Is There a Doctor in the House?

I spoke to my mother earlier tonight; she really enjoyed GIFT, and since she is a doctor, she appreciated the medical details. 

That's an interesting coincidence ; my mother worked as a doctor for forty years, and her brother was also a doctor (working in Canada.) My elder brother Alan is also a doctor, though not of medicine (he has a PhD in neurochemistry.) And I'm a doctor too!

Okay, you could argue I'm not a REAL doctor.  If someone has a heart attack on a Tube train, don't look to me to know what to do. (I worked on MCCALLUM, an ITV series about a pathologist, so I'm up to speed on post mortems of already dead people; when they're merely ill, I'm a bit shaky.)

But no, my expertise is is of a different kind entirely. I am a SCRIPT doctor.  Dr Palmer; script healer.

Script doctoring is an odd concept. It's not the same as script editing, even though as a script editor you can get very very closely involved in solving story problems, and even suggesting scenes and dialogue.  But a script editor always work WITH a writer; the script doctor only comes into play when the writer is off the scene.  Imagine a doctor who kills his patient, steals his identity, moves into his house, and spends the money in his bank account; that's a script doctor for you!

I once script doctored an Oscar winning screenwriter - I can't name him, but he's extremely well known - though sadly my version didn't get produced. (Maybe one day.)  A friend of mine script doctored a screenplay by David Mamet; then had HIS draft rewritten by some other schmuck. 

(Allthough I should be careful about definitions here; there's a world of difference between REWRITING and SCRIPT DOCTORING.  Or is there...?)

In theory, the difference is that rewriters get a screen credit, but script doctors don't.  When Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for THE GODFATHER, there was one scene which eluded them - when Michael Corleone spoke to his father about the family business.  This was the second draft version of the scene:

DON CORLEONE (MARLON BRANDO) AND MICHAEL CORLEONE (AL PACINO) IN DISCUSSION AFTER MICHAEL'S RETURN FROM SICILY):

DON CORLEONE
Have you thought about a wife?  A
family?

MICHAEL
  (pained)
No.

DON CORLEONE
I understand, Michael.  But you
must make a family, you know.

MICHAEL
I want children, I want a family.
But I don't know when.

DON CORLEONE
Accept what's happened, Michael.

MICHAEL
I could accept everything that's
happened; I could accept it, but
that I never had a choice.  From
the time I was born, you had laid
this all out for me.

DON CORLEONE
No, I wanted other things for you.

MICHAEL
You wanted me to be your son.

DON CORLEONE
Yes, but sons who would be
professors, scientists,
musicians...and grandchildren who
could be, who knows, a Governor, a
President even, nothing's impossible
here in America.

MICHAEL
Then why have I become a man like
you?

DON CORLEONE
You are like me, we refuse to be
fools, to be puppets dancing on a
string pulled by other men.  I
hoped the time for guns and killing
and massacres was over.  That was
my misfortune.  That was your
misfortune.  I was hunted on the
streets of Corleone when I was
twelve years old because of who my
father was.  I had no choice.

MICHAEL
A man has to choose what he will be.
I believe that.

DON CORLEONE
What else do you believe in?

MICHAEL doesn't answer.

DON CORLEONE
Believe in a family.  Can you
believe in your country?  Those
Pezzonovante of the State who
decide what we shall do with our
lives?  Who declare wars they wish
us to fight in to protect what they
own.  Do you put your fate in the
hands of men whose only talent is
that they tricked a bloc of people
to vote for them?  Michael, in five
years the Corleone family can be
completely legitimate.  Very
difficult things have to happen to
make that possible.  I can't do
them anymore, but you can, if you
choose to.

MICHAEL listens.

DON CORLEONE
Believe in a family; believe in a
Code of Honor, older and higher,
believe in Roots that go back
thousands of years into your Race.
Make a family, Michael, and protect
it.  These are our affairs, sono cosa
nostra, Governments only protect
men who have their own individual
power.  Be one of those men...you
have the choice.

Here's the same scene as it appears in the movie; tweaked, rewritten and generally 'doctored' by Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown:

DISSOLVE TO: The Don's garden. The Don, older looking now, sits with Michael -day

VITO CORLEONE
So -- Barzini will move against you first. He'll set up a meeting with someone that you
absolutely trust -- guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting, you'll be assassinated.

(then, as the Don drinks from a glass of wine as Michael watches him)

I like to drink wine more than I used to -- anyway, I'm drinking more...

