should probably be keeping stum about this, and not sharing the wealth! But, I suspect that this has occurred to other people too, only not with the 'Kwai-Chang' characters, but with the 'Cinderella' ones. Was there a point when wannabe writer Joanne Rowling realised that her protagonist, "Harriet Potter", was just a little too like all those other meant-for-better-things young women trapped in the clutches of a cruel foster family, that we've seen countless times in stories and folk-lore? Did she hit upon the genius idea of switching the gender of her central 'Static Cursed' character, and thus creating something new? Well, whether or not that happened, the possiblity is there to similarly switch the gender of the 'Mobile Cursed' or 'Wandering' character. This does raise some interesting problems of course, because one reason why female wanderers are rare, is probably that they would be too vulnerable to rape and murder. But then, there have been plenty of wandering old men in folklore, and they're just as vulnerable? Interestingly, when I've been travelling with my rucksack on my back, I've met quite a few wandering females, so perhaps this indicates that we really do live in peaceable, civilised times? On the other hand, I stopped hitch-hiking when the Celine Figard case happened in the UK. It wasn't a concious decision, it was something that just happened. Hmm... maybe I should start again. But, that is another blog post.

Anyway, it seems to me that here is an opening for a character that we've not previously seen, effectively the "Wandering Jewess". Why is she wandering, and what is she running from, and why does she keep going, rather than just stop, and accept her fate? There's all kinds of milage here.

Good shows get cancelled

2009-04-13T22:40:00.000+01:00

Okay, at the outset I've got to say, this is going to be a really long post. I saw some TV last night, and I've got a lot to say about it. I don't have a TV of my own, so I don't get to see much TV, so seeing some recent programming is something of an event for me.

Everyone knows that 1) most American TV is bad. 2) If a US TV program is good, it's not worth watching because it will get canceled after two seasons.

Quite how, or why, this happens is a mystery. Shows come out that everyone raves about, and people fight to get the DVD box sets, and yet the get cancelled after two seasons due to 'poor ratings'. Something isn't right here,

and interestingly, it's exactly the same something as operates in supermarkets.

My brother is insistent that supermarkets know exactly what they have on their shelves, and how well it is selling. After all, you frequently see people scanning the product with those RF 'gun' scanners. However, this claim is patently not true. Time and again, I've found myself looking at a near empty, or empty section, for an item that I wish to buy. Sometimes when it's not there, I've asked the staff "Do you have any X?", only to receive answers like "Oh no, we're out of that. You have to get in early to get that! Fast as we put it on the shelves, it's gone!". Then, one day, I'll find that not only is the section empty, it's gone, possibly replaced by another similar, but not at all the same, product. When I've asked about this, I've been told "Oh, we don't carry that any more."
WTF? You told me it was one of your best selling products! And the replacement, which doesn't taste the same, or is full of E-numbers or whatever, sits there. Everytime I go down the row, the section with the replacement item is full. I never seen anyone take one. I never have the experience of someone frustratingly taking the last one just before me (which admittedly, I wouldn't, because I'm not taking the replacement product myself, but it's never empty enough for the situation to arise). What is going on here?
The short answer, I think, is that a lot of things are not what people think they are. I actually work in a company that installs systems that use those RF guns, and I can tell you, they aren't magic. If someone comes along, shortly after the system is installed, and changes working practices in such a way that the system can no longer function properly, the system isn't self-aware, nor does it have evolutionary algorithms that adapt to the new regime. (If you are thinking that it should have these features, then you should talk to Sarah Connor). The system is, as ever, only as good as the information put into it, and only as good as the people following its instructions.
Actually, this is a topic for a separate post, but trust me, things aren't as efficient as you think they are. In those long ago days when I was young, I used to worry that I was too disorganized and flawed to ever find decent employment, because I had this vision of business people who dressed smartly, walked everywhere in arrowhead formation, who were fast and through and sharp as a tack, and I wasn't that.
Since actually getting into the working life, my attitude has changed so much, that on meeting someone in a suit my secret thoughts are "You are almost certainly incompetent, and I could do your job. You just look good in a suit." Trust me, business, everywhere, is a shambles. What's your workplace like, honestly? It's a shambles isn't it? Somehow, you manage to get stuff out of the door on time, but quite how you manage it everyday, is a mystery. Some people insist on denying this, I've even had them deny it straight after some hilarity has ensued.
If you doubt all this, let me ask, hows the world economy, run by all those megabrain captains-of-industry, masters-of-the-universe, going for you these days?
So, the fact that popular products get dumped, because someone somewhere is misreading the signals from a rating system, or the system is full of bugs or otherwise broken, shouldn't be a surprise.

So, recently I was visiting someone, and they forced me (well, forced might be overstating it, I had just eaten dinner, and thus was not able to really resist) to watch three of their favourite US TV series. Dollhouse, Bones, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Now, I've only seen one episode of each (except the terminator one, in which I saw the last two episodes of season 2) so I may be about to say a bunch of stuff that's regrettably off-base and wrong. But on this unrepresentative sample, here are my opinions. (Warning: There is one slight spoiler in this with regard to the Sarah Connor Chronicles).

Dollhouse:

Dollhouse has a great premise, and keeps hinting that it's going to explore all kinds of ethical sidelines that could be really interesting. It has a pretty good script that's bursting with ideas, and a neat gimmick in presenting everything from the viewpoint of the dollhouse, even those they are really the villains of the piece.

So, why doesn't it work?

I felt that dollhouse had a great script trapped within it, kept down by bad implementation.
First things first, there's something creepy going on with the female characters. Now, as I've said before, I'm a rank hypocrite. I'd be lying if I said that I don't enjoy seeing pretty women running around in scanties on TV. Admittedly, I don't watch TV anymore (except when visiting people) but there are certain things that are going to hold my attention, and I don't really think there's anything wrong with that. Okay, maybe there is, just as maybe I should face up to that fact that eating meat might have issues. But I like meat too much to give up. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with images of attractive women wearing very little, or even nothing, per se, just as I don't think there's anything wrong with all those programs where the male lead loses his shirt at every opportunity for the female audience. But it all depends on context, doesn't it?
With so many things there's a line that, when crossed, changes how one feels. One can't say where the line is, but it's out there somewhere, and there's always someone who's going to step over it. For me the fact that the dolls in the dollhouse were predominantly female and were constantly wearing very little and that quite often we'd see female characters changing clothes or taking off their blouses to have a bullet wound treated or something, began to get jarring. Maybe this was amplified by the fact that the whole premise of dollhouse, which is basically mind-wiping and reprogramming people to sell them into prostitution, is so horrid that it sets one's sensitivity to 'high'. Whatever the reason, after a while, the program itself started to seem just as icky and unethical as the dollhouse itself, in fact more so. The dollhouse is quite honest about what it is, but I felt sometimes that the program was connivingly using the whole premise of the dollhouse as an excuse to stuff their actresses into tight tops that reveal a flash of midriff, and it began to bug the hell out of me.
Sometimes the show seems to wink at the viewer, as though saying "You know what we're up to here, right?" For instance, the 'Echo' character at one point says "I need some clothes, I can't hunt a spy in my pajamas". In the next scene we see her in a tight top cut to leave her arms bare back to the shoulder-blades and tight trousers/leggings. Her pajamas were a tight top that was more concealing than this new one and baggy pants which were less figure-hugging than what she's now wearing. Is this subtle humor, an accident, or what?
It didn't help that the show opened with a scene featuring a dominatrix character, dressed in fetish gear. She wasn't exactly vital to the plot, and it seemed quite clear to me that she was just there to have a fit woman in fetish gear and maybe get some of the ratings up. I don't know if this kind of thing does get the ratings up, but it set the squirmy tone of things for me.

