I, Ian

Of course, were I ever to need tyres, these are the tyres I'd buy

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:46:00 +0000

At least the first one briefly flirts with highlighting some desirable quality of Kumho tyres in comparison to their competition.

These are, so far as I'm aware, the only adverts Kumho has ever run in the United States. They're on fairly constantly on Fox Soccer Channel, and the second one--the one that's currently in rotation--was on the main Fox network this weekend when they broadcast the Arsenal/Man United match.

I just find it fascinating how absolutely different they are. One is in a European urban centre; the other is on an isolated, apparently North American beach. One is about sophistication and refinement; the other is about youthful exuberance. One tells a story; the other is a snapshot. One looks like it was shot on low-budget videotape; the other looks like it was shot on film, slick and professional. One demands deliberately stylised artifice from its actors; the other goes for (and achieved) that candid, sort of found-footage effect that we'd often associate with a music video.

And yet they both have exactly the same emotional arc:

sexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexBUY OUR TYRES!

I

Nothing new under the sun

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:06:00 +0000

The first time it happened was this summer, when I happened to catch a showing of the (great) 1940 British spy thriller Night Train to Munich on TMC. Night Train to Munich is set in the days leading up to the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany in September 1939. The Nazis kidnap a Czechoslovak scientist and his daughter, and to rescue them, a British secret agent (played by a strikingly young Rex Harrison) travels to Berlin, dons a Gestapo uniform and bluffs his way into Gestapo headquarters.

Of course, there's no way I could watch that scene and not instantly draw the connection to a similar episode in A Traitor's Loyalty, in which the protagonist, a British spy, travels to Berlin to hunt a British defector and, in order to get information, disguises himself as a Gestapo officer and enters Gestapo headquarters.

Then over the holidays, I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, as is my wont, got home from the film and immediately looked it up on Wikipedia. And therein I discovered that, in the book on which the movie's based, the codename that MI-6 gives to their star Soviet mole is Merlin. In A Traitor's Loyalty, by the by, the hero used to be MI-6's star Nazi mole, and his codename back when he worked for MI-6 was Merlin. (In A Traitor's Loyalty, which takes place in a world where the Nazis defeated the Soviets, the cold war is fought between NATO and Nazi Germany rather than NATO and Soviet Russia.)

(SPOILERS FOR HAYWIRE AND A TRAITOR'S LOYALTY AHEAD)

And then yesterday I saw Haywire. At one point, in one small moment, after the heroine has had her employers turn against her, she searches her trusty rucksack and discovers, sewn into its lining, a small black device with an antenna on one end and a blinking red light on the other. In A Traitor's Loyalty, when the hero realises his masters have been manipulating behind his back, he searches the car they gave him and discovers, sewn into the upholstery of the boot, a "small radio transistor with a red light blinking slowly at one end".

(END SPOILERS)

Your first reaction when you come across stuff like this--or my first reaction, at any rate--is to wince, to think that you're a horribly derivative writer incapable of thinking up an idea someone else hasn't thought of, and that you're about to be exposed as such before the world.

After a little while, though, you start getting a little bit of perspective. You realise, first of all, that it isn't about having every element of your story be something no one's ever thought of before--it's about what you do with your story elements, combining them and presenting them in a way that people still find fresh and interesting. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code are both famously made up of a multiplicity of sources from elsewhere, but even those readers who could spot and tease out the inspirations for the stories' different elements still often found reading them very enjoyable.

Downtown Abbey could be summed up without much inaccuracy as a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Upstairs Downstairs. That was obvious to me within its first five minutes, but not only did it not do anything to dampen my appreciation of the show, it actually added another dimension to it for me. I got to see how Downton took the premise of a country landowner who has fathered only daughters but whose estate is entailed upon the male line and how it treated that premise--doing some things that were similar to what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice and some things that were very different.

And then the second thing you have to realise is that a lot you see, you only see because you're you--you're the author of the work in question. The example from Haywire is a perfect incidence of that--I'd be stunned if anyone who were to see Haywire and read A Traitor's Loyalty noticed such a tiny coincidence. It gets about five seconds of screen time in both works, and "secret homing device" and "a spy discovers his (or her) masters have been spying on him" are hardly such unique, distinctive tropes that your first thought when you encounter them is, "That's just like ...!"

Ditto the codename "Merlin"--it's such a minor point in both books (so minor in Tinker Tailor that it didn't even make it into the movie) and the contexts surrounding it are so very different that I think anyone who picked up on it would simply give me the undeserved credit of thinking I'd done it deliberately, as a respectful homage to the work of John le Carré.

(That's if they had the chance--I confess, I did email my editor and ask him to change the codename to Lancelot. But A Traitor's Loyalty does still have a genuine homage to le Carré--there's a very minor character who's named after two characters in my favourite le Carré book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)

Your book is, of course, your baby, and as such, you've got a natural inclination to be highly sensitised to anything concerning it. As authors we're taught early on about having to let go of one part of that--about detaching ourselves when we receive feedback and critique. This is another part, I think. It's a very human thing to draw connections and see patterns, and we're so close to our own books that it's inevitable for those to be what we draw the connections to.

I have a hypothesis that the reason I've started seeing elements of my story everywhere now is because the book is, essentially, now out of my hands--I no longer have the ability to make any significant changes to it. In that sense, I've already let it go--I've had to. And now I also have to let it go emotionally.

I

Cinema Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:35:00 +0000

This morning I went to see the new Steven Soderbergh movie, Haywire. The plan was actually that I'd be seeing Contraband--according to Lisa's plan, I'd see the 10.30 showing of Contraband, and she and the kids would see the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie at 10.50. Contraband is twenty minutes longer than Alvin and the Chipmunks, so it would work out perfectly.

Well, except that when we got to the ticket machine, we discovered Contraband didn't start till 11.40. And that the Chipmunks started at 10.15. (It was 10.13 when we discovered this.) So I decided to see the 10.40 Haywire instead, while Lisa and the kids headed into Alvin and the Chipmunks. As it turned out, they didn't miss anything, because instead of the Chipmunks, the cinema put The Iron Lady onscreen instead. (They fixed that, of course, and then gave everyone in the auditorium a free future admission.) This was in contrast to the theatre where I was sitting waiting for Haywire, where rather than start the wrong movie, they didn't start any movie at all--after that series of commercials-dressed-up-as-entertainment that cinemas show nowadays, we got five minutes of a screensaver on the screen, then ten minutes of sitting in the dark. Presumably because whoever was in charge of getting the movie started was at the other end of the cinema, desperately trying to stop an auditorium full of six-year-olds having to watch Margaret Thatcher order the sinking of the General Belgrano.

It was a weird trip to the movies, is what I'm saying. Weird enough that the discovery that there's actually a church that's located in one of our cinema's auditoria on Sundays becomes just a sidenote.

