Archive for March, 2008
Great news for Ariel, the webguy who is the mentor and designer of this site...He's now been hired by Orbit in a senior capacity as a Marketing Executive, in recognition of his book-selling experience and exceptional online expertise.
And, over and above all else, Ariel aka Darren Turpin is a man who knows and loves his science fiction.
It's nice to see the good guys doing so well...
I'm thrilled to say that today (Sunday March 23rd) Debatable Space is Book of the Day on the Meet the Author site.
And after today, if you google me you'll see a clip of my interview in which I say various things.
I'm off to Eastercon this weekend, for what promises to be a fabulous convention. Two of my favourite writers - Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee - are Guests of Honour - and I notice that the magnificent and prolific Charles Stross will also be attending. My agent John Jarrold, a veteran of Worldcons and Eastercons, will also be there. I'm new to the SF convention experience, but I expect to be a duck impacting water.
And in fact, from now on my year appears to be cluttered with festivals and conventions - I'm on a panel at Alt. Fiction in Derby, with the gifted Stephen Gallagher, and then in May I spend a week in Cannes, for the Film Festival.
And between those two events comes another great festival, which I would like to shamelessly pimp - the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. If you can get to London do check it out.
Now I need to find some time to actually write novels.
There's a great site called Meet the Author in which you can watch clips of your favourite writers talking about their books. It features Gregory Maguire singing the title of his new book, Son of a Witch; and among the SF writers, my favourite clip features a barnstorming performance from Iain M. Banks.
I went along on Friday of last week to do my own 'piece to camera'. Strangely, I wasn't too nervous, largely because these days I never have time to get nervous (I used to spend days, nay weeks, getting nervous about things! Ah, happy times.)
And, though I'd mentally prepared a few things to say, I hadn't managed to write anything down. I thought, what the hell, I'll busk it. And, to my own considerable surprise, I began calmly, and spoke fluently, and didn't forget anything I wanted to say when suddenly
Nothing.
My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried'.
The very nice camera guy then explained I was way over length anyway - the ideal time for these things is 2 minutes, and I'd already passed the 6 minute mark, with footnotes and a prose poem sketch of my experiences running in Crystal Palace Park. So I gulped, resolved to be less verbose, and started again.
This time, I'm glad to say, I was far more economical. I got through about a minute and half's worth of chat effortlessly and then
Nothing.
My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried', for the second time.
This, have to say, is the moment when I realised when I could never be an actor. It's not just that I don't look right, and I can't act, and I get embarrassed in public, though those are major handicaps. It's my brain. It doesn't remember the end of things.
To be or not to be, that is the
Um? What comes next?
That would be me.
Interestingly, the art of classical rhetoric was very much concerned with the art of memory. Greek orators used to memorise their speeches by associating each section with their living room, as part of a visual mnemonic system. You start with the door, move across to the sofa; and when you reach the main part or 'focus' of your argument, you're at the fireplace. (The word 'focus' comes from the Greek word for 'hearth', for precisely this reason.)
I've never learned any such rhetorical tricks; I relied on luck to get my through, and luck failed me miserably.
By this point, furious and battle-scarred, I wanted to start the whole thing again; but the camera guy just got me to carry on from where I'd stopped. His plan is to edit it together seamlessly, but I'm convinced you'll be able to see a few seconds of dead air, and a panic-stricken writer with a fish-eye stare who has clearly had his data banks wiped.
In the interests of my own public mortification, I'll post a blog to say when the interview has gone online.
I recently attended the last in this year's SPARKS workshops up in Yorkshire. It's been six months of intensive work with 3 bunches of writers. My lot were developing TV series, and a damned good job they did too. And the other groups were working on feature projects, creating a wonderfully diverse range of projects.
I did a brief talk on one of my favourite shows, Heroes. Not everyone loves this show (Jeff Somers is agin it, and he's someone whose opinions I very much respect) but I find it exhilarating and fresh and, damn it all, wonderful. But, as is always the way, when you have to teach a movie or a TV series, you look at it with fresh eyes.
And what I discovered about Heroes, on a second viewing with notepad in hand, is how much of it is not great; and how little that matters.
