It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

This blog is no more, it has ceased to be...

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:13:00 +0000

... well, it has moved. To here, to be precise. This one will no longer be updated, and the content here will soon enough disappear. Please update your links, feeds, etc.

Having my mind melded

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:04:00 +0000

Sf Signal asked a bunch of people for their picks of the top five genre books, films and television of 2009. I was one of those people, and you can see my response here.

I'll be doing my usual best of the year here on this blog as well, of course, but it won't be limited to science fiction, fantasy or horror. And I'll admit now that at least two of the books in my top five are mainstream (as are many of the honourable mentions). Likewise with the films. And, rather than television, I'll be doing my best albums of the year.

My best of the year post should appear in a couple of weeks - I don't think I'll do it early because I still have a few books lined up for which I have high hopes...

Readings & Watchings

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Books

The New Space Opera 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois (2009), I'd been looking forward to after very much enjoying The New Space Opera. Sadly, I found it disappointing. I shall be writing about it here shortly.

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (1992), is the first in McCarthy's Border Trilogy. I still don't quite get the McCarthy thing. Yes, there's some lovely prose in this - especially when describing the landscape. But. It took me half the book to work out the story was set in 1949. The two lead characters are supposed to be sixteen-year-old boys but come across as adult men. The plot fell apart somewhat near the end, when the protagonists are released from Mexican prison for no good reason - not to mention their arrest in the first place. And I still don't understand McCarthy's bizarre punctuation - the lack of quotation marks I understand, but why no apostrophe on some, but not all, contractions? All the same, I think I shall read more of his books.

Without Me You're Nothing, Frank Herbert and Max Barnard (1980), I read because I went through a completist phase with Herbert's books last year. Without Me You're Nothing is an introduction to home computing and, as you can imagine given the year of publication, it makes for a somewhat peculiar read today. In some respects, it's almost prophetic; in others, it couldn't have been more wrong. Herbert suggests some future uses for computers which did indeed come true, but also thinks the price of UNIX will continue to rise (nowadays, of course, it's free). Strangely, the authors seem almost apoplectic in their denunciation of those involved in the industry, claiming they're deliberately obfuscating the technology in order to maintain their elite status. I suspect Herbert had a bad experience with someone who sold him a computer...

Brain Thief, Alexander Jablokov (2010), I reviewed for Interzone. So you'll have to buy the next issue to find out what I think of it.

Spies, Michael Frayn (2002), took a while to get going. The narrator returns to his childhood home and, like many novels of this type, tells the story of his time there while leading up to a life-changing event. Frayn takes his time getting to that event - it took place during World War II, and it all begins when the narrator's best friend declares that his mother is a Nazi spy. She isn't, of course; but neither is she entirely innocent. Once the story started gather speed - about a third of the way in - I started to enjoy it more. The "dark secret" isn't all that shocking, but it fits in with the rest of the story. Definitely worth reading.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890), must have been the Twilight of its day. I was not impressed by this one bit. The central conceit is one of those which has entered public consciousness but it's not enough in my, er, book to forgive the novel's faults. The writing in The Picture of Dorian Gray was poor - characters lecturing each other, aphasic dialogue, book-saidism, and when was the last time you saw someone "knit their brows"? Yes, Wilde had a way with paradoxical aphorisms, and there are plenty of bon mots in this book. But as a novel, as a piece of long prose, this is not up to much.

Austerlitz, WG Sebald (2001), was my first Sebald, although I'd been wanting to try one of his books for a while. The entire novel is written as one great wodge of text, with no paragraphs, in long rambling sentences in which dialogue is often reported at two or three removes. There are also a number of photographs scattered throughout the book, some of which directly relate to the story at that point, others which are only peripherally related. It sounds as though Austerlitz might be a book to avoid but, on the contrary, it's one of the best novels I've read this year. Sebald's prose is extremely readable, and the story he tells - digressive and rambling though it is - works extremely well. The title doesn't refer to the Napoleonic battle, but is the name of a man the book's narrator meets at intervals over thirty years, and who tells him his life story. Austerlitz the man, who grew up in Wales, was actually born in Prague of Jewish parents who were interned by the Nazis. His story is not only a search for identity but also to discover the fate of his mother and father. Recommended.

