What I've Been Doing Recently...

... or A Desperate Attempt To Generate Content For This Blog Before People Give Up On It. Well, perhaps not "desperate" - it's not been that long since I last posted. But my last few posts might have given the erroneous impression that I've mostly given up on reading science fiction. I haven't. And here's the proof. Sort of.

I have been reading...

The Quincunx of Time, James Blish (1973) - I knew this was an expansion of a short story, but I didn't know if I'd read the story. So the déjà vu which hit me two pages into the book didn't come as much of a surprise. I had read the story, 'Beep'. Unfortunately, as Blish explains in a foreword, he had never intended to expand 'Beep', and when he was eventually persuaded to do so he chose to focus on some of the issues raised by the story. He didn't expand the plot, or the story's remit. He just deepened the scientific bollocks the various characters explain to each other. It made for a dull and unconvincing - and short - novel. Not one of Blish's best.

The Facts of Life, Graham Joyce (2002) - I have unjustly neglected Graham in my reading. I thought his first few novels were very good indeed, but sort of stopped buying and reading them for no real reason. I actually interviewed him for a small press magazine when his debut novel, Dreamside, was published. Unfortunately, it was on the last day of a convention, and we'd both been drinking until 4 a.m. the night before and were very hungover. I sent Graham a verbatim transcript of the interview. He replied, "I remember it as quite an insightful interview... so who were those two fucking Martians on the tape?" A carefully edited version, which made both of us appear sane and intelligent, later appeared in the magazine. But, The Facts of Life. I decided to buy this because it's set in Coventry. I went to university there, so I know the city. The Facts of Life is excellent stuff and I have no excuse now for not reading more of Graham's books. Incidentally, I was little spooked by one chapter in the novel - because it's set in Coventry it of course features Lady Godiva. Which couldn't help but remind me of my own encounter with her (see here). Graham's done that to me before: I had a lucid dream the morning before starting Dreamside, which opens... with someone having a lucid dream.

The Universe Maker, AE van Vogt (1953) - for some reason, an image from this novel has stayed with me throughout the decades since I last read it: a shadow in the shape of a person, and in which you can see stars, appearing in a park and speaking to someone. But I couldn't remember the context. So I decided to reread the book to remind me. And it is apparently a Shadow, one of an elite which rules a future Earth and the members of which appear to have special powers. So there you go. This novel is, like most of van Vogt's, completely bonkers. It's a headlong charge through a number of sf tropes - chief among them time travel - most of which make little sense if you pause to think. And that's part of its charm. Before you can even scoff, you're thrown into something new and even more implausible. Now I want to reread van Vogt's Mission to the Stars, which has the giant battleship that splits up into hundreds of little ships when it hits a galactic storm...

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (2007) - Reynolds is one of those authors whose books I buy in hardback as soon as they're published. He's also one of those authors whose work can sometimes disappoint, but only when compared to his other novels. And so it was with House of Suns. I never quite swallowed the novel's timeline of millions of years, and the characters seemed a little too contemporary for me to willingly suspend disbelief. But, there were - as usual - some real gosh-wow special effects, some jaw-dropping ideas, and even an occasional nod here and there to other sf books and films. Good stuff.

The Ship That Died of Shame & Other Stories, Nicholas Monsarrat (1959) - I have a soft spot for Monsarrat's fiction - The Cruel Sea is a classic, and his unfinished The Master Mariner is one of my favourite non-sf novels. So I continue to seek out and read his books, even though many of his plots have passed their sell-by date. It's a bit like watching the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents from the mid-1950s - those twists in the tale have been done so many times you can see them coming a mile off. But they must have been a surprise when they were first used back then. And so it is for some of Monsarrat's novels and short stories. But I'll still read him.

I've been watching stuff, too. Such as...

