It's Chinatown, Mike

I used to write screenplays.

No, don't look for me on IMDB, because I'm not there.  I wrote six, sold four; two on spec to, and two on commission for British indie production companies that were little more than a couple of blokes and a business card looking for other people's cash.  Merge the three companies I worked with (the two commissions were for the same people), and I think you could fit all involved into a mid-sized people carrier.  That said, I found out years later that Ric Young ("Too much to drink, Doctor Jones?") was the Los Angeles end of the one operation that didn't seem to be completely built on sand.

My only other sighting of fame and fortune in the distance, heading away from me, out of reach, was a pitch meeting with a freelance development executive with ties to DNA and Working Title.  I knew that because we sat in a lobby with two doors leading off, one marked 'DNA', the other 'Working Title'.  After I had pitched something along the lines of The Thing set in Afghanistan, we talked about what else we did with our lives.  I tried to make human resources sound exciting; he told me he managed Keane.  'Nuff said.

The reason I bring this up is only partially through mystification as to where it all went wrong.  There is a school of thought that Robert Towne's script for Chinatown is the apogee of the screenwriter's craft, the perfect screenplay.  I'm not here to agree or disagree, but to give a slightly different take.

Which is this: if Chinatown had never been made, and an unknown writer were to turn in exactly those words, would it be recognised as such?  Would a producer say that any change would be a move slightly down the slope of quality?  Would it be declared fit for purpose, fit for production, without so much as a note?

I don't think so.  The idea that a first draft could be the best draft, that the writer has found his or her way around all the problems in the most effective and efficient way is an anathema.  There are always changes to be made, and its how the creative process demonstrates its worth.  By people sticking their oar in and putting their stamp on things.

So, with that logic, couldn't Chinatown have been tweaked some more?  Well, yes, it could, but the point is that it had been tweaked enough.  Every draft contains arbitrary choices, which are neither better nor worse than other arbitrary choices.  What gets made or printed is where you were when the music stopped.  And, if you're an unknown, you're going to get tweaked, even if those amendments blur the vision, muddle the narrative, or skew the arc.

The opposite end of this problem was brought home to me by 'The Homecoming' by Mike Resnick in Galaxy's Edge 48.  Whilst this is still the latest issue, you can read it for free.  If you're stumbling over this blog in months and years to come, I guess that link will take you elsewhere.

Now, I have a lot of time for Mike Resnick's work, and I'm well aware that he is both no longer here to respond, and that he put a lot back whilst he was.  To the best of my knowledge, he was one of the good guys.  I've read stories by him that have stood out as exemplars.  But I have an issue with this particular story, which is fine, but... God, it could be cut by 50%, or more.  It's padded like Mister Creosote on a Chesterfield.  There's a good little story trying to get out, but it's a flash at best.  Oh, for an editor with a good blue pencil.

You'll recall that I have a story hovering on the edge of one particular SFWA-recognised publication.  Its fate is still undecided, 'under consideration'.  It's been subjected to three sets of notes and is far better for it.  In each and every rewrite they've asked me to tighten and tighten, much as a football coach asks his team to up the tempo, regardless of whether he has anything else tactical to offer.  And, like a tired footballer, I've wondered how the hell to manage it, and then found what's required.

And yet, I read stories like 'The Homecoming' with their languid pacing and verbal redundancies and can't help thinking how those editors telling me to 'make it run faster' would react; that, just as an unknown's Chinatown would get copious notes, so the works of the big beasts are far more liable to be ticked through with a minimum of a proof and a polish, regardless of their objective quality.  If I had put my name on this and sent it out, I'm not confident I'd get any takers in its current form, not even from the semi-professional market.  I know many won't like me saying that, but I can't help thinking it.

There seems to be only one solution to this conundrum.  I must continue to battle to get myself on to a higher level, where I'll be better able to get stories into print without so much critical scrutiny.  And you, dear reader, should focus your attention on reading the works of relative unknowns, who have had to go through the mill to prove their worth.  So, in that spirit, could I recommend these two worthy works? 

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Most heinous

Here are a couple of offensive images from a movie that may be naggingly, tip-of-the-tongue familiar to many.  But which is the most egregious?

Yes, it's the top one, of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, being objectified for the ogling delectation of men.  That's what society decrees, and we have to fall into step with the groupthink that cannot be anything other than right and proper. Wash my brain out with napalm jelly if I were to think anything else.

Well, I fear you may have to prepare some jelly (with cream or ice cream, really don't mind) because I can't help disagreeing. 

And it's not because Fisher's get-up is consistent with the story, and what Jabba's character would do with her, displaying her as a hands-off-she's-mine trophy, although that's all true. The instant riposte to that is that it's not as though this is documentary (sorry, die-hard Star Wars fans); the film-makers have as much control over what story they chose to tell as well as how to tell it.

