Hmm. So the Vatican's official astronomer has finally got around to outlining what James Blish predicted 50 years ago would be the Catholic church's position on the spiritual implications of extraterrestrial life[1]. (Admittedly he misses out the "sentient creatures without souls" category, but it's difficult to imagine that one catching on. Unless the aliens in question were militarily naïve and owned large amounts of oil, obviously.)
As Blish suggests in his introduction to A Case of Conscience, Fr Funes refuses to countenance the possibility that extraterrestrials might have experienced their own salvation event as well as their own fall from grace -- making it the church's duty, if they exist, to evangelise them mercilessly. He calls Jesus' incarnation "a unique event that cannot be repeated", which seems parochial to me.
There is, by assumption, only one divine Logos, the active principle of the Creator of the universe, but I don't see any reason to believe that this entity could only become incarnate once, or couldn't work towards the salvation of other planetary populations in other ways. (Nor does the Reverend Father cite any evidence for this. What does he expect us to do, just take it on faith?)
...And speaking of damned creatures doomed to eternal torment, I've just landed another writing gig. The usual reasons of commercial secrecy mean I can't say anything about it yet, but I'm looking forward to it already[2].
[1] Actually, Blish was quoting Gerald Heard,but since he doesn't cite the source and I'm largely unfamiliar with Heard's work I can't say where he gets it from. Look, if you want unimpeachable standards of academic rigour, go and read someone else's blog.
[2] There is actually a sequitur there, but it's one that won't become apparent until I can tell you more about the story. Sorry about that.
16 May 2008
07 May 2008
2008 Weddings -- #1 in a Series of at Least 4
Last Sunday Kate and Silk, of whom you may have heard me speak (almost invariably in the context of beer, to nobody's particular surprise) tied the knot and got married in the Town Hall in Oxford, where B. and I held our wedding reception many years ago.
(For the usual reasons of busyness I failed to blog the relevant stag party a few weeks ago, where Silk and some sixteen other men in the 25-40 age bracket met at the stone circle in Avebury, wandered some ten miles through the thick scrubland of Wiltshire then drank a great deal of unsurprising beer in the middle of bloody nowhere. The plan of meeting for a drink at the stone circle was more sensible than it sounds, given that Avebury is the only stone circle in England which encircles a village, and more pertinently a pub.
It's a particular shame I missed the opportunity to blog about this, as I was going to use the title "Only Us Menhir". You'll just have to pretend I used it and react accordingly.)
Silk and Kate made the elementary error of asking me not only to read at the ceremony, but also to write something special for the occasion. Having tried before to write a sincere celebration of marriage as a sacrament and discovered that it came out a bit rubbish, I wasn't going to be tempted down that route again.
Here's what I read (or rather, since it requires a certain amount of comedy business with tones of voice and pieces of paper, performed):
(I'll be adding this to the website in due course, as soon as I can decide whether to put it among the poetic juvenilia or the mature prose, or to create a new category for it or what. It's about time I updated the site, given that the last time that happened seems to have been last year. [Edit to add: now updated.])
The wedding was the first of at least four, possibly five, that B. and I'll be attending this year. The bride and groom looked very very happy, and in Silk's case unwontedly smart (Kate looked gorgeous, but that's less unusual). It was, as ever, thoroughly lovely to catch up with many old friends, together with their partners and in one case progeny.
The three speeches, incredibly, were only 13 minutes 30 seconds long between them, meaning that B., who'd taken a risk with 14 minutes, won the sweepstake. My guess was nearly twice that.
The wedding breakfast was followed by punting (in which I wisely didn't partake) and board games (in which I equally wisely did -- Hive is fantastic and I need to buy it as a matter of urgency), music and dancing and at least four different types of cheese. Very nice wine, as well, which I didn't drink far too much of -- indeed, the only areas in which I disgraced myself were (inevitably) my dancing, and succumbing to the temptation to have a quick cigarette before leaving. Bad Phil.
Generally a very successful day, though, and one which would have achieved high marks if we'd kept up our scoring system. Roll on Sunday 25th in Taunton.
(For the usual reasons of busyness I failed to blog the relevant stag party a few weeks ago, where Silk and some sixteen other men in the 25-40 age bracket met at the stone circle in Avebury, wandered some ten miles through the thick scrubland of Wiltshire then drank a great deal of unsurprising beer in the middle of bloody nowhere. The plan of meeting for a drink at the stone circle was more sensible than it sounds, given that Avebury is the only stone circle in England which encircles a village, and more pertinently a pub.
It's a particular shame I missed the opportunity to blog about this, as I was going to use the title "Only Us Menhir". You'll just have to pretend I used it and react accordingly.)
Silk and Kate made the elementary error of asking me not only to read at the ceremony, but also to write something special for the occasion. Having tried before to write a sincere celebration of marriage as a sacrament and discovered that it came out a bit rubbish, I wasn't going to be tempted down that route again.
Here's what I read (or rather, since it requires a certain amount of comedy business with tones of voice and pieces of paper, performed):
CONTRATHALAMION
by Philip Purser-Hallard
To Silk and Kate, with love
on the happy occasion of their wedding –
Sunday 4 May 2008.
Let not the marriage of true minds –
but you’ve heard that one. Let me talk
instead about the many kinds
of daily strife which make it awk-
ward to stay married, once those first
impediments are past. I’ve made
a list of those I find the worst.
My wife… helped. First – the marmalade.
No, hang on, that’s page 2. Let’s see...
You may find things that you yourself
put somewhere safe will later be
somewhere absurd, like on the shelf
where mug-trees live. Unless, you know,
they’re mug-trees, and that’s where they go.
Toenail clippings, rather than
the bin, might turn up in your bed,
your trousers, or your frying-pan.
A book that should be under Z
in fiction – a Zelazny, say –
you’ll find instead is in the car,
the bath, the fridge, or under J.
You’ll wonder where your pliers are,
and as for DVD remotes –
I’m ranting now. Perhaps it’s best
if I just give you all my notes,
and spare these charming folk the rest.
(You may think I’m exaggerating.
See what you think in 2018.)
© Philip Purser-Hallard 2008
(I'll be adding this to the website in due course, as soon as I can decide whether to put it among the poetic juvenilia or the mature prose, or to create a new category for it or what. It's about time I updated the site, given that the last time that happened seems to have been last year. [Edit to add: now updated.])
The wedding was the first of at least four, possibly five, that B. and I'll be attending this year. The bride and groom looked very very happy, and in Silk's case unwontedly smart (Kate looked gorgeous, but that's less unusual). It was, as ever, thoroughly lovely to catch up with many old friends, together with their partners and in one case progeny.
The three speeches, incredibly, were only 13 minutes 30 seconds long between them, meaning that B., who'd taken a risk with 14 minutes, won the sweepstake. My guess was nearly twice that.
The wedding breakfast was followed by punting (in which I wisely didn't partake) and board games (in which I equally wisely did -- Hive is fantastic and I need to buy it as a matter of urgency), music and dancing and at least four different types of cheese. Very nice wine, as well, which I didn't drink far too much of -- indeed, the only areas in which I disgraced myself were (inevitably) my dancing, and succumbing to the temptation to have a quick cigarette before leaving. Bad Phil.
Generally a very successful day, though, and one which would have achieved high marks if we'd kept up our scoring system. Roll on Sunday 25th in Taunton.
The Bat Dome
Yet more fun with predictive text:
"I'll get the cat food"...is predicted as:
"I'll get the act done"Or -- if you remember to correct the first time but not the second -- the rather more apposite:
"I'll get the cat done".
26 April 2008
"Well, Narnia and barmier don't rhyme, to begin with."
I've only just noticed that my column for this month is now up at Surefish. In retrospect, I may have got a little carried away with the S.F. theology towards the end.
This is slightly unfortunate, as I'm now writing a review for Surefish endorsing this book, which claims to have discovered a "secret imaginative key" to C.S. Lewis's Narnia septet, based around the tenets of medieval astrology.
And yes, I know how that sounds, but in point of fact Michael Ward's argument is so well-informed, persuasive and -- if you actually know anything about Lewis's thought -- downright reasonable, that I can't imagine not endorsing it. And as someone who reads Fortean Times religiously every month, I have some experience of evaluating dodgy arguments. (Actually, "religiously" sounds wrong in that sentence. In fact I probably read Fortean Times secularly every month.)
If you don't believe me, that's probably fair enough, but if you find Lewis's work interesting enough to be open to new perspectives on it, do give the book (or even this summary) a read before dismissing it. Perhaps you'll decide I'm less insane than the readers at Surefish are now likely to believe.
Otherwise, I've been grindly slowly onwards on the reading front. River of Gods is still huge and difficult to fathom -- I'm perhaps two-thirds of the way through now, but it's slow going. I'm finding that McDonald's use of local (Indian) vocabulary goes way beyond scene-setting and into the realms of deliberate obscurity. The book has an "If I know this, why don't you?" air, which might seem reasonable (if smug) if its target readership consisted of Indians and indologists, but is only going to irritate the average western reader. There's a glossary, admittedly, but it's hopelessly sketchy.
In other respects it's a pretty good character-driven S.F. novel, although there are a hell of a lot of characters. Perhaps a cast list would have been more useful than the glossary.
I think the only other things I've read are a couple of Doctor Who books, The Pirate Loop (mindless fluff, nothing like as good as the author's capable of) and The Many Hands (immensely better, but still suffering from its curtailed length).
I'm also halfway through Reginald Hill's A Cure for All Diseases, which as a police procedural set in modern Yorkshire suffers rather from being closely based on an unfinished Jane Austen comedy of manners set in 18th-century Sussex. Crime writers are weird.
This is slightly unfortunate, as I'm now writing a review for Surefish endorsing this book, which claims to have discovered a "secret imaginative key" to C.S. Lewis's Narnia septet, based around the tenets of medieval astrology.
And yes, I know how that sounds, but in point of fact Michael Ward's argument is so well-informed, persuasive and -- if you actually know anything about Lewis's thought -- downright reasonable, that I can't imagine not endorsing it. And as someone who reads Fortean Times religiously every month, I have some experience of evaluating dodgy arguments. (Actually, "religiously" sounds wrong in that sentence. In fact I probably read Fortean Times secularly every month.)
If you don't believe me, that's probably fair enough, but if you find Lewis's work interesting enough to be open to new perspectives on it, do give the book (or even this summary) a read before dismissing it. Perhaps you'll decide I'm less insane than the readers at Surefish are now likely to believe.
Otherwise, I've been grindly slowly onwards on the reading front. River of Gods is still huge and difficult to fathom -- I'm perhaps two-thirds of the way through now, but it's slow going. I'm finding that McDonald's use of local (Indian) vocabulary goes way beyond scene-setting and into the realms of deliberate obscurity. The book has an "If I know this, why don't you?" air, which might seem reasonable (if smug) if its target readership consisted of Indians and indologists, but is only going to irritate the average western reader. There's a glossary, admittedly, but it's hopelessly sketchy.
In other respects it's a pretty good character-driven S.F. novel, although there are a hell of a lot of characters. Perhaps a cast list would have been more useful than the glossary.
I think the only other things I've read are a couple of Doctor Who books, The Pirate Loop (mindless fluff, nothing like as good as the author's capable of) and The Many Hands (immensely better, but still suffering from its curtailed length).
I'm also halfway through Reginald Hill's A Cure for All Diseases, which as a police procedural set in modern Yorkshire suffers rather from being closely based on an unfinished Jane Austen comedy of manners set in 18th-century Sussex. Crime writers are weird.
09 April 2008
01 April 2008
Do Ordinands Dream of Electric Priests? ...etc.
To accompany today's (ahem) fortuitously-timed news story about the first automated church minister package, my latest column on the spiritual dimensions of artificial intelligence is up at Surefish.
31 March 2008
Triptych of Stuff
1. S.F. authors -- the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Thanks to Geoff Wessel for the link.)
My favourite paragraph:
I'd pay good money to see a U.K. equivalent of this group, with the likes of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod explaining to Gordon Brown why technology makes the revolution of the proletariat inevitable, and why he might as well hand over power to the people now.
2. For various reasons relating to small publishers and the extreme commercial pressures they face, most of the writing contracts I've had have involved flat fees -- I deliver the manuscript, I get paid, then the publisher takes it and sells it as best they can without having to worry about any further outgoings in my direction. There's one exception, who I won't name for obvious reasons of confidentiality, and they sent me my first genuine actual royalty cheque last week.
Hurrah for royalties! B. and I were so excited that we went out and blew the entire £21.72 on a modest pub lunch. Rock and roll!
3. If you're on Facebook, you may have been reading the products of the Six Word Stories writing group. If you aren't or haven't, then you'll be momentarily distracted to know that I'm the runner-up in their fortnightly writing contest with a werewolf story:
My favourite paragraph:
Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.The neocon ranting is somewhat less funny, admittedly, though more or less what I'd have expected from this particular clique of hard-S.F. practitioners. What the article doesn't mention is that Niven and Pournelle have been itching for a shot at statesmanship for a while now: their 1985 novel Footfall has a pair of strangely familiar S.F. writers advising the U.S. government during an alien invasion.
