In Other News...

• I've reinvigorated @trapphic on Twitter: if you're not a subscriber, you can consult the feed here for the latest 140-character microfictions spattered from my disintegrating brain.
  
• I realise I'm... erm, 56 years late to the party, but the two surviving episodes of The Quatermass Experiment are shockingly awesome.
  
• I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but it's bloody cold out.

6 ≤

Patrick McGoohan is no more.

Fun with Sentences

Some educationalists criticised the programme [Teletubbies] for encouraging young children to mimic the infantile sounds of its characters and Christian leaders in the US, who claimed that one of its characters, Tinky Winky, was gay.
[The Guardian, 4 January 2009]

I suspect that this sentence originally began "The programme was criticised by some educationalists...", and was recast from the passive by a subeditor who wasn't quite paying attention. But I do like the idea of toddlers imitating the "infantile sounds" made by Jerry Falwell et al.

...when the Doctor's younger than you are

Well, there's no getting away from it[1], it's 2009. And I said I'd be making a New Year's resolution to post here more. So let's give it a go.

I spent most of yesterday writing a Surefish column -- due up sometime this week, with any luck -- on the casting of the new Doctor Who. Although in fact it's less about the specific casting of young Matt Smith than about the recasting of the Doctor in general, and how it compares with the periodic renewals of Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and certain pagan fertility gods. Oh, and that Jesus chap. Actually, I don't think I've squeezed quite so many abstruse references into a column before, so that might be worth looking out for. (Or not. Your call.)

The casting itself is something I'm having trouble forming an opinion on. Some of my fellow Book of the War authors have jumped both ways on this, neither of them being directions I'm altogether inclined to leap in myself.

I wasn't previously aware of Smith's work, not having seen any of the items on his disconcertingly brief TV CV. I know Party Animals got a certain amount of praise, but how much of that was due to Smith's performance I have no idea. Even if I had heard of him... well, there were plenty of names being touted around who would have excited me far more.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, for one. Paterson Joseph and Idris Elba, for two other ones. Excellent actors all, each with a degree of maturity and gravitas which it's very difficult to imagine emanating from a 26-year-old.

What I find baffling, really, is this: even if Smith is (as outgoing showrunner Russell T Davies and his successor Steven Moffat both seemed to be asserting on last night's Doctor Who Confidental), a brilliant, innovative actor who's perfect for the part -- why couldn't he have waited another 10 or 20 years before being given it? (It's not as if, with the best will in the world, his looks are going to spoil... although in fact that weird, otherworldly face is one of his best credentials for the role.)

The Smith Doctor may or may not be an outstanding interpretation, but I'd be a hell of a lot more excited to be looking forward to the Joseph, Ejiofor and Elba Doctors -- and then, if he was ready for it, the Smith one -- than the Smith one right now. Are the showrunners really that impatient? (And yes, I know Peter Davison was only 29 when he got the part... but for pity's sake, when William Hartnell was cast he was twice Smith's age. What's wrong with a happy medium?)

I can't entirely work out how to view the Eccleston-Tennant-Smith progression, either[2]. Consider a respected, globally recognised cinema and TV actor with an impeccable artistic pedigree, giving way to a rising star with a solid theatrical background... who's followed in turn by an unknown with a couple of TV credits.

One possible interpretation -- and I've seen it espoused online -- is that the series is doomed, and has been on the way out since Eccleston left. The other is that, as it's got bigger, it's become less reliant on the recognition of its star... and that, in fact, being cast as the new Doctor is now all the credentials an actor needs.

If nothing else, the sequence of Eccleston (40 years old at the time of casting), Tennant (34), Smith (26) rather suggests that the future twelfth Doctor is currently recuperating from a critically-lauded pre-Christmas stint as a Wise Man, or possibly a Sheep.

Anyway. Personally I'd have much preferred to see an older Doctor introduced as a contrast to Tennant's breezy laddishness... but the fact that the new Doctor is even younger doesn't necessarily mean more of the same. Moffat is (as his 2008 Children in Need mini-episode Time Crash amply demonstrated) a big fan of the aforementioned Peter Davison's interpretation of the character, often described as "an old man in a young man's body". Tennant, by contrast, rarely gives us any indication of the Doctor's great and venerable age, choosing instead to give us his best impersonation of a four-year-old on tartrazine.

If Smith's all Moffat cracks him up to be, he may well be capable of pulling off as effective a version of this character as Davison. That would certainly be something to see -- and, of course, it genuinely requires a young man in the part.

It's a hell of a gamble to have taken, though.

[1]Except possibly through extensive calendar reform. According to these chaps it's actually 02009, which I rather like.

The Hanna-Barbera Act

A: If the U.S. really wants to get tough on vigilanteism, then it's not your masked-and-costumed hero they should be cracking down on. It's the gangs of teenage youths who roam the countryside in vans with anthropomorphic animals, solving all kinds of crimes without any kind of federal or state mandate.
B: You say "all kinds"...
A: Well, admittedly they're usually the type of of fraud which entails dressing up as ghosts, vampires or some other form of monster in order to scare people away from whatever secret the criminal wants to stay hidden, like an altered will or stolen deeds.
B: Or a newly-discovered gold seam?
A: Well, quite. I wonder why crimes like that are so prevalent in the rural U.S.A.?
B: Just their equivalent of muggings and petty thefts, I suppose.

[Pause]

A: You'd think the government would do something about it. Make impersonation of a creature from folklore or the horror genre for personal gain a federal offence.
B: You would, wouldn't you?
A: I wonder why they don't?