MICHAEL
It's good for you, Pop.

VITO CORLEONE (after a long pause)
I don't know -- your wife and children -- are you happy with them?

MICHAEL
Very happy...

VITO CORLEONE
That's good.
(then)
I hope you don't mind the way I -- I keep going over this Barzini business...

MICHAEL
No, not at all...

VITO CORLEONE
It's an old habit. I spent my life trying not to be careless -- women and children can be
careless, but not men.
(then)
How's your boy?

MICHAEL
He's good --

VITO CORLEONE
You know he looks more like you every day.

MICHAEL (smiling)
He's smarter than I am. Three years old, he can read the funny papers

VITO CORLEONE (laughs)
Read the funny papers --
(then)
Oh -- well -- eh, I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in
and out of here -- because...

MICHAEL
I did it already, Pop.

VITO CORLEONE
-- ya'know, cuz it could be anyone...

MICHAEL
Pop, I took care of that.

VITO CORLEONE
Oh, that's right -- I forgot.

MICHAEL (reaching over, touching his father)
What's the matter? What's bothering you?
(then, after the Don doesn't answer)
I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it.

VITO CORLEONE (as he stands)
I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this. And Fredo -- well --
(then, after he sits besides Michael)
-- Fredo was -- well -- But I never -- I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I
don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused -- to be a fool -- dancing on the
string, held by all those -- bigshots. I don't apologize -- that's my life -- but I thought that --
that when it was your time -- that -- that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator -
Corleone. Governor - Corleone, or something...

MICHAEL
Another pezzonovante...

VITO CORLEONE
Well -- this wasn't enough time, Michael. Wasn't enough time...

MICHAEL
We'll get there, Pop -- we'll get there...

VITO CORLEONE
Uh...
(then, after kissing Michael on the cheek)
Now listen -- whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting -- he's the traitor. Don't forget
that.

Yeah, it's better isn't it?

The point here being that Coppola always generously gave Towne all the credit he deserved for the rewriting; but it was never Towne's movie.  He just did a job of work, on a single scene; script carpentry, more than script doctoring.

And this is something I've always enjoyed doing.  Coming in on an existing project; fixing problems, adding stuff that wasn't there, improving stuff that was there, and then walking away again. Vision is great, passion is fun; but life's too short for EVERY project to be a passion project.  Sometimes it's cool to be a writer for hire.

The two major script doctoring jobs I've done which resulted in movies that got made are very different.  One is an extraordinary and surreal movie set in Cuba called GUANTANAMERO (aka ARRITMIA), produced by Michiyo Yoshizaki, producer of THE CRYING GAME, and MERRY CHRISTMAS MR LAWRENCE.  My brief initially was to script edit a Hispanic writer/director on an audacious screenplay (for reasons I can't even explain, I can't name said person!)  The script editing job involved a trip to Paris, first class on Eurostar (you know it's First Class when they bring unnecessary free champagne) and evolved into a full rewrite.  The movie is remarkable  - flawed ,but very beautiful. (For details, see here.) But though I get an IMDb credit for the film, I still regard it as 'doctoring' not proper writing; it wasn't my story, my vision, my characters.  But I did help, I think, to make it work. 

The other project is a Greek film called URANYA. Here the deal was very simple; I was given sixty pages of script and asked to turn them into 100 pages of script (60 pages is only half a film!) The writer/director Costas Kapakas had written a quite wonderful coming of age story set in a Greek village, oozing with character and vision and wit; but like many passionate artists he had only written the 'best bits', not the joining bits which make the best bits work. Story logic; causality; setups & payoffs; all tha technical stuff.

I did my job - and loved it - and I get I think a simple script editing credit, which I'm very happy with. Because this was Costas's movie! And, I'm told by a former screenwriting student of mine from Cyprus, URANYA has gone on to develop a cult reputation as one of the best Greek movies of recent years. (Details here.)

All these memories are fresh in my mind because I'm currently working on a new script doctoring job, for a British producer who has written a delightful British comedy  based on his own experiences, and has hired me to shape and finesse it. I won't reveal the story, but I will say that this project has introduced me to a style of music I'd never experienced before - modern Klezmer music, which is Jewish folk music with a modern tang. This music is the motif and undercurrent of the story; and it lends great magic to an already magical project.

More news on this if the movie gets made....