I'd pay good money to see a U.K. equivalent of this group, with the likes of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod explaining to Gordon Brown why technology makes the revolution of the proletariat inevitable, and why he might as well hand over power to the people now.
2. For various reasons relating to small publishers and the extreme commercial pressures they face, most of the writing contracts I've had have involved flat fees -- I deliver the manuscript, I get paid, then the publisher takes it and sells it as best they can without having to worry about any further outgoings in my direction. There's one exception, who I won't name for obvious reasons of confidentiality, and they sent me my first genuine actual royalty cheque last week.
Hurrah for royalties! B. and I were so excited that we went out and blew the entire £21.72 on a modest pub lunch. Rock and roll!
3. If you're on Facebook, you may have been reading the products of the Six Word Stories writing group. If you aren't or haven't, then you'll be momentarily distracted to know that I'm the runner-up in their fortnightly writing contest with a werewolf story:
"You teach, like, anthropology?"Yay me.
"No -- lycanthropology."
22 March 2008
Resisting All The Usual Puns
"Everyone knew he was gay," writes Michael Moorcock of Arthur C. Clarke.
Well, it would have taken a remarkably closed mind to read, say, Imperial Earth or 2061: Odyssey Three without realising that this was a strong possibility. But as far as I'm aware, Clarke never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, and nor did his family, his ex-wife or anyone else close to him.
I'm wondering why Moorcock feels the need to out Clarke when he's been dead less than a week. It feels oddly gleeful, somehow, as if he still thinks he's living in 1967 and needs to freak out the squares.
Well, it would have taken a remarkably closed mind to read, say, Imperial Earth or 2061: Odyssey Three without realising that this was a strong possibility. But as far as I'm aware, Clarke never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, and nor did his family, his ex-wife or anyone else close to him.
I'm wondering why Moorcock feels the need to out Clarke when he's been dead less than a week. It feels oddly gleeful, somehow, as if he still thinks he's living in 1967 and needs to freak out the squares.
20 March 2008
And So To Beer
Hurrah, and many of them, for last Saturday, when B. and I, nine of our friends and a couple of thousand other people piled into the Brunel Passenger Shed at Temple Meads to drink 120 different kinds of beer.
We all had a splendid time. At least, I know I did -- I was enjoying my beer to much to keep track of everyone else. As a particular personal triumph, this year I managed to avoid the perennial trap of previous years: deciding that what's needed after four-and-a-half hours of drinking many different kinds of beer is -- huzzah! -- more beer, and thus falling over outside some nearby pub. (The absence on family business of Silk may have assisted in averting this.)
Instead we repaired to the chocolate café in Clifton to replenish our sugar and fat reserves. (There we met up with, among others, our goddaughter E., who I perhaps unwisely promised she could accompany us to the 2019 Beer Festival, by which time she'll be old enough.)
My tasting notes were, like last year's, a little incoherent and not always easy to decipher. Of the circa 25 beers I tasted (13 of which I drank half-pints of), the following were notable:
I was less keen on the Dr Okell's I.P.A. ("tad generic"), Purple Moose's Dark Side of the Moose ("liquoricey aftertaste") and Nottingham Rock Mild ("sluggy aftertaste", bizarrely). For Shardlow's Whistlestop I wrote: "No idea. Forgot to make a note. Beery???".
Things I need to remember to do next year include rereading my notes from past years, so that I know a) what I've had already, and b) which of those I liked. (I don't seem to have duplicated any from last year, as it happens, but there are a couple I'd have liked to sample again.) Also to bring my CAMRA membership card, folding chairs and chocolate.
We all had a splendid time. At least, I know I did -- I was enjoying my beer to much to keep track of everyone else. As a particular personal triumph, this year I managed to avoid the perennial trap of previous years: deciding that what's needed after four-and-a-half hours of drinking many different kinds of beer is -- huzzah! -- more beer, and thus falling over outside some nearby pub. (The absence on family business of Silk may have assisted in averting this.)
Instead we repaired to the chocolate café in Clifton to replenish our sugar and fat reserves. (There we met up with, among others, our goddaughter E., who I perhaps unwisely promised she could accompany us to the 2019 Beer Festival, by which time she'll be old enough.)
My tasting notes were, like last year's, a little incoherent and not always easy to decipher. Of the circa 25 beers I tasted (13 of which I drank half-pints of), the following were notable:
- Skinner's Cornish Knocker -- a very decent beer, despite the tweeness of the website. My tasting notes read "Nutty and sweet -- mm. Good session beer, I suspect" (a "session beer" being one you could sit and drink all evening, or at least that's what I've always imagined it means).
- Orkney Dark Island. Orkney do some lovely beers, and I very much enjoyed this one, although it was probably too dark to drink early on (as I did). I've underlined and ticked the word "chocolate" in the CAMRA-provided programme notes, and written: "[M.] says 'whiskyish' -- tasty and caramely."
- Ottley O.B.B.. Everyone seemed a little surprised by how much I raved about this one, but I really liked it. "Refreshingly bitter -- sloshy, persistent. Good stuff.", I wrote.
- Copper Dragon's Scotts 1816. My notes read: "Mellow and cheerful, like a relaxing tongue-massage." [Later annotation: "I expect."] "This is good."
- Triple FFF's Comfortably Numb. Not as good as it sounds -- I've written "Way too sweet... OK otherwise. Grows on you, actually." I've underlined "fruity" in the phrase "subtle fruity flavours", but crossed out "subtle".
- Dark Star Festival. Despite the quirky name (and wanky website), I wasn't all that keen on this one. I wrote: "Grows on you... don't judge by early appearances. Still... bit unimaginative. Coffeeish (oddly)."
- Spire's Sgt Peppers Stout. This one I really liked, although it wouldn't have been to everyone's taste. The CAMRA programme explains that it's "An unusual stout that is flavoured with ground black pepper," although I have to say this wasn't overly apparent in the taste. It was very tasty, though. I said, "Good. Esp w food. Smooth & stouty.", and added three ticks.
- Beowulf's Dragon Smoke Stout. I seem to remember I was too late to get any of this in 2007, so I made sure I managed it this time. I described it as: "Smoky, stouty, dragony. Mm. Good stuff, though not supernally so" (supernally?), and underlined "full roast" and "bitterness" in the programme notes.
- Bath Ales Dark Hare, from a brewery close to both Bristol and my heart. Dark Hare is a rare seasonal beer including chocolate malt, roast barley and nutmeg. My notes read: "V. nice -- rather mellow (though less so than [Cottage Brewery's] Norman's Conquest) -- velvety and pleasing mouthfeel", and all instances of the word "chocolate" in the accompanying programme notes are underlined. I think I'd just tried the Norman's Conquest (which I found "mellow and calming"), and had been amused earlier by the word "mouthfeel" in the programme notes for the Dark Star.
- Moor's Ported Pete Porter. By this stage I was frantically buying all the dark beers I could find and quaffing them. This one I pronounced "Good -- little bit metallic, but hurrah." Which is less flattering than it could have been.
- Sarah Hughes' Dark Ruby Mild. This was almost the last one I had, so I'm not altogether sure my opinion can be trusted, but I voted for it as Beer of the Festival. An initial tasting note (when I tried someone else's) reads, "Ooh. I could drink lots of that," and I later added: "And indeed, it is fine & relaxed & leisurely, with fruity, chocolatey tones."
I was less keen on the Dr Okell's I.P.A. ("tad generic"), Purple Moose's Dark Side of the Moose ("liquoricey aftertaste") and Nottingham Rock Mild ("sluggy aftertaste", bizarrely). For Shardlow's Whistlestop I wrote: "No idea. Forgot to make a note. Beery???".
Things I need to remember to do next year include rereading my notes from past years, so that I know a) what I've had already, and b) which of those I liked. (I don't seem to have duplicated any from last year, as it happens, but there are a couple I'd have liked to sample again.) Also to bring my CAMRA membership card, folding chairs and chocolate.
Life, Death, Space, Time, Matter, Gods, Aliens...
...you know the drill.
And now so do I. A BLOODY GREAT BIG DRILL, in fact, positioned a few inches from my head as the next-door house is disassembled down to its very foundations (warning: slight risk of hyperbole). I guess that writing I mentioned won't be happening today.
(Disturbingly, the van at the front of the house belongs to a pest control company, suggesting that they've been called in to deal with something living in the walls.)
So -- books. And beer as well, but probably in a separate post.
I think I've said what I wanted to about Arthur C. Clarke in my piece for Surefish. I'll update here when that's available online -- I'm hoping it might be today [ETA: Yes -- see above], but it may have to wait till Tuesday[ETA: No, I told you, the link's just up there.]. Suffice it to say that Clarke's been an inspirational figure since my childhood, has had a pervading influence on my thinking in all kinds of ways -- most of them too deeply ingrained to identify -- and that his death, whatever age he reached, was always going to be a loss to the world.
(One thing I hadn't room to mention in the article was that his 62-year professional writing career was one of the few to threaten the 65-year record of George Bernard Shaw. If Clarke had lived another four years, as Shaw did, I'm sure he'd have overtaken him.)
One thing that some of you might be able to tell me, though... the most recent book of Clarke's I read was 3001: The Final Odyssey, one of a cluster of utopian novels by senior SF writers which popped up unexpectedly around the turn of the millennium. I've not read any of his co-written stuff, not being a big fan of Stephen Baxter's work and suspecting that Beyond the Fall of Night and the Rama sequels in particular were blatant cash-ins.
So, um... are any of the collaborations any good? I'm thinking here particularly of the Clarke-Lee Rama books and the Clarke-Baxter Time Odyssey series, all of which I really ought to have read at some point.
In other S.F. news... I enjoyed Iain Banks' Matter, but like The Steep Approach to Garbadale and to some extent The Algebraist, it had the feel of Banks working to a reliable formula without much interest in stretching himself. (Dead Air didn't feel like that to me, and nor did Look to Windward, so I hope this is an extended lapse rather than a long-term slide into senescence.)
The complex and massive detail of an insanely long-lived galactic metacivilisation (and a completely different one from the one in The Algebraist, at that) was well done, but other elements felt fairly familiar. This is particularly true of the absurdly advanced and enlightened Culture's covert intervention in the affairs of the rather boring feudal society who form the focus of the novel, since this was also the plot of Inversions nearly ten years ago. Admittedly this feudal culture occupies a portion of a world-sized artifact left behind my mysterious long-vanished aliens, but -- as one of the characters even points out during the novel -- that's the only interesting thing about them.
Admittedly there's a cleverish twist in that the Culture's agent is herself a native of the feudal society in question -- a princess no less, donated by the king as payment for services rendered some time previously, and immediately emancipated as a fully entitled (and enabled) Culture citizen. (Her name, Djan Seriy, recalls "Janissary", whether deliberately or otherwise.) In other respects, the book rehashes elements of Excession, Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, to no particularly worthwhile effect. It's a fun read and I was never bored, but I do feel Banks has been treading water for the past half-decade or so.
Since finishing Matter I've started River of Gods by Ian McDonald. I'm not very far in, and so far it's a little baffling -- I'm ashamed to say the panoply of Indian names, not all of them readily distinguishable to my angloglot eyes, isn't helping with that. I've just reached the part where the synthetic Bollywood-soap star explains that he was created as an A.I. actor rather than an A.I. character because everyone likes to know what stars get up to behind the scenes, only for it to be revealed that this part of his life is just as scripted as his soap appearances. That's fairly promising.
I'm also most of the way through Bryan Appleyard's Aliens: Why They Are Here, an examination of fictional and supposedly-real aliens which blends pop-culture and philosophy with immense readability. It's fascinating.
Oh, and this isn't a book, but it did appear in the Guardian Books supplement, and is written by the author of a book I want to read. Well, I guess that about wraps it up for Dawkins.
And now so do I. A BLOODY GREAT BIG DRILL, in fact, positioned a few inches from my head as the next-door house is disassembled down to its very foundations (warning: slight risk of hyperbole). I guess that writing I mentioned won't be happening today.
(Disturbingly, the van at the front of the house belongs to a pest control company, suggesting that they've been called in to deal with something living in the walls.)
So -- books. And beer as well, but probably in a separate post.
I think I've said what I wanted to about Arthur C. Clarke in my piece for Surefish. I'll update here when that's available online -- I'm hoping it might be today [ETA: Yes -- see above], but it may have to wait till Tuesday[ETA: No, I told you, the link's just up there.]. Suffice it to say that Clarke's been an inspirational figure since my childhood, has had a pervading influence on my thinking in all kinds of ways -- most of them too deeply ingrained to identify -- and that his death, whatever age he reached, was always going to be a loss to the world.
