Yesterday afternoon at the Bristol Beer Festival was thoroughly splendid, although I really need to learn that what I need after these things is a nice lie down and a cup of tea, rather than going on to a pub to drink more beer.
I didn't end up listening to Iain Banks in the end on account of being just too bloody tired, and left Silk to make his way home from Bath alone. Then I stayed awake all night anyway. Never mind.
The Festival itself was fantastic, though, with twelve of us (and about 1,500 to 2,000 other people) crammed into the Brunel Passenger Shed at Temple Meads Station. 130 beers were there, many of which I had at least a sip of and several of which I quaffed heartily.
I made some tasting notes, which -- my memory being what it is after a Beer Festival -- are my best clue now as to which ones I tried and how I thought they tasted. Based on these, I seem to have sampled at least 27 beers, and there were probably others I failed to write down.
I won't list all of them here, but these were a few of the more notable. (They're mostly stouts or porters because those are the beers whose flavours I find most interesting, though for actual drinking I generally favour the lighter stuff.)
Bristol Beer Factory Milk Stout: I think I voted for this one as Beer of the Festival. My tasting notes read "Wow. Mm. Bacony. Refreshing," and it was indeed smoky yet surprisingly drinkable. I may have somewhat swayed by loyalty to a local brewery, but the beer was genuinely special.
Downton's Chimera I.P.A.: Interestingly, the CAMRA leaflet calls this "a proper I.P.A. at more like the strength that they were intended to be" -- that being, in this case, an imposing 6.8%. The flavour was gorgeous ("chewy & crunchy" according to my notes). We liked.
Fuller's Golden Pride: Rare in pubs, this was another strong golden beer, very complex in flavour, which we all agreed was "Really decent," and also "Brandyy". Good stuff.
Garton's Liquid Lobotomy Stout: A deep black stout apparently derived from a Victorian recipe (though presumably renamed). My notes read "Molasses & stuff", and I remember it being very smoky and treacly.
Hambleton Nightmare Porter: Rightly described in the leaflet as "One of the great dark beers of Britain", and by me as "Complex and confusing. Good with Maltesers."
Isle of Arran's Arran Sunset: A lovely fresh-tasting summer beer, for which my tasting notes read "Refreshing hoppy boing."
Orkney Skullsplitter: A barley wine which was so flavoursome and sweet I actually found it quite difficult to drink. Possibly because it was living up to its name, I failed to make any tasting notes about it at all.
Valhalla Sjolmet Stout: A Shetland stout, surly and sinister but with a surprising fruitiness which made it very drinkable. My verdict: "Smoky".
Others we were less keen on included Keynsham's Stockwood Stout, which was just too sweet for me, Farmer's Ales' A Drop of Nelson's Blood, which CAMRA seem to like but which had an unpleasant brussels-sprouty aftertaste, and Hidden Depths, which we thought must have been named ironically. (It was perfectly decent, but generic. The Hidden Brewery have recently taken over the Cornubia pub in central Bristol, though, saving it from closing, and therefore deserve support.)
Rather nice pasties and utterly bog-standard crisps were on sale as well, to soak up the beer. That Beer Festival comedy staple, the queue for the Gents', was much in evidence, and caused the usual hiliarity among the women popping in and out of the almost empty Ladies'. I enjoyed a startling freak success at the table skittles, and won a smart new Young's bar-towel to replace the ratty old Guinness towel the cats sit on.
B. and I also made a drunken clothing-buying decision, as a result of which I'm now wearing a T-shirt with an parody Intel logo reading "real ale inside". This seems inexplicably less hilarious and witty than it did yesterday afternoon.
A damn good day out, all told, and one I shall try to repeat next year, with appropriate variations.
04 March 2007
Signature Recognition
The latest Doctor Who Magazine has a very pleasing review by Matt Michael of Short Trips: Time Signature. I've been ambivalent about a previous review of Matt's, but this one lavishes Simon's anthology with well-deserved praise.
My favourite sentences are, predictably, these two:
Matt is equally fulsome about some other stories in the collection, notably Ben Aaronivitch's "Gone Fishing", Jonathan Clements' "Second Contact" and Joff Brown's "Walking City Blues", all of which I too thought were excellent.
In the same issue Vanessa Bishop is also very positive about Collected Works, although at less length and with no direct mention of my quiet masterfulness. She seems to have liked the Quire, though.
My favourite sentences are, predictably, these two:
"The Ruins of Time" by Philip Purser-Hallard has the First Doctor and his companions materialise on the planet Torcaldi, where time can be stolen as though it's a commodity, leaving burgled individuals frozen eternally. Purser-Hallard skilfully evokes the atmosphere of the early Hartnell episodes, where each new world is a dangerous and mysterious environment, and the result is quietly masterful.Let's just read that last bit again, shall we?
...and the result is quietly masterful.Yes, lets.
Matt is equally fulsome about some other stories in the collection, notably Ben Aaronivitch's "Gone Fishing", Jonathan Clements' "Second Contact" and Joff Brown's "Walking City Blues", all of which I too thought were excellent.
In the same issue Vanessa Bishop is also very positive about Collected Works, although at less length and with no direct mention of my quiet masterfulness. She seems to have liked the Quire, though.
01 March 2007
Books Update: Eligible Spatula
In the past three weeks, I've finished three books. Reading, unfortunately, not writing. Two of these have been rereads, which is unusual.
Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman is classic prose Doctor Who, from the era when the novels were at their strongest -- far outstripping in sophistication and depth, anything a range marketed under the banner of an ongoing T.V. series could possibly be. Return is character-driven S.F., the story of Bernice Summerfield's search for her lost father, and of the rivalry and reconciliation between him, her new husband Jason and her mentor, the seventh Doctor. It deals with love, loss, friendship, betrayal, humanity, alienation, existential terror and a sentient spatula called Graeme, and presents them all with utter conviction (perhaps slightly less so with Graeme). It's my favourite of Kate's Virgin-era novels, and Kate's one of my favourite authors. Read this book! Read Kate's other books! Pre-order the book Kate, Jon and I are writing together!
Pashazade: The First Arabesk was my first exposure to the much-hyped Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and I'm unconvinced. Given the potential richness and complexity of the setting ("El Iskandryia", the German-Allied Alexandria of an Islamic Ottoman Empire in the post-cyberpunk mid-21st century of a history where the 1914 Balkans conflict never escalated into a World War), Grimwood provides remarkably little by way of detailed worldbuilding. A writer can expect a reader to extrapolate a panorama from a miniature -- building up vast imaginary worlds from throwaway lines -- but not vice versa. Grimwood seems more interested in his protagonist, who has the opposite problem of being given so many personal, psychological and technological quirks that he seems scarcely believable either. The detective plot's reasonably clever, however, and the prose, at least, is very slick and shiny. I'll probably read the sequels at some point.
I've written about The Pooh Perplex (1964) by Frederick C Crews here before... and with good reason, as I tend to reread it every couple of years or so. I doubt I own a book I've read more times, except for the Pooh books themselves, which like the Perplex itself I use for comfort reading whenever I'm feeling ill or unhappy. If you love Milne's work, and hold literary critics in a kind of suspension of affection and contempt, then it's one of the funniest books it's possible to read. I've now moved on to Crews' much savager (but equally funny) late sequel, Postmodern Pooh (2001).
In addition to PoPooh, I'm currently reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (who Silk and I are going, perhaps ill-advisedly, to hear speak after the Beer Festival on Saturday) and Accelerando by Charles Stross. I haven't yet got far enough into the Banks to form an opinion (though it hasn't grabbed me on the first page the way, say, Complicity or The Crow Road did), but the Stross is remarkable. I thought at first that it was just another trendy information-dense post-cyberpunk screed, and wondered whether mightn't actually be enough of those in the world already. A third of the way through, though, it's shaping up to be something altogether more interesting. More on this later.
Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman is classic prose Doctor Who, from the era when the novels were at their strongest -- far outstripping in sophistication and depth, anything a range marketed under the banner of an ongoing T.V. series could possibly be. Return is character-driven S.F., the story of Bernice Summerfield's search for her lost father, and of the rivalry and reconciliation between him, her new husband Jason and her mentor, the seventh Doctor. It deals with love, loss, friendship, betrayal, humanity, alienation, existential terror and a sentient spatula called Graeme, and presents them all with utter conviction (perhaps slightly less so with Graeme). It's my favourite of Kate's Virgin-era novels, and Kate's one of my favourite authors. Read this book! Read Kate's other books! Pre-order the book Kate, Jon and I are writing together!
Pashazade: The First Arabesk was my first exposure to the much-hyped Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and I'm unconvinced. Given the potential richness and complexity of the setting ("El Iskandryia", the German-Allied Alexandria of an Islamic Ottoman Empire in the post-cyberpunk mid-21st century of a history where the 1914 Balkans conflict never escalated into a World War), Grimwood provides remarkably little by way of detailed worldbuilding. A writer can expect a reader to extrapolate a panorama from a miniature -- building up vast imaginary worlds from throwaway lines -- but not vice versa. Grimwood seems more interested in his protagonist, who has the opposite problem of being given so many personal, psychological and technological quirks that he seems scarcely believable either. The detective plot's reasonably clever, however, and the prose, at least, is very slick and shiny. I'll probably read the sequels at some point.
I've written about The Pooh Perplex (1964) by Frederick C Crews here before... and with good reason, as I tend to reread it every couple of years or so. I doubt I own a book I've read more times, except for the Pooh books themselves, which like the Perplex itself I use for comfort reading whenever I'm feeling ill or unhappy. If you love Milne's work, and hold literary critics in a kind of suspension of affection and contempt, then it's one of the funniest books it's possible to read. I've now moved on to Crews' much savager (but equally funny) late sequel, Postmodern Pooh (2001).
In addition to PoPooh, I'm currently reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (who Silk and I are going, perhaps ill-advisedly, to hear speak after the Beer Festival on Saturday) and Accelerando by Charles Stross. I haven't yet got far enough into the Banks to form an opinion (though it hasn't grabbed me on the first page the way, say, Complicity or The Crow Road did), but the Stross is remarkable. I thought at first that it was just another trendy information-dense post-cyberpunk screed, and wondered whether mightn't actually be enough of those in the world already. A third of the way through, though, it's shaping up to be something altogether more interesting. More on this later.
Force Feeding
Apologies to all of you whose feeds have been spammed by my overenthusiastic tagging last night. Blogger have introduced tag technology, but not the functionality of tagging a previous post without republishing it altogether. This means a lot of posts may have reappeared in people's friends lists or wherever.
I've also been conspicuously overtagging, and seem to have ended up with 42 of the things -- some of them probably more useful than others. This is partly out of an abundance of enthusiasm at discovering exciting new functionality; partly due to a mild case of autism from recent overwork; and partly due to the fact that my posts don't tend to have a single clearly-defined subject, instead banging on about different topics, summarising events and making comparisons between things and other things.
In any case, some of the tags are redundant and some of them probably spurious, but I don't have time to fix that for the moment. At some point when I have a day free I'll go through rationalising the tags for the whole blog, including tagging the early stuff. This will cause another splurge in your feeds, but after that there shouldn't be any more.
Meanwhile, I am Most Displeased with both Sky One and Virgin Media (who weren't even our T.V. providers until they bought out Telewest, the bastards). Thanks to the joint coporate greed of (bloody) Branson and (even bloodier) Murdoch, B. and I won't get to see any more Battlestar Galactica until the Season Three boxed set comes out. Among other things this screws up my vague idea for a talk to pitch to Greenbelt this year.
(Unless, that is, I decide to violate Sky One's intellectual property and compromise my own principles by illegally bittorrenting B.S.G. instead. Which is an option I find sorely tempting right now, I have to say.)
On the plus side, writing's gone well today and I've finished another chapter (sample words: "aqualung", "Neolithic", "plonker", plus three different types of shag). And the day after tomorrow there's beer. So life isn't all bad.
I've also been conspicuously overtagging, and seem to have ended up with 42 of the things -- some of them probably more useful than others. This is partly out of an abundance of enthusiasm at discovering exciting new functionality; partly due to a mild case of autism from recent overwork; and partly due to the fact that my posts don't tend to have a single clearly-defined subject, instead banging on about different topics, summarising events and making comparisons between things and other things.
In any case, some of the tags are redundant and some of them probably spurious, but I don't have time to fix that for the moment. At some point when I have a day free I'll go through rationalising the tags for the whole blog, including tagging the early stuff. This will cause another splurge in your feeds, but after that there shouldn't be any more.
Meanwhile, I am Most Displeased with both Sky One and Virgin Media (who weren't even our T.V. providers until they bought out Telewest, the bastards). Thanks to the joint coporate greed of (bloody) Branson and (even bloodier) Murdoch, B. and I won't get to see any more Battlestar Galactica until the Season Three boxed set comes out. Among other things this screws up my vague idea for a talk to pitch to Greenbelt this year.
