Talk is Cheap

Words written 9454

Stories completed 1

Rejections 5

Acceptances 0

Made the ‘what film have you not seen but should have?’ question* harder last night by catching up with Forbidden Planet and, in so doing, filled in another hole in my sci-fi list of things to make and do.

Perhaps it’s watching it through twenty-first century eyes, although I was trying to make allowances, but wasn’t this just an episode of Star Trek with a slightly crass crewing policy?: not a black or female face to be seen.

And not much of the ship made sense in spatial terms – there seemed to be just a bridge in the middle of the saucer but somehow twenty or so men lived and worked in there.  How?  Plus it was so ‘ship’-like that I suspected an early draft was actually set at sea and EXT: OCEAN had been switched to EXT: SPACE.

Yes, the effects were brilliant for the age, but if all the budget went on the effects the it’s lucky that talk is cheap, because there was an awful lot of it in between.  I may have drifted off during one of the set pieces.  And some of the worst B-movie hokum I’ve heard, the zenith or nadir being something about the planet’s former residents lack of ‘physical operationalities’, whatever they are.

I knew the film’s reputation as The Tempest in space, but I saw more of Night of the Demon in it.  That last comment probably says more about me than it, though.

* - still not that hard: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Some humble thoughts on the progress of humanity

Words written 9454

Stories completed 1

Rejections 5

Acceptances 0

One pifflingly small piece of drama from the tail end of last year was a minor battle with the ten year-old over data allowance and limits and how everything that he sees on the interweb - mainly other people playing Minecraft on YouTube - eats away at the amount of ones and zeros that we can suck from the ether each month.

There were a couple of conceptual problems for him in there.  You can tell because his eyes flick elsewhere and he tries to change the subject; no, hold on, that happens hourly.  Firstly, that data is being downloaded even when he isn’t saving it to his hard-drive.  I think he’s clear on that one now.

Secondly, that he should favour pages with text and not so much video if he wants to spend longer on his laptop.  This has generally led to the Xbox being interactive screen of choice with the laptop left untouched and unloved.

My initial middle-aged reactionary reaction was to put it down to the youth of toady, appalling attention spans, inability to concentrate or think or even read, and all this despite exemplary parenting.  But maybe he’s right.

It’s hard to spot the flow of history when you’re moving at tectonic pace, possibly even slower, but humanity is just a work in progress.  Perhaps words, text, what I’m producing right now, are a blind alley?

Think about it.  In the beginning was - no, not the Word - cave paintings.  There was no written language.  There were images.  And what came first?  The written account of the hunt, or the hunters acting it out?

Sure, written language has major advantages.  Those hunters won’t be around forever to act out the killing of the biggest, hairiest mastodon they’d ever seen.  But it seems to me that the human race and my ten year-old have a predilection towards the visual.  And that's directing the flow of history.

Some examples.  Newspapers have become websites where, increasingly, the items are videos not text.  Another, unrepresentative, youth culture example.  About ten years ago I bought a copy of the New Musical Express because it had a free 7” single on it (which I have since regularly tried on eBay without success).  In my day you had to turn the page to finish an article; in the 21^st century that's no longer true even though the pages are smaller, and it’s now mainly pictures.  Extrapolating back, children of the 60s were probably faced with something like The Lancet or Nature when they picked up the NME.  Some would say it shows in the quality of what they produced.

Even warnings on packages have moved from ‘Do Not Swallow’ to pictures of people, hands held out signally 'stop', screaming.

So, will words become redundant?  Are they, like the steam engine or the hat or good manners, a meander in humanity’s progress?  I don’t think so, not completely.  But I do think generations to come will look back at us with our shelves of books and magazines as we do on the Georgians in their periwigs and think, 'why?'.

But, I don’t even think information conveyed by streamed video, even straight into your eyeballs as will surely happen soon, will be the end.  Either technology or evolution will inevitably deliver: thought transference.

And then, perhaps in the 23^rd or 24^th century, all forms of communication outside the skull - words on a page, moving images on a screen, or 3d football matches projected onto your coffee table - will seem quaint.

Perhaps there's not such a pressing need for me to progress with those bookshelves...

The Only Rule is That There is an Exception to Every Rule

Words written: 5414
Stories completed: 1
Rejections: 5
Acceptances: 0

Thought I'd keep a little Bridget Jones-style tally of the year so far so you can see the full horror of writing at the margins...

Meanwhile, I recently posted on the slight embarrassment I often feel in the realm of sci-fi, particularly when it involves dressing up in foam rubber, giving yourself a name by pulling letters out of a scrabble bag lubricated with the odd apostrophe, and spouting hokum.

Well, I realised there's an exception to every rule by watching Armageddon.  Yes, old film; no, never got around to watching it before.  Like I've said, there's a hell of a lot of sci-fi out there.