(One thing I hadn't room to mention in the article was that his 62-year professional writing career was one of the few to threaten the 65-year record of George Bernard Shaw. If Clarke had lived another four years, as Shaw did, I'm sure he'd have overtaken him.)
One thing that some of you might be able to tell me, though... the most recent book of Clarke's I read was 3001: The Final Odyssey, one of a cluster of utopian novels by senior SF writers which popped up unexpectedly around the turn of the millennium. I've not read any of his co-written stuff, not being a big fan of Stephen Baxter's work and suspecting that Beyond the Fall of Night and the Rama sequels in particular were blatant cash-ins.
So, um... are any of the collaborations any good? I'm thinking here particularly of the Clarke-Lee Rama books and the Clarke-Baxter Time Odyssey series, all of which I really ought to have read at some point.
In other S.F. news... I enjoyed Iain Banks' Matter, but like The Steep Approach to Garbadale and to some extent The Algebraist, it had the feel of Banks working to a reliable formula without much interest in stretching himself. (Dead Air didn't feel like that to me, and nor did Look to Windward, so I hope this is an extended lapse rather than a long-term slide into senescence.)
The complex and massive detail of an insanely long-lived galactic metacivilisation (and a completely different one from the one in The Algebraist, at that) was well done, but other elements felt fairly familiar. This is particularly true of the absurdly advanced and enlightened Culture's covert intervention in the affairs of the rather boring feudal society who form the focus of the novel, since this was also the plot of Inversions nearly ten years ago. Admittedly this feudal culture occupies a portion of a world-sized artifact left behind my mysterious long-vanished aliens, but -- as one of the characters even points out during the novel -- that's the only interesting thing about them.
Admittedly there's a cleverish twist in that the Culture's agent is herself a native of the feudal society in question -- a princess no less, donated by the king as payment for services rendered some time previously, and immediately emancipated as a fully entitled (and enabled) Culture citizen. (Her name, Djan Seriy, recalls "Janissary", whether deliberately or otherwise.) In other respects, the book rehashes elements of Excession, Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, to no particularly worthwhile effect. It's a fun read and I was never bored, but I do feel Banks has been treading water for the past half-decade or so.
Since finishing Matter I've started River of Gods by Ian McDonald. I'm not very far in, and so far it's a little baffling -- I'm ashamed to say the panoply of Indian names, not all of them readily distinguishable to my angloglot eyes, isn't helping with that. I've just reached the part where the synthetic Bollywood-soap star explains that he was created as an A.I. actor rather than an A.I. character because everyone likes to know what stars get up to behind the scenes, only for it to be revealed that this part of his life is just as scripted as his soap appearances. That's fairly promising.
I'm also most of the way through Bryan Appleyard's Aliens: Why They Are Here, an examination of fictional and supposedly-real aliens which blends pop-culture and philosophy with immense readability. It's fascinating.
Oh, and this isn't a book, but it did appear in the Guardian Books supplement, and is written by the author of a book I want to read. Well, I guess that about wraps it up for Dawkins.
19 March 2008
I Know, I Know...
...I really need to update this blog more often.
I was expecting to be writing a report on Saturday's Bristol Beer Festival today -- I've got my tasting notes and everything, and I really need to use them before everything I drank falls out of my head.
(Er, metaphorically. It didn't do that in literal terms, thank heavens.)
But then Arthur C. Clarke died, and I spent this morning expecting that I'd be blogging instead about his books, their influence on my life -- which has been substantial -- and on the world.
Which I would have done. Only when I got home from work I got an email offering to pay me for writing something along these lines... only obviously not here. So what I've actually been doing this afternoon is writing the wittily-entitled "2008: A Space Obituary", which should be appearing at an internet near you after the Bank Holiday weekend.
I'll try to catch up here tomorrow. But -- and this is also somewhat crucial -- I actually succeeded in doing some proper creative writing late last week, with characters and descriptions and stuff. Given how rare that's been recently, if I can manage to carry on with that tomorrow, it may have to take precedence over telling you all about my exciting adventures with beer. Fun though those were.
I was expecting to be writing a report on Saturday's Bristol Beer Festival today -- I've got my tasting notes and everything, and I really need to use them before everything I drank falls out of my head.
(Er, metaphorically. It didn't do that in literal terms, thank heavens.)
But then Arthur C. Clarke died, and I spent this morning expecting that I'd be blogging instead about his books, their influence on my life -- which has been substantial -- and on the world.
Which I would have done. Only when I got home from work I got an email offering to pay me for writing something along these lines... only obviously not here. So what I've actually been doing this afternoon is writing the wittily-entitled "2008: A Space Obituary", which should be appearing at an internet near you after the Bank Holiday weekend.
I'll try to catch up here tomorrow. But -- and this is also somewhat crucial -- I actually succeeded in doing some proper creative writing late last week, with characters and descriptions and stuff. Given how rare that's been recently, if I can manage to carry on with that tomorrow, it may have to take precedence over telling you all about my exciting adventures with beer. Fun though those were.
25 February 2008
I've Got You Under My Skin
Call me a shameless future-slut... but if this is the Mark of the Beast, I want to be Left Behind.
The tattoo display communicates wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices - both in the outside world and within the same body. Although the device is always on (as long as your blood´s flowing), the display can be turned off and on by pushing a small dot on the skin.That is so cool. Or maybe I just haven't watched enough David Cronenberg films to realise.
21 February 2008
Goodness, has it really?
As long as that? Blimey.
I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:
This is why I'm rather glad I've managed to spend today writing a column for Surefish (and on only three coffees, too), even if it does retread some rather familiar ground for anyone who's heard me witter on about my thesis. It isn't this one about TV's Heroes, which as it happens has just gone up today -- some editorial rescheduling at Surefish has meant that that one's been waiting in the pipeline a little while. (I didn't really need to write the next column today at all, in fact, but since I seemed to be making actual progress with it I thought I ought to press on.)
So what else have I been doing recently? Well, consuming various bits of culture, pop- and otherwise, in diverse media. There'll be too many to list, but they include:
I also, last weekend, met up with a cluster of friends whom I love a great deal and get far too sentimental about, together with assorted partners and a baby, to eat food, drink too much and talk random nonsense. Sadly B. was working at the weekend and couldn't come. The whole thing was thoroughly lovely, though, and put me in a far mellower mood after the weekend than I was at the end of last week. Or, unfortunately, this one.
I've also been listening to the Walkman I acquired at (though not for) Christmas. Now I've got over the "My god, it's the soundtrack to my life!" response which comes from stalking about the place with non-diegetic music sounding in your ears, I'm finding it's a good way of consuming the CDs of random audio drama I have lying about the place, as well as discovering quite how limited my music collection is. Recommended.
I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:
- natural idleness
- extended post-Christmas lassitude
- busyness at work
- mild depression
- my caffeine dependency reaching the point where coffee no longer has any actual stimulant effect.
This is why I'm rather glad I've managed to spend today writing a column for Surefish (and on only three coffees, too), even if it does retread some rather familiar ground for anyone who's heard me witter on about my thesis. It isn't this one about TV's Heroes, which as it happens has just gone up today -- some editorial rescheduling at Surefish has meant that that one's been waiting in the pipeline a little while. (I didn't really need to write the next column today at all, in fact, but since I seemed to be making actual progress with it I thought I ought to press on.)
So what else have I been doing recently? Well, consuming various bits of culture, pop- and otherwise, in diverse media. There'll be too many to list, but they include:
- Alan Moore's brilliant and hilarious The Black Dossier -- the latest in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series -- which is about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, spying in post-Big-Brother Britain in the 1950s.
- Kim Newman's clever and mildly disturbing Andy Warhol's Dracula -- a a follow-up, though not a particularly recent one, to his Anno Dracula series -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York in the 1970s.
- Paul Magrs' very fine and splendid Something Borrowed -- the sequel to the equally fine and splendid Never the Bride -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, meeting up at a B&B in Whitby in the present day.
- Newtons Sleep, the sixth (or seventh, or eighth, depending how you're counting) Faction Paradox novel and the first from new publishers Random Static. Which is just great, and which I should probably also say more about here soon.
- Iain M. Banks's Matter, which is fun so far, although if you've read the previous Culture novels it's rather noticeably more of the same. Still, there's a lot of incredibly detailed and imaginative worldbuilding, which it's always worth reading Banks-the-S.F.-writer for.
- Cloverfield, which is very clever and interestingly done, but not actually all that entertaining to watch, which is a bit of an oversight. It's rather lucky that they do keep the monster offscreen for most of the time, because when you actually see it it's a bit rubbish. (It also gave me terrible motion sickness, which has been happening more recently. I suspect this is the current cinematic trend towards low-tech verisimilitude, rather than my advancing age, but if it carries on I'm going to have to take travel-sickness pills before going to the cinema, which is silly.)
- Penelope. Christina Ricci -- whom the plot requires to be repulsively ugly -- is sexier as a pig-faced woman than I'd have imagined possible.
- Ashes to Ashes. That Keeley Hawes really isn't John Simm, is she?
- Torchwood, which, while more consistent this season, will have to do an awful lot of arse-gearing before I start feeling it's actually worth my while watching it. (That said, and presumably just to keep me paying attention, the episode Adam was blindingly good.)
I also, last weekend, met up with a cluster of friends whom I love a great deal and get far too sentimental about, together with assorted partners and a baby, to eat food, drink too much and talk random nonsense. Sadly B. was working at the weekend and couldn't come. The whole thing was thoroughly lovely, though, and put me in a far mellower mood after the weekend than I was at the end of last week. Or, unfortunately, this one.
I've also been listening to the Walkman I acquired at (though not for) Christmas. Now I've got over the "My god, it's the soundtrack to my life!" response which comes from stalking about the place with non-diegetic music sounding in your ears, I'm finding it's a good way of consuming the CDs of random audio drama I have lying about the place, as well as discovering quite how limited my music collection is. Recommended.
26 January 2008
Scotch - Wahey!
I'm feeling somewhat sluggish this morning, following a celebration last night with friends of the 249th birthday of Robert Burns, the most renowned of all Scottish poets who aren't William McGonagall.
As is traditional, the event involved haggis, tatties and neeps, readings of Burns's poetry and copious quantities of whisky. In deference to the fact that we're all middle-class urban English cultural tourists, the haggis was vegetarian, the potatoes and swede roasted rather than bashed, and the poetry read out in a variety of painful imitations of Scottish accents (except for Seamus Heaney's "A Birl for Burns", for which an Irish accent was felt to be more appropriate). It was thoroughly good fun -- the Quorn-based pseudo-haggis, homemade by B., being a particular triumph -- and the whisky at least included a wide range of thoroughly genuine Scottish single malts. Mm, Talisker.
All of which (together with our entirely spurious inclusion among the readings of MacGonagall's immortal The Tay Bridge Disaster), made me speculate about the possibility of a MacGonagall Night supper, involving the foulest whiskies available, dramatised readings, a recreation of MacGonagall's legendary performance as Macbeth, and plates of peas for throwing purposes. But it's probably been done.
As well as being an obvious way of preserving meat through the winter months, haggis is also an excellent stomach-liner, as are the carbohydratey vegetables which accompany it. So I don't feel too rough this morning, despite the many whiskies.
I'm now pondering the extent of Burns's literary reputation, and especially Wikipedia's claim that "He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism." Clearly Burns was and remains pivotal to the development of both Scottish poetry and Scots-language poetry. Having studied most of the major English Romantics, though, I've a strong suspicion that the rest of this is a patriotic exaggeration.
Burns remains best known for his pithier lyrics: the sentimental ones, like "Auld Lang Syne" and "A Red, Red Rose"; the humorous ones, like the Addresses to haggises and mice; and of course the patriotic ones, like "Scots Wha Hae". While it's true that the English pioneers of Romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, started off like Burns, writing pastoral, lyrical poetry with an emphasis on folklore and rural traditions, they were hardly unique in this. What's more, both soon progressed to longer, weightier works like The Prelude and Biographia Literaria, and it's these which herald the emergence of English Romanticism as an intellectual movement -- everything before that was just pootling about in fields.
Although Burns certainly shared many of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's political and social convictions, too much of his time was taken up with practical farm work, learning to dress flax and knocking up all the women he could get his hands on (not a big concern for his English Romantic contemporaries, but one which their successors Byron, Keats and Shelley would throw themselves into with great enthusiasm), to produce any works of parallel significance. Burns's most sustained accomplishment is "Tam O'Shanter" -- a short pseudo-epic about an encounter with witches, which is essentially a prolonged drunken anecdote. Albeit quite a funny one.
Burns was splendid at what he did, of course, but I remain to be convinced that what he did would be considered so highly if it wasn't for Scottish national pride. Not, I have to admit, that I'd relish arguing the point with a well-informed Scot.