(The review that's about to follow is, I think, basically spoiler free.)

But so how, Haywire. Good movie. Utterly disposable, with a ridiculous plot--not a film I'll ever see again. But an enjoyable, watchable, well-done thriller. But what made the biggest impression on me by far was the directorial style.

Style seems an odd word to use here, because what that style amounts to is a heightening of the realism of certain aspects of the film (certain aspects only--other parts of the film remain as preposterous as they generally are in this sort of thriller); but style is exactly what it was.

The fight scenes. There are four or five hand-to-hand combat scenes in the film, distinctively choreographed--since Haywire has been put out as a vehicle for its star, female retired mixed martial artist Gina Carano, this isn't much of a surprise. The fights aren't filmed in any sort of spectacular way; they're presented matter-of-factly. But impacts are emphasised in a way that highlights how painful they must be.

I don't mean that they're gory; as far as I recall, there isn't a single drop of blood spilled during them, though they'd certainly produced blood in real life. But whenever someone gets their face slammed into a mirror, or a wall, or the zinc counter in a diner, there's a quick closeup of it that can't help but you make wince.

The movie's one car chase is probably the most realistic car chase I've ever seen--by which I mean, it's the slowest car chase I've ever seen. It starts off making you think it's going to be a traditional high-speed chase: our heroine Carano is driving briskly down a long, straight US Highway in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on either side by a forest of bare, snow-covered trees, when she comes upon a police roadblock. She slams on the brake and turns the wheel, and we get the traditional shot of the car spinning a hundred eight degrees as it stops, so that now she can slam on the accelerator and speed away. Of course, the cops pursue her.

But a moment later, Carano turns off the highway onto a dirt path, and all pretence of a conventional, spectacle-laden car chase is abandoned. She doesn't slam on the break as she turns, so that the car slides along the road into its turn. Instead, she does exactly what all of us do when we play Grand Theft Auto or the like (which is, I think, about as close as any of us ever get to being in an actual high-speed chase)--she slows down when she's making the critical turn into a narrow space, to ensure that she takes it smoothly.

And once she's made the turn, the chase is now taking place on a snowy dirt road, only the width of a single vehicle, that twists its way through the trees--so the cars involved move damn slowly.

And last, there are two scenes in which the tension is drawn out far longer than we'd ordinarily expect. In the first, Carano emerges from a building, spots a man across the street who may or may not be tailing her, then turns and walks down the busy city street. The man starts walking parallel to her, and she and we know that he is following her.

What would normally happen, of course, is that she'd therefore take some action to lose him--dash down a side street or get into a car--and a chase would ensue. But not here--because there's nowhere for us to go. We stick with Carano as she walks, deliberately unhurried, the entire length of the city block, before finally turning the first time she comes to a corner. Which is, of course, exactly how it would happen in real life, and it takes probably a full minute to play out onscreen.

There's another moment like this, late in the movie. A bad guy is lounging on his patio, with a much younger, bikini-clad companion canoodling with him on a cabana. There's a knock at the door, and the bikini bunny gets up and walks inside to go answer it. She doesn't come back.

Of course, we know what's going on, and what danger the knock at the door and the woman's failure to return signals for the bad guy. But Soderbergh draws it out beautifully--and all through a single shot. It has the bad guy's face in the foreground on the right half of the screen, while on the left half of the screen we can see over his shoulder. First we see the bikini buttocks departing, across the patio, then through the door into the kitchen, then disappearing through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house. And then we're left with just the empty kitchen, while the bad guy contentedly lights a cigar, then has something occur to him and shouts an instruction to the woman in the house, then frown slightly and look over his shoulder as he realises it's taking longer than he thought, then go back to puffing on his cigar, then finally realise that it's taking way too long and get up to go investigate. Again, it takes as long as it would take in real life.

I don't want to give the impression that Haywire is some sort of cinema verité found-footage docudrama--the spy thriller genre's answer to The Conversation. It's very much in the same boat with other identically-plotted movies like Hannah, The Bourne Identity and the first Mission Impossible film. But even while playing in that fantasy world, it tips its hat toward reality, and I really liked that.

I

SOPA, PIPA and sopapillas

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:14:00 +0000

ETA: Within about two minutes of posting this, I watched an excellent summary of the current state of SOPA and PIPA pop up in my e-reader from Making Light. A wonderful highlight of some of the bills' most egregious freedom of speech implications.

Yesterday, 18 January, was SOPA Blackout Day, when websites all across the Internet ideally went dark (like Wikipedia), or else put up educational messages (like Google), to raise awareness about the real threat to freedom of expression, and freedom in general, posed by SOPA and PIPA.

And it seems it worked. On the tide of a groundswell of phone calls and emails, U.S. senators and members of Congress backed off SOPA and PIPA in large numbers. Many, including even several of the bills' co-sponsors, explicitly turned against it, for which they're to be commended. Others refused to formally renounce it, instead choosing to state that they have reservations about the bills in their current form, and are going to want to work on them some more to improve them; they probably aren't to be trusted on this issue and should have an eye kept on them until the matter comes to a vote.

What really caught my eye about the congressional renunciation of SOPA and PIPA, though, and what troubles me about it, was that it was a wholly Republican-led phenomenon. It was predominantly Republicans who condemned the bills, Republican co-sponsors who loudly took their names off them; it was predominantly Democrats who tried to sound like they were distancing themselves from them while retaining the freedom of action to vote for them once public scrutiny has faded.

Call me socialist. Call me progressive. Call me liberal. I embrace all three labels. I'm a socialist because I believe that it is through society that we can best foster the flowering of the individual. I'm a progressive because I believe in progress, in a future that's better than our present. I'm a liberal because I believe in freedom and opportunity for everyone, and not just for the privileged.

What I've found is that very often--perhaps even always, though I shy away from absolute statements--those three different things boil down to one core issue: when the powerful wage war upon the weak, I side with the weak.

This is why I overwhelmingly find myself aligned more closely with Democrats than Republicans in American politics. It's not that Democrats can be relied upon to side with the weak when the strong come after them, because they can't. There's always a sizable faction of Dems aligning with the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party on the side of the strong. But what voices there are consistently rising in support of the weak are Democratic voices.

We've seen it time and again over the past ten years. The movement to roll back our civil liberties and stifle our freedom of action through things like the USA PATRIOT Act. Efforts to decide whether marriage to the person you love is a right enjoyed by all Americans, or a privilege restricted only to the heterosexual portion of the population. The debate over how the burden of adequately funding (or inadequately funding) our government should be distributed over the economic spectrum of our society. Efforts to strip workers of the protections that trade unions provide them. The fight to ensure that no one in America should have to choose between bankruptcy and illness. Consistently, in all those national conversations, I've watched the Republican Party and a sizable faction of the Democratic Party on the side of the strong, while on the side of the weak are the other faction of the Democrats, either alone or buttressed by a small, fringe minority of Republicans calling themselves libertarians.

