Archive for October, 2007
I recently did a Q & A for the Book Swede - great fun. If you fancy reading it, then click here.
The Writers Guild is hosting a one-off event this week to celebrate the renaissance in home-grown science fiction and fantasy writing. They've called it Imaginary Worlds, and it's a forum for debate to be held at the Writers Guild headquarters in Britannia Street.
I'll be on the panel, discussing SF novels and my take on SF on telly, together with Adrian Hodges, co-creator of Primeval, Ashley Pharaoh, co-creator of Life on Mars and Phil Ford, a script editor who has worked on Dr Who and Torchwood.
Tickets are £5 for Writers Guild members, £7.50 for non-members. For further details, click here.
Tonight was the UK screening of the last episode ever of The Sopranos. After the US screening, some viewers wrote in demanding their subscription to HBO back, so bitterly disappointed were they by the final ep. However, I found it well written, and moving, and intriguing. Without giving too much away, I would just say that it has an 'open' ending, genuinely so. But I wasn't disappointed at that; it's a show that's always been oblique, contrary, and unexpected, and to me it seems right that it ended that way.
The Sopranos is the show that broke all the rules - a genuinely hateful central character, vast amounts of subtextual storytelling, slow narrative pace, and character arcs that sometimes spanned years of real time. I loved the way that scenes would seem to ramble and lead nowhere, and yet would actually, and sneakily, advance the story. In one episode, Junior Soprano (Tony's Uncle) is teased during a golf match for his penchant for pleasuring ladies in a manner frowned upon by Italian Americans. It's a throwaway moment; but this small incident sowed the seeds for Junior's later attempts to murder his own nephew. Cunnilingus as a plot point; only in The Sopranos....
In some ways it was, for me, the most inconsistent of the great US TV series. Some eps were lame, some were pretentious; and even good eps (like the final ep) were sometimes marred by jerky bad editing, and poor matching of shots. But the characters were rich and gloriously awful and full of flaws; and the acting, always, was superb.
Why do we like Tony Soprano? Is it because he kills people? Is it because his life is more interesting than ours? Or is it because his life is actually just as crap and boring as everyone else's?
It's a show which managed to have its cake and eat it; it made us love and admire Tony and root for him to win, and it also made us despise his petty small mindedness, his bullying, his racism, his homophobia and his general nastiness.
In the movies, gangsters are glamorous; in real life, and in The Sopranos, gangsters are nasty little shits. And to be honest I've no idea how the show managed to make me despise and revile its main characters yet still draw me back week after week to watch them some more.
The last ep ended with an RIP logo; the R was an upturned gun. A nice final flourish.
Now, what the hell else do I watch, when I want dark, resonant, bloodthirsty, gripping drama?
I was once told it was possible to study Klingon as part of a language degree at a British university, though I can't remember which particular institution was offering that module...I suppose that may have been an urban myth, but I do hope it was and is true. There are so many ways of foolishly wasting time in this life - playing Spider Solitaire for instance! - that to devote several years to learning the language of the alien villains in Star Trek seems an eminently reasonable thing to do.
And recently, my wonderful copy editor at Orbit, Bella, has devoted some of her valuable time to creating a language for one of the species of aliens in Debatable Space, the flame beasts. In my MSS, I just used gibberish to indicate their dialogue - which is created by a series of flashing lights generated by their own bodies. (Since they are made of flame...)
Bella, with magnificent devotion to duty, has rendered the flame beasts' dialogue intelligible by creating an entire alphabet out of non-standard icons. And if you know the code and become fluent in flame beast lingo, you can read these sections and they will make sense.
The 'flame beast language' is of course a human transliteration of the actual flashes of light. But it occurs to me that it might be possible to have a laptop programmed to render the flame beasts words into two languages at once - into flashes of light, and into symbols that can be read. The symbols could also be given a phonetic value; and before you know where you are, we could be speaking flame beast!
