Everyone's a hero in their own story (again)

I appreciate that many of these posts are about how story works, why story works, and why it sometimes doesn't, which is as applicable to any genre as science fiction.  But I'm pretty much going to carry on until somebody tells me to stop.

A few days ago our nuclear family unit caught up with a film (fantasy, rather than sci-fi) that's been out since the summer, so forgive me if all this has been written before - there still seems to be room on the internet.  As, unlike, say, meat, films don't go off I rarely feel the need to see a movie when it first appears, being happy to catch up with the cheaper rep performances.  Or even when it appears on TV.  I refuse to be in thrall to marketing wallahs telling me something is 'must-see' here and now.  There's simply too much stuff out there and too few hours in a day.

I've always subscribed to the view that a performance (film, book, TV show, whatever) should make you laugh, cry, scared, come, whatever - any reaction is better than none.  So I suppose the fact that I felt utterly uncomfortable for large parts of this movie - as uncomfortable as I've felt watching any film since The Hunger Games or even the appalling Life is Beautiful - is a form of praise.

However, given that I was feeling uncomfortable over the romanticising of the kidnapping and (non-sexual) grooming of a child, I'm not sure how far that praise can stretch.  Any sense of victim and perpetrator was swept under the carpet, with the kid in question foregoing the desire to escape for befriending her captor like a stray puppy.  Yes, kids, we're talking full-blown Stockholm Syndrome kicking in pretty much before hunger and thirst in a way that I found genuinely creepy.

And the name of the movie?  Steven Spielberg's 'BFG'.

On the way back to the car my twelve-year old and I had a couple of robust discussions.  (One of the best pieces of advice about writing I've seen recently came from a Charlie Brooker article in a recent Guardian interview where he said that Russell T Davies had advised him that conversations tend to be two monologues clashing.  It was that kind of discussion.)  One was about my 'theory' that what we had just watched was Stockholm Syndrome.  The other was about comedy.

As a syndrome is defined as a set of symptoms, I disagreed that I was proposing a theory.  If you have spots and I say you have spots, that's observation.  If I say you have measles, that's a theory.  I was just bundling up what I had seen on screen under a convenient and appropriate umbrella term.  Neither was I saying that either Dahl or Spielberg had set out to make a story about Stockholm Syndrome - that would have been a theory.  What I was saying was that what we saw and heard added up to Patty Hearst-lite.

Indeed, I'm pretty sure that neither Dahl nor Spielberg would agree with my reading, and would probably be slightly appalled.  But, like the Hunger Games before, for me, it all comes down to the lead character's reactions to events failing to convince.  Does she react how you'd expect a kidnap victim to react?  Does she try to escape?  (Well, actually, yes, but half-heartedly.)  Is she terrified?  Fears for her life?  Not sure that comes across.  I wasn't expecting The Disappearance of Alice Creed, but at least I was convinced that Alice Creed was at least inconvenienced.

For me, that's it in a nutshell.  I'm happy to believe in the BFG.  But I'm not happy to believe in a human child reacting like that to the BFG.  And if you lose faith in the hero, who is your stand-in in the story, then you're lost, period.  (It's also why I'm probably the only person in the universe who thinks Divergent is a better story than The Hunger Games whose name isn't listed in the credits; the premise may be even sillier, but at least I can go along with how the characters react to their predicament).

And, again's the pity, that the story could have been easily fixed.  Show me that the orphanage is a horrible place (maybe it goes without saying, but this one seems fairly neglect-free), and it's better to be out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Or put the BFG in a position where he absolutely has to kidnap Sophie, possibly to save her from the murderous giants, where his options reduce to one, and one he takes reluctantly.  But that doesn't happen.  A friendly giant would trust her not to talk, or be believed if she did, and only take her when she blubbed.  In other words, if Sophie forced him into kidnapping her.  All those would work dramatically, but not this.  Perhaps Spielberg was in thrall to Dahl's original?