Reference Guide to the International Space Station, Edited by Gary Kitmacher (2006), is a hardcopy edition by Apogee Books of a NASA book - which can be found as PDFs here. I reviewed it for my Space Books blog here.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer (1971), was November's book for the reading challenge, read a little late. See my piece on it here.

The Sea, John Banville (2005), won the Man Booker in 2005, so I had high hopes for this. It's another literary novel like Frayn's Spies, in which a narrator revisits a place important to him during his childhood and gradually reveals an event which subsequently shaped his life. Perhaps I read The Sea too soon after Spies, but I found it a less satisfying read than Frayn's novel. I was also less enamoured of Banville's prose style - sometimes he just seemed to choose a word, or phrase, that didn't seem to be the best he could have used. As for The Sea's "dark secret", it's certainly more shocking than that in Spies, but it didn't actually seem to change the narrator's life as much. Disappointing.

Blood-Red Rivers, Jean-Christophe Grangé (1998), is the novel on which the film The Crimson Rivers was based. I quite like the film - yes, there's a disconcerting jump in story logic about two-thirds of the way through (note to film-makers: if you have to choose between pace or story logic, you've probably done something wrong). So I fancied reading the book, to see how it compared to the movie and... it joins the ranks of Marnie and The Commitments as one of those books which are not as good as their film adaptations. Blood-Red Rivers is poor stuff. I don't know if Grangé is just a bad writer, or was badly served by his translator, but Blood-Red Rivers contains Dan Brown levels of writing. The film also made a better fist of its plot. A book to avoid.

Pendulum, AE van Vogt (1978), is, well, is late van Vogt. I have a soft spot for van Vogt's fiction because much of it is engagingly bonkers. But by the 1970s, that bonkersness had turned into senility. How else to explain the crap stories in this collection? Van Vogt always made it up as he went along, writing 800-word scenes which ended on cliff-hangers. But in these stories, he drags in stuff from nowhere to try and make sense of plots that ceased making any kind of sense by the third page. Somewhere in van Vogt's career there must be a tipping point - good before that date, rubbish after. I need to find it, so I know which of his books to avoid. Sadly, that will probably involve reading a lot of the bad ones...

Films

Encounters in the Deep, dir. Tonino Ricci (1989), is spaghetti sci-fi, and as good as that description suggests. A newly-married couple disappear while cruising off the coast of Florida, and their father bankrolls a scientist's expedition to search the area. They find a flying saucer on the sea bottom, and it's the aliens who have kidnapped the newly-weds. And a lot of other people. And there's this island which rises up out of the sea. And then sinks again when the UFO takes off. And I think my eyes had started to glaze over about twenty minutes into the film, so I have only a vague idea of what actually happened.

Skellig, dir. Annabel Jankel (2009) is an adaptation of David Almond's novel. I've not read the book - which was selected by the judges of the Carnegie Medal in 2007 as one of the ten most important children's novels of the past seventy years. That importance isn't as evident in the film, which is done well but has probably lost something in the transfer to the big screen. Michael and his parents have just moved into a new house, and Michael finds an old junkie hiding in the garden shed. This is Skellig, who is very odd and has strange growths on his back. Michael suspects Skellig may be an angel, and certainly he seems to have strange powers. Meanwhile, Michael's mother is pregnant but the baby is sickly when born and nearly dies. But Skellig saves her. A good film.

Manhattan, dir. Woody Allen (1979). Okay, so both Manhattan and Annie Hall regularly appear on "best of" film lists, but I've yet to understand why. Annie Hall was at least passable, but Manhattan is awful. A forty-two-year-old man is dating a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and no one thinks he's a disgusting letch. Most of the cast appear to be there to stroke Allen's ego, while he himself continually whines and puts himself down - he wants to have his cake and eat it too. I think there's a plot in there somewhere, but I can't remember what it was. I was never a fan of Allen, but I'd always wondered if I was being unfair to him. I've now seen his two best films, and I thought they were terrible. So no, I wasn't being unfair.

Alienator, dir. Fred Olen Ray (1989), was completely and utterly pants. The title character is a female wrester (I think) in a silver fright wig. She's meant to be a cyborg assassin, sent to Earth to kill a prisoner who has escaped from a prison on some alien world (but which strangely resembles an earthly industrial plant). The prison warden is played by Jan-Michael Vincent of Airwolf fame, and I suspect he was pissed for the entire film. I probably should have been when I watched it.