The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) - Tarkovsky isn't a science fiction film director, although three of his films were sf. Both Solaris and Stalker were adaptations of sf novels - by Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. The Sacrifice, on the other hand, is from an original screenplay by Tarkovsky himself. A man living on Gotland, a Baltic island off the coast of Sweden, witnesses the end of the world by nuclear war, and in despair vows to God that he will sacrifice everything he loves if the world is returned to normal. He then - at the urging of a friend and neighbour - sleeps with a female servant, who is a witch. The next morning, it's as if the nuclear holocaust had never happened. And so the man sets about fulfilling his vow, alienating his loved ones, destroying his possessions, and burning down his house. Like all Tarkovsky films, it's very slow, with very long takes. But parts are disturbingly intense. The reaction of the man's wife, for example, to the end of the world is difficult to watch. There are also dream sequences which might not be dream sequences, and a use of colour and black & white film which might help unravel the ambiguous story. I think I prefer Mirror more than The Sacrifice, but it's a more affecting film than some of Tarkovsky's, and he remains a favourite director.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 2 (1993) - I'd read often enough that DS9 was the best of the Trek franchises, but I'd only ever seen a handful of episodes from the first season. From them it was hard to see it as any better than any of the other franchises. But I decided to give the series a go - prompted by a much-reduced price on Amazon. And discovered that not only was the setting interesting - the planet of Bajor after Cardassian occupationary forces have withdrawn - but I liked the characters. Much more so than the Star Trek: The Next Generation ones. Well, except for Quark the Ferengi. He's just irritating. Anyway, I finished season 1, and then bought season 2. And I have every intention of working my way through to the end of season 7. Especially since I'm told it gets much better when the Federation go to war against the Dominion....

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, dir. Steven Spielberg (2008) - it seems a bit pointless to moan about Hollywood remakes of perfectly good films from earlier decades when they're just as liable to dig up old franchises and add a new vehicle to it. And what a creaking lumbering vehicle it is. Harrison Ford manages to hold his own, despite his advanced years, but the plot in this thing is a horrible mess. It's as if they chose to throw as many clichés at it as possible in the hope one or two would stick. Unfortunately, it's not plot coupons which stuck. This film is just an embarrassingly bad sequence of CGI spectacles and stunts held together by a plot which makes no attempt at plausibility. Best avoided.

Aliens Vs Predator 2: Requiem, dir. the Strause brothers (2007) - sadly, my film-viewing could sink even further than a geriatric Indy chasing after a "magnetic" skull which can bizarrely attract non-ferrous materials. It plummetted to this. The directors clearly felt that making the film as dark as possible would hide a multitude of sins. And I don't mean "dark" as in mood. I mean, "dark" as in filmed at night, "dark" as in having to sit in a pitch-black room in order to actually see what's on the bloody screen. Which isn't much more than the title suggests. There's this Alien, see; and it crash-lands on Earth. And a Predator gets this signal telling it what's happened. So off it goes to hunt it down. In Ridley Scott's excellent Alien, the eponymous creature was an unstoppable killing machine. In AvP2, teenagers with shotguns slaughter hundreds of them. Which is a bit like revealing Sasquatch as a marmoset. But then, what teenager wants to watch a platoon of elite forces get blatted by a single alien? They'd much rather see themselves in the title role, wreaking mayhem and spraying bullets and killing all those nasty cunningly-externalised fears and neuroses... Avoid this film like you would a, well, an alien.

The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection - I mentioned one of these in a previous posts - Der Schweigende Stern / The Silent Star, dir. Kurt Maetzig (1960). See here. The other two in this boxed set are In the Dust of the Stars / Im Staub der Sterne, dir. Gottfried Kolditz (1976), and Eolomea, dir. Herrmann Zschoche (1972). The first is... plenty weird. A mission from one planet arrives on another. There's something suspicious going on, but they're welcomed with a big party. Of course, they soon find out what the actual situation is.... But. The strange 1970s GDR aesthetic is one thing. But the gratuitous - tastefully back-lit, so in silhouette only - nude scene just seems completely, well, gratuitous. And then there's the party scenes. Disco-dancing East Germans in Spaaaacccceee. Sort of. Eolomea is a much more restrained affair. Some ships have gone missing, and a group of scientists are sent to figure out what happened. It seemed to me a bit of the story went missing somewhere as well. The film's title makes no sense for the first thirty or so minutes, and is only explained in passing. But never mind. It's all good post-2001: A Space Odyssey 1970s sf - none of that silly Western Imperialist space opera thank you very much. There is a fourth DEFA sf film which isn't included in this collection, Signal: A Space Adventure (1970). I want a copy.

