Content not product

One of my stock phrases along with 'you get what you pay for' and 'I'll sleep when I'm dead' is 'content not product'.

I started to get a reasonable amount of disposable income at the height of the DVD/CD-era when we thought that filling our houses with shiny data-packed discs was the height of sophistication.  So I did.  Nowadays the kids know better and by putting everything on the cloud or online or wherever it lives its virtual life we've ditched the bathwater (the shiny disc) and kept the baby (the movie).

Hence I still have a mass of DVDs that I'm watching once more and recycling via the charity shop.  Latest one to stop off at my DVD player en route to Age UK was Alien.

Of course it's a stonewall classic.  Tight story, brilliant direction, lit superbly, but for me the standout is the production design.  Not so much HR Giger's alien [RIP Hans Rudolf - only just found out now when I Googled to check his spelling) but the Nostromo.  It's grimy and real.  This, to me, is what a spaceship should look like; there seems a sense that the Nostromo would exist even without the story, Parker whinging about shares, whereas I'm not sure the Millennium Falcon has any reason to exist except as a story device.

Although I've yet to get one through the quality filter of Neil Clarke and his ilk of SFWA-accredited editors, I have a series of stories set within the Galactic Merchant Marine; until I rewatched Alien I didn't realise how much of Ridley Scott's milieu had rubbed off on my efforts.

However, this isn't all hagiographic.  I do have one gripe and that's the technology.  It's not the miniaturisation that they didn't see coming - it's all big lit-up buttons and clunky green text and Tom Skerritt's captain has to go into a separate room to talk to 'mother' whereas now it'd be on a handheld.  (I briefly worked in aerospace R&D and that all looked like Flash Gordon, although it was for the company reckoned to be the last to work in imperial measurements in the UK so go figure).

No, it's the fact that they didn't seem to think that computers would work out the answers for you but instead they'd give you more raw data, quicker.  At one point Ripley stares at a screen cascading with ones and zeros as if that was what we'd be looking at in the twenty second century, having to do the mental legwork for ourselves.

Actually, I find all of that forgivable - power of hindsight and all that - but what, for me, goes off the hokum scale is the the self-destruct mechanism, although they're not the first or last to use that old chestnut.

Think about it.  You design a ship - a commercial tug vehicle, not some black-ops military vehicle carrying state secrets or bleeding edge technology - would you give it a self-destruct mechanism?  As the client would you specify that in your spec?  As the designer would you add it in as a nice-to-have?  If there wasn't a story to tell would it be there?  I vote for 'no'.

Ships can be scuttled, and I think it's this extrapolation from sea-going to space-going craft that's responsible for the modern-day equivalent to the deus ex machina.  But a) in a 2D world (which is what the surface of the sea is in effect) there is far more need to remove a counter from the board than there would be in the 3D world of space; and b) correct me, but I don't think any ship has a dedicated mechanism built-in for scuttling?

I may be wrong - in the best traditions of the interweb I have, of course, done no research whatsoever...

It's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to...

Yes, it's my birthday, but I'm want to keep this as narcissism-free as possible.

As anybody with opposable thumbs living in the twenty-first century will know birthdays bring congratulatory messages generated by dates saved into Facebook and the like from friends and corporate behemoths wanting your business alike.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Actually, my point isn't about the corporate behemoths; I know I'm not really in the thoughts of Pizza Express.  It's the rarely-seen friends and acquaintances who ping off a message based on an automated prod from their digital manservant.  It feels so... contractual obligation.

But wasn't it ever thus?  When a card arrived through the post (if you're under twenty-five ask a grown-up) from anybody other than immediate family I never thought that that was all their own work.  No, of course the date was written down in a diary and without that the card would never have arrived.  So what's changed?  Other than the fact that we no longer have to remember to look at the diary, it reminds us...

But is that what I'm objecting to?  The fact that the burden of having to remember to check is taken off our shoulders?  That you'll no longer be able to tell those who remembered to check from those that didn't (maybe because I'd always be in the latter camp).  Is this one reason more why life feels ever-more diluted, downgraded, made greyer and blander?

But shouldn't it sound like progress, never having to remember to check?  Where else could we apply this principle?  I could really do with bins that put themselves out.  And (being male) I'm hugely reluctant to go to the doctor - could my body decide for me?  From where I'm sitting I can see shelves of books, a pile of DVDs, and a PVR that always has about 30 hours for me to catch up with.  There must be a better way than going through them line by line, frame by frame?  Can technology distill them, give me the impression of having read and watched them?