[Pause]

B: Pressure from the Trick or Treat lobby, I guess.

Nobody Calls Me Mezzo

Apologies to those of you who share a mailing list with me and saw this yesterday. I'm widening out the consultation.

For the past few years, every time I'd started worrying that I was coming to an end of the list of post-1990 TV which I could persuade B. to watch episode-by-episode and which we'd both be interested in, I'd been comforting myself with the fact that neither of us had ever seen an episode of The Sopranos, the groundbreaking series (and studio stablemate of the damn near perfect Six Feet Under) widely acclaimed as the best TV show of the past 10 years.

We've now watched a season and a half of it, and can't honestly see what I'm supposed to like.

For a start, I don't care about any of the characters -- except, rarely, a couple of the women. When watching drama I'm able sympathise with well-characterised villains, and with complex morally ambivalent characters, and with heroes who are forced to do terrible things in the name of a greater good -- but the characters in The Sopranos perform atrocities routinely, banally, as part of their daily grind. That's just... repellent. It's like watching a soap opera about concentration camp guards.

The macho face-saving culture to which the men all subscribe (where it's apparently shameful to admit to -- among other things -- receiving counselling, having a relative with a learning disability, performing cunnilingus, forgiving anyone for anything ever) is one with which I simply can't have the slightest sympathy. If this was a drama set in, say, imperial China then I'd be able to accept it as a given of the characters' subjective world, but this is, for God's sake, about 21st-century Americans. I keep wanting to slap them in the face repeatedly until they grow up.

I honestly can't imagine why I'm meant to care whether a single one of them lives or dies, but the fact that all the non-gangster characters -- and even the news programmes we see -- find these people endlessly fascinating strongly suggests that the writers are assuming the opposite is true.

The psychiatry aspect of the show is occasionally borderline-interesting (and Dr Melfi is one of the few characters for whom I occasionally feel a twinge of sympathy, when she's not too obviously hero-worshipping Tony), but it's so bound up in the aforementioned idiotic social assumptions, plus obscure U.S. pop-culture references, that half the itme I have no idea what it's getting at.

In the last episode I saw, Tony's therapy sessions kept referring to some ancient pop-folk song I'd never heard of, as some kind of keystone against which Tony judged himself and other people. It was never made clear what the significance of this, for him or for anyone else, might be. At the end of the episode something mildly unexpected happened, and the song played portentously over the end credits. It was like trying to decode a transmission from Tau Ceti.

As a piece of anthropological observation, the show may well have something to be said for it, although I wouldn't want to watch two episodes of it, let along 86. As it is, I'm too busy trying to get a handle on the anthropology to penetrate to the actual drama.

My imminent brother-in-law (according to definition 2b in Merriam-Webster, anyway), who works in TV and knows about this kind of thing, tells us that we need to watch the first three seasons before we give up on it. Honestly, though, I'm not sure I can summon up the stamina.

What am I missing? Does it get better, or will I never like it if I haven't yet?

Am I being racist (for U.S. definitions of "race", since as far as I'm concerned Italians are the same ethnicity I am) in assuming that Italian-American men should be capable of the same degree of moral, emotional and intellectual development as everyone else?

Am I broken inside, or is this the most appallingly overrated television series since the invention of the medium?

I'd welcome your thoughts...

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:

• 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.

I suspect the last of those, myself -- it happens occasionally, and generally requires a two-month detox so I can start feeling the benefit again -- but the others may also be playing a part.

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.

(These three are surprisingly different from one another, to the extent that I might try comparing them in detail here, if I manage the time and energy. The Black Dossier is the best, I think, but I'd be more likely recommend the camp Hammerology of Something Borrowed to the casual reader. It's fab.)

• 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.)

And a bunch of other stuff as well.

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.

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?

Largely Random Observations

Or, What I'd Be Blogging About If Only I Had The Time

1. I must stop mentioning the weather in my Surefish column. When this month's number goes live it's going to start "Gosh, isn't it marvellous that summer's finally started after all that miserable rain we were having earlier?" Aargh.

2. B. and I have been married for eight years as of today. Hurrah for us! Eight years is Sodium, if I recall correctly.

3. Thanks to the aforementioned balmy summer weather, I spent today wandering about the office in:

• wet trousers.
  
• a wet shirt.
  
• a wet tie.
  
• wet underpants.
  
• no shoes, because they were wet.
  
• dry socks, because I keep a pair at work.

It's amazing how much difference dry socks make to your comfort levels. I'm beginning to think I should keep a pair of pants at work too, and possibly an entire spare bedroom.

4. Trisyllabic words that should rhyme but don't: "kilobyte" and "trilobite".

5. When I was growing up in Worthing, my parents had a lean-to shed which they referred to -- in an act of 70s middle-class pretension which Margo Leadbeatter would have baulked at -- as "our loggia". It was only when I read A Room with a View that I realised that what I'd always heard as "losure" was an Italian word, rather than being short for "enclosure".

6. Heroes is -- so far, at least, which from our point of view synchronises with BBC3's advance showings but not with The Sci-Fi Channel -- pretty great.

7. Cryptic crosswords are surprisingly difficult, though. I've been making a vague effort to start doing them regularly, given that sources as diverse as B.'s granny and Toby off The West Wing inform me that they keep your brain supple well into old age. I'm finding the bastards almost impossible, though, suggesting that I've already descended too far into senility for any non-miraculous intervention to be effective. Oh well.