However, this wasn't the biggest issue with dollhouse. The biggest issue was casting. This is always nasty territory to go into, because I'm sure the cast are all doing their best and it seems pretty mean to point up their flaws. But, they're all being paid well enough I imagine and don't give a hoot what some nobody writes on his blog. So, hopefully none of them will read this.
The woman playing the central character, 'Echo' (whom I am informed was in Buffy previously) just doesn't have the gravitas to pull the character off. In fact this seems to be true of most of the dolls. Now, the excuse was raised that this is all down to the fact that the dolls, when not imprinted with a programmed personality, are kind of blank and child-like. I don't entirely buy this, because I'd have thought they'd be a lot less automaton-like. If you've had a lot of your memories wiped then you are going to lose a lot of your social programming and yes, you're going to be returned to something of a child-like state. This is going to mean tantrums, fear, confusion. Even if you don't buy that, there is the problem of how the dolls behave when they are 'programmed'. Echo doesn't behave any different, she just goes from being a pretty, somewhat blank girl, to being a pretty, somewhat blank girl, who knows kung fu. Knowing kung-fu and memories that come with it from the person she's downloaded, don't any effect upon her.
The dolls in dollhouse reminded me of the witches in Charmed (yes, I've seen a couple of episodes of that, I'm not proud to admit it). They seemed to be fantasy-girlfriend types, who are able to kick anyones ass, without having to give up 'their femininity'. This tends to be femininity defined, I think, by males. (i.e. they remain vulnerable and big-eyed, and don't neglect their make-up, or build too much muscle, or ever have a hair out of place). Okay, none of the dolls stay imprinted with their programmed characters for very long, but even if they did, you know that they're not going to show up after eight weeks on assignment as a killer, bulging with muscle and say "Bin workin' out. This body is weak." That's not going to happen, because there's an eye-candy value to having them stay petite of frame.
This didn't matter in Buffy, because Buffy had strong comedic elements, and was all make-believe, so it kinda worked. But Dollhouse is a far more serious program in tone, and needs casting that is suited to that.

I guess this is down to bigger issues than casting. I've always had a problem with Mr Whedon's female characters, in that I rarely find them believable. If you've suddenly had the responsibility of hunting vampires thrust upon you, it's going to change you, but I never felt this was true of Buffy, who remained in her soul a cheerleader forever. Ditto the girl Summer Glau played in Firefly, whom I always felt was another action-girly-without-consequences. Admittedly, the rest of the female cast in firefly, including the main action-woman, I did find believable, but there is a certain kind of kick-ass-earth-child-supermodel type that Mr Whedon does, that doesn't work for me.
I might be unfair on the woman playing Sierra, who does at one point deliver a line "Do you need this sorting out?" that fits with the character that's supposed to have been downloaded into her. However, after that, she becomes very much the standard secret-agent girl/guy of the James Bond variety. Bond can get away with it, because he was the original (and even Bond has started to work on more depth of character). She doesn't get much in the way of dialogue beyond "I need a roof extraction", so it could be that if I'd seen more of her, I'd have been more impressed. One interesting thing I found about her was that, if you've not been introduced to a character and don't know who they are as a person, then watching them running around trying to steal a microfilm from a secret installation, isn't that engrossing because it has no emotional context. It's like watching a videogame. Not playing one, watching one.

Anyway, I just didn't believe Echo. When she had a secret-agent personality downloaded into her, but the only change in her behaviour was an increase in wise-ass rating, I didn't believe that either. It didn't help that she, and a lot of the rest of the cast, look like they've just stepped out of a high-school comedy, and straight into this. It didn't help that the entire cast, male and female, looked like they were walking cosmetics adverts. And speaking of cosmetics, almost no-one had a real face. I know this is a bad thing to say, but the women in particular were all pretty in that creepy, skin-too-tight kind of way that you see a lot on American TV. Their faces look a little alien, just somehow not right. If you saw them walking down the street, you'd look twice because they are somehow inhumanly beautiful. Having a room full of them on TV just doesn't seem real.
Okay, that's what didn't work. What did work? Ms DeWitt. I loved watching the actress chew up the scenery as this complex shades-of-grey character. Also, she was paired in one scene with the only out-and-out believable Doll, which was the male one, Victor. The guy playing Victor did a pretty good English accent (although I'm English and I don't recall ever meeting anyone who speaks like that, but then maybe I don't move in sufficiently upper-bracket circles), but more than this, he seemed to have assumed an entirely different character that was just there for the time that he's 'imprinted'. Admittedly, we didn't see much of him 'out of imprint', so maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's how it seemed. He was charming, but kindof a domineering ass at the same time, and fitted perfectly to DeWitts Jekyll and Hyde misunderstood villainess. DeWitt was one of the few characters with a believable face, and the actress exhibited a lot of range, with us seeing DeWitt as a carefree lover one moment, broken hearted at the lie that is her life the next, and then a switch to the utterly ruthless and vengeful commander of the dollhouse, and all this fits together perfectly.
Ms DeWitt is a complex character, who may not actually be completely evil, despite all that she's involved with. In the scene where Victor has been imprinted with the belief that he loves her, he suggests they abscond together, sell everything they own and retire secretly to a Caribbean island together. There's a moment when DeWitt seems to consider this, she could have her perfect lover who is actually made to her specifications. She could be happy, something that she clearly isn't despite the power and money she has access to as director of the Dollhouse. But, it would mean stealing someone's life. It would effectively mean killing Victor to give herself the perfect man. Perhaps she says no because she fears how her superiors in the dollhouse will react, or perhaps she says no because she feels that this wouldn't be right, and she does have some ethical limits somewhere. This ambiguity made her a very interesting character to watch. Also interesting was her predicament, in the words of a song by Garbage: "I bought into what I once sold, and ended up with nothing."
The only failing I had with the Ms DeWitt character, was that they went a little too far with the 'I'm tough as nails, I am' thing. At one point, she takes a bullet, but just ignores it while everyone else around her is like: "Hey, you've just been shot. Shouldn't you go to medical or something?" It does turn out to be a flesh wound (Which we see after she takes her blouse off, there's that thing again) but she refuses anesthetic while having it stitched up. What is this woman trying to prove? We buy that she's someone to take seriously, she doesn't have to prove it by demonstrating an immunity to physical pain!

Ms DeWitt didn't have the only good scenes in this episode. An ex FBI agent is pursuing his own obsession of investigating the dollhouse, and there is a scene where his long-absent girlfriend turns up, and initially he just blathers at her about the dollhouse and what he's uncovered. At that point, it's not clear whether she believes him or not, she may be planning to stick around because she fears he is going insane. Of course, we know her reasons for sticking around, and when she suddenly goes blank in his embrace, and starts reciting "This is a message from inside the dollhouse" he discovers that his girlfriend is actually a doll, and an unwitting spy for the organization. A mole in the organization is sending him a warning message about her by using the woman herself as a kind of tape-recorder to deliver the message. He's told he must play along with her, as if the dollhouse cannot keep tabs on him, they are likely to kill him. When she returns to 'normal', which means to a fake personality that's been imprinted upon her, he has to pretend, and give no hint of how he must be feeling given that his girlfriend, and their relationship, has all just been shown to be a lie.

The problem with all this is that when we switch from the DeWitt actress acting her heart out in a real drama, to Echo delivering her spy-hunting summation as though she were a character from Scooby Doo, there's a real sense of having inadvertently switched channels from a serious drama, to a frivolous one. The cast is unbalanced, with some people who are so good that they make everyone else look bad, and some who are probably great at their kind of thing, but have been cast into a role where they are trying to do someone else's kind of thing, and failing.

There are some great people amongst the supporting cast. In this episode, Echo is looking for a spy, and interviews some of the smaller-part characters. This underlines the shows weaknesses, with Echo flatly delivering some bad dialogue "Something makes me trust you, I don't know why", while the characters sitting opposite her are played by actors/actresses who are thinking "I'm hardly in this weeks episode, in fact this is my only sizeable scene, so I'm going to go at this as though I've been told that if I don't give an excellent performance, I'm going to be taken out back and shot like a knackered horse." The workaholic doctor with the mysterious scars on her face who is clearly hiding from her own demons, the cynical 'Handler' who seems to be fixated on protecting Echo, the frustrated female understudy to the Dollhouse's resident geek; all of these were far better than the actress playing the lead character, I'm sorry to say.
One character that I did find boring, was the resident zany geek. He was quite well played and what have you, but I've just seen too many comedy computer geniuses, and Dollhouse would have been better served by having a more original character in this role.
In synopsis then, Dollhouse is full of great ideas, and some great scenes. It's ambitious, and the central premise could be used to investigate and explore all kinds of issues. But the casting and some of the dialogue badly lets it down, and in the end, it just doesn't quite work. It's one of those shows where all you can think of when watching it, is what might have been.

