The guilty party in The Innocents

'The Innocents' is a 1961 British gothic psychological horror film starring Deborah Kerr, based on the 125-year-old novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, with a screenplay smeared with the buttery fingerprints of Truman Capote and, to a lesser extent, John Mortimer. The psychological underpinnings of the film's screenplay have made it the subject of numerous critical and scholarly essays, particularly in the area of film theory and it was selected by The Guardian as one of the 25 best horror films ever made.

Quite a pedigree. Which makes you wonder who the hell am I to wade in with my pennyworth.

And it's quite a simple criticism really, having rewatched it a few days ago. And it has nothing to do with 'psychological underpinnings' (can you tell I culled much of that from Wikipedia'?) but from a writerly perspective. I've mulled on why it simply does not work for me as a film (and, I seem to dimly remember, as a book). 

There's somebody missing.

Let's just precis the first act. Miss Giddens (Kerr) becomes governess to two orphans on a large country estate, the previous incumbent having died. Whilst her charges are generally angelic, she grows disturbed by their occasional odd, and oddly adult, behaviour. She is also disturbed by disembodied voices and apparitions she—and only she—witnesses. She concludes that these are the ghosts of her predecessor and her lover and are in possession of the children so they can physically continue their relationship. She determines to rescue them from this possession.

And therein lies my problem. What on earth would make Debs come to such a bonkers conclusion as a first guess? The kids are playing up and there are ghosts around. There's nothing, nada, zilch, zip that links the two. Not a smidgen of a suggestion unless you cook it up in your own mind.

The only way that I would buy this line of reasoning in any way, shape or form is if either she had exhausted all other possibilities, or somebody put the idea in Miss Giddens' head. It is too great a leap for somebody to make, at least in one step, and I'm not sure what the 'other possibilities' are here as I'm inclined to tick the 'unrelated' box and deal with each issue separately. Which makes me think we need somebody whispering this concept into Giddens' shell-like.

Okay, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was published decades after James wrote his story, and wasn't the go-to in Hollywood when the film was made as it was when, say, Star Wars was being story-boarded, but even so... it describes established story elements rather than inventing them afresh. The mentor has existed for ever.

Without a mentor, possibly an unreliable mentor, to plant the idea of possession in the governess's mind I'm just left unempathetic and unengaged as she goes off on a bonkers one. Maybe that's the idea: horror movie as clinical observation of somebody's cheese sliding off their cracker. But I always regard the main character as being my proxy in the storyworld, as the eyes I see that world through. Their going mad means my going mad. That makes it my cheese sliding off my cracker. No dice.

When I first learnt story structure under an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (okay, a writer of an Oscar-nominated short), one of the many things that stuck in my mind (far less red wine had flowed under the bridge) was that protagonists' thought processes must be clear and reasoned, even if, say, driven by gut instinct, whereas antagonists can display leaps of logic worthy of a wuxia hero. Bond must show his workings, whereas only Blofeld's allowed to act like a loose cannon.

How much better, then, to have a mentor figure whispering in Miss Giddens' ear: when the children act like that, they're not the children, they're possessed by the spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, and for Miss Giddens to come to think, slowly, over the course of the second act: that's ridiculous, but wait, that does accord with what's happening, and there it is again, that's the only conclusion, it can't be anything else, the children... they're possessed, I have to help them...

Truman! Truman!! We're gonna need a rewrite...

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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.

Medium rare

I've been published, I've been podcast, and now - a whole new medium - I'm going to be performed on stage...

Actually, I don't know if I'm going to be performed proper, or just read out with immense panache, but either way, the Delta Literary Arts Society have taken my flash The Ultimate Vegan Curry for their "horror/sci-fi themed dramatized event, Killer Verse" and will do with it as they please. Something wonderful, I trust.

And, in case you're wondering, the delta in question is, I think, of the Fraser River just south of the (genuinely, I'm not just saying it) wonderful city of Vancouver.

If you go, let me know how it goes.

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Click on the images or search 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.

An end to history

A meta-posting today: a post about and that leads you to another post, in this case the Public Domain Review's essays, and specifically Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge's Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments.

Not just because it deals with fantastika, and therefore falls under the very wide, though not always watertight, umbrella of this blog.  And not simply because the Public Domain Review's essays are consistently engaging and thought-provoking and deserving of your attention.  But because it throws up an odd parallel with the world of science fiction.

You see, there was a time when there were sounds we had never heard, sounds that could not conceivably have been heard then.  Every time a new instrument was invented, it created a new, never-before-heard, sound.  Hell, if you want to be impossibly fine-grained about it, every time a new instrument was made, it created new sounds.