Sci-Fighters, dir. Peter Svatek (1996), was a tiny fraction better than Alienator. Which makes it almost completely and utterly pants. Roddy Piper is a "black shield" detective, on the hunt for an ex-partner who had been sentenced to life at a penal colony on the Moon. But he died of some strange alien virus. So, of course, they shipped his body back to Earth... where he promptly came back to life, and then went on a rampage, infecting lots of other people with his alien disease. I never did figure out the relevance of the title.

The Decameron, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971), is based on a series of novellas from fourteenth century Italy by Giovanni Boccaccio. The film is a series of linked comedy sketches, ranging from scatological (one character falls into a pit full of human shit) to ironic (a dumb gardener services each of the nuns at a convent, only to reveal that he could always speak). It's an entertaining romp, a sort of cross between a Carry On (but without the verbal wit) and a Hollywood swords & sandal epic made on a low budget. Worth seeing.

Chrysalis, dir. Julien Leclercq (2007), is a stylish French near-future thriller, which is pretty much a genre of its own these days. Police lieutenant David Hoffman loses his wife / police partner to a villain he has been chasing, and subsequently becomes involved in an investigation into the death of an unidentified young woman. His case leads him to a top plastic surgery clinic, which is using, er, cutting-edge technology for purposes other than the clinic's raison d'être. The blurb on the back of the jewel-case gives away the twist in Chrysalis, which spoiled it a bit. I'll not do the same. A pretty good film.

Empire of Ash, dir. Michael Mazo (1988) - yes, I watch some shit films; no, I don't really know why. This is one of those low-budget US post-apocalypse films that were churned out by the shed-load during the 1980s. I blame Mad Max. Despite the fact that civilisation has collapsed, the survivors still have trucks and guns. But not much in the way of clothes. Especially the women. They do have make-up, though. And everyone seems to have forgotten how to act. I think there was a plot in the film somewhere, but I don't recall what it was - good bunch of survivors fighting evil bunch of survivors, probably. Isn't that the plot all these sort of films use?

The Informers, dir. Gregor Jordan (2008), I reviewed for VideoVista - see here.

Stranger Than Fiction, dir. Marc Forster (2006), is one of those films which has a really neat idea at its core. But it also stars Will Ferrell. So I both wanted to watch it and avoid it. Neat idea... Will Ferrell. The premise won out... and, perversely, it turned out that the film only really worked because Ferrell played the lead. That neat idea didn't actually work that well - it was good for the first ten minutes, but then it started to slowly unravel. Still, the film was mostly entertaining and engaging. It was spoiled a bit by the fact that Emma Thompson's character is meant to be a Really Important Novelist, but the prose she read out wasn't actually very good...

The 2010 Reading Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:56:00 +0000

After the comments left on my post here, and some consultation with the members of the Science Fiction Fans group on LibraryThing, I have come up with a list of twelve fantasy novels for next year's reading challenge. Those books are:

Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings (1982)
Magician, Raymond E Feist (1982)
The Dragonbone Chair, Tad Williams (1988)
Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb (1995)
King's Dragon, Kate Elliott (1997)
Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker (1998)
The Sum of All Men, David Farland (1998)
The One Kingdom, Sean Russell (2001)
The Darkness That Comes Before, R Scott Bakker (2003)
The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells (2003)
The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie (2006)
Winterbirth, Brian Ruckley (2006)

The plan is: each month I will read one of the above, and then blog about it. I won't just be considering the quality of the work in question - the writing, the plotting, the world-building, etc. - but also whether or not the book makes me want to continue reading the series. It should prove... informative. Some of the books I've chosen are quite hefty volumes, so it should also prove... strengthening.

I'd just like to reiterate that I won't be coming to modern / secondary world / Tolkienesque (whichever term you might prefer) fantasy completely cold. I've read Robert Jordan, George RR Martin, Steven Erikson... a whole bunch of fantasy. But none of the above, of course.

The list may change, depending on whether or not I can get hold of a chosen title. I already have Colours in the Steel on my book-shelves, so that'll be January's read.

Reading Challenge #11 - To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:49:00 +0000

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series is recognised as a classic of the genre - it says so on the blurb of my 1981 paperback copy of To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the series. The last time I read it was, I think, back in the mid-1980s. Like Ringworld (see here) and Rendezvous With Rama (see here), it's one of those sf novels which is overshadowed by a Big Dumb Object central to the story. In this case, it's Riverworld itself, a planet whose surface is one long river valley which weaves its away across the entire surface.