Bones:

Bones is a comedy detective/police procedural drama. It started off pretty well, with a couple of throwaway characters putting in a performance in the opening scene that I felt was better than that delivered by many of the main characters of Dollhouse. It's strange that it's named after the female 'lead' (who is called 'Bones', presumably a nickname) because it's very much an ensemble show. Most of the characters are well cast and well acted, and none seemed to have that 'weird face' look, or if they did it was because they'd been born with a weird face. All of the characters are fairly charming and interesting. However, I had trouble early on with the incidental music that's used to underline "This is a funny scene". I always find this kind of thing insulting, as it seems to amount to the show's producers saying "We need the music to tell the audience they are watching a funny scene, as they are too stupid to realise that otherwise". But, I could put up with that, it's par-for-the-course for shows like this.
In this episode a high-flying female theoretical physicist has been murdered. She worked at an institute in which all the scientists are exceptionally good looking, coolly dressed, and bonk all the time, indulging in random sex to relieve their tension so they can get on with their work. I found this utterly, utterly implausible (I've a physics degree myself. If I really believed that theoretical physics was like that, I'd have worked harder to get a better mark). However, I grokked that this show was mostly about fun, so again, I could put up with this.
There were some great laughs in the show, only spoiled by that damn stupid music. Most of these revolved around a couple of forensic scientists who made a very effective "Penn and Teller" team, often carrying out experiments that are supposed to advance the case, but are really far more about blowing stuff up for kicks. One of the best laughs in the show involves a test with a turkey fast-frozen in liquid nitrogen and dropped from a height, simulating what is believed to have been done to hide the identity of the body. Everyone expects it to shatter on impact, but instead it bounces, flying through the air and striking down one of the team.

In this episode we learn that all very intelligent people are pompous asses with an answer for everything and no real respect for human life, who also have lots of sex at the drop of a hat. This latter point led to some unintentional (I think) humor, when a researcher who has just been caught in flagrante delicto is asked "Who had access to your lab?" and responds "Um, everybody."
Unfortunately, the fact that all smart people are pompous asses rather detracts from the female lead's own character. She can also be a pompous ass, and seems socially inept (which accusation, coming from me, is really, really bad). She's a nightmare to have on a murder case, delivering the news of murder to the dead woman's fiancee with such insensitivity that you'll be unable to watch, and hide behind the sofa and watching through your fingers, like you did with the scary bits of Dr Who when you were ten. This, of course, is much of her charm as a character, and having a legion of characters who are just like that seriously detracts from her.

This episode featured a very unfortunate comedy subplot about the father of one of the female cast coming to town to punish her boyfriend for breaking up their relationship. Her father just happens to be one of the guys from ZZ Top. We're supposed to believe that he's a scary dude. He's not, he just looks ridiculous. I didn't care about him, the subplot, nor indeed the girl, though she was very pretty and took one for the team in the flying turkey incident, but she seemed to be a character who had nothing going for her other than being very pretty. I could have done without this whole subplot, and the time wasted on it could have been spent preventing the final train wreck of the main plot.

Oh, the ending. Even though this is a comedy show, (despite the fact that it deals with grisly murder) I was expecting a clever wrap-up to the murder mystery. Instead they line up the suspects and throw an accusation at them about bloodstains they've found with luminol. The suspects, who are pompous assess with an answer to everything, sneer and point out that luminol glows in the presence of a whole range of substances, allowing for a lot of false positives (and taking a swipe at competing show CSI, which just loves luminol), to whit, the detectives have no case. The lead character then remembers that luminol glows in the presence of pond scum, which one of the researches is working with, so he must be the murderer!
What?
WTF?
This is allowed to fly. The suspect makes no objection as he's carted off, failing to point out that luminol doesn't just glow in the presence of pond scum, but lots of other substances too, for instance blood. Presumably he doesn't raise any objection because he knows that even the cheapest lawyer will go through the prosecution's case like a bulldozer though a sand castle. I felt utterly cheated by this brush-off ending, and was shouting at the screen "You've got NOTHING! NOOOOOTHING!!" But the cast were unable to hear me, smugly assuming that they'd wrapped up the case when they'd done nothing of the sort.

In synopsis, Bones is fun for a while, but at the end you are left thinking of all the ways you could have better spent your time other than watching it. It's one of those programs like 'moonlighting', which will be quite popular at the time, but forgotten in five years.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Oh
My
God.

Where to begin? How about...

Real Faces.

Don't get me wrong, the actress playing Sarah Connor is quite beautiful, but at the same time, she's got a face that looks like she might have seen some sh*t. I don't know whether this is down to the innate shape of someone's face, or whether it's down to acting, but when Echo from dollhouse says "I'm a brain-wiped person currently imprinted with the mind of a hired killer", you look into her eyes and think "No, you're not. I saw you on 'Sorority Sleepover' just a few minutes ago on another channel?" When Sarah Connor says "I've spent the last ten years of my life fighting time-travelling humanoid robots sent to kill my son, and with him, the future of humanity." One thinks "Yeah, no offence luv, but you kinda look it."

No-one in this show has that shrunk-in-the-wash look to their faces. Don't get me wrong, there are some beautiful people in this show, but they look naturally beautiful. There are plenty of people as well though, who aren't afraid to be plain, to wear a face that you'd not remember if it passed you in the street, but to make damn sure you remember them by hammering their character into your memory by force of acting.
No mention of faces can, of course, pass up Summer Glau. Summer is another woman with a face that is both beautiful, and somehow a little creepy/odd, but this time the oddness seems natural, genetic rather than cosmetic. As I said above, I didn't buy her as the human weapon in Firefly, and expected to be similarly disappointed by her as a terminator. I saw posters of this pretty girl with big eyes, and her lovely hair being blown in a passing wind, and holding huge guns, and thought "no, sorry, doesn't work, I'm not buying it".
Boy, was I ever wrong. Ms Glau is mesmerising to watch as an psychotic-autistic beauty with just a hint of emotional subtext. For once the fact that she looks impossibly and inhumanly beautiful is perfect, given that she is actually a construct, a made thing, a machine. Her hair alone is magical, falling in coils that seem to have a life of their own and to change color. It never looks arranged, but never looks anything other than spectacular either. It occured to me that the hair might be CGI. But, although she looks startling, it's not the looks that really make her perfect in this role. Which brings us to the next discussion point...

Casting.

Ms Glau is fantastically cast. Despite all my reservations, I totally bought her as a female terminator. But it's not her face that makes her perfect for this role, it's her voice, or rather what she does with it. Or rather, it's what I think she's doing with it.
There is something going on in Ms Glau's voice that is so subtle, that I might even be imagining it. Summer keeps her voice flat and level, the standard emotionless robot. Except, just there, did you hear that? There was something there, a tremble, a change of tone, something. I'm sure of it. Unless I imagined it? No, I'm sure I heard it. It must mean something. Rewind and let's hear it again?
As I say, I might be imagining it, but every now and then it seems to me that Ms Glau will put the barest hint of emotion into her words. The result is maddening, causing one to shout at the screen "There! She's doing the thing again!", but in the next second she delivers a line so blank and dead-pan that one begins to think "No, maybe I am imagining it after all." If I'm not imagining it, and she's really doing this, then it's genius because it forces the viewer into the same experience that the characters around Summer's Terminator are going through. "I think there's something going on with our Terminator. Or maybe I'm imagining it? Maybe they do this to win over your trust, before they betray you? Or maybe she's faulty? Or maybe it's me that's thinking with my hormones? Or maybe it means something more?"
Ms Glau will deliver lines like "You said it yourself, I'm just a machine.", with this utterly innocent "Yes, I'm just a machine, just a doll" expression, but there's something somewhere that has you thinking "Was that a hint of resentment I heard there? I think it was! I think it was?"
If she's really doing this, then this some incredible acting, because she keeps you right on the edge of sure/not sure/sure/not sure never stepping too far over the line either way. I can't imagine how anyone would begin to pitch acted behaviour that perfectly, so I do think I might be imagining it. If not, then Ms Glau is a seriously accomplished actress. If she is doing it, then I wonder whose idea it was. If it was her idea, then "wow" is all I can say.