As is traditional, the event involved haggis, tatties and neeps, readings of Burns's poetry and copious quantities of whisky. In deference to the fact that we're all middle-class urban English cultural tourists, the haggis was vegetarian, the potatoes and swede roasted rather than bashed, and the poetry read out in a variety of painful imitations of Scottish accents (except for Seamus Heaney's "A Birl for Burns", for which an Irish accent was felt to be more appropriate). It was thoroughly good fun -- the Quorn-based pseudo-haggis, homemade by B., being a particular triumph -- and the whisky at least included a wide range of thoroughly genuine Scottish single malts. Mm, Talisker.
All of which (together with our entirely spurious inclusion among the readings of MacGonagall's immortal The Tay Bridge Disaster), made me speculate about the possibility of a MacGonagall Night supper, involving the foulest whiskies available, dramatised readings, a recreation of MacGonagall's legendary performance as Macbeth, and plates of peas for throwing purposes. But it's probably been done.
As well as being an obvious way of preserving meat through the winter months, haggis is also an excellent stomach-liner, as are the carbohydratey vegetables which accompany it. So I don't feel too rough this morning, despite the many whiskies.
I'm now pondering the extent of Burns's literary reputation, and especially Wikipedia's claim that "He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism." Clearly Burns was and remains pivotal to the development of both Scottish poetry and Scots-language poetry. Having studied most of the major English Romantics, though, I've a strong suspicion that the rest of this is a patriotic exaggeration.
Burns remains best known for his pithier lyrics: the sentimental ones, like "Auld Lang Syne" and "A Red, Red Rose"; the humorous ones, like the Addresses to haggises and mice; and of course the patriotic ones, like "Scots Wha Hae". While it's true that the English pioneers of Romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, started off like Burns, writing pastoral, lyrical poetry with an emphasis on folklore and rural traditions, they were hardly unique in this. What's more, both soon progressed to longer, weightier works like The Prelude and Biographia Literaria, and it's these which herald the emergence of English Romanticism as an intellectual movement -- everything before that was just pootling about in fields.
Although Burns certainly shared many of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's political and social convictions, too much of his time was taken up with practical farm work, learning to dress flax and knocking up all the women he could get his hands on (not a big concern for his English Romantic contemporaries, but one which their successors Byron, Keats and Shelley would throw themselves into with great enthusiasm), to produce any works of parallel significance. Burns's most sustained accomplishment is "Tam O'Shanter" -- a short pseudo-epic about an encounter with witches, which is essentially a prolonged drunken anecdote. Albeit quite a funny one.
Burns was splendid at what he did, of course, but I remain to be convinced that what he did would be considered so highly if it wasn't for Scottish national pride. Not, I have to admit, that I'd relish arguing the point with a well-informed Scot.
Work in Progress
Apply this rule after the message arrivesThis now works about 50% of the time. 'Casino' was removed from the roster after it filtered out a mailing-list discussion of the recent James Bond film.
Where the Subject line contains 'cock' or 'penis' or 'rolex' or 'replica' or 'fuck' or 'stick' or 'watches' or 'schlong' or 'erectile' or 'sexy' or 'phallus' or 'bodypart' or 'dick' or 'pharmacy' or 'erection' or 'viagra' or 'cialis' or 'tabs' or 'willy' or 'pen!s' or 'medication' or 's'e'xual' or 'sexual' or 'loser' or 'giant' or 'FDA' or 'OEM' or 'pill' or 'length' or 'organ' or 'shlong' or 'masculinity' or 'masculine' or 'pleasurable' or 'pleasure' or 'lover' or 'girlfriend' or 'boner' or 'd'ick' or 'di'ck' or 'dic'k' or 'love wand' or 'ejaaculation' or 'gambling' or 'poker' or 'herbal' or 'pharma' or 'repl1ca' or 'hero' or 'phalli' or 'inches' or 'anatrim'
Move it to the Spam folder
09 January 2008
The Elseworld, the Flesh and the Devil
Yes, sorry, that last entry was a bit dull, wasn't it? I've been rather dim-witted at work this week as well.
I'm still trying to persuade my brain and body that Christmas is over, and that I really am expected to be functioning as normal at the moment, rather than lounging around reading, sleeping and watching TV. Also that there are no mince pies or chocolate decorations left, because I've eaten them all.
Never mind. Surefish have put up my latest column, written back in December, about alternative history and what it might tell us about christianity. Read it and let me know what you think.
A slightly more interesting allotheological question than the one I ask here, "What if Jesus had never been crucified?" would (unless, of course, you're a boringly conservative penal substitutionary atonement fan) be "What if Jesus had never been an adult?".
Infant mortality in first-century Palestine was shockingly high, not to mention that a successful conception is absolutely no guarantee you'll end up being born. Many doctrines of the atonement hold that Christ's incarnation, with an optional side-order of death and suffering, were sufficient for the salvation of humanity -- but what if this happened and no-one knew about it, because the saviour had perished from diphtheria, saving the world in the process, while two weeks old?
Er. That probably won't be of much interest to most of you, but it's the kind of thing I sometimes think about (along with "What if Jesus had been born Persian, say, or indeed Roman?", "What if Jesus had used his powers for evil and become a supervillain?" and "Mm, I could really do with a mince pie".) This doesn't necessarily mean anyone else has to take any notice, at least until I put it in a novel or something.
...and now, inevitably, I'm imagining what that middle one would look like as a comic, with rival Roman and Jewish teams of superheroes (The Centurion and Kid Caesar, Simon Magus and the Wandering Jew) vying for the privilege of taking down Messiahman and his Disciples of Doom. I need to go and clean my brain out now.
Oh look, a badger!
I'm still trying to persuade my brain and body that Christmas is over, and that I really am expected to be functioning as normal at the moment, rather than lounging around reading, sleeping and watching TV. Also that there are no mince pies or chocolate decorations left, because I've eaten them all.
Never mind. Surefish have put up my latest column, written back in December, about alternative history and what it might tell us about christianity. Read it and let me know what you think.
A slightly more interesting allotheological question than the one I ask here, "What if Jesus had never been crucified?" would (unless, of course, you're a boringly conservative penal substitutionary atonement fan) be "What if Jesus had never been an adult?".
Infant mortality in first-century Palestine was shockingly high, not to mention that a successful conception is absolutely no guarantee you'll end up being born. Many doctrines of the atonement hold that Christ's incarnation, with an optional side-order of death and suffering, were sufficient for the salvation of humanity -- but what if this happened and no-one knew about it, because the saviour had perished from diphtheria, saving the world in the process, while two weeks old?
Er. That probably won't be of much interest to most of you, but it's the kind of thing I sometimes think about (along with "What if Jesus had been born Persian, say, or indeed Roman?", "What if Jesus had used his powers for evil and become a supervillain?" and "Mm, I could really do with a mince pie".) This doesn't necessarily mean anyone else has to take any notice, at least until I put it in a novel or something.
...and now, inevitably, I'm imagining what that middle one would look like as a comic, with rival Roman and Jewish teams of superheroes (The Centurion and Kid Caesar, Simon Magus and the Wandering Jew) vying for the privilege of taking down Messiahman and his Disciples of Doom. I need to go and clean my brain out now.
Oh look, a badger!
06 January 2008
6 / 366
Happy New Year, belatedly, to whoever's reading this. Hope you have a splendid time in 2008, and that it brings you everything you might conceivably desire. (Unless you're a U.S. Republican, in which case I'm sorry, but no.)
"2008" in a mirror looks very much like "BOOS". We'll be in a better position to assess the numerological significance of this later in the year.
Since I last posted here, I've flitted around the country like a moth in bloody great Doc Martens, visiting various relatives, in-laws and friends for Christmas and New Year, then spent a week or so recovering from same.
I'm very pleased with various presents, and most weightily with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, a four-way joint birthday-Christmas gift from my and B.'s parents. It's basically the full twelve volumes of the O.E.D. scrunched up small enough to fit into a single book, plus a magnifying glass. It's enormous and splendid, and has already told me that I was lied to long ago about the etymology of "marmalade". Hurrah.
Very happy also to have got Paul Magrs' Something Borrowed and Twin Freaks, Kim Newman's Andy Warhol's Dracula plus various other books and DVDs of Casino Royale, The Fountain (which I've still not seen, though I love Π) and the outstanding Children of Men. I've also obtained, though non-christmatically, a shiny new Sony MP3man which I need to learn to use, and the utterly splendid League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier... bringing to three the number of sequels to successful modern multitextual crossovers of nineteenth-century novel characters which I've acquired in the past fortnight.
Last night B. and I went to see The Golden Compass, which I wish had spent a tenth as much effort getting its script right as it evidently did on its (mostly superlative) special effects. The very obvious attempts to emulate successful recent movies (the spoken introduction telling us about the last remainingRing alethiometer; the rubbish stardust-visionary effect when Lyra uses the same; the casting of Christopher Lee as a sinister old man and the last-minute recasting of Ian-McKellen-by-the-numbers as Iorek Byrnison), together with the deliberate ironing-out of anything contentious Philip Pullman might have had to say about religion, have turned his remarkable visionary parable into a thoroughly generic children's fantasy film.
I particularly enjoyed the visuals accompanying that opening narration, where the contrast between worlds was shown by first presenting the Radcliffe Camera surrounded by modern office-blocks to show our world rooted in reality, and then dissolving into the whimsical fantasy world by replacing these with the buildings which are actually bloody there. I can only imagine the derision with which the Oxford audiences would have reacted to that one.
Thanks to the maniacity of December I've fallen badly behind on writing and on updating this blog. I've rather signally failed to stick to my resolution for 2007 of reading a book a week and blogging about them -- the last time I wrote about what I'd been reading it was early November, and even then I left a couple out. I'll try to rectify this in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow, for the first time this year. Hurrah for Bank Holidays which fall on my working days and prevent me having to take unmanageable amounts of leave.
Enjoy the year. I'll try to blog again before the end of it.
"2008" in a mirror looks very much like "BOOS". We'll be in a better position to assess the numerological significance of this later in the year.
Since I last posted here, I've flitted around the country like a moth in bloody great Doc Martens, visiting various relatives, in-laws and friends for Christmas and New Year, then spent a week or so recovering from same.
I'm very pleased with various presents, and most weightily with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, a four-way joint birthday-Christmas gift from my and B.'s parents. It's basically the full twelve volumes of the O.E.D. scrunched up small enough to fit into a single book, plus a magnifying glass. It's enormous and splendid, and has already told me that I was lied to long ago about the etymology of "marmalade". Hurrah.
Very happy also to have got Paul Magrs' Something Borrowed and Twin Freaks, Kim Newman's Andy Warhol's Dracula plus various other books and DVDs of Casino Royale, The Fountain (which I've still not seen, though I love Π) and the outstanding Children of Men. I've also obtained, though non-christmatically, a shiny new Sony MP3man which I need to learn to use, and the utterly splendid League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier... bringing to three the number of sequels to successful modern multitextual crossovers of nineteenth-century novel characters which I've acquired in the past fortnight.
Last night B. and I went to see The Golden Compass, which I wish had spent a tenth as much effort getting its script right as it evidently did on its (mostly superlative) special effects. The very obvious attempts to emulate successful recent movies (the spoken introduction telling us about the last remaining
I particularly enjoyed the visuals accompanying that opening narration, where the contrast between worlds was shown by first presenting the Radcliffe Camera surrounded by modern office-blocks to show our world rooted in reality, and then dissolving into the whimsical fantasy world by replacing these with the buildings which are actually bloody there. I can only imagine the derision with which the Oxford audiences would have reacted to that one.
Thanks to the maniacity of December I've fallen badly behind on writing and on updating this blog. I've rather signally failed to stick to my resolution for 2007 of reading a book a week and blogging about them -- the last time I wrote about what I'd been reading it was early November, and even then I left a couple out. I'll try to rectify this in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow, for the first time this year. Hurrah for Bank Holidays which fall on my working days and prevent me having to take unmanageable amounts of leave.
Enjoy the year. I'll try to blog again before the end of it.
21 December 2007
If It Wasn't for December, I Wouldn't Have Any Embers
Inevitably, this month has been spent largely in preparing for the forthcoming santaic rituals, and I've had very little time for blogging, or indeed for writing anything other than our Christmas cards. (I have managed another Surefish column, but that won't be up till January.)
I trust that "Sol Invictus" will partially remedy this lack, although a few of you will have seen it already last year. Those of you I send cards to should be receiving this year's story, "Polarity", shortly -- the rest of you will have to wait till December 2008.
Much of today has been spent rushing around manically, distributing presents and buying supplies for the forthcoming jollities. (I've never actually visited the Bristol Beer Factory before, but it turns out to be the only place one can actually buy kegs of their beer. Not that there's a brewery shop or anything -- I wandered in and found a chap in overalls, who was kind enough to stop putting mash into vats with a great big scoop and sell me some.)