How to Write Action SF

What's the best way to kill an alien? Do you zap it with energy beams, blast it with bullets, burn it with a flame-thrower, drop an anti-matter bomb on it, or challenge it to a mano a alien duel?

Welcome to my world; these are the kind of difficult questions which occupy a large part of my professional life.

Shooting an alien with bullets can feel horribly old-fashioned, of course; so maybe what we need is a dual-use gun that fires a) exploding bullets and b) bursts of plasma energy.  Such a gun would be a fearsome and terrible thing, and it's hard to imagine any organic creature being able to survive such an attack.

This means - BAD NEWS! START AGAIN! - that the alien we are fighting will be instantly and easily killed.  If there's an entire army of aliens, each with twelve arms and three heads and brandishing swords, then a single human warrior can simply hose down the motherfrakkers with his dual-use gun and kill tens of thousands of aliens before any of them get near enough to lop his (or her) head off.

That, frankly, is a really bad action scene. It's a massacre, a turkey-shoot; and hence, is no fun to read about.  Instead of enjoying the kick-ass action, the reader, confronted with his unfair massacre, is going to start thinking moral thoughts like: is it right to kill these poor aliens in the first place?

So the answer is - give the aliens body armour!  We fire plasma blasts at them, and alternate that with explosive bullets; but the plasma and the bullets bounce off  the aliens' super-hard body armour and they keep on coming with their swords and, er, lop our hero's head off.

Well that was crap too.  The novel is over, and the writer is consigned to the dustbin of history.

So the answer has to be: make the aliens and the humans fairly evenly matched in terms of weaponry and defensive capability. Maybe the aliens DON'T have body armour, but they have a special Thingummy that allows them to become invisible. So our plucky soldiers are fighting an enemy they can't see. If they see it, they can kill it; but they can't see the frakker! Now that works.

And that of course is pretty much the action-scenario of Predator. 

The Predator can camouflage itself so that our plucky soldiers can't see it to kill it.  When they do see it, it's too fast.  So as a result - the Predator can't be defeated!

But that's crap also, so

BEWARE MINOR PLOT SPOILER, BUT I REALLY DON'T THINK IT'LL HURT THAT MUCH

we contrive things so that Arnold Huge-Biceps Shwarzenegger discovers a way to camouflage HIMSELF, so the Predator can't see HIM.  And that's now an elegant piece of action-story plotting.  For it seemed as if the hero couldn't win, he was up against unbeatable odds; but lo and behold, he now finds the one chink in the armour of his enemy that makes victory possible. 

It's comparable to the case of the Greek hero Achilles, who was unkillable because he was dipped in a magical river Styx as a child; but his enemies learned that in order to be dipped, he had to be held by his heel, which hence was not invulnerable.  So his enemy Paris shot an arrow  into the back of Achilles' foot, and killed him! Everyone, in other words, has an Achilles' heel, especially Achilles.

And to find the enemy's weak spot - well that takes brain work. For action scenes are of course not the same as scenes of violence.  Violence is just killing; action is killing + THINKING.  A dumb hero who kills is not a hero at all, he (or she) is just a murdering psychopath.

Action scenes are, I would argue, the core and staple of most modern SF writing.  That wasn't always the case; I have plenty of books on my shelves that are cerebral SF explorations of ideas and themes.  But you would be hard pressed - I would tentatively suggest - to make a living as an SF novelist nowadays if all you do is write 'novels of ideas' in which clever concepts are unpicked.  Without kick-ass, books don't sell; so even the cerebral writers do kick-ass.

Take Asimov's Foundation trilogy; I loved it as a boy and as a young man, but when I re-read it, I was amazed at how little kick-ass action it contains.  Roland Emmerich is now doing a movie of it; and the first thing his talented screenwriters will do is add kick-ass - thus, obviously, defiling the very essence of the piece. Hollywood has already done that very thing with its adaptation of I, Robot.  Asimov fans will remember that the core premise of his robot books is the Law of Robotics that says a robot cannot harm a human being.

So guess what - these murdering frakking robots do NOTHING BUT harm or try to harm human beings.  They are psychopathic robots, which makes a mockery of Asimov. They are also ridiculously easy to kill - Will Smith knocks over dozens of the frakkers. Which is why this is a dull action movie.

In The Matrix, however, which is a GREAT action movie, Neo is given powers which make him more powerful than anyone else in the Matrix, ie the bad guys. So what do they do? They give Mr Smith CLONES, so that Neo has to fight an army. He goes from overdog to underdog in a single plot twist; and we CARE again. 