And what's more, Summer, and the rest of the female cast in this, mostly wear sensible clothes, rather than beachwear or something tight that's most appropriate for an aerobics class. There was only one scene where summer takes her top off, which had me thinking "Uh-oh, here it comes." But this scene then did a bait-and-switch on me, becoming something unexpected that had far greater emotional depth than I expected.

And get this, Summer's great, but she's not the only one delivering a great performance in this, and the competition is so tight, that she might very well not be the best!
The-actress-playing-Sarah-Connor (Who I really should look up on wikipedia or imdb, but I'm too lazy to reach across to my browser window) looks great, looks real, and really emotes with her face all the time. Unlike the Whedon action girls, she doesn't look vulnerable because she's still a girly-girl, but rather because she's someone whose lived for years at the edge of her breaking point, and doesn't know when the final 'snap' is going to come. We didn't get to see so much of her in these two episodes, as it seems like the focus of the plot is beginning to move away from her story, and perhaps towards Jason's. Still, she was a convincing leader-of-the-pack, and her every step seemed to be taken under the weight of the responsibility she was bearing. She was great, and if she'd had more of the focus of the story in these episodes, I think I'd have a lot more to say about her.

With all the major female characters in this show, there's one thing I can say. Often I find that action-women in film and on TV aren't convincing in the role of someone who may have to kill for what they believe in, or because it's their job. Not so in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Every one of these women had what it takes to be a killer, I felt, and not in the fantasy Jane-Bond secret-agent kind of way, but in the "Sometimes I look in mirrors, and what I see looking back out scares me, but I still believe I'm doing the right thing, and will keep on doing it, because things have gone too far to turn back now" kind of way, or the "If people get in the way, I kill them, efficiently. I feel nothing about it, it's what I must do." kind of way.

All the terminators I saw portrayed in these two episodes were wonderful. It's the little things. Summer will suddenly turn her head, and look through walls like a dog, and then a knock will come at the door. Fight scenes between two terminators are brilliantly done, with the two combatants keeping their faces utterly blank as they throw each other around. They're also amusingly pointless, as the two terminators are too indestructible to really do each other any harm, and are just going through the motions like mindless automatons.
There's a terminator delivery man who grins a perfectly winning grin, looking like the friendly delivery guy, as he pulls out a gun and shoots an unsuspecting victim in the head. Then, once the usefulness of the grin is done with, it's cast off like the mask it is.
The only slightly strange thing, perhaps, is that female terminators seem to have a tendency to stick their busts out when taking bullets. But, in it's way, that's kindof fun, and fun is not something that The Sarah Connor Chronicles has in abundance. This is serious drama, and it's not ashamed of that.

I'm often finding myself in groups asking "Name ten great actors", and then "Name ten great actresses". I guess I go to boring parties. The thing is, that it's normally far easier to name ten great actors, than ten actresses (I normally start to struggle after Rachel Weiss, and that woman who played the mom in the Sixth Sense, who we never seemed to see again). One of the explanations given for this is that the roles just aren't out there for women to really strut their stuff. Whilst I agree that good female roles are sparse, I normally don't buy this, because it's my experience that a good actor/actress can have a scene in which they have no dialogue, and just walk across a room and look out of a window, and be quite unforgettable when doing it. However Sarah Connor Chronicles is evidence that supports the theory of lacking roles, because it's got some incredible female roles in it, incredibly portrayed by incredible actresses. Maybe we didn't realise they were incredible actresses before, because they just didn't get the roles to show off and be, you know, incredible.
Indeed, this is a show whose female characters are so powerful, and who are inhabited by actresses able to output the watts of acting power to animate them, that the male characters (excepting John Henry) are somewhat pushed to the sidelines, at least in the two episodes I saw. Given the paucity of good female roles, if I were an aspiring actress with a shot at one of these roles, I would happily cagefight any bitch who thought she was more entitled to it than me. Hmm... no, that strategy is too risky, she might be bigger than me. Better to just poison her latte at the auditions.

From the two episodes I saw though, the woman at the top of the pecking order actress wise wasn't Summer or the actress playing Ms Connor, it was Shirley Manson. Shirley Manson used to be in a band called Garbage, and normally when musicians decide to switch careers to acting, the results aren't pretty. Well, 'pretty' isn't a word one would use to describe Ms Manson's performance, unless you were saying "pretty terrifying" or "pretty unforgettable" or the like.
Admittedly, it can be said that a lot of Ms Manson's performance came down to "I've got a tough scottish accent, so you probably don't want to mess with me." but that's her mojo, and she she delivered it brilliantly. Not for one moment did I doubt that she was a bitch so tough that she spits nails, (and given her characters secret, she probably can). She's playing an utterly ambiguous character, whom we still can't place in terms of allegiances even after the season finale. Her eyes are convincingly soulless, but where they linger implies that there might be more soul in her than she lets show. For me, she was an acting surprise on a par with David Bowie's amazing performance in "The Prestige". I feel that I'm doing Ms Manson a disservice, given that I've rambled on about Summer Glau's lovely hair, and wonderful voice, and beautiful eyes, and great performance, and blah, blah, blah, but I can only come up with a paragraph for Ms Manson. In my defense, her performance was one of those things that when someone says "What's so brilliant about it?" your only answer is "I don't know. It just is brilliant." The best way I can sum it up is that, if you were to turn around and find her unexpectedly stood behind you, and in character from this show, you might very well drop dead of fright.

Even the incidental characters are giving it their all in this. People like the police detective, or the girl who delivers a message, know they only have tiny roles, but that doesn't stop them from filling out those roles as completely as the script will let them. There was only one incidental character, the priest, who I felt gave a somewhat rocky performance, everyone else was great.

Turning to the male characters, the guy playing Jason Connor performs well, he too knows how to pull his face about to express emotion. My problem with him, and it says something about TSCC that I'm saying this of the male characters, and not the female ones, is that he's just too pretty for the part. He really looks like he just stepped out of a boy band. If he looked a little more haggard and scarred by life on the run, it would have worked better for me. That said, his performance was pretty good, and scene's in which there is just him and Terminator Glau, and therefore he's out from under his mother's wing, are interesting because Jason is still a rash young man who sometimes runs on his emotions. His guardian terminator is very clearly not competent to deal with this and this gave those scenes a sense of foreboding that bad things could happen because Jason is off the leash. Unfortunately they went for injecting a little unresolved sexual tension between the Jason and Terminator Glau characters, and I felt this was a mistake. It's quite well handled, in that it seemed clear to me that Jason is projecting things onto the Terminator that she cannot live up to, but I felt it would have been better to avoid this and instead put the Terminator into the role of the inexperienced baby-sitter who doesn't know how to keep her reckless charge in line.
The big-hitter character amongst the 'males' on the show is John Henry, a humaniod robot body with a cord running to it's head that is connected to an animating artificial intelligence. Indeed, it's one of the great things about this show that all the really engaging and interesting characters are the supposedly emotionless machines. The actual human characters tend to play second fiddle to the various machines with their complex motivations and unknown alligencies.

John Henry's friendship with a little girl is an effecting one, because though he has an adult body, John Henry is himself very clearly a child, though one that is having to grow up fast. He's one of the most sympathetic characters on the show and one of its only sources of occasional humor. However, we do not know what his future is, might he become Skynet? Might he become something worse? Every scene in which John Henry is around lying, scheming humans who tell him first one thing, then something else, has you holding your head and screaming "No! Think of the example you are setting him! Stop messing with his head or he'll turn bad!" Of all the people in the story he was the one whose well-being I was most concerned about, both in terms of him being a sympathetic character, and in terms of him being obviously imperilled. When the Connors learn about him, and assume that he's a monster-in-the-making that must be destroyed, the viewer is conflicted, because they feel that John Henry has every chance to turn out good, and that the Connors are just blinded by their past experience with Skynet. At the same time though one cannot deny that they might well be right.