SOPA and PIPA are unambiguously attacks on the weak by the strong. Everything in them stacks the deck against those without resources and in favour of those with them, from the way they punish someone simply for having an accusation made against them, to the provisions designed to ensure that, when the accusers actually are found to have deployed the laws unjustly and abusively, they're immune from suffering any penalty--like the penalty they will already have visited upon their target.

And today, it's the Republicans who stand with the weak, and the Democrats standing with the strong.

I'm a copyright holder. I'm in exactly the demographic PIPA and SOPA claim to be protecting. Copyright and copyright protection are important to me, both in terms of my own copyright and livelihood, and in terms of copyright as an intellectual principle. And online piracy is a grave threat to copyright and needs to be combatted. But PIPA and SOPA are not acceptable ways of doing that. They would, in fact, greatly limit my ability to exploit my copyright, by restricting and penalising the free flow of discussion and ideas.

FiveThirtyEight presented an obvious reason why the congressional parties should align the way they seem to have here: ninety per cent of political contributions from Hollywood go to the Democratic Party. Which raises another salient point about yesterday's win over SOPA and PIPA:

It's only temporary.

Truckloads of money will continue to trundle across the country from California to the District of Columbia. And every provision in those bills will be back. It might be under the same name; it might not. Certainly, there'll be more circumspection about how it's reintroduced. But if we're not prepared to act, again, against it, then it will come to pass.

I

MarsCon

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:15:00 +0000

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

This weekend we headed down to Williamsburg for MarsCon. I can't do a pictorial overview like I did for DragonCon, because there's much less spectacle and therefore fewer pictures. But everyone had a great time. Lisa, I think, liked it especially because it's such a smaller scale than DragonCon--there were about twelve hundred guests--and therefore she didn't have to deal with crowds, of which she's no fan.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

We went to a few things we wouldn't have gone to at DragonCon, like the bellydancing show and the charity auction (both at Boy's instigation), and really enjoyed ourselves. Girl especially enjoyed herself at the auction--she figured out the game and started raising her hand every time a new bid was called for. And the kids' programming we went to--a kids' science activity session and a how-to-draw Star Wars characters session--were small enough that the kids actually got to interact with the presenters.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I was gratified at the profile Doctor Who had around the con. The most common costumes were zombies, because that was this year's theme, and steampunk, because that's the trendy fashion nowadays. But once we get into the specific franchise costumes, there were about four or five Star Wars costumes, four or five Star Trek costumes, and at least two dozen Doctor Who costumes. Who was also the only TV/movie franchise to get its own dedicated panel, albeit one that was rather dampened by the one attendee who shouted down anyone who mentioned the programme's current production era without expressing hatred for Moffatt's approach to Doctor Who.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

So we'll be heading back again next year--and hopefully we'll have the sense to book a hotel room when we pre-register for the con, in which case the hotel won't be sold out by the time we go looking for a room. As it was we stayed two miles up the road from the Holiday Inn where MarsCon was held, and yet somehow there two more Holiday Inns between us and them. Seriously, three Holiday Inns in a two-mile stretch on one road.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I

Aura of mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:13:00 +0000

With all this research about Germany right after the end of the Second World War, one of the most striking and inescapable things about the period is the uncertainty that pervades it. Everyone in Central Europe--both the native populations and the personnel of the four large Allied armies that were governing them--were profoundly aware of how little they knew about so much of what was going on in the world. It filled their discourse and it was a huge factor in their actions.

It's an atmosphere that I think is important to capture in the book--it created an underlying sense of doubt around literally any decision people made when trying to reconstruct lives for themselves. But there's a problem with that--all those great questions are questions to which we very publicly now know the answers.

A (very) abridged list of things we now know about 1 January 1946 that we did not know on 1 January 1946:

That Hitler was dead.
That Martin Bormann was (probably) dead.
That Adolf Eichmann was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That Josef Mengele was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That the Soviet Union would have the atomic bomb by the end of the 1940s.
That the bomb would come to be defined as a new class of weapon, and that it would not be used again, so that, for instance, North Korea was not subjected to an atomic bombing when she went to war with the Allies upon invading South Korea in 1950.
That by 1949, the three Western Powers would have merged their Zones of Occupation in Germany into a single joint zone (called Trizonia), then granted Trizonia independence as a new West German state.
That the Soviets would respond by creating a competing East German state out of their own Zone of Occupation.
That the inhabitants of the two heavily militarised German states would spend the forty years of their uneasy coexistence living under the cloud of knowing they'd be the first battlefield in the war between the Soviet Union and NATO that seemed the almost inescapable conclusion of the Cold War.
That within fifteen years, the two Germanies would be separated by a physical wall, and that siblings, spouses, and parents and children who lived on opposite sides of the wall would largely be left without the ability to see or communicate with each other for thirty years.
The whereabouts of billions of dollars worth of art, artefacts and currency that had been hidden or lost during the war. (More billions of dollars worth of it is still missing.) Much had been hidden by the Nazis--every year or so, we continue to get news stories of some of it being recovered--but other parts of it had been shrouded behind the Iron Curtain, such as Priam's Treasure.

Trying to summon up that atmosphere is a tricky business. Certainly the first step is highlighting the much more personal questions that people didn't know the answer to--like whether missing loved ones were alive or dead; and if they would ever return from the liberated concentration camps, or from the detention camps in which the Allies held a huge number of Germans after the war, or from servitude in Siberia, or from the massive and bloody population shifts that both sides subjected millions of people to during and after the war.

But those local questions need to be compounded by the uncertainty that pervades the whole world in general, and doing so involves some fairly tricky manoeuvring. "Is Hitler alive or dead?" or "Will all Europe be speaking Russian ten years from now?" are questions that could legitimately provoke suspense and unease in 1946, but to a reader in 2012 who already knows the answers, they're much less so.

I toyed with the idea of having certain things turn out to be different in the book than is actually true (having it turn out in the book that Hitler is alive and in hiding, for instance), so that the reader then couldn't be sure what they knew and what they didn't, but ultimately I rejected that idea--I thought I'd be breaking too many readers' suspension of disbelief if I did.

I got particularly resentful over Priam's Treasure. I want to include a lost Second World War loot, and Priam's Treasure would have been perfect for my purposes--a priceless, high-concept hoard, that can easily be broken down into smaller, discrete units to use as currency. Then I found out that it had been recovered in 1990, and that it wasn't the Nazis who looted it. I haven't been able to find a replacement that works nearly as well.

(If anyone does have a favourite piece of Nazi loot that's vanished without a trace, let me know.)

Of course, it's true when writing of any historical period that you're writing of a time about which we now know things that people didn't know at the time. But what sets post-war Central Europe apart, I think, is that it was a time when people were very much aware of how little they knew, and of how important the missing pieces of information were.