No, the reason I find the second more offensive than the first (I'm not even sure I do find it offensive, but I recognise that others do and, more importantly, the actress found it uncomfortable) is that the first is a value judgment whereas the second is an objective error.  Large animals running wild in a vast desert with nothing to eat or drink?  With no other links in a food chain, not a blade of grass or a mouse?  It's simply not plausible.  (I have similar issues with The Empire Strikes Back's wampa and exogorth, by the way, but at least they have a point in the story).

Speculative fiction is about consequences - if we were to seed the clouds with sea salt to cool the planet, or refreeze the Arctic, would those be isolated effects or would the ripples have unintended consequences?  I'm not pretending this kind of hard sci-fi is a strength of mine - and I'm hugely admiring of those than can pull the trick off, keeping a plausible handle on exactly how the ripples cause their own ripples - but I like to think that I don't populate my fiction with such utter clangers just because they look nice.

Having waded through various treatises on ethics from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics onwards during a degree and a half in philosophy, I've always been fascinated how some ethical rules seem to be objective constants set in stone whilst others reflecting the fashion. Taking - of life, of property - seems to be objectively wrong. Sexual ethics, however, tend to reflect the times. Right now, right here, same sex relationships are acceptable whereas relationships involving females only just past puberty are not. Chose another place and/or another time and those rules reverse. Unlike the ones over murder or theft. Odd. Like they're of distinctly different categories.

A lot depends on whether you think we're progressing towards an ideal state or just meandering through future history with no particular place to go. I favour the latter. Right now, we're going through a puritan phase.  In a hundred years time, who's to say that things won't come full circle and we'll all be signing up to the schools of Islamic jurisprudence's historic view that nine years of age is good enough for girls , looking back on today's sense of right and wrong with bafflement. Indeed, some Americans seem to be trying to get back to this 'golden age' already.

One of the drags on human progression is, of course, human nature itself. We can either pretend that it's suitable to take home to meet your parents when it's not, or recognise it for what it is, warts and all. The internet is a very good litmus test. It's basically a porn delivery system that can also aggregate your debts and investments and either make your mailman redundant or give him musculoskeletal issues carrying packages, all depending. It reflects a basic truth about our fundamental nature, however distasteful it may be to some - we are sexual beings with sexual needs, despite society's best efforts.

Whenever I hear arguments otherwise, I'm transported back to a documentary I saw twenty, possibly more, years ago following middle-aged female pornographers. I can't quite remember what their game was - peep shows, telephone chat lines, pole dancing - but they were asked, Aren't you exploiting young women. They fell about laughing. No, they answered, we're exploiting middle-aged men with credit cards.

They were being realistic. There are a lot of people being idealistic, or naive, if you prefer. There always was, always will be people like that, but I fear this contagion is spreading, as evidenced in my recognition that society expects me to openly and loudly react to one of those pictures in a way that is orthogonal with human nature.  There's a zealous, puritanical streak to this that I find concerning, and I fear we're in danger of losing sight of what is important.

This is why we've ended up in a world where the makers of Pixar's Soul made considerable investment ensuring that the film’s cultural reference points struck just the right note but left the story a confusing mess of bum notes, not necessarily played in the right order. Or, as another example, there's now a move to expunge Donald Trump from Home Alone 2, possibly even replacing him with an adult Macaulay Culkin.  It's not that I'm a Trump supporter - anything but - but this rewriting of history puts me in mind of Stalinist purges.

It also affects people who misstep even accidentally. Take a look at this post from respected (and pro-paying) magazine Fireside. I don't know Pablo Defendini, never had anything to do with him, but he strikes me as being as much a victim, of a hysterical over-reaction in his case, as anyone in this. I hope he's found a safe harbour after this farrago.

Let's take a moment to unpack the precedents set.  Pablo was lax in letting through an inappropriate recording. He has made no effort to defend it. He completely sees it for what it is. But somehow it is on a par with producing and broadcasting it with malice aforethought.

That's not how the world works.  That's why manslaughter is a couple of rungs below murder.  That's why intention is really quite a big issue in legal cases.  And, if you are guilty of what the broadcast accidentally did, to what degree are you guilty of all the other things the broadcast could have done but didn't? If you weren't checking it for racism, you can't have been checking it for every other ism.  Who's to say that it wasn't treacherous, treasonous or inciting a riot?  Why be satisfied with limiting Pablo's statement to matters of race when his modern-day pillorying could cover so many more thought-crimes.

Donning my other professional hat, the one with 'Kiss me Quick' taped over and replaced by the words 'Human Resources', I'm struggling to see how in Britain this dismissal could be legitimate or appropriate, but concede there are legalities about who is ultimately responsible for what is broadcast. Even if it were, such public acts of shaming slam us straight back into a medieval sensibility, and that's what I find most terrifying.

Yes. I'm striding into tricky territory here, and some would say that I'm the last person who should be embarking on this journey - male, stale and pale as I am. But, as the saying goes, zeal without prudence is frenzy. Just a thought.

#

Search for these on Amazon

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.