(Unless, that is, I decide to violate Sky One's intellectual property and compromise my own principles by illegally bittorrenting B.S.G. instead. Which is an option I find sorely tempting right now, I have to say.)
On the plus side, writing's gone well today and I've finished another chapter (sample words: "aqualung", "Neolithic", "plonker", plus three different types of shag). And the day after tomorrow there's beer. So life isn't all bad.
28 February 2007
You're It
Ooh look, I've got tags.
[Edit: Although tagging all my past posts is going to take quite some time, I, er, seem to have done the first year's worth this afternoon. The novelty's beginning to wear off now.]
I gather from the stony silence which met my last post that I'm the only one who finds that video link amusing as well as offensive. Oh well.
I'm still embroiled in novella writing, so I'm still not getting much time to update the blog [Edit: Not that you'd think it from the way I've just spent my afternoon, but never mind]. I can't say much about the book before at least a blurb is publicised, hence the succession of rather dull wordcount figures I've been subjecting you all to recently. I can, however, reveal that the last chapter I completed contained the words "crabmeat", "volcanic", and "quarterstaff", plus explicit depictions of caffeine consumption.
Other than that -- and a certain amount of what we used to call "mindless absorption of pop culture" when I was at Oxford, but which would probably now have to be described using the words "product" and "consumer" -- it's mostly been work of one kind or another.
Pleasant exceptions have included a couple of brunches out with B. (which we deserve, this being the busiest time of her working year as well as mine so far) and the anticipation of Bristol Beer Festival this coming Saturday. Unpleasant things have included being told "I'm sorry, I thought you were young," by someone in her twenties, who went on to imply that I looked over forty. Bah.
[Edit: Although tagging all my past posts is going to take quite some time, I, er, seem to have done the first year's worth this afternoon. The novelty's beginning to wear off now.]
I gather from the stony silence which met my last post that I'm the only one who finds that video link amusing as well as offensive. Oh well.
I'm still embroiled in novella writing, so I'm still not getting much time to update the blog [Edit: Not that you'd think it from the way I've just spent my afternoon, but never mind]. I can't say much about the book before at least a blurb is publicised, hence the succession of rather dull wordcount figures I've been subjecting you all to recently. I can, however, reveal that the last chapter I completed contained the words "crabmeat", "volcanic", and "quarterstaff", plus explicit depictions of caffeine consumption.
Other than that -- and a certain amount of what we used to call "mindless absorption of pop culture" when I was at Oxford, but which would probably now have to be described using the words "product" and "consumer" -- it's mostly been work of one kind or another.
Pleasant exceptions have included a couple of brunches out with B. (which we deserve, this being the busiest time of her working year as well as mine so far) and the anticipation of Bristol Beer Festival this coming Saturday. Unpleasant things have included being told "I'm sorry, I thought you were young," by someone in her twenties, who went on to imply that I looked over forty. Bah.
25 February 2007
Additional Vaultage
I've spent the last few days revising and writing more of the novella. Current word count is roughly 18,000 out of 25,000 words, although as I have at least 9,000 still to write it's looking like I'll be overrunning a little.
(Oh, and I've written the Giant Space Mirrors column. Watch this blog for news of its appearance at Surefish.)
I've also been reading books and watching TV, but I'm probably not going to get the time to blog them for a short while yet. Life on Mars is good, though.
Fortunately, I have some more of The Curse of Odin-Hotep in reserve.
...I'm going to run out of this sample at some point, probably before I stop being so busy. I may have to resort to posting links to amusing videos.
(Oh, all right then. WARNING: The above link is not for the easily offended, especially sincere believers in the divinity of Mel Gibson.)
(Oh, and I've written the Giant Space Mirrors column. Watch this blog for news of its appearance at Surefish.)
I've also been reading books and watching TV, but I'm probably not going to get the time to blog them for a short while yet. Life on Mars is good, though.
Fortunately, I have some more of The Curse of Odin-Hotep in reserve.
The first sign of the burglar’s arrival was the careful removal of a grille set into the ceiling, protecting the bottom of a ventilation shaft. It was a time-consuming process, as each strand of the grille had to be sawn through individually and silently, without alerting the patrols of Royal Archivists in the Vault below.Can you guess the later twist about the burglar's identity, gentlemen and -- quite possibly -- ladies?
This done, the grille was lifted gently up the shaft, from which the intruder’s balaclavaed head emerged almost at once to peer down into the Vault. A pair of gloved hands followed, and soon the body that connected them was wriggling, sloughing off the tightness of the shaft with painful slowness, until its hips came free and it fell.
The figure twisted in the air with agile and uncanny freedom to land crouching, feet-first, upon the nearest stack of crates. It was still holding the detached grille of the ventilator and the handsaw, both of which it placed quietly upon the wooden slats of the topmost crate. Its night-black clothing, set about with bulging nodes, vibrated silently with obscure energy.
A quick glance around reassured the thief that the untoward presence in the Vault had not been noticed. The Archivists were changing shifts at present, and were occupied in the complicated security protocols associated with the process.
The figure stepped to the edge of the wall of crates, and dropped – lightly again, and gracefully – down to the concrete floor. It paused a moment to examine the lettering on the nearest crate, then headed purposefully away along the alleyway.
Despite some knowledge of the basic filing algorithms, the search was not an easy one, and it was not long before the Archivists had successfully negotiated their defensive rituals. The burglar had some idea of the pattern which their patrols would be following, and took an altogether different route among the crates.
Name after name, date after date, presented themselves, identifying men and years long lost to the world: P ASKWITH – 1940. DR C T MONTAGUE – 1909. W L WONG – 1956.
A soldier turned the corner at the far end of the alley, his head turned back to call behind him to his mate. Quick as a snake, the thief leapt limberly onto the nearest, mercifully low, wall of crates. Clambering to the top the intruder lay still, coveralls throbbing gently, breathing as unobtrusively as possible.
Had the Archivist noticed something amiss? Had he been ordered to vary his routine from time to time? Was he just bored?
The danger of discovery passed with the echo of his boots.
Five minutes later, the thief was examining one of the oldest crates, whose yellow wood and greying stencilled letters spelled out the inscription: T G TRAVERS – 1896.
In one deft movement, the figure unbuttoned a pocket at its thigh and withdrew a short and slender crowbar.
[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005.]
...I'm going to run out of this sample at some point, probably before I stop being so busy. I may have to resort to posting links to amusing videos.
(Oh, all right then. WARNING: The above link is not for the easily offended, especially sincere believers in the divinity of Mel Gibson.)
18 February 2007
Of Books and Bacilli
I've been struck down by the cold-with-a-side-order-of-nervous- exhaustion which seems to have been circulating the country this winter, so have spent the last day or so doing very little. Which is restful, though it doesn't seem to be making me any less tired. B. is similarly afflicted, but has been having to go into work anyway, poor love.
This means that very little's happened to me recently. The novella's going O.K., although I've had to revise my schedule to fit in my recent indolence. I need to write this month's Surefish column by Friday.
I've been reading Pashazade, which is... well, as I've said on a mailing list, it's clever, and the prose is pretty slick, but it all seems strangely soulless. The ideas are interesting, the setting is interesting, even the story could be interesting if I cared about the characters, but it's all so attenuated and substanceless, like certain very wrong people accuse William Gibson of being.
Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, on the other hand, is great. I'll try to give it a proper writeup once I'm back on form.
Meanwhile, the best I can do is to leave you with some more of the opening chapter of my pulp steampunk novel that would have been, The Curse of Odin-Hotep:
This means that very little's happened to me recently. The novella's going O.K., although I've had to revise my schedule to fit in my recent indolence. I need to write this month's Surefish column by Friday.
I've been reading Pashazade, which is... well, as I've said on a mailing list, it's clever, and the prose is pretty slick, but it all seems strangely soulless. The ideas are interesting, the setting is interesting, even the story could be interesting if I cared about the characters, but it's all so attenuated and substanceless, like certain very wrong people accuse William Gibson of being.
Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, on the other hand, is great. I'll try to give it a proper writeup once I'm back on form.
Meanwhile, the best I can do is to leave you with some more of the opening chapter of my pulp steampunk novel that would have been, The Curse of Odin-Hotep:
The Archives of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government were a labyrinth. Located underneath the capital for reasons of supreme security, their tunnels spread for miles beneath the city, connecting Downing Street with the Bank of England and Great Scotland Yard with the Tower of London. Reputedly one divergent branch stretched out as far as Lord’s cricket ground, to which, at the demand of certain of the Whitehall mandarins who frequented the tunnels, it also provided access.
All of these corridors were lined with paper files, boxes and ledgers, most of them filthy with accreted cobwebbed grime. Every step taken was muffled, all its resonance absorbed by dusty stacks of paperwork.
Each shelf bore a brass rail along which, very rarely, automatic filing devices would skitter, search-and-retrieval schedules mapped out for them by the great governmental engine-houses in Vauxhall and Battersea, whose tenders had named them, in a fit of uncharacteristic whimsy, after the city’s legendary protectors Gog and Magog.
Ingress to this vast archival root-network was through strong metal doors: dozens of them across the capital, to be sure, but each stoutly defended against unauthorised admission. A battery of craniometers and phrenological comparators ensured that the only persons admitted were those whose facial features and cranial contours were in perfect correspondence with one of the thousands of punch-cards held by Gog at Vauxhall. In case of differences of opinion, these devices were backed up by Royal Archivists armed with electric rifles.
There was, or should have been, no possibility of an intruder gaining access to the secrets, tedious though many of them may have been, which the Archives held.
Nowhere was this truer than the Vault.
The Vault was where Her Majesty’s Government put all the things for which it would have preferred not to be responsible, but which it certainly would not have wanted anybody else to get their hands on. Vials of highly virulent experimental bacilli; ancient relics of reputed occult power; blueprints and prototypes for devices too infernal ever to be built; scandalous information relating to half the crowned heads of Europe (the half, some of the Archivists suggested ribaldly, for whom the scandals in question were not already public knowledge): all of them ended up, sooner or later, inside the Vault.
It lay deep beneath Bloomsbury, deep below the British Museum’s own enormous vaults and cellars: a great echoing space which could have easily contained a concert hall or ballroom (such cultured metaphors came naturally to the men who had commissioned and designed the Vault). It was laid out in a dozen aisles stacked with wooden crates, thousands in all, identical in size but of visibly varying ages. They reached halfway to the ceiling, each neatly stencilled with a legend identifying its donor (willing or unwilling) and the year of its acquisition.
These names and dates gave little indication of the boxes’ contents, and deliberately so. The filing system applied to the crates by Magog was also assiduously obscurantist. The Royal Archivists’ Battalion were one of the few units who still refused to use steam-driven military drudges: the enlisted men’s duties were too delicate, their officers insisted, to be performed by anything other than a human. Yet humans brought special problems of their own, and it was undeniable that the men worked and slept easier for not knowing when they were patrolling within feet of the crated remnants of a captured Chinese military satellite and its midget operators, or leaning for a quiet cigarette against a box containing the inurned ashes of a Romanian vampire-prince of bloody reputation.
The Vault was the holy of holies, the secret of secrets. It had levels of security all of its own: a second, even more stringent array of physiognometric devices was supplemented by graphological and electrolytic tests, and the single door was guarded at all times, inside and out, by six heavily-armed Archivists.
For all these reasons, if there had happened to be an all-seeing observer watching the Vault at half past ten o’clock on the night of the third of March, 199–, the said observer would not have been expecting there to be a figure, clearly not an Archivist, creeping surreptitiously between the aisles of crates and peering at their stencilled designations. A slight and furtive figure muffled in bulky black coveralls would have been, so our hypothetical spectator might have thought, a precise example of the kind of thing that there most certainly should not, on this occasion or any other, have been.
There was such a figure, however; although there was not any such spectator, apart perhaps from that ubiquitous, omniscient Observer who oversees us all.
[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005.]
08 February 2007
I Can See Your Blog From Up Here
Ohh, this is exciting:
You can create your own visitor map here.
...I really should be working, shouldn't I.
You can create your own visitor map here.
...I really should be working, shouldn't I.
07 February 2007
Books Update: Shirtopener
During the last week or so I've mostly been reading telefantasy tie-in titles.
The Prisoner: The Original Scripts Volume 2, edited by Roger Fairclough, is just as fascinating as the first volume was. As there, Fairclough's editorial apparatus is a little erratic: it's sometimes difficult to tell where informed speculation ends and fannish wish-fulfilment takes over, for instance. Furthermore, in this volume Fairclough really goes to town with the script annotations, so that while reading Hammer into Anvil we are told among other things that "As filmed, Number 2 doesn't sit in his chair" or "As filmed, the Prisoner doesn't ask for adhesive tape" -- facts which are: a) fantastically trivial and b) easily observed by anybody in possession of the D.V.D.s (or even, like me, the ancient 1993 V.H.S. boxed set).