Not only have I not watched Armageddon before, this was the first example of the oeuvre of Michael Bay that had take place before my eyeballs.  Being an adherent of the Church of Wittertainment I had a more or less fixed view on his output, but I couldn't believe how much shouting there was in the first reel.  Where are they going to go?  Everything was already turned up to eleven and not in a good way.

With story and subtlety at just as much risk as planet Earth, it struck me that Mr Bay had managed to craft a product without blokes with rubber horns or ridged foreheads, with normal names and a minimum of dilithium-crystal-hyperdrive-antigrav-transporter-beam, but that was so patently silly so as to make you squirm.  Even my eight-year old (girl) described it as 'badly filmed', by which I don't think she meant effects and cinematography.  And, if you can't get your story past an eight year-old, what hope is there?

Ten-year old boy, though, loved it - target audience. 

My Year in Books

Those nice people at goodreads.com recently sent me a list of books I read in 2014.

At least, that's what it purports to be.  It's actually a list of books I've reviewed, having read enough of them to review in 2014.  Of the twenty-three books listed I abandoned five without finishing.  I've probably only ever abandoned ten or so books in my life, so I'm not sure what this says about me - impending mortality raising the quality threshold?

Others were tomes that got finished in 2014 - a detailed history of the shire county I used to live in; two reference works on building and property renovation; Hofstadter & Dennett's 'Mind's Eye'.

Of the twenty-three titles, fourteen were fiction.  The subject matter of the non-fiction, over and above local history, architecture and cognitive science were cosmology, economic history, the characteristics of improbable events and Alain de Botton's 'Status Anxiety', which I'm not sure how to categorise, other than as total tosh.  If I had to pick out a highlight it'd be JK Galbriath's 'The Great Crash 1929'.

Of the remaining fiction titles (and, sorry, I'm including '12 Years a Slave', but only because it's a narrative), only four could possibly be described as sci-fi (Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'?), and one, Nicola Griffith's 'Slow River' was one I gave up on as being about as engaging as Ebola, but I'm clearly in the minority judging by goodreads.com ratings.

So, three sci-fi stories read.  Is that good enough for somebody writing sci-fi?

Well, here's the rub.  On the one hand, as a writer you're expected to know your genre.  On the other - and I wish I could remember who I'm quoting - a writer should know a little about a lot, preferably a little about everything.  One of my pet hates is writers having writers as their main character, because that's all they know.  And, at the same time, I'm meant to fit in everything else that a 21st century parent does.

And, remember, as I mused recently, there's so much out there that's sci-fi - or masquerading as sci-fi.

But, as we launch boldly into 2015, we all have good intentions.  I'm giving up ham.  And, I'm going to to read more sci-fi.  My reading strategy - yes, I have one, although I rarely stick to it - will be Gibson, Asimov, Ballard and Dick.  I'll let you know how I do, on both counts.

Happy New Year.

Targets

Like any well brought-up management consultant, I have targets that are specific, measurable, achievable, recorded (if only in my head), and time-bound.

My specific writing target is to sell three stories a year.  Preferably to SWFA-accredited markets, but no matter.  Bottom line is three.  Well, this year I've sold five.

As well as My Avatar Has An Avatar at Daily Science Fiction, and The Lodeon Situation at Fiction Vortex, three acceptances have come in at once, like proverbial hover-buses:

• My flash story Divorced from Reality has been selected for Christina Escamilla Publishing's Welcome to the Future Anthology (and I've been paid already, which is nice)

• Shooting the Messenger (think Homeland meets sci-fi) has been taken by Geminid Press for their Take Me To Your Leader anthology.  It's intended to be the first chapter in a novel called Toefoot, but as I've only managed two and a quarter chapters in about five years, there's no danger of it trying to sneak out before Geminid's book.  I haven't been paid yet, but that's probably because the contract is still in the scanner.  And,

• Domain SF have taken my water-warning story Farndale's Revelation - at least, I think they have; not exactly sure, contractually, what their expression of interest means.

Still, my spreadsheet (like any well brought-up management consultant I love spreadsheets) shows a sea of red at the intersections of story title and publisher - Mister Clarke continues to bat my work back like we're playing Pong - but a few splashes of green on the page give me some heart in carrying on writing.

But would it make that much difference?  Like most corporations, missing targets rarely seems to change the strategy.  I think I'd still be tapping away, bloody-minded, ploughing my own furrow, whatever.

Fisheggs

Captain Kamen slowed the skimmer down to the point where the planet’s surface was no longer a blur and switched the controls to manual.  His pressure suit partially deflated; the control yoke swung over his shoulders and into his hand.  He turned his craft towards the coordinates the Kasstelleeian had given him before he died.  He barrelled on, safe in the thought that his Galactic-issue mark IV magpistol was strapped to his right thigh, three spare clips on his left.

‘Fisheggs,’ Captain Kamen swore softly to himself as he stared into the mouth of the cave system that lay at the coordinates.  The Galetti lay moored within, out of sight of the satellites that swept the sky overhead searching for her.