8. I can't work out quite why anyone would want to visit Ashton Court for the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, given that there are better places across Bristol's multiple hills for watching the launches and flights. On Saturday our preferred vantage point (and that of around 2,000 other people, most of them under the age of six) was up the cliffs near Clifton Observatory, where the balloons pass pretty much overhead. (Sometimes they dip right down into the Avon Gorge first, which apparently is Just Showing Off.) It seems particularly perverse to drive to Ashton Court just as some godblighted football match is finishing at Ashton Gate Stadium, which is what the entire population of Southern England bar those 2,000 were doing an hour or so before the launch.

9. The other day I read an ancient Dilbert strip which included the words "Now I have to hug this guy so it won't seem awkward." Five minutes later I had "Purple Haze" going through my head.

10. After nearly nine years of very occasionally killing mice or other small vertebrates, then sitting and watching the corpses in the forlorn hope that they'll start moving again, Mulder has finally worked out what being a predator is actually about. Or so the mouse B. found on the living-room floor last Wednesday would suggest... if it had any front half left to squeak the news with.

TV Update: Doctors, Lawyers and Political Candidates

Meanwhile, I seem to have been neglecting the usual reports on my TV-watching habits for, well, it looks like most of this year.

This Life remains excellent drama, although rewatching it after many years I'm a little puzzled as to how intensely I felt it was speaking to me the first time round. Admittedly I had a fair number of unfortunate house-sharing experiences in the 1990s, but I'm sure it can't just have been that which made me feel that This Life represented the authentic voice of my generation.

Oh, well. Whatever it was, it's gone now. Still a damn good series, though.

Not, admittedly, as good as The West Wing, which fluctuating access to TV-on-demand recently allowed B. and me to watch the first half of the seventh season of. I think we're going to have to rent it to watch the rest. (Please, no-one tell me who wins the election -- though frankly Arnold Vinick would be vastly preferable to the Republicans who are currently in charge of the United States and, in an offhand sort of way, the world. Indeed, I almost wonder whether that wouldn't make a better ending to the series, avoiding obvious wish-fulfilment fantasies while showing that Bartlett's true legacy lies in making the far right unelectable. Don't tell me, though.)

And don't tell me what happens at the end of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, either -- the falling-out between Virgin and Sky has meant that we still haven't managed to watch all of it, which I'm still enormously frustrated by.

Semi-finally, we seem to be watching the first season of 24. Why? I mean, it's absolute rubbish. Utterly implausible, bereft of sympathetic or believable characters, distasteful in its politics and featuring the most repellent hero I've seen since The Talented Mr Ripley. And yet I seem to be hooked. If anyone can explain this to me, I'd be profoundly grateful.

What else? Oh, the first episode of Jekyll was pretty good. And current Doctor Who is, of course, ace beyond my wildest imaginings. The last time there were four episodes this good in a row, the Doctor had a crewcut. And if the final two episodes of the season manage to maintain the same standard... well, I'm not sure there'll have been anything comparable, in T.V. terms, since about 1963.

Force Feeding

Apologies to all of you whose feeds have been spammed by my overenthusiastic tagging last night. Blogger have introduced tag technology, but not the functionality of tagging a previous post without republishing it altogether. This means a lot of posts may have reappeared in people's friends lists or wherever.

I've also been conspicuously overtagging, and seem to have ended up with 42 of the things -- some of them probably more useful than others. This is partly out of an abundance of enthusiasm at discovering exciting new functionality; partly due to a mild case of autism from recent overwork; and partly due to the fact that my posts don't tend to have a single clearly-defined subject, instead banging on about different topics, summarising events and making comparisons between things and other things.

In any case, some of the tags are redundant and some of them probably spurious, but I don't have time to fix that for the moment. At some point when I have a day free I'll go through rationalising the tags for the whole blog, including tagging the early stuff. This will cause another splurge in your feeds, but after that there shouldn't be any more.

Meanwhile, I am Most Displeased with both Sky One and Virgin Media (who weren't even our T.V. providers until they bought out Telewest, the bastards). Thanks to the joint coporate greed of (bloody) Branson and (even bloodier) Murdoch, B. and I won't get to see any more Battlestar Galactica until the Season Three boxed set comes out. Among other things this screws up my vague idea for a talk to pitch to Greenbelt this year.

(Unless, that is, I decide to violate Sky One's intellectual property and compromise my own principles by illegally bittorrenting B.S.G. instead. Which is an option I find sorely tempting right now, I have to say.)

On the plus side, writing's gone well today and I've finished another chapter (sample words: "aqualung", "Neolithic", "plonker", plus three different types of shag). And the day after tomorrow there's beer. So life isn't all bad.

Cylon of Cyrene

Urgh. No time to post properly at the moment, for reasons I'd describe in detail if I had time to post properly at the moment.

I certainly haven't had time to write my column for Surefish about giant space mirrors. However, here's one I prepared earlier.

Book Depository

I'm aware I've been banging on about routine personal stuff rather a lot here recently, as if this were some ghastly tabloid LiveJournal rather than the altogether better class of broadsheet blogging one's accustomed to finding on Blogspot. As a sort of mini-resolution, I've decided that during 2007 (and ideally beyond) I shall try to record every book I read here at Peculiar Times, and write at least two sentences about each one.

