It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

Readings & Watchings

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:49:00 +0000

Somewhat later than usual, but here's the usual roundup of readings and watchings...

Books

The Chimpanzee Complex 1: Paradox, Richard Marazano & Jean-Michel Ponzio (2009), is another European graphic novel published in English by Cinebook. The opening is a killer. It's 2035, and an unidentified spacecraft is detected heading for a crash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. The US Navy sends a flotilla to intercept it. The spacecraft proves to be... the Apollo 11 capsule, containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. So who were the three astronauts who returned to Earth in 1969? Unfortunately, Paradox can't quite keep the sheer effrontery of that opening premise going. The military determine that the reappearance of Armstrong and Aldrin justifies a trip to the Moon, which subsequently takes place. Clues then point to an unknown Soviet mission to Mars contemporary with Apollo. So off they head to the Red Planet. Paradox is done well, with excellent artwork, and designs that have clearly been thought about. The sequels, The Sons of Ares and Civilisation, are already on my wants list.

Orbital 2: Ruptures, Serge Pellé & Sylvain Runberg (2007), is the sequel to Orbital 1: Scars, and continues immediately from it. The secret of the world of Senestam proves to be less than inventive than I'd expected, but Pellé and Runberg still tell a well-rounded story with excellent artwork. For a sf graphic novel, it's surprisingly political - which is no bad thing. Apparently, two more books have been, or are due to be, published in France: Nomads and Ravages. Hopefully, they'll be published in English by Cinebooks soon. Interestingly, according to an interview here, Runberg claims Iain M Banks's Culture novels as an inspiration for Orbital.

T is for Trespass, Sue Grafton (2008), is the latest in the continuing alphabetical adventures of Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator in an invented city north of Los Angeles. The next, U is for Undertow, is due to be published in January 2010. Grafton has my respect for keeping this series going for so long, and managing to keep the characters and world consistent throughout. Since the books began in the early 1980s, and the internal chronology doesn't map onto the real world, T is for Trespass takes place in late 1987. In this one, an elderly neighbour takes a tumble and is too injured to look after himself, so his niece hires a nurse to look after him. But the nurse is a sociopath who makes a living from selling off her charges' assets, emptying their bank accounts, and then murdering them.

The Translator, Leila Aboulela (1999), is the first novel by a Sudanese writer, who was resident in Aberdeen but apparently now lives in Abu Dhabi. The title character is Sammar, a Sudanese widow living in Aberdeen. She translates work for the university and becomes involved with a Scottish Islamic expert, Rae Isles. I'm in two minds about this one - Sammar frequently describes things as though she is seeing them "through fog and mist", and that's what reading this book felt like. I like lyrical prose, but this often felt over-done.

An April Shroud, Reginald Hill (1975), is an early Dalziel & Pascoe novel, and not an especially memorable one. Pascoe gets married and disappears off into the wilds of Lincolnshire for his honeymoon. Which leaves Dalziel on his own in the county. He falls in with a dysfunctional family who live in a manor house, and when people start turning up dead he realises he's become much too close to the family. I've read a fair number of the books in this series, but reading early books in series with which you're familiar isn't always a good idea.

The Brains of Earth/The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, Jack Vance (1966), is an Ace double with a pair of early Vances back-to-back. The Brains of Earth is, well, just plain silly. An alien race have decimated their world in a battle to rid themselves of invisible mind-parasites, and now they have determined to clean Earth of the selfsame parasites. so they recruit an Earthman to do it for them. Except it proves to be more complicated that that. Despite nearly inventing dark matter, this isn't Vance's best by a long way. The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, a collection of shorts from the late 1940s and early 1950s, is better. Ridolph is part Cugel and part Kirth Gersen, and the stories read like early trying-out of plots for both of them. Both books are for completists only.

Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (1947), is a 1964 reprint of a compilation of essays on writing science fiction by well-known writers from the early days of the genre - Robert Heinlein, Jack Williamson, EE Doc Smith, L Sprague du Camp, AE van Vogt, John W Campbell... Not, you would have thought, the best people from whom to take writing advice, given that none of them were especially good writers. But then writing per se was not seen as important in sf in those days - or even nowadays, according to some. The interesting thing about these essays is the fixity of opinion of the writers. There's a right way and a wrong way - and their way is the right way. The fact that each author's way is different, and each has been successful, doesn't to them mean their way is not the one true way to writing publishable science fiction. An historical curiosity.

Radix, AA Attanasio (1981), was October's reading challenge novel, and I'll be posting a piece here on it shortly.

Islands, John Fowles and Fay Godwin (1978), is a coffee-table book about the Scillies, with text by Fowles and black and white photos by Godwin. Fowles' prose is good, but the book seems neither one thing nor the other - it's not big enough or glossy enough to be a proper coffee-table book; it's not informative enough to be a guidebook (nor are the photos - admittedly very nice - useful in that regard); and it's not personal enough (cf Lawrence Durrell's The Greek Islands) to be a book by and about Fowles...

My Death, Lisa Tuttle (2004), is a PS Publishing novella I bought in their recent sale. The narrator is an American writer resident in Scotland, as Tuttle is an American writer resident in Scotland. Her career has suffered after the recent death of her husband, and in an effort to find a project to pull her life back together, she decides to write a biography of early feminist novelist Helen Ralston. Who was also an American writer resident in Scotland. My Death ends twice - although one feels somewhat rushed - and each end gives an entirely different complexion to the story. Recommended

The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass, Vera Nazarian (2005), is another PS Publishing novella I bought in their sale. I thought this looked interesting when it was published, but never got around to buying it until recently. And... it's not as interesting as I'd expected. In the distant future, Earth's last civilisation creates a young woman to a much older genetic template. She is intended to mate with the Clock King, a man who is held in stasis for generations, and then brought for a short period... to mate with the young woman. The prose has its moments, but feels stilted in places; the world-building is a bit perfunctory; and the story is not entirely original. Overall, it felt like a valiant attempt to do something that someone else once did, only memories of the original one insisted it was better...

Age of Bronze: Betrayal Vol 3 Part 1, Eric Shanower (2008), is the first half of the third part of Shanower's graphic novel retelling of the Trojan War. As comics go, this is a busy one, but there's a lot to get through. Shanower is trying to be as authentic as possible, and each book includes an extensive bibliography. If it's a bit soap-opera-ish in places, that's perhaps from a need to humanise a story originally told using an entirely different story-telling paradigm.

Journey into Space, Toby Litt (2008). Lately a number of literary authors have written sf novels - more so than in earlier years, anyway. Some were happy to say their books were science fiction; others did all they could to distance their novels from the genre. Litt is one of the former - the Penguin web site describes Journey into Space as "science fiction at its most classic and beguiling: timeless, vast in scope and daring in execution". Not that anyone would believe if he said it wasn't sf: it's set aboard a generation spaceship, which is very much a genre staple. Having said that, it's clear Litt isn't actually a sf writer. In parts, Journey into Space felt more like a writing exercise than an exploration of its ideas. And literary authors are often too diffident when deploying sf tropes, and that lack of confidence gives their novels a peculiar apologetic air, which often reads as old-fashioned genre-wise. I like literary fiction and I like sf, and I've been mostly dissatisfied by literary authors' attempts at science fiction. Isn't it about time a sf writer upped their game and wrote a proper literary sf novel?

Films

Marooned, dir. John Sturges (1969), features a subject I find appealing but which is typically done badly by Hollywood - the Space Race. Marooned is based on a novel by Martin Caidin, who wrote a number of books on space and space exploration, both fiction and non-fiction. In Marooned, the crew of an Apollo spacecraft are stuck in orbit after their retro-rockets fail. They've just spent the last five months in Skylab-like space station, so they're not at their best. And their oxygen is running out. Cue rescue mission - sticking an experimental lifting body on top of a Titan launcher, and launching in the eye of a hurricane. The film-makers tried hard, especially at depicting zero gravity; but a lot looked wrong. The spacesuits, for example, looked mostly authentic, but had these cheap-looking red plastic helmets which looked silly. And the stock footage used for the launches mixed and matched Saturn V, Saturn IB, and Titan. Oh, and for men who had the "right stuff", the marooned astronauts fell apart surprisingly quickly...

Annie Hall, dir. Woody Allen (1977) - I'm not an Allen fan. In fact, I dislike his films. But this is supposed to be one of his best, so I thought I'd give it a go. And... I found it mostly annoying. The only bit that amused me was when Allen dragged Marshall McLuhan into the frame from off-screen to prove that someone was misquoting him.

Blindness, dir.Fernando Mireilles (2008), was something of a surprise. I expected to enjoy this - a serious adaptation of a high concept literary/sf novel by a Portuguese writer. But I absolutely hated it. The plot is simple - people start to go blind, and because of fears of infection they are locked up in quarantine compounds. And in those compounds, society quickly breaks down. The speed with which the blind people turn into animals irritated me, their passivity in the face of threats of violence, their inability to rise above their situation... It probably works well in a novel, but in a film it makes for an excruciatingly dull and annoying experience.

Stranded, dir. María Lidón (2001), is an independent Spanish-made film about a group of astronauts who are, well, stranded on Mars. Plot-wise, it's similar to Brian de Palma's 2000 film Mission To Mars - astronauts are marooned on the Red Planet, but are saved by mysterious aliens. But in Stranded it's the artefacts left by long-dead aliens which save the day. Considering that it was made for a twentieth of the cost of de Palma's film, Stranded isn't bad. It looks a bit cheap in places, and the characters are straight out of Central Casting, but it's eminently watchable.

A Thousand Months, dir. Faouzi Bensaïdi (2003), is a Moroccan film and is one of those films with several intersecting stories. Some parts of it were amusing, such as the man who controlled the local television transmitter and would turn it off during the middle of a popular soap opera because he enjoyed being popular as the only person who knew what happened in it. Overall, a slow film but worth persevering.

Role Models, dir. David Wain (2008), I didn't expect to like as much as I did. A pair of typical Hollywood dickheads have to mentor a kid each after being sentenced to fifty days of community service. It's all typically Hollywood affirming life-lessons rubbish, but it's also very amusing. Jayne Lynch, the founder of the mentoring programme the two join, speaks an inspired line in gibberish. And having one of the kids into live role-playing was different.

The Keeper, dir. Keoni Waxman (2009), I reviewed for videovista.net - see here.

Fragments, dir. Rowan Woods (2008), I also reviewed for videovista.net - see here.

The Gold Rush, dir. Charlie Chaplin (1925), is one of the American Film Institute's 100 Movies - 10th Anniversary Edition, but I can't say I enjoyed it all that much. Chaplin plays a prospector in the Alaska Gold Rush. There are some funny set pieces, but most of the film is embarrassingly mawkish. The version I watched was narrated by Chaplin, and it's a bit weird watching something on the screen while a voice tells you what you're seeing.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex, dir. Uli Edel (2008), tells the story of the Red Army Faction, a German terrorist group responsible for a number of murders and attacks during the 1970s. The film never quite engages with terrorists' rhetoric, perhaps in an attempt to make them more sympathetic (which they'd need to be to carry the film). Their path to violence is clearly shown - while the film shows their response is extreme, it doesn't present many alternatives. The groups mistreatment by the authorities after their arrest is also shown in detail. The Baader-Meinhof Complex does feel a little too slanted towards its subjects, which can make for uncomfortable viewing; but it's still worth seeing.

Dragon, dir. Leigh Scott (2006), is a low-budget sword and sorcery film, and it shows. The acting was terrible, the CGI was poor, and the dialogue was cringe-inducing. One actor couldn't decide if he had an American accent or a Northern Irish accent. I can remember little of the plot - lots of badly-staged sword-fights in some woods, that's about all. Avoid.

Bridge To Terabithia, dir. Gábor Csupó (2007). Hollywood never lets a good idea go to waste. Children's fantasies are doing well at the box office, so they dig up as many as they can find and adapt them - Narnia, The Golden Compass, Inkheart, City Of Ember, The Dark Is Rising... and now Bridge To Terabithia. Except this one is a bit different. Two lonely kids make friends and invent a fantasy land in a wood near where they live. So it's not explicitly fantasy - either secondary world, or hidden mythology. I quite enjoyed it.