But isn't that it?  Am I not wishing somebody to live my life for me?  Given life's inherent pointlessness (feel free to argue teleology if you like, but I've never bought it) it's absurd to try to create a short-cut to a non-event.  I may as well be a Cartesian brain in a vat...

Which, on your birthday, sounds like not a bad idea...

Spam, spam, spam, spam

Should have spent the weekend humming the Pythons' ode to spam - but, as I have an eight-year old rendering the Disney-saccharine songs of Frozen to burrow into my brain, that isn't my current earworm of somebody else's choice  - I didn't.

Why?  Well, taking an occasional - very, very occasional, probably the first time in two or three years - look at my email spam for a completely unrelated reason, I found that Daily Science Fiction had picked up my story 'My Avatar has an Avatar' more than a month before.

Naturally chuffed as, having chosen to target only SFWA-accredited markets, this was my first sci-fi short story acceptance in, oh, about two years.  Also provides a marker against the growing evidence that I can't actually write.  Of course, I like to believe that it's more a question of editors signing up to my particular and singular vision but, nevertheless, it was looking a bit bleak.  So regards to Jonathan an Michele at Daily Science Fiction; toffs, scholars and gents both.

But it did get me thinking.  What if spam filters weren't just on email?  What if you had them on your brain?  How would you set them?  What would be the effects?  How would it impact on your daily life?  There's a story there.

Maybe the mental firewalls are there already.  It would explain why I don't retain everything the good lady wife says to me (or, perhaps that's the early onset dementia).  Is there a whole layer of reality which we're missing?  Matrix-like, is there more to the world than we're aware of, a cross-cognitive equivalent of the visual blind spot?

I'll dwell on such thoughts and see if a story emerges... 

Close Encounters - just how sci-fi is it?

Re-watched Close Encounters yesterday and whilst there are, as a writer, elements about it that I just love - Roy Neary seeing shapes in the shaving foam is one of the subtlest act 1/2 breaks I know - there are still a whole load of things in it that don't make sense.

Why do the aliens send Earth co-ordinates, a totally artificial, man-made (literally) nomenclature?  How big are those alien ships? they seem to be either huge or the size of a car, depending on what SS feels like; Father Dougal would never cope.  And I've never quite understood the topography of Devil's Tower, there seems to be lots of climbing just to get to the bottom...

Matthew Dicks has some other, more major issues with it which, as a father of two I should share but oddly don't, well argued as his piece is.  I think the problem is with me rather than Matt...

But the reason for my mentioning my re-watching of the Speilberg classic is that, ask anyone whether this is sci-fi and they'd say yes, each and every one of them.  But is it?  It's about space and aliens, but science?  Even Truffaut wanders around saying it's important but he doesn't know why, and the officer in charge of the supposed gas leak evacuation tells him it isn't science.

This isn't about differentiating between hard and soft sci-fi, but noting that most sci-fi now doesn't even pretend to bother with science, not even a black box of gizmos that the mad professor has perfected to prevent the Zartrons from over-running the Bronx.  At least the (pseudo-)science, even if delivered as a deus ex machina, of the 1950s Blob-era B-movies made sense in terms of powering on the story.

Ask yourself this, can any movie set in the space, or in the future, not be sci-fi?  Is the flexibility of sci-fi - anything at all as long as it's got aliens, or is set in the future or another planet - actually its undoing?

I've got nothing against any of it, it's what I write, but I rarely find myself looking up any science.  My strongest science fiction was a detective story that involved poisons and placebos.  We need another name for science-free sci-fi.

Hokum-fiction?  Or is that too close to the bone?

Lest we forget...

Apart from the Finnish Iron Sky I'm struggling with decent sci-fi from non English-speaking nations and, if memory serves, even that was in English...

Pourquoi?

...and still, sort of, on the subject of working out where stories go wrong...

It was brought home to me recently how much of a snob I am when I found myself watching the Euro-drivel that is Salamander.  Like Britain's car parks, this fails to work on so many levels.  Why are the sixty-six senior figures holding material in their bank safes which can be used to blackmail them? why not simply burn it all?  Why does the inside man not simply empty the safes himself rather than mark them for people tunneling in from the sewers?  Why doesn't the perpetrator simply send it all to the police or the press if he's after the effect of the information going public - resignations and suicides - not money?