The reason for this is partly the hope that it'll be interesting, partly to keep up the critical writing which is one of the reasons I maintain this blog, but mostly because -- now my memory's passed the halfway point in its deterioration towards senescence -- I find I'm having real trouble remembering what I've actually read.

So, the following are the books I've finished so far this year. Some of them, of course, were begun last year.

The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod. This one was a reread -- it was this book and its sequels which first convinced me that I had to make reading every book Macleod published a high priority for the rest of my life. It's almost embarrassing, in retrospect, how much of an influence on Of the City of the Saved... this was -- the chief difference being that I have none of Macleod's expertise in political theory, so had to write about entirely fictional politics instead. It's still excellent stuff, although there are traces of the awkwardness and completism which afflicts many first novels.

King Rat by China Miéville. This one's more obviously a first novel: evidently Miéville hit his stride with Perdido Street Station (another novel which has a scary amount in common with OtCotS, but which I fortunately hadn't read until well after it came out). King Rat takes place in contemporary London, which allows it to indulge an interest in real-world urban musical styles, but as a setting is surprisingly thin: it's clear that the author is already straining after his own vivid world. The quality of Miéville's reinterpretation of real-world myth and folklore is variable: his take on the Pied Piper is excellent, but his Anansi pales compared with Neil Gaiman's.

About Time 2 by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood. This is the latest instalment of Lawrence and Tat's ongoing and epic attempt to place the various eras of twentieth-century TV Doctor Who in its cultural context -- expected to run (after the publication of the next and final volume, About Time 6) to a million words, of which this must constitute at least 175,000. As I mentioned on Parrinium Mines, this volume suffers from documenting the relatively dull repetitiveness of the Troughton era (rather than, say, the freeform experimentation of the Hartnell stuff), as well as the authors' inability to keep their verbiage under control. It's still one of the most entertaining books ever written about Doctor Who, though (and believe me, there's a wide field for comparison).

The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. This was a weird one, a birthday present from the vicar and family. It's a combination of criticism and theology, but unlike most such studies (well, most that deserve the term "studies", anyway) it's heavily weighted towards the theology end of things. This means that the criticism's rather facile, but there's an awful lot of background concerning things like pre-christian sacrificial cults and the authorship of Revelation.

Nonetheless, the actual conclusions the authors come to are often interesting, if frequently batty. The idea that Doctor Who is about the superseding of sacrificial kingship relies on a very selective reading, and ignores a great many stories which might have been useful to the argument, as well as some which might well have blown it out of the water. There's some confusion about the understanding of the term "science fiction", with the analysis of the cross-genre anthology show The Twilight Zone relying mostly on the episodes where characters make Faustian bargains firmly in the tradition of theological fantasy. Some aspects of the authors' research have been sketchy at best, and there are some bizarre factual errors. (Jon Pertwee's name accumulating an extra "h" is common and understandable, though irritating -- but when exactly did Babylon 5's Mr Morden acquire the first name "Ethan"?)

The fact that it treats Star Trek with moral seriousness gives away the fact that The Truth Is Out There is an American book. Perhaps because of this I found both it surprisingly conservative both in politics and theology -- there is, for instance, a startlingly vehement rant about how television in general is eroding the nation's morals, the six series under advisement being honorable exceptions. More disturbingly still, it seems to assume an even more conservative readership, who need much convincing of the few non-traditional assumptions the authors make. It's a fascinating perspective on TV SF, and I'm glad to have read it, but it's phenomenally wrong on a quite startling number of levels.

Shortly before Christmas I finished Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by anthropologist Kate Fox. I'm not going to go on about it at length, because I've said far more than two sentences about all of the above, especially that last one. Suffice to say that it's brilliant, clever and funny, and that if you're English you need to read it in order to understand yourself. (If you're not English, you still need to read it, in order to understand any English people you might happen to meet.)

Currently I'm reading the second volume of the Prisoner scriptbook; and Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale -- the fifth, final and, on its showing so far, very possibly the best of Mad Norwegian Press's Faction Paradox novels.

Finally, it's been ages since I updated my reading list.

Books in bold have been added since the last time. Stuff in square brackets has been reluctantly designated less urgent, which means I'll probably not get around to reading it unless I find myself in bed with spinal injuries for a year or so. Two rather unappealing Doctor Who tie-ins have fallen off the list altogether.

Non-Fiction:

• [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
  
• Jared Diamond, Collapse.
  
• Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
  
• Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
  
• Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
  
• Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
  
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.

Fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
  
• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
  
• Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
  
• [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
  
• [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
  
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
  
• [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
  
• Frank Herbert, Dune.
  
• Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
  
• China Miéville, Iron Council.
  
• Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
  
• Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
  
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
  
• Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.
  
• Charles Stross, Accelerando.

Goodness -- that is rather a lot of books. I'd better get cracking.

How Cod Rot

I've been meaning for a while to do a full-scale media update here, giving my opinions on Ada or Ardor (which I finally finished), Children of Men (which B. and I went to see a couple of weeks ago), The Netherlands National Circus (who we took goddaughter E. to see the other weekend), Robin Hood (which, after three episodes, I've now seen as much of as I'll ever need to, thanks), and the like.

But I've got stuff to write. Specifically, this novel proposal I'm working on, and an article on Philip K. Dick (obviously) for Movement magazine. So it'll have to wait, or if we're unlucky possibly never happen.

I can't, though, let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...

For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.

I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.

The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.

Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.

I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].

I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.

Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.

I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).

Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)

That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he appears to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.

Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].


[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.

[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.

[3] Or rather, watch Parrinium Mines, where I'm crossposting this and where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought to go.