The scripts themselves, however, are just as absorbing as those in the first volume, with the genuinely substantial scripting changes, both subtle and huge, being fascinating to follow. It's really interesting seeing how It's Your Funeral originally incorporated a Manchurian Candidate brainwashing plot, for instance, or how the flirtation between the Prisoner and Number 86 in A Change of Mind was ruthlessly edited out by Patrick McGoohan. Even The Girl Who Was Death lost what would have been some gloriously funny and surreal sequences (including one where a gardener who has been spraying bushes with a canister marked "Insecticide" suddenly begins pursuing Number 6 with a canister marked "Homicide").
The most astonishing discovery in this volume, though, is that the original script for Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling -- the sorry runt of the seventeen-episode family, full of precisely the kind of melodramatic plot, clichéd sub-S.F. devices and over-reliance on obvious back-projection which were so prevalent in the spy series of the era, and which The Girl Who Was Death would mock so mercilessly just two episodes later -- is actually really good. Somehow this intelligent, subtle script, where a well-paced plot develops gradually through revealed clues and the more extreme elements emerge naturally through the action rather than being baldly stated upfront -- this quintessential Prisoner script, in fact -- was mangled during the production process until it became the drivelly mess that ended up on screen.
(For what it's worth, most of the changes made to the scripts in these volumes were largely McGoohan's responsibility, and are generally improvements, or at least not obviously detrimental. On the other hand, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling was edited and mostly produced in McGoohan's absence. Make of this what you will.)
Like its sister volume, this is well worth the substantial cover price. Highly recommended.
Less weightily, Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane isn't bad by TV tie-in fiction standards, and certainly better than most of the televised Torchwood stories. Lane has a good grasp on the regular characters (better than most of the scriptwriters, or indeed some of the actors) and a way of coming up with clever, intriguing images which illuminate them and their situations. His prose is smoothly functional, and his horror scenes are appropriately unpleasant.
Unfortunately the plot is formulaic and predictable, and based irritatingly on a very obvious and stupid fallacy. (Highlight whitespace to be spoiled: A parasite in the human gut, however alien, will not make the host appear to lose either weight or volume by eating all their food for them. Instead the hosts, containing as they do a massive, bloated parasite, will look like big, heavy starving people. This makes the idea of using said parasites as a diet tool utterly idiotic.)
It's an O.K. tie-in book, but not a patch on the adult Doctor Who novel ranges of the past... speaking of which, I'm currently re-reading for work-related reasons (writing work, obviously, not administration work) Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, which I haven't looked at for many years, and which really is fabulous. I'm also in the early stages of John Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesk, which took a while to get into but which I'm now enjoying.
And that's this week's book news.
The Prisoner: The Original Scripts Volume 2, edited by Roger Fairclough, is just as fascinating as the first volume was. As there, Fairclough's editorial apparatus is a little erratic: it's sometimes difficult to tell where informed speculation ends and fannish wish-fulfilment takes over, for instance. Furthermore, in this volume Fairclough really goes to town with the script annotations, so that while reading Hammer into Anvil we are told among other things that "As filmed, Number 2 doesn't sit in his chair" or "As filmed, the Prisoner doesn't ask for adhesive tape" -- facts which are: a) fantastically trivial and b) easily observed by anybody in possession of the D.V.D.s (or even, like me, the ancient 1993 V.H.S. boxed set).
The scripts themselves, however, are just as absorbing as those in the first volume, with the genuinely substantial scripting changes, both subtle and huge, being fascinating to follow. It's really interesting seeing how It's Your Funeral originally incorporated a Manchurian Candidate brainwashing plot, for instance, or how the flirtation between the Prisoner and Number 86 in A Change of Mind was ruthlessly edited out by Patrick McGoohan. Even The Girl Who Was Death lost what would have been some gloriously funny and surreal sequences (including one where a gardener who has been spraying bushes with a canister marked "Insecticide" suddenly begins pursuing Number 6 with a canister marked "Homicide").
The most astonishing discovery in this volume, though, is that the original script for Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling -- the sorry runt of the seventeen-episode family, full of precisely the kind of melodramatic plot, clichéd sub-S.F. devices and over-reliance on obvious back-projection which were so prevalent in the spy series of the era, and which The Girl Who Was Death would mock so mercilessly just two episodes later -- is actually really good. Somehow this intelligent, subtle script, where a well-paced plot develops gradually through revealed clues and the more extreme elements emerge naturally through the action rather than being baldly stated upfront -- this quintessential Prisoner script, in fact -- was mangled during the production process until it became the drivelly mess that ended up on screen.
(For what it's worth, most of the changes made to the scripts in these volumes were largely McGoohan's responsibility, and are generally improvements, or at least not obviously detrimental. On the other hand, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling was edited and mostly produced in McGoohan's absence. Make of this what you will.)
Like its sister volume, this is well worth the substantial cover price. Highly recommended.
Less weightily, Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane isn't bad by TV tie-in fiction standards, and certainly better than most of the televised Torchwood stories. Lane has a good grasp on the regular characters (better than most of the scriptwriters, or indeed some of the actors) and a way of coming up with clever, intriguing images which illuminate them and their situations. His prose is smoothly functional, and his horror scenes are appropriately unpleasant.
Unfortunately the plot is formulaic and predictable, and based irritatingly on a very obvious and stupid fallacy. (Highlight whitespace to be spoiled: A parasite in the human gut, however alien, will not make the host appear to lose either weight or volume by eating all their food for them. Instead the hosts, containing as they do a massive, bloated parasite, will look like big, heavy starving people. This makes the idea of using said parasites as a diet tool utterly idiotic.)
It's an O.K. tie-in book, but not a patch on the adult Doctor Who novel ranges of the past... speaking of which, I'm currently re-reading for work-related reasons (writing work, obviously, not administration work) Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, which I haven't looked at for many years, and which really is fabulous. I'm also in the early stages of John Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesk, which took a while to get into but which I'm now enjoying.
And that's this week's book news.
R.I.P. The Curse of Odin-Hotep
I don't think I mentioned, but the pseudonymous pulp-S.F. series novel I was talking about possibly writing a year and a quarter ago isn't going to happen now.
This is a shame, because I had a cast of thousands, including time-travelling Nazis, cyborg soldiers, eugenically enhanced Pharaohs, flying dragon-sphinxes and berserker warrior-mummies, poised to perform for your reading pleasure. Or at least the reading pleasure of the people who enjoy reading that sort of thing.
Never mind. Maybe I can salvage some of it for a future project.
Here (in pointedly purplish pulpy prose) is the beginning of what you missed out on:
This is a shame, because I had a cast of thousands, including time-travelling Nazis, cyborg soldiers, eugenically enhanced Pharaohs, flying dragon-sphinxes and berserker warrior-mummies, poised to perform for your reading pleasure. Or at least the reading pleasure of the people who enjoy reading that sort of thing.
Never mind. Maybe I can salvage some of it for a future project.
Here (in pointedly purplish pulpy prose) is the beginning of what you missed out on:
At this height the wind is deafening, blinding: it shrieks past your ears, drying out your eyes. It buffets and bruises you as you hang in place, held there by lines of aetherial magnetism, counter-gravity. It is as well you have dressed warmly: at this altitude, the wind’s chill is intense.Hmm. I'd been reading Perdido Street Station. Can you tell?
Not so below. Beneath your feet, beneath the level of the birds and airships, the air across the ground is stagnant, warm and dense with smog. Exhausts from myriad flues vomit forth the steam and soot of burnt-out fuel, from coal or coke or oil or anything that, thousands of millennia ago, was once alive. From the tiniest micro-furnaces which fire the hand-held processing-engines of businessmen and bureaucrats, to the great belching chimneys of the automated factories and shipyards, every device in this great capital exhales smoke. It combines with the natural vapours of the slug-trail river whose floodplain this is, to create a foul, miasmic cloud.
Laid out above its gloom like veins on jaundiced skin, a spider-web of viaducts maps out the lines of the overhead railways. Between them the tallest of the city’s edifices emerge, the office-buildings and the slum-containment blocks. They burst forth accusingly from the murk to point at you, the spy, anchored by arcane science far above their precious city.
This is London. Or rather, that was what she was once. Now she is Londinium Maximum, Greatest London, the dark and cancerous heart of the global body that is Magna Britannia. The greatest empire and the most malignant tyrant the planet Earth, and now the solar system, have ever known.
From the suburban terraces of Slough and Windsor in the west to the commercial docks of Canvey in the east; from the slums of Dagenham and Dartford to the voluptuous townhouses of Mayfair; from drab St Albans in the north, and spreading down along the southern coastal railway-line as far as Horsham and Grinstead – London sprawls open to her visitors, balefully inviting.
Accepting, you descend.
[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005 or thereabouts.]
03 February 2007
Verbiage
As you may have noticed, I haven't had time to get to this blog during the past week or so. That's probably going to continue for a little while, as I try rather manically to catch up with writing my novella for War Stories.
What with there having been Christmas last year and everything, this work has slipped back rather, so that I've had to impose a fairly rigorous writing schedule on myself to get it... well, started, to be honest. I'm pretty much entirely hopeless in matters of self-discipline, as anyone who saw me at mealtimes over Christmas can attest.
Being remarkably anally-retentive, I've broken my time down into all the days I'm free from work, then worked out how much of which chapter I can sensibly expect to write on each of them -- factoring in the necessary Surefish columns, a couple of possible one-off articles and a Beer Festival, all of which are coming up in the next few months.
Fortunately the fact of knowing that this expectation exists, even if only in my brain, has been sufficient so far to force me into actually doing the work, rather than arsing around on the internet, reading mailing lists, fiddling with Wikipedia and the like.
When I was an undergraduate I could write 4000-word essays overnight. Admittedly I didn't enjoy it much, which is why I left it to the last minute. And nobody was holding me to a publishable standard, and non-fiction is different anyway... but still, I envy my younger self that facility with language. Even when I was writing Of the City of the Saved... I often managed 2000 words in a day, and there were a couple when I was pushing 3000, but they were exceptional even then.
I can't imagine being able to work that fast now. The more fiction I write, the more pitfalls and difficulties I can see, the more care and attention I feel I have to put into each individual word, sentence and paragraph, and the longer it takes.
Admittedly, getting broadband probably hasn't helped either.
Over the past four days I've managed a respectable 6000 words, but it's been a killer. Most of the schedule demands 1000 to 1250 a day, which is more achievable but still a bit punishing.
All of which is a roundabout -- and, under the circumstances, an unnecessarily verbose -- way of saying that updates to this blog are going to be slowing down somewhat in the forseeable future. Before, of course, being reborn triumphant after my deadline.
I'll try to keep up the mini book reviews, but I'm behind on those already. Expect something, er, Wednesday possibly. If that's all right with everyone.
What with there having been Christmas last year and everything, this work has slipped back rather, so that I've had to impose a fairly rigorous writing schedule on myself to get it... well, started, to be honest. I'm pretty much entirely hopeless in matters of self-discipline, as anyone who saw me at mealtimes over Christmas can attest.
Being remarkably anally-retentive, I've broken my time down into all the days I'm free from work, then worked out how much of which chapter I can sensibly expect to write on each of them -- factoring in the necessary Surefish columns, a couple of possible one-off articles and a Beer Festival, all of which are coming up in the next few months.
Fortunately the fact of knowing that this expectation exists, even if only in my brain, has been sufficient so far to force me into actually doing the work, rather than arsing around on the internet, reading mailing lists, fiddling with Wikipedia and the like.
When I was an undergraduate I could write 4000-word essays overnight. Admittedly I didn't enjoy it much, which is why I left it to the last minute. And nobody was holding me to a publishable standard, and non-fiction is different anyway... but still, I envy my younger self that facility with language. Even when I was writing Of the City of the Saved... I often managed 2000 words in a day, and there were a couple when I was pushing 3000, but they were exceptional even then.
I can't imagine being able to work that fast now. The more fiction I write, the more pitfalls and difficulties I can see, the more care and attention I feel I have to put into each individual word, sentence and paragraph, and the longer it takes.
Admittedly, getting broadband probably hasn't helped either.
Over the past four days I've managed a respectable 6000 words, but it's been a killer. Most of the schedule demands 1000 to 1250 a day, which is more achievable but still a bit punishing.
All of which is a roundabout -- and, under the circumstances, an unnecessarily verbose -- way of saying that updates to this blog are going to be slowing down somewhat in the forseeable future. Before, of course, being reborn triumphant after my deadline.
I'll try to keep up the mini book reviews, but I'm behind on those already. Expect something, er, Wednesday possibly. If that's all right with everyone.
29 January 2007
Cylon of Cyrene
Urgh. No time to post properly at the moment, for reasons I'd describe in detail if I had time to post properly at the moment.
I certainly haven't had time to write my column for Surefish about giant space mirrors. However, here's one I prepared earlier.
I certainly haven't had time to write my column for Surefish about giant space mirrors. However, here's one I prepared earlier.