At the end of the first episode I saw things had pretty much gone to hell, and a montage of scenes depicting this was overlaid with John Henry singing "Donald where's your Trousers?", which has been taught to him by the little girl. Even though this is a completely silly song it was made very effecting by John Henry's flat, childlike voice and it was really an inspired moment in the show. I felt that this was where the season finale should have finished, and that things should have stayed 'gone to hell' for a little longer than they did, requiring half of the next season to be put back on an even keel.

I could go on and on about this show, there's just so much going on in it and it's production values are just so high. In synopsis: This show is bursting with awesome. It absolutely can't fit in any more awesome. If it tried, if it were to accept that one last wafer-thin mint of awesome, an awesomeness containment failure would surely ensue. This is the kind of TV that you only get to see once in a while. I would go so far as to say that, on the basis of what I've seen, this series is actually better than the films that inspired it, and remember, those were great films (except perhaps number 3, which I've not seen, but hear mixed things about).

So, that's what I saw. One of these shows is up for cancellation apparently, because it isn't pulling in the ratings.

Can you guess which one?

SF Creatures aren't Alien Enough

2009-04-01T11:28:00.000+01:00

Things have been quiet on the blog front, because of VERY heavy work commitments, and a dose of what was probably food poisoning. I'm not entirely better, but despite that, I feel it's time to get back into the swing of things. Also, one of the benefits of being sick, I've always felt, is that people have to listen sympathetically to your delusional ramblings!

Today's topic: Lazy species design in SF, and trying to justify it with 'Convergent Evolution'

As a wannabe writer, I'm often critting other people's work. One of the recurring things that I see is SF stories featuring 'alien' creatures that, if you saw them in a zoo, you wouldn't think them particularly surprising, or even foreign, let alone alien. This is very common in published SF too. Then again, perhaps I'm particularly insouciant with regard to strange critters, and have a higher standard of 'strange'. I remember one American's response to some British fauna:

"AARRGGHH!! What the ****'s THAT!!?"
"It's a hedgehog."

This from a native of a country that has bears and giant pigs roaming in the wilds. Maybe hedgehogs do look particularly alien if you've not seen one before, but for me they're not so shocking.

I should point out here, that this is another 'Do as I say, not as I do' rant. In my own writing efforts, I've always stayed firmly away from alien ecosystems, precisely because they require such effort to do well, and those that I have come up with, are not so remarkable.

Anyway, I don't let my own failings get in the way of pointing out to my fellow writers that their xenofauna are somewhat pedestrian. The reply tends to be:

"Ah, it's Convergent Evolution. Conditions being the same throughout the universe on habitable planets, leads to species being much the same."

And to this I say "COBBLERS!!" This is the same nonsense that Star Trek uses to pass off actors with a bit of rubber stuck on their nose as alien races. In Star Trek's case, they at least have the excuse of working to an SFX budget. The writer has no such excuse, their SFX budget is effectively infinite, and they're working with the best animators that infinite money can buy.

So, let's deal with some issues. Firstly:

Mammals.

There seems to be a widespread belief (at least in the creators of SF ecosystems) that mammalian life is inevitable. This may be based on it's abundance in the world today, or it may just be based on the fact that a tiger is a cool animal, and an alien tiger, with antennae and three eyes, is an even COOLER animal. However, the first mammals appeared about 200 million years ago (I think) and prior to that, for another 200 million years, we had an ecosystem that didn't contain them AND GOT ALONG JUST FINE WITHOUT THEM. There seems to be an idea that the dinosaurs were a sub-standard product, pushed out by the superior mammals, but the truth is more that the dinosaurs were very advanced and well adapted FOR THE WORLD THEY LIVED IN. But that world changed. The dinosaurs had spent eons adapting themselves to perfection to a warm, wet world. When that changed, it threw the advantage over to species that were better able to handle cold (I think, I'm no expert at any of this, but that's never stopped me). Had their world not changed, the mammals would have been around, but they might have stayed forever as small rodent creatures, because the niches they occupy today, would already be filled by terrifying lizards.
And the mammals didn't rise to prominence straight away, first came the age of the Terror Birds. Giant flightless birds, some taller than a human, with huge vicious beaks, that were the top predators of their day. Quite what happened to them, no one seems to know.
But, there is no reason that we shouldn't be in a world of birds, lizards, or insects. And quite why the insects gave up the big niches, is hard to say, they've had a long time to evolve something akin to lungs, and then they'd be able to get really big. Why haven't they? Then again, as most of the life-mass of the planet is insects, maybe they just don't need to.

Four legs good.

Why do most SF creatures seem to be four-legged? Most creatures on earth aren't four-legged, but six legged (being insects). If four legs are so perfect, why haven't most insects lost their extra two? Having said that, what is the benefit of six legs, and why do spiders have eight? We adapted from creatures with four legs, but our forelegs became arms with hands. If you had six legs, would you adapt two to become arms, or four? Why didn't elephants develop hands on their trunks? Maybe the tip of an elephants trunk is already dexterous enough? I don't know, there is lots of stuff to think on here, rather than just opting for the default 'four legs'.

Lack of Environmental Interaction.

In a lot of the stuff I encounter, the creatures are just in their environment, whatever it is. They don't try to utilize it in any clever ways to give them an advantage. They don't build, like beavers or termites, or if they do build, then they build exactly like beavers or termites, never building anything surprising. Here's a surprising thing that most creatures don't build: Traps. Yes, I know, spiders, but really, why don't more creatures build traps? I guess there's ant-lions too, they dig pits and bury themselves at the bottom, waiting for stuff to come rolling down into their jaws.
But very few creatures do this. This is strange. Surely this would be a better approach than chasing after stuff? You could build lots of traps, and then harvest from them at the end of the day. I suppose there is an issue of other species stealing from your traps, but then, this is an issue for humans too. I don't think anything generally steals from lobster pots. Why has nothing else invented lobster pots, before us? What kind of traps could be built, and how advanced could they be, given 'animal intelligence'?
A recent example of an SF ecosystem that I thought was rather good in regard of utilizing the environment, is discussed here. It features creatures living in a near-frozen ocean (something like Europa") or Lake Vostok ) in which creatures manipulate the salinity of the water in order to promote freezing, allowing them to build structures from ice. The really unusual step to this, is that they do this even within their own bodies, allowing otherwise 'jellyfish' type creatures to have bones and teeth of ice. Of course, they'd leave no fossils, I suspect.
Now, to me, that's a fairly new and interesting idea. Sadly, it wasn't in an SF story, but the result of speculation by a team of scientists as to what alien life might be like.

Five Senses Good.

It's rare to encounter anything with different senses to the usual five, unless it's 1) Bat-style sonar or 2) Telepathy. What about electric senses? Many animals have this, although not on land, but I'm not sure why these don't exist on land. Yes, they work better in water, but at a recent trip to the Berlin Sea-Life Center (I love aquariums, but that's a separate post) a worker there told me that the rays can track people by the electrical impulses of their heartbeats. Now, I was dubious about this, but he seemed very knowledgeable, and was quite insistent. If this is true, that rays in a tank can track the weak impulse of the human heart through air, glass, and water, then it must be usable as a hunting sense on land. It wouldn't be much use in daylight, but in the dark, maybe in cave environments, or hunting for small creatures buried in sand or soil, it would come into it's own. Nature hasn't done this on land on earth, but that doesn't mean it can't do it elsewhere.
What about radio? This may seem a silly thing to say, but given that nature has already come up with excellent receptors for visible wavelength light, and that it should be easier to do so for radio wavelengths (I think?), why hasn't this been done in nature? You could use it for communication, or radar. It might be very good for 'looking' into soil, where something might be hiding. Or, getting wild, you might use it as a signaling method in a hive species. This might even allow many individual members of a colony to think, and share information, as one.

Just because it's not been done...

