Underwhelmed of Devon

Excuse me if I don't get up, but I'm finding the latest, greatest news in physics, the confirmation of gravity waves, a tad, well, underwhelming.

I know I should be excited by the effects of two black holes merging 1.3 billion light years away like neopolitan ice-cream in the sun (okay, neopolitan has three colours, but its the best analogy I can think of off the cuff) but, seriously, if the effect is about the same as a bacteria farting, why bother?

I'm very much of the opinion that science is not helpful to science fiction.  Each discovery may confirm a particular hypothesis, but discounts a potentially large set of ifs, buts and maybes.  By confirming gravity waves as something that affects atoms like, say, me breathing lightly on the Rocky Mountains, we've just made rips in the space-time continuum through which four-dimensional alien matter can pour not just less likely but, somehow, sillier if I were to suggest it.

And rips in the space-time continuum through which four-dimensional alien matter can pour is what I deal in.

However, on a slightly more exciting note, Night Lights: An Anthology of Short Fiction: First Contact, Conspiracy, and Space Opera, in which I have the story Shooting the Messenger is out now from Geminid Press LLC.  Buy! Buy! Buy!

Glad I'm not going mad

Knew I'd seen it somewhere...

Why not a War of the Words?

So, the BBC is planing a glossy new version of War of the Worlds.  (At least, I'm sure that I read that somewhere recently, but Google brings nothing up about it, although they are planning an adaptation of Len Deighton's SS-GB, about which I'm mildly excited).

Still, I'm going to proceed on the basis that I haven't imagined it.  It will, after all, be the 70th anniversary of his death this summer, to be celebrated shortly after by the publication of a sequel to War of the Worlds, the book having gone out of copyright.

But, let's assume the BBC are to produce a new War.  A great piece of writing; that opening monologue, whether read by Richard Burton or Morgan Freeman.  A landmark book.  Wikipedia lists ten films that it's spawned, plus a rash of telly and radio.  And let's not forget the mass hysteria and panic following the Welles radio play in 1938... that never actually happened.

And there's the basis of my issue.  It's been done before.  Over and over.  Good story, although we can debate whether the ending is a deus ex machina or early postmodern irony.  But there are so many new stories out there.  God knows, I'm trying to lever my goods into a crowded marketplace.  There must be at least one decent, filmable story by an untried writer?  Why not have a War of the Words to find a new voice?

The BBC is brilliant at bringing on new talent.  I'm immensely proud of my BBC artist number, garnered for a brief satirical sketch on Weekending some twenty-plus years ago.  I could just walk into Broadcasting House into the open writers' meeting for the show and pitch.  I download the Radio 6 Music Introducing podcast, new music by unsigned bands who just send in their wares.  It's what public service broadcasting is about, people.

It's one of the aspects that makes the BBC brilliant.  So, why so conservative here?  I'm not even sure whether the Wells brand is strong enough these days to make it an economic decision; if anything the choice (if it's really been made and I didn't dream it) smacks slightly of laziness.  I'm not sure that I'll be watching...

#

And, talking of levering my goods into a crowded marketplace, PunksWritePoems Press have taken my story Litterpicking on the Moon for their Don't Wait 'til Doomsday anthology.  Which is nice.

A long, long time ago...

No, it hasn't taken me five weeks to see Star Wars.  Just five weeks to blog about it.

Let me start off by saying that what JJ Abrams has done with Star Wars is a triumph, certainly in comparison with the previous Lucas-driven drivel, his cracking storylines about galactic taxes (or something) and obsession that no frame can have enough furry CGI vermin.

I took the scrolling yellow text, fading to infinity, as a given.  And then the star destroyer filling the screen, then dwarfing the audience, then dwarfing Exeter itself.  That filled me with the belief that we were back on the right track.

And then a rollercoaster ride.  Brilliant.

But, alongside the childlike grin, I started to get a strange feeling.  The unhappy young adult trapped on a planet at the arse end of the universe from which he/she escapes on the Millennium Falcon, shepherding a droid with information encoded within it that has to be got to the right people...  A baddy in a black mask...  The spherical death machine in space, which still has an unguarded letterbox to post shit through...  Even an obligatory cantina scene.

Hold on.  This isn't a continuation of the story; this is a bloody reboot, a remake.

And, as if to really highlight the point, the ending...  What do you think that's setting us up for?  Okay, so it's more windswept island than swamp but, really, do I need to draw you a diagram? 