Even in my lifetime - and I think RA Moog Inc must have been hard at work on the Mini Moog Model B prototype when I took my first breath - each new wheezy analogue or early digital device like the Fairlight had a specific recognisable sound quality, a warmth or a iciness or a razor-sharpness, that gave bands distinct identities.  But now, digital synthesizers (are they even synthesizers given that suggests processing pre-existing elements?) can create any sound imaginable, starting as they do from abstract parameters.  All of Patteson and Loughridge's instruments - we can hear them now, and without having to stick needles into felines to boot.

And what does this have to do with science fiction, other than I'm very fond of a bit of kosmische musik burbling away as I write?  Well, we live on a planet with pretty much every square metre of dry land now explored.  Maybe there is a lost city or two under jungle vines, but no undiscovered continents or even islands. We know what's over every horizon.  In space, too, we know the Moon and Mars are just rocks and dust, and the ones too far to ever reach are balls of frozen methane and ammonia.  There's nothing out there.  We are alone.  We have been everywhere we can ever go, just as we've heard every sound we can ever hear.  My lifetime has been one of closing down possibilities, an end to history if not the end to history.

Which is, I continue to tell myself, why I write speculative fiction because that's the only place left for adventure and am not, say, training to be an astronaut.

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Click on the images or search 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.

Tell Nietzsche that I'm just doing the plumber

There's been a lot of heat and noise created over the last few months by artificial intelligence in general, and ChatGPT in particular.  That's certainly true from the perspective of one who pitches speculative fiction tales into the mouth of the beast that is semi-professional publishing - every site has suddenly started asking for confirmation of the author's humanity - but, whatever your point of view, AI is probably upsetting the apple cart, then picking the least bruised ones off the floor to eat whilst grinning at you in a way that says there's damn all you can do about it and you both know it.

Like mushrooms or Hitler, ChatGPT has sprung up and made its presence felt in a shockingly tight timescale: it was only released on the last day of November 2022, and by mid-March 2023 the CEO said they were "a little bit scared" of what they'd created.  I'm that far behind with even my most up-to-date podcasts - what will the world be like when I get to listen to this week's More or Less?!

But I think we've been here before. Whether the video nasty hysteria, mutually assured destruction, or the seemingly permanent occupation of the number one spot by the ghastly (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, it only seems bad because we can't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But, in this case, I'm not even sure we're in a tunnel.

You see, I argue we've actually been in a world of machines that can speak intelligently for some time, and to a degree that may surprise.  Calling the first (and, to be honest, only) witness for the prosecution... Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now, say what you like about about bonkers Freddy - being dead, it's not as if he's going to sue - but there does seem to be a consensus that the guy was a genius, with an estimated IQ of 180.  And, as a genius, we should dwell on his pronouncements and consider them deeply.  Words such as these, picked pretty much at random from his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (GD's review: "It's like Jesus, but cooler"), which I'm currently working my way through:

• "I wish that the earth shook with convulsions when a saint and a goose mate together."
• "And when all footholds disappear, you must know how to climb upon your own head: how could you climb upwards otherwise?"
• "They have put all the faults and weaknesses of mankind between themselves and me - they call this a 'false flooring' in their houses."

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think these are qualitatively different from the drivel called 'predictive text' that we've had to battle against for years now.  The one that sticks in my mind was when I texted the good lady wife with 'I'm just doing the' - washing-up, I think - and my phone's best suggestion follow up word was 'plumber'. QED: genii produce gnomic bollocks indistinguishable from mobile phone predictive text.

So, what to conclude? Maybe we're actually regressing? Perhaps it's actually taken years to produce levels of artificial intelligence on a par with most humans, because whilst we may not have IQs that'll win world titles when consistently produced by three darts, our intelligence is of a messy, hard-to-describe as an algorithm sort, coloured by random noise, gut feeling, emotion, sentiment, cognitive bias, and an ability to compensate and make allowances for all those self-same things in our fellow human beings, the ones that don't run like machines.

Or that bonkers Freddy was actually bonkers and if it sounds like gibberish, it's just that. I know which one I think is true.

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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.

Four out of seven ain’t bad

A couple of weeks ago a small package wrapped up in brown paper came through the letterbox and turned out to have a couple of complementary copies of the latest edition of NewCon Press’s Best of British Science Fiction.  And very nice to see my name at the top of the list, even if only for alphabetical reasons. Regardless, it does give me a small tingling of pride and assurance I must be getting something right some of the time. My fourth appearance since the series launched in 2017 (with the 2016 edition; I still find the retrospective titling confusing - the Car of the Year gets announced that April, and if a sci-fi best of can’t be forward looking, what can?). 