All this raises two moral side-questions, which I'll ask and then fail to answer.  Firstly, is it alright to be kidnapped by somebody who can offer you a more interesting life than the one you've got?  And, secondly, is it alright to kidnap somebody in order to save them from a worse fate, such as abuse or murder?  I suspect the second is easier than the first.  Feel free to theme a story around those.  Yours for free.

That other argument?  Simply that, when my twelve-year old heard that Life is Beautiful is a comedy set in a concentration camp, he declared that there were subjects that you should not write comedies about.  I, on the other hand, would defend an artist's right to make a comedy about anything, with the caveat that if and when it goes wrong you risk creating a story that is off the scale in terms of being crass and offensive.  Not sure The BFG was in that territory, but it was certainly ill-thought out.

One F or two?

I've never hidden my preference for science fiction over fantasy.  In fact, I've always found it strange how the two have become cousins, because to me science fiction is a quasi-philosophical activity, social gedankenexperiments that would be impossible in any lab.  And fantasy is, well.. all a bit ridiculous. Like standing in the dock, ready to defend your public protest on points of principle, and turning around to find your fellow accused has a revolving bow-tie and a plastic flower that squirts water.

Granted, science fiction can rapidly find itself embroiled in silliness; basically anything that would have been portrayed on Sixties television with a rubber suit and lots of arm waving, or portentous dialogue spoken whilst holding a weapon made out of plumbing parts. But, if it doesn't leave the Ballard, Gibson and Dick end of the spectrum, it doesn't need to go there. It's just that fantasy starts off in the world of Thring-son-of-Throng-son-of-Thrung-son-of-Thrang-son-of-Threng-of the-Hairybols, and you can't get back to plausibility from there anytime soon.

Yes, I sat through the Lord of the Rings movies ("Nobody tosses a dwarf!"), but mainly because I loved it when I was thirteen. Harry Potter, too, but being a children's book (and a great one) you could enjoy it as such. And that, I thought, was the key issue: fantasy was one of those childish things that you leave behind together with colouring books and 'being a racing car'.

But I think there's a more fundamental issue for me. And it struck home when I saw the following quote, from Jim Kay, brilliant illustrator of a new edition of Potters, which chimed with me like Big Ben chimes with the hours:

"JK Rowling describes the castle as being 'supported by magic' so this gave me the opportunity to bring something different to the architecture. The odd thing is that it becomes habit to draw architecture to look like it should stand up, and it has taken me a while to 'unlearn' common sense physics and embrace the fantasy elements."

The castle in question is, of course, Hogwarts.  But the more general point is that Kay's Hogwarts doesn't stand up, and neither does a great deal of fantasy. It doesn't need to, because you can always get out of your hole with a mirror that talks back to you or an enchantment or a potion. You can cherry pick the rules of the game as you want.  And conveniently forget others - like if the castle stands up without supports, why don't you levitate off the doorstep?

Sure, sci-fi does enough of that. Faster than light travel, portals, and so forth that conveniently drop you in strange worlds. But there's a greater sense of working within a consistent set of rules in sci-fi; no privileged magic-user who has a monopoly on bending the principles of physics.  If the storyverse has FTLT then it's available to everybody with the price of a ticket.

There's something about science fiction that restricts, whereas fantasy allows, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Alec Issigonis, car designer, said something along the lines of anybody can design a large car, but it takes talent to design a small one. And promptly came up with the Mini. And it's the same with science fiction.  It sets you parameters to work within and, in doing so, forces you to think. In sci-fi there's no deus ex machina, no eagle - or bloke in a rubber suit - to grab you by the epaulettes and fly you out of Mordor.

Notes and corrections

Some updates from recent posts:

I'm in two minds about this post
The more I look, the more examples I see, and the more it makes perfect sense: Carl Jung described himself as having two conflicting personalities, no.1 and no.2; and this, in a magazine interview with Gillian Anderson: "Yeah. I am a mix  of normal, safe, quiet, regimented, serious, morally and ethically led – or at least I try to be for the most part.  Then every once in a while – or maybe more than once in a while – there is  a part of me that is incredibly reckless. I think it bubbles underneath all the time..."