On reflection, that characterisation may be slightly unfair - yes, Riverworld qualifies as a BDO, but it's not that which is most often remembered about the Riverworld series. It's that Riverworld is entirely populated by the resurrected dead of Earth, from all regions and all ages. Including known historical figures.

And it's a historical figure who is the protagonist of To Your Scattered Bodies Go. He is Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika, and translator of 1001 Nights and Kama Sutra. The novel opens with him waking up in a vast space, whose limits he cannot see, floating in some sort of clear gel and surrounded by rank upon rank of sleeping human beings. He attempts to escape, but is caught and returned to sleep... only to awake at the side of the River.

The entire population of Earth from its entire history has been dumped along the River. Burton finds himself the leader of a small group which includes Alice Liddell Hargreaves (Carroll's inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and a number of fictional characters - including a Neanderthal (I think), and an alien from Tau Ceti (who apparently visited the Earth at the start of the twenty-first century).

Each person arrives on Riverworld with nothing but a "grail", which is a sort of tiffin tin. Every mile along the River are "grailstones", large mushroom-shaped stones with rings of depressions on their tops into which the grails fit. Twice a day, grails left in the depressions are filled with food, alcoholic drinks, soap, cigarettes, and other items. Initially, everyone is naked, and Farmer is keen to get this across, describing it more often than is really necessary. Later, the grails provide simple garments - kilts, halter-tops and the like.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not present a cheering vision of humanity. Not content with having the resurrected humans display the worst elements of their nature during the first few days after their arrival on Riverworld, Farmer later has them banding together to form small nations, most of which fight each other or run slave economies.

After several chapters in which Burton et al explore their immediate surroundings and build huts - and little else except violent encounters occur - he decides to build a boat and travel up the River. Which he does - on a large catamaran, with a crew of a dozen, including Alice, the caveman, the Tau Cetan, and several others of his group.

They travel a great distance - "exactly 415 days later, they had passed 24,900 grailrocks" - and see a great many people - "they must have passed an estimated 44,370,000 people, at least".

The journey comes to an abrupt end when the boat is attacked and its crew captured by a state ruled by Herman Goering and early Roman emperor Tullus Hostilius. These two have enslaved all those in their vicinity, letting them keep the food from their grails, but confiscating the luxury items - whiskey, narcotics, cigarettes, etc. Goering apparently managed to take control after whipping up anti-semitic feeling amongst the people around him.

Unfortunately, Riverworld, for all that its population contains all of human history, is nothing more than middle America. Farmer has obviously read a book on Richard Burton - perhaps even the one mentioned by another character, Burton: Arabian Nights Adventurer, Fairfax Downey (1931) - and so he made him his hero. But the Burton of To Your Scattered Bodies Go reads like an ordinary mid-twentieth century competent man, and his one historical quirk appears to be an impassioned defence - usually cut short - of writing a book repeatedly described as anti-semitic. In fact, To Your Scattered Bodies Go is full of anti-anti-semitism. Goering used anti-semitism as a route to power; one of the catamaran's crew is a twentieth-century Jew who argues repeatedly with Burton; and after being enslaved by Goering, Burton and the others are imprisoned with a group of Israelis. Strangely, there are no Arabs in To Your Scattered Bodies Go. And Burton, who spent so long in the Arab world - and was the first European to visit Makka - never discusses Islam.

Then there's the cigarettes... Yes, more people are alive today than have lived throughout history, but is it really plausible to expect cigarettes to feature so heavily in Riverworld? Perhaps it's understandable that a sf short story submitted to a US magazine of the mid-twentieth century would be so parochial, but I'd have expected more of novel. Admittedly, two parts of To Your Scattered Bodies Go were originally published as short stories - 'The Day of the Great Shout' in 1965, and 'Riverworld' in 1966.

More than this, the story's plot is fundamentally flawed. When Burton and the others are captured by Goering's mob and enslaved, they immediately begin plotting an escape. They manage to break out and, in fact, seize power and remake the state along more egalitarian lines. But the whole slavery thing is flawed. Everyone already knows that if they die they are resurrected again, although not in the same area in which they died. So they could try to escape their enslavers - if they fail and are killed, well, they'll just re-appear somewhere else. No one has any reason to accept slavery. Yet they do. It makes no sense.