27 January 2007
Flogging Jehovah
Is it wrong to be polite to Jehovah's Witnesses?
I answered the door to two of them -- a mother and son, I think -- in my dressing-gown this morning, in the hope that they might be delivering my Doctor Who: New Beginnings DVD boxed set. (They weren't, but it's a tactic they might want to consider in future.) They were a little nonplussed by my déshabille, but launched gamely into their spiel before I cut them off, politely, and told them, politely, that I wasn't really able to discuss the Lord Jesus with them right now.
The thing is, I'm not a particularly tolerant person, where intrusions into my privacy are concerned. I have no difficulty being rude to cold-callers who phone up trying to sell me double glazing or new kitchens: they took the job, they're being paid for it (badly, but that's a matter between them and their employer), and they knew full well that my being bloody rude to them was a risk they were accepting along with the position. Also, they're bastards.
I can't bring myself to take that attitude with J.W.s. I doubt my beliefs have more in common with theirs than perhaps a third of the Nicene Creed, I think they show some worryingly cultish tendencies and they most certainly get the christian community (of which they're fairly marginal members) a bad name. But still, I can't help looking at it from their point of view.
As far as they're concerned, their calling from door to door is a desperate attempt to save their neighbours from eternal damnation. Out of sheer charitable love for people who they've never met, and are very likely to tell them to fuck off, they brave rejection, insult and physical violence on a regular basis as a working-out of their faith. That faith isn't mine, and I can't see any way it ever could be. But if I was in their position, I very much doubt I'd have that degree of commitment or moral courage.
Oddly, this isn't a respect I extend to evangelical "missions", Alpha Course organisers, or people who stand in the street shouting through megaphones that I'm going to Hell. They can fuck off, with their bullying rhetoric, their unchallengeable certainties and their smug middle-class haircuts.
The J.W.s, though, I can't help respecting even while I think they're deluded fools.
So... should I continue to be polite to them, and to tell them (as I did today) that although I don't want to talk to them I do appreciate their kindness? Or should I tell them to fuck off, on the grounds that this will discourage them from intruding into people's lives, risking their own safety and bringing religious people (slightly further) into disrepute?
...Actually, I think I know the answer to that. In most cases it wouldn't discourage them at all -- it would just confirm them in their belief that the world is fundamentally corrupt and deaf to their preaching of the truth.
It's difficult to know how you can affect a mindset like that, short of engaging them in actual argument. And sadly that's something I haven't the time or energy -- or commitment, or moral courage -- to do.
I answered the door to two of them -- a mother and son, I think -- in my dressing-gown this morning, in the hope that they might be delivering my Doctor Who: New Beginnings DVD boxed set. (They weren't, but it's a tactic they might want to consider in future.) They were a little nonplussed by my déshabille, but launched gamely into their spiel before I cut them off, politely, and told them, politely, that I wasn't really able to discuss the Lord Jesus with them right now.
The thing is, I'm not a particularly tolerant person, where intrusions into my privacy are concerned. I have no difficulty being rude to cold-callers who phone up trying to sell me double glazing or new kitchens: they took the job, they're being paid for it (badly, but that's a matter between them and their employer), and they knew full well that my being bloody rude to them was a risk they were accepting along with the position. Also, they're bastards.
I can't bring myself to take that attitude with J.W.s. I doubt my beliefs have more in common with theirs than perhaps a third of the Nicene Creed, I think they show some worryingly cultish tendencies and they most certainly get the christian community (of which they're fairly marginal members) a bad name. But still, I can't help looking at it from their point of view.
As far as they're concerned, their calling from door to door is a desperate attempt to save their neighbours from eternal damnation. Out of sheer charitable love for people who they've never met, and are very likely to tell them to fuck off, they brave rejection, insult and physical violence on a regular basis as a working-out of their faith. That faith isn't mine, and I can't see any way it ever could be. But if I was in their position, I very much doubt I'd have that degree of commitment or moral courage.
Oddly, this isn't a respect I extend to evangelical "missions", Alpha Course organisers, or people who stand in the street shouting through megaphones that I'm going to Hell. They can fuck off, with their bullying rhetoric, their unchallengeable certainties and their smug middle-class haircuts.
The J.W.s, though, I can't help respecting even while I think they're deluded fools.
So... should I continue to be polite to them, and to tell them (as I did today) that although I don't want to talk to them I do appreciate their kindness? Or should I tell them to fuck off, on the grounds that this will discourage them from intruding into people's lives, risking their own safety and bringing religious people (slightly further) into disrepute?
...Actually, I think I know the answer to that. In most cases it wouldn't discourage them at all -- it would just confirm them in their belief that the world is fundamentally corrupt and deaf to their preaching of the truth.
It's difficult to know how you can affect a mindset like that, short of engaging them in actual argument. And sadly that's something I haven't the time or energy -- or commitment, or moral courage -- to do.
A Time for Reflection
It seems the U.S. will shortly be unveiling its strategy to combat global warming (you know, just in case it turns out that it's actually happening after all), and it's:
Giant Space Mirrors!
That's my next Surefish column sorted, then.
Giant Space Mirrors!
That's my next Surefish column sorted, then.
24 January 2007
Books Update: Demolishing Our Holmes
(Hmm. I think I may have used that one before. Never mind, it was a while ago now and I doubt anyone will notice.)
In accordance with this mini-resolution, here's a brief writeup of the latest book I've finished reading:
Erasing Sherlock by the remarkable Kelly Hale, is the fifth Faction Paradox novel: the story of a modern woman set loose, thanks to some dodgy pirated time-travel technology, in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The narrator -- an academic posing as a maid -- is a delight to read, a brilliant, utterly alive creation, while Holmes and Watson are more vibrant and textured than I can remember them being in any Conan Doyle story, whilst still being perfectly true to his conception. I rather prefer the first half of the book, which is essentially an intellectual-game-turned-romance between the narrator and Holmes on the latter's home turf, to the later chapters where both are having to improvise in unfamiliar territory.
The prose is gorgeous, rich and creamy, and the period detail is excellent, erudite but executed with a light touch. On the whole, a fantastic novel with some marvellous character work, an addictive story and a surprising amount of shagging. I've no hesitation in calling it the best -- just as, sadly, it's the last -- of Mad Norwegian's Faction Paradox range.
In accordance with this mini-resolution, here's a brief writeup of the latest book I've finished reading:
Erasing Sherlock by the remarkable Kelly Hale, is the fifth Faction Paradox novel: the story of a modern woman set loose, thanks to some dodgy pirated time-travel technology, in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The narrator -- an academic posing as a maid -- is a delight to read, a brilliant, utterly alive creation, while Holmes and Watson are more vibrant and textured than I can remember them being in any Conan Doyle story, whilst still being perfectly true to his conception. I rather prefer the first half of the book, which is essentially an intellectual-game-turned-romance between the narrator and Holmes on the latter's home turf, to the later chapters where both are having to improvise in unfamiliar territory.
The prose is gorgeous, rich and creamy, and the period detail is excellent, erudite but executed with a light touch. On the whole, a fantastic novel with some marvellous character work, an addictive story and a surprising amount of shagging. I've no hesitation in calling it the best -- just as, sadly, it's the last -- of Mad Norwegian's Faction Paradox range.
Not Chuffed
I can't say I approve of the recent protest by my fellow commuters in Bristol and Bath against First Great Western. Apart from anything else, making sure that your consumer action group gets as much publicity as possible on the very day it's breaking the law by using a publicly-funded service without paying for it, isn't a terribly impressive way of claiming the moral high ground.
Nonetheless, I am most displeased with F.G.W. For weeks now they've been saving money (and raising those all-important shareholder dividends) by running underequipped and overcrowded train services, charging commuters extortionate prices for the privilege of being crammed into carriages like cattle. (Albeit cattle in suits and ties, who instead of being taken to abbatoirs to be electrically stunned and slaughtered will be spending a day behind a desk in an office, staring at computer screens, mooing and chewing the cud in a perplexed kind of way.)
Yesterday my train to work was so crowded it couldn't physically fit me on board. People were standing all the way up the corridors of both carriages, crammed in around the doors and apparently in the toilet as well. (I didn't even know that the service in question had a toilet, but evidently no expense had been spared. Oh, wait.) Of the half-dozen people waiting at our little branch-line station, four managed to squeeze on board after some shoehorning by the guard, while I and one other were turned away. I had to take the bus to Bristol Temple Meads to get a later train, arrive at work an hour late and forego my lunch hour in order to catch up. Grr.
Petty law-breaking and catchily-named pressure groups aren't the way to go, however. Instead, I urge everbody in the South-West to participate fully in the spirit of the free-market philosophy espoused so fervently by this government and their marginally less liberal predecessors, by refusing to give another penny of your money to F.G.W., and instead granting your custom to one of the many comptetitors of theirs who run trains along the same routes.
...Oh, that's right. You can't, in fact, do either of those. Because while the Government passes out marketarian propaganda with one invisible hand, it's using the other to hand over functional monopolies to companies along with millions of pounds of public money, thus effortlessly combining the worst aspects of a state-run monopoly and a profit-driven private company.
That it then makes pathetic excuses for them, instead of enforcing basic standards of customer care, helps to ensure we don't for a moment mistake its sheer corrupt contempt for the public interest for anything so naïve and charming as incompetence.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not endorsed by anyone other than me. Even the cats are looking dubious, actually. But honestly. T'ch.]
Nonetheless, I am most displeased with F.G.W. For weeks now they've been saving money (and raising those all-important shareholder dividends) by running underequipped and overcrowded train services, charging commuters extortionate prices for the privilege of being crammed into carriages like cattle. (Albeit cattle in suits and ties, who instead of being taken to abbatoirs to be electrically stunned and slaughtered will be spending a day behind a desk in an office, staring at computer screens, mooing and chewing the cud in a perplexed kind of way.)
Yesterday my train to work was so crowded it couldn't physically fit me on board. People were standing all the way up the corridors of both carriages, crammed in around the doors and apparently in the toilet as well. (I didn't even know that the service in question had a toilet, but evidently no expense had been spared. Oh, wait.) Of the half-dozen people waiting at our little branch-line station, four managed to squeeze on board after some shoehorning by the guard, while I and one other were turned away. I had to take the bus to Bristol Temple Meads to get a later train, arrive at work an hour late and forego my lunch hour in order to catch up. Grr.
Petty law-breaking and catchily-named pressure groups aren't the way to go, however. Instead, I urge everbody in the South-West to participate fully in the spirit of the free-market philosophy espoused so fervently by this government and their marginally less liberal predecessors, by refusing to give another penny of your money to F.G.W., and instead granting your custom to one of the many comptetitors of theirs who run trains along the same routes.
...Oh, that's right. You can't, in fact, do either of those. Because while the Government passes out marketarian propaganda with one invisible hand, it's using the other to hand over functional monopolies to companies along with millions of pounds of public money, thus effortlessly combining the worst aspects of a state-run monopoly and a profit-driven private company.
That it then makes pathetic excuses for them, instead of enforcing basic standards of customer care, helps to ensure we don't for a moment mistake its sheer corrupt contempt for the public interest for anything so naïve and charming as incompetence.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not endorsed by anyone other than me. Even the cats are looking dubious, actually. But honestly. T'ch.]
20 January 2007
Scenes from a 21st-Century Life
LIVING ROOM. DAY.
[Enter Phil. B. is watching Holby City. On screen, the doctors have just performed a caesarian section.]
PHIL: Can I talk to you a sec?
B.: Just let me pause this.
[She pauses it. The screen is full of open torso and blood-smeared baby.]
PHIL: Erm. Preferably not while looking at that?
B.: Sure.
[She rewinds. The doctors put the baby back inside.]
[Enter Phil. B. is watching Holby City. On screen, the doctors have just performed a caesarian section.]
PHIL: Can I talk to you a sec?
B.: Just let me pause this.
[She pauses it. The screen is full of open torso and blood-smeared baby.]
PHIL: Erm. Preferably not while looking at that?
B.: Sure.
[She rewinds. The doctors put the baby back inside.]
18 January 2007
Book Depository
I'm aware I've been banging on about routine personal stuff rather a lot here recently, as if this were some ghastly tabloid LiveJournal rather than the altogether better class of broadsheet blogging one's accustomed to finding on Blogspot. As a sort of mini-resolution, I've decided that during 2007 (and ideally beyond) I shall try to record every book I read here at Peculiar Times, and write at least two sentences about each one.
The reason for this is partly the hope that it'll be interesting, partly to keep up the critical writing which is one of the reasons I maintain this blog, but mostly because -- now my memory's passed the halfway point in its deterioration towards senescence -- I find I'm having real trouble remembering what I've actually read.
So, the following are the books I've finished so far this year. Some of them, of course, were begun last year.