The stuff that's not great is, really, all the voiceover narration by the Mohinder character. On first hearing, it seems fine; but when you listen again, and focus in on the content - well, it's so much tripe really. It's all platitudes and generalisations, and doesn't advance the story. (And of course, almost all the of the 'science' that Mohinder spouts in his actual dialogue scenes is, um, pretty dodgy.)
And yet, this doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because Mohinder's voiceover is there for a complex and subtle reason, and not because the narration is needed to move the story. It was added, in fact, in post-production, always a sign of a panic last measure; and what it does is add style.
There's a scene in Ep 3, which I screened, in which the Nikki character is burying some bodies in the desert. (If you want to know why, you need to watch it.) It's classic thriller stuff, well shot admittedly, but very much the kind of scene you might get in any crime show. So it could easily look, well, B movieish, or cheap tellyish.
But when the scene is played out with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy's beautifully spoken voiceover on top of it, it becomes special, and evocative, and stylised. It's more than a woman burying bodies; it's a scene of sublimity and pathos.
This is one of the great tricks of the show; everything is stylised, enhanced, 'more so.' The colours are richer than life, with yellows and oranges and browns and fabulous set designs, and Indian streets stalls selling brightly coloured fruit, and shockingly bold shirts, and vividly rich lighting. And the angles are cleverly chosen, bold and striking and disorienting, the shots develop swiftly and in a complex way, and every single shot has a three dimensional quality (something in the foreground, something in the background, something in the mid-ground, so the eye is constantly tantalised and entertained.)
And the voiceover adds a whole level of stylisation on to this; it makes us aware that what we are watching is meant to be thought provoking and idea provoking and assumption provoking. The voiceover teaches us how to 'read' what we are watching, in other words.
But Mohinder's prose, as I say, is painted on with a very broad brush; I have a feeling, really, that it was written in a hurry. But I'm not carping, just observing; and the narration is spoken so beautifully that it's a pleasure to hear it, even if I often don't bother listening to it.
And I came away once more confirmed in my belief that American TV series are better than their British counterparts because they really really care about style, as much as they care about content. Every great American show has its own visual aesthetic, its own style rules - from the jerky camera movements of NYPD Blue to the staccato explorations of urban New Jersey in The Sopranos, to the lush malice implicit in the cinematography of Desperate Housewives. Whereas British shows tend to be shot in one of two ways; cinematically (if it's high budget telly) and cheaply (if it's factory telly.) But there's no real attempt to do what movie directors to - to create a unique visual look. (Compare Spielberg's Minority Report, with Spielberg's ET, and compare them both to Spielberg's Schindler's List - they represent three totally different directorial 'looks'.)
After my brief talk to the SPARKS group, we did a question and answer session, and it quickly emerged that Heroes is a show which has really captured the imagination of almost all the writers present. It's Marvel comics merged with prime-time US TV storytelling skills (Stan Lee even has a cameo as a coach driver.) And it is, I would argue, one of the most visually beautiful TV shows ever made.
Later in the course of this residential weekend, we had a screening of the classic British film The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, one of Powell and Pressburger's most outrageous, and funny, and satirical, and thought-provoking films. It features a very different type of hero - a moustachio'd Colonel Blimp who appears in the first scene as a figure of fun, and emerges after the film has told his story, as a man of romance, passion, and integrity, and heroism. It's a homage to an old fashioned kind of British hero.
There are plans for another SPARKS workshop next year; I hope very much to be involved in it.
Great film! See it.
Imagine if you could travel anywhere, whenever you wanted.
It's that simple really. A science fiction extrapolation of the back-packer's wanderlust. You can travel to London, Rome, and Egypt - and still be home in time to watch your favourite show on telly.
There are villains, rather good ones, if dubiously motivated; and Samuel L. Jackson plays a bad guy with a scary haircut. But the real conflict is between two Jumpers, who bicker and end up having a fist fight that zaps exhilaratingly from location to location.
It's a film that has no resonance, and leaves no lasting insights or profundities in the mind. It's just - zap - zap - zap - great fun.