I

Fashionista

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:08:00 +0000

As Lisa tells the story, she was wandering through the men's department at Target, wondering what the kids could get me for Christmas, when Girl suddenly started shouting, "Elmo! Dad, Elmo! Elmo, Dad!"

She'd spotted a set of Elmo pyjamas (she's obsessed with Elmo despite never having seen an episode of Sesame Street) and had been able to tell that they were sized for me, and not for, say, Lisa. So that became my Christmas present from Girl.

I often wear sweatpants at home, so I figured the pants could just be another pair of sweatpants to add to my rotation. The shirt is essentially just a t-shirt, so I decided it would be the Elmo t-shirt that I, as a funky, ironic guy and a cool dad, happen to own and occasionally wear.

Boxing Day night, after Boy and I had got home from seeing Tintin, I went into the bedroom and changed into the Elmo pants, then headed out into the living room to see if Girl noticed. She did--her face split into a huge grin. And then it started.

"Elmo! Dad, Elmo shirt! Elmo t-shirt, peas! Elmo shirt!"

"Do I ... have to wear the shirt as well?" I was kind of surprised she even remembered that there was a shirt to go with them.

"Yes peas! Elmo t-shirt, Dad!"

So I went into the bedroom and got the t-shirt and put it on over the t-shirt I was already wearing. Half an hour or so later, I happened to be in the bedroom again, and I took the Elmo shirt off. I headed back out to the living room and sat down at my computer. Girl gave no reaction, and I figured she hadn't noticed.

A few moments later, though, she was at my side, and I assumed she wanted to sit in my lap. Without really looking away from the computer screen, I reached out to pick her up. But instead, she pressed a bundle of fabric into my hands.

The Elmo shirt. Which she'd gone into the master bedroom to retrieve.

"Here go! You're problem!" (That's her mishmash of you're welcome and no problem.)

So I wore the shirt until she went to bed that night, because really, that was clearly the most painless option for everyone.

So glad I have a member of today's youth monitoring my look. Now I'm dreading when she's thirteen and decides to give her mother and me makeovers.

I

The elephant on the front page

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:45:00 +0000

First Palin. Then Trump. Then Bachmann. Gingrich. Cain. Perry. Pinochet. Gingrich again. Pinochet again. Now it's even Ron Paul.

Every time this happens, it's the same story, and I genuinely don't understand why it's treated as a unique event. I don't understand why we're not getting exactly the same lede to start off the story every time: The economic and religious movements that drive the Republican Party have further confirmed their deep ambivalence between nominating an individual who will recapture the Presidency in 2012, and their desire that their nominee pass a checklist of discredited reactionary, oligarchic, plutocratic, anti-democratic, xenophobic, fascistic and borderline sociopathic positions on social and fiscal policy that would instantly disqualify any such nominee from receiving the vote of any rational, reflective voter considering the respective merits of the candidate.

Barack Obama should be profoundly vulnerable in the 2012 election. He's consistently brushed off the political left, who were his most enthusiastic supporters during the 2008 campaign. He's consistently failed the political centre by confusing "collaboration, consensus-building and intelligent conversation" with "complete abdication of leadership and authority". And the political right will hate him as a matter of principle.

And yet he has to be a heavy favourite for re-election, because instead of genuine conservative candidates for the Presidency, the Republican public have proven themselves only interested a parade of religious zealots, anti-liberty fascists and economic fringists who keep shouting that the best way to end a global recession brought about by a decade of Randian plutocratic policy from Republican congresses is more Randian plutocratic policy. They're so desperate to find someone like that to be their nominee that they glomp onto every new one that comes along, until they realise that, hey, this one's just as detestable to the American general electorate as the others have been.

Mainstream media don't preserve their neutrality by failing to point this out--they in fact abandon it. When you deliberately ignore such a basic and important element of the story as the ridiculousness of the Republican primary field, and the desperate attempts of Republican primary voters to cling to economic and religious extremism, you slant the story in favour of ridiculousness and economic and religious extremism.

Of course, the Republicans have another candidate. He's consistently the number two candidate whenever the latest fringe extremist jumps to the head of the pack, and he's consistently the number one candidate whenever the media and the Republican voters haven't yet found a new fringe extremist to get excited about. Just as Barack Obama will in all likelihood be re-elected by default because the only candidates the Republican Party can find capable of winning the vote of a conservative primary voter all make moderate general election voters either collapse with laughter or shudder at the terror of them winning the Presidency, so too will Mitt Romney in all likelihood win the Republican nomination by default because the Republican Party can't find any candidates acceptable to conservative voters who aren't also laughter-inducing or terrifying to sane, moderate general election voters.

They don't like him because he doesn't pass their religion test, and they attack him for not being a fringe extremist, but in the end, Republican primary voters will hold their noses and vote for Mitt Romney. Then they'll hold him up before the general election voters with an unmistakable attitude of, "We couldn't find anyone we actually like, so ... this is the best we could do. Mitt 2012! Yeah!" With predictable results.

All in all, a whole lot of huff and puff and enough candidate debates that the cable news networks really should have started a weekly Republican Debate Tuesday show by now, and all done just to surrender a general election.

I

Titling and Titleation

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Work proceeds apace on the outline, though admittedly it was slowed somewhat by a family visit last week. It's also been slowed by the need to work out some kinks in the plotline, but exposing such kinks is, of course, the very point of doing such an in-depth outline.

Periodically, my mind turns to thinking about a title. There are several I've thought about so far, some of which are rather more realistic possibilities than others:

A Fistful of Sterling
Berlin 1946
The Russian Sector
The Russian Officer
The Dead Russian
Zero Hour
The Zero Hour
Stunde Null

Certainly none of these have yet leapt out at me as the title; in fact, I have one of them as the title on the first page of my outline, while there's a different one in the header that appears on every page. But they're a start.

I

It's always been solved before, but THIS WILL BE THE EXCEPTION

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:17:00 +0000

When I start working on the book, I know very little of the book. A main character, a hook, an inciting incident, maybe a couple of supporting characters, maybe a scenario I'd like to come up somewhere in the middle of the book. Isolated spots in a sea of blanks.

Filling in all those blanks, so that they first become isolated puddles in a sea of, er, filled-in stuff, and then disappear completely, isn't a steady progression. For me, there'll be something that triggers an idea, and then that idea will lead to a whole sequence of things falling into place. Three or four instances of stuff like this--the last one or two of which might not happen until I'm several thousand words into the first draft.

The funny thing about this, to me, is that until each of these revelations, I always have such an ominous certainty that there will be no more revelations coming, and that I will never figure out the ending of this book.

Like with the new book. I came up with the idea a couple of months ago for it, and it started out with a pretty standard collection of new-idea attributes: a time period and setting, a protagonist, an inciting incident, a twist and a pair of love interests (one of them a heroine, the other a femme fatale. Love triangle! Woot!) I worked on it a bit and fleshed it out, adding a few more elements. Then it sort of gelled the way it was, and for a month or so, that was all I knew about the book. Just like always.