The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod. This one was a reread -- it was this book and its sequels which first convinced me that I had to make reading every book Macleod published a high priority for the rest of my life. It's almost embarrassing, in retrospect, how much of an influence on Of the City of the Saved... this was -- the chief difference being that I have none of Macleod's expertise in political theory, so had to write about entirely fictional politics instead. It's still excellent stuff, although there are traces of the awkwardness and completism which afflicts many first novels.
King Rat by China Miéville. This one's more obviously a first novel: evidently Miéville hit his stride with Perdido Street Station (another novel which has a scary amount in common with OtCotS, but which I fortunately hadn't read until well after it came out). King Rat takes place in contemporary London, which allows it to indulge an interest in real-world urban musical styles, but as a setting is surprisingly thin: it's clear that the author is already straining after his own vivid world. The quality of Miéville's reinterpretation of real-world myth and folklore is variable: his take on the Pied Piper is excellent, but his Anansi pales compared with Neil Gaiman's.
About Time 2 by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood. This is the latest instalment of Lawrence and Tat's ongoing and epic attempt to place the various eras of twentieth-century TV Doctor Who in its cultural context -- expected to run (after the publication of the next and final volume, About Time 6) to a million words, of which this must constitute at least 175,000. As I mentioned on Parrinium Mines, this volume suffers from documenting the relatively dull repetitiveness of the Troughton era (rather than, say, the freeform experimentation of the Hartnell stuff), as well as the authors' inability to keep their verbiage under control. It's still one of the most entertaining books ever written about Doctor Who, though (and believe me, there's a wide field for comparison).
The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. This was a weird one, a birthday present from the vicar and family. It's a combination of criticism and theology, but unlike most such studies (well, most that deserve the term "studies", anyway) it's heavily weighted towards the theology end of things. This means that the criticism's rather facile, but there's an awful lot of background concerning things like pre-christian sacrificial cults and the authorship of Revelation.
Nonetheless, the actual conclusions the authors come to are often interesting, if frequently batty. The idea that Doctor Who is about the superseding of sacrificial kingship relies on a very selective reading, and ignores a great many stories which might have been useful to the argument, as well as some which might well have blown it out of the water. There's some confusion about the understanding of the term "science fiction", with the analysis of the cross-genre anthology show The Twilight Zone relying mostly on the episodes where characters make Faustian bargains firmly in the tradition of theological fantasy. Some aspects of the authors' research have been sketchy at best, and there are some bizarre factual errors. (Jon Pertwee's name accumulating an extra "h" is common and understandable, though irritating -- but when exactly did Babylon 5's Mr Morden acquire the first name "Ethan"?)
The fact that it treats Star Trek with moral seriousness gives away the fact that The Truth Is Out There is an American book. Perhaps because of this I found both it surprisingly conservative both in politics and theology -- there is, for instance, a startlingly vehement rant about how television in general is eroding the nation's morals, the six series under advisement being honorable exceptions. More disturbingly still, it seems to assume an even more conservative readership, who need much convincing of the few non-traditional assumptions the authors make. It's a fascinating perspective on TV SF, and I'm glad to have read it, but it's phenomenally wrong on a quite startling number of levels.
Shortly before Christmas I finished Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by anthropologist Kate Fox. I'm not going to go on about it at length, because I've said far more than two sentences about all of the above, especially that last one. Suffice to say that it's brilliant, clever and funny, and that if you're English you need to read it in order to understand yourself. (If you're not English, you still need to read it, in order to understand any English people you might happen to meet.)
Currently I'm reading the second volume of the Prisoner scriptbook; and Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale -- the fifth, final and, on its showing so far, very possibly the best of Mad Norwegian Press's Faction Paradox novels.
Finally, it's been ages since I updated my reading list.
Books in bold have been added since the last time. Stuff in square brackets has been reluctantly designated less urgent, which means I'll probably not get around to reading it unless I find myself in bed with spinal injuries for a year or so. Two rather unappealing Doctor Who tie-ins have fallen off the list altogether.
Non-Fiction:
The reason for this is partly the hope that it'll be interesting, partly to keep up the critical writing which is one of the reasons I maintain this blog, but mostly because -- now my memory's passed the halfway point in its deterioration towards senescence -- I find I'm having real trouble remembering what I've actually read.
So, the following are the books I've finished so far this year. Some of them, of course, were begun last year.
The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod. This one was a reread -- it was this book and its sequels which first convinced me that I had to make reading every book Macleod published a high priority for the rest of my life. It's almost embarrassing, in retrospect, how much of an influence on Of the City of the Saved... this was -- the chief difference being that I have none of Macleod's expertise in political theory, so had to write about entirely fictional politics instead. It's still excellent stuff, although there are traces of the awkwardness and completism which afflicts many first novels.
King Rat by China Miéville. This one's more obviously a first novel: evidently Miéville hit his stride with Perdido Street Station (another novel which has a scary amount in common with OtCotS, but which I fortunately hadn't read until well after it came out). King Rat takes place in contemporary London, which allows it to indulge an interest in real-world urban musical styles, but as a setting is surprisingly thin: it's clear that the author is already straining after his own vivid world. The quality of Miéville's reinterpretation of real-world myth and folklore is variable: his take on the Pied Piper is excellent, but his Anansi pales compared with Neil Gaiman's.
About Time 2 by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood. This is the latest instalment of Lawrence and Tat's ongoing and epic attempt to place the various eras of twentieth-century TV Doctor Who in its cultural context -- expected to run (after the publication of the next and final volume, About Time 6) to a million words, of which this must constitute at least 175,000. As I mentioned on Parrinium Mines, this volume suffers from documenting the relatively dull repetitiveness of the Troughton era (rather than, say, the freeform experimentation of the Hartnell stuff), as well as the authors' inability to keep their verbiage under control. It's still one of the most entertaining books ever written about Doctor Who, though (and believe me, there's a wide field for comparison).
The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. This was a weird one, a birthday present from the vicar and family. It's a combination of criticism and theology, but unlike most such studies (well, most that deserve the term "studies", anyway) it's heavily weighted towards the theology end of things. This means that the criticism's rather facile, but there's an awful lot of background concerning things like pre-christian sacrificial cults and the authorship of Revelation.
Nonetheless, the actual conclusions the authors come to are often interesting, if frequently batty. The idea that Doctor Who is about the superseding of sacrificial kingship relies on a very selective reading, and ignores a great many stories which might have been useful to the argument, as well as some which might well have blown it out of the water. There's some confusion about the understanding of the term "science fiction", with the analysis of the cross-genre anthology show The Twilight Zone relying mostly on the episodes where characters make Faustian bargains firmly in the tradition of theological fantasy. Some aspects of the authors' research have been sketchy at best, and there are some bizarre factual errors. (Jon Pertwee's name accumulating an extra "h" is common and understandable, though irritating -- but when exactly did Babylon 5's Mr Morden acquire the first name "Ethan"?)
The fact that it treats Star Trek with moral seriousness gives away the fact that The Truth Is Out There is an American book. Perhaps because of this I found both it surprisingly conservative both in politics and theology -- there is, for instance, a startlingly vehement rant about how television in general is eroding the nation's morals, the six series under advisement being honorable exceptions. More disturbingly still, it seems to assume an even more conservative readership, who need much convincing of the few non-traditional assumptions the authors make. It's a fascinating perspective on TV SF, and I'm glad to have read it, but it's phenomenally wrong on a quite startling number of levels.
Shortly before Christmas I finished Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by anthropologist Kate Fox. I'm not going to go on about it at length, because I've said far more than two sentences about all of the above, especially that last one. Suffice to say that it's brilliant, clever and funny, and that if you're English you need to read it in order to understand yourself. (If you're not English, you still need to read it, in order to understand any English people you might happen to meet.)
Currently I'm reading the second volume of the Prisoner scriptbook; and Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale -- the fifth, final and, on its showing so far, very possibly the best of Mad Norwegian Press's Faction Paradox novels.
Finally, it's been ages since I updated my reading list.
Books in bold have been added since the last time. Stuff in square brackets has been reluctantly designated less urgent, which means I'll probably not get around to reading it unless I find myself in bed with spinal injuries for a year or so. Two rather unappealing Doctor Who tie-ins have fallen off the list altogether.
Non-Fiction:
- [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
- Jared Diamond, Collapse.
- Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
- Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
- Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
- Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
- David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.
- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
- Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
- [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
- [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
- Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
- [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
- Frank Herbert, Dune.
- Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
- China Miéville, Iron Council.
- Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
- Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
- Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
- Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.
- Charles Stross, Accelerando.
17 January 2007
Höllering
Brief update today, to catch up on a busy weekend and a busier week.
After getting a few hundred whole words of my novella written during the last couple of days of last week, I disappeared to London with B. for Saturday and Sunday, to visit relatives (or in my case in-laws), attend a birthday party and appreciate the art at the Tate Modern.
After a pleasant lunch with B.'s granny, most of Saturday afternoon was wasted in dithering. The London "hotel" we'd booked online -- which had looked cheap and basic, but perfectly serviceable, in pixel form -- turned out to be a godawful dive of a pub on a rubbish-strewn sink estate, and not at all the sort of place where we'd have been happy walking, or even leaving a taxi, late at night. After much agonising over the possibilities, we eventually settled for the inconvenience (to her and us) of sleeping on B.'s sister's sofa instead. (It was kind and rather heroic of said sister to take us in, considering that she was already putting up her boyfriend and the aforementioned granny, and that her house isn't exactly vast.)
That decision made, we managed to enjoy ourselves on Carsten Höller's masterwork, which was appropriately spectacular and boundary-breaking, but may or may not count as actual art. I can't yet decide whether my considered response is:
We then proceeded to the party, which was great -- plenty of beer and interesting conversation, lots of hardcore dance music (which our hosts, at our drunken insistence, very patiently and painstakingly explained to us), three lovely velvety rats (pet ones who were meant to be there, rather than the less convivial kind we'd have been likely to find near our "hotel"), and several equally lovely velvety single malt whiskies. Mm.
The next morning I was feeling rather delicate, but was soon revived by brunch with other friends, somewhere in Clapham. At least, I think it was Clapham. I was too hungry to notice really. Then we drove back to Bristol in the afternoon, ate too much supper (possibly to line our stomachs retrospectively for the night before), and went to bed.
Since then I've been back at work, wading through acronyms until (as I discovered when trying to read a safety notice on the train home today) I genuinely can't see words printed in capitals without wondering what all the letters stand for.
Oh, and watching the first three episodes of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, which is ace. More on that anon.
After getting a few hundred whole words of my novella written during the last couple of days of last week, I disappeared to London with B. for Saturday and Sunday, to visit relatives (or in my case in-laws), attend a birthday party and appreciate the art at the Tate Modern.
After a pleasant lunch with B.'s granny, most of Saturday afternoon was wasted in dithering. The London "hotel" we'd booked online -- which had looked cheap and basic, but perfectly serviceable, in pixel form -- turned out to be a godawful dive of a pub on a rubbish-strewn sink estate, and not at all the sort of place where we'd have been happy walking, or even leaving a taxi, late at night. After much agonising over the possibilities, we eventually settled for the inconvenience (to her and us) of sleeping on B.'s sister's sofa instead. (It was kind and rather heroic of said sister to take us in, considering that she was already putting up her boyfriend and the aforementioned granny, and that her house isn't exactly vast.)
That decision made, we managed to enjoy ourselves on Carsten Höller's masterwork, which was appropriately spectacular and boundary-breaking, but may or may not count as actual art. I can't yet decide whether my considered response is:
Höller's Test Site is a fascinating and vivid demonstration of the tendency of a limited loss of stability and control over one's environment to evoke the most visceral human emotional responses, and a witty and profound exploration of the boundaries between architecture, psychology and child's play.or:
I liked the Level Four slide best because of the steep bits which were scary! But the Level Five slide was best too because you get to go very very fast! WHEEEEEEEE!
We then proceeded to the party, which was great -- plenty of beer and interesting conversation, lots of hardcore dance music (which our hosts, at our drunken insistence, very patiently and painstakingly explained to us), three lovely velvety rats (pet ones who were meant to be there, rather than the less convivial kind we'd have been likely to find near our "hotel"), and several equally lovely velvety single malt whiskies. Mm.
The next morning I was feeling rather delicate, but was soon revived by brunch with other friends, somewhere in Clapham. At least, I think it was Clapham. I was too hungry to notice really. Then we drove back to Bristol in the afternoon, ate too much supper (possibly to line our stomachs retrospectively for the night before), and went to bed.
Since then I've been back at work, wading through acronyms until (as I discovered when trying to read a safety notice on the train home today) I genuinely can't see words printed in capitals without wondering what all the letters stand for.
Oh, and watching the first three episodes of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, which is ace. More on that anon.
11 January 2007
Re-Quired
An update to the website today, in the form of some behind-the-scenes material on Collected Works.
As those of you who've read the book will know, the Quire are a clan of posthuman scholars from the distant future who visit the Braxiatel Collection where the hero, Professor Bernice Summerfield, lives and works. They have to adjust to the ways of their distant ancestors even as the humans of the Collection are adjusting to them -- a relationship which ultimately goes sour in various unpleasant ways.