Space Opus

Last night we finished watching Season 2 of the shiny (or rather, rough and grimy but splendid) new Battlestar Galactica -- courtesy of R. and M.'s DVD box set, which by a strange coincidence we bought them recently as a belated / early joint birthday present.

After the very tight, very compelling Season 1 there were a couple of bits of Season 2 which were a little less satisfying. A couple of episodes (and at least one major plot point) did seem to be resolved by authorial fiat rather than narrative logic, and there was a standout (and actually quite unnecessary) manifestation of "magic" which deserved, if not explanation, then at least for the characters to speculate about the possibility of one[1].

On the whole, though, I remain resolutely impressed. The final two-parter, in particular, was enormously ambitious (its events could have provided the material for an entire season without much difficulty) and shakes up the status quo like no episode of series television I've seen before. I'm not completely convinced that every aspect of it worked dramatically -- in particular, I think we needed longer to get used to the episode's interim status quo before that, too, was thrown up in the air[2] -- but with this kind of ambition on display I can readily forgive that.

One thing which confused me at first was the appearance of previously-unseen clips during the last few episodes' "Previously" montages. At first I thought they were just being sloppy and not paying attention to what they'd cut, but this happened so often that I'm convinced it was a deliberate dramatic device designed to fill us in on things which had happened offscreen during past episodes. It's a rather clever use of the medium, which after my initial confusion worked rather well.

Unlike the old series of Battlestar Galactica -- which there's a strong consensus was a load of old pants, probably gold lamé ones -- the new series is one which seems to divide S.F. viewers. I've read opinions saying that it's dull or one-note, with inconsistent characterisation.

I only wish I had the time to compose a reasoned and impassioned defence of it like Simon Forward's, but I don't. I can only say that on the whole I think it's great, enjoyed it enormously, and am frustrated to be waiting until -- apparently -- January for the next installment.

Here's hoping Torchwood's good enough to tide me over.


Footnotes contain SPOILERS. Highlight the whitespace to read:

[1] The plot point is, of course, Roslin's cancer, which has been integral to her character and function since the original miniseries, and is brushed aside with some terrible technobollocks about a Cylon donor having an enhanced immune system.

The "magic" scene is the characters' full-immersion consensual VR experience in Athena's Tomb. In fact, since it's fairly clear that there are eventually going to be some major revelations about the nature of the Lords of Kobol -- who will, I suspect, either be the Cylons from a previous historical "cycle" or your standard godlike aliens -- we can presumably put this down to Clarke's (third) Law. But it's so far beyond what we've seen of either Colonial or Cylon technology that it should have shaken the characters' worldview considerably more than it seems to have.

[2] Specifically, we should have seen more of the colonists' harsh but peaceful life on New Caprica before the arrival of the Cylons shook everything up again. Even a full episode would have worked better.

My Top 5 DVDs of All Time

I wrote the following as a sample for a job I didn't get. It's the sort of thing many people seem to post on their blogs, so I thought I might as well offer it up for your edification.

It is, admittedly, somewhat constrained by the limited number of DVDs I've actually watched, and in particular bothered with the extras for.

My Top 5 DVDs of All Time
(in 50 words each)

Firefly: The Complete Series (4-disc boxed set)
Tragically cancelled before its time, Joss ‘Buffy’ Whedon’s space-opera Western was the cleverest, funniest, most stylish TV sci-fi in years. Experience all 14 episodes along with featurettes, deleted scenes, an outtakes reel that’s actually funny, and commentaries from actors and crew so witty, warm and articulate you’ll hate them. Glorious.

I Claudius (5-disc boxed set)
Roll over Rome – Derek Jacobi stars as the Emperor Claudius in ten hours of the greatest BBC drama ever made. Where else would you see Blackadder’s Nursie as a poisoner, or Christopher Biggins playing Nero? Features include documentaries, actors’ favourite scenes and an interactive genealogy of that nice Caesar family.

Jam (2-disc set)
Christopher Morris’ unnerving sketch comedy of dead babies and psychotic doctors comes complete with its fuzzier late-night remix, Jaaaaam. Each episode plays in yet another alternative format, such as a ‘ffwd version’ or ‘quadrilateral lava lamp version’. If you missed the day Kilroy lost his mind, then welcome… in Jam.

Minority Report (2-disc set)
Tom Cruise stars as a ‘pre-crime’ cop on the run, after being fingered as a future murderer. The extras disc goes overboard with design sketches, storyboards, biographies and no fewer than 17 featurettes, with menus in the film’s own hands-on interactive graphics style. The movie’s not at all bad, either.

Doctor Who: The Beginning (3-disc boxed set)
Sinister, giggling William Hartnell abducts two of his granddaughter’s teachers in his time-machine, in Doctor Who the way it was meant to be. These first three stories bring us cavemen, insanity and eerie machine-people called ‘Daleks’. The best of many bonuses brings long-deleted historical story Marco Polo to partial life.

Words and Pictures

Quick roundup of books and other media I've been experiencing in the last couple of weeks...

Books

I've now finished Pete Rollins' book How (Not) to Speak of God, which I'd recommend highly to anyone with a sincere interest in christian mysticism and how it relates to a contemporary urban context. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's changed my life, but it's furthered some of the changes which were taking place there anyway.