And yet, as a week or two or three passed without significant additions to the outline in my head, I began to think, Man, I've made a huge mistake with this. It's a decent first twenty thousand words of a book, but there is clearly nowhere for the last eighty per cent of the book to go.

And then, two or three weeks ago, I sat down one weekend with an idea for another element of the book, and I found what felt like the whole story opening out before me. It came in such a rush that I sat down and wrote down all the different ideas I had for the book, trying as much as possible to order them, and it came to three pages, or about two thousand words.

I then wrote a short outline incorporating them all, and that came to about three thousand words over five pages. It got most of the way through the book--really, all that's left is the final climactic sequence, covering about the final quarter to the final third of the book, where everything gets resolved.

I'm now in the process of writing as in-depth of an outline as I can; it's so far thirteen thousand words long, and has reached up to the second page of my five-page outline. My hope is that this in-depth outline will make the first draft proper pretty much just stream out of my fingers when I go to start it.

And along the way, I've even had an idea for something in that last sequence. (There's no source for ideas as good as actually being writing.) Yet. I still have this feeling of I will never find a decent ending to this book. I'm going to write seventy thousand words, and they will all be wasted. Might as well just end it by fading to black.

I'd come up with a good, solid closing paragraph for this post, except I can't really think of one right now, and strongly suspect I never will. Never mind that I've written nine hundred blog posts prior to this. This is clearly the one I will never finish.

I

A fresh pair of eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:04:00 +0000

My mother and sisters are staying with us this week, which is making it somewhat more difficult to make progress on the current work-in-progress--shutting myself in the master bedroom for three hours isn't exactly the action of a good host.

But there's one way in which their arrival has been really conducive to getting work done, and that's on A Traitor's Loyalty. I got the second-pass pages on Friday. Having probably read the manuscript seven or eight times when it was first written and when my agent took me on, I reread it for the first time in a number of years when the contract got signed in the summer. I then reread it again last month, when I got the first-pass pages. Rereading it again now on the second pass is my job, and I'm doing it--but I confess, there are times when my eyes start sliding right over the text a little.

So enter Claire, whom I have ~~conned into working for free~~offered the wonderful opportunity of getting to participate in the publication of a novel by going over the second-pass pages with me. So far we've found two typographical errors in the first half of the book, and by "we've", I mean "she've". Wait.

Too bad it's too late to rewrite the acknowledgements. But I've promised her an acknowledgement in the next book. Of course, I also promised my other sister an acknowledgement in the next book for giving me her Yorkshire pudding at dinner tonight.

I

The moral thing to do

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:18:00 +0000

It's going to be LSU and Alabama. I mean, obviously it is. And I don't think we can really call that an injustice. I've been perfectly open that I think a rematch between the two schools is a waste of a national championship game for a number of reasons--because it does a complete disservice to LSU's regular-season win at Alabama, because Alabama haven't earnt it, and because it will be, fundamentally, a far less interesting or enticing national championship game than a matchup between LSU and the best non-SEC school would be.

(To be fair, "the best non-SEC school" would still mean "the fourth-best school in the country".)

But I can't claim that anyone's being treated unfairly here; I can't make an irate argument that someone else is getting dicked over to give Alabama a do-over for the national title and it's an outrage, dammit! Because the simple fact is that the reason Alabama are in the title game is because every time there's another contender to take that number two spot, they keep losing and knocking themselves out of contention--Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Stanford, Oregon, Boise State, Wisconsin.

But I do think there are two scenarios for which we can make a better moral argument than we can for an LSU/Bama title game. The first is to have Oklahoma State play LSU. Let me be clear: I don't think Oklahoma State are a better football team than Alabama. I don't think they're as good a football team as Alabama. I think if Alabama played Oklahoma State, Alabama would be likely to win. (Though if the game were at OK State, I'd probably bet on the Cowboys.)

ETA: When I posted this, I totally forgot to point out that Oklahoma State has beaten two top-ten opponents this year, while Alabama has beaten none top-ten opponents. It was finding out that fact this morning that first turned me from, "Well, I guess it has to be Alabama," to, "Wait, no--it should be Oklahoma State."

But I don't know which of the two is better, because they haven't played. I do know that LSU is better than Alabama, because LSU beat Alabama. An LSU/Oklahoma State title game would then demonstrate either that Oklahoma State is better than both LSU and Alabama, or that LSU is better than both Alabama and Oklahoma State. In such a scenario, whether or not Alabama is also better than Oklahoma State would be immaterial.

If we really can't get any team other than Bama into the game, then I think the other scenario should be just not to hold a national championship game at all. If Alabama were to beat LSU in the title game, then as far as I'm concerned, LSU would still be national champions. They'd have beaten Alabama at Alabama, and they'd have endured an extra test Alabama didn't have to face, winning an additional game in the SEC Championship Game. The additional points Alabama gains by beating LSU on a neutral field shouldn't be enough to transfer the national championship from Baton Rouge to Tuscaloosa.

One thing I do feel is that all the champions of the BCS, all the guys who scream every season about what a bad idea a playoff would be, should be the ones most decrying the notion of an LSU/Alabama title game. Their whole argument is, explicitly, "But with the BCS, our regular season is our playoff!" And rematching LSU and Bama in the title game gives the lie to that. Alabama lost their "playoff". And they lost it at home. They shouldn't be getting a do-over.

Or, you know, we could just have a playoff.

I

It's what I do

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:46:00 +0000

You might recall that shortly after I signed my book deal, I was getting crippling stage fright over calling myself a professional author. Last week at Lisa's birthday party, I found my way around that.

I apparently am pretty fine with responding to "So what do you do?" with, "I'm a writer." (Though that wasn't necessarily the case a few months ago.) And what I discovered at the party was that when you give that answer, the very next question is, "What sort of writer?" And that's when you nonchalantly slip in, "I'm a novelist."

A bit longer is the conversational chain that ensues when someone asks what we do with our kids during the day.

"I work at home."

"So they're home with you! That's great! What do you do?"

"Oh, I'm a writer."

Refrain.

Really, the hardest part is not bopping up and down whenever I say it, because the inner squeeing? Still hasn't stopped.

I

Nose to the grindstone

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:43:00 +0000

I'm now working in earnest on the next book, though I'm still in the research and outlining stage. In a perfect world, I'd like to have myself a good, solid, rigorous outline before I start the first draft.

This one is a straight historical thriller, set in Berlin between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. The working title is A Fistful of Sterling, but that really is, completely, just a title for personal use and not at all what I'm expecting to put on the finished first draft. I'm pretty excited about the project right now (which is good, because it's bad to be writing something you're uninterested in) and have been doing a lot of reading about the place and time.