And I have been listening to...

The "double whammy" - I wanted to see Isis, who were performing locally last Sunday night, but no one else wanted to go. Then Stuart said he'd go, if I went to see Johnny Truant at the same venue the following night. The "double whammy".

Isis were excellent, as usual. They're another one of those bands you forget how good they are... and then you see them live. I ended up buying one of their CDs from the merchandise stand, and was tempted to buy more. They were ably supported by Torche, who were good in parts.

And then it was Johnny Truant... Who are a bit too hardcore for my taste. This was a much younger crowd than Isis - I could have passed as just about any audience member's dad. The sound was also very loud. I don't mind loud - and I've been to plenty of loud gigs. But it seems a bit pointless when everything's turned up so high you can't actually hear the guitars. Just the bass and blastbeats. The rest is a wall of noise. Mind you, there was a little more banter between songs than the previous night. The only words spoken by Isis were, "This is our last song." The lead singer of Johnny Truant, however, was cracking jokes - "Our next two songs are 'Hotel California' and 'Tiny Dancer'" - and moaning about eating too many pies. Not to mention the lead singer from support act Blackhole, who climbed down from the stage and performed most of the set from the middle of the dance-floor...

I've been working as well, of course. The big fat space opera sequel, assorted short stories (three sold this year so far; go me), and even another poem or two.

Two New DVD Reviews Up...

... on videovista.net: Lost in Austen and Sordid Lives.

Interzone 219...

... is out now, with my review of Michael Andre-Druissi's Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition in it. Plus, of course, some excellent fiction by Jeff Spock, Jason Sanford, Mercurio D Rivera, Aliette de Bodard, Gord Sellar and Alexander Marsh Freed.

The Future's So Bright

A couple of nights ago, I watched Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World for the first time in many years. I first saw this film back in, I think, late 1993 or early 1994. I thought then its depiction of 1999 was one of the most realistic and plausible depictions of the near-future I had ever seen.

But that was before the year in which film is set. I've now watched it again almost a decade after the year in which it is set...

Wenders apparently wrote Until the End of the World to be the "ultimate road movie". It's set in the months leading up to the start of the new millennium. An Indian nuclear-powered satellite is out of control, and could fall from orbit, causing widespread contamination. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) is returning to Paris from Venice when a traffic jam prompted by the impending crash of the satellite forces her off the beaten track. As a result, she is involved in an accident with a pair of friendly bank robbers. After giving them a lift to the nearest town - her car survived the crash, theirs didn't - they ask her to take their ill-gotten gains to Paris for a 30% cut. En route, Claire then meets Trevor (William Hurt) and gives him a lift to Paris... but he steals some of the money.

The film then develops into a chase, with Claire and her boyfriend Gene (Sam Neill) following Trevor to retrieve the stolen, er, stolen money. Trevor is also being chased by bounty hunters, since he apparently stole an expensive prototype camera from a US lab. This camera records the brainwaves associated with seeing. Trevor is using the camera to record his relatives for his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau). The film finishes up in the Australian Outback, where Trevor's father (Max von Sydow), the inventor of the camera, has a secret lab.

Then the Indian nuclear-powered satellite explodes, causing an electro-magnetic pulse which wipes out all unshielded electronic equipment...

When I first saw Until the End of the World, I was very taken at the way in which it showed technology integrated into everyday life. Cars had electronic maps on their dashboards, computers were small and portable, videophones were the norm, software programs had animated avatars as user interfaces and could search global data... And yet other aspects remained unchanged. Cars looked a sleeker but a lot of old models were still being driven. Cities appeared to have changed very little - more neon and glass, perhaps, but no real substantial changes. And the way in which people lived their lives had not altered...

Science fiction has never been about predicting the future - that's futurism. But watching Until the End of the World now, eight years after it was set, seventeen years after it was made... it's interesting seeing just how close Wenders was.