Planet Of The Apes, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. I bought the boxed set containing these films cheap on eBay since I fancied watching them. The first two I knew I'd seen before, but some of the others I was less certain. I remember seeing one back in the 1970s when we lived in Oman. The cinema was at the army barracks in Ruwais - the side of one of the buildings was the screen, and auditorium was an area surrounded by a barasti fence and containing folding chairs. In the event, it turned out I'd seen the first four before; but I don't think I missed anything by never having seen the fifth. The quality plummets as the series continues. By Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, much of the plot is carried by characters explaining it to each other, and both Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and Battle For The Planet Of The Apes start with extended recaps of the entire series from the beginning. The original has its moments, and it has one of sf cinema's great endings; but they should have stopped there.

Red Planet, dir. Antony Hoffman (2000), is the second of two Mars films from that year - the other is Brian de Palma's Mission To Mars. And it's hard to say which of the two is the best. De Palma's is more realistic... up until the third act, where mysterious aliens show up and save the day. Red Planet is less realistic upfront - the Mars 1 spacecraft is too sf-nal to be plausible - but its plot and ending doesn't involve an alien super-race. Unfortunately, it suffers from having an mostly unlikeable cast, and you don't really care if they all die on Mars.

DVD reviews online

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:48:00 +0000

This month's Videovista is now up with my reviews of Fragments (see here) and Steven Seagal's The Keeper (see here).

That sound you hear is my ears ringing

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:37:00 +0000

It's been a musical week for me. On Tuesday 20 October, I saw Tinariwen in concert. They're a Tuareg band from Mali. I've liked their music since seeing a documentary on the Festival in the Desert seven or eight years ago. They proved much better live than I expected. I bought their new album, Imidiwan: Companions, at the gig, and it's better than the previous one. Here's some Tinariwen:

And then I spent Saturday 24 October in Leeds at the Damnation Festival. I'd thought about going to this the last couple of years, but the line-up never appealed. This year, it definitely did. I got to see three bands I like a great deal - Mithras, Anathema and Akercocke. Mithras played with their new line-up, with Sam Bean, ex-The Berzerker, replacing Rayner Coss on bass and vocals. Anathema performed a somewhat over-the-top "best of" set, but it was bloody good. Akercocke weren't wearing suits. Also there were Rotting Christ, whose last album Theogonia is good. The headline act was Life of Agony, but I wasn't too impressed. But still, a good festival - much better than I'd expected.

People of Fact in Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:35:00 +0000

There's an interesting article on the Aqueduct Press blog regarding the use of real - dead or alive, historical or celebrity - people in fiction. This has apparently been kicked off by AS Byatt's comments on Man Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Byatt has said in an interview that it is "appropriation of others' lives and privacy", and "I really don't like the idea of 'basing' a character on someone, and these days I don't like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead."

As a writer of science fiction, how relevant is this to me? After all, sf is set in the future, right? In space. With aliens. It's not real.

Well, yes it is.

Science fiction is as real as any other genre. Sf is not just spaceships and robots. Sf is not divorced from, or irrelevant to, the real world.

I don't have a problem with fiction writers using real people in their stories. I've done it myself. I've even had it done to me - I've been horribly dismembered in at least two stories by writer Jim Steel.

But I do have a problem with writers who confuse their fact with fiction.

On my Space Books blog, I've reviewed a number of books about the space race. And some of them have been written in a style which dramatises their subject, makes it more immediate, a more readable book and not a dry academic tome. It is presented almost as if it were fiction. When the non-fiction author describes what a person is thinking or feeling, with no citation or quote to show that this is what the person has said they thought or felt, then the author is writing fiction. But since their book is presented as fact, they're misleading the reader. I think that is wrong.

But for a fiction writer to use fact? It doesn't even require the "ironic distance" discussed in the Aqueduct Press piece. The text itself is fiction, and is pretty much always labelled as such. There may be other clues in the story - especially if it is alternate history.

Take, for example, my own flash story 'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams' (available here). The story has three characters: Stuart A Roosa, Gerald P Carr and Paul J Weitz. It mentions two other people by name: Neil Armstrong and Iven Kincheloe. All five are real people. Three of them are still alive.

The story describes Apollo 20, a mission to the Moon which never took place. So it's alternate history. This might not, of course, be obvious to everyone. The US went to the Moon eight times, and landed twelve men on its surface. That it happened is known to everyone. The details of each mission may not be. So a lunar landing with Stuart Roosa and Gerald Carr could conceivably be misread as fact, if a reader didn't know the names of the twelve men who walked on the Moon.

Even the line "Apollo 20, the first mission to visit the dark side of the Moon" only really signals that 'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams' is alternate history to someone who knows that the last Apollo mission was Apollo 17 (Apollo 18 was actually the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project), and that no Apollo mission visited the dark side of the Moon.

But 'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams' is clearly labelled as "fiction".

I could have invented astronauts for the story - Commander Stu Bobbington and Lunar Module Pilot Gerry Freddison. I didn't have to use real ones. I could have crewed Apollo 20 with entirely made-up people.

But.

I used real people because I find it interesting when fiction intersects the real world. 'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams' is intended to read as feasible - its plausibility rests on its feasibility. By referencing real people, I bolstered its feasibility. Iven Kincheloe really did die in 1958. He was a test pilot, and had been selected in 1957 - along with Neil Armstrong - for the USAF Man in Space Soonest programme. Conspiracy theories have been built on less.

I didn't make a serious attempt to capture the characters of Roosa and the others - it's a 1,000 word story, after all. Some might consider that an unfair appropriation of their names. In fact, I'd originally written the piece with Jack R Lousma as the LMP - he was the most likely candidate for Apollo 20. But I had to read out the story and Roosa and Lousma sounded too similar, so I replaced Lousma with Carr, who was actually the planned LMP for Apollo 19.

When I made the change, I didn't rewrite the dialogue. As I said, the story is not an attempt to present real versions of the people. I've no idea if they talked the way I portrayed them. I don't especially care. It's their career baggage which interested me, and which added an additional dimension to my short story.

'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams' is not the first time I've used real people in a piece of fiction. Another features World War I soldier-poet Wilfred Owen (it will be published next year). I'm sure there'll be other stories - some have to be told from the viewpoint of a real person; some real people need to have stories told about them. I see no reason why a writer should limit themselves by only using invented characters.

Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't research - the character needs to resemble the real person, or the reader won't recognise them for who they are. You can't just appropriate their names - Roosa's career mapped perfectly onto the plot of 'The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams; I didn't simply pick a random member of the astronaut corps. And besides, the final line simply doesn't work if I'd used a made-up name instead of Neil Armstrong. My Wilfred Owen story references his poetry and writings, and the plot hinges on the fact that he did not survive World War I.

There should be no limits on fiction. Start telling writers what they can and cannot do, and the readers will suffer as well. Imagination works best when it is unfettered.

Space Flash

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

The writing group I belong to is having an open night this evening as part of a local literary festival. Each of us will read out a flash fiction piece we have written. I've decided to publish mine on my blog as well. It's here. Enjoy.

Advance warning: my reading challenge for 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:57:00 +0000

Since starting this blog in late 2006, each year I've run a reading challenge - read one book per month to a theme, and blog the results. In 2007, it was my favourite sf novels. In 2008, it was twelve classic authors I'd not read before. This year, it's a dozen sf novels I remember fondly from my teen years.

I've been thinking about what I should read next year.

And I had a jolly good idea. I'm going to read a fantasy novel each month. Specifically, I'm going to read the first novel in a fantasy series. And then I'm going to write about it, about what I thought to the book, about whether or not the book is good enough to make me want continue to read the series. However...

I don't know which books to read. So I'm looking for suggestions. I'd like people to recommend the titles of epic fantasy novels, the first books in series. There are a few caveats - well, one caveat: there must be at least three books in the series currently available. I don't want to read a book, only to discover I've got wait a few years until I can read the next one.

When I say "series", I'm also including trilogies. Anything more than two, in other words. Er, that's another caveat.

And before you start banging out suggestions, the following series are out because I've already read, or am reading, them: The Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Steven Erikson's Malazan Books of the Fallen, Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, Samuel R Delany's Nevèrÿon, anything by Michael Moorcock, George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Ricardo Pinto's Stone Dance of the Chameleon, Mike Cobley's Shadowkings, Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea , Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant or Mordant's Need, M John Harrison's Viriconium...

So, to summarise:

epic fantasy
three books or more in the series
three books or more of the series published
not one of the above-named series

All suggestions welcomed - just leave me a comment. You've got nearly three months to persuade me which titles to read.

An Unreliable Review: Transition, by Iain Banks

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:35:00 +0000

"Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get."

So opens Iain Banks' Transition. It is a science fiction novel, set among and across many alternate worlds; but it has been published in the UK without the defining "M". Transition is ostensibly about the Concern, an organisation from an alternate Earth which operates an undefined number of agents who have the ability to "transition", to travel between alternate realities. In order to further an agenda which never quite becomes clear. Chief among these operatives is Madame d'Ortolan, who heads the Concern's Central Council and so runs the organisation. Set against her is the rebel Mrs Mulverhill. And caught between the two is Concern agent and assassin Temudjin Oh.

The novel comprises a number of different narratives, none of which progress in chronological order. One featuring "Patient 8262" does very little until the epilogue, which gives his identity without actually explaining it. Another narrative is that of a Yuppie barrow-boy-turned-trader, who is peripherally involved. And there's another, which appears only a handful of times, about an American film producer trying to get a project green-lit.

There is little that is actually unreliable about the story of Transition. Perhaps there's a vague possibility that it is all confabulation, but if there are clues suggesting as much I missed them. In fact, other than the bald "I am an Unreliable Narrator" which opens the book, there's very little in the way of narrative games in Transition. Structurally, yes - the plot is a collage of related vignettes and episodes from life histories. But that's nothing new for Banks - his Use of Weapons is justifiably known for its innovative structure. But the structure of Transition does beg the question: is it greater than the sum of its parts?

And... I don't think so. Banks has never been a great prose stylist - good, but not great. But his fiction has always been characterised by great imagination. Even as Iain Banks, the mainstream writer, there has been bleed-through from his science fiction persona, Iain M Banks. And while Transition is certainly not a M book in feel or presentation, it is coloured by his sf far more than any of his other mainstream novels. It's not a M book because it is low-residue, low-profile science fiction. It's not the in-your-face space operatics of the Culture novels.

The central conceit, the travelling between alternate Earths, is certainly science fiction; but it is never explained or rationalised. There's a drug, septum, and a certain small percentage of the population has a talent... There's a vague nod in the direction of the Many Worlds Hypothesis, but no real attempt at depicting the phenomenon realistically. If anything, it's simply a device to allow Banks to present different worlds - which are constructed with much of the invention and excess of his science fiction. Sometimes too much, in fact...

The Culture at least provides Banks with a framework for his invention. And he needs it, otherwise he has a tendency to over-colour his worlds. The chief villain of The Algebraist, the Archimandrite Luseferous, is such a pantomime figure, all he is missing are twirling moustaches. And the same is true of Madame d'Ortolan in Transition. She's not real. Neither, for that matter, is Mrs Mulverhill. They're comic-book characters - in fact, you can almost imagine them in some brightly-coloured hyper-real graphic novel. Adrian, the 1980s trader, is more real, but even then he's something of a cliché. And, it has to be said, yuppie excesses are an old target. Today it is the bankers, especially the incompetent CEOs who get to walk away from the wreckage with millions.

In fact, there is a sense throughout Transition of old battles being dragged back into the light. Banks has never been one to shy away from a fight, and we get the usual well-worded attacks - on libertarianism, religion, the rich, military adventurism, the ends justifying the means, torture...