I love writing SF action scenes, and I take a lot of care to study other writers and how they achieve their effects.  Of course, there are no immutable rules about how to write Action SF, which makes a total nonsense of the title of this blog. So, ignoring that awkward fact, here are some rules - culled from experience and keeping my eyes open - of How To Write Action SF.

RULE 1:  ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST WITH AN ATTITUDE.

Whoa! I hear you think - what's this got to do with writing action? Action is all about kicking ass; 'attitude' is all about tone, and style, and character.  But it's still my rule number 1.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

Wedged into the mirror's frame was Axl's driving licence which showed a round-faced European male with spiky, peroxide-blond hair...

Age 29, height 6'!", weight 152 lb, name Axl Borja, status human. It lied about everything except his height, and that was only true if Axl wore Cuban heels....he was using another name these days too. Which one didn't matter. He changed them as regularly as he swopped his dead-end jobs flipping hamburgers.

This is from Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Red Robe, which I revere as the book which rekindled my passion for science fiction; it's the book that taught me that SF novels had become cool again.  And it's a book with the wonderful log line:

Ex-assassin All Borja has secrets. The least of them is he's just agreed to do one last hit. The only problem is, he hasn't yet told his gun.

Wow! This is one book you just HAVE to read.

And that's what I mean by 'attitude'.  Action per se is, as I say, just violence;  but the EXPECTATION OF VIOLENCE FEATURING A COOL PROTAGONIST is, truly, action at its best.  So in the para above, Jon is preparing his ground; he tells us this guy looks cool, seems ordinary, but nurses a dark secret. We know bad stuff will happen to this guy; but we already suspect he will be more than a match for the bad guys. We EXPECT action, in other words; and that gets our adrenalin pumping and our synapses twitching (assuming that synapses do in fact twitch - but let's not get TOO hung up on the science stuff just for now.)

Here's another example of Attitude, from Richard Morgan's Black Man:

He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez.

Here's how it would be in a literary novel:  the protagonist would be introduced, he would have a backstory, and character flaws, and angst, and anxieties, and a family, and most of all (beware, screenwriting cliche ahead!) his 'wants' and 'needs' would be clearly identified.

Here's what Morgan tells us about his protagonist:  He. 

Yup, that's it. The one word, 'He'. We don't even know the guy's name!  But we do know what he IS. He's  a hunter; he's smart; and he's out to get this guy Gray.  And we know, by the end of the first sentence, that Shit Is Going To Ensue.

And so it does. Our protagonist - Carl Marsalis - comes off worst in an encounter with a knife, he is stabbed, but his enhanced conditioning kicks in, there's a chase, a clumsy shoot-out - and Carl wins. He doesn't win easily, things go wrong, but he copes, and he prevails, ruthlessly.  At every moment in this action set-piece there's no guarantee that Carl will win - we don't even know if we WANT him to! - but he does. 

And that's great action.

Here's the definition and embodiment of Attitude,  as embodied by the protagonist in an action story:

The clothes are cheap, he can't afford a razor, the poncho is REALLY naff...but you know immediately that this guy is trouble.  He doesn't seek it; he just IS it.  That's Attitude.

Rule Number 2:  Suspension of Morality

Action is, first and foremost, about killing other sentient creatures. This is morally wrong.  If your boss is mean to you, you have no right to blow his brains out.  If you want a planet that's occupied by another sentient species, you have no right to kill them all just so you can plant potatoes and palm trees and bask under an alien sun.

So for action to work, there has to be not just Suspension of Disbelief, there also has to be Suspension of Morality.  Thou Shalt Not Kill is a commandment that is of no use whatsoever to the writer of action.  Thou Shalt Kill, Plentifully and Bloodily and With Gratuitous Gore is the action writer's only commandment.

So when is it justified to kill others?  Well in self-defence obviously.

And also when your enemy is UGLY: 

Or when your enemy resembles the kind of bug we hate to have in the bathroom:

 Or when your enemy looks like a vacuum cleaner:

Another time-hallowed option is to create an enemy which resembles that annoying Russian President, Leonid Brezhnev:

This brute is both a) Ugly and b) reminscent of the actual enemy of Americans during the Cold War years when this show (NO points for guessing the name of the show) was made. 

The trick of course is to contrive an enemy who we, the reader, fear and hate; and that way we won't quibble about seeing hundreds of the frakkers slain by our protagonists.