And this means of "escape" later becomes a major plot point for Burton. He is being hunted by the builders of Riverworld - dubbed the "Ethicals" - and in order to stay out of their clutches, he repeatedly takes his own life - 777 times before finally being caught by them.

Like The Stainless Steel Rat earlier this year, To Your Scattered Bodies Go failed for me on this reread because it seemed little or no thought had been put into the story beyond its central premise. Burton is not a convincing recreation of the historical figure. And every period of history presented in the book is the same as twentieth-century America in its outlook and sensibilities. I need more than a neat idea for me to enjoy a story, and certainly more than that for me to think a story is any good. Perhaps it's not all that surprising that, in a genre in which it's now extremely difficult to come up with a new original idea because they've all been done, present-day sf readers tend to look at the stuff around the central premise - the world-building, the writing, rigour, plausibility, logic - in order to determine quality.

Despite my disappointment with To Your Scattered Bodies Go, I think I'll hang onto to my Riverworld boxed set for the time-being. I've never been a big fan of Farmer's fiction - in fact, I've always wanted to like his books more than I do, because he never seemed to approach the genre in an especially straight line like the other writers of his generation. One day, perhaps, I'll read more by him.

Science Fiction is the literature of the future

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

And by that I don't mean that science fiction is stories set in the future.

At this moment in time, in purely commercial terms, taking the genre as a whole, fantasy is outselling science fiction. Mark Charan Newton gives some reasons why on his blog here.

But that means what, exactly? That sf is at risk? that it's dying? that if this terrible state of affairs keeps up, there'll be no more science fiction?

Of course not.

These days, I suspect it's wrong to even call sf a genre. It's more of a culture set. Its styles and tropes, anything which might readily identify it, have been picked up by other genres, have been spun out to create yet other genres, have become in many respects a significant part of our cultural landscape.

(This doesn't mean I buy into the "we live in a science fiction world, so people don't want to read it" argument. The 1950s - atomic bombs! - and 1960s - the Apollo programme! - were pretty much science fiction worlds, and the genre was going strong then.)

As I said, science fiction has spread out into a number of diverse cultures - some it has infected, some it has generated fully-formed from its own brow. Cyberpunk, steampunk, military sf, for example. It has invaded popular film and television and computer games.

So sf is no longer a monolithic genre or culture. Add up everything that can be called "science fiction" and I think you'll find it outsells fantasy. It's not just literature anymore. Neither, of course, is fantasy - just look at the success of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films. But fantasy is not yet as pervasive as sf in the western cultural landscape.

(Yes, some forms of fantasy play a significant role in western culture; but not the form usually identified as fantasy literature - unlike that which is usually identified as science fiction literature.)

So yes, science fiction is the literature of the future because it is not just literature. It is a culture, it is pervasive. It is populating, and may soon dominate, our cultural landscape. Science fiction is not just the literature of the future, it is the future.

DVD review online

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:05:00 +0000

My review of The Informers, an adaptation of the novel by Bret East Ellis, is now up at VideoVista - see here.

Having seen Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Rules Of Attraction and now The Informers (we won't count American Psycho 2), I've yet to be convinced Ellis' novels are capable of good film adaptation. All of them have been unsatisfactory in one way or another. Perhaps it's his characters - they work over the length of a novel, where you at least have the prose; but in a movie they're simply too unlikeable or affectless to carry a story in such a short period of time.

Robert Holdstock 1948 - 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:18:00 +0000

I was very saddened to hear of the death of Robert Holdstock yesterday, 29 November 2009. His novel Where Time Winds Blow is a favourite of mine - and has been mentioned several times on this blog. It was one of the books I read as part of my 2007 Reading Challenge of rereading all my favourite sf novels (see here), and also was one of the books I listed in the "fifteen books that have affected you most, and will always stay with you" meme (see here). I recommend it to people regularly. I have two copies of the book a first edition hardback and a paperback - both are signed.

I only met Rob Holdstock on a couple of occasions. He was a genuinely nice bloke. He will be missed. But at least we still have his books.

Reading Challenge #10 - Radix AA Attanasio

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Sales) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:08:00 +0000

When I decided this year to reread books I remembered fondly from my teens, it was a given that some - if not all - might not survive the experience. After all, I'd like to think I'm a more discerning reader now. I'm certainly a more experienced one. And what I look for, and expect to find, in fiction has changed a great deal over the past few decades. So, ten months in, and the results of this year's reading challenge have not been entirely unexpected - and yet, there have been surprises too. I hadn't expected to hate The Stainless Steel Rat so much that I'd purge my book-shelves of it and its sequels. I hadn't expected The Left Hand of Darkness to impress me so much all over again.