I also finished James Chapman's Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, which was more of a disappointment. Chapman's forays into television history are very interesting (he's gleaned a lot of information about Doctor Who from the BBC archives, as well as biographical and other material relating to the main players in its development), but his criticism is rather pedestrian. It's not tainted by fan politics in the way I felt Kim Newman's was, but the comments on the individual stories rarely rise above the level of received opinion. I'd have preferred to read a full-length history of the TV programme, without the kind of commentary I can read by the bucketload on the web.

I'm still working my way through Something More and Ada or Ardor. Good though they both are (particular in the case of the Nabokov), I am rather hoping that I finish one of them soon, so I can move onto something a bit more lively.

TV

B. and I have been watching the first season of Frasier, after she found the videos going cheap on eBay. Despite the distracting laughter track (not present on the British broadcast unless I'm very much mistaken) I've been enjoying it a lot. There are occasional juddery episodes this season as the scriptwriters commit the Friends error of thinking that we care about the characters when they're not making jokes, but it remains by far the best U.S. sitcom I've ever seen.

The remarkable thing is how appalling the whole concept sounds on paper. It's a spinoff from Cheers, you see, with this neurotic psychiatrist -- and his brother, who's also a psychiatrist, and even more neurotic than he is! And their father's crusty and cantankerous, but keeps the family together with his homespun blue-collar wisdom. Plus there's a comedy English nurse! And a funny dog!

It ought to be absolutely dismal. Somehow, though, it ended up with scalpel-sharp, witty, character-driven scripts and some brilliant comedy performances.

Kelsey Grammar is uneven as Frasier himself -- good when the material's subtle, but pretty terrible when it requires him to ham it up. But Jane Leeves completely salvages Daphne by playing her entirely straight, as a working-class Mancunian whose naturalism anchors even the weirdest things the character's required to say and do. And David Hyde Pearce is incapable of opening his mouth as Niles -- in fact, it's rare to see him twitch a muscle -- without being chest-hurtingly hilarious. Even Moose the dog as Eddie the dog is impressively well-trained.

Film

The less said about M Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water the better, really. I actually rather enjoyed The Village and (until the last ten minutes) Signs, despite their being clearly not in the same class as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable... but dear, oh dear.

The plot's arbitrary and free-associating (Shyamalan seriously seems to think that, because it's fantasy, he can make it up as he goes along, rather than having to state his ground-rules early on and stick to them), the characters are cardboard cutouts (and as for casting himself as the tortured, neglected genius whose writing will one day usher in a new era of peace and enlightenment...) and the ending abandons Shyamalan's trademark "Ooh, that's clever" (or, in the case of Signs, "Good grief, does he really think that's clever?") in favour of a resounding "Er... so is that it?".

There are two good ideas in the film: the monster that can lie completely flat and has grass growing from its back, and the bodybuilder (played by a thoroughly wasted Rico from Six Feet Under) who's developing only one side of his body. The former is swiftly abandoned in favour of generic evil-dog action, the latter is a throwaway with no relevance to the plot or anything else.

Very much not recommended.

What else? ...Oh yes, I watched Pitch Black for the first time the other day, and was favourably impressed.

It has a reputation as a rather dire no-brain action flick, which I don't think is warranted at all. Vin Diesel is intrinsically ridiculous, it's true, but his character has more than the standard one dimension, and some of the others even aspire to three. The cinematography's clever and textured, and the setting appears to have been worked out by someone with both a modicum of intelligence and an interest in serious S.F. (This may be explained, if Wikipedia's any guide, by the story being loosely based on Asimov's short story "Nightfall".)

There's even a positive Islamic character, whose journey of faith we're meant to sympathise with. It's difficult to imagine that happening in a big-budget action film these days.

So... surprisingly better than I expected. Although not good enough to give me any inclination towards watching the sequel.

Reviewing Random Bits of Media Tat

I've not yet blogged a summary of the epic Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch, and now the experience has receded from my head rather.

It seems to have taken us around nine months, from rather earlier than this post to shortly before this one. It's been fascinating, watching seven years of televisual evolution compressed into that short a time. As the aesthetic of the show shifts and changes there's often a sense that the plot is being made up as they go along (notably with Angel's swiftly-undone death at the end of Season Two), but still there are character stories (such as Willow's sexual development and the Buffy-Spike romance) which show every sign of having been planned years in advance.

The episodes do show a certain tendency to settle into formula as time passes, and the plot emphasis shifts seismically from the individual episode to the season-long story arc. Nevertheless, Season Seven remains as good as (the admittedly rather patchy) Season One. Both are mindblowingly excellent in certain episodes (e.g. Angel and Conversations with Dead People), but distinctly ropy in others (Teacher's Pet, First Date). Both have strong character-driven climaxes which explore the personal consequences of Buffy's calling... although thinking on it, that's true for all the other seasons as well.

It's true that, in that final year, some of the regular characters are sidelined in favour of newcomers like Andrew and Kennedy... but introducing new faces and making us care about them has been a staple of the series from very early on. (And the only one who's actively annoying is Molly, whose brutal murder by Caleb is just retribution for her atrocious attempt at a cockney accent.)

Certainly I see no sign that the series went into decline after Season Three -- as stated on fansites passim with regard to this and, oddly, every other series ever. It's true that there's a sustained peak between Seasons Two and Four, and in particular from Halloween (The One With The Halloween Costumes) to Restless (The One Where They're All Asleep), but the only sustained trough is in Season Six, with the unfortunate treatment of Willow's magic addiction compounded by the dismal Doublemeat Palace. And that same season offers not only the greatest episode ever in Once More, with Feeling, but also the surprisingly brave Normal Again.