The book launch will be live across Planet Earth on YouTube at 7.30pm Tuesday 25th July.  Hope to see you there.

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Click on the images or search 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.

New Kids on the Block

Apparently, a cosmorama is an exhibition of perspective pictures, typically of famous landmarks or cityscapes, a sort of static Imax cinema screen image from when cinema was just misspelled Ancient Greek.  Who knew?

But Cosmorama is also a new online magazine that's been putting short speculative fiction for free on their website since late last month, and my story, Some of us are Going on a Bear Hunt, of how Kamala, a call centre operator, outsmarted the bigots, has been selected to join them.  Look out for it.

I wish them well.

#

Click on the images or search 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.

The winner or the game?

You know that feeling when you realise other people, who look and act much like you, are utterly different on a fundamental level, and you never even suspected?  I’ve just had one of those moments.

It came, in part, after reading this gambit on a post by Michael J Moore on the SFWA’s ever-excellent ‘The Art of Writing’ blog: “You write speculative fiction for the same reason you’ve read or watched it your entire life. There’s something inside of you that craves tales of relatable characters overcoming adversity.”

MJ, if I can call him that, just throws it out there as a given, as so obvious we can all sign up to the sentiment and have fun developing the argument from there.  But for me the words rang false.  There’s an insecurity, a sense of needing affirmation, seeking it out vicariously through stories, in his claim that I don’t recognise, at least not in myself.  But who’s the odd one out here - MJ or me?

Putting aside that the claim doesn’t say anything special about speculative fiction - all fiction should be about main characters overcoming hurdles - I write (but, to be honest, barely read) speculative fiction because of the ideas, the what-ifs, the how the world may switch if you altered a line on the list of ingredients.  Dick’s ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’ is a perfect example.  The relatable character overcoming adversity bit is just a vehicle for more fundamental philosophising.  Which is rarely there.  Hence my general reluctance to read things which are more-often-than-not overwhelmingly ho-hum, making me turn instead to things like non-fiction which prompt the disquieting speculating which drives my writing.

The other prompt for this posting comes after watching the comedy Fast and Furious 9 (it is a comedy? yes? there are police vans with ‘Interpol’ on them).  In this, two characters - don’t ask me who; there’s a Vincent Diesel (nominative determinism?) involved, and neither were him, that’s about all I remember; I slept through bits - speculate on why they’re still alive after so much jeopardy and danger.  They fluff they opportunity to conclude they must be recurring characters in a movie franchise - the braver, meta-, Deadpool-alike choice - and simply decide they’re invincible.  So arrogant, so brash, so… American.

Maybe that's the difference?

Here in Europe, we watch America in much the same way as we rubberneck accidents on the motorway: with a sense of grim, morbid fascination, knowing we shouldn’t be looking and that it slows our own journeys, but also that we didn’t ask for it to happen, so if fate and fortune throw a blackly, bleakly comic carnival sideshow our way, what are we meant to do?  I’m all for putting up screens so you can’t see the gory details.  Would work for traffic accidents too.

Most of those involved in speculative fiction are American: that’s who publishes most stories, that’s where I mainly submit - and, without going back and checking, where I have most success.  But I refuse to write like an American, except in a basic sense - 'realize', 'hood', 'trunk', and so forth, but I have learnt that a demi-john is a 'carboy' (who knew?).

Looking back at editors’ feedback, I can’t help but sense occasions where culture clash has come across as po-faced literalism, preventing someone ‘getting it’. Remember that story, the one the (American, SFWA professional-rate) publication hated with the feedback:

"I'm sorry, I found this story unsavory and unpleasant with a disturbing ending.  I think at certain points it was attempting to be clever or rough-edged but was just distasteful.  Written with undeniable skill, it is nonetheless full of nasty, evil people.  While it is a good set-up, unfortunately they win, going against the sort of story we prefer, where evil doesn't win.".

even though one of the characters was written with Ben "Paddington-fucking-Bear" Wishaw in mind to play (in your head, obviously.)  Well, it's coming out later in the year through the well-regarded British outfit PS Publishing. Looks like they got the joke - and the fact that the end was meant to be disturbing: if evil never won, it's meaningless when good does so.

As George Bernard Shaw said, we’re two countries separated by a common language.  To Americans it’s all about the winner, to Europeans - the British, at least, or maybe just me? - it’s about the game.  In speculative fiction, just as in the rest of life.  Yes, it's a gross generalisation, but one that captures a truth, I think.

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Click on the images or search 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.