I guess if I'm going to keep writing novels about Berlin, I should, you know, visit the place someday.

I

Yesterday and today

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:06:00 +0000

Yesterday (1993)

I'm watching a documentary I taped this weekend, The Story of the FA Cup, which, after an opening quarter hour about the first 89 years of the competition, has had match highlights of every Cup Final since 1961.

Whenever I watch old sport highlights, I'm always fascinated by how, in my head, the moment when I started watching the sport is the demarcating line between the sport's modern day (by which time the sport has become fast-paced and exciting) and its prehistory (less skilful, less technically accomplished, less engaging as a spectacle). I first noticed it when I watched America's Game, the NFL Network's series which devoted an episode to each winner of the Super Bowl, and I've had it reaffirmed tonight.

I started watching football during the 1994 World Cup, the first time the sport became easily accessible to an American TV audience. So by the mid-1980s, there were players popping up that I can well remember still being professional players in the 1990s: Brian Robson captaining the 1985 Man United side; Ian Rush scoring for Liverpool in the 1986 final; Dennis Wise taking the free kick that provided Wimbledon the only goal in the 1988 final; Ian Wright scoring two goals off the bench for Crystal Palace in the first match of the 1990 final.

But still, even with the easy recognisability of the faces, and with the appearance of kits and balls becoming steadily more modern, the game still looked amateurish, the play sluggish and sloppy.

Today (1996)

By the 1990s, the teams were made up entirely of players I know very well, and I was watching highlights of events with which I'm perfectly familiar, even if I wasn't around to watch them live: Man United beating Crystal Palace in a Final Replay, Alex Ferguson's first trophy as United manager; the famous 1991 semi-final between Tottenham and Arsenal.

So by this point, I was actively telling myself I needed to be perceiving these matches as modern. The way things were going, I was about to be seeing highlights from games that I actually had watched live as they happened--Man United's three consecutive Cup Final appearances from 1994 to 1996--and I'd be thinking to myself, "My God, how did they replace the vibrant, pulsating matches I remember from the live broadcast with antiquated, 70s-style football?"

But then the documentary actually got to the 1994 final, starting with footage of Man United and Chelsea walking out the tunnel at the start of the match. And seeing the United players take the field, it was as if a switch got flipped in my head. All of a sudden the players seemed quicker and more capable, the ball lighter and less leaden.

That was shortly followed, of course, by Eric Cantona's 85th-minute winner against Liverpool in the 1996 final, which is probably the moment from all of professional sport that is preserved most vividly in my memory. That was only three years after Arsenal beat Sheffield Wednesday in the last ever Cup Final Replay, and now, it's fifteen years in the past. Yet the Arsenal-Wednesday replay is History; Cantona giving United the only goal of the match is Recent Events.

I

An announcement. I'm announcing here.

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:28:00 +0000

Since the cover has appeared on the Amazon page, I guess I can go ahead and post it here:

I really like the cover. Whenever the topic has been discussed before of what the cover for the book should look like, pretty much my first suggestion has always been, "The Union Jack and the swastika should be combined in some way," but I haven't been able to think of what a good way is to do that. So I'm pretty chuffed to see it done here in a way that I wouldn't have thought of, and that I think works really well.

An early version of the cover involved the swastika silhouette over the American, rather than British, flag. This was objected to because the novel is about a British spy in Nazi Germany, so America didn't seem really like the topic the cover should be showcasing. This little anecdote will be relevant later in the post.

Eagle-eyed readers will observe that in order for the cover to appear on the Amazon page, there must in fact now be an Amazon page, and indeed there is. So get your preordering fingers ready, and remember: you can never own enough copies of A Traitor's Loyalty. A print-out confirmation that you've placed an order makes a perfect Christmas or Chanukah present, and will also make a great Easter or Presidents' Day present.

The book will appear soon at bn.com and other places, and there'll also be e-ditions for the Kindle and Nook and such.

(I'm trying to get the word e-dition going. It can be my great contribution to Internet culture. Besides, you know, the novels. Come on, people. We can do this.)

I won't lie; I'm excited. This is definitely one of those "Oh boy, I'm a novelist" moments, like when you get the first cover mockups, or when you sign the contract in the first place. Or when you receive your first page proofs.

But now I have to put that aside and get back to work on the page proofs, and on the early work for the next book on my contract. For which, ironically enough, a swastika silhouette over the American flag would probably make a pretty solid cover.

I

Because girls aren't people

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:43:00 +0000

When Girl and I pick Boy up from the school bus every afternoon, we typically go to the park for half an hour. The other day we got there and found a couple of mothers with three kids between them, a year or two younger than Boy. Boy immediately picked out the girl in the group, as is his wont, and the two of them started playing together, gathering up all the acorns that have been falling from the tree overhanging the park and stuffing their pockets full of them.

After the other kids had left and we were alone at the playground, Boy idly asked me as he played, "Dad, do you think schools can climb up high on the playground like I do?"

"Do I think what can climb up high?"

"Girls," he repeated. "Like the girl that had all the nuts. Do you think girls can climb up high on the playground like I do?"

"Um. Sure."

"How do they get down again?"

"... The same way you get down, I'd expect."

"Down the slide?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sure."

"But Dad! Girls can't use the slide!"

"Why not?"

"Because girls aren't people!"

I was horrified. "They most certainly are."

He looked at me like I'm a complete tool. "No they're not, Dad!" Such an idea would just be silly.

Yeah. He wasn't saying girls. He was saying skirls. As in, his tongue was having an impossible time wrapping itself around squirrels.

You know, like a squirrel that gathers nuts.

I

Quoted

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:09:00 +0000

I'm currently reading A Woman in Berlin, a diary kept by an anonymous Berliner as she lived through the city's conquest and occupation by the Red Army in April through June, 1945. There's a lot in here to catch the attention, but one passage in particular that's struck me:

I often find myself thinking about the fuss I used to make over the men on leave, how I pampered them, how much respect I showed them. And some of them had come from cities like Paris or Oslo, which were farther from the front than Berlin, where we were under constant bombardment. Or else they'd been in places where there was absolutely peace, like Prague or Luxemburg. But even when they were coming from the front, until 1943 they always looked neat and well fed, unlike most of us today. And they loved to tell their stories, which always involved exploits that showed them in a good light. We, on the other hand, will have to keep politely mum; each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared. Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us anymore.

I

It's like The Club Dumas

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:15:00 +0000

Yesterday arrived my copy of Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949 by Paul Steege. I'm in the midst of a big reading kick about that particular topic, so I'm looking forward to getting started on the book.

I worked in a bookshop. In fact, for a solid chunk of the time I worked in a bookshop, I worked in the stock room. So I've seen quite a number of printing and binding errors in my time. Like books that have been bound upside down, that sort of thing.