When did you last see a venomous mammal in SF? Not often, I suspect, I strongly suspect that venomous reptiles are more common (though I haven't, and can't, do a survey of SF ecosystems to check this out). On our own planet, mammals aren't venomous, so SF writers tend to figure there must be some reason for that. But, there is one venomous mammal out there. The Platypus. Yes, in addition to all the other weird things about it, like laying eggs, the Platypus is venomous. Male Platypuses (Platy-pi?) grow a 'fang' on their back-legs, which they use in fighting over females, injecting the venom into their rivals.
Oh, and the Platypus has an electric sense, though it uses it underwater.

Gas-bag creatures.

Living blimp creatures are great, the only thing is, they're starting to be overdone. It seems that when people want to come up with something that's really alien, it tends to be balloon-creatures of various types, ranging from human-sized 'flying squid' up to city-sized ones living in the atmospheres of gas-giant planets. Time to find a new idea, I'm afraid.

So, those are some of the issues of the species that I see in SF. Basically, people often seem afraid to break the mold of what we have on earth, in this belief that what we have on earth is going to be replicated elsewhere, because it is somehow inherently *right*. However, they are only considering a very narrow spectrum of what we have on earth, because, if you hunt around, earth has, and has had, some truly weird creatures. And this, I think, is the strongest proof of the falsity of the claim 'Life everywhere will be much alike', because life *even here on Earth* isn't much alike. Here are some weirdos:

The Robber Crab.

It's a giant crab. It lives on land. It drowns in water. It climbs trees. It eats coconuts.
If you made this up, people would laugh at you, but it's real. I'm fairly confident that no-where else out there in the universe is there a land-based-tree-climbing-coconut-eating crab. This one is ours, and ours alone.

The Malaysian Exploding Ant.

Does exactly what it says on the tin. It has large glands full of poison in it's body, and when sensing threats, it throws itself towards them with a squeak of "For the colony!", and contracts muscles that cause the glands to explode, expiring in a spray of poison and parts.

The Cone Snail.

It's a snail, but it has a harpoon. Yes, a harpoon. What would be teeth in normal snails (snails have teeth? Who knew?) becomes a dart that is loaded with incredibly powerful poison. The dart is shot out at passing fish, and the poison injected, and then the paralyzed fish is reeled in towards the snails mouth (the dart is tethered and can be retracted). The poison is some of the most powerful known, and can kill humans in quick order. Why it needs a poison that powerful for hunting fish, I don't know. Oh, and it carries a stock of darts, and scan shoot them in all directions, even backwards. Basically, it's a living, submersible, battle-tank.

Tripod Fish.

A deep-sea fish whose fins have become three incredibly long 'legs', and which spends most of it's time just stood on these legs, feeding off plankton. It's a hermaphrodite, having both female and male organs, which are both active at the same time, so it can probably reproduce with itself, as a last resort. Given that the deep sea is wide, dark, and empty, and tripod fish rare, it's probably a sensible adaption for this species.

Deep sea Angler Fish:

Apart from being hideous ugly, and having a glowing 'lure' tentacle-thingy, and an inflatable stomach so they can swallow things bigger than themselves, deep sea Anglers are notable for the male of the species. The males are much smaller than the females (like one twentieth their size) and once mature, they seek out a female, bite onto her, and gradually 'meld' their blood supply with hers, allowing their own internal organs to degenerate, eventually becoming nothing other than sperm-supply appendages. I don't know if their brains remain, or not.

Clownfish:

These are the fish that live in amongst the tentacles of sea anemones. What I didn't know is that generally, one anemone will support a group of fish, one large female, a smaller male who is her 'husband', and a bunch of smaller 'non-reproductive' males (who might be family, I'm not sure). This sex-imbalance is because all clownfish are born male, yes, I know that sounds impossible, but it's true. Where do the females come from? Well, if the female is removed, then the breeding male will change sex, and become female, and one of the 'non-breeding' males will become the 'husband'. I don't know if 'non-breeding' means 'infertile' or just 'not married', but either way, getting to breed is a case of dead-mans-shoes.

Hamlet Fish:

More hermaphroditic fish, but in this case they don't self-fertilize, but when they find a mate, they will take turns at being male and female over multiple matings.

The Snapping Shrimp:

My personal favorite. It's a shrimp. It has a claw. One of it's claws is way bigger than the other, and can snap closed producing a loud 'bang!'. So loud is the bang that the snapping shrimp is considered one of the loudest animals on earth. So loud is the bang, that it can stun, or even kill, fish. So loud is the bang, (and you're not going to believe this, but it's true) that it causes something called 'sonoluminescence'. Basically, tiny bubbles of air in the water are compressed by the shock-wave, and collapse emitting a flash of light. No one understands where the light comes from exactly, but it's believed that the temperature within these tiny bubbles reaches 5000K.
This is a shrimp, with a sonic blaster.
Some of these shrimp hunt small fish with these sonic weapons.
And that's not the end of it. Some snapping shrimp are eusocial, living in complex societies like ants, with 'soldier' shrimps who have an extra big claw-blaster to fend off threats. Other species exist in a symbiotic relationship with particular species of fish. The fish has good eyesight, and the shrimp (which is pretty much blind) can dig tunnels, so they get together. The shrimp digs a tunnel, and the fish posts itself as lookout at the front of the tunnel. The shrimp never ventures too far from the tunnel, and keeps an antenna touching the tail of the fish. If the fish spots danger, it signals with a movement of it's tail, and both animals retreat into the burrow. This latter symbiosis is interesting, because it implies some species can avoid the 'cost' of evolving and maintaining a complex organ like the eye (which also requires extra brain, and all the energy and material needed to keep the whole system running) by entering a symbiotic relationship with one who has all this.

So, there are a bunch of animals far stranger than what I find in a lot of SF, and these are only drawn from what's alive now. If we new in more detail about the behavior of more ancient animals, (rather than just their bone-structures) I'm sure there is far weirder stuff to be found in the past. There are many things that will converge in evolution (for instance, if you want to swim fast in the sea, you have to be streamlined, but there are many niches that don't require streamlining, and even some streamlined animals look strange) but a lot doesn't. There are a lot of creatures out there with unique ways of life, which might never have come about, and if the creature went extinct, might never be seen again. For instance, in quite a few species (seahorses, harvestmen, etc) the male looks after the offspring, but I can imagine living on a world where this was unknown in nature, there is no reason why it has to turn up. Equally, there could be a world where every species is derived from a common ancestor that had 'male-looks-after-offspring' tendencies, and so everything alive follows this approach. There isn't one ideal set of solutions that everything will converge to, but rather, many ways of achieving the same thing.
Consider the eye. There are many radically different variants of the eye currently in use on earth. Nautiluses have 'pinhole' eyes without a lens, that work just like pinhole cameras. Cats and dogs have 'reflectors' in their eyes that bounce light back, so that any light that wasn't detected the first time it passed through the retina, stands a chance of being detected when it's reflected back through. Some marine species have 'telescope eyes' that have multiple lenses, that can be moved in regard to each other to focus on near or distant objects. Some creatures have 'mirror eyes', like mirror telescopes, that focus images with a curved mirror, instead of a lens. Then there are compound eyes. Sight is the thing being converged on, but the methods used, the wavelengths of light seen, and whether color is used or not, all these are different.

Given the radically different and strange creatures that Earth itself has produced, SF worlds populated exclusively by what appear to be African Savannah animals in heavy make-up really aren't enough, and they don't engage my 'sense of wonder', personally speaking.

So, I guess that's the end of the stream-of-opinion for now. Does anyone else know of any animals as SF as the snapping shrimp, or can they recommend instances of SF creatures/ecosystems that have been done really well?

Anything can be a horror movie title

2009-03-05T10:22:00.000Z

I am stuck in a warehouse in Basingstoke making a big piece of equipment work, hence the blogposts have been few recently. Also, I didn't want to push the titanic 'What's wrong with modern SF' mags post off the bottom of the blog. But, the time has come to post something else.