But often, of course, war is wrong; wars are fought for stupid reasons, or the wrong reasons, and a decent liberal humane person has to accept that it's better to wage peace, not war. 

This admirable sentiment is fatal for the writer of Action SF; the war has to be vicious, and full of horror, and the violence has to escalate! More ass has to be kicked! (Which, you know, is kind of awful really; but as least we're not as morally murky as those evil bastards who write horror.)

However, a number of writers do play complex games with our morality in teling their stories.  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War for instance is a masterpiece of Action SF which (SPOILER AHEAD, BUT I'LL TRY AND BE VAGUE) has an ending that is morally complex and challenging to our whole understanding of what has gone before.

Sometimes, in other words, it turns out that our hero is WRONG too kill these bad guys; and that can be a powerful twist.

But, moment by moment, scene by scene, we have to root for the protagonist who is killing other people.  Even if we end up wondering if he's morally wrong - like Carl Marsalis, a hired killer - we have to want him to win during the actual action scene/sequence.  Or the life goes out of the action;  and the reader starts to doubt the validity of his or own pleasure. And that's when books get thrown in the bin which (let me be clear) is what we DO NOT WANT.

So, NEVER LET SUCH MORAL MURKINESS IN BEFORE THE ACTION IS MOSTLY OVER. Until that moment when you bare your liberal conscience, make the enemy ugly, inhuman, ruthless, utterly evil, and hence easy to hate...even if you reverse our perceptions and moral assumptions at a later stage.

3) Justify your visuals

Every job has its occupational hazards.  Firefighters walk into burning buildings; paramedics often have to deal with violent drunks; soldiers get shot and bombed. And writers of action science fiction novels have to wrestle with the vexed question of defining the POV of their storytelling.

Jeez, those other guys have it SO easy.

The question of defining POV is different in the movies, where you have a handy thing known as 'ubiquitous POV'.  (For instance, in the movie 2012, you have all those shots of buildings falling into the sea etc, even though none of our regular characters bear witness to this.)  Most action movies use ubiquituous POV freely; or they might use antagonist POV, where you see what the hero is doing, but you're also allowed to see what the villain is doing too.  Hardcore single POV films tend to be arthouse fare (e.g. the recent Fishtank) or crime dramas (eg Chinatown). 

But the point is - in the movies it's easy to switch from protagonist POV to ubiquitous POV. In a film like High Sierra, for instance, we the audience see everything from the POV of main character Roy Earle  (Humphrey Bogart), UNTIL he's being chased by the cops; then we cut to the cops chasing him.

In a novel, however, if you write the entire book in the first person or in the third person POV mode, you CANNOT then cut to scenes not featuring your POV's eyes.   You can only say in your writing what your POV character sees. 

It sounds technical, but it's a major issue for writers of action. Because in action scenes, especially in huge space battle scenes, YOU HAVE TO SEE ALL THE ACTION.  You can't have this, for instance:

Reilly and Dwyer sit in front of the TV, switching channels. 

'According to CNN,' said Reilly, 'the alien ships have just encountered the first wave of our space defence force.'

'My God,' said Dwyer. 'My brother in law is a pilot on one of those defence ships - let me call him on my mobile phone so he can tell us what's happening!'

This kind of scene does not play well with lovers of action SF; they want to be UP THERE with the defence force, killing alien ass at first hand.  The brother in law, in short, has to be the POV character; Reilly and Dwyer must be relegated to collateral damage.

Of course, it's possible to have an 'omniscient  narrator' - this is the way Dickens used to write.  He'd be the god of the story, describing to us what HE saw with his eyes - the chimney sweep on the crossing, the old man in his Curiosity Shop, etc etc.  But the danger is, when you use this voice, there's a loss of immediacy.  It CAN still be done, but has to be done sparingly.

Take this, the opening of Asimov's Foundation:

The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the planets of the Galaxy...' etc. 

In fairness that's just the prologue; but even so, it's dry as dust, pure expository prose. Contract that with the real beginning of the book, Park I, which has a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica, then follows it with:

There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considered too dry for our purposes in any case.

That's the narrator as character - Asimov himself, mocking his own sources for their dryness. It's the Storyteller Voice.  And that's certainly still one way of achieving ubiquitous POV. Douglas Adams does it brilliantly in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Far out in the uncharterted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy, lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

It's exposition we adore, because it's the voice of our Narrator, the adorable Douglas.