I've never seen a binding error like this one. Open the book to page one, everything's fine. Start reading. Keeping going to page ninety, everything's fine. Then suddenly:

Yes, starting on page 91, the whole book turns upside down. And yet the pages are still in the correct order, not reversed, which means that in order to rotate the book and keep reading, from that point forward I have to read the right-side page first, then the left-side page, then turn the pages from right to left. Here we see chapter six beginning on the left side, and chapter five ending on the right:

I've got no issue turning a book upside down to read. The only issue here is how distracting it's going to be going from right to left, which is to say, that's going to be pretty distracting. But it's an interesting enough problem that I'm inclined to hang onto the book, particularly considering that I'm far too profoundly lazy to be arsed enough to pack the book up and send it back to get it exchanged.

I

And the space shuttle? That was mine.

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:26:00 +0000

I first heard the word internet on an episode of seaQuest DSV.

I remember this because I had actually recently made up the word internet for a science fiction story I was writing. To name an international network, I'd combined international and network. How original am I.

(Actually, I have a feeling I'd combined interplanetary and network or interstellar and network.)

And my reaction to the word's use on seaQuest was to think, Damn. Now I can't use that word, because now it's a seaQuest word. Everyone's going to think I stole it from seaQuest.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I

If you don't see a YouTube video above this text, check out the original post to see it.

The todder and the wasp

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:42:00 +0000

Over the past few days, Girl has learnt most of her body parts, so this morning, when I had her stood up on her changing table, I was reviewing them with her. "Where's your nose? Where's your head? Where are your feet? Where's your tummy?"

She got them all right, including one or two I didn't know she'd know, so I said, "High five!" and she gave me a high five with her hand at shoulder height.

Then, out of the blue, she held her hand up for a successive high five, stretching her arm as high above her head as she could reach. "Up high!"

A few minutes later, as I was busily typing this adorable story to Diane over the Instant Messenger, Girl got up from where she was sitting playing with an annoying talking toy on the floor, ran over to me, and handed me a giant piece of carpet fuzz or something.

Absentmindedly, I took it from her and deposited it on the table next to me.

And at that point, noticed it was a wasp.

Like, an alive wasp.

I'm not going to lie. There may have been a bit of screaming like a girl, and a bit of running across the living room flapping my hands in terror. When I got back, the wasp was trying to climb inside my laptop by way of the USB port. So I killed it dead.

I'm going with the theory that it came in when I told Boy off for standing with the front door open on the way out to school this morning. Because the only alternatives I can think of are that we've had a wasp in our home all night, or that wasps have free access to our home.

So, when he held the door open this morning.

I

Judging by its ...

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:42:00 +0000

A moment that makes "I'm getting published" real?

Seeing possible covers in progress.

Gaaaah! Talk about your anxiety level going through the roof.

Not because of any problems with the covers--which were totally cool--but because you're thinking to yourself, Oh my God, this is happening.

I

The wedding with Steven Moffat

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:29:00 +0000

"All of history is happening at once!"

I've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Doctor Who season 32. I was intrigued by the decision to abandon the highly-structured season-long arc format of the Russell T Davies era, and I think ultimately the season benefited from that, developing a freewheeling narrative feel that recaptured a part of 60s and 70s Who that had eluded the revived series at least since Christopher Eccleston left.

It also allowed far more cliffhangers than we had during the RTD years--by my count, seven of the season's thirteen episodes ended with cliffhangers.

But as far as the individual stories themselves? I'd been unimpressed. Apart from the gem of "The Doctor's Wife", the first seven-episode half-season, transmitted in the spring, was deeply average, with a couple of competent stories and a couple of sub-par but not horrible ones. That's not a condemnation--it means, of course, that the season could have been far worse. But it could also have been far better.

(Even "The Doctor's Wife" relied for its gem-ness on the viewer already having a familiarity and an emotional investment in the programme; in that respect, it was far more of a "Remembrance of the Daleks" or "School Reunion"--though better than both those--than a "Caves of Androzani", "The Empty Child" or "Blink", whose brilliance I'd expect to shine through even to the casual viewer. I don't know how the not-we reacted to "The Doctor's Wife", but I'd be curious to find out.)

And then the second half-season picked up at the end of August with "Let's Kill Hitler", which was, in this reporter's opinion, the single worst story Doctor Who has ever done in the 48 years since it first began transmission. Really, just absolutely horrible. Every creative choice made in the writing, direction and editing of that episode made a bad situation worse. We're still in 1967 with our Doctor Who rewatch, and already I'm dreading the day when we get up to "Let's Kill Hitler" and I have to watch it again.

After that nadir, though, the second half-season picked up for me, with four stories that were all solid and enjoyable (one of which was outright excellent). Only with the last, "Closing Time", did I really find anything to spoil it for me, borne out of an inability really to successfully marry the episode's dark menace (Cybermen really are at their best when they're a desperate, final remnant of their race) with the attempt to recapture the happy-chappy bromance atmosphere of the Doctor's relationship with Craig (James Corden) from "The Lodger", to which this episode serves as a sequel.

(Ironically, I thought the dynamic between the Doctor and Craig in "Closing Time" was far more successful than it had been in "The Lodger". All this time I'd been thinking "The Lodger" failed because of the way it contorted itself to serve as a vehicle for its celebrity guest star, but now I'm having to conclude that its problem is one of execution rather than conception.)

But even as I was enjoying those four successive stories--and even as someone who was sympathetic to the abandonment of the RTD narrative-arc-by-rote format*--I confess that that succession of standalone episodes making up the body of the second half-season caught me by surprise. This is exactly the period when we'd normally expect the buildup to the season finale to be ratcheting up, but what we instead got were four entirely self-contained episodes that moved away from that completely (apart from the last five minutes of "Closing Time").

That's a choice that's going to take some thinking about before I can evaluate whether it's a choice I would have made. On the one hand, I think Peter David's quite right when he observes that a consequence of this approach has been the absence of the I-need-to-see-next-week's-episode-now tension that the programme often achieved at the tail end of the Davies seasons. (Though it's important not to overstate that; even during much of the Davies era, that feeling was only achieved following episode twelve of the thirteen-episode season; only two of New Who's six series have had a cliffhanger leading from episode eleven to episode twelve, turning the finale into a three-episode event rather than a two-episode one.)

On the other hand, I once read Lawrence Miles make the excellent point that the problem with arc storytelling is that it places all the focus on what might happen in future episodes rather than on what's currently happening in the episode that's on right now. That's bad for a number of reasons, and happily, for the first time since Christopher Eccleston was playing the Doctor, it managed to be largely absent from this second half-season. That was both refreshing in and of itself, and also--yes--gave the half-season a strong Classic Who feel (which was only helped along by all the classic-era callbacks and thematic links in "The God Complex" and "Closing Time".)