Whilst visiting my brother and his gf, I made an important discovery. After watching 'The Orphanage' (which I didn't find half as scary as people claim, and I'm a card-carrying-coward. Yes, I jumped once or twice, but you can get the same effect with the old inflated-paper-bag-trick) it was observed that almost any english noun can be a horror movie title, with a few interesting failures.

Say these in a scary voice, or, if you are visually oriented, imagine one of those generic horror movie trailers with fast cuts so you can't quite made things out, and a lot of random shots of people screaming, cut to black, and imagine the word fading in.

The Picnic
The Estate
Fun Fair (tagline 'the ride of your life')
Light
The Shed
Packaged
Grime
Cake
Mounds
Voltage
Wires
The Notebook

My own personal favourite is:
Gravy

And, on a similar theme
Lumps
Chutney

Strangely, some classes of words don't work. Drinks:
Beer
Wine
Water
Coke <-- might work as a cop drama
Pepsi
Tea
Coffee

The only drink that works, in my opinion, is 'Juice'

Overly technical things don't work either it seems 'The printer' or 'the modem' don't work. Maybe 'the scanner' does, of course there's "Scanners".
Someone suggested "The Server Room", but for me that doesn't work, because that's the place you go and shut the door, and lock out all the world. It's the happy place.

On the other hand: 'Downtime'

Ted Chiang: Greatest Living Englishman, or what?

2009-02-27T15:30:00.000Z

Okay, technically, he's not English, nor even British. But this is a technical oversight that could be quite easily remedied, as I will outline later.

Ted Chiang quite simply *IS* 21st century science fiction. There's no one else, to my mind, who manages to write 'proper' _science_ fiction, and still have an eye for drama. Most everyone else is writing cooky post-singularity stuff, steampunk, or tired old space opera. Ted (no, that's too familiar, I really should call him 'Mr Chiang' or even 'Sir', or best yet, 'Sir Chiang', which is another reason why my plan, "Operation Scheherazade", outlined below, should be taken seriously) writes surprising stories that discuss important scientific or philosophical concepts (thermodynamics, the ethics of beauty, the meaning of life in a deterministic universe) whilst still being engaging tales about people. It seems to me that no-one else currently out there, is managing to tick all these boxes.

Some people say he is "The new Borges". I've read Borges, and I can report that no, Borges is "The old Ted Chiang". Borges's stories are glittering, but opaque. I never quite know what I'm supposed to take away from them. This isn't true of Sir Chiang's stories.

Last year, the Utterly Brilliant "Merchant and the Alchemists Gate" failed to win the BSFA awards, a result that had everyone scratching their heads and speculating on the dirt that someone evidently had on the judges. I'm not denying the other stories were good, but that's all they were. Ted's story was a masterwork (as evidenced by it's winning both the Hugo and Nebula). This year, he's up again with 'Exhalation'. If he doesn't win this time, something is very, very wrong somewhere.

StarShipSofa has readings of two of these masterworks available for free download:

Exhalation: http://podcast.starshipsofa.com/podcast/StarShipSofa_BSFA_Nominee_Ted_Chiang.mp3
Which is a story of a strange robotic being studying the workings of it's very alien world, which manages to illustrate concepts that are just as applicable to our universe.

The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate: http://podcast.starshipsofa.com/podcast/Ted_Chiang_The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemists_Gate.mp3
A time travel story with a strong "Arabian Knights" influence. Ted nails the "Story in a story in a story" jive of the Arabian Knights, he's done his homework.

And, within this show somewhere, http://podcast.starshipsofa.com/podcast/StarShipSofa_Aural_Delights_No_37_Alastair_Reynolds.mp3
a flash fiction "What's expected of us", one of his stories that deals with determinism.

Understand: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
Not one of his best, if you ask me, but still rather damn good.

Division by Zero: http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/division/
What if maths genuinely doesn't add up?

Alas, my favorite "The story of your life" isn't available for free.

Now on to other things...

Operation Scheherazade.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in these days of reality TV and plastic-boobed 'celebrities' it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that the image of Britain, and its peoples, has undergone a severe decline. Once we were amongst the worlds leading intellectual powerhouses, producing minds like Maynard Keynes, Alan Turing, Bertrand Russel, Iris Murdock, Arthur C Clarke, the list could go on and on. Nowadays we produce talentless slappers who scream abuse at each other on 'reality' TV. Ladies and Gentlemen, I put it to you that something must be done. If Britannia cannot produce home-grown genius, then she should do what she has always done when she discovers that something, say tea, or bananas, will not grow in Albion's soil: Steal it from elsewhere.
I propose, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we kidnap Ted Chiang, brainwash him, give him a British citizenship, a Knight-hood, get him addicted to tea, and make him in all ways as British as possible. This may seem a difficult undertaking, but I ask you, what have we been paying our taxes for if not to have a secret service capable of operations like this? And it should not be so difficult, whilst the USA has expended vast resources on guarding a large stockpile of useless yellow metal in Fort Knox, I observe that the security surrounding Ted Chiang, though he's evidently a national treasure, is almost non-existent. Indeed, it should be quite easy to get him to come to us under the pretext of, for instance, and invite to "Best Science Fiction" story contest, which he would obviously win. This would require the creation of some kind of fake 'British Science-Fiction Association', but once again, this should be quite easy for MI5 to mock-up, and even make it seem they had a plausible historical existence.
Indeed, after years of sending us McDonalds, Bad Movies, Poorly Justified Wars, MC Hammer, Jerry Springer, Evangelism, and Economic catastrophe, I say that America owes us Ted Chiang!

Thank you for your time

Not a toy! Adult collectors only!

2009-02-25T20:55:00.000Z

Someone sent me one of these for my birthday.

Alas, I opened it in a hurry, without reading the instructions. Only after winding it up, setting it going, and chortling over it's cute wobbling just-managing-not-to-tip-over march, only after I set it obstacles of spoons, forks, bubblewrap to contend with in it's UNSTOPPABLE MECHANICAL MARCH (alas, not very unstoppable, but he did overcome the spoons), only after I've voiced him as Bender, Robby Kryten and the Lost-in-Space Robot, only after I've done the Bela Lugosi "I have created a race of atomic supermen!" voice, do I read the fateful words:

"Attention: This is not a toy! For adult collectors only"

Oh noes! I've misused Mechanical Robot! Now I'll be wanted by the dreaded communist 'Appropriate product use police'! (Mechanical Robot was born in China). I'll be tried for crimes against mass-produced products (I'd like several hundred counts of "didn't read the instructions" taken into account for every piece of electrical or electronic equipment I've ever owned). Random people will assult me in the street shouting "This is for what you did to Mechanical Robot! We don't want your kind 'round here!"
Will Mechanical Robot say loyally tight-lipped, or grass me up for a lube and that muon-gun attachment he's always wanted? Will he sell his story to the tabloids: "Aging hacker used me as Toy!"?

What shall I do!?

Alternatively, maybe someone in Chinese manufacturing has a sense of humor. I mean, who puts "Not a toy" on a wind-up-walking-robot with "Robot" written on the front?

Evil Twin Gambit

2009-02-25T14:52:00.000Z

Everyone should have an Evil Twin. They cost nothing in terms of upkeep, and are one of the most important social tools available to the modern person.

I'm unsure which seminal event it was that bought about this insight, but I think it involved awakening with a sore head, and a UFO-abduction-style blackout that commenced from my speaking the words "Four pints of 'Contemptible Scumbag' please, my good man." (I may have been underage at the time, as every underage drinker knows that speaking like the comedy-aristocrat from a period drama ensures being taken seriously as a man of the world). The next day, finding myself confronted by the greeting: "You've got a ***in' nerve showin' your ****in' face after wot you ****in' did last night" I hit the 'turbo' button on my still addled gray matter, and Sebastian entered my life.

Sebastian is my evil twin, and illustrates many of the important aspects of a well turned out evil twin.