The religion one is especially interesting. There have been many mentions of the novel's assertion that Christianity is a perfect religion for terrorism.Which may be true considering its creed. But terrorism is a secular activity, and Islam, unlike Christianity, is not simply a creed and a moral framework. It is a political and judicial system, it is more tightly-interwoven into the lives of its followers than Christianity. And, it should be pointed out, all studies on suicide bombers and terrorists to date have demonstrated that they are driven more by nationalistic and political motives than they are religious.

In total, it's hard to know exactly what to make of Transition. The total doesn't quite add up. The Concern's secret agenda - which is the hidden engine of the plot - is not properly geared to the story. The low-profile sf which permeates the novel gets inexplicably thrown away at the climax and replaced with, well, magic. If the villains are comic-book characters, then Oh only wins through at the end because he turns into a superhero...

On reflection, seen in that light - Transition is a hyper-real graphic novel in prose - then perhaps things begin to make sense. The need to atone for the 1980s. The brightly-coloured and highly-detailed backgrounds. The ungrounded inventiveness. The larger-than-sf characters. The way in which each vignette or episode must be treated as complete in and of itself, and yet must also be taken as a part of the greater plot. Transition feels as though Banks has adopted comic-book story-telling techniques to a prose novel. And disguised it as science fiction.

Has Banks has created a novel which can be read in three modes - mainstream, science fiction, and comic-book? Possibly. Because reading Transition solely in one of those modes renders it an unsatisfactory read. It never quite convinces as science fiction; it becomes increasingly too fantastic to work as mainstream; and its narrative is perhaps too complex to succeed as a comic-book. But it certainly makes for a (mostly) interesting read.

Someone once said of Anthony Burgess that he was a great novelist who never wrote a great novel. I'm beginning to wonder if we should say the same of Iain Banks...

Waking the Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:52:00 +0000

The eighth series of Waking the Dead finished a couple of weeks ago. And it's difficult to know what to make of it. One character died, one resigned but then seemed to stay, one transferred out of the team, and one handed over to a replacement while she went into hospital... but her replacement cocked things up and so might not be taking over after all.

Waking the Dead, for those of you who have never heard of it, or don't watch it, is a BBC drama about a police team which investigates old unsolved case, the Metropolitan Police's Cold Case Unit. The programme has been broadcast annually since 2001, and each series usually takes the form of four to six two-hour episodes, each one split over two nights (typically Sunday and Monday). At present, the Cold Case Unit comprises Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), psychological profiler Dr Grace Foley (Sue Johnston), Detective Inspector Spencer Jordan (Will Johnson), Detective Sergeant Stella Goodman (Félicité du Jeu), and forensic pathologist Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara FitzGerald).

I don't normally write about television programmes on this blog - well, not unless they're science fiction... But Waking the Dead is one of my favourite series. And that's despite not being much of a fan of police procedurals. Waking the Dead, however, is not only classy drama, with high production values, it's also very watchable. And - it is probably this which appeals to me the most - each series it does something interesting... as a police procedural and as a television drama. Past series, for example, have been themed, with each story an interpretation of the theme. It has run story-arcs in the background over multiple series. And in series eight, it put the entire cast at risk, and then failed to resolve their fates.

In fact, if there is a theme to series eight, it's that: lack of resolution. Not one of the four stories was properly resolved. I couldn't actually decide if this was deliberate, a choice explored by the writers, or simply evidence of poor writing. Given the programme's history, I'm inclined to the former.

But it's such an odd choice of theme. And its implementation seemed to undercut the plausibility of the programme.

In the first two-parter, 'Magdalene 26', a body found hanging in the victim's house, which has been dead for several days, proves crucial to the investigation. Except... it is never actually identified. Initially, it's believed to be the victim's husband, but he later turns up alive. So who was it?

So: not resolved. One or two loose ends I can accept. Not everything needs to be tied up neatly.

But the ending of the story? The murder eventually proves to be the work of a pair of Turkish gangsters, after the victim's millions. Boyd, claiming to be a shady financier, arranges to meet the Turks in a secluded spot. He has a pair of hidden snipers with him. Boyd pulls out his warrant card to show the Turks. One goes for his gun. Two shots ring out. The credits roll.

Hang on a minute.

They haven't solved the case. Justice hasn't been served. The Cold Case Unit shot the villains. That doesn't happen in the UK.Certainly not without a great deal more provocation.

Was this, perhaps, an attempt to make the series more US-friendly? Or was it a commentary on US-style police procedurals?

The second two-parter, 'End of the Night', made it no clearer. Twelve years earlier, a teenage girl was raped and her younger brother murdered by a pair of men the authorities have failed to identify. The girl, now a young woman, attempts suicide, and this inspires Boyd to re-open the investigation. Eventually, the Cold Case Unit identify both rapists. The young woman learns their names. She kidnaps the man who murdered her brother and takes him to the scene of the crime, a high stone bridge over a narrow brook. She murders the killer, and then tries to kill herself by jumping off the bridge. Boyd stops her before she can. The credits roll.

Okay. A more plausible ending, certainly. But the only resolution is that of the victim's character arc. And, like 'Magdalene 26', it's a more abrupt ending than you'd expect from a television drama.

Like the previous two, the third story, Substitute', started well enough. Eve enters into a relationship with a man, but doubts his identity. So she secretly takes a DNA swab, and checks up on him. It seems his DNA was found at the scene of a ten-year-old murder - in fact, his semen was on the victim's body. The means by which Eve took the DNA means the evidence is tainted. But Boyd insists on re-opening the investigation into the murder. As the story progresses, the more it seems the main suspect, Eve's lover, is not guilty. Or is he? Not that it really matters. During the investigation, the team have identified the villain of the piece. At the end of the episode, Eve has taken her lover to a remote boat-house in order to determine whether he is truly innocence. The rest of the team turn up. As does the villain and his henchman. Eve gets her answer. Boyd and the team drive away, leaving the suspect to be killed by the villain. A shot rings out. The credits roll.

Er.. what? The Cold Case Unit left their suspect to be murdered by a criminal? What happened to justice? The Cold Case Unit are members of the Metropolitan Police, aren't they? They've not only allowed a murder to take place, and so condoned it, but they've also failed to charge the villain - against whom they have plenty of evidence.

I did wonder if this was the last series of Waking the Dead, and they were wrapping everything up. Stella had been shot in the first two-parter - and then abruptly died off-stage in hospital from a thrombosis. Spencer had jumped ship to CID, and Eve had handed in her resignation. Boyd was complicit in a murder, and clearly going off the deep end.

The Cold Case Unit was finished.

But no. The final two-parter, 'Endgame', seemed to be a return to form. It brought back an old villain, the psychopathic prison guard Linda Cummings from series seven, and also referenced a couple of episodes from previous series. Spencer, despite his move, was dragged back in to help. Stella's replacement Kat was clearly now a full member of the team. Grace, however, had been admitted into hospital for treatment for cancer, and a replacement had joined the unit. Played by Gina McKee. Casting her led me to suspect she would be staying, that Grace was going to be written out. But she proved to be partly complicit in Linda Cummings' scheme. So she's unlikely to stay. And we still don't know what's going to happen to Grace.

The ending of the story was also less abrupt than those of the preceding two-parters. Cummings kidnaps Grace from her hospital bed, and threatens to kill her unless Boyd does as she says. There's a last-minute reprieve and Grace is rescued unharmed. It is, on reflection, an almost traditional ending to these sort of stories. It is also completely at odds with the endings of other series eight stories. It's as if the writers bent the concept of a "police procedural story ending" completely out of shape... only to let it snap back in the final two-parter. Which certainly qualifies as "interesting".

Perhaps they had no choice - they had to leave the series as they found it. This is not unusual, given that most television programmes are made on a series by series, or season by season, basis. Some, such as Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (also programmes I like a great deal), have strictly-defined runs - although I believe this is a lot more common on British television than it is on US television. But still most expect to return the following year. And so they have to leave cast and story-arc in a state which does not preclude continuation.

But this doesn't explain the events of the first three two-parters of series eight. Certainly one of the cast has gone - killed in the line of duty. Spencer is unlikely to return given his transfer. Eve resigned, but then stayed on. But perhaps she's leaving too. Grace's fate is unknown.

And yet, if no series nine was planned, I would have expected a more final ending to 'Endgame' - I suspect the title is not a hint. The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to believe that in this series the writers were exploring the use of dramatic unconventional endings. While this may have had unintended consequences - plausibility took something of a bashing, and the various endings seemed more characterised by a lack of resolution than anything else - it does strike me as a valid, and interesting, artistic choice.

I can only wonder what next year's theme will be. Because I certainly hope there will be a series nine.

Anatomy of a Story: Thicker Than Water

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

The second of the two stories I've put up on this blog is 'Thicker Than Water', a hard sf story set on a moon of Saturn. It was originally published in Jupiter sf magazine, issue 23, in January 2009.

Major Gina Priest lives on Tethys, a moon of Saturn. When two raiders from another moon, Titan, attempt to steal some of the fullerenes found on Tethys, they are captured. Gina is shocked to discover that one of the raiders is her brother. She learns she was abducted from Titan at a very young age. After another officer disobeys her orders and tortures the raiders, Gina decides to help the Titans escape and return with them to to her long-lost mother and father.

Here's the PDF. You might want to read the story before you continue reading this.

The plot of 'Thicker Than Water' is based on the story of Iphigenia from ancient Greece. She was abducted as a child and taken to Tauris, where she grew up and became a priestess of Aphrodite. A pair of Athenians then raided the temple while Iphigenia was present. She learned they were her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. So she lied to the Taurians, and returned to Athens to join her long-lost family. With the statue of Aphrodite they had stolen.

I forget where I originally came across Iphigenia's story. It was back in the early 1990s, so it wasn't on the Web. I'd also found a mention of a mysterious dark patch on Tethys in a planetology textbook I'd bought for reference - Exploring the Planets by Eric H Christiansen and Kenneth W Hamblin (1995). The book's a bit out-of-date now, but I have the Web instead. I decided that the dark patch was buckminsterfullerenes - carbon molecules in the shape of spheres or tubes, which were thought to be artificial but do occur very rarely in nature. This idea came partly from another story, 'Black Rain' (available in Set It In Space And Stick A Robot In It), which is set on Titan, and takes place in an earlier version of the universe of 'Thicker Than Water'. In that story, the settlement's manufactory was destroyed by a blow-in of Titan's noxious atmosphere, and the superconductor cultures were poisoned. So, instead of Aphrodite's statue, I'd have Orestes and Pylades, natives of Titan, travelling to Tethys to steal fullerenes in order to re-seed their superconductor cultures. It all slotted very neatly together - and this is actually mentioned in passing in 'Thicker Than Water'.

I wrote the story, and even submitted it to a magazine or two. They rejected it.

Then it sat in the "bottom drawer" for over a decade.

Last year, I dug out the manuscript, read through it, and decided it was worth having another go. But it needed more than just rewriting. While reminding myself of Iphigenia's story, I came across mention of Euripides, an ancient Greek playwright. He actually wrote a play, Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Iphigenia's story. So there's another dimension, I thought. I can tie in an ancient Greek tragedy.

Greek plays, of course, have Greek choruses. So why shouldn't 'Thicker Than Water' have one? And since NASA had posted a MP3 of the radio noises generated by Saturn, why not use the ringed gas giant as my "chorus"? Hence the numerous mentions of Saturn's radio-noise in the story.

I used the play in other ways, too. I borrowed the odd phrase from the Potter translation (which provides the lines from the play which preface the story). And I named all my characters for the characters in the play. The king of Tauris is Thoas, but I decided to use King instead. Iphigenia, priestess of Aphrodite, is of course Gina Priest. Orestes and Pylades I shortened to Orris and Pyle. And two unnamed characters, a herald and a herdsman, became Messenger and Shepard.

There are a few other scattered "clues" as well - such as "as if from some oracular distance" in the opening paragraph. Oracular. Oracle. Delphi. Get it?