All of which is a very long preamble to say--I was trepidatious going into "The Wedding of River Song". I'd been simultaneously impressed and nonplussed by the four stories since "Let's Kill Hitler". And I knew that status of "The Wedding of River Song" as the Big Finale Episode would herald a return to all the things that were responsible for the depths that "Let's Kill Hitler" plumbed, the very things that the ensuing four episodes had been able to move away from: the poor handling of a complicated (and in places, frankly, uninteresting) arc storyline, and the need for supposed Grand Spectacle to justify all the hype surrounding the episode as a Big Event.

So I was gratified to spend an hour watching an engaging and entertaining piece of television. Really, it was pretty decent. Not a timeless addition to the pantheon of great Who by any means, but nevertheless fun, and smart enough for the kids, and dumb enough for the grownups--which is, in the end, all I think we should ever be asking of Doctor Who.

It's worth noting that it was exceptionally uncreative, basically a mishmash of formulae from Moffat's previous big episodes. It opens on a peaceful alternate Earth filled with storybook oddities, brought on by a paradox surrounding the Doctor's death; as opposed to Moffat's other season finale, "The Big Bang", which opened on a peaceful alternate Earth filled with storybook oddities, brought on by a paradox surrounding the TARDIS's death. Like the mid-season finale, "A Good Man Goes to War", it spends its opening third showing the Doctor popping up in a progression of seedy science-fictional settings, seeking out a series of ruffians and ne'er-do-wells. (I must say, I love how Farscape the programme looks when it does that.) And like "Let's Get Hitler", it's built around a succession of "Ooh, now look at this cool bit!" set pieces, but critically, it strings them together to form a plot, rather than using them in lieu of a plot like "Hitler" did.

Of course, formula is not stranger to New Who finales. In RTD's four finales, three of his opening episodes ("Bad Wolf", "Army of Ghosts" and "The Sound of Drums") were all constructed to a single formula, and three of his part twos ("The Parting of the Ways", "Doomsday" and "Journey's End") were all constructed to a single formula. Which didn't stop any of them from being enjoyable stories.

But really, there were two moments in "The Wedding of River Song" that turned me from "Yeah, it was fairly good," to having an outright great time. The first was the lovely, sweet farewell to Nicholas Courtney, a moment made all the more poignant by it being thematically integral to the storyline. It's something I want to devote a few paragraphs to in a post of its own tomorrow, because it's resonant with my own family situation right now.

And the second was that ending. "The oldest question, hidden in plain sight." Goodness me. You know how much I love post modernism, right? Well, I'm telling you that right now we can pretty much stop post modernism from this moment forward. There's no point to it anymore. With "The Wedding of River Song" it reached its moment of sublimity, and any further instance of post modernism won't be able to measure up to what's come before.

(As some fans of message boards seem to have failed to notice, it works so well because it's just as legitimately "the first question" in-universe as it is to us, watching the programme--Who am I? is the most basic of philosophical questions.)

So, yeah. "Let's Kill Hitler" was still awful, so for me "The Wedding of River Song" wasn't good enough to redeem the season as a whole. But it was a lovely cap to the sequence of solid episodes we've had throughout September.

I

*I want to state for the record that I don't think the RTD formula for a season-arc is a bad thing, just that after doing it five series in succession, it was time for a change. The one constant of Doctor Who is change, in every aspect of its storytelling, and I think it would have been no more advisable for Moffat to stick to the RTD format once a new era of the programme began than it would have been for RTD to pick up in 2005 with the Cartmel Master Plan (or, egads, to have pursued the idea of the Doctor being half-human) and have had episodes be 25 minutes long. And for that matter, of course, there's the obvious point that Moffat didn't want to replicate what RTD had been doing any more than RTD wanted to replicate what JNT and Andrew Cartmel had been doing during their own tenure.

Spectrum

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:51:00 +0000

So, something I've noticed about Boy developmentally in the past few weeks. When it comes to spectra, he doesn't see them as polar. He doesn't see every move away from one end of the spectrum as a move toward the other. He sees each gradation as its own discrete point.

For instance, likes and dislikes. He doesn't think of "love" as simply a more intense version of "like". He refused to try cantaloupe because "I don't like that." Well, he was asked, how can you know if you like it without trying it? This was irrefutably logical, so he tried it (after waiting till all adults had left him alone, so they wouldn't see him try it). A few minutes later, he was discovered busily gobbling down cantaloupe. "I love it!" See? was the response, I told you you might like it if you tried it. "Oh no," he said, in that entirely unironic, pompous manner he has of correcting others, which he can only have developed from being the oldest child (or, um, from having a pair of oldest children for parents), "I didn't say, 'I like it.' I said I love it."

Or heat. Heat is my favourite. As far as he's concerned, there are four different grades of temperature: cold, cool, warm and hot. And when something is getter "cooler", that doesn't necessarily mean the temperature is lowering; nor is it necessarily rising when something gets "warmer"--instead, the temperature is simply moving closer to "cool" or "warm" respectively. So on a blisteringly hot day, when the rain clouds roll in and the temperature mercifully drops from the high nineties to the low eighties, "Oh, Dad, don't you love it when it gets warmer?" Or when his ice lolly starts to melt--"Oh no! My popsicle's getting cooler!"

I

Production value

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Racey) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:46:00 +0000

For whatever reason, Lisa and I have decided to sample more new shows this season than we normally do--Ringer, The Playboy Club, Pan Am, Revenge, Terra Nova, Up All Night and a couple of others. They've been okay so far, but nothing has been really standout so far.

But one thing has been consistent--poor production values. The pilot of Ringer had a scene of two people out in a speed boat, with absolutely horrible bluescreening (or greenscreening, I suppose) of the background behind the boat, and then, when one of them jumped off the boat into the sea, a splashing sound that was entirely out of sync with the splash itself. Later in the same episode, a particularly weird shot had Sarah Michelle Gellar's face filling the right half of the screen, while the left half contained the crowded theatre that was behind her--except the two elements looked like they'd been extraordinarily cheaply composited together, like the cover of an urban fantasy or teen novel. What made this really odd was that the previous shot had established quite clearly that Gellar in fact really was sitting in amongst the crowd.

The Playboy Club had a ride in the car that, again, had a horribly greenscreened background, worse than you'll see in most sitcoms.

And Revenge featured two sequences of what were meant to be other footage: first, an excerpt from a news report, and second, spy footage shot through someone's window, and then enhanced to reveal the faces of the two people who had been unknowingly caught on film having an affair. Except no attempt was made to make either sequence look like it was alien to the programme. Both were shot on the exact same film stock and given the exact same filter as the show's general footage--news footage of a trial, or a zoomed-in, enhanced image of two people kissing, looked just as defined and crisp as every other moment of the show.

Seriously, it's like TV is warping back to 1990.

I'm assuming there's a general trend behind this--budgetary pressures or time constraints. But it's really distracting, and it's not something I want to see continue.

I