But my point is this: if this weren't subtitled I wouldn't be watching it.  Okay, so in part it's down to trusting the judgment of the good people at BBC4 who have to fill their Eurocrime slot somehow.  But, really it's snobbery.  To put it bluntly, I know that the best, possibly only way to get to watch Midsomer Murders is to dub it into Danish the subtitle it.

So why bring it up here?  Well, we're awash with subtitled crime, but I'm really struggling to think of any decent foreign language sci-fi, SE Asian monster movies apart.  And it was Jules Verne who (partially) invented the genre.

Any suggestions?

The Adjustment Bureau - in need of adjustment

This was going to be a quick post, commenting that I'm currently reading the 1959 Philip K Dick classic Time Out of Joint in which Ragle Gumm's middling life in middle America is disturbed, amongst other things, when a soft-drink stand disappears, replaced by a small slip of paper with the words "SOFT-DRINK STAND" printed on it and how that seems to be utterly prescient of what happens to photos on websites when links are broken.  Particularly websites designed by me.

But Mr Dick made another of his frequent crossings of my path when I finally caught up with the movie The Adjustment Bureau.

My initial reaction when the credits came up was that it must have been made during a writers' strike, but checking the web shows that it's a reasonably well-regarded movie.

Well, I thought it was a mess.

I perversely enjoy watching films that (I think) don't work in order to think about where they don't work.  And this one has taken a certain amount of musing.  Now I haven't read the Dick original, which is (crucially) a short story rather than a novel, so I think much of the film story can be attributed to the filmmakers rather than the late Mr Dick.  Which is exactly as it should be.

I've come to the conclusion that the root problem is all about point of view.  When you tell a story (sf or otherwise) you make choices about your point of view.  If you're going to live inside the head of your hero then, to a large degree, you don't need to worry about the methods or motivations of your antagonists.  If your point of view is more universal - the all-seeing eye looking down - then you need to see the chess game from both angles.  (This is all a rule of thumb, of course).

But, whatever you go for, stick to it.  I like cheesecake.  I like beer.  But I wouldn't want them mixed.  Either tell the story from one point of view or the other.  Mixing them just leaves biscuit base and cream cheese floating in my brown ale.

The Adjustment Bureau wanted its cake both eaten and left intact on the plate.  Most of the time it was telling the story from the Matt Damon character's point of view, with these inexplicable entities messing with his passage through time and space.  If they'd stuck to this then they didn't need to justify or explain the actions of the antagonists.

But they didn't.

As soon as you have scenes of the antagonists discussing their plans you've taken the point of view away from the hero.  You've become a disembodied, objective observer looking down on all the action.  And if their plans don't make sense then the audience starts to disengage.  And I was left utterly unconvinced by the logic and rationale of those trying to mess with Mr Damon's head but simultaneously feeling that I should have some understanding.

Maybe the reason the writers were so reticent, making their antagonists middlemen who only had part of the masterplan, was because the hell that was to be avoided - happily married mediocrity - didn't seem to be a hell at all.  Hasn't Hollywood taught us that love conquers all, is the most important thing?  Jason Bourne would have laughed in the face of the choice and tried to have (the apparently mutually inclusive and reinforcing) both.  I needed (and felt Matt Damon needed) more convincing that he couldn't have the girl and the career other than by the trilby tribe telling him so.

So would editing out all the scenes without Matt Damon in have worked for anybody other than Mr Damon and his agent?

Probably not.  You see, when you have a hero like that he stands proxy for us, he's an everyman.  And as soon as you think why didn't you do that? or why did you do that? he becomes less of an everyman.  When the audience have a whole list of questions of the 'who are you guys?' and 'where do you come from?' variety which don't get asked when the hero and the people getting in his way get face time together (or the hero fails to justify not asking the killer questions) then the story trips and falls.  The bottom line is that the everyman hero is us, and anything that breaks that link breaks the illusion.

Which takes us back to Ragle Gumm, don't you think?

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Also on the subject of rubbishing that which numerous others have found wonderful I've also just abandoned Nicola Griffith's 'Slow River'; you can find my review at Goodreads.com.  Again, I appear to be in a very small minority...