But that wasn’t what surprised the ageing spacetrooper.  ‘That spaceship… miaowed.’

I have a confession.

I find much sci-fi, possibly most sci-fi, slightly embarrassing.

This isn’t much of a confession, unless you’re trying to write sci-fi and get it published.  Which I am.

I’ve been meaning to write this confession for a while, but have struggled putting it into words, giving it definite form.  Because I’ve struggled with exactly what it is that I find embarrassing.  I’ve tried to write a bit of breast-beating space opera to illustrate what makes me squirm, although it’s nowhere near as bad as I wanted to make it.  I think I must have some kind of quality threshold which I can’t push myself below.

I think at a very surface level it’s authors’ obvious enjoyment of making up names - of spaceships, planets, races, weaponry - over and above deepening character and focussing on story.  George Lucas, for both JarJar Binks and the elements you revealingly focussed on in scrubbing up the earlier films - no, Mos Eisley was never crying out for flurries of little furry creatures, I’m very much thinking of you.

At a more sophisticated level, given sci-fi’s reputation for being a 'genre of ideas', it’s when there is a surfeit of ideas.  Just boy meets girl or black hats versus white hats in space.

‘In space’.  Hold that thought.  Because any pitch with ‘in space’ afterwards become sci-fi, in a way that doesn’t apply to any other genre.  Northanger Abbey, the story of Christ, the wide-mouthed frog joke.  Add ‘in space’ afterwards and they all become sci-fi.  But not real sci-fi.  Just stories wearing sci-fi’s clothes.  In short, there’s too much of it around.

This line of thought has been prompted by Tomorrow’s Worlds, Dominic Sandbrooke’s TV history (? personal walk-though?) of sci-fi.  It’s reasonably engaging stuff, but all a bit random, because it’s such a wide genre that it doesn’t really have much of a history that can be grabbed hold of easily.  Sure, there’s a few milestones - Melieres, Verne, Lt Uhuru - but for the main part it’s a ragbag of Dom’s favourites.

One of the more thought-provoking parts was when Sandbrooke contrasted and compared HG Wells ‘War of the Worlds’ with the US film versions, with the book set in the Surrey stockbroker belt, the stateside versions in the big city.  He quite rightly contrasts the quiet of Surrey’s rolling landscape with the coming of the Martians in a way that doesn’t quite apply to the American versions as the story arc begins to tend towards ‘more is more’.

And it’s this contrast between the everyday, the prosaic, and the alien that makes sci-fi disconcerting.  And disconcerting, I've decided, is what I look for in thought-provoking, adult, idea-driven sci-fi.  And - I think this is where I find sci-fi squirmy - there’s a direct correlation between lack of disconcerting-ness and feelings of silliness.  There’s a disconcerting-shaped hole left behind.

Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s a British or Commonwealth thing.  Maybe it’s a non-Californian thing.  Or maybe it’s something that everybody except Michael Bay shares.  But I’d much prefer a story in which nothing happens except everybody who was left-handed became right-handed and vica versa than the planet blows up.

Captain Kamen, out.

UFOs

I’ve seen a UFO!  Weh-hey!  What are the chances of that?

Let me add some of the detail to the horde of UFO-lore.  I was lying on a beach at the very southern tip of Gran Canaria off the coast of Africa staring at the sky.  Staring at those things that float around in the aqueous humour of your eye, to be honest, letting my focus drift between them and the deep azure of the heavens when I saw it.

There wasn’t a lot to ‘it’.   A dot at the edge of space.  Bright on the side catching the sun; the opposite dark with shadow.  It didn’t pulse, shimmer, shiver or make any movement apart from arcing across from the point I saw it until I lost it over towards the northern horizon.  Arrow straight, it must have taken ten, twelve, fifteen seconds to traverse those ninety or so degrees.  Way faster than a plane and without any contrail, I concluded that I’d seen a satellite.

It also fitted with those satellite trails you sometimes see overlaid on world maps, arcing sinusoidally over the Earth north to south, each pass seeming to move on a few hundred miles whereas its really the Earth that turns beneath.

But then a gull flew over at great height, but not so great that I couldn’t pick out detail, grey and white, the sun catching one side of it, gliding on the Jetstream.  It too arced at velocity in a perfect line - the same line too - until out of sight in exactly the same direction.  But if what I’d seen had been a gull then it had been practically stratospheric.

So, satellite or seagull?  And you thought that I was going to talk about flying discs and little green men…

And this is my point: it’s unidentified; its identity is yet to be established.  And if a UFO is an ‘unidentified flying object’ then what I saw was, QED, a UFO.  In fact, anything that flies that we’re not sure about is, pedantically, a UFO.  UFOs are therefore quite prosaic, everyday entities.

What we really mean, of course, is ‘unidentifiable flying object’ which is much rarer.  I’d suggest rare to the point of non-existent.  Satellite or seagull?  Yes, one or the other…