I don't want to sound like I'm the only one who can see this, but aren't we all on a spectrum here, guys?  I mean, like, not just the crazies...  We keep being told that there's no 'I' in 'team'.  But there is 'me'.  Or, more to the point, there's a team in me.

Closer to the transom
Following that encouraging response from Asimov's in June I sent off another story.  Which didn't come back in a matter of days.  It's now been with them over three months with complete radio silence.  So I gently prodded to see what's the state of play.  Turns out they're only getting through to stories from May.  My heart sank - it's just queued, circling the drain...

That said, I've looked at the response turnaround times on the Grinder and very few stories get to being more than three months old, so I think I can conclude it's made it past the guardians of the slush pile.  Even then, it's still only a one in twenty hit rate...

Lakeside Circus
Still waiting...

A Slow Meteorite Night

So, last month, on holiday in Brittany I dimly remember the existence of the Perseid meteorite shower.  Through the power of Google I find that peak activity is due that very night.  This doesn't usually happen, does it?  It's normally the night before.  

And not only that, it isn't going to be an ordinary meteor shower.  It isn't even going to be an M&S meteor shower.  It's going to be a meteor outbreak.

So up I get the family, bleary and stumbly, from their beds and out into the mild clear night air (even the meterology is with us).  And we stare.  And stare.

And, yes, there are a few blink-and-you-miss-it smears of light in the sky.  Real shooting stars.  And sometimes you see them.  And sometimes you miss them.  But nothing like what a lifetime watching the ever-developing art and science of special effects, computer-generated or otherwise, has led me to expect.  I wanted to be, you know, within the spray of a galactic angle-grinder whereas it was more like the gods trying to strike slightly damp matches.

Since then we've spent a dusk bat-watching at Berry Head.  Again, nothing like what CGI-heavy horror films had built me up for.  No showers of creatures tangling in your hair.  A few pipistrelles went that way.  Three or four greater horseshoe bats went that way.  Then our guide thanked us for our time.

Two nocturnal activities which have proved slightly flat.  Two bouts of sky-staring that have led to tired necks and not a great deal more.  Two evenings that have left the optimist in me wondering.  Given that I have plans to travel to the States to see the total eclipse next year (yes, appreciate that it isn't an evening thing, but I am expecting the sky to go dark) I'm left wondering... third time lucky, or do things come in threes?

I'm in two minds about this post

Two recent occurrences, unrelated at first, second and even third glance.  Firstly, I've been reading Jonathan Glover's 'I: the Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity'.  Struggling with, slightly if truth be told, not through any density on the part of either book or myself.  Being a slightly more academic version of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, it keeps generating story ideas in my brain, which tend to shout their presence over the author's voice until they dominate and I have to put the book aside.

The second event was that I shut my finger in a drawer.

As I said, quite unrelated.

Early on in 'I', the idea of a singularity of consciousness is taken as a starting point, as something obvious.  In other words, that there's only one 'I'.  If not by Glover, at least by some big cheeses in the world of deep thinking.  From Rene Descartes ("The first observation I make at this point is that there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible") to Erwin Schrodinger ("...the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular... We are not even able to imagine the plurality of consciousness in one mind.  We can pronounce these words all right, but they are not the description of any thinkable experience").

But here's the thing.  When I shut my finger in the drawer I think I experienced exactly that.  On the one hand (literally) I was shutting the drawer; on the other, I was trying to push the trailing end of a sock back in before the drawer shut.  I am sure, for that instant, my mind was working independently, down two separate tracks.  Two streams of thought.  Two 'I's.  Simultaneously.  Each had its objective, and each wasn't going to let the other get in the way.  The drawer pushing won, to the cost of my finger.  Yes, I shut the drawer on my finger, but my contention is that the 'my' doesn't belong to the 'I'.