So pfah.

* * *

After Buffy, we worked our way very much more quickly through Ultraviolet, which at a beautifully contained six episodes is exactly one twenty-fourth of Buffy's length.

It's just as marvellous, although in quite different ways: where Buffy has extravagant wit, linguistic creativity and supernatural spectacle, Ultraviolet relies on insinuation, misdirection and double meaning. The dialogue may sound mundane in comparison, but almost everything anybody says has multiple meanings depending on the context in which you understand it. Even its vampires (who are smarter, more organised and deadlier than the ones in Buffy, although also more morally ambivalent) exist in a dual context, being seen both as the mirror-defying supernatural impossibilities they traditionally are, and as a scientific phenomenon susceptible to rational investigation.

One strength the series do share is in crafting a strong and sympathetic ensemble of characters with whose conflicts and predicaments we constantly identify. The climax of the final episode, where all four members of the shadowy vampire-killing hit-squad, together with a vampire and his potential victim, act out their individual concerns and tensions in concert through the same simple sequence of events, is a masterwork of ambiguity and shifting perspective.

Having recently seen more of writer-director Joe Ahearne's directing work in various Doctor Who episodes, I also found myself recognising distinctive tricks like the superimposition of faces in partially reflective glass, the almost subliminal use of religious paraphernalia and a peculiar way of lighting faces in semi-darkness which gives them a halo-like luminosity. Now I'm desperate to see what Ahearne could do with a Who script of his own.

* * *

Superman Returns, on the other hand, was a disappointment -- especially coming from Brian Singer, who made such an excellent job of directing the first two X-Men films.

Much has been made of its rather slavish adulation of the 1970s Superman movies, but mostly I just thought it went on too bloody long. Honestly, it could stand to lose a good 45 minutes -- it would tighten up the action sequences enormously and would allow the excision of all the small-cute-child / father-son-bonding business which Hollywood is under the impression it does so well.

The only thing there really should have been more of was Kevin Spacey camping it up as Lex Luthor, but unfortunately we'd already seen all of his best moments in the trailer. Given that the astonishing "bullet bounces from Superman's eye" sequence was also in there, this did leave the film itself with remarkably little to offer for its two-and-a-half-hour duration.

Given the extent to which Singer plays on the parallels between Superman and God (and / or Jesus) -- showing him floating above the world listening to humanity's cries of help, and later falling from the skies in that cruciform pose characteristic of Hollywood heroes who are in the process of sacrificing themselves -- I'd even have welcomed some theological debate, just to liven things up. How does Superman choose which situations He should intervene in, and when He should let nature take its course? Why are the Americans His chosen people? How exactly can He justify buggering off to Krypton for five years and abandoning us to Luthor and, implicitly, 9/11?

Mostly this kind of thing makes me groan in films, but in this particular case it would have livened it up no end.

* * *

And speaking of spurious S.F. theology... B. and I have just started watching Battlestar Galactica on D.V.D. Prior to borrowing the three-hour miniseries from the local vicar last month, I hadn't seen any Galactica since 1980, when it was only just beginning to be regarded as a camp classic rather than a dreadful load of old balls.

So I'm very much behind the curve here, I know... but having watched the miniseries and the first episode proper, this new series is looking really rather good. Military-grade hard-S.F. space-opera has never been my thing in books, but Babylon 5 gave me an appreciation of its potential on T.V., especially when combined with grown-up politics. Beginning the whole story with a crippling defeat for the good guys is a bold move, and seems to be paying off very well.

I imagine a whole season of such grimness will become rather unrelenting -- as indeed the miniseries was -- but I'm actually really enjoying a fictional universe which takes itself as seriously as this. Great stuff.

A Momentary Break in the Static

I'm sorry, once again, about the radio silence from these parts. I'm snowed under with various aspects of work and life at present, and keeping the blog updated is -- just for the moment -- rather more than I can manage on a regular basis.

Things which I am up to include two short fiction projects for Big Finish, both of which are for different reasons rather longer, rather more interesting and considerably bittier to write than the usual fare. I'm enjoying them both very much, but they are taking up large chunks of the available time. Expect to see moderately exciting announcements reasonably soon now.

I'm still hoping that time will soon allow me to post more regularly, and more interestingly, here and on Parrinium Mines. But, er, not the moment. Sorry.

If you were wondering, Club Sabbath was tremendous fun, despite some teething troubles -- it's probably already going down in urban legend as the night with as many M.C.s as there were comedians, after several of Lawrence's associates found their improv skills in demand following his early and impromptu vanishing act. What with the masks, it's always possible some of the punters present didn't notice.

Still, everyone involved was funny -- sadly Danielle Ward wasn't able to be there, but I was glad to have the opportunity to discover that Natalie Haynes is just as hilarious.

What's more, the London Stone is a surprisingly atmospheric and strange venue, belying the gothy kitsch of its owners' website. The whole of the cellar bar is painted to resemble a library in the idiom of Edgar Allen Poe, with the toilets hidden amusingly behind concealed doors in the painted bookshelves. Along with the predictable skulls and candles there's a large display case full of alchemical instruments. It's very odd.

The beer's hopeless, mind you. Still, it was tremendous fun to meet up with numerous splendid people, including Vigornian, Puffinry, Mags and The Ladylark, and to talk Doctor Who with some of them.