I created the Quire for the anthology, based on a brief from the editor, Nick Wallace, who believed based on my previous writing that I could do a decent job of posthuman worldbuilding. What's now up on my website is the original briefing document sent to contributors, to introduce the characters and their background. It comes with some scene-setting preamble from me and a lot of footnotes explaining the thinking which went into creating the characters and setup.
You should find it worth a read if you're interested in how short-story anthologies evolve, or if you found the hints of the Quire's background in Collected Works intriguing and want to learn more, or if for some unimaginable reason you're simply fascinated by the way my mind works. (That's why I like it, anyway. But then it is my mind.)
Speaking of the website... over Christmas I became thoroughly sick of Onetel's email service, which utterly fell over for me and many others on 22 December and wasn't fixed until the end of last week. A helpline (whose number was difficult enough to find in the first place) promised "hourly updates" on the problem on another line -- each of which, for weeks at a time , bore a startling similarity to the last.
As a result of this, I've arranged for a full web-hosting and email account with Black Cat Networks. Black Cat have been hosting the redirection for my infinitarian.com domain and email addresses for years now. They're a small company run by computer geeks, which means they're reliable, friendly and cheap, but do have a slight tendency to assume that all their customers know what SMTPs and DNSes are without being told.
Anyway. I'll be moving the website across to my shiny new webspace at some point, which will mean that the www.infinitarian.com address will actually hold its own material rather than redirecting to the webspace which came free with my TV, phone and broadband.
The move shouldn't make any practical difference to anyone approaching the site via its official address -- and I'll probably keep the Blueyonder version as a mirror -- but it may finally make the current mirror site at Thoughtplay redundant. I'll mention it if and when that happens, though.
As those of you who've read the book will know, the Quire are a clan of posthuman scholars from the distant future who visit the Braxiatel Collection where the hero, Professor Bernice Summerfield, lives and works. They have to adjust to the ways of their distant ancestors even as the humans of the Collection are adjusting to them -- a relationship which ultimately goes sour in various unpleasant ways.
I created the Quire for the anthology, based on a brief from the editor, Nick Wallace, who believed based on my previous writing that I could do a decent job of posthuman worldbuilding. What's now up on my website is the original briefing document sent to contributors, to introduce the characters and their background. It comes with some scene-setting preamble from me and a lot of footnotes explaining the thinking which went into creating the characters and setup.
You should find it worth a read if you're interested in how short-story anthologies evolve, or if you found the hints of the Quire's background in Collected Works intriguing and want to learn more, or if for some unimaginable reason you're simply fascinated by the way my mind works. (That's why I like it, anyway. But then it is my mind.)
Speaking of the website... over Christmas I became thoroughly sick of Onetel's email service, which utterly fell over for me and many others on 22 December and wasn't fixed until the end of last week. A helpline (whose number was difficult enough to find in the first place) promised "hourly updates" on the problem on another line -- each of which, for weeks at a time , bore a startling similarity to the last.
As a result of this, I've arranged for a full web-hosting and email account with Black Cat Networks. Black Cat have been hosting the redirection for my infinitarian.com domain and email addresses for years now. They're a small company run by computer geeks, which means they're reliable, friendly and cheap, but do have a slight tendency to assume that all their customers know what SMTPs and DNSes are without being told.
Anyway. I'll be moving the website across to my shiny new webspace at some point, which will mean that the www.infinitarian.com address will actually hold its own material rather than redirecting to the webspace which came free with my TV, phone and broadband.
The move shouldn't make any practical difference to anyone approaching the site via its official address -- and I'll probably keep the Blueyonder version as a mirror -- but it may finally make the current mirror site at Thoughtplay redundant. I'll mention it if and when that happens, though.
05 January 2007
Festivity and Christmas Spirit
Well, my last substantial post here was on 21 December. Since then the final panicked stages of Advent have been followed by Christmas, which -- being technically not over until tomorrow -- has also incorporated New Year.
During this time I've:
I should also mention the generous and exciting gift of a digital camera from my parents, although that happened during our visit before Christmas. I'm currently trying to un-bloat the contents of my hard drive so I can download the software and start transferring actual photos. I'll probably post some here, although I may be required to start a Flickr account at some point soon.
During this time I've:
- Wrapped my Christmas presents and distributed them to various relatives, friends and a wife.
- Had people round for pre-Christmas drinks, with much mulling of wine, cracking of nuts and mincing of pies.
- Spent a lovely Christmas Day here in Bristol, starting with a generous Christmas breakfast and punctuated by a pleasant trip across the city to exchange presents with our goddaughter and family.
- Jointly prepared a vast and decadent Christmas dinner with B., then found that (very likely due to the aftermath of that bout of food poisoning, or just possibly the generous breakfast) we both had insufficient appetite to do justice to it.
- Packed in a hurry then headed to B.'s parents for Boxing Day lunch, followed by four days' stay with said in-laws.
- Received a gratifying number of Christmas presents, including The Prisoner scriptbook volume two from B., The Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 from her parents, Revolver and Rubber Soul from her granny, Inferno and Genesis of the Daleks on DVD from her big sister and a Dalek T-shirt from her little sister (plus respective boyfriends).
- Returned to Bristol to unpack, comfort the cats and watch Godzilla (one of my presents to B., the other being King Kong. We both enjoy gigantic monsters tearing cities apart.)
- Picked up my brother and sister-in-law's delayed presents from the post office, including the splendid-looking two-DVD edition of Dune.
- Watched somewhere in the region of seven hours of Doctor Who and its spinoffs, which I may be writing about on Parrinium Mines at some point.
- Spent New Year's Eve in a pub with Bath Festivity and some very nice single malt whiskies to hand.
- Gone back to work, which has admittedly been a rather less celebratory experience.
I should also mention the generous and exciting gift of a digital camera from my parents, although that happened during our visit before Christmas. I'm currently trying to un-bloat the contents of my hard drive so I can download the software and start transferring actual photos. I'll probably post some here, although I may be required to start a Flickr account at some point soon.
Pluto to Mars in Six Months
My second monthly column, "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", is now up at the Surefish site. It's about life on Mars, responding (rather belatedly now) to the discovery of running water on the Martian surface back in December.
And they've started using my preferred title, Divine Invasions. Hurrah.
As a bonus extra (and following on from the "planet" theme), here's the first of the two sample columns I offered Surefish back in August to persuade them to take me on. (The second is what became my first Divine Invasions column, "It's Been Unreal".)
It's not usable now, because it's tied so explicitly to a particular moment in astronomical history. Crucially, it attempts to pre-empt the result of the I.A.U. discussions concerning Pluto, and gets the details wrong. You could probably date it to the day, if you studied the contemporary press predictions carefully enough.
On the understanding that most of the information in it is now out of date, though, we present...
I'll carry on flagging up further columns here, unless it starts annoying people.
And they've started using my preferred title, Divine Invasions. Hurrah.
As a bonus extra (and following on from the "planet" theme), here's the first of the two sample columns I offered Surefish back in August to persuade them to take me on. (The second is what became my first Divine Invasions column, "It's Been Unreal".)
It's not usable now, because it's tied so explicitly to a particular moment in astronomical history. Crucially, it attempts to pre-empt the result of the I.A.U. discussions concerning Pluto, and gets the details wrong. You could probably date it to the day, if you studied the contemporary press predictions carefully enough.
On the understanding that most of the information in it is now out of date, though, we present...
DIVINE INVASIONS
Hell-Gods from Outer Space
Most of us know the story. There’s the hot one, the mysterious one, the motherly one, the red one, the great big one, the one with all the rings, the one with the rude name, the blue one and the cold one.
Sadly, the myth of the solar system’s nine planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as they’re more formally known – has been exploded for good.
Pluto, the most recent to have been discovered, has been recognised as a planet since 1930 mostly because its discoverers knew rather less about the solar system than astronomers do now. This month [August 2006] the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has voted to recognise the fact, demoting Pluto to a new class of ‘dwarf planets’. It is joined there by the asteroid Ceres, by the recently-discovered 2003 UB313 (more memorably nicknamed ‘Xena’), and – in the ultimate indignity – by its own moon, Charon.
The debate only concerns definitions, and the new categories are simply those which astronomers consider most helpful in discussing celestial bodies. The only people who are actually likely to care are the disenfranchised astrologers (for whom Pluto governs power and corruption, thanks to the decade of history following its discovery) and the science fiction fans.
Pluto was discovered just as science fiction was taking off as a popular art form, and consequently the myth of the Nine Planets has contributed profoundly to its readers’ sense of our place in the cosmos. Stories have tended to depict Pluto romantically as the Solar System’s last outpost, a chilly, lonely world on which humanity might one day walk. (Neptune, the next one in, is a bad candidate for landing or colonisation, having a surface mostly made of gaseous hydrogen.)
For some of us, discovering that Pluto isn’t a proper planet after all means a change of world-view as traumatic as Galileo’s suggestion that it might be just about possible the sun wasn’t going around the Earth.
The process of redefinition has also brought into the open the process whereby new celestial bodies are named. In 1930 astronomers still followed the ancient tradition of calling planets after the Roman gods, and hence gave Pluto the name of the ruler of the underworld (and not that of Walt Disney’s cartoon dog, who first appeared in the same year as the planet).
Unfortunately, improved detection technologies have meant that virtually all names from classical mythology have now been used. The discoverers of recent asteroids have been forced to turn to other sources for their names – as a brief glance at 17059 Elvis and 9007 James Bond demonstrates.
The conventions for naming planets are more stringent – which is why, sadly, the name ‘Xena’ is unlikely to stick. The IAU’s specifications require such bodies to be named objects after creation deities or underworld spirits, hence the names given to some of the other bodies considered for ‘dwarf planet’ status.
90377 Sedna, for instance, is named after an Inuit sea-goddess (who is both), while 50000 Quaoar’s name comes from that of the creator in the Native American Tongva tribe’s myth system.
All of which raises the possibility of a devout astronomer – or perhaps more interestingly a clear-thinking atheist – naming a future planetary discovery after the Christian God, and thereby relegating that deity to just another upstart competing with the Roman pantheon.
Still, there’s already an asteroid named 1930 Lucifer – and Satan, after all, might qualify as an ‘underworld spirit’. A planet named Jehovah could still prove to be the more palatable option.
Useful Links
International Astronomical Union
Facts about Pluto
List of names of minor planets
Astrology and the new planets
I'll carry on flagging up further columns here, unless it starts annoying people.
03 January 2007
Missing Matter
Still somewhat exhausted from all the Christmas and New Year cheer, followed by a rather half-hearted return to work yesterday and today.
A proper summary of What I Did On My Holidays should follow in the next couple of days, after which normal service should be resumed. In the meantime, a brief public service announcement: my email's shagged. The providers claim to be sorting it out, but I don't hold much confidence in that. Things like mailing lists, CCs and the forwarding from the various at infinitarian dot com addresses are either bouncing or vanishing into the ether. If you've been trying to contact me since around 22 December and failing, then leaving a comment here alerting me to the fact might be a good idea.
A proper summary of What I Did On My Holidays should follow in the next couple of days, after which normal service should be resumed. In the meantime, a brief public service announcement: my email's shagged. The providers claim to be sorting it out, but I don't hold much confidence in that. Things like mailing lists, CCs and the forwarding from the various at infinitarian dot com addresses are either bouncing or vanishing into the ether. If you've been trying to contact me since around 22 December and failing, then leaving a comment here alerting me to the fact might be a good idea.
21 December 2006
As The Days Get Shorter, There's More And More To Do
Sorry about the distinct lack of communication on this blog in the last couple of weeks. You know (or perhaps, if you're remarkably lucky, you don't) how things can get during December.
Since last we spoke, dear readers, I've:
I may have more to say on some or all of these at some point soon, but I wouldn't bank on it. Happy Midwinter to you all, though, and a thoroughly Merry Christmas if I don't manage to update further before then.
Since last we spoke, dear readers, I've:
- Written my December column for Surefish (not up at the site yet -- I'll flag it here when it is);
- Spent five days on a pre-seasonal visit to my parents;
- Additionally visited various friends and their charming offspring (no, no, that wasn't ironic, the offspring in question really was charming);
- Contracted food poisoning (from a meal unlikely now ever to be determined) and spent several days and nights feeling like, not to put too fine a point on it, shit;
- Done every single last bit (oh please dear God) of my Christmas shopping;
- Revised my opinion of Torchwood slightly upward again in the light of the thoroughly competent Out of Time;
- Gone to the very pleasant and tasteful Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Mary Redcliffe;
- Written a celebratory midwinter story and distributed it to friends in lieu of Christmas cards;
- Done two and a half days at work;
- Had lunch with a random university friend I haven't seen for years, who I now seem to be working in the same building with;
- Played host to a miserable bloody cold that's still showing no signs of departing after nearly a week together.