Cars do indeed have electronic maps on their dashboards - GPS. Desktop computers have not changed greatly in appearance in ten years (unless you include the introduction of TFTs), but laptops certainly have. They are a great deal smaller and more powerful than they were in 1991 - the Asus EEE, for example, is 22.5 x 16.5 cm. Admittedly, the animated GUI for the search programs shown in the film are crude; modern CGI is far more sophisticated and realistic. But the search through global data itself is not so far from Google and the like - don't forget that when Until the End of the World was released, the WWW did not exist. And while videophones have yet to really catch on, mobile phones with cameras are common, as are webcams.

Despite this, the film still doesn't feel like it was actually made in 1999. There are enough near-misses to indicate its true age. And, of course, the central conceit, the camera which records brainwaves, is pure science fiction.

It's still a damn good film, however. I'm not sure I'd call it a favourite - the plot feels a little like two stories badly-welded together, and both William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin seem curiously blank throughout. And the edition released in the UK has no subtitles, despite there being a lot of French dialogue (which is a little too fast and fluent for me). But I'll certainly watch it again.

100 Must-Argue Science Fiction Novels

100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels by Stephen E Andrews and Nick Rennison is a new reading guide to the genre. It is not, the authors write, a list of the best of science fiction. Their intent was to provide "100 books to read in order to gain an overview of the rich and diverse writing to be found in SF".

By its very nature, the contents of such a book are going to be contentious. Why that book, and not that one? Christopher Priest says as much in his foreword, and even names some of the novels he would himself have included. Likewise, I could argue the inclusion or exclusion of many of the titles given in the guide. But what's the point?

However, what is interesting is that of 100 books named, more than half are from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (and near half of those are from the Sixties). There are two novels from the 21st Century. It is the least-represented decade since the 1930s - and while the decade is not yet over, it has surely seen more sf novels published than the first three decades of the 20th Century. But then that's science fiction's single biggest problem - for a genre that frequently uses the future as its setting, it spends an inordinate amount of time looking backwards. I have seen people recommend fifty-year-old novels to readers new to the genre. Fifty years old. Why? Would they recommend Dennis Wheatley to someone looking for an introduction to contemporary fiction?

It could be argued that the language of sf requires readers to work their way through its history in order to gain fluency. But that's complete rubbish. Current day narrative techniques and styles of story-telling - not to mention the attitudes and sensibilites embedded in the text - bear little resemblance to those of, say, the 1950s. Modern readers expect modern texts. So why foist old ones on them?

An example: last year, nostalgia drove me to re-read EE 'Doc' Smith's Masters of Space. Unusually, I remember exactly when and where I originally purchased and read the book: it was Easter 1978. My father had picked me up from school, and we spent a couple of days in London before flying out to the Middle East. I'm not sure in which book shop I bought Masters of Space - probably Foyles. But I remember the occasion, because it was the first time I saw Star Wars. So. Almost thirty years ago. The book itself was first published in 1961, although in style and content it harkens back to Smith's works of the 1930s. When I read it in 1978, I remember enjoying it. When I read it in 2006... oh dear. I don't know which was worse: the rampant wish-fulfilment, the cheesy 1930s dialogue, the neanderthal sexual stereotypes... Halfway though Masters of Space, the characters are given the opportunity of replacing their bodies with ageless, super-strong android bodies. The women are all for it - because it means their tits will never sag. While spung! may not have actually appeared in the pages of Masters of Space, it was very much there in spirit.

I would never willingly force someone new to sf to undergo the same experience. Not if I want them to continue to read science fiction. There is an unrealistic expectation among fans of science fiction that non-sf readers will appreciate classic works as much as they themselves do. Not as classics of the genre, but as straight genre works. No one reads Jane Austen without recognising that she lived 200 years ago. You, a science fiction fan since the age of eleven, may have fond memories of Asimov's Foundation - but does that really make it an appropriate example of science fiction to give to someone new to the genre?

I argued a couple of posts ago that science fiction stories should contain a science-fictional conceit. As fans of the genre, have we become so hung up on the "idea" that it has become the only criteria by which we can judge genre works? Is that why we think of a fifty-year-old novel on the same terms as we think of one from last year? Is that why the genre won't recognise that it has an historical dimension, and insists on categorising all its works as if it belonged to an eternal present?

They say the Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen. It's certainly true that sf fans grow older. Perhaps it's time they grew up too.