And so, for October, albeit somewhat late, we come to Radix, AA Attanasio's debut novel. Which I'd expected to survive a reread. (The cover below is not the edition I own - a Corgi B-format paperback from 1983 - although mine does also feature a naked man.)

I don't think anyone would ever describe Radix as a "classic", although it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award in 1981. Certainly it impressed me enough on my first reading that I subsequently followed Attanasio's career, buying and reading each of his novels as they hit paperback. And during the 1980s and 1990s, Attanasio churned out a succession of well-regarded and reasonably successful genre novels. Not all were sf - for example, Wyvern was an historical novel, the Arthor series was fantasy, and The Moon's Wife was an urban fantasy. At the start of the new century, however, Attanasio seemed to drop from sight. He returned only recently, with a pair of YA fantasies.

But, Radix. In this book, the Earth has moved into the path of a Line of energy being broadcast from the centre of the galaxy. This energy was generated in another dimension, and has had catastrophic effects on the planet. In the thirty-fourth century, when the novel opens, Earth is very different. There is a map at the front of Radix, which depicts an area of North America (with north and south swapped), but which bears little or no resemblance to any territory from a real-world atlas. This is where the story takes place.

Sumner Kagan is a fat, lazy, teenaged slob. He's also a serial killer - he puts together complicated plans in which he lures gang members who have humiliated him into traps, and then he kills them. Kagan is also the father of Corby, a voor-human hybrid who is a sort of voor messiah. The voors are an alien race with psionic powers, who have travelled to the Earth along the Line and taken human form. Kagan is arrested, beaten to near-death by the police, and sent to a penal camp in the jungle. The commandant there makes Kagan his personal project, giving him tasks which improve his physique, fitness, strength and agility, with the aim of selling him later as a slave. But Kagan escapes, and ends up joining the special forces. He trains in a swamp, goes on several missions, suffers burn-out, and ends up living with a tribe of mutants on the edge of a desert...

There's a lot to get through in Radix. Especially since the above - the history of Sumner Kagan - is only the build-up to what the novel is really about. Which is: when the Earth moved into the Line in the early twenty-second century, a "godmind" called the Delph took up residence in the mind of an Israeli pilot, Jac Halevy-Cohen. The Delph has more or less dominated the Earth ever since. Sumner Kagan is the Delph's "eth", "a fear-reflection that haunted him in many human forms", as the glossary has it. Yes, Radix has a glossary.

For three-quarters of Radix, Kagan is honed and tempered for a final confrontation - but not with the Delph, with the AI it created to manage its affairs, Rubeus, and which has turned megalomaniacal. Along the way there's lots of weird New Age-y stuff, little of which seems to add much to the story. In fact, Radix is very much a book of two halves - there's the straightforward sf story recounting Kagan's adventures; and there's the underlying battle between Rubeus and the eth, fought with the assistance of the voors (especially Corby, who is disembodied and takes up residence in Kagan's mind). It makes for an odd reading experience...

... and one, sadly, that these days I have less patience for than I once had. Radix reads like a bizarre cross between Dune and Samuel R Delany, and I admire both. But in Radix, Attanasio was either trying too hard, or not fully in command of his prose style, because his attempts at Delany-esque language are not always successful - "He was a shark slendering...", "The presence of people was palpable as blood", "a dreamworld had intrigued into reality"...

Having said that, Attansio's world-building in the novel is very good. He has created an interesting backdrop for his story, and he uses it well. It is in that respect, and in the character journey undertaken by Kagan, that Radix most resembles Dune - well, that and its appendices, comprising a timeline, character profiles and a glossary.

Incidentally, Radix is actually the first book in a thematic "tetrad". The sequels are: In Other Worlds, Arc of the Dream and The Last Legends of Earth.

I've read Radix several times during the past twenty-six years, but I suspect it's one of those books I remember as being better than it actually is. It starts off well enough, and some of the set-pieces are very good, but when the New Age-y stuff starts to overwhelm the plot then my eyes start to glaze and find myself looking around for something else to read. I'll keep the book on my book-shelves, but I'll not be rereading it again in the foreseeable future.

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.