I may have more to say on some or all of these at some point soon, but I wouldn't bank on it. Happy Midwinter to you all, though, and a thoroughly Merry Christmas if I don't manage to update further before then.
08 December 2006
Traditional Yuletide Celebrations
The lead article in this month's Fortean Times reminds me, oddly enough, of our recent discussion of shared themes in The Wicker Man and The Prisoner. There J-P suggests that both Summerisle and the Village represent countercultures become mainstream, rebellion becoming authority -- a familiar idea to anyone with a passing interest in Soviet history.
FT's article on Hitler's attempts to replace the German Christmas with an all-Aryan patriotic winter festival, with rituals based loosely on the Norse winter festivities, reminds me that the Nazis, like the Summerisle family, had a yen for neo-pagan reconstructionism. It may be that Summerisle's attempts to replicate "the old religion", and the twentieth-century totalitarian states of which the Village is a microcosm, might not have seemed that far apart to scriptwriters who'd been paying attention during the 1930s.
(I don't have any further conclusions to draw from that, I just thought it was interesting.)
FT's editorial, taking its cue from the lead article, concerns recent campaigns by groups such as the Christian-Muslim Forum to counter the insidious liberal-secular conspiracy to "abolish Christmas" for fear of offending other faiths. By a weird coincidence, it arrived the same day as both The Guardian and Andrew Rilstone ran lengthy articles refuting the idea that any such conspiracy exists, and pointing out that the "evidence" for it is, by and large, absolute bollocks. Both pieces are worth reading.
I've sent a letter to the editors expressing surprise that Fortean Times, of all publications, is unable to spot an urban myth when it sees one.
FT's article on Hitler's attempts to replace the German Christmas with an all-Aryan patriotic winter festival, with rituals based loosely on the Norse winter festivities, reminds me that the Nazis, like the Summerisle family, had a yen for neo-pagan reconstructionism. It may be that Summerisle's attempts to replicate "the old religion", and the twentieth-century totalitarian states of which the Village is a microcosm, might not have seemed that far apart to scriptwriters who'd been paying attention during the 1930s.
(I don't have any further conclusions to draw from that, I just thought it was interesting.)
FT's editorial, taking its cue from the lead article, concerns recent campaigns by groups such as the Christian-Muslim Forum to counter the insidious liberal-secular conspiracy to "abolish Christmas" for fear of offending other faiths. By a weird coincidence, it arrived the same day as both The Guardian and Andrew Rilstone ran lengthy articles refuting the idea that any such conspiracy exists, and pointing out that the "evidence" for it is, by and large, absolute bollocks. Both pieces are worth reading.
I've sent a letter to the editors expressing surprise that Fortean Times, of all publications, is unable to spot an urban myth when it sees one.
05 December 2006
Good News, Bad News
I'm having a bit of an insane week, so I don't have the space to do this post justice, but are were two things that can't really wait.
Firstly, I see Big Finish have rather uncharacteristically spoiled the suspense over my recent oblique hints at a new writing commission -- by announcing War Stories, the collection of three novellas to which I'm contributing alongside the frighteningly talented writing team of Kate Orman and Jon Blum. I'll have to make up a webpage for it, but not today.
Second, I was saddened to learn yesterday that another Doctor Who novelist, Craig Hinton, had died. I never met Craig in the flesh (not for want of trying on one occasion), and even by the standards of people I've only known online he wasn't a particularly close friend.
His online persona gave a vivid impression of the kind of person people always call "larger than life": kind, generous, witty, expansive, outrageously bitchy, warm in both friendship and anger. He wrote Millennial Rites, one of my favourite of Virgin Publishing's 1990s Missing Adventures novels, and one of the best stories in Wildthyme on Top.
His family and his many, many friends have my very sincere sympathies at what must be a very dreadful time.
Firstly, I see Big Finish have rather uncharacteristically spoiled the suspense over my recent oblique hints at a new writing commission -- by announcing War Stories, the collection of three novellas to which I'm contributing alongside the frighteningly talented writing team of Kate Orman and Jon Blum. I'll have to make up a webpage for it, but not today.
Second, I was saddened to learn yesterday that another Doctor Who novelist, Craig Hinton, had died. I never met Craig in the flesh (not for want of trying on one occasion), and even by the standards of people I've only known online he wasn't a particularly close friend.
His online persona gave a vivid impression of the kind of person people always call "larger than life": kind, generous, witty, expansive, outrageously bitchy, warm in both friendship and anger. He wrote Millennial Rites, one of my favourite of Virgin Publishing's 1990s Missing Adventures novels, and one of the best stories in Wildthyme on Top.
His family and his many, many friends have my very sincere sympathies at what must be a very dreadful time.
03 December 2006
I Am Not a Number, I Am the Green Man
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of the Prisoner script book (a birthday present from B.), and watched the director's cut of The Wicker Man (part of the three-disc DVD boxed set, a birthday present from J-P[1]).
Both are really very splendid. It's fascinating to see how the original scripts for the first eight Prisoner episodes changed -- usually for the better, though sometimes not -- generally at the instigation of Patrick McGoohan, who had some very definite ideas about the sorts of thing his character would and wouldn't do[2]. Robert Fairclough's editorial apparatus is somewhat erratic and poorly-formatted, but the actual material is well worth any Prisoner fan's time.
The Wicker Man director's cut is also (mostly) an improvement -- not that the original is in any way shabby, but the extra time gives more opportunity for the tension to mount, and the pre-credits sequence set before Sergeant Howie comes to Summerisle makes more sense of some of the later revelations. It's a phenomenally fine film, as I mentioned here last year when I first got around to experiencing it.
However, reading the T.V. scripts and watching the film so close together made me aware of how extensive the similarities are between the two works' underlying conceptions. In that earlier entryI noted in passing their shared evocation of paranoia, but the parallels seem to go rather deeper than that.
[NB: What follows includes SPOILERS for a 33-year-old film and a 38-year-old television series. If you've somehow managed to avoid learning about the plot of either during your life so far, and you still think you might want to watch them one day, then I suggest you go and look at some kittens.]
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are set in isolated microcultures. Both set a single righteous man against the community as a whole. In each the central character is a representative of authority -- Number 6 is a covert government agent, Sgt Howie a police officer. Each protagonist is pious, self-righteous and unlikeable as well as genuinely heroic, while their antagonists are charismatic and seductive as well as sinister. Like the film, many episodes of the T.V. series centre around a deception played out as a trap for the hero, in which the entire community is complicit, including the apparently innocent victim acting as bait. In both, pageantry, ritual, processions and music play a significant part.
(Also, of course, both villages are populated by middle-aged British character actors of the 1960s and 70s -- including John Sharp and the ever-hammy Aubrey Morris -- but that's perhaps of rather less interest.)
The Wicker Man was made five years after The Prisoner, but belongs identifiably to the same era. It's possible that the TV series was an influence on the film, but if so Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy don't discuss the fact. What's more the script clearly has a lot in common with Shaffer's other work (especially Sleuth) and that of his brother.
I suspect the similarities help to explain why The Wicker Man, like The Prisoner, immediately grabbed my imagination and gave it a good shaking the moment I first saw it. (Quite why these patterns fit the inside of my head so well is another matter.) What's currently interesting me, though, is whether these similarities translate to shared themes at a deeper level.
Clearly the two works belong to different genres and media: The Wicker Man has a horror film's freedom, even in the 70s, to deal overtly with matters of sex and religion, while The Prisoner has its own genre-based concerns of dystopian politics and social satire.
There's little in The Wicker Man to suggest that Sgt Howie's justifiable paranoia has anything of the Cold War about it. The Summerisle villagers are feudal rather than communist, religious rather than secular and reconstructionist rather than revolutionary. What Howie finds awaiting him is a version of the culture which (supposedly) preceded Western christendom, not that which threatened to succeed it.
On one level, however, Lord Summerisle and his subjects, however enthusiastic about their island's past, are clearly nothing but a bunch of hippies. Howie's appalled reaction is in many ways that of a conservative member of the establishment faced with the licentiousness and disrespect for convention of the younger generation. This is particularly obvious when he interrupts the multiple couplings on the village green, but is equally apparent in his appalled reaction to discovering that the island's schoolchildren are not being taught christian values. In the 1970s, neo-paganism was already part of the counterculture.
Number 6's Village, too, is seen in these terms more often than one might expect. Though natural rebels against the Village's totalitarianism, hippyish characters are shown as being part of its apparatus in A Change of Mind; in the original script for The General, "a fair proportion" of the brainwashed students are said to be "long haired and bearded"[3]; and even in the final episode, Fall Out, where the scruffy, flower-adorned, hip-talking Number 48 appears as an archetypal rebel, his revolt is ultimately subsumed into the Prisoner's paradoxical reassertion of the authoritarian status quo.
One of establishment shibboleths of the time, of course, was precisely that the Soviets were infiltrating Western society through its rebellious youth subcultures. Odd bedfellows though they may have been, Summerisle's neo-pagans and A Change of Mind's Maoist-seeming "Social Group" would have been seen by some as aspects of the same deliberate erosion of traditional (but not too traditional) British values.
More interesting, however, are the themes of faith and sacrifice. While The Prisoner's Village has obvious cultish overtones, the one nod towards making its inhabitants religious is in their obscure use of a salute apparently used by the early church. Where Sgt Howie is explicitly a pious, judgmental, conservative christian, Number 6 is the secular model, espousing similar values without ever commenting on their provenance. Indeed, some explicit references to religion were excised from the script for The Chimes of Big Ben, apparently at the request of the devout McGoohan.
The boundaries between Number 6 and the actor who played him are often difficult to discern, which has led some critics to attempt interpretions of the series as religious allegory. These are rare, though, and tend to be no more convincing than those of secularist critics who see the oppressive Village as representing organised religion.
The ritual with which The Wicker Man culminates sees Howie becoming, in theory "king for a day", allowing him to stand as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods and restore the fruitfulness of the island's crops. The Prisoner's Village shows no interest in agriculture, choosing to replace it with technology. Nevertheless, its rulers never seem to last for very long.
For the most part, each episode of The Prisoner features a different Number 2. Some of them are seen retiring peaceably, or handing over the reins to their predecessors: others, however, are evidently punished for their failure. Of the two who do come back, Colin Gordon's character ends A., B. and C. convinced that he is about to be hauled over the coals by Number 1, before returning for a lucky escape from death in The General[4]. Leo McKern's Number 2 survives The Chimes of Big Ben without mishap, but the events of Once Upon a Time culminate uniquely in his death.
Lord Summerisle's trick, of course, lies in persuading the villagers to sacrifice Howie instead of the true king, his lordship himself: the sacrifice's "kingship" is an entirely notional one. In this respect, the Prisoner episode which comes closest to embodying the same ideas is the election episode, Free for All. At the end of this story, Number 6 has been elected to the position of Number 2, his opponent and predecessor having conceded defeat. A triumphal procession leads him to the Green Dome, where he finally attempts to take charge of the Village.
It's a trick, of course.
Thanks to the Village, Number 6 has become both a king and a fool. He represents the law, being both a covert agent of the British government and the rightfully-elected head of state of the Village. Given his attitude to intimacy, he may even be a virgin. He hasn't, of course, come to the Village of his own free will (although the eventual revelation of Number 1's identity in Fall Out may cast doubt even on that), but in other respects Lord Summerisle would consider him the perfect sacrifice for the continued smooth operation of the Village.
Number 6 isn't burned alive. Instead he's beaten up, more brutally than usual, with his arms held spreadeagled in a crucifix position, before his formerly compliant aide (who seemed, like Rowan Morrison, to be an innocent in all of this) takes the reins of office and returns him ignominiously to his home-from-home. Despite experiencing not-infrequent birth imagery, and being declared dead at least once, Number 6 is never given a death scene of his own.
However, the point about sacrificial godkings -- not that this would have been of much comfort to the late Sgt Howie -- is that their death is seen as a precursor to rebirth. As Miss Rose explains to him, the "life force" of the dead lives on in the form of animals, trees and -- as they hope will happen in Howie's case -- in crops. In the light of this, the fact that McKern's Number 2 is resurrected by technology in Fall Out begins to look rather less like the christian allegory some have painted it as, and more like an S.F. recapitulation of just this type of ritual.
McGoohan's Number 6 and McKern's Number 2 aren't the same person, of course. But Fall Out is, in some readings, a strongly psychoanalytical text, and it certainly presents both men as archetypes of rebellion. Might they -- and Number 48, the Butler, and for that matter anybody else in the Village up to and including "Rover" -- not be aspects of the same person, just as Number 1 is?
If The Prisoner is interested in ancient pagan models of sacrifice and rebirth, then it's evidently in a far less overt way than The Wicker Man. On the other hand, the recurrence of remarkably similar patterns, in a ritual context, suggests that at the very least there's some subconscious referencing going on[5].