Astronomers could then study pulsars and variable stars to see whether the patterns generated corresponded in any way to flame beast words. Because, of course, it's quite possible that the very stars speak flame beast...
Thanks, Bella, for your heroic efforts; I fear however that I am not up to the task of writing an entire novel in the flame beast language....Klingon, yes, now that's an easy task by comparison.
I've added a new link on the Blogroll to the right of these words...it gives you direct access to NASA TV, that little known TV station which offers live coverage of NASA missions. At the moment, you can see live film of Expedition 16 on board the International Space Station. I just spent a few valuable minutes which could have been spent doing something I get paid for doing watching the solar panel of the ISS slowly moving against the backdrop of the planet Earth.
I can't believe how much time I'm going to waste watching this. It's surreal to suddenly be catapulted out of Ordinary World into the world of space.
There was a wonderful episode of Heartbeat last year in which the 1960s characters gathered in the Aidensfield Arms to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon...and it was clear that the power of that moment lay in its extraordinary uniqueness.
Now, the moment is not unique; you can access it any time, day or night (though you have to check the schedules or take pot luck, because sometimes it's just archive or educational stuff) , just by clicking on the following words:
Did you read this fascinating piece by Neil Gaiman in the Guardian, on the art of fairy tales? It's a witty and very informative piece, which serves as the perfect intro to the movie of Gaiman's Stardust which comes out next week. The film is written and directed by Matthew Vaughn, producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and director of Layer Cake. Gaiman is pleased at the final result, and I'm looking forward hugely to seeing it.
As well as his novels and original graphic novels like Sandman, Gaiman also wrote what I think must be one of the boldest and most brilliant Marvel Comics stories of all time - the extraordinary 1602, which posits an alternative reality in which the spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I is not Walsingham, it's Nick Fury; and the court magician is not John Dee, it's Dr Stephen Strange.
1602 is a dense, dark piece of storytelling, with multiple protagonists which is laced with brilliant gags (there's a character called Peter Parquah, a silly flourish which I find indecently funny, I'm not sure why.) And appalling things happen to some of our best loved Marvel characters, giving the narrative a shocking bite.
Damn, I wish I'd written this; or even thought of it.
I suspect, however, there isn't a movie in it, because the storytelling doesn't stand alone; it relies on a thorough and geeky knowledge of Marvel lore. (The minute we meet a character called Bruce Banner, we know what will happen...)
Oh and there's a Templar treasure...and guess what that turns out to be....1602 gives us Gaiman at his most subversive, and funny, and serious.
Commander Peggy Whitson is now aboard the International Space Station - we can see her in the photo above in one of her most glamorous and fetching space ensembles looking, um, like the robot from Lost in Space. That's her on the right.
The NASA website account of the changeover between Expeditions is as detailed and dry as always; the reality of life in space is endless grinding detail and routine. But of course the unexpected does sometimes happen. In Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's splendid novel Time's Eye, the crew of the ISS are jolted out of their usual routine when the Earth is subject to a massive time dislocation which causes Mission Control to vanish, and compels the crew of the ISS to make a hazardous landing without any assistance, only to find themselves confronted by the massed hordes of Genghis Khan's army.
It is, I reluctantly concede, very unlikely that Peggy and her gang will face a similar plight. (Although if they do, we won't know about it... We'll be the ones who are obliterated!) But in the real world, things are usually dull most of the time; that's why we read novels.
Still, it's reassuring to see the ordinary, workaday business of space going on...and I will in this blog keep popping in to see how Expedition 16 are faring.
All photographs reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
I spent last weekend in Hebden Bridge, a startlingly beautiful town in Yorkshire with mill chimneys and clock towers and horribly, horribly steep hills. I was teaching on a workshop run by Screen Yorkshire for new and established screenwriters.
Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen was there too, giving a talk on how to write...he's an engagingly and delightfully grounded guy. He spoke about he and his pals took a show to Edinburgh, worked their socks off to make it good - and the rest was history. Success swooped and swept them away, and the success of the League has been remarkable.