Oh, and Tauris... In the original version of the story, the settlement on Tethys was also a carousel - a ring which rotated at a speed sufficient to provide some gravity - but it was unnamed. When I stumbled across Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, it occurred to me that a carousel could be torus-shaped. So Tauris became Torus. Sometimes research just gifts you things you'd be a fool to refuse or ignore.

I also changed the plot slightly when I rewrote the story. In the original version, Gina decides to help her brother to escape, but when she returns to his cell he has already been taken away. The story ended with her being unable to prevent his execution - as he was pushed out of an airlock without a spacesuit. For the new version, I had the three of them escape successfully. Which then allowed me to bring the alien sentinel more into the story. That - the mysterious alien vessel patrolling the Solar system - was there right from the start, but more as a clue to why Earth had abandoned its space colonies, and as the reason for the Tethysians protection of the sea of fullerenes.

It had always been in the back of my mind to have 'Thicker Than Water' (and the earlier 'Black Rain') be part of a single fictional universe. In it, Earth has withdrawn all its space resources, shut down its EM broadcasting, and essentially firewalled itself inside its atmosphere. This has left on their own the many settlements and colonies scattered on Mars and the moons of the Saturn, Jupiter and the Outer Planets. These settlements have also discovered a series of strange alien artefacts, most of which resemble extremely unlikely natural phenomena. Their purpose is unknown. And then there's the mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system which doesn't take kindly to any kind of interference with these artefacts.

Now that I was basing my stories on the plays of Euripides, I decided to call this my Euripidean Space universe.

Despite all this going on in the background, the story still needed something more. The escape succeeded, and in the process doomed the Tethys settlement - from an implied attack by the alien... That gave me a better ending. But I needed something extra to round out the middle. So I looked to the news. And came up with...

Torture. The Tethysians would torture the two raiders from Titan, and that would in part explain Gina's motivation to help Orris and Pyle escape.

I'm not actually all that interested in writing science fiction, I'm more interested in using science fiction in writing, in extending the genre. I don't want to write adventure stories in a science-fictional universe - I consider it a form of artistic cowardice. 'Thicker Than Water' is in part a sf treatment of an ancient Greek play - it uses the same cast, and I tried in some way to carry the flavour across. But it's also about torture, about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Stories should be about something, about something relevant. Even if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens. Perhaps even especially if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens.

I read through the story now, nine months after it was published, and perhaps one or two of the reviews of it weren't so far off the mark. Perhaps some of the characters' motivations weren't entirely clear - one of the perils, I suspect, of taking a story from an ancient Greek play. Perhaps the ending did seem a little disconnected... but the clues were there. But maybe that's because that aspect of the story wasn't intended to entirely stand alone - it would be just one element in a greater story, told through many stories. On reflection, I shouldn't have relied on that. I'll know better for the next one. And yes, there are more Euripidean Space stories planned.

Again, I hope you enjoyed both the story and this piece on it. No other stories of mine have been published in the last twelve months, although there's a few due to see the light of day soon. Some time in the future, I may give one of those the same treatment.

Readings, yes, and watchings too

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:51:00 +0000

In lieu of intelligent content, here's another trawl through the books what I've read and the films what I've watched since the last time I did one of these posts...

Books
Lord Valentine's Castle, Robert Silverberg (1980), was September's book for this year's reading challenge. I wrote about it here.

Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming (1954), I found in a local charity shop and I'm glad I got it cheap. The films are much better than the books. The books may be very much products of their time, but the casual racism and sexism makes them hard to enjoy. The plot, incidentally, only vaguely resembles that of the movie.

Fantasms and Magics, Jack Vance (1969), is a collection of short stories. The opening novella, 'The Miracle Workers', is classic Vance, and 'Guyal of Sfere' (which I kept on misreading as 'Gruyere') is a Dying Earth novella and quite good. The rest are forgettable.

The Dan Dare Dossier, Frank Hampson et al (1990), is the last of the thirteen volume series of Dan Dare reprints issued by Hawk Publishing. Unlike the others it's not a reprint of strips from Eagle, but a discussion of Hampson, his studio of artists, the characters, world, and merchandising associated with the strip. The text could have done with some serious editing, but if you're a fan of Dan Dare - as I am - then it's all interesting and useful information.

Broken Symmetries, Steve Redwood (2009), is a collection of short stories by a small-press writer which I reviewed for Interzone.

Winged Rocketry, James C Sparks (1968), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

Shades of Gray, Lewis Shiner (2008), is a chapbook given away with purchases of the limited edition of Shiner's last novel, Black & White. Shiner himself describes the four stories in Shades of Gray as either too rough, too slight, or too silly to go into the upcoming Collected Stories. It's hard not to disagree.

Shifts, Adam Thorpe (2000), is themed collection of short stories, the theme being careers and people whose lives are defined by their careers. The stand-out is the title story, about a Ghanaian immigrant eking out a living in London in 1966. 'Sawmill' is a Greenesque tale set in, I think, an invented African nation, and is also very good. Some of the others don't seem to do much, but the writing throughout is of a very high standard. I plan to read more Thorpe.

The Lordly Ones, Keith Roberts (1986), is also a collection of short stories. I like Roberts' fiction - in fact, one of his short stories is a favourite, 'The Lake of Tuonela'. Sadly, there's nothing as good as that in this; nor indeed is The Lordly Ones as good a collection as the collection in which that appears, The Grain Kings. On the whole, some lovely writing in places, but a little dated in execution.

Transition, Iain Banks (2009). A new novel by Banks deserves a review all its own. And it shall get one. Soon. Keep watching.

Films
Highlander, dir. Russell Mulcahy (1986), I first saw when it came out twenty-three years ago. I remember at the time thinking it reminded me of an sf novel - one I later identified as George Turner's Vaneglory. Watching it again, it's not so close to the novel, but it is, well, very camp. All that posing in dark alleys and lights shining through rain and steam. And the Queen soundtrack. I also seem to recall the film being held in relatively high regard, although I can't see why. There's the bizarre casting: a Frenchman as a Scot, and a Scot as a Spaniard (well, Egyptian originally). The badly-choreographed fight scenes. The stereotype characters. And the franchise degraded in quality, too.

The Spirit, dir. Frank Miller (2008), I'd heard plenty of bad words about, but I decided to see for myself. It is bad. The look of the film aping a comic - like Sin City and 300 - is just a gimmick. The story is silly, the characters are paper-thin, the women are there to make the men look good, and the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Not impressed.

The Faculty, dir. Robert Rodriguez (1998), has to be one of the most blatant metaphors ever committed to celluloid. Oh noes, the teachers have all been taken over by aliens! But it's done with tongue firmly in cheek, and even Josh Hartnett's brainiac slacker character doesn't spoil the fun. Plus there's a few mentions of sf and sf authors by someone who clearly knew what they were talking about. A fun film.

Total Reality, dir. Philip J Roth (1997), is a bad straight-to-DVD sf film. That should be enough to make me avoid it, but in fact the opposite happens. I want to watch these sort of films, no matter how crap they are. And I never really enjoy them. Because they're so bad. But I keep on watching them. In this one, a team of soldiers sentenced to death for treason are sent back in time on the trail of a pair of rebels. They have to prevent the murder of the self-help guru whose "system" was adopted by a politician and subsequently resulted in a brutal interstellar empire several centuries later. The CGI is terrible, the production design is awful, and the acting is poor. But the explosion of the guru's house is pretty impressive.

Futuresport, dir. Ernest R Dickerson (1998), is another bad straight-to-DVD sf film. But with a surprisingly high-powered cast: Wesley Snipes, Vanessa Williams and Dean Cain. How the mighty have fallen. Well, not Dean Cain - he was never A-list. Futuresport is little more than a remake of Rollerball, but nowhere near as good as that film. All you really need to know is that it's about a new ball game, called Futuresport. If you were going to invent a new ball game, why would you call it "futuresport"? It's a dumb name.

Letter From An Unknown Woman, dir. Max Ophüls (1948), is another film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list. I have three lists on Lovefilm DVD rentals - one for recent films, one for foreign films, and one for films from the Time Out list. Each month, I'm sent two from each list. Not all the films from the Time Out list have struck me as enjoyable or impressive. Letter From An Unknown Woman was one such. Louis Jourdan plays a self-centred concert pianist who sleeps with, and then discards, a young woman - played by Joan Fontaine - who has had a crush on him since she was a girl. The story is framed as a letter written by the woman, and sent to Jourdan after she's died. I found it a bit dull.

Soldier, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1998). Yes, I know: Anderson has never made a good film. (Although his television movie, The Sight, is actually not bad.) Soldier is certainly worse than Event Horizon (see here). It's Rambo in all but setting. Which is a planet on which some vaguely-defined interstellar human federation dumps its rubbish (shades of Futurama). Kurt Russell plays a genetically-engineered soldier who is left for dead and dumped on the planet of rubbish after losing in a demonstration fight against a newer model. Where he is taken in by a lost colony. And those exact same newer models just happen to visit the planet of rubbish on manoeuvres. They attack the colonists. Russell fights back. It's another Anderson film which makes very little sense if you think about it too hard. The story follows through from beginning to middle to end, but there's no logic to it, or to the world on which it takes place.

Léon, dir. Luc Besson (1994), I reviewed for videovista.net - see here.

Earth Alien, dir. Kevin Tenney (2002), is yet another crap sf film. It doesn't boast the talent of Futuresport, but it's not that far off - Eric Roberts, Arnold Vosloo and the ubiquitous John Rhys Davies. Someone is killing people in gyms, and Roberts is the detective investigating. Turns out the serial killer is an alien on hunting trip. Earth is a game reserve, humans are the prey, and Vosloo is the game warden. A very silly film. There's not even a good explosion in it.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, dir. Jack Perez (2009), I reviewed for videovista.net - see here.

Daratt, dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2006), I rented after enjoying Haroun's earlier Abouna. Like that film, it's set in Haroun's native Chad. Sixteen-year-old Atim, orphaned by the civil war, determines to find the man who killed his father - as all war criminals have been given amnesty by the government now that the civil war has finally ended. He heads for, I think, the capital N'Djamena, where he discovers that his father's killer, Nassara, is now a baker, attends mosque regularly, and has a young pregnant wife. In order to get close to the man and so find an opportunity for revenge, Atim apprentices himself to Nassara. And as he gets to know him, the less he wants to kill him. An excellent film. Recommended.

Privates On Parade, dir. Michael Blakemore (1982), is based on a play by Peter Nicholls, which is in turn based on his own experiences, as described in his autobiography, Feeling You're Behind, which I read several years ago. The film is about a British armed forces concert party in Malaysia in 1948. Many of the characters are apparently based on real-life individuals. It's a comedy, but it's hard to know exactly who or what are its targets. John Cleese plays the commanding officer, and he's a typical John Cleese character. The rest of the cast are just as much caricatures. And the English countryside makes a poor stand-in for the Malayan jungle. Mildly amusing.

Burn After Reading, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen (2008). I'm not a big fan of the Coen brothers' films. I'll watch them, and I sort of enjoy them. But that's about all. This one is fairly typical of their oeuvre. John Malkovich plays a nasty intelligence analyst fired by the CIA, who subsequently starts writing his memoirs. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt plays a pair of dim-witted gym employees who find a CD-ROM containing Malkovich's memoir. George Clooney plays an equally dim-witted philanderer who gets involved with Malkovich's wife and McDormand, and so gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. More amusing than Privates On Parade, but not by a great deal.

The Stepford Wives, dir. Bryan Forbes (1975), is the original adaptation of Ira Levin's novel of the same name. Which makes it the superior adaptation. It's certainly an unsettling film, but not a very scary one. The plot staggers around a little and the sub-Hitchcockian ending is a bit of a let down, but it hangs together entertainingly.

All That Heaven Allows, dir. Douglas Sirk (1955), is from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list and... it couldn't have been more different than Letter From An Unknown Woman. I don't recall ever watching a film by Sirk before, and I didn't expect much of this. A 1950s melodrama, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. But. I loved it. So much so that I immediately went and bought the Directed By Douglas Sirk boxed set from Amazon - well, it was reduced from £69.99 to £13.48. Bargain. So All That Heaven Allows is just Lady Chatterley's Lover set in 1950s USA, but it's beautifully done and the 1950s Technicolour looks wonderful. You expect some wit in films of that period, but the condemnation of contemporary society and mores is done with surprising subtlety. A new film for the favourites list. Recommended.