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are enormously dense texts, with complex, sometimes apparently contradictory things to say about their subject matter, both overt and hidden. The idea that they might be able to illuminate each other may, I admit, turn out to be slightly mad. Still, I'm reasonably convined that they have more in common than would appear on the face of things.
[1] Lots of people at the party asked me, "Is that the new one?" No, it bloody isn't.
[2] The most egregious example is the nonsensical ending of the otherwise excellent episode Dance of the Dead, which would have ended with Number 6 embracing his Observer, waltzing with the dead-eyed, historically-costumed Villagers in a ritual masque... were it not for McGoohan's insistence that he was only going to dance with Mrs McGoohan. This man was considered for the part of James Bond.
[3] Fairclough's marginal note explains: "A reference to the emerging 'hippy' look that youth culture was beginning to adopt in the mid 1960s. Such a period-specific look was dropped when the scene went before the cameras." It's a shame that nobody thought to do the same when "The General" itself was revealed to be a light-bulb flashing, tape-spooling, punch-card-regurgitating giant metal box of a computer.
[4] Originally these two episodes were intended to be shown together in reverse order, with Gordon's Number 2 barely surviving the events of The General and then spending A., B. and C. on borrowed time. The script of The General was amended to allow him to live.
[5] Not, obviously, to The Wicker Man itself -- but quite possibly to Robert Graves' The White Goddess or James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
Both are really very splendid. It's fascinating to see how the original scripts for the first eight Prisoner episodes changed -- usually for the better, though sometimes not -- generally at the instigation of Patrick McGoohan, who had some very definite ideas about the sorts of thing his character would and wouldn't do[2]. Robert Fairclough's editorial apparatus is somewhat erratic and poorly-formatted, but the actual material is well worth any Prisoner fan's time.
The Wicker Man director's cut is also (mostly) an improvement -- not that the original is in any way shabby, but the extra time gives more opportunity for the tension to mount, and the pre-credits sequence set before Sergeant Howie comes to Summerisle makes more sense of some of the later revelations. It's a phenomenally fine film, as I mentioned here last year when I first got around to experiencing it.
However, reading the T.V. scripts and watching the film so close together made me aware of how extensive the similarities are between the two works' underlying conceptions. In that earlier entryI noted in passing their shared evocation of paranoia, but the parallels seem to go rather deeper than that.
[NB: What follows includes SPOILERS for a 33-year-old film and a 38-year-old television series. If you've somehow managed to avoid learning about the plot of either during your life so far, and you still think you might want to watch them one day, then I suggest you go and look at some kittens.]
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are set in isolated microcultures. Both set a single righteous man against the community as a whole. In each the central character is a representative of authority -- Number 6 is a covert government agent, Sgt Howie a police officer. Each protagonist is pious, self-righteous and unlikeable as well as genuinely heroic, while their antagonists are charismatic and seductive as well as sinister. Like the film, many episodes of the T.V. series centre around a deception played out as a trap for the hero, in which the entire community is complicit, including the apparently innocent victim acting as bait. In both, pageantry, ritual, processions and music play a significant part.
(Also, of course, both villages are populated by middle-aged British character actors of the 1960s and 70s -- including John Sharp and the ever-hammy Aubrey Morris -- but that's perhaps of rather less interest.)
The Wicker Man was made five years after The Prisoner, but belongs identifiably to the same era. It's possible that the TV series was an influence on the film, but if so Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy don't discuss the fact. What's more the script clearly has a lot in common with Shaffer's other work (especially Sleuth) and that of his brother.
I suspect the similarities help to explain why The Wicker Man, like The Prisoner, immediately grabbed my imagination and gave it a good shaking the moment I first saw it. (Quite why these patterns fit the inside of my head so well is another matter.) What's currently interesting me, though, is whether these similarities translate to shared themes at a deeper level.
Clearly the two works belong to different genres and media: The Wicker Man has a horror film's freedom, even in the 70s, to deal overtly with matters of sex and religion, while The Prisoner has its own genre-based concerns of dystopian politics and social satire.
There's little in The Wicker Man to suggest that Sgt Howie's justifiable paranoia has anything of the Cold War about it. The Summerisle villagers are feudal rather than communist, religious rather than secular and reconstructionist rather than revolutionary. What Howie finds awaiting him is a version of the culture which (supposedly) preceded Western christendom, not that which threatened to succeed it.
On one level, however, Lord Summerisle and his subjects, however enthusiastic about their island's past, are clearly nothing but a bunch of hippies. Howie's appalled reaction is in many ways that of a conservative member of the establishment faced with the licentiousness and disrespect for convention of the younger generation. This is particularly obvious when he interrupts the multiple couplings on the village green, but is equally apparent in his appalled reaction to discovering that the island's schoolchildren are not being taught christian values. In the 1970s, neo-paganism was already part of the counterculture.
Number 6's Village, too, is seen in these terms more often than one might expect. Though natural rebels against the Village's totalitarianism, hippyish characters are shown as being part of its apparatus in A Change of Mind; in the original script for The General, "a fair proportion" of the brainwashed students are said to be "long haired and bearded"[3]; and even in the final episode, Fall Out, where the scruffy, flower-adorned, hip-talking Number 48 appears as an archetypal rebel, his revolt is ultimately subsumed into the Prisoner's paradoxical reassertion of the authoritarian status quo.
One of establishment shibboleths of the time, of course, was precisely that the Soviets were infiltrating Western society through its rebellious youth subcultures. Odd bedfellows though they may have been, Summerisle's neo-pagans and A Change of Mind's Maoist-seeming "Social Group" would have been seen by some as aspects of the same deliberate erosion of traditional (but not too traditional) British values.
More interesting, however, are the themes of faith and sacrifice. While The Prisoner's Village has obvious cultish overtones, the one nod towards making its inhabitants religious is in their obscure use of a salute apparently used by the early church. Where Sgt Howie is explicitly a pious, judgmental, conservative christian, Number 6 is the secular model, espousing similar values without ever commenting on their provenance. Indeed, some explicit references to religion were excised from the script for The Chimes of Big Ben, apparently at the request of the devout McGoohan.
The boundaries between Number 6 and the actor who played him are often difficult to discern, which has led some critics to attempt interpretions of the series as religious allegory. These are rare, though, and tend to be no more convincing than those of secularist critics who see the oppressive Village as representing organised religion.
The ritual with which The Wicker Man culminates sees Howie becoming, in theory "king for a day", allowing him to stand as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods and restore the fruitfulness of the island's crops. The Prisoner's Village shows no interest in agriculture, choosing to replace it with technology. Nevertheless, its rulers never seem to last for very long.
For the most part, each episode of The Prisoner features a different Number 2. Some of them are seen retiring peaceably, or handing over the reins to their predecessors: others, however, are evidently punished for their failure. Of the two who do come back, Colin Gordon's character ends A., B. and C. convinced that he is about to be hauled over the coals by Number 1, before returning for a lucky escape from death in The General[4]. Leo McKern's Number 2 survives The Chimes of Big Ben without mishap, but the events of Once Upon a Time culminate uniquely in his death.
Lord Summerisle's trick, of course, lies in persuading the villagers to sacrifice Howie instead of the true king, his lordship himself: the sacrifice's "kingship" is an entirely notional one. In this respect, the Prisoner episode which comes closest to embodying the same ideas is the election episode, Free for All. At the end of this story, Number 6 has been elected to the position of Number 2, his opponent and predecessor having conceded defeat. A triumphal procession leads him to the Green Dome, where he finally attempts to take charge of the Village.
It's a trick, of course.
Thanks to the Village, Number 6 has become both a king and a fool. He represents the law, being both a covert agent of the British government and the rightfully-elected head of state of the Village. Given his attitude to intimacy, he may even be a virgin. He hasn't, of course, come to the Village of his own free will (although the eventual revelation of Number 1's identity in Fall Out may cast doubt even on that), but in other respects Lord Summerisle would consider him the perfect sacrifice for the continued smooth operation of the Village.
Number 6 isn't burned alive. Instead he's beaten up, more brutally than usual, with his arms held spreadeagled in a crucifix position, before his formerly compliant aide (who seemed, like Rowan Morrison, to be an innocent in all of this) takes the reins of office and returns him ignominiously to his home-from-home. Despite experiencing not-infrequent birth imagery, and being declared dead at least once, Number 6 is never given a death scene of his own.
However, the point about sacrificial godkings -- not that this would have been of much comfort to the late Sgt Howie -- is that their death is seen as a precursor to rebirth. As Miss Rose explains to him, the "life force" of the dead lives on in the form of animals, trees and -- as they hope will happen in Howie's case -- in crops. In the light of this, the fact that McKern's Number 2 is resurrected by technology in Fall Out begins to look rather less like the christian allegory some have painted it as, and more like an S.F. recapitulation of just this type of ritual.
McGoohan's Number 6 and McKern's Number 2 aren't the same person, of course. But Fall Out is, in some readings, a strongly psychoanalytical text, and it certainly presents both men as archetypes of rebellion. Might they -- and Number 48, the Butler, and for that matter anybody else in the Village up to and including "Rover" -- not be aspects of the same person, just as Number 1 is?
If The Prisoner is interested in ancient pagan models of sacrifice and rebirth, then it's evidently in a far less overt way than The Wicker Man. On the other hand, the recurrence of remarkably similar patterns, in a ritual context, suggests that at the very least there's some subconscious referencing going on[5].
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are enormously dense texts, with complex, sometimes apparently contradictory things to say about their subject matter, both overt and hidden. The idea that they might be able to illuminate each other may, I admit, turn out to be slightly mad. Still, I'm reasonably convined that they have more in common than would appear on the face of things.
[1] Lots of people at the party asked me, "Is that the new one?" No, it bloody isn't.
[2] The most egregious example is the nonsensical ending of the otherwise excellent episode Dance of the Dead, which would have ended with Number 6 embracing his Observer, waltzing with the dead-eyed, historically-costumed Villagers in a ritual masque... were it not for McGoohan's insistence that he was only going to dance with Mrs McGoohan. This man was considered for the part of James Bond.
[3] Fairclough's marginal note explains: "A reference to the emerging 'hippy' look that youth culture was beginning to adopt in the mid 1960s. Such a period-specific look was dropped when the scene went before the cameras." It's a shame that nobody thought to do the same when "The General" itself was revealed to be a light-bulb flashing, tape-spooling, punch-card-regurgitating giant metal box of a computer.
[4] Originally these two episodes were intended to be shown together in reverse order, with Gordon's Number 2 barely surviving the events of The General and then spending A., B. and C. on borrowed time. The script of The General was amended to allow him to live.
[5] Not, obviously, to The Wicker Man itself -- but quite possibly to Robert Graves' The White Goddess or James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
02 December 2006
Works in Review
Have I mentioned that I'm a big review slut? And that Richard McGinlay at Sci-Fi Online is one of my favourite reviewers?
Ah, yes, I see that I have.
Richard says of Collected Works:
Ah, yes, I see that I have.
Richard says of Collected Works:
Though Nick Wallace is named as the editor of this anthology, I suspect that a great deal of credit is also due to Philip Purser-Hallard. He has written five linking interludes, entitled “Perspectives”, which focus upon the Quire - a clan of fascinatingly strange visitors from humanity’s distant future, who crop up throughout this carefully controlled book - and he also co-wrote the final tale, “Future Relations”, with Wallace.I'm not sure that that's entirely fair to Nick, but it's still pleasing to hear. You can read the whole review here.
01 December 2006
Lies, All Lies
The first half-week of work at the new job went well. For obvious reasons, I won't be going into detail about exactly what I'm doing, where or for whom, but so far my colleagues are friendly, my work reasonably interesting and my journey not too irksome. It does involve a twenty-minute walk at the far end of my twenty-minute train journey, but at least that's potentially good for my waistline.
I am, however, knackered, as much from the pre-job stress as from the job itself, so the Torchwood rant and the film reviews are going to have to wait for a little while.
In the meantime, allow me to plug my friend J-P's fiction at Quiet Little Lies, and in particular his self-published and -distributed collection A Pocketful of Lies. As the blurb says:
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and cook pasta.
I am, however, knackered, as much from the pre-job stress as from the job itself, so the Torchwood rant and the film reviews are going to have to wait for a little while.
In the meantime, allow me to plug my friend J-P's fiction at Quiet Little Lies, and in particular his self-published and -distributed collection A Pocketful of Lies. As the blurb says:
An ideal Christmas gift, this handcrafted pamphlet has been lovingly assembled from a dozen complex, thoughtful tales that will vex and puzzle relatives or friends of any stripe! Following your Christmas meal, contemplate what lies beneath the surface of each sinister, questioning story, and thank the stars that your family is indeed relatively well-adjusted after all.It's free including postage, so you've nothing to lose -- and if you can't be arsed to order it, he'll be putting it online in the New Year anyway. You can sample plenty of J-P's fiction at the site, along with his book reviews, and his blog about frankly incomprehensible computer-related stuff.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and cook pasta.
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