I know I'm not the first to point any of this out - there's a line of us as long as the ones outside the cinemas back in '77.  When, exactly, did JJ do anything truly original?  Super 8?  Since then it's been oh-so-clever remakes.  There are meant to be an infinite number of stories in the universe (or is it seven?) - so why repeat them?

But maybe the last laugh is on JJ.  I've said several times before in these postings that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.  At my most paranoid I've wondered whether we'll be rebooting the Great War in ten years time, with our current tweens and teens, conscripted boots on the ground, in the Holy Land against the massed ranks of ISIS.

Maybe that's his point.  What comes around, goes around.  A long, long time ago stories were told for the first time, but not the last.

If it happens, it won’t be the strangest thing this year

As with most 11-year olds, the Boy gets easily confused about things, such as returning clothes and books to their allotted drawer or shelf, or shutting doors once you’ve opened and gone through them.

But recently, he got confused over something that made me think twice.

It was an episode of the Film Programme on the 70^th anniversary of ‘Brief Encounter’, the not-in-the-least sci-fi film that I’ve previously speculated may count as real, literal sci-fi on the basis of Trevor Howard’s pushing back of the boundaries of medical science in Africa.  In this, Francine Stock wondered out-loud about whether Alec was, in fact, a serial bounder who had preyed on bored housewives previously, possibly regularly, rather than a good egg helplessly besotted and confused.

The idea that characters have existence outside of fixed texts just baffled him.  His strong view was that there’s a book or a film and what they say or do is in the script; otherwise they don’t exist.  If the text doesn’t tell us whether Alec was prone to dalliances, or that his (non-)affair with Celia Johnson was an uncomfortable departure for him, then it’s a non-question.  What happens is in the book or film; if it isn’t then why ask?: there is no existence for a fiction.  QED.

It’s a stance that has a logic.  You and I are flesh and blood, we have a life when others’ aren’t looking.  To ask what we’re doing the rest of the time is a real question.  If you only exist on a page then the rules aren’t the same, there is no existence outside the script.  To speculate on what a fiction, a creation, does outside of what the author tells us does seem somewhat bizarre.  To extrapolate from the actual made-up to the yet-to-be-made-up (Alec is a philanderer; Chewbacca marries Bungle; James T Kirk is finally picked up by Intergalactic Yewtree) has a hint of intellectual masturbation about it.

And, lest we forget, it’s the sleight of hand that allowed M Night Shyamalan to forge a film career (think about it; The Sixth Sense works for the moments we’re privy to – but what about the bits in between?).

But, maybe, we’re doing this all the time.  Our Facebook and  Linkedin profiles, our online lives present us in such a way.  It’s more important to be seen online than off.  We’ve split.  It used to be that only Mister Bond’s reputation preceded him.  Now all our reputations precede us.  Soon, our reputations will go places we won’t follow, won’t even be invited.  They’ll be more important than us; what our online creations that share our face and name, but are constantly smiling and continually successful, are up to will matter more than the activities of our last-century actual beings.

It’s getting to the stage where we’re beginning to feel inadequate, not in comparison to our peers or our neighbours or our bosses’ or parents’ expectations, but in comparison to our own online claims.  And not factual claims, I’m not talking about the brazen porkies, but the gloss we put on things, the selfies of us doing, having, achieving.  We can’t be that person 24/7, even if that’s the person staring back at us from our own profile page 24/7.

Search on Google and you can find horror story after horror story on abuse and bullying through social media leading to suicide.  But how long before somebody takes their own life without anybody else’s intervention, simply through not being able to live up to their own hype?

Believe me, if it happens, it won’t be the strangest thing this year.

Review of the year - must try harder

Words written c37500

Stories completed 6

Rejections 102

Acceptances 1

Or possibly change my strategy altogether...

Modern-day irony

Words written c37500

Stories completed 6

Rejections 99

Acceptances 1

Stumbled across an article the other day promising to tell me how to better cope in the information-overload age, how not to go crazy with the relentless bombardment of views, opinions, facts, data, information, knowledge, psudo-knowledge, quasi-knowledge, numbers, words, images and stuff.  Particularly stuff.  How to cut down our brain-input to a manageable burbling brook of what's most important.

Quite agree that that sort of thing is vital.

So I took an important first step by skipping it.