1) Sinister name: It is *absolutely vital* that your evil twin has a name that implies they amuse themselves by catapulting kittens into the crocodile enclosure at the local zoo (or even better, that they have their butler do it). Class politics being what they are, it's essential to find a name that reeks of unearned privilege. "Sebastian", "Tarquin", "Lucinda" and "Allegra" are excellent choices. (I did once meet an 'Allegra', she was charming. However, it's peoples prejudices that we are playing to here (and for all I know Allegra was secretly evil (indeed, I secretly hope so))). These names also have a kinky vibe to them, which can be useful in adding verisimilitude to your claim that your evil twin is responsible in those cases that the act you wish to deny is sexual in nature.
Obviously, the corollary of this is that your name should be a down-home, working class, honest yeomanry type of name. 'Bill', 'Fred', 'Sandra' or 'Agnes'. The kind of name that would hand a lost tenner in at the police station. If you are actually named 'Pericles' or 'Lavinia', consider getting it changed by deed poll.

2) Identical twin: Obviously, your evil twin should be the same sex as you, in order to plausibly have committed your many crimes. If, for instance, you are female, but the twin male, chocolate-pilfery will be hard to pin on them. Even more to the point, in those cases where you have been seen committing the act you can only shift blame to your twin if they are identical. Resist the temptation to give your Evil Twin glamorous or romantic identifying features, like a streak of white in their dark hair, dueling-scars, eye-patches, shoulder-mounted parrots, or cybernetic limbs. The point is not to have an Evil Twin that is cool, but to have one that can pass as you when required.

3) Your Evil Twin should have the same existential status as the King of France's beard. If you get this wrong, and now have a real Evil Twin, this will be bad. Good for the twin, perhaps, but bad for you. It may seem that having an actual, flesh-and-blood Evil Twin provides the ultimate in deniability, but it turns out the exact opposite is true. The Evil Twin, being evil, will commit terrible acts and pin the blame for them onto YOU. This is the reverse of what nature intended. If you find yourself in this situation, I can only offer my sympathy (actually, I lie. I can't even offer that. Serves you right) and suggest that you consider changing your appearance in some major way in order than you cannot be mistaken for your evil Twin. Take up dueling or get a cybernetic arm.

How not to do it:

This lamer has broken two of the important rules of the Evil Twin Gambit. 1) There is an obvious difference between himself and his twin. 2) He's opted for the dangerous 'actualised Evil Twin' approach, with an Evil Twin that's every bit as real as he is, and who unsurprisingly hates his guts.

Application: The deployment of the Evil Twin Gambit should be obvious:

Poirot: "And now, Mesdames Messieurs, after much fevered cogitation of my little grey cells, I can reveal that the murder was... Him!"
Him: "Ah, no, actually. This happens to me all the time. You see, I have this evil twin..."

Indeed, if you attend to the televised career of Poirot, Marple, and Colombo, you'll see that they only ever managed to bag those hapless, unprepared souls who've not taken the time to prepare the ground for an Evil Twin Gambit. Will you ever hear one of these supposed criminal masterminds attempt to deploy an Evil Twin? No. Hence, in the next scene, they are in handcuffs. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. Be prepared.

Here endeth the lesson.

The Apostrophe: Innocent punctuation or MARK OF SATAN?

2009-02-22T11:51:00.000Z

I hate these little blighters. There's nothing else in grammar that I have more trouble with than apostrophes. Indeed, I just wrote "apostrophe's" there, and had to go back and correct it. It's not that I don't know the rules, I've been told them often enough now by weary people on Critters, but whenever I start to write, all that I know goes out of my head, and I start broadcasting them randomly. I must say, I don't actually ever remember being *taught* where they go as a child, maybe that's why I just put them whereever I like.

For anyone else in the same boat, here are the rules. Unless I get them wrong:

1) Possessive: Whenever we're talking about something belonging to someone, we put an apostrophe in thusly:

The troll's hat.

If we leave it out, then 'trolls' means a collection of trolls, rather than a troll that possesses something.

Now, if we really are dealing with a mob of trolls, all wearing hats, maybe the troll mafia or such, then we move the apostrophe to after the 's', so as we can see that the 's' stands for plural, but it's still possessive:

The trolls' hats.

Proof, if it were needed, that english was just HACKED UP:

"So, how shall we indicate possession?"
"I know, why don't we use a little squiggle, like this?"
"Yuk. That's hideous. It looks like bug died on the page."
"You got a better idea?"
"Okay, okay, the squiggle stays. We've only got an hour left before this has to be handed in."
"You were the one who wanted to go to that bar. 'Lubrication for work', what a stupid idea that was."
"I didn't see you resisting much. Anyway, come on, we've got to do dialogue marks yet, where does this squiggle go?"
"Erm... here! Noun-squiggle-'s'. That's how we do possessives!"
"But, I thought an 's' indicated plural?"
"Bugger."

And it gets worse. There are plural words that don't use 's'. 'Children', 'people', 'men', 'women', 'brethren'. These words should NEVER HAVE BEEN ALLOWED IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The proper words would have been: 'Childs', 'mens', etc. I mean, the plural of 'girl' isn't 'girlen', so why does 'woman' become 'women'? Anyway, the rule for these, is the same as if they weren't plural:

The children's sticky fingers
The people's voices

As if that weren't bad enough 'people' can have a second meaning, in which it's singular, not plural 'The Soviet people' is one 'people' in this case. I wonder if this means that "We, the people" should really be "I, the people"? Unfortunately, this kind of 'people' is allowed to be plural: "The Native American Peoples", and worse still, they are allowed to possess things: "The Native American Peoples' history".

It's a mess, isn't it? No wonder I have trouble.

But, there is a common exception to these rules, and the fact that there is an exception shows you that the english language was BADLY SPECCED AND POORLY IMPLEMENTED, is someting belonging to 'it'. In this case, we use "its", breaking our own rules. That's because we need to save "it's" for the next use, contractions. I wonder what we use for the plural of 'it'? People will say there can be no such thing, but as a wannabe SF writer I say: "Ha! I mock your underdeveloped imagination, puny flatlander"-

Paniced, the strange creature activated its natural defense mechanism, splitting into multiple duplicates. Suddenly the room was full of its.

And it doesn't end with 'its'. There's also "his", "hers", "ours", "theirs" and "whose", non of which take an apostrophe. If you think "Of course not", then consider "one's", which does. Why does "one's" take and apostrophe, and "ours" doesn't, hmmm? Oh, and there is a situation in which even this rule doesn't hold true. If you have, say, an album title called "His and hers", and it possesses something, say its cover artwork, then you say "His and hers' cover artwork is dull". Notice the apostrophe after "hers". That's there because "His and hers" is all one name, and not actually "hers", but "His and hers".

If english were a computer programming language, it would be FORTRAN.

I wonder how other languages deal with possession. Better, I hope. Actually, I know mandarin is wonderful in this regard. Things of made plural by adding 'men' to the end of them, and posession is indicated by 'de', a word roughly equivalent to 'of'. So, we get "Wo de pengyou", meaning 'my friend' and "Women de pengyou" meaning 'our friend'. And that's it. Perfect. Pity they made it a tonal language and messed up the writing system.
Why, why, why, why, why would anyone opt for this approach of using 's' for two purposes, possession and plural, and then needing this EVIL PETTY LITTLE MARK to distinguish between the two?

2) Contraction: When two words become incestuously linked together, like "That is" becoming "That's", "I have" becoming "I've" or "We are" becoming "we're", you use an apostrophe to indicate the contraction. This is why we have to use "its" as the possessive of "it", because we need "it's" to indicate "it is". If we hadn't tried to use the same damn squiggle for two jobs, this would never have happened.

3) Ugly sounding alien languages: The apostrophe is particularly popular in SF to indicate languages full of glottal stops (which are very popular amongst alien species, regardless of what vocal equipment they have) e.g. Klingon. I wonder what other kinds of weird sounds there could be in alien languages, and what symbols could be used to indicate them?
This is, I feel the most honest and untroublesome use of the apostrophe.

So, there you have it. Actually, no you don't, I've only scratched the surface here. Wikipedia has a huge page on apostrophe usage. But one question remains, how did it get like this. How did an otherwise respectable langauge get so messed up? Who introduced this nasty little squiggle, and why?

Anyone who has seen 'The Omen', knows the answer. "666". No, look again.

Those are apostrophes.