Above the Snowline

100 pages in.  My slight concern that Steph Swainston never gives her women much of a look-in is assuaged.  Shira Dellin is definitely aspirational, and all the survivalism and nature stuff makes the pages turn very fast.  Having more narrators than just Jant is good too, because it makes it more obvious that he’s unreliable.

I wonder if Swainston has read any of Storm Constantine’s Wraethru stuff.  Seems to me that they’re similar in some ways.

More writing

So, I frequent a few websites and there are some bizarre thought patterns out there.  There are those who think fiction should not touch on complex issues.  And there are those who decry fiction for being escapism.  The latter is thrown most often at fantastic fiction, showing how some people are completely incapable of reading subtext.

To be honest, internet behaviour bothers me at the best of times.  I read in New Scientist about how you can now buy malware to steal people’s bank account details.  So thieves are now making money not by stealing but by enabling others to steal.  I have 1.011 spam comments on this site (all centred around the story the Eternal Heart for some reason…) trying to pass on links for all sorts of crap that people don’t need.  Internet fora are full of trolls and people making knee-jerk reactions because they’re either too stupid to live, or because they’re trying to replicate the kind of conversations they would have in the real world.  Except that in the real world, people would observe social niceties and not fall immediately into fighting.  However, it sets me to thinking about what I want to achieve with my writing.  There’s nothing wrong with escapism.  I use fiction to escape the humdrum nature of reality.  I’m one of those pathetic, unattractive losers that television and journalists like to make fun of*, so fiction is the one place where I can identify with the hero, the one place I can experience a relationship without being on the outside, the place where I can go into space, or find a lost city or be a winged immortal travelling back to his homeland.  So escapism is good.  But addressing deeper issues is good too.  At the moment I’m struggling with the idea of fixing what’s wrong with the world, and whether we need to follow the past or forge a new future.  Perhaps we have to give up privacy as a concern seeing as how technology is stripping privacy away.  Or maybe we need to realise that 24 hour a day consumerism and irresponsibility has led to the problems we’re experiencing.  The only thing I care about is having more stories.  Possessions aren’t a big concern.  But our society is built on money exchanging hands.

Anyway, tomorrow will be a story.  The clockwork bees story.  Well, an early version of it because I think Hub can still publish it if they want to.  But I intend to re-write it.  This is just to show you that I can produce rubbish.

Things to get excited about

Films:

Kick-Ass

Scott Pilgrim versus the World (the comics are excellent so read them first!  Knives Chau, still sixteen)

TV:

New Doctor Who - he’s more like the Doctor than the last one

Writing

I’ve been writing again.  My style surprises even me.  There are times I look back at my writing and wonder if it was really me who wrote that thing.  And I did.  But there’s something really sparky about what I’ve just written.  I have such things in my head and they’re all spraying out again.  Which is molto bene.

What’s odd is that the stuff I’ve been reading lately hasn’t been particularly stylish in the way it’s written and that maybe subconsciously that’s what I’ve responded to.  (For those keeping score, I’m currently reading Star Trek Academy: Collision Course by Bill Shatner [really by Judith and Gar Reeves-Stevens] and The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, which has a nice muscular, working class style to it.  And I recently read the Bookman by Lavie Tidhar.  And various short stories.)

Style is a funny thing because it can be highly distracting.  Steve Aylett’s writing is so heavily stylised that it makes it difficult to keep track of his plots.  Robert Rankin’s mannerisms, on the other hand, are intrinsic to how he tells his stories, a Rankin story would be nothing without the usual “load of old toot” which is why I tend to prefer his Pooley and Omalley stuff over his recent stuff, which has been more dense.

Writers like Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman (who coincidentally are mates) have developed smooth styles, probably taking something from Hemingway’s elliptical pithiness, that don’t get in the way of the reader.  They skip along with an understanding of the cadences in writing - that a reader sounds things out in their head.  Salman Rushdie meanwhile fills a page with a paragraph, sometimes comprised of just one sentence.  The man likes his sub-clauses, but it also means that the reader has to do a lot of work.  A lot of science fiction writers can be quite dry and stiff like Arthur C. Clarke, or slightly awkward like Phil Dick (a hero of mine so I say this with utmost fondness) or superawkward like A E van Vogt.

Kate Orman writes prose that is effortlessly easy to read, and keeps you reading, as does Steph Swainston.  John Christopher you have to be in the right frame of mind for.

I’m not sure I always get the joke in P. G. Wodehouse stories.  Which is an odd thing because comedy was something that occupied a large part of my childhood.  But I do get the joke in Kinky Friedman’s books.  And his music.  Kinkstah!

For a long time my favourite author was Michael Marshall Smith because he applied a thriller style to science fiction.  He used first person and it worked so well.  Nowadays he writes thrillers and it doesn’t seem so credible.  Or maybe it just feels ordinary. But then One of Us gave us God, so I guess he figured there was nowhere else for that to go.

Not all of the writers above have influenced me and in some ways the captions in an Alan Moore or Simon Furman-written comic probably had more of an effect on how my prose gets set down.

Dark matter

It’s an interesting thing that scientists can spend their lives chasing something, or having to take their time proving something they believe is wrong.  I imagine that could be quite soul-crushing to put on your CV.