In other, unrelated Christmas news... look, Kylie with a Dalek! Her dress may be minimal in scope, but at least she kept it on, unlike certain 1970s Doctor Who companions I could mention (and who'll appear fairly swiftly if you type "katy manning dalek" into Google Images).
Forgetting Christmas for the moment (as if such a thing were possible)... Elizabeth II may now be Britain's oldest monarch, but she won't be our longest-lived head of state for a few years yet. That honour goes to, of all people, Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector when he was 31, ruled for a disastrous eight months in 1658-59, then lived on in obscurity until the age of 85. If longevity in our rulers is a thing to be celebrated, than All Hail Tumbledown Dick.
Finally, the new word for worldbuilding an alternative history is whatification. Pass it on, and use it at all available opportunities.
And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
I trust that "Sol Invictus" will partially remedy this lack, although a few of you will have seen it already last year. Those of you I send cards to should be receiving this year's story, "Polarity", shortly -- the rest of you will have to wait till December 2008.
Much of today has been spent rushing around manically, distributing presents and buying supplies for the forthcoming jollities. (I've never actually visited the Bristol Beer Factory before, but it turns out to be the only place one can actually buy kegs of their beer. Not that there's a brewery shop or anything -- I wandered in and found a chap in overalls, who was kind enough to stop putting mash into vats with a great big scoop and sell me some.)
In other, unrelated Christmas news... look, Kylie with a Dalek! Her dress may be minimal in scope, but at least she kept it on, unlike certain 1970s Doctor Who companions I could mention (and who'll appear fairly swiftly if you type "katy manning dalek" into Google Images).
Forgetting Christmas for the moment (as if such a thing were possible)... Elizabeth II may now be Britain's oldest monarch, but she won't be our longest-lived head of state for a few years yet. That honour goes to, of all people, Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector when he was 31, ruled for a disastrous eight months in 1658-59, then lived on in obscurity until the age of 85. If longevity in our rulers is a thing to be celebrated, than All Hail Tumbledown Dick.
Finally, the new word for worldbuilding an alternative history is whatification. Pass it on, and use it at all available opportunities.
And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
Sol Invictus
A cheerily pagan Midwinter's tale for you all. This is the one which went out with last year's Christmas cards. You can also read it on my website.
SOL INVICTUS
The card read: To Dick and Mel – Yuletide Greetings from Jez and Sandy. The design on the front depicted a trestle-table garishly laden with seasonal delicacies, a giant log burning in a grate behind.
The painted food’s profusion and glazed stickiness made Melissa feel faintly queasy.
‘Who on earth are Jez and Sandy?’ she asked her husband at breakfast, as she passed him the marmalade. ‘And do they really call you Dick?’
‘Never heard of them,’ said Richard, accepting the jar. He glanced from his newspaper to his watch. He was always wary of being drawn into a conversation when he had to catch the train. Apparently reassured, he added, ‘And no, not if they’ve got any sense. No-one’s called me Dick since school.’
‘Well, they know our name and address. We’ll have to send them one back. Did we meet them in Marrakech?’
Their overfed labrador, Boris, trundled into the room. He lay down heavily beside Richard, who absently tickled the dog’s ears as he bit into his toast.
‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t that Gerry and Alex?’
Melissa was relieved. ‘Well, there you are, then. Jez must be short for Gerry, and Alex and Sandy are both short for Alexander. Or do I mean Alexandra? Which one of them was which?’
‘No idea,’ Richard replied, immersed again in his newspaper. He didn’t seem remotely curious as to why Gerry/Jez and/or Sandy/Alex might address Melissa as ‘Mel’. She was ‘Lissa’ to close friends, and ‘Lizzie’ to her parents and sister. Only Richard himself ever called his wife ‘Mel’, and that was in the same abstracted tone in which he called Boris ‘boy’.
‘I think we’ve got a new postman,’ she murmured.
Richard glanced at his watch again. Boris began to snore. Melissa put the card up on the mantelpiece.
* * *
She caught a glimpse of him the next morning, in the early cold-and-grey of late December. He looked very young, and wore a uniform she hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t sure whether his red cap was part of the outfit or something more festive. It didn’t look like a Father Christmas hat, but she knew that folklore and traditions changed from generation to generation.
‘Yo! Saturnalia,’ read Richard reluctantly, when she showed him the card she’d picked out of the pile. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Saturnalia? It was a Roman festival, I think,’ Melissa answered. She flipped the card closed to show a pile of traditional-looking carved toys – dice, tops, wooden soldiers. ‘What they used to have at midwinter, instead of Christmas.’
Melissa read a lot. It was one of the few things there were to do while all the commuters were at work. Their Kent village might be quiet, the station unmanned and the post office about to close, but somehow they still warranted a little rural library. Melissa suspected an elderly, wealthy relative’s influence on some county councillor or other.
‘Bloody funny thing to say,’ Richard grumbled, collecting a fresh slice from the toaster. ‘Who’s it from?’
‘Marcus, apparently.’
‘Mark at work?’ He cast around for the butter, which Melissa passed to him.
‘I thought he was just Mark,’ she said. ‘But darling, it’s addressed to “Richard and Debbie”.’
Richard dropped his butter-knife on the floor. Boris, startled from his torpor by the clatter, gave a reproachful yelp.
‘Debbie’s your secretary, isn’t she?’ Melissa felt slightly aggrieved.
‘Mark must have got the two of you mixed up,’ said Richard, busying himself with the hunt for a fresh knife. ‘Head in the clouds, that one.’
‘I remember,’ Melissa said. ‘I worked for him for two years. You’d think he’d remember my name.’
When they’d been married, she and Richard had agreed there wasn’t a lot of point in her carrying on at the office. Richard could support them both on an accountant’s salary: she’d benefit from the leisure time. Melissa had never been particularly bright or gifted, and the arrangement had seemed to make reasonable sense at the time.
Of course, she’d had some expectations then which life, and Richard, had never quite fulfilled. Still, she couldn’t complain. It would have been rather churlish under the circumstances.
‘Oh, don’t mind him,’ said Richard. ‘Dopy as hell, Mark. Marcus. Whatever his name is.’
Melissa put the card in the middle of the mantelpiece, next to Jez and Sandy’s Yuletide greetings.
* * *
On the Friday, the postman brought the biggest pile of Christmas cards yet.
They were predictable enough for the most part: trees and stars, robins and lambs, Santas and Jesuses. All the usual reminders of hope, of birth and well-filled bonhomie amidst the bleak and hungry emptiness of winter. All except one were from the same familiar names.
The picture on the front of the exception was a stylised diagram of earth and sun, indicating exactly how midwinter solstice happened in the northern hemisphere. Citizens! the printed matter read. Fraternal Greetings on the occasion of the Hibernal Festival.
‘Must be a joke,’ said Richard, when she showed him. ‘You know, “Happy Politically Correct Christmas” sort of thing.’ He sounded doubtful.
‘It isn’t very funny,’ she said.
‘No.’ He peered uneasily at his watch, then out of the window at the driving rain. ‘It’ll take me longer to get to the station today.’
The postman had been just a smudge that morning, black coat and scarlet cap against the sleety dawn.
‘Hang on,’ said Richard, his early-morning synapses catching up with him. ‘Let me see that one again.’
Melissa passed it over. She was surprised he’d been paying that much attention.
‘To Lissa and Guy,’ read Richard. ‘Who the bloody hell’s Guy?’ He sounded quite cross.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Melissa said quietly.
Guy was an old, old boyfriend. He’d been her first really serious crush, and some years later her first lover. The two of them had talked for a while about settling down together, but then he’d gone away to university and found somebody on his newly-acquired intellectual level.
They’d both been very young. She still thought of him sometimes.
Staring at the signature Richard added, ‘And who’s Britannica?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ she repeated, truthfully. She was sure she’d have remembered someone called that. ‘Like you said, darling, it must be a joke.’
‘Well, it’s not bloody funny,’ he repeated. ‘If I find out who’s sending these damn things…’
‘You’d better hurry,’ said Melissa. ‘Your train’s nearly due.’
She put the card up later, after he left. The tiny golden sun shone brightly, between the polished toys of Saturnalia and the glazed meats of Yule.
* * *
The next morning, the Saturday, she was waiting for him.
He was no more than a boy, fifteen or sixteen at most. He wore a tunic, and a cloak against the midwinter cold. Its black, fur-trimmed interior sparkled with stars.
His face was Mediterranean with a hint of the Middle East, and his red cap was buoyed up on a tide of dark curls.
Grinning, he showed her two stiff envelopes. She took the one addressed to her, and opened it.
Dear Lissa, Guy and Felix, it began. It wished the three of them a happy Lux Arturi, and expressed the hope that Brigida would make their lands and family fertile during the coming year.
Melissa had always liked the name Felix. Richard hated it. It had been one of the last things the two of them had disagreed about with any degree of joy or passion. That had been a year or so after their wedding, before the miscarriage.
She read the signature. Though not the name of anyone she knew, it was a name she recognised. She looked up into the postman’s grinning face, ruddy and glowing in the leaden English winter.
‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘I’m ready now.’
Taking the second card, she closed the door behind her, and slid it in softly through the letterbox. Inside the house Boris growled gently, then subsided into sleep.
The young man spread his cloak wide, welcoming her into its summer warmth.
* * *
When Richard got up later, hungry, craving coffee, Melissa was gone. Probably to the shops, he thought. Typical. Why hadn’t she gone yesterday, when he was at work?
He needed breakfast. The doormat held a single card, addressed to him alone. He opened it with a butter-knife he found on the kitchen floor.
The picture was of a young boy hatching out of an egg, although it might perhaps have been a rock. Sunbeams poured from the child like honey. He wore a red cap, and a cloak the colour of the summer night.
Hail Richard (and Boris), he read. A very merry Mithras-tide to you and your household. All the best, Guy, Lissa and Felix. He stared at it for a while.
Then he threw it in the bin, and started looking for the frying-pan.
© Philip Purser-Hallard 2006.
06 December 2007
Bard Humbug
I've spent some of today writing a short story for B. and me to send out with our Christmas cards. I started this tradition in 2006, and last year's story (a midwinter fantasy called "Sol Invictus") should be appearing at my website at some point between now and Christmas itself. I may as well post it here as well.
If you need entertaining in the meantime, you can always read my latest column about dystopias at Surefish.
Today I've also been scouting out Christmas presents online, including the latest Arden Shakespeare for our goddaughter E.'s collection. We've been giving her a play every birthday and Christmas since she was born, making (Antony and Cleopatra) her thirteenth (and E. herself, of course, six). We calculate that, including the poems and sonnets, there's an adequate supply of Shakespeare to last her until her twentieth birthday, following which we can make the whole library redundant by giving her the Complete Shakespeare for Christmas 2021.
Obviously we're having to be judicious about this. On the one hand, we want to be able to give her some of the interesting plays when she's old enough to appreciate them. On the other hand, when she reaches an age to take an interest in a long-dead verse playwright, we don't want her to look through the selection she's got and realise that most of them are frankly rubbish.
With the best Will in the world (ho ho), not many teenagers these days read Timon of Athens or Pericles, Prince of Tyre for pleasure, and the few who do are probably as disturbed by the obsession with father-daughter incest as amused by Pericles' Pythonesque description of fish as "the finny subject of the sea".
So, we've been trying to alternate the interesting (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra) and less-interesting (Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors) plays, as well as keeping up a vaguely even balance of the genres.
We have two lists, of Good and Not Good plays, each title colour-coded according to whether it's a Tragedy, a Comedy, a History or the one of difficult-to-categorise Last Plays. (Identifying Good Histories has been a bit of a challenge, of course. Once you've done Henry V and Richard III you're a bit stuck.)
She may, of course, have to study some of the plays at school or college, which might mean we have to alter our plans. Some plays we're keeping back for specific life-stages: Hamlet is obviously an ideal gift for a moody teenager who hates their parents, while Titus Andronicus -- a cheerful tale of murder, rape, revenge, mutilation and cannibalism -- seems ideal for her Goth phase.
I wonder slightly whether I should be revealing future plans for presents on a blog which is archived indefinitely. While a six-year-old is unlikely to be browsing the web in search of people she knows, a sixteen-year-old might well be.
On the other hand, I rather suspect E. will have better things to do in 2017 than reading ten-year-old blog posts by her 46-year-old godfather. As for 415-year-old plays by a 450-year-old playwright... well, the jury's still out on that one.
If you need entertaining in the meantime, you can always read my latest column about dystopias at Surefish.
Today I've also been scouting out Christmas presents online, including the latest Arden Shakespeare for our goddaughter E.'s collection. We've been giving her a play every birthday and Christmas since she was born, making (Antony and Cleopatra) her thirteenth (and E. herself, of course, six). We calculate that, including the poems and sonnets, there's an adequate supply of Shakespeare to last her until her twentieth birthday, following which we can make the whole library redundant by giving her the Complete Shakespeare for Christmas 2021.