Loulou, dir. Maurice Pialat (1980), stars a very young-looking Isabelle Huppert, and Gérard Depardieu, who seems to have looked the same for the past three decades. Huppert leaves her husband and shacks up with aimless drifter Depardieu. Things happen. It's all very 1970s, very French and very sexist. Enjoyable, but I felt no desire to dash out and buy the DVD.

DVD Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:48:00 +0000

This month's Videovista is now up, with my reviews of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (see here) and the new director's cut of Léon (see here).

Book Porn - Shepard & Shiner

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:11:00 +0000

Lucius Shepard and Lewis Shiner are among the finest writers of fantasy (and the occasional science fiction) currently being published. Shepard has won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, two World Fantasy Awards, a Sturgeon Award, a Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), a Kurd Laßwitz Award (Germany), five International Horror Guild Awards, a Rhysling (poetry), and a Shirley Jackson Award. He also won the Campbell New Writer Award for 1985. Shiner has not been so lauded and to date has only won a single World Fantasy Award. But then, many of his novels have been presented as mainstream rather than fantasy.

Both are writers whose novels and stories I admire as much as I enjoy. So I collect them. First editions, of course. Many are also signed - but both are frequently published by small presses, such as PS Publishing and Subterranean Press, which produce beautifully put-together signed limited editions.

But on with the photos. Below are the books I own by both writers. My Shepard collection is far from complete, but the Shiner one is... although there is a Collected Stories due to be published later this year by Subterranean.

Catastrophia ToC announced

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Editor Allen Ashley has announced the full table of contents of his forthcoming anthology, Catastrophia. The stories, by alphabetical order of author are:

'Hapless Humanity' by Brian Aldiss
'The Phoney War' by Nina Allan
'Nanoamerica' by David John Baker
'Steven’s Boat' by Billie Bundschuh
'Happy Ending' by Simon Clark
'Something for Nothing' by Joe Essid
'Check' by Robert Guffey
'Fade' by David Gullen
'Trouble with Telebrations' by “J. B. Harris”
'Up' by Andrew Hook
'A Hard Place' by Carole Johnstone
'Scalped' by Jet McDonald
'Noose' by Adam Roberts
'In the Face of Disaster' by Ian Sales
'Pixels on a Screen' by Patrick Shuler
'The Long Road to the Sea' by James L. Sutter
'Gravity Wave' by Douglas Thompson
'Crashes' by Stuart Young

I'm in good company there, I see.

See here for the full press release.

Anatomy of a Story: The Amber Room

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:00:00 +0000

It occurred to me some people might find it interesting to learn how I came up with the ideas for my stories, how I approached those ideas, and what I was trying to achieve with the stories which resulted.

First up is 'The Amber Room', which was published in Pantechnicon #9 in March 2009. If I were to write a blurb for the story, it would go something like this:

Tina lives in a museum, but this museum contains all the lost art treasures of the world. They were found by her boyfriend Chris, who has an amazing ability: he can visit alternate universes. That's where he "found" the lost art treasures.

Here's a PDF of the 'The Amber Room'; so you can read it before reading the rest of this post.

The idea for the story came to me sometime in March 2007. As far as I recall, it was inspired by the real-life Amber Room itself, mention of which I'd stumbled across somewhere on the Web. I wanted to use it in a story, but, of course, it was lost. So why not write a story about it being found? And since I write science fiction, why not have it found in an alternate universe? In fact, why not have an entire museum filled with "lost" works of art which had been found in alternate universes?

But that's not actually a story. It needs a plot, characters... a beginning, middle and end...

I remember banging out a first draft in pretty much a single sitting. In that original version, the story focused on Chris, the universe-hopping "art thief", and was structured as a series of vignettes from his life in no particular chronological order. But it had the same sting in the tail: the identity of Chris' girlfriend, that she was him from an alternate universe in which his "parents" had had a daughter.

I emailed the draft to a group of friends to see what they thought to it. We've been emailing each other stories and novel excerpts for several years now; I value their comments. They liked the central premise, but not the way I'd chosen to tell the story. I rewrote it, making Tina the central character and giving the narrative a linear structure. I sent this second draft to my friends. They liked it a great deal better. However, they still weren't keen on the ending - initially, the story explained that Tina and Chris were alternate versions of each other. I changed that, made it, well, subtle - i.e., having Tina look at a pair of photographs which reveal the truth... And that too nicely linked in with the Amber Room and the whole concept of "lost" art, turning it into a metaphor of the central relationship. Sometimes, you get to a point in a story where all the choices you made earlier, without really knowing why you made them, suddenly slot together and it all works.

After that, it was simply a matter of refining and polishing the prose. At one point, it occurred to me that since the Amber Room featured four mosaics depicting the five senses, then I should do the same in the story. So every section is written such that it references each of the five senses, beginning with Tina hearing something, then seeing, then touching, and so on.

For example, from the first section: we have "The slam of the door echoed in memory, but she heard now only the metronome click of her heels on the marble steps" (sound). Later in the same section is, "The windows to her right painted great rectangles of sunlight on the floor" (sight). Then "Whenever in the Room, she felt a desire to run her fingers over the mosaics' tessellae..." (touch), and "The Room soothed her, calmed her. It smelled of history" (er, smell). And finally, "... the wine tasted unnaturally full-bodied and rich to her" (taste). It's not always a smooth progression - and looking back at the story now, I can see a couple of places where I slipped up and used a sight reference in a line that should have been sound reference, and so on.

Choosing to use the senses in this way also proved useful as it provided a framework for the descriptive writing. Because I could only use imagery specific to the sense referenced at that point in the narrative, I had to think harder about my sentences and word-choices. Take the line "She glanced back up the cochlea-curve of the staircase". Originally, I'd used "nautilus-curve", which was the image I wanted; but "cochlea" is hearing-related, and of a similar shape, so I used that instead. And I think it works better too.

Then there was the research. Every single piece of art mentioned in the story is real, and very much lost. When you're writing, research should hurt. You need to get everything right. Sf is not like it used to be - you can't just blithely invent stuff, or wave an authorial hand in front of the reader. Like you, readers have got access to the Internet, and they can fact-check as well as you can. Science fiction doesn't mean you can make it up as you go along. On the contrary, it's harder to write because you can't rely on readers' assumptions or common knowledge.

And, I should point out, it was while researching more about the Amber Room that I learnt of the four mosaics it contained. Which I then fed back into the story as a framework for the prose in each section. So none of it was wasted.

As for the roll call of alternate history sf mentioned on page four... The novels and stories mentioned are all ones I've read, and some of them I admire a great deal. Sticking 'The Amber Room' in among them was just my attempt at a little postmodern humour. And the "two films - different futures dependent upon whether or not a train was caught" on page seven... Most people have realised that one is Sliding Doors; the other is Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

'The Amber Room' was a deliberate attempt to write a "literary" sf story. I wasn't interested in exploring the central premise. I was interested in the premise's effect on two people and their relationship. How their relationship came about, how it was progressing. And I wanted the story to be about politics too, about the complicity and greed of politicians. Yes, I could have written a story in which Chris uses his experiences of all those alternate universes to create the perfect political system, or to help humanity reach the stars, or something equally sfnal... But that would be a different story and, to tell the truth, I'm not that interested in writing sf which privileges the central idea. I see the premise, the sfnal aspect of the story, as an enabling device - it enables a story that could not take place without it, that could not be transposed into another genre. If you can swap out the furniture and change the labels, and the story remains unchanged, then it's not science fiction.

'The Amber Room' is by no means perfect - there are rough spots in it. But I achieved what I set out to do with it, and I stand by it. I was disappointed it received so many rejections - five, according to my records - before Pantechnicon took it. I thought it was better than that; I still do. I'd like to think others do as well. And I'd like to think others have found this dissection of it informative and useful.

I hope to do the same soon for the other story of mine I've posted here: 'Thicker Than Water'.

Thicker Than Water

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:03:00 +0000

My story 'Thicker Than Water' was published in Jupiter magazine's January 2009 issue. Unlike 'The Amber Room' (see here), it received a couple of reviews and was described as an "exciting story" (SFRevu) and "a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting" (SF Crowsnest). SF Site was less complimentary - "I was not really convinced ... either by the motivations of anyone involved, nor by the potentially interesting conclusion, which is not sufficiently a part of the rest of the story." For the record, 'Thicker Than Water' was inspired by the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. Click the link below to download the story in PDF format.

Thicker Than Water

Reading Challenge #9 - Lord Valentine's Castle, Robert Silverberg

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:00:00 +0000

I can't say I'm a huge Silverberg fan. I've read many of his books and short stories, and I've enjoyed them. But I've never made an effort to seek out those of his works I've not read - as I have done with some other writers. To be fair, Silverberg is one of the stalwarts of the genre. He's had - and still has, of course - a fifty-four year writing career, and has mostly produced good books and stories. During that more-than-half-a-century, he has won four Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.

Silverberg's most well-known creation is, arguably, the world of Majipoor, on which he has set seven novels, two novellas and a short story. The first of these is Lord Valentine's Castle, published in 1980.

Majipoor is a big planet - in fact, it was inspired by Jack Vance's novel, Big Planet - with four enormous continents. The world has been settled for thousands of years and has a population of some sixty billion; but it is now something of a backwater, and rarely visited by people from other planets. It is home to several races - humans, Skandars, Ghayrogs, Vroons, Su-Suheris, Liimen, and Hjorts. There are also the native Metamorphs, from whom the humans took the world, and they now live in a reservation. Majipoor is ruled by four potentates - the Coronal, who is the executive arm of government and rules from his castle atop the thirty-mile-high Castle Mount; the Pontifex, the legislative arm, who lives in the Labyrinth; the Lady of the Isle of Sleep, who through dreams provides the world's moral framework; and the King of Dreams, who punishes wrongdoers, also through dreams.

Lord Valentine's Castle opens with a man called Valentine on a ridge looking down upon the city of Pidruid, on the western shore of the continent Zimroel. He doesn't know who he is, or how he got there. A passing boy, taking cattle to market in Pidruid, approaches him and the two enter the city together. Within a couple of chapters, Valentine has shown an uncanny natural ability at juggling, and joined a juggling troupe. The Coronal - also called Valentine - is due to appear shortly in Pidruid on the Grand Processional all coronals take shortly after ascending to power.

The name is not a coincidence. Valentine the juggler soon learns that he was Coronal Valentine but, by some art or science never explained, his mind has been swapped into another body and someone else has taken his place as coronal. The more of his memory Valentine recovers, the more he determines to take back his throne. So he travels across Zimroel to its east coast, and there takes ship to the Isle of Sleep, in order to persuade the Lady (who is always the mother of the coronal) of his true identity. And after succeeding in doing that, he continues on to the eastern continent, Alhanroel, to first gain the Pontifex's support, and then march on Castle Mount and throw down the usurper.

And that's pretty much the plot. Silverberg intended that "the book must be fun" - "all light, delightful, raffish..." And in that respect he succeeds. Valentine encounters obstacles on his way, but he overcomes them. He has exciting adventures - some of which seem a little too much, such as being swallowed by a legendarily giant sea-dragon while en route to the Isle of Sleep.

But then, Lord Valentine's Castle is not a book to take seriously. It has a simple plot and a hero who prevails. It is, above all, colourful - Valentine's journey east is very descriptive. And everything he sees and meets is exotic. And we know it is exotic because Silverberg has given it a made-up name. Although not all names, it has to be said, actually work all that well. "Niyk-tree" isn't too bad, nor is "blave"; but "stajja" and "dhiim" just look like typographical accidents.