But in Action SF, the ominscient narrator is harder to pull off.  Who, the reader may ask, IS this guy? And if he or she is narrating it, does that mean the action has already happened, the result is already known?  The omniscient narrator, then, can interfere with the vital 'present-tenseness' of the action writing, the illusion it's all happening NOW (even though the prose is technically in the past tense.)

To get over this problem, many action SF writers use the old trick of multiple POV. In other words, if you have enough characters, damn it all, at least ONE OF THEM must be there to witness the big action setpiece space battle.  Peter F. Hamilton favours this approach - he has so many character-POVs that you  need a flow chart to keep up (but remarkably, it always holds together, grippingly.)

I've also recently been reading Scott Westerfeld, who is a master of this multiple-POV approach. In The Risen Empire, for the first long section, he tells the story of a single setpiece action sequence  from the POVs of a vast range of characters - Pilot, Captain, Executive, Officer, Doctor, Pilot, compound mind (hey, this is SF), and so on.  Some of these characters settle down to be actual PROTAGONISTS; but several of them hold no long-term value; they are only there because of what they SEE.

And thus, by alternating from character to character to character, Westerfield achieves a perfect widescreen experience; we the reader see everything that a film camera would and could see.  We see the major characters, the minor characters, the long shots, the close ups - it's a stunning replication of a cinematic experience though artful prose.  And damn it, it's exciting.

(And, in Debatable Space, I vary this technique by having multiple POVs all in the first person.)

But even that isn't enough!  It's okay in the ground wars, and the classic mano a alien battles (John Scalzi has a great example of this in Old Man's War, in which the super-powerful aliens with their super-duper weapons 'prefer' to fight the human soldiers in single combat. Why! How dumb are they! But it makes for an exhilarating action SF setpiece.) But when it comes to space opera battles - who can possibly see all THAT?  The heroes in their space ship see what's on their screen; the villains in their space ships see what's on THEIR screens.  But there's no conceivable justification for seeing - at first hand - missiles flying through space, hitting space ships, being deflected by shields, etc etc etc.  All the great action scenes you witness in shows like Battlestar Galactica are only possible if you have cameras, or if you have established an Asimovian omniscient narrator voice.

I'm talking about images like this:

Great images - but who is seeing this? No pilot in a spaceship would have such a clear view, so you can't describe it UNLESS you have a) microcameras in space b) a spaceflying alien's POV c) an omniscient narrator or d) balls of steel.

Rule 4)  Define and escalate your jeopardy

This is the killer; it's the hardest thing to do and also the most important.

Let's say your troop of human soldiers arrive on an alien planet and start killing aliens. Why? 

Blood flows, limbs are lopped off, alien gore is spilled, plasma blasts burn, bombs explode...

But why?

It doesn't matter how 'enjoyable' (sorry, but we can't deny we love this stuff!) the violence is, it means nothing unless there's an objective, and a jeopardy.  That doesn't mean it has to be a 'just war'.  You could have soldiers killing aliens just to steal their land; but if your likeable heroine is abducted and is about to be eviscerated or worse -  then suddenly SOMEONE WE CARE ABOUT is in jeopardy. And we know Why; and any amount of bloodshed from thereon in is permissible.

So writing jeopardy is all about asking the question, 'What's at stake?' and 'Who's in jeopardy?'

When I worked in TV drama we would sit around a table and brainstorm these questions for hours on end.  So the bad guy has escaped from police custody and is about to murder another victim. Well, yawn, who cares? But if the bad guy has escaped and has abucted the hero's cute 5 year old daughter - massive jeopardy!! We all care!

All Hollywood movies work around this jeopardy template.  What's at stake, who's in jeopardy, and is the somebody who's in jeopardy vulnerable and cute?  If the hero's cantankerous old bat of a granny has been abducted by the aliens - well, a) it's not as exciting and b) you do rather feel sorry for the aliens.

But it's not enough to have one jeopardy; there have to be multiple jeopardies, which escalate by the end.  Humanity itself is usually at stake in action SF stories - the planet Earth will be destroyed unless we kick this particular alien ass!  But jeopardy can be subtler. It may be it's the hero's integrity that's in jeopardy.  The hero - a brilliant soldier - has killed aliens all his career and has suddenly realised it's humanity who's the bad guy here. So he has a moral choice; do the right thing, or the wrong thing? And if he does the right thing - he's saved his integrity! Even if he loses the battle, he'll have won the story.