Schrodinger's take was that this is an unthinkable experience.  As Glover points out, he said that before any classic split brain experiments had been carried out, but even they only claimed to show such phenomena as showing through in exceptional circumstances.  What I'm saying is that we're all doing it every day, all the time.  It's even in our language: 'I'm in two minds'; 'I can't believe I did that' (different 'I's!) 'Sorry I was miles away', meaning somebody else was in my place.

Like a mirror of Breq in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series, we can be several people in one place, if not one person in several places.  I don't think it's unusual at all and if we wake up and start to look for it we (and here I (we?) really think I (we?) mean 'we', each and every individual 'we') will see it all the time.

I think it explains a lot.

Everyone's a hero in their own story

Contains spoilers

One piece of advice I remember being given when I started writing seriously was to be scrupulous in ensuring your protagonist's actions are driven by character, but when it comes to your antagonist, anything goes.  Action derives from character; how your hero reacts to his predicament is determined by his strengths, weaknesses, foibles, knowledge, superstitions, physical abilities, history, and so forth.  What makes your lemming the one that walks away from the cliff edge?

The antagonist's job is to provide those predicaments; we don't stop to ask for consistency or justification; our focus is on the hero through whose eyes we'll follow the action.  If anything, an antagonist who acts with a cocktail of quasi-omniscience, semi-omnipotence, and unhinged irrationality makes for a pretty good baddie.

The truth is that you have a great deal more wriggle room with your antagonist; he is, after all, the one whose job it is to throw chairs in the way of the hero, but it helps enormously if your antagonist's actions also have some kind of twisted internal logic.  However, all too often, the baddie just seems to be there to give the hero something to push up or show off against, leading to such classics as:

"Do you really expect me to talk?"
"No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DIE."

If that was really Goldfinger's aim then would he really have constructed some homoerotic laser (or, in the book, circular saw)?  No, he would have just shot the bastard there and then, if not earlier.  The whole thing was really for the story's benefit first, and the character's second, if at all.

Let's compare and contrast one recent undeserving sci-if classic - The Hunger Games - with one recent unrecognised classic - Wool by Hugh Howey.  Both are set in a post-apocalyptic America, both with society splintered, albeit with very different levels of awareness of each other.  Both have strong heroines who butt up against the social order itself.

I'm not so interested here in contrasting Katniss with Juliette.  Rather, let's think about how much sense the initiatives engineered by society for keeping them in their place make.  Because, I think, each falls foul of the 'they wouldn't really do that' test, albeit at very different ends of the spectrum, which means that one, but only one, can be rescued via 'would they?'.

Firstly, Wool.  As a preliminary step prior to a preconceived holocaust of the mutually assured destruction-type, the American people take to fifty or so huge silos, buried one hundred and fifty storeys deep.  Over centuries memories of the world-that-was, the other silos even, are lost, except to the controlling elite.  Each silo becomes a self-contained universe with nobody beyond; anybody who says or thinks differently is sent to 'clean' the sensors that give a view of the dead surface in a suit with a deliberately shortened life.

Does it make sense?  Well, it's not the most obvious solution to sedition, but troublemakers need to be got rid of.  I was surprised, given that there are more twists in the story than in the strings of that kite you stuffed to the back of the loft last summer, that the air outside didn't turn out to be breathable, but that being the case, 'cleaning' offers a very visible way of demonstrating the toxicity of the world beyond the silo.

What makes less sense, however, is admitting that there's a world outside without making it an aim to ever leave the silo.  Why give people dreams if you're determined to quash them?  To quote James, If I hadn't seen such riches I could live with being poor.  A nonsense, but a necessary nonsense in order to tell a great story.

I'll take it as read that you know how the Hunger Games works.  Again, the purpose of the Games is to humiliate the twelve remaining districts defeated by The Capitol.   Obviously there's a lot of gladiators in Ancient Rome going on here, both in terms of the political relationship between ruler and slave-states, and the resulting human blood sport.