Obviously we're having to be judicious about this. On the one hand, we want to be able to give her some of the interesting plays when she's old enough to appreciate them. On the other hand, when she reaches an age to take an interest in a long-dead verse playwright, we don't want her to look through the selection she's got and realise that most of them are frankly rubbish.
With the best Will in the world (ho ho), not many teenagers these days read Timon of Athens or Pericles, Prince of Tyre for pleasure, and the few who do are probably as disturbed by the obsession with father-daughter incest as amused by Pericles' Pythonesque description of fish as "the finny subject of the sea".
So, we've been trying to alternate the interesting (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra) and less-interesting (Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors) plays, as well as keeping up a vaguely even balance of the genres.
We have two lists, of Good and Not Good plays, each title colour-coded according to whether it's a Tragedy, a Comedy, a History or the one of difficult-to-categorise Last Plays. (Identifying Good Histories has been a bit of a challenge, of course. Once you've done Henry V and Richard III you're a bit stuck.)
She may, of course, have to study some of the plays at school or college, which might mean we have to alter our plans. Some plays we're keeping back for specific life-stages: Hamlet is obviously an ideal gift for a moody teenager who hates their parents, while Titus Andronicus -- a cheerful tale of murder, rape, revenge, mutilation and cannibalism -- seems ideal for her Goth phase.
I wonder slightly whether I should be revealing future plans for presents on a blog which is archived indefinitely. While a six-year-old is unlikely to be browsing the web in search of people she knows, a sixteen-year-old might well be.
On the other hand, I rather suspect E. will have better things to do in 2017 than reading ten-year-old blog posts by her 46-year-old godfather. As for 415-year-old plays by a 450-year-old playwright... well, the jury's still out on that one.
25 November 2007
But Scully's the Sceptic...
Last night, while B. and I were playing a board game, our cat Scully leapt suddenly and violently out of her basket, looking terrified. We assumed she'd had a nightmare (we're fairly sure that both cats experience something like dreaming, although at what level it's difficult to tell), but she spent the rest of the evening very unhappy.
This morning she was still spooked, refusing to be stroked, cowering when she walked and hiding behind things. She's started calming down a bit now (and a phone call to the vet established that there's probably nothing physically wrong), but she's still quite nervous.
This spontaneous reaction of terror to something non-existent sounds a lot like the behaviour of animals which pet-owners describe when they suspect their houses are haunted. I'm not a believer in ghosts (see footnote [1] for a more nuanced statement about this), and we've lived here for over three years without encountering anything else out of the ordinary. In any case, Mulder remains completely at ease. Which makes me suspect what these owners are describing is, in fact, an unusual but mundane cat behaviour.
What's odd -- and might well strike a cat-owner as evidence of something quite out of the ordinary -- is that it's so out of character. Scully doesn't get this upset when something traumatic has actually happened, like going to the vet's. She's normally self-confident, vocal and demanding of attention to an extent that borders on the tyrannical. Whatever it was the poor love thinks happened, it must have been terribly distressing.
[1] When I say I don't believe in ghosts, I'm not professing a strong disbelief in them. I do disbelieve, on theological as well as common-sense grounds, that spirits of the dead wander the Earth seeking closure with their children or hiding other people's socks, but I'm open to the idea that some of the phenomena which have been labelled as ghosts have an objective existence.
They may be as-yet-unrealised products of known scientific laws, or result from causes science has yet to categorise. There's an outside chance they may be symptoms of a large-scale seam of irrationality in the universe which science as currently constituted wouldn't be equipped to cover. However, Occam's Razor means I'm hardly going to adduce as-yet-unknown phenomena to explain something which, however unexpected, is explicable by a known and loved cat suddenly going a bit dappy.
This morning she was still spooked, refusing to be stroked, cowering when she walked and hiding behind things. She's started calming down a bit now (and a phone call to the vet established that there's probably nothing physically wrong), but she's still quite nervous.
This spontaneous reaction of terror to something non-existent sounds a lot like the behaviour of animals which pet-owners describe when they suspect their houses are haunted. I'm not a believer in ghosts (see footnote [1] for a more nuanced statement about this), and we've lived here for over three years without encountering anything else out of the ordinary. In any case, Mulder remains completely at ease. Which makes me suspect what these owners are describing is, in fact, an unusual but mundane cat behaviour.
What's odd -- and might well strike a cat-owner as evidence of something quite out of the ordinary -- is that it's so out of character. Scully doesn't get this upset when something traumatic has actually happened, like going to the vet's. She's normally self-confident, vocal and demanding of attention to an extent that borders on the tyrannical. Whatever it was the poor love thinks happened, it must have been terribly distressing.
[1] When I say I don't believe in ghosts, I'm not professing a strong disbelief in them. I do disbelieve, on theological as well as common-sense grounds, that spirits of the dead wander the Earth seeking closure with their children or hiding other people's socks, but I'm open to the idea that some of the phenomena which have been labelled as ghosts have an objective existence.
They may be as-yet-unrealised products of known scientific laws, or result from causes science has yet to categorise. There's an outside chance they may be symptoms of a large-scale seam of irrationality in the universe which science as currently constituted wouldn't be equipped to cover. However, Occam's Razor means I'm hardly going to adduce as-yet-unknown phenomena to explain something which, however unexpected, is explicable by a known and loved cat suddenly going a bit dappy.
24 November 2007
Three Things about The Prisoner
A.
One of the three non-fiction books I didn't have time to review last time I posted book-related stuff here was Fall Out: the unofficial and unauthorised guide to The Prisoner, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore, which I read... er, back in Septemberish, I think.
I said then that, of the three, one was good, one very good and one quite stunningly good. This was the good one.
Despite my evident obsession with The Prisoner I don't claim to have read all the available factual books about the series... but excepting the Scriptbooks (which are a special case, obviously) this is probably the best of the ones I've read.
(It's certainly deeper than The Prisoner: a television masterpiece by Alain Carrazé and Hélène Oswald, the first book about the series I ever read, which is pretty, glossy and almost entirely uninformative. Most of it consists of a detailed summary of the episodes, with occasional script extracts. I can only assume the French didn't have video recorders in 1992.)
I'd heard great things about Stevens' and Moore's Blake's Seven guide (which, being almost entirely unfamiliar with and indifferent to Blake's Seven, I haven't read myself), and may accordingly have set my expectations a little high. I'd have preferred rather more analysis and less of a summary of the (undeniably entertaining) behind-the-scenes soap opera of McGoohan's single-handed struggle against everybody else who worked on the series ever, but never mind -- it's a fine treatment of the subject matter.
As well as the in-depth episode guides and analyses, there are some good (if short) essays on aspects of the series: the vexed question of the "correct" episode order, a piece on the series' treatment of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, some analysis of the baffling figure of Number 1 and the like. There's also some excellent introductory material, setting The Prisoner in its cultural context rather in the manner of the About Time series. It also gets points for dealing with the Prisoner apocrypha: the original novels (including the recent, and excellent, The Prisoner's Dilemma, the 1980s comics (whose late-Cold-War peculiarities it has some fun with), and the unmade scripts and story pitches included in the Scriptbooks.
It's not the towering work of intellectual analysis the show has been crying out for for throughout the past 40 years, but it's well worth a read.
B.
I'm still enjoying my 40th anniversary Prisoner DVDs. The picture quality is gloriously crisp and sharp, enabling me to read text (on the ID cards Number 6 gets handed in Arrival, for instance) that I never even knew was there.
The extras include a rather splendid documentary full of interviews with writers, behind-the-scenes people and surviving cast members (with the exception, naturally, of Patrick McGoohan, who's always preferred to coast along on a surfboard of enigma rather than tell people what he actually meant by anything).
One thing that stuck in my mind from the documentary was Vincent Tilsley, the scriptwriter of The Chimes of Big Ben, taking about his later, more inglorious Prisoner episode, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, and in particular explaining why it's such rubbish. (You'll note that Jonny Morris, who wrote the BBC episode guide I'm linking to here, disagrees that it's rubbish. This is because, entertaining though his reviews are, every single one of his opinions are deeply wrong. Except about The Girl Who Was Death, which is indeed the best episode of the series.)
I've talked before about -- and speculated, I suspect rather unjustly, about McGoohan's part in -- the alterations which were made to this script between writing and broadcast. There's no denying, though, that the premise is a fundamentally lame one. Tilsley states that his reason for falling back on such a hackneyed plot device as recasting the central character via mind-swap machine was that he was told to write a Prisoner story with neither Patrick McGoohan nor Portmeirion in it, and panicked.
Personally, I'd say there was a much more interesting story to be told with those constraints: invert the premise of the series, to show an outsider attempting to break into the Village.
One of the Prisoner's old adversaries, a spy from the other side of the Iron Curtain, is trying to track him down. This spy has found evidence that his Soviet masters are opearating a secret hidden facility where ex-agents from both sides are held against their will, brainwashed and tortured. The spy is appalled by this treatment of his fellows, but has been warned off any interference by his masters. He now wants to bring this to the attention of the West, and is attempting to locate the most trustworthy and honourable of his opponents, the man we know as Number 6.
However, all his attempts to make contact with the man lead him, inevitably, to the very facility whose existence he's discovered. By now he strongly suspects that East and West are co-operating in order to run the prison camp -- perhaps indeed that there's a high-level conspiracy on both sides to maintain the status quo. Eventually deciding to spring Number 6 from the facility, he locates it in the middle of nowhere and breaks in... only for us to realise that he hasn't found the Village after all, but a completely different-looking facility with the same setup. Now he's there, of course, he can never leave -- except that the agency behind the Village has determined that his personal relationship with Number 6 could be very useful to them, and offer him a turn at being Number 2. We leave him pondering his stark choice: whether to become a warder -- or a prisoner...
Of course, this sort of one-off episode is something culty drama series do all the time these days -- see for instance the highly Prisoneresque Babylon 5 episode The Corps Is Mother, the Corps Is Father -- so I have the advantage of chronology.
But even so -- a mind-swap machine? Give me a break.
C.
Random stream-of-consciousness alert: I've never been convinced by any of the religious readings of The Prisoner, as despite McGoohan's well-documented Catholicism, there's barely any hint at such a reading being remotely plausible. (There's a metaphorical reference in The Chimes of Big Ben to church doors obstructing freedom -- though whether freedom is to be found inside or outside the church is left altogether ambiguous -- and a vaguely crucifixish pose struck by the Prisoner whilst being beaten up in Free for All. That's about it.)
Fall Out (the book), though, makes a halfway decent argument for the idea that Number 1 in Fall Out (the episode) being God. Or something.
If such a reading were to make any sense, it would have to be a Gnostic one, I think, with Number 1 representing the fallen demiurge who's made the Village in his own image and who is confused by the Villagers with the true God of whom the identical-looking Prisoner is a representative. Number 6 himself would therefore be a saviour from outside the created order, come not to bring peace but a machine-gun, liberating the few individuals capable of true enlightenment.
Or something.
On the other hand, this could well be my usual obsessions showing through. After all, pretty much all SF's Gnostic, according to my thesis... and that doesn't seem very likely really, does it?
One of the three non-fiction books I didn't have time to review last time I posted book-related stuff here was Fall Out: the unofficial and unauthorised guide to The Prisoner, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore, which I read... er, back in Septemberish, I think.
I said then that, of the three, one was good, one very good and one quite stunningly good. This was the good one.
Despite my evident obsession with The Prisoner I don't claim to have read all the available factual books about the series... but excepting the Scriptbooks (which are a special case, obviously) this is probably the best of the ones I've read.
(It's certainly deeper than The Prisoner: a television masterpiece by Alain Carrazé and Hélène Oswald, the first book about the series I ever read, which is pretty, glossy and almost entirely uninformative. Most of it consists of a detailed summary of the episodes, with occasional script extracts. I can only assume the French didn't have video recorders in 1992.)
I'd heard great things about Stevens' and Moore's Blake's Seven guide (which, being almost entirely unfamiliar with and indifferent to Blake's Seven, I haven't read myself), and may accordingly have set my expectations a little high. I'd have preferred rather more analysis and less of a summary of the (undeniably entertaining) behind-the-scenes soap opera of McGoohan's single-handed struggle against everybody else who worked on the series ever, but never mind -- it's a fine treatment of the subject matter.
As well as the in-depth episode guides and analyses, there are some good (if short) essays on aspects of the series: the vexed question of the "correct" episode order, a piece on the series' treatment of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, some analysis of the baffling figure of Number 1 and the like. There's also some excellent introductory material, setting The Prisoner in its cultural context rather in the manner of the About Time series. It also gets points for dealing with the Prisoner apocrypha: the original novels (including the recent, and excellent, The Prisoner's Dilemma, the 1980s comics (whose late-Cold-War peculiarities it has some fun with), and the unmade scripts and story pitches included in the Scriptbooks.