What strikes me most about this book is not the acknowledged debt it owes to Big Planet, but the debt it owes to Vance. Silverberg is channelling Vance. He does it well, because Silverberg is nothing if not a master craftsman. But, all the same, Lord Valentine's Castle often feels a little like there's too much Vance in it, as if Silverberg has crammed several novels by Vance into one book - which at 506 pages (in my 1982 Pan paperback; not the cover shown above) probably is equivalent to several novels by Vance...

Unlike some of the other books I've read in this year's reading challenge, I didn't regret rereading Lord Valentine's Castle. I quite enjoyed it. It's mind candy, but the sort of mind candy a friend might bring back from a trip to a foreign country - still fluffy, but with an exotic flavour to it. It's a good book to read on a dull journey. And, like many books of its type, its general shape will linger - that the world of Majipoor is so big, Castle Mount and the Fifty Cities on its slopes, the overall story of the book but not Valentine's individual adventures... and that it all ends happily. It had been a good twenty years or more since I last read Lord Valentine's Castle, and still it felt comfortably familiar. Which is no bad thing sometimes.

The Amber Room

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:22:00 +0000

My story 'The Amber Room' was published in March this year by Pantechnicon magazine. But there appear to be problems with the magazine's web site, so I'm putting a copy of the story here on my blog. Click on the link below to download the story in PDF format.

The Amber Room

Rounding up the Readings & Watchings

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:15:00 +0000

I seem to have been a bit busy lately, which is why I've not posted here recently as often as I have done in the past. Here, anyway, is another catch-up post on what I've read and what I've watched.

Books
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985), I bought in Abu Dhabi, so I've had it at least seven years. I've no idea why it sat there neglected on my book-shelves for so long, because I expected it to be a good book. And so it proved to be. Admittedly, I'd also expected it to be a more straightforward approach to its premise - a US theocratic dystopia - that it actually was. But couching the story as the reminiscences of the narrator I thought worked very well. Some of the scenes were especially powerful. For all the bollocks Atwood talks in trying to distance herself from sf, it can't be denied that she's a very good prose stylist. An excellent book. Now I'd like to see the film.

The Power Of Starhawk, Stever Gerber (2009), is the second of Marvel's collection of early Guardians of the Galaxy comics. These ones are at least better than the previous collection (see here). The Guardians are an odd group - they weren't popular on their debut in 1969, but in the years following various people have tried to revive them - Gerber in 1976 (collected in this volume), Jim Valentino in 1990, and now Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning from 2008. It's the Gerber ones - from Marvel Presents #3 to #12 - that I remember from my childhood. The artwork is typical of Marvel for the period, and the story has its moments. One for, er, fans, I suppose.

Sicilian Carousel, Lawrence Durrell (1977). I adore Durrell's writing, and there's plenty of good stuff in this one to salivate over. It's one of his Mediterranean travel books, which, of course, are not travel books per se. In Sicilian Carousel, Durrell joins the eponymous package tour of Sicily, and writes as much about his fellow travellers as he does the island. As usual, he evokes place with near-perfect prose, and characterises his companions with a mixture of affection and pomposity. Typical Durrell - brilliant, in other words.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969), was August's book for my 2009 reading challenge. I wrote about it here.

De Secretis Mulierum, L Timmel Duchamp (2005), is a novella originally published in F&SF magazine in 1995, but now available from Aqueduct Press as one of their "Conversation Pieces" series of fiction and non-fiction. A time-viewing project discovers that Leonardo da Vinci was a woman masquerading as a man... and that the same was also true of Thomas Aquinas. A female history doctoral student, against the wishes and advice of her sexist controlling male professor, continues with her thesis on da Vinci. I liked the central conceit, and the discussion of history and women's roles in it that the conceit generated... but the professor was such a complete wanker he seemed a little as though he had been deliberately made so as a counterpoint to the conceit. A very good novella.

The Buonarotti Quartet, Gwyneth Jones (2009), is also a Conversation Piece, and is a collection of four short stories set in the same universe as Jones' excellent Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant (see here). The four stories are 'Saving Tiamaat' (originally published in The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan), 'The Fulcrum' (Constellations, edited by Pete Crowther), 'The Voyage Out' (Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, edited by Lynne Jamneck), and 'The Tomb Wife' (F&SF, August 2007). The last story was also shortlisted for the 2008 Nebula Award. Like the novel, these are rich stories, and while sometimes that richness feels like it's obfuscating the story, it also helps create a physicality to the invented universe. Of the four, I liked 'The Fulcrum' the best, although some of the characters felt as though Jones was having too much fun with the space opera furniture.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R Delany (1984), I read for the LibraryThing sf reading group and... it was a bit of a slog. Delany is a writer I admire, and his Dhalgren (see here) has long been a favourite. But for some reason I find Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand really hard to get into. I tried three times to read it back in the 1980s when it was first published, and failed. This time at least I finished the book. I'm not sure what it is that gives me so much of a problem - perhaps it's the way the story gets heavier and heavier under the weight of accumulated detail, and so the plot gradually grinds to a halt. Perhaps it's the bizarre society Delany has invented - in which everyone is addressed using the female gender, but the masculine gender is reserved solely for objects of lust - and which Delany seems determined to explain as much as possible about. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand doesn't feel like a novel. It's not just that it's half of a diptych - which is unlikely to ever be completed - but it reads like 500 pages of set-up, of prologue, and the real novel, which would probably rival anything by Peter F Hamilton in size, isn't there. One day I may have another go at reading it.

One Small Step, PB Kerr (2008), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

Renaissance, AE van Vogt (1979), is late van Vogt and... oh dear. There's something I find entertainingly bonkers about van Vogt's fiction, but his later novels are embarrassingly bad. This one is based on a premise so slight, so badly put together, and so stupidly old-fashioned in its attitudes, it made for a difficult read. Aliens have conquered Earth, put women in charge, and through the use of a drug made all men near-sighted so they are forced to view the world through "rose-tinted" spectacles (which have made them meek and mild and non-sexual). But when one man's glasses are broken, he starts to regain masculine mastery, shows his wife who's boss, and goes head to head against the aliens. If this had been written in the 1940s and 1950s, the attitudes in it might have been understandable. Definitely one for laying down and avoiding.

Orbital Vol 1: Scars, by Sylvain Runberg & Serge Pellé (2009), is one of the many French sf comics Cinebook is publishing in English editions. It's not unlike Valérian: Agent Spatio-Temporel (see here), which I like very much. A couple of hundred years from now, Earth joins a galactic federation, although a faction of isolationists still cause trouble. A human and an alien Sandjarr are teamed together as diplomats, sort of federal marshals and mediators, to resolve a dispute between a human colony and their world's owners, the alien Jävlodes. There's a nasty info-dump in the middle of the story, but otherwise this is pretty good stuff. The sequel is on my Amazon wish list.

Nights of Villjamur, Mark Charan Newton (2009), is a debut-that's-not-a-debut which landed earlier this year with quite a splash. (Newton's actual first novel was The Reef, published in 2008 by small press Pendragon Press.) Nights of Villjamur was very well-received - except here, where a negative review caused a bizarre backlash in the comments thread. So, is the book worth the hype? Sadly, no. Newton has created an interesting world, but there are infelicities in the prose - caused, I suspect, by him trying too hard; his writing's better when he sticks to plain language - and a couple of the narrative threads didn't seem to add much to the plot. It shows plenty of promise; and yes, it's a better book than The Reef. While it's certainly a respectable debut, I'll be surprised if we see it on any shortlists next year.

Films
One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, dir. Powell & Pressburger (1942), is one of the Archer's wartime films, and while it's done with wit and style the heavy hand of propaganda flattens parts of the story. The crew of B for Bertie, a Wellington bomber, bail out over the occupied Netherlands when their plane is damaged by flak - but it flies on, unmanned, to cross the Channel and crash in England. The Dutch resistance take the downed crew in hand and smuggle them to the coast, where they're given a boat and must row for Britain. Bizarrely, the film ends, and then a series of title cards appear on screen explaining that the cast, crew and everyone associated with the film wanted to know what happened to the crew of B for Bertie after their rescue. So there's a brief epilogue showing the airmen doing their bit for Blighty.

Nosferatu, dir. FW Murnau (1922), is a famous silent film, the first to put Bram Stoker's story of Dracula on celluloid - the names were changed because it was an unauthorised adaptation. I have yet to quite figure out how to approach silent films. I find them slow, and often my attention begins to wonder... but afterwards I want to be able to watch them again. Nosferatu was a rental DVD, but I'm tempted to buy a copy of my own so I can watch it again. While the presentation - silent, black & white, the odd mugging style of the acting in those days, dialogue carried on infrequent intertitles - is something of a barrier to someone used to cinema as it exists now, that difference also forms part of the appeal.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, dir. Jamoril Jires (1970), is like Jodorowsky meets Buñuel. I didn't understand one bit of it. The titular Valeria floats about; there's a vampire-like figure who pops up every now and again, and who might or might not be her father; there's her mother, who gets bitten by the vampire and grows younger; and... lots of other bits and pieces I couldn't quite fathom, It's all very dream-like... which is the apparent intent. I like strange films, but for some reason this one didn't really appeal to me.

A Comedy of Power, dir. Claude Chabron (2006), stars the excellent Isabelle Huppert. In this films she's a judge heading an investigation into a government-supported body which donates money to other nations for large infrastructure projects - the French equivalent of the Overseas Development Agency, in other words. And, like the OSDA, just as corrupt. There's not much that's actually funny in A Comedy of Power, despite its title; except perhaps the drôlerie of a system in which corrupt officials are protected by officials who are themselves corrupt... except for the one they've decided to sacrifice, of course. A surprisingly lightweight thriller.

Outland, dir. Peter Hyams (1981), may be High Noon in space - well, on a moon of Jupiter - but it never pretends to be anything else. Sean Connery plays the local marshal, who uncovers a conspiracy at the mine. So the mine owners send a team of assassins to Io to rid themselves of the troublesome sheriff. Mostly, it works; except for repeated instances of people exploding in vacuum. That doesn't happen - in fact, it's believed a person can survive for about three minutes in vacuum. Even then they won't inflate like a balloon and then burst. If it hadn't been for that, and the mysterious earth-like gravity (on a moon with a diameter 3,642 kilometres) - oh, and the lack of vulcanism on Io's surface - Outland might have been quite a good sf film.

A Kind of Loving is a 10-episode television drama from 1982 I reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Let The Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson (2008), is a vampire film from Sweden, which has deservedly won a bunch of awards. Oskar, a twelve-year-old boy, is being bullied at school. He makes friends with the girl who has just moved in next door, Eli, and who only appears at night and seems a bit odd. I'm not a big fan of horror films, or vampire films for that matter - notwithstanding Nosferatu above - but Let The Right One In really is very very good. It's perhaps slower than I'd expected, more of a drama than a horror film per se. But it's very effective, and definitely worth seeing.

Event Horizon, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1997), I remember first seeing at the cinema in Abu Dhabi. I wasn't impressed then, and I'm still not impressed after watching it again more than a decade later. There's nothing wrong with the central premise per se - Earth's first FTL ship goes missing on its maiden voyage, and it transpires its FTL drive opened a portal into another dimension, Hell. Yes, the eponymous ship is little more than a haunted house in space; but the "hauntings" are effectively done. But that doesn't mean it has to look like a haunted house. It should look like a spaceship. It doesn't matter how cool it looks, it still has to look plausible.

Equilibrium, dir. Kurt Wimmer (2002), I'd heard vaguely good things about. So it came as a bit of surprise to discover that this film was rubbish from start to finish. The opening exposition is clumsy. The main character (Christian Bale, putting on a terrible American accent) is a "Grammaton Cleric", which sounds like something out of a fourteen-year-old's Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The story is ripped off from 1984. The final reveal that "Father" died years before is obvious right from the start. Throughout the film, everyone is supposed to be emotionless, thanks to a wonder drug called Prozium, yet all the dialogue references feelings and emotions. Even the "Gun Kata", the firearm/martial art, is daft - watch any of the firefights and there's no way any of the clerics could have survived. The film is stupid nonsense from start to finish.