So, your President Snow's predecessor.  Your blood's up and you want a way to keep your defeated territories under the cosh and on their knees.  Do you invent The Hunger Games?

No.  At least, not as described.

The very last thing you would do is allow resistance to centre on any martyr or hero-figure.  So, forget all those parades and interviews and fancy frocks.  You want to dehumanise, not create a cult of personality.  Remind them that the victor is of a different standing - think of the British in India, or America's relationship with its Native Americans.  A single man - Ghandi - had a lot to do with the ending of the Raj.  When people bay for blood it must be the blood of animals, or at least a lower caste of humans; under no circumstance must they think there but for the grace of god...

As for selecting children, no.  Not out of squeamishness, but because it makes you look weak.  Spartacus was made an example of because he was the strongest the slaves could muster, but still not strong enough for the might of Rome.  That was the message.

A lottery?  No.  Give the districts the pain of selecting their own tributes.  Make them offer up their best, with punishments for the districts with the weakest representatives.  Make the comfort, if not survival, of the district dependent on the Games.  Make the districts themselves snuff out any thoughts of resistance.

If you are going to have a lottery, what about the substitution rule?  Ludicrous.  Districts will either select the best (unlikely in reality given the odds of winning are slight and there doesn't seem to be anything in it for the district itself) or, more probably, some cripple whose family have been persuaded to sacrifice for better rations.  So you're faced with the prospect of the games resembling Todd Hayne's Freaks.  Not pretty.

Getting more food for having more entries in the lottery?  Hello?  The aim is to keep them enfeebled.  If everybody puts in for more food then the odds don't really change.  Ultimately all you've done is give aid and succour to people you're trying to quash and you still get two tributes per district.  Smart.  Not.

The Hunger Games also fails in large part to a question of scale.  Wool's conceit may be nonsensical, but it's nonsensical in a way that chimes with our experience of bureaucracy.  It's the sort of thing governments do.  The Hunger Games is so ill-conceived and on a society-defining scale too, that it topples over on the weight of it's own idiocy.  It is also actually self-defeating, in danger of creating the martyr figure that will bring about the revolution.

Much more seriously, in Wool, once you accept the premise, all the characters act  more consistently and believably and, well... in character than in The Hunger Games.  The Hunger Games exist as an irritant, like pre-holiday jabs.  Nobody suggests rebelling in the face of such evil.  Katniss and the other tributes act throughout as though there's a danger of being knocked out of an inter-schools hockey tournament, not of imminent bloody death.

Katniss is written as an everywoman.  She's us, the character we can empathetically drop into for the ride; so you can't argue the Games are so ingrained in her society they are simply blindly accepted, because we the reader can't accept them so easily.  We can't accept them at face value, so neither should our heroine.

The irritation is that there is a good story trying to get out of The Hunger Games; it's eminently fixable.  Firstly, learn from Spartacus.  Make Katniss the rebel, the troublemaker who needs to be dealt with - her hunting trips beyond the wire give ample reason in a world where people are subjugated through lack of food.  Have her fight against depersonalisation as she becomes a gladiator for others' entertainment.  Put her under duress - most of her actions and decisions actually make more sense - sorry, delete 'more' - if she had to fight to avoid bad things happening to the people she loves.  And don't change the ending - winning, but on her terms.

Oh, and maybe not make the standard of writing that of a hack writer's movie novelisation.

I may even write it myself.

The Doctor Who Experience

Unfortunately not involving Malcolm Tucker on guitar with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass.  Playing The Wind Cries Missy, perhaps…

Rather, The Doctor Who Experience is an interactive tourist attraction and museum (many would separate those two concepts but, being a nerd, I don’t see them as mutually exclusive) in Cardiff Bay.

Approaching it, the hanger-like building is shaped like something the architects pulled out of the bin with a deadline looming.  Not unlike the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker’s Guide; a running shoe for clubfeet.