It's not the towering work of intellectual analysis the show has been crying out for for throughout the past 40 years, but it's well worth a read.
B.
I'm still enjoying my 40th anniversary Prisoner DVDs. The picture quality is gloriously crisp and sharp, enabling me to read text (on the ID cards Number 6 gets handed in Arrival, for instance) that I never even knew was there.
The extras include a rather splendid documentary full of interviews with writers, behind-the-scenes people and surviving cast members (with the exception, naturally, of Patrick McGoohan, who's always preferred to coast along on a surfboard of enigma rather than tell people what he actually meant by anything).
One thing that stuck in my mind from the documentary was Vincent Tilsley, the scriptwriter of The Chimes of Big Ben, taking about his later, more inglorious Prisoner episode, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, and in particular explaining why it's such rubbish. (You'll note that Jonny Morris, who wrote the BBC episode guide I'm linking to here, disagrees that it's rubbish. This is because, entertaining though his reviews are, every single one of his opinions are deeply wrong. Except about The Girl Who Was Death, which is indeed the best episode of the series.)
I've talked before about -- and speculated, I suspect rather unjustly, about McGoohan's part in -- the alterations which were made to this script between writing and broadcast. There's no denying, though, that the premise is a fundamentally lame one. Tilsley states that his reason for falling back on such a hackneyed plot device as recasting the central character via mind-swap machine was that he was told to write a Prisoner story with neither Patrick McGoohan nor Portmeirion in it, and panicked.
Personally, I'd say there was a much more interesting story to be told with those constraints: invert the premise of the series, to show an outsider attempting to break into the Village.
One of the Prisoner's old adversaries, a spy from the other side of the Iron Curtain, is trying to track him down. This spy has found evidence that his Soviet masters are opearating a secret hidden facility where ex-agents from both sides are held against their will, brainwashed and tortured. The spy is appalled by this treatment of his fellows, but has been warned off any interference by his masters. He now wants to bring this to the attention of the West, and is attempting to locate the most trustworthy and honourable of his opponents, the man we know as Number 6.
However, all his attempts to make contact with the man lead him, inevitably, to the very facility whose existence he's discovered. By now he strongly suspects that East and West are co-operating in order to run the prison camp -- perhaps indeed that there's a high-level conspiracy on both sides to maintain the status quo. Eventually deciding to spring Number 6 from the facility, he locates it in the middle of nowhere and breaks in... only for us to realise that he hasn't found the Village after all, but a completely different-looking facility with the same setup. Now he's there, of course, he can never leave -- except that the agency behind the Village has determined that his personal relationship with Number 6 could be very useful to them, and offer him a turn at being Number 2. We leave him pondering his stark choice: whether to become a warder -- or a prisoner...
Of course, this sort of one-off episode is something culty drama series do all the time these days -- see for instance the highly Prisoneresque Babylon 5 episode The Corps Is Mother, the Corps Is Father -- so I have the advantage of chronology.
But even so -- a mind-swap machine? Give me a break.
C.
Random stream-of-consciousness alert: I've never been convinced by any of the religious readings of The Prisoner, as despite McGoohan's well-documented Catholicism, there's barely any hint at such a reading being remotely plausible. (There's a metaphorical reference in The Chimes of Big Ben to church doors obstructing freedom -- though whether freedom is to be found inside or outside the church is left altogether ambiguous -- and a vaguely crucifixish pose struck by the Prisoner whilst being beaten up in Free for All. That's about it.)
Fall Out (the book), though, makes a halfway decent argument for the idea that Number 1 in Fall Out (the episode) being God. Or something.
If such a reading were to make any sense, it would have to be a Gnostic one, I think, with Number 1 representing the fallen demiurge who's made the Village in his own image and who is confused by the Villagers with the true God of whom the identical-looking Prisoner is a representative. Number 6 himself would therefore be a saviour from outside the created order, come not to bring peace but a machine-gun, liberating the few individuals capable of true enlightenment.
Or something.
On the other hand, this could well be my usual obsessions showing through. After all, pretty much all SF's Gnostic, according to my thesis... and that doesn't seem very likely really, does it?
Orpheus in the Underwear
Apparently, scholars of the life and career of the Parisian composer Jacques Offenbach frequently confess to longing for a really contentious theory to arise about his work -- one that will generate article after article debating its merits -- so that someone can finally refer to "the controversial theory that dogs Offenbach".
...At least, I assume they do. I know I would.
...At least, I assume they do. I know I would.
09 November 2007
Webfondlings
Meanwhile, my indefatigable attempts to colonise an ever-decreasing percentage of the exponentially widening world Web have resulted in the following:
- My latest Surefish column, about Future Church History. (I'm predictably pleased with the sub-headings, although I'll admit to stealing one of them from here.)
- A sympathetic review of Nobody's Children, which ends by imagining me as part of a progenitive parenting threesome along with Jon Blum and Kate Orman. I don't know which of us should be more disturbed at that.
Books Update: Gold and Brown (Baxter likes one)
Let me start by apologising for that truly appalling title. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry...
So, what have I been reading in the surprisingly lengthy expanse of time since my last book update? Quite a lot really. Blimey.
Let's get that horrible pun out of the way first:
Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold was nice, but not great. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read it before, rather than after, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The authors are friends, and their books are engaged in much the same project of reinventing the American adventure novel, but with a contemporary political outlook and vastly increased literary panache.
Both are set in a major U.S. city during specific decades of the 20th century; both deal with issues of love and rivalry and oppression and belonging. Both feature real historical characters and events, but fictionalise them heavily. Both have a stage magician as the central character, and his younger gay relative as a sidekick.
Carter Beats the Devil does all of these things well, but Kavalier and Clay does them consummately. As I seem to remember saying about following David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with his earlier Ghostwritten, if I'd gone from the latter to the former it would have felt like I was ascending from the heights of excellence to a zenith of genius, whereas doing it the other way round felt like a bit of a letdown, really. Ah well.
Eric Brown's Approaching Omega's been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now, since I found it hanging around in a secondhand bookshop. Unfortunately it was a letdown after the other Telos publishing originals I've read. In particular, coming right after the literary banquet of Daniel O'Mahony's Force Majeure (see below) it tasted of takeaway pizza, competently constructed but to a terribly familiar template.
Approaching Omega is formulaic hard S.F., where the maintenance team aboard a generation starship start to act (and worse still, talk) like hardened space marines the moment danger threatens, because that's how People In Space behave (and talk). It deals with interesting issues -- if you hybridise human beings with A.I., where does the human end and the machine begin? -- but in a facile way, albeit with one mildly interesting twist. Stephen Baxter's quoted on the back cover as saying "Brown is at the height of his powers", which makes me wonder what his earlier books were like. (Reasonably numerous, apparently.)
I love Samuel R. Delany's work, but a little of his intense and densely-textured prose goes a long way. I've only read a few of his books over the years, and I still haven't had the courage to tackle the gargantuan, Finnegans Wake-ish Dhalgren. Babel-17 is one I missed out when I first discovered Delany and have only recently gone back to.
It's less impressive than some of his later works, but not by much. The characters are vivid and their predicament fiendishly clever, but some of the space-opera background -- well-drawn and detailed as it is -- feels a little formulaic. What's more, unlike some of the other Delany books I've read it's simply using the formula rather than (apparently) deconstructing it.
Groundbreakingly for S.F. at the time, the plot revolves around linguistics, which it treats in much the same way as earlier S.F. treats the hard sciences -- taking the then-popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and extrapolating from it an extreme conceptual scenario designed to distort the boundaries of the reader's worldview. Its linguistics feel a little antiquated now, as does its proto-cyberpunk, but that's only because of how things have moved on since then.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers is a book I first read when it came out, at which time I was twelve or so. I was surprised how much of it I remembered, and by how well it stood up to my memory of it. In retrospect it's obviously a first novel -- it crams in too many disparate clever things, there are some awkward moments in the writing and the American author never seems quite comfortable with his London milieu -- but there remain some excellent ideas, vivid descriptions and compelling adventure narrative, and a surprisingly coherent magical scheme which works itself out mostly in hints and allusions rather than direct exposition.
Reginald Hill's The Death of Dalziel is a well-written police procedural, relying (perhaps slightly too heavily) on the charm of the characters he's created in his 20-odd previous Dalziel and Pascoe novels. This one revolves somewhat fantastically around a British anti-Islamic terrorist organisation known as "the Templars", which I thought at first was a cop-out allowing the liberal Hill to deal with contemporary issues without offending Islamic sensibilities. Actually, though, it works as a rather clever way of engaging the reader's sympathy with the terrorist mindset, suggesting that terrorists are people whose understandable, rather mundane concerns are radicalised by their extreme life-experiences.
I noted approvingly some months ago that the range of Doctor Who tie-in novels was showing some hints of returning to its former impressive heights, with the announcement of works by Paul Magrs and Mark Michalowski, among others. Subsequent commissions have called this trend into some doubt, but it's still splendid that we have Magrs's whimsically Ballardian Sick Building and Michalowski's biological hard-S.F. novel Wetworld in the range.
Sick Building combines some familiar Magrsian tropes -- a wintry landscape full of fantastical beasts, a young man's troubled relationship with his parents, a villain motivated by possessive love who talks like someone's auntie -- with a take on The Tempest which makes Forbidden Planet look conventional. It's at the lightweight end of Magrs's output, which has certainly included more serious and meatier fare. The eructation-driven climax read almost like a self-consciously silly embracing of New Who's occasional CBeebie-ish excesses -- which, being written by Magrs, it very likely was.
Wetworld's a maturer piece, and one which pays some real interest to the science underpinning its SF world. Where Sick Building, by an author who's written children's books as well as (sometimes very) adult ones, could have been accused of talking down to its readers, Wetworld takes it for granted that they'll be interested in adult stuff like xenobiology and the politics of survival. It's still enormous fun, though, with Michalowski's sympathy for his characters and sometimes wicked wit fleshing out the sturdy framework into one of the best new-series novels yet.
Both authors nail the characters of the tenth Doctor and Martha right through the ears, which I appreciated greatly. I'm not a huge fan of David Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor, but divorced from his actual presence, the three-year-old's attention span and manic logorrhoea are rather endearing. And Martha's fab, of course.
The best work of fiction I've read recently, though, was Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahony -- an alumnus of the Doctor Who novel ranges from back when they were good. Despite the terribly generic cover, this short novel (or maybe it's a longish novella) reads like a hybrid of Jorge Luis Borges and Christopher Priest, presenting a beautifully-envisaged, yet clearly unreal, Latin American city apparently founded in prehistory by dragons, intersecting with the forces of 21st-century capitalism.
As with some of O'Mahony's earlier works, it's not entirely clear what happens in the book and what doesn't, but the descriptions of what may or may not have happened are beautiful and disturbing. His knack of making us sympathise with unlikeable characters is also to the fore.
It's not O'Mahony's best work -- that would still be his Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light -- but it's a brilliant excursion, and it makes me positively salivate for his forthcoming Faction Paradox novel, Newtons Sleep.
Finally (for now), Ken MacLeod's The Human Front is a fun alternative-history novella about a post-WWII world where the U.S.A.F.'s experimental flying saucer didn't crash at Roswell in 1947, but gave rise to a whole new generation of anti-gravity bombers with which America attempts, disastrously, to win the Cold War. As usual with MacLeod's books it's full of left-wing political theory, humanised by a questionable yet sympathetic central character, and ends in a firework-burst of S.F. cleverness. It's even published back-to-back with another novella, so (if I was feeling exceptionally optimistic) I could even give Eric Brown another try.
That's the fiction I've read since August. The non-fiction is another story (as it were), but in the interests of keeping the blog up-to-date (and not having this post fester in my blogspot directory for further months) I'll cover those books later. Suffice it to say that I've read three of them recently, one of which was good, one very good and one quite stunningly good. To find out what they were, watch this space.
So, what have I been reading in the surprisingly lengthy expanse of time since my last book update? Quite a lot really. Blimey.
Let's get that horrible pun out of the way first:
Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold was nice, but not great. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read it before, rather than after, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The authors are friends, and their books are engaged in much the same project of reinventing the American adventure novel, but with a contemporary political outlook and vastly increased literary panache.
Both are set in a major U.S. city during specific decades of the 20th century; both deal with issues of love and rivalry and oppression and belonging. Both feature real historical characters and events, but fictionalise them heavily. Both have a stage magician as the central character, and his younger gay relative as a sidekick.
Carter Beats the Devil does all of these things well, but Kavalier and Clay does them consummately. As I seem to remember saying about following David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with his earlier Ghostwritten, if I'd gone from the latter to the former it would have felt like I was ascending from the heights of excellence to a zenith of genius, whereas doing it the other way round felt like a bit of a letdown, really. Ah well.