Ordet, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1955), is a film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 Films list. It's also very grim and dour. Perhaps that's because it's Danish (joke). It's filmed in black and white, with a small cast, none of whom ever seem to smile. Anders Borgen wants to marry Anne Petersen, but their parents won't allow it because each family belongs to a different Christian sect. The Borgens are, ironically, "Glad Christians", while the Petersens are "Inner Mission". Then Anders' sister-in-law, Inger, suffers a stillbirth and then dies. Petersen relents and allows Anders and Anne to be betrothed. Then Anders' older brother, Johannes, who is mad and believes himself to be Christ, reappears after vanishing earlier, and resurrects Inger. He also appears to be sane. Despite the flatness of its presentation - the sparse décor of the interior sets, the black and white film stock, the monotonous landscape - Ordet is a study in opposites: one faith against another, science against religion, sanity against insanity.... Perhaps it's the straight face, which never cracks a smile, with which the film is played that makes the final scene so affecting.

Even Dwarfs Started Small, dir. Werner Herzog (1970), is the final film in the Werner Herzog Collection and... I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. The entire cast are dwarfs and the plot is, well, there's little plot, in fact (no pun intended). A bunch of dwarfs are behaving anarchically outside an institution, and demanding the return of their leader who is imprisoned within by another dwarf. One dwarf rides round on a motorbike. Later, he hotwires a van and ropes the steering-wheel so it drives round continually in a tight circle. Another dwarf, Helmut Döring, has the most bizarre chuckle I've ever heard. Some films you are better if you have a bottle of wine or a few cans of beer as you watch them; Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of those films which are better if you have a bottle of wine or a few cans of beer before you watch them.

Top 10 Displacement Activities

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:51:00 +0000

Ten things you find yourself doing when you should be working on a short story or novel:

1. browsing the Internet
2. reading
3. watching telly
4. playing a computer game
5. alphabetising your book-shelves
6. re-tagging your MP3 collection
7. daydreaming about the short story or novel you're going to write
8. thinking up a top ten list of something
9. housework
10. writing blog posts about displacement activities...

DVD Review online

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:16:00 +0000

Only one DVD review by me at videovista.net this month - it's for A Kind of Loving, a 1982 television adaptation of Stan Barstow's 1960 novel of the same name. See here.

Reading Challenge #8 - The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Le Guin is an author who grows as you grow. You can read and admire her at thirteen, and you can read and admire her at forty-three. As I have done. Because I think it must be around thirty years since I last read The Left Hand of Darkness. I'd never really felt the need to reread it because I knew the story. It's one of those novels whose plot and characters have entered science fiction common knowledge - we all know about it even if we've not read it.

Which is a shame. Because it's definitely worth reading, and certainly stands up to rereading.

The book is set in Le Guin's Ekumen, a loose mystical/economic interstellar polity of eighty-odd human planets with the world of Hain at its centre. Earth was seeded by the Hainish. The Left Hand of Darkness is set on Gethen, also known as Winter, which has just been invited to join.

The Gethenians have no space travel and, strangely - and uniquely among the humans of the Ekumen - they are hermaphrodites. For three weeks of every month they are effectively neuter, but for a week they are in heat, or "kemmer". And the gender they take during kemmer depends entirely on those around them.

The Left Hand of Darkness is essentially a character study of a Gethenian called Estraven. He is the royal contact of Genly Ai, the Ekumen's lone Envoy to the world. And it is through Ai's, er, eyes that we come to know Estraven and, by extension, the people of Gethen. The novel is essentially world-building, and it's a fascinating society Le Guin has created - a result of both the Gethenians' sexuality and the planet's harsh near-Arctic climate.

The plot of The Left Hand of Darkness is considerably less complex than the world itself. Estraven falls from favour and is banished from Karhide. The king's new adviser is not interested in joining the Ekumen, only in provoking a war with the neighbouring police state of Orgoreyn. Ai visits Orgoreyn, hoping to have more luck with its "commensals". He meets the exiled Estraven, who warns him that no one is interested in the Ekumen, only in using the Envoy to improve their own political fortunes. When those machinations fail, Ai is arrested and shipped off to a "Voluntary Farm", where he is continually drugged and interrogated. There is an ongoing discussion amongst the Gethenians regarding Ai's true nature - is he what he claims to be, or just the perpetrator of an elaborate hoax? This is purely Gethenian speculation; for the reader, Ai's nature is never in doubt.

Estraven rescues Ai from the farm, and the two trek across the northern ice shield to return to Karhide. Since the commensals had claimed Ai had died of a virulent fever, his miraculous return should be enough to provoke the king of Karhide into inviting the Ekumen ambassadors to Gethen.

The story is told by Ai, who begins the novel with the line:

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ai's narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the journal of Estraven. And between the two they cover the entire period between Estraven's exile from Karhide and the landing of the ship containing the Ekumen ambassadors. The focus remains firmly on the two narrators.

Since the Gethenians are neuter for 75% of the time, and can be either gender when in kemmer, their society is essentially single-gendered. So The Left Hand of Darkness is as much a book about gender-roles as it is an exploration of an alien Other. And, while it was first published in 1969, perhaps in order to better contrast Gethenian society with the reader's, Le Guin seems every now and again to drop into gender stereotypes - especially for women, since Ai is male and Estraven is neither. But that's a minor quibble.

The Left Hand of Darkness is Gethen. And Gethen is one of the best-realised worlds in science fiction. I'd last read this book years ago, but had since then reread The Dispossessed... and decided the latter was the better of the two. But having now read The Left Hand of Darkness once again, I find I'm not sure. There's no doubt they're the best two of Le Guin's Hainish novels - which makes them amongst the best the genre has produced - but I suspect I'll never decide which is best and which is second-best.

Unlike the other books I've reread for this year's challenge, The Left Hand of Darkness did not disappoint. In fact, it did the opposite - I like it even more than I thought I did. I will definitely be reading it again one day. I might even add it to the bottom of my favourite novels list....

Some Fantasies From A Fan of SF

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:17:00 +0000

The New Yorker published a list of seven essential fantasy reads, which were pretty much the usual genre heartland suspects. Mark Charan Newton provided his alternatives here, and Larry has done likewise on the OF Blof of the Fallen here. Both Mark and Larry are bigger fans of fantasy than I am - Mark, of course, writes it: his novel Nights of Villjamur has received much good press recently.

However, I have on occasion read the odd fantasy book. Some of them I liked a great deal more than others (yes, I've tried most of the big series). So here is my seven damn fine fantasy reads:

The Ægypt Cycle, John Crowley, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania and Endless Things. This is one of the great works of fantastical literature, if not one of the great works of late twentieth century American literature. It is required reading.

A Princess of Roumania, Paul Park. Given Park's previous works, that he then chose to write a secondary world fantasy with a female teenager as the protagonist was a surprise. But as this series progressed - through The Tourmaline, The White Tyger and The Hidden World - then what he was doing became far more typical of his oeuvre. This is a complex, beautifully written fantasy series, with, in Baroness Ceaucescu, one of the genre's great villains.

The Lens of the World series, RA MacAvoy, is a trilogy - Lens of the World, King of the Dead and Winter of the Wolf - and they're uncharacteristically thin books for fantasy. In other respects, it more closely resembles the typical secondary world / high fantasy... although not really. I'm surprised these books aren't better known, they're one of the best fantasy trilogies I've read. They're out of print but definitely worth seeking out.

The Dragon Griaule, Lucius Shepard, is a series of novellas and short fiction, begun with 'The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule' published in F&SF in 1984. This was followed by The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter, The Father of Stones, and Liar's House... and The Taborin Scale is due from Subterranean Press later this year.

Lord of Stone, Keith Brooke, is not a well-known novel but it deserves to be. It's a secondary world fantasy, but it's not set in a cod mediaeval world. If anything, the setting is closest to Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War. But with magic. Except the magic is dying out.

Viriconium, M John Harrison, is a series of stories and novels set in and around the eponymous city. The stories have been variously collected in Viriconium Nights and at least two books titled Viriconium; the novels are The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium. These stories are an antidote to secondary world fantasies which, naturally, begin by appearing to be secondary world fantasies themselves.

The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, Ricardo Pinto, is the series title of three huge volumes - The Chosen, The Standing Dead and The Third God. This is world-building as an artform, with one of the most original secondary worlds I've ever come across - this again is no cod mediaeval England. The story which takes place there is equally ambitious and equally well put together.

honourable mentions
The Dragon Waiting, John M Ford, was in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series. Unlike the other novels mentioned in this list, The Dragon Waiting is more of an alternate history set in fifteenth century England. But with vampires.

Kirith Kirin, Jim Grimsley, is one of those books which reads entirely as secondary world fantasy, but has an appendix which makes you question its genre credentials. It was followed by The Ordinary and The Last Green Tree which are overtly science-fictional.

Shadowkings, Michael Cobley, is the first in a trilogy followed by Shadowgod and Shadowmasque. This is grim dark stuff, possibly because Cobley is Scottish.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Michael Swanwick, like the Ford above was in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series. Swanwick has recently had a new novel in the same world published, The Dragons of Babel.

Reading & Watching - Aug 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:30:00 +0000

More reading and watching over the past few weeks...

Books
The Affinity Trap, Martin Sketchley (2004), is solid twenty-first century British space opera: take some Banks, mix vigorously with Reynolds, add a pinch of Morgan, a soupçon of McAuley and garnish with a sprinkle of Warhammer 40K. Which is not to say that the end result is not done well. If my TBR weren't already approaching Olympian heights, I'd be tempted to pick up books two and three in the trilogy begun by this novel.

Guardians Of The Galaxy: War Of Kings Book 1, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (2009), is the further adventures of the "re-booted" Guardians of the Galaxy sfnal superhero team from Marvel. The plot thickens, the dialogue continues to entertain, and the art is (mostly) high quality. I'll admit I don't understand why Marvel change artists from episode to episode on these mini-series things. I'd have thought consistency would be best. But perhaps they have to spread the work around to hit the planned publication date.

Return to Earth, Buzz Aldrin (1973), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, Michael Collins (1974), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong, James R Hansen (2005), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

A Fair Day's Work, Nicholas Monsarrat (1964), is a potboiler which paints its characters with a little too broad a brush to be entirely plausible. It's set aboard a liner on the eve of departure from Liverpool. Except the new "breed" of stewards - the first post-war generation, in other words - are lazy goodfornothing union layabouts, and they keep on staging strikes to delay the ship. It's up to the captain - the best-drawn character in the book - to sort it out. Which he does.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005), I read on the train travelling up to Glasgow for Satellite 2. It was not the book I'd expected it to be. Set in an alternate recent past, it posited a UK in which clones exist as an underclass to provide replacement organs. They're treated worse than slaves. Except for those at Hailsham, a boarding school where they were given special treatment. I suspect Ishiguro has never attended boarding-school. And a stylistic tic, in which the narrator mentions some event or past incident, and then breaks from the main plot to to describe it, became increasingly irritating as the novel progressed. But it was nice to read a science fiction novel with real characters and lovely prose, even if it was a very thin on ideas. Why can't we have sf novels with all three, eh?

Atomised, Michel Houellebecq (1999), I read on the train travelling down from Glasgow after Satellite 2. An odd book, and I'm not entirely sure how successful it was. It's certainly bleak, and the didactic tone of the early part of the novel made for an interesting read. But when one character started telling their life story to another character for no good reason, my sense of disbelief began to falter... and when I got to the final section in which a narrator describes Michel's work following the years described in the rest of the novel, well, at that point my suspension of disbelief just gave up the ghost and expired. I like the idea of a postscript which changes all that has gone before, but you have to do the necessary preparation for it. Atomised didn't. I'd still like to read more by Houellebecq, however.

Open Your Eyes, Paul Jessup (2009), describes itself as a "surreal space opera", but I was reminded more of Delany's early works than anything else - especially Nova, Babel-17 and 'The Star Pit'. This is not a bad thing; they are fine antecedents. The universe of this novella was weirdly original, the writing worked more often than it failed, and the ideas may not have been entirely original but were given interesting spins. Unfortunately, the characters were a little flat. Nevertheless, a good novella, and I think it'd make a more interesting nomination for an award next year than most of those which end up on shortlists.