With a quarter of an hour or so to kill before the timed entrance on our pre-booked tickets we walk straight into the café.  And straight out again.  If I want coffee in a sauna I’d, well, have coffee in a sauna.  So we head around the corner to the ‘World of Boats’ where we have lattes made with UHT milk.  Better view, worse drinks.  You choose; only after millennia of evolution can we cope with such first-world dilemmas.

One positive of the Experience is that only thirty-five may enter every quarter hour.  This is the size of each party that goes through the ‘Experience’.  Which means that you’re never craning over somebody’s shoulder in the museum.

They ask everybody not to say anything about the interactive bit, so I won’t.  But suffice to say that it’s all a bit cheesy, but bearable if you act like a twelve year old, shaky-shaky, flashy-flashy and pointy-pointy through 3D glasses, all delivered with enthusiasm set to medium.

I don’t think I’ve broken any embargos there.

Once you’re experienced, you get spat out into the museum bit.  About which I can say more.  For example, I can tell you that you can dwell, and take photos.

The museum begins, unsurprisingly, in 1963 with newspaper headlines announcing the Kennedy assassination and a display on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.  This includes a Stuart Maconie’s documentary about queen of all things that sound like the Aphex Twin before the Aphex Twin was a gleam in Mr Aphex Snr’s eye, Delia Derbyshire.

We would have lingered to watch the whole documentary but for two things: firstly, it wasn’t really set up for watching in its entirety, no seats to encourage you to linger awhile (it’s only ten minutes, but we didn’t realize this at the time); secondly, we expected there’d be more of the same, more interviews on the making-of and other diversions.  But from there on in the museum becomes little more than a collection of sets, props and costumes.

On the lower level there are a couple of Tardis (is that the plural?), a K9, and a green screen where you can be exploited for cash.  On the upper level, mainly costumes, mainly from the modern era, but also a smattering from the old.  An interactive learn-to-walk-like-a-monster thing that occupied the kids for five minutes.  But no clips.  With half a century of archive you’d think we’d get to see some old footage.  But no.  I suspect it’s a question of rights (did I see a BBC logo anywhere other than in old photos?  Whose museum is this?).  Which may also explain why Peter Cushing has been airbrushed completely out of this version of Whovian history.

But here’s the thing, somewhere on the stairs between levels, between Bessie at the bottom and Cybermen suits above, a conceit kicks in.  And this conceit is that Doctor Who is real.  The signage is all about when and where the Doctor encountered this foe or that, as if this were some offshoot of the Imperial War Museum.  There are a number of Daleks with explanation of when and where they fit into the story, but no acknowledgement that one arm ends in a sink plunger.

Unlike, say, the Harry Potter-themed Warner Brothers Studio Tour, which knows that the whole thing is a fiction and balances the making-of with the magic (pun intended) of the story.  With Doctor Who, unless you’re twelve or into cos-play, the insistence that we suspend our disbelief for a museum as we would for a tale gets to be ever so slightly very embarrassingly silly.

It also means that, if they don’t have a prop or costume (which, to be fair, are credited with having been worn by actors and actresses), there’s very little acknowledgement of, say, the Doctor’s assistants.  Yes, there’s a police-procedural-type board with photos, but I would have liked to see a complete list of characters and actors and the years they appeared.  More of an adult overview and less an adolescent showing off his collection.

And then it’s all over very quickly and you’re exiting through the giftshop, as is traditional.

One last nugget, and that is that the translation into Welsh of ‘Half-Faced Man’s balloon’ is covered in one word.  When I see this I feel a wave of paranoia advance.  What does this say about the ancient Welsh language, their culture, their shared history?  Is a half-faced man nothing out of the ordinary in the valleys?  But I soon realise that it was only the word ‘balloon’ that they had translated.  As if summing up the overall approach of only dealing with half the issue, the easy half, the playful, pretend half.  The half that raises the fewest tricky issues…