Eric Brown's Approaching Omega's been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now, since I found it hanging around in a secondhand bookshop. Unfortunately it was a letdown after the other Telos publishing originals I've read. In particular, coming right after the literary banquet of Daniel O'Mahony's Force Majeure (see below) it tasted of takeaway pizza, competently constructed but to a terribly familiar template.
Approaching Omega is formulaic hard S.F., where the maintenance team aboard a generation starship start to act (and worse still, talk) like hardened space marines the moment danger threatens, because that's how People In Space behave (and talk). It deals with interesting issues -- if you hybridise human beings with A.I., where does the human end and the machine begin? -- but in a facile way, albeit with one mildly interesting twist. Stephen Baxter's quoted on the back cover as saying "Brown is at the height of his powers", which makes me wonder what his earlier books were like. (Reasonably numerous, apparently.)
I love Samuel R. Delany's work, but a little of his intense and densely-textured prose goes a long way. I've only read a few of his books over the years, and I still haven't had the courage to tackle the gargantuan, Finnegans Wake-ish Dhalgren. Babel-17 is one I missed out when I first discovered Delany and have only recently gone back to.
It's less impressive than some of his later works, but not by much. The characters are vivid and their predicament fiendishly clever, but some of the space-opera background -- well-drawn and detailed as it is -- feels a little formulaic. What's more, unlike some of the other Delany books I've read it's simply using the formula rather than (apparently) deconstructing it.
Groundbreakingly for S.F. at the time, the plot revolves around linguistics, which it treats in much the same way as earlier S.F. treats the hard sciences -- taking the then-popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and extrapolating from it an extreme conceptual scenario designed to distort the boundaries of the reader's worldview. Its linguistics feel a little antiquated now, as does its proto-cyberpunk, but that's only because of how things have moved on since then.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers is a book I first read when it came out, at which time I was twelve or so. I was surprised how much of it I remembered, and by how well it stood up to my memory of it. In retrospect it's obviously a first novel -- it crams in too many disparate clever things, there are some awkward moments in the writing and the American author never seems quite comfortable with his London milieu -- but there remain some excellent ideas, vivid descriptions and compelling adventure narrative, and a surprisingly coherent magical scheme which works itself out mostly in hints and allusions rather than direct exposition.
Reginald Hill's The Death of Dalziel is a well-written police procedural, relying (perhaps slightly too heavily) on the charm of the characters he's created in his 20-odd previous Dalziel and Pascoe novels. This one revolves somewhat fantastically around a British anti-Islamic terrorist organisation known as "the Templars", which I thought at first was a cop-out allowing the liberal Hill to deal with contemporary issues without offending Islamic sensibilities. Actually, though, it works as a rather clever way of engaging the reader's sympathy with the terrorist mindset, suggesting that terrorists are people whose understandable, rather mundane concerns are radicalised by their extreme life-experiences.
I noted approvingly some months ago that the range of Doctor Who tie-in novels was showing some hints of returning to its former impressive heights, with the announcement of works by Paul Magrs and Mark Michalowski, among others. Subsequent commissions have called this trend into some doubt, but it's still splendid that we have Magrs's whimsically Ballardian Sick Building and Michalowski's biological hard-S.F. novel Wetworld in the range.
Sick Building combines some familiar Magrsian tropes -- a wintry landscape full of fantastical beasts, a young man's troubled relationship with his parents, a villain motivated by possessive love who talks like someone's auntie -- with a take on The Tempest which makes Forbidden Planet look conventional. It's at the lightweight end of Magrs's output, which has certainly included more serious and meatier fare. The eructation-driven climax read almost like a self-consciously silly embracing of New Who's occasional CBeebie-ish excesses -- which, being written by Magrs, it very likely was.
Wetworld's a maturer piece, and one which pays some real interest to the science underpinning its SF world. Where Sick Building, by an author who's written children's books as well as (sometimes very) adult ones, could have been accused of talking down to its readers, Wetworld takes it for granted that they'll be interested in adult stuff like xenobiology and the politics of survival. It's still enormous fun, though, with Michalowski's sympathy for his characters and sometimes wicked wit fleshing out the sturdy framework into one of the best new-series novels yet.
Both authors nail the characters of the tenth Doctor and Martha right through the ears, which I appreciated greatly. I'm not a huge fan of David Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor, but divorced from his actual presence, the three-year-old's attention span and manic logorrhoea are rather endearing. And Martha's fab, of course.
The best work of fiction I've read recently, though, was Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahony -- an alumnus of the Doctor Who novel ranges from back when they were good. Despite the terribly generic cover, this short novel (or maybe it's a longish novella) reads like a hybrid of Jorge Luis Borges and Christopher Priest, presenting a beautifully-envisaged, yet clearly unreal, Latin American city apparently founded in prehistory by dragons, intersecting with the forces of 21st-century capitalism.
As with some of O'Mahony's earlier works, it's not entirely clear what happens in the book and what doesn't, but the descriptions of what may or may not have happened are beautiful and disturbing. His knack of making us sympathise with unlikeable characters is also to the fore.
It's not O'Mahony's best work -- that would still be his Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light -- but it's a brilliant excursion, and it makes me positively salivate for his forthcoming Faction Paradox novel, Newtons Sleep.
Finally (for now), Ken MacLeod's The Human Front is a fun alternative-history novella about a post-WWII world where the U.S.A.F.'s experimental flying saucer didn't crash at Roswell in 1947, but gave rise to a whole new generation of anti-gravity bombers with which America attempts, disastrously, to win the Cold War. As usual with MacLeod's books it's full of left-wing political theory, humanised by a questionable yet sympathetic central character, and ends in a firework-burst of S.F. cleverness. It's even published back-to-back with another novella, so (if I was feeling exceptionally optimistic) I could even give Eric Brown another try.
That's the fiction I've read since August. The non-fiction is another story (as it were), but in the interests of keeping the blog up-to-date (and not having this post fester in my blogspot directory for further months) I'll cover those books later. Suffice it to say that I've read three of them recently, one of which was good, one very good and one quite stunningly good. To find out what they were, watch this space.
Wye, O Wye
Since my last update here I've had a birthday (my 36th, although I prefer to think of it as two eighteenth birthdays rolled into one) and a weekend away wallowing in second-hand bookshops at Hay-on-Wye. I've also read any number of books, reviews of which should be arriving shortly in a mammoth update of more or less everything I've read since August.
The birthday was happy, as these things are traditionally supposed to be, with presents of DVDs from parents and spouse and an Amnesty International T-shirt from my in-laws (which is more welcome than you might imagine, especially since they're holding on to my real present until Christmas). The DVDs from B. included Edge of Darkness, which I've heard a lot about but never seen, so I'm looking forward to a great deal.
Mum and Dad gave me the 40th anniversary Prisoner DVD boxed set, a welcome upgrade to the rather dog-eared 25th anniversary VHS boxed set which I've been watching on and off for the past one-and-a-half decades. The picture quality is gorgeously crisp, there's an hour and a half documentary full of interviews (Peter Wyngarde seems to be the only surviving Number 2 who hasn't turned fat, having opted instead to look astonishingly like Ben Kingsley), PDFs of the scripts, commentaries and all kinds of goodies including the original edit of Arrival. I'm thrilled with the whole thing.
The weekend in Hay was really lovely: relaxing insofar as we were staying in a lovely B&B and had nothing more strenuous to do than wander aimlessly round bookshops and cafés; tiring in that there were -- as you may have gathered -- rather a lot of bookshops to be wandered aimlessly around in our two days there. I believe we visited 20, and came back with some 42 books, not counting presents:
(The top row's mine, the bottom row B.'s. The ones in between we agreed to buy between us.)
Some of these are titles I'd been looking for for a while; some I'd vaguely heard of and looked interesting; some just caught my eye serendipitously in the shops. Some will be useful for reference purposes; some will tell me profound things about the human condition; some will be fun.
Of the bookshops, by far the most impressive is the colossal Hay Cinema Bookshop, filling four enormous warehouse-like rooms (well, former cinema screens, but it amounts to the same thing) on two floors with all the literature, history, cultural studies, theology and the like you could possibly dream of seeing assembled in one place (though they're admittedly a bit thin on the sciences). S.F. alone (or rather S.F. and Fantasy, because in reality you're never allowed to browse S.F. alone) takes up half a dozen sets of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Equally huge is the stock of the older and more rambling (but also rather smellier and less well-organised) Richard Booth's Bookshop.
The ones where I bought the most stock were probably (if I'm identifying them correctly from the map) The Sensible Bookshop, which had S.F. and mainstream fiction trailing up and down its staircase like a comet's tail, and the optimistically-named The Bookshop, a Bookends subsidiary which combines decent-quality secondhand stuff with remaindered copies of books you actually want to buy, at very reasonable prices. (Admittedly, the staff there have never heard of feminism. Quite literally, as B. discovered when asking after a Germaine Greer she was wanting.) The most pleasant bookshop to be in -- just in case you're wanting further recommendations -- was probably Addyman's Annexe.
Browsing in secondhand bookshops is, I think, one of the closest approaches one can make to Heaven in this life. Or perhaps I just need to get out more. Either way, it was a gloriously relaxing way to spend a weekend.
I've already read the tenth book from the left in my row above (and will be blogging about it shortly -- it's Ken MacLeod's The Human Front, which is one of the ones I'd been looking for for ages), and got stuck well in to the fourth and eleventh, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate and Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. Both are set in San Francisco, oddly enough, but in rather different time periods. They're otherwise staggeringly different. I'll tell you more about them later.
(Bizarrely, Hay-on-Wye is now twinned with Timbuktu. I wish I could tell you more about this, but I can't. I approve on general principles, though.)
The birthday was happy, as these things are traditionally supposed to be, with presents of DVDs from parents and spouse and an Amnesty International T-shirt from my in-laws (which is more welcome than you might imagine, especially since they're holding on to my real present until Christmas). The DVDs from B. included Edge of Darkness, which I've heard a lot about but never seen, so I'm looking forward to a great deal.
Mum and Dad gave me the 40th anniversary Prisoner DVD boxed set, a welcome upgrade to the rather dog-eared 25th anniversary VHS boxed set which I've been watching on and off for the past one-and-a-half decades. The picture quality is gorgeously crisp, there's an hour and a half documentary full of interviews (Peter Wyngarde seems to be the only surviving Number 2 who hasn't turned fat, having opted instead to look astonishingly like Ben Kingsley), PDFs of the scripts, commentaries and all kinds of goodies including the original edit of Arrival. I'm thrilled with the whole thing.
The weekend in Hay was really lovely: relaxing insofar as we were staying in a lovely B&B and had nothing more strenuous to do than wander aimlessly round bookshops and cafés; tiring in that there were -- as you may have gathered -- rather a lot of bookshops to be wandered aimlessly around in our two days there. I believe we visited 20, and came back with some 42 books, not counting presents:
(The top row's mine, the bottom row B.'s. The ones in between we agreed to buy between us.)
Some of these are titles I'd been looking for for a while; some I'd vaguely heard of and looked interesting; some just caught my eye serendipitously in the shops. Some will be useful for reference purposes; some will tell me profound things about the human condition; some will be fun.
Of the bookshops, by far the most impressive is the colossal Hay Cinema Bookshop, filling four enormous warehouse-like rooms (well, former cinema screens, but it amounts to the same thing) on two floors with all the literature, history, cultural studies, theology and the like you could possibly dream of seeing assembled in one place (though they're admittedly a bit thin on the sciences). S.F. alone (or rather S.F. and Fantasy, because in reality you're never allowed to browse S.F. alone) takes up half a dozen sets of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Equally huge is the stock of the older and more rambling (but also rather smellier and less well-organised) Richard Booth's Bookshop.
The ones where I bought the most stock were probably (if I'm identifying them correctly from the map) The Sensible Bookshop, which had S.F. and mainstream fiction trailing up and down its staircase like a comet's tail, and the optimistically-named The Bookshop, a Bookends subsidiary which combines decent-quality secondhand stuff with remaindered copies of books you actually want to buy, at very reasonable prices. (Admittedly, the staff there have never heard of feminism. Quite literally, as B. discovered when asking after a Germaine Greer she was wanting.) The most pleasant bookshop to be in -- just in case you're wanting further recommendations -- was probably Addyman's Annexe.
Browsing in secondhand bookshops is, I think, one of the closest approaches one can make to Heaven in this life. Or perhaps I just need to get out more. Either way, it was a gloriously relaxing way to spend a weekend.
I've already read the tenth book from the left in my row above (and will be blogging about it shortly -- it's Ken MacLeod's The Human Front, which is one of the ones I'd been looking for for ages), and got stuck well in to the fourth and eleventh, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate and Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. Both are set in San Francisco, oddly enough, but in rather different time periods. They're otherwise staggeringly different. I'll tell you more about them later.
(Bizarrely, Hay-on-Wye is now twinned with Timbuktu. I wish I could tell you more about this, but I can't. I approve on general principles, though.)
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