The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan (2008), is a book which promised so much before its arrival, but seems to have slowly faded from sight in the year since its publication. Morgan Does Fantasy. You can understand why this made many salivate - high fantasy as a genre is turning moribund, and after Black Man I can't think of another writer better suited to inject some fresh vigour. But. Morgan made some interesting choices for his novel - his protagonist, Ringil Eskiath, is an out homosexual, in a world in which such a sexual orientation is a sin and illegal; his world is high fantasy, but hints at an underlying science-fictional nature; he begins his story with his "hardy band of adventurers" (so to speak) leading separate lives, so it takes a while to get them together for the climax.... Morgan wields his genre clichés as though they were morning stars, dirty great maces with heads covered in lethal spikes - blunt trauma and puncture wounds. It all makes for a high fantasy novel which struggles to escape the straitjacket of its genre trappings and succeeds only in rolling about loudly on the floor. All the same, The Steel Remains is a superior example of its type, and I'm a little disappointed its brightness seems to have waned over the past twelve months.

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde (2001), was a book of which I had high hopes. I was told it was funny, and I do like literary metafictional tricks - even populist stuff like Lost In Austen (but not, I have to admit, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). So The Eyre Affair promised much... but delivered very little. It's a first novel, and it shows. Fforde breaks out of PoV all over the place, telling the reader stuff his narrator could not know; he can't decide whether to focus on his alternate world with its 130-year-long Crimean War and high literature pop culture, or on the "Prose Portal" which allows characters to visit the world's books; and there were a couple of places where the logic of the story broke down. Oh, and the puns were bad too. It didn't help that I read a US edition, so the shoehorned-in references to US cultures, such as car models, just seemed really odd. I'll not be bothering with the rest of the series....

Films
Taxi Driver, dir. Martin Scorsese (1976). I consider Scorsese the second most over-rated director after Tim Burton. His first few films weren't bad, although they were pretty much the same movie with the same cast playing different parts. Once he stopped making his wiseguy picture, he started churning out Hollywood "product". Taxi Driver is about the best of Scorsese's early works, and if you have to watch one film by him then, yes, I'd say it was this one.

The Sheltering Sky, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (1990), I didn't expect to like very much. It was slow to start, and the characters were really unlikeable. But then scenery began to take over the film... and for the second half I was hooked. Now I want to read the book.

Knowing, dir. Alex Proyas (2008), was reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Fata Morgana (1971), Heart Of Glass (1976), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), and Stroszek (1977), dir. Werner Herzog, are four of the five films in the Werner Herzog Box Set, and I was a bit surprised at which I discovered I liked and which ones I didn't. Fata Morgana sounded as though it would appeal - it has no plot, and consists solely of footage shot in Africa while a voice reads out creation myths, strange observations, song lyrics, etc. Despite the arresting photography, it proved uninvolving. It probably needs a second attempt at watching it. Heart Of Glass is notable chiefly because the entire cast acted their parts while under hypnosis. It's... odd. Not the story, but the way the cast behave. Not a very successful experiment, I suspect. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was held together by Bruno S's bizarre performance. It's a more traditional film than the previous two, but for Bruno S and his odd declamatory method of acting. It's certainly easy to understand why Herzog was so taken with him that he went on to write Stroszek specially for him. And that last film proved the most watchable and involving of the four. Bruno S is released from prison, is bullied by his prostitute girlfriend's pimps, and leaves with her for the US. In deepest, darkest Wisconsin, he struggles to survive as the American Dream drowns him in debt. Bruno S is still odd, and his peculiar acting style gives Stroszek a near-documentary feel which works in its favour. Easily the best of the four.

Lions For Lambs, dir. Robert Redford (2007), is one of those movies Hollywood releases at intervals as a sort of "sorry for being so venal and mercenary" note. It attacks Bush's Administration with all the impact of a wet haddock across the face, is as wishy-washy in its criticisms as Bush's government was in its justifications, and is basically little more than muddled moralising from a high ground no more than one step up from its target. Hollywood should stick to brainless action movies.

Time Regained, dir. Raoul Ruiz (1999), is, I think, the only cinematic adaptation ever made of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. And even then it's not especially faithful to the books; although, I suspect, it is in spirit. I have the novels on my bookshelves, but I've yet to read them. The film is surreal in parts, and a relatively straightforward historical movie in others. Definitely a film which bears rewatching. It'd be interesting to see it again after I've finally got round to reading the books.

The Quiet Man, dir. John Ford (1952), is a film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100, and I have absolutely no idea why. John Wayne returns to the Irish village where he was born, and woos fiery spinster Maureen O'Hara. The village is populated by stage Oirish stereotypes, Wayne happily beats O'Hara when she refuses to do his bidding - a female villager even offers him a stick as a weapon! - and even the film's colour palette seems better suited to Oz than Eire. Most blarney is more plausible than this old-fashioned, offensive rubbish.

Pierrot Le Fou, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1965). The version I watched was dubbed rather than subtitled, and it's amazing how much more pretentious Nouvelle Vague films seem when the dialogue is in English. You can more or less forgive the pretentious bollocks most of the characters speak when you're reading a subtitle or puzzling out the spoken French. But when drawled in American English, it sounds like the sort of stuff that makes you doubt the sanity of the speaker. Mind you, I'm not a big fan of the Nouvelle Vague - I quite like Alphaville, but not those of Godard's other films I've seen; I love Fahrenheit 451, but have not enjoyed any of Truffaut's other movies; and Last Year In Marienbad is tosh. Give me Tarkovsky any day of the week.

10,000 BC, dir. Roland Emmerlich (2008), is the latest film by a director who seems to have carved out a career making films which present in believable detail worlds which are complete and utter tosh. In this one, slavers on horses attack the village of a tribe of mammoth hunters, and cart off several. The film's hero, a Hollywood Cro-Magnon with good teeth and male model looks, follows them to effect a rescue. This means crossing a huge mountain range, stumbling into the territory of a Nilotic race, trekking through a jungle and then through a desert, to reach... the pyramids of Egypt. Er, hang on. Caucasian Cro-Magnon travels south to the Nile via a jungle, the African plains and a desert? Not to mention all the fauna he meets, most of which went extinct a million years before 10,000 BC. And the stupid put-on accents didn't help, either. Gah.

eXistenZ, David Cronenberg (1999), is a film which has sort of passed its sell-by date. Perhaps there were people out there ten years ago who would have found the nested virtual realities of eXistenZ's story confusingly impressive. But it's old hat now, and the "are we still in the game or not?" mind tricks of the film are ho-hum and predictable. But, this is a Cronenberg film, so there's a patina of strangeness which sort of makes the movie less dated than it should be. Jude Law's bad America accent throughout is a bit annoying, though.

Reading Challenge #7 - Jack of Eagles, James Blish

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

This month's book was somewhat delayed as I've been focusing on reading and writing about books related to Apollo 11 for my celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing. You can find those reviews on my Space Books blog here.

But on with the reading challenge.... My edition of James Blish's Jack of Eagles is a 1977 Arrow paperback with cover art by Chris Foss. I suspect it was bought for me some time around then. So I must have been twelve or thirteen when I first read it. I actually have a number of Blish novels from that period - all with Foss cover art - as he was one of my favourite sf authors at the time. Which made rereading Jack of Eagles an interesting exercise.

The novel is about Danny Caiden, a young man who develops psychic powers - precognition, telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, etc. - and subsequently becomes embroiled in a secret war between two groups of powerful psychics, one of which is bent on taking over the world. With the help of a parapsychology professor at a local university, Caiden learns how to control his new-found powers... but it is only when he comes into conflict with the Brotherhood In Psi that he discovers he is the most powerful psi ever.

There's a definite sense of time and place to Jack of Eagles. It was expanded from a 1949 novelette, 'Let the Finder Beware', and with its mention of the GI Bill and other details, it's clearly set a few years after the end of World War 2. The book is also, like much of Blish's fiction, well written. But. And this is a problem I had with his The Quincunx of Time when I read it at the end of last year. That too had originally been a short story - which I'd read - but Blish had not chosen to expand the plot, or provide more details of the setting. Instead, he'd used the greater wordcount to waffle on about the bogus science and philosophy which underpinned the book's central idea - a faster-than-light communication device which allowed people to pick up signals from the future.

And I suspect the same thing happened in Jack of Eagles. The first half of the novel is a relatively straightforward action story - Caiden loses his job, and seeks to learn more about his burgeoning powers by visiting various "experts". But there's a long section in which the parapsychologist, Dr Todd, tries to explain the scientific basis of Caiden's powers, referencing some mangled form of quantum mechanics and the Many Worlds Hypothesis. It's pointless, implausible guff, and it slows down the story to a crawl.

Later, during Caiden's battle with the Brotherhood, he escapes by travelling into alternative futures - explained once again by the bogus science of earlier. Each of the futures he visits is interesting, but Blish spends far too long trying to explaining the how of it and his explanations ring false and spoil the atmosphere.

I can't remember what it is about Blish's stories and novels that appealed to me when I was in my early teens. Rereading them now, thirty years later, it's plain that Blish was a good writer. But he seems to have this bad tendency to pad out his novels with implausibly bogus science and philosophy. He should have just finessed it. The explanations interrupt the pace of the narrative and add little or nothing to the story. They probably seemed impressive to a naive thirteen-year-old. Perhaps that was the attraction of Blish's novels. That and the Chris Foss cover art, of course.

I'm tempted to try reading or rereading a Blish novel that wasn't expanded from a shorter piece, just to see if it's the expansion process which led to him padding out the story with scientific bollocks. Perhaps he didn't do that for stories which were originally planned to be novel-length. The only difficulty is finding such a novel in his oeuvre.

Jack of Eagles was certainly better than the other books I've read for this challenge. I'm not entirely sure what it is about the book which originally appealed to me all those years ago, but I doubt I'd have become a fan if I'd read it at my current age. All the same, I still think Blish is a pretty good sf writer, and I won't be purging my shelves of his books....

Relaxestcon

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

I spent last weekend at Satellite 2, a small sf con in Glasgow. Actually, it wasn't just about science fiction; it was also about spaceflight, falling as it did just after the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. The guest of honour was Iain Banks.

It was a very quiet convention - at least it was inside the Crowne Plaza hotel. Outside was the Glasgow River Festival, so there were many thousands of Glaswegians wandering up and down either side of the Clyde by the SECC. Satellite 2 was chiefly confined to the rear entrance / bar area of the hotel (the one that looks onto the Armadillo's rear, for those who know the SECC).

Highlights of the weekend included...

... meeting up with the usual suspects; an interesting presentation on the Apollo Guidance Computer by Frank O'Brien - he has a book out on the subject early next year, so that's gone on the wants list (unfortunately I missed the other panel items about Apollo); six-year-old Emma Steel saying in the dealers room, "I like books but I can't read"; the discussion about the Puffer Fish Chain Gun on the Saturday evening; discussing NewSpace with Charlie Stross; being present when Mike Cobley was asked to sign a copy of his Seeds of Earth by a fan of, he admitted, Banks, MacLeod and Stross; starting up a discussion on the Roberts vs Scalzi Hugo novel shortlist debate after forgetting that Charlie Stross was sitting at the table.... And no doubt other conversations and incidents that I've forgotten.

Satellite 2 was an unusual con for me on two counts. I spent more money getting there than I did at the con. And my bag was lighter coming home than it had been going to the con. Well, it was a small con, and the dealers' room reflected that. In other words, I didn't buy anything.

In all, a good weekend. Many thanks to the redoubtable Steels for putting me up. The con programming was an interesting mix, and I wish I'd managed to attend more items. That may usually be the case after a con, but there were more I'm sorry I missed at Satellite 2 than at an eastercon. If there's a Satellite 3, then I'd seriously consider going.