“So what was your last job, Mister Bentley?”

“I spent five years proving that dark matter doesn’t exist.”

“You can’t prove a negative, Mister Bentley.”

“I spent five years looking for evidence that dark matter exists and didn’t find anything.”

“And?”

“And I’m not getting those five years back.”

“Well, actually you are, seeing as how other scientists found the cure for aging while you were buggering about with fairydust.”

“Great, so now I’ll never live this down.”

“No.  What wild goose chase do you want to undertake next?”

“Librarianship.”

I was a disaster area in the chemistry lab.  Tasting barium, having dishes fall to bits whilst heating them.  Pouring copper sulphate over people.  I was good at biology and maths though.  Ecology actually was probably the way I should have gone with my life.

Anyways.  Watching Buffy season 7.  It’s okay, I watched a lot of Callan to set myself up.  I realise that there is compromise in a TV show, that you can only play to the actors’ strengths and you have to fit the network’s wishes and that you have limited budgets, but you know, the comic is better.  Except the bit where Buffy experiments with sleeping with girls.  It didn’t add much and wasn’t referred to again.

The Doctor is not a super hero… But is he really not a super hero?

I was made slightly irate recently by the declaration that Doctor Who is super hero fiction. This assertion was made by Strange Horizons, a webzine which fits into a certain section of science fiction fandom that I can’t really describe. It tends to deal with emotions quite heavily, which befits the new Doctor Who quite well. There are writers who work in this area I quite enjoy, but it is very domestic, very middle class science fiction, because it has no truck with the working class - except to portray them as rednecks or noble savages, preferring to deal with university graduates. (It’s rather like the trope in fantasy that a lowborn can only be noble if they are secretly a highborn.) Ecclestone Who was resolutely working class, but that was quickly ditched for taking swipes at chavs when Tennant came on board, Rose’s relegation to the love interest, and all subsequent companions being suburban dwellers.

And don’t get me started on Torchwood. It could certainly be held up as a mirror to most University graduates and their approach to life. People pretending to be adults by aping someone else (mostly their parents), rather than creating their own set of values. No wonder they were doomed to mediocrity.

But anyway, the Doctor isn’t a super hero. He’s an adventurer, an explorer. He doesn’t fight crime, he overturns the status quo. He champions life. Or at least that’s who he should be. The Tennant era got so caught up in the super hero narrative that the final two episodes were super hero fiction, with electro-Agent Smith-Master, and the Doctor jumping out of a spaceship and surviving the fall. But then RTD is a self-confessed fan of super hero comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and they are the predominant vibe in cinema, so it was only to be expected that they would feed into any new version of Who.

Encouragingly Moffatt is quoted as saying that the Doctor is just a man, so we may see a shift - although bear in mind that Moffatt gave the Doctor the Fonzie-esque power of opening the TARDIS doors with a click of his fingers, so we cannot count on good judgment here, no matter how well written his episodes have been. Hopefully Smith is down-to-earth and will give us a normal Doctor.

And what’s this? CGI Clash of the Titans? I feel I must see this film, much as I must see Kick-Ass. I like people on flying horses fighting sea monsters, and the idea of Nicholas Cage impersonating Adam West is mind-warpingly fun.

Space

So no doubt you’ve been watching Wonders of the Solar System with ex-D.Ream Dr Cox?  Cox is very bad at actually explaining things to non-scientific types.  The worst bit being his explanation of why Mars appears to double back on itself in its journey across the night sky.  I came across this first when he did a documentary on time.  I understood what he was saying, in spite of the way he was saying it.  As such there were a lot of ellipses in the explanations, where some proper science would have helped.  I can’t help thinking that he got the job purely because he used to be in a pop combo favoured by New Labour.

Perhaps he’s happier with equations?

Nonetheless, it’s quite beautiful in its pictures and inspiring in that I started thinking about stories set on ice planets.

I do love that currently, because they can’t figure out how things like water are generated from constituent elements, cosmologists always resort to the idea that life must be the results of things coming from outer space and striking the Earth.  Huge huge statistical problems, that don’t resolve the problem of where the water is coming from in the first place - a bit like the problem of intelligent design that causes scientists to dismiss it…  Rather like the expectation that discovering the smallest possible particle will explain the physical rules of the universe completely.

Oh, I’m thirty one now.  But my wii fit age is usually about 25 and I always had an older reading age so I don’t think of myself as that age.

I still don’t quite get some stuff. I have a friend who seems to want to avoid friendship, rather than grasp it and wring it for all its worth, even though we’re on a ticking clock. I don’t understand why Peter David thinks that confrontation = dramatic conflict in his novels and screenplays, and why I still like his work in spite of this annoying tendency in his characterisation. I don’t know why having a credit card is thought to be a good thing.

Also try http://www.mechmaster.co.uk/cg-lair/daleks/secemp-index.htm for a distinctly beautiful and very fun Dalek comic strip.  I admire the man’s gumption!

The last story

And they stepped into the presence of God.

“What is the meaning of life?”

God’s eyebrows raised.  “What, I left the universe switched on?”