Back in Bristol, B. and I have discovered another rather decent pub in our near vicinity. This one is a bit gentrified, and some of the rooms do look a little like a furniture catalogue... but it does Bristol Beer Factory beers, and Wild Hare organic lager, and Pieminister's fantastic pies (the "Mighty Aphrodite" with aubergine, pepper and feta being particularly recommended), and is thus deserving of our custom.

Otherwise, things are manic yet strangely uninteresting. Our Buffy and Six Feet Under retrospectives have now progressed to seasons Six and Five respectively, and I'm reading books by two S.F.-or-affiliated authors about whom I've raved here previously: Priest's The Affirmation (a sequel of sorts to The Dream Archipelago, although predictably one which subverts it entirely) and McAuley's Fairyland , both of which are fantastic.

(My copy of Fairyland has "Philip Hallard 1997" written in the flyleaf. Frustratingly, I've only just got round to reading it.)

And -- while I usually make it a policy not to bang on about Doctor Who here more than my general career path makes necessary -- I can't resist pointing out that The Girl in the Fireplace was a beautiful, intricately-crafted clockwork miniature of an episode, single-handedly restoring my faith in the series after what I've felt to be a very rocky start to this season and to David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor. Praise be to Steven Moffat.

Beer Pressure

Had a thoroughly enjoyable time last weekend with Silk and his good lady Kate, who it's very lovely to see back together again after a recent period of dithering. We'd been planning, originally, to go to the Bristol Beer Festival, but unfortunately the tickets sold out in record time months ago. The centrepiece of the weekend was therefore a linear pub crawl from North Bristol back to our house, starting at about 1pm and finishing at 10:30pm because we wanted to get chips on the way home.

Present: self, B., Silk, Kate, my friend Anthony and Kate's friend Vaughn. Ants was with us until 7ish, when he had to return home to Petersfield and his wife and daughter. Vaughn joined us in a pub or two. B.'s stamina failed her at about 8:30 (well, she's been working hard recently), and she took a bus home.

Itinerary of pubs visited:

1. The Hare on the Hill. Very pleasant small pub owned by Bath Ales, whose available varieties we sampled all of between us. I had the S.P.A. Bath are my favourite local brewers' since Smiles went tits-up (of which more anon), and The Hare is one of their four pubs in Bristol, all of which are excellent. They do very nice crisps, too.

2. Micawber's Ale House. A solid traditional pub with some good real ales and musical tastes running oddly to 70s disco. I had a pint of Brains S.A., I think, although at this point I still hadn't had lunch and was getting a bit light-headed. We therefore repaired to...

3. Zerodegrees. Local branch of a chain of two microbreweries-cum-nightclubs (apparently a third is opening in Reading sometime soon), which I've had cause to mention here before. This was included largely for the excellent pizzas, of which we had several. On the beer front I drank the black lager, which is always Mmmmm, and the overly sweet mango beer, which I wasn't nearly drunk enough to enjoy.

4. A diversion to the recently-reopened Smiles Brewery Tap, which was deeply disappointing. Smiles closed down last year and has been bought out by Highgate, who don't seem on the evidence we sampled to be brewing the beers to anything like the same standard. (It's also no longer brewed on the premises, making the pub's name a bit of a misnomer.) They sold us chocolate, though.

5. The Bank. We'd never been here before, but it stood in at the last minute for The Three Sugar Loaves, which was unexpectedly closed. I can't remember what I had to drink -- whatever the guest ale was, I assume, but things were becoming pleasantly fuzzy by this stage. We played dominoes, and listened to Guns'n'Roses singing "Live and Let Die" on the juke box.

6. The Cornubia. One of the major highlights of Bristol's real ale scene. The Cornubia always has half a dozen different real ales on tap, and half of them are generally very obscure. I have no idea what I drank here, but it was bloody good. We ran into some loud refugees from the Beer Festival, and a random Doctor Who author was working behind the bar. Ants left and Vaughn joined us, after a certain amount of getting lost.

7. The Shakespeare. One of no fewer than four pubs of that name in Bristol. (B. and I used to go to pub quizzes at The Shakespeare when we lived nearby, and we occasionally met up for lunch at the daringly-named Ye Shakespeare when we both worked in town. I hadn't heard of The Shakespeare until just now, though.[Edit 31/2/6: No, I'm wrong -- we went there when we went to Glasnost one time. I hadn't realised that was what it was called, but under the circumstances I should probably have expected it. Anyway...]) The one in Prince Street has a banner outside boasting of its real ales, and does indeed do some very nice ones. Reconstructing my probable state of mind at the time, I imagine I had the Greene King I.P.A., but I can't swear to it. I remember crisps, though. Vaughn and B. both left us after this one. Personally I was impressed that any of us had lasted this long.

8. The Coronation. One of our two locals, in the sense that it's within reasonable walking distance of us and we go there sometimes. (They do a free cheeseboard on a Sunday.) Owned by Hop Back, and selling a fine selection of their splendid beers. Again, I forget what I had -- possibly the Odyssey. Distressingly, though, they'd stopped doing food.

9. The Tobacco Factory. Our other kind-of-local, and our last stop before the chip shop. They sell Bristol Beer Factory beers, which are very tasty. I drank the Red, which for some reasons isn't listed on the website, but is my favourite of their beers.

By this point I was feeling extremely hungry, so we bought chips and pasties, came home and watched as many episodes of series one of Look Around You as we could before we fell over.

We followed this up on Sunday with a relatively tame trip to The Boston Tea Party and Bristol City Museum.