But Jeremy has kept a clear understanding on what it's like to be on the other side of the wall, and judged his audience extremely well. A number of the would-be writers on the workshop had completed an MA in Screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University, in the hope it would lead to fame and fortune. And Jeremy was one of the first people to do that same course; and here is now, writing comedies for men dressed as big breasted women in Royston Vasey.
Jeremy spoke brilliantly and very honestly about what it is like to be a writer. It is basically very hard because you get out of bed, sit in front of the computer...then nothing happens. And when nothing happens, for hour after hour, day after day, it does become profoundly embarrassing. It is, I would surmise, a bit like being a gigolo who doesn't much like sex. It is horrible, and awful, and also petty, and humiliating. There is the blank page. There is the writer staring at it. It's not a bit like Clint Eastwood glaring at Lee Van Cleef. It is just basically....banal.
All writers know this. Clever writers use words like Writers Block to add dignity to the embarrassing phenomenon of creative impotence. And smart writers like Jeremy have a whole battery of techniques for conjuring up a creative mood in which the words happen. For Jeremy, it hinges around having a clear desk, a neat environment, and stopwatch techniques in which he forces himself to write 5 minutes of anything, however crap it may be. Then he takes a break. Then he writes for another 5 minutes. Then - and then, something takes off and magic comedy results. When the flow flows, it really flows.
After Jeremy's talk, the writers broke up into 3 groups of 5. I was teaching the TV drama group, who were full of pizzaz and optimism and paid me the enormous compliment of actually having heard of the first TV show I worked on, The Paradise Club. (It's a cult hit, but there's a ghastly rumour that all the tapes have been lost or hidden in some basement somewhere - though this is a show that cries out to be given a DVD release.)
Kathyrn O'Connor, head of development of the Northern office of Talkback Thames, came to talk to the writers about TV today, and gave great feedback on their stories. I gave my usual spiel about the fact that TV really has got more interesting - it used to be nothing but police procedurals, but now high concept and science fiction and weirdy and wacky are all in vogue, which means there is at least the possibility of drama that's excitingly different.
The projects pitched to me ranged from a cop show (by an actress with recent CAD room experience, ie being the person who sits behind a microphone telling the area car where to go) to teen drama (sexy, stylish, full of potential) to precinct drama to hugely ambitious melodrama. Interestingly, most of the writers doing the TV section of this SPARKS course have significant experience as writers, but are looking for human contact, and feedback, and career openings. The talent is out there...it's finding a way to connect that's so hard.
Later that weekend, at the instigation of script guru and my pal Simon van der Borgh, we did a pitching session in which all 15 writers had 15 minutes to pitch their idea to a scary panel including myself, Simon, Hugo Heppell (head of Screen Yorkshire) and Ann Tobin (senior lecturer at Leeds Met University.) As a joke, we compared it to the X Factor (I was cast as Louis of course.) In reality - it was alarmingly and terrifyingly like the X Factor. For a new writer, to walk in a room with four industry professionals and pitch a project which then gets ripped to shreds must be one of the most frightening experiences possible...and frankly, we pulled few punches in our critiques.
But we were nice with it; and the truth is, that degree of adrenalin does really help the creative process. I was amazed at how much the projects developed and grew after that Bunsen Burner process.
But then, of course, the follow up to that kind of scary pitching session has to involve TLC and slow, careful project development. Writers need a safe space in which to try out ideas; and they need room to spread their wings.
I love teaching; over and above the high quality work that results, the whole process is about getting the best out of people. And to be part of that process is a privilege.
SPARKS continues through the Autumn and into the early months of next year. I salute Screen Yorkshire for actually giving a damn about the new screenwriters in the region, and for giving them a chance to develop. Some will be better than others; some will have careers, some won't. But everyone gets an even break, which is all we can ask for in this wicked world.