This, pretty much, is the story of Avatar; and also the story of High Noon. A man's gotta do what a  man's gotta do; if he doesn't, he loses his soul. 

And jeopardy is also tied in with POV.  Every time you create a POV in a novel, you create a character that the reader has to care about - even if it's only a brief cameo role.  And once the heroes of the story are defined, then those are the people the reader will care about most.  So they, by definition, must be MOST in jeopardy; and their integrity, and morality, must be the most challenged.

So when you write from the POV of a character, you're not just creating 'eyes'; you're creating a character the reader can care about, and love or hate.  And you do this a) because creating rich characters is a pleasure in itself and b) because (from the action SF writer's perspective) you can't have exciting action stuff unless IT INVOLVES THE POTENTIAL DEATH OR MUTILATION OF CHARACTERS THE READER GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.

God, that sounds cold-blooded;  but it's true.  Action without character can work okay on a movie screen - where you can lose yourself in the spectacle. But it doesn't work nearly so well on the page, where the reader's empathy has to be snagged on the writer's hook. 

Rule number 5) Give your characters a break

The perfect action story is a series of exciting setpieces intricately woven together and escalating to an even more exciting finale.  But you can't achieve this if EVERYTHING is action.  There needs to be light, in order for there to be shade.

One of the most impressive pieces of action writing I've ever read is the original screenplay of The Fugitive by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart. I read it for a film company who were looking at acquiring distribution rights for certain territories; and I was awed at the sheer shameless pace of the damned thing. In the opening scene the prison van containing Dr Richard Kimble crashes and Kimble escapes; and he doesn't stop running after that!  Setpiece led to setpiece with barely a pause for breath - but that 'barely' was esssential.  Running away; searching for clues about the one-armed man; cleverly evading capture; running away again - that was the underlying rhythm.  The mystery and the chase interwove to create non-stop suspense, with (as I recall) a single slight romantic digression, because the writer knew that's what was needed.

In fact there are two versions of this version of the Fugitive. The script I read by Twohy is the one that blew me away; Jeb Stuart did the major rewrite which was actually filmed, and was different in very many respects - the setpieces, the characters, and the addition of the brilliant Tommy Lee Jones 'shithouse' speech.  But both versions were brilliant in my view because they both preserved the balance between action & mystery; the suspense never faltered, but the action was never repetitious, or 'so-what-ish'.

So variety is a key tool for the action SF writer.  Sometimes there's action; but sometimes there's suspense (which is anticipated action). And sometimes there's mystery (who's to blame for the frakking action which killed X or Y?)  And sometimes there are gentle subtle character scenes (establishing characters who the reader can empathise with SO THEY GIVE A SHIT WHEN THOSE CHARACTERS ARE KILLED OR INVOLVED IN DANGEROUS ACTION.)

Writing action SF is a tough job - nay, a dangerous job!  It's very easy for the Action SF writer to be struck by an off-target simile, or wounded by a hyperbolic description of gross carnage.  We constantly imperil our moral sense by revelling in scenes of murder and depravity.  But we are a fearless and indomitable breed, and never falter as we go about our business of killing and maiming bad guys and endangering the lives of adorably cute secondary characters. 

In conclusion, I should just say that these brief comments about how to write Action SF are no substitute for the real thing; so get out there, and kill!

If Jackals Ruled the World

I've finally seen Avatar, and it's as amazing and spectacular as everyone says.  The 3D experience is exhilarating, the plot is tight and smart, and the concept is brilliant.  It's one thing to write a story from an alien's point of view; but Cameron has gone one step further, by allowing a human being to become an alien.  (I know that also happens in District 9 - but in Avatar you really start to see and feel the world from this new, extraordinary perspective.)

I do have a couple of gripes about the movie though.   And I accept that my criticisms probably say more about me than they do about James Cameron.

But really,  who would actually want to live on that ghastly planet full of simpering size zero models?  They're all so skinny!  Where are the tubby aliens!

I also have a problem with the sheer unremitting niceness of the aliens.  Admittedly, Neytiri the cute alien love interest, does get to snarl and be cross from time to time, and those indeed are her sexiest scenes. But the deal is: humans, especially American soldier humans, and American mean-minded bureaucrat humans, are a Bad Thing (except for our small team of liberal-leaning American nice guys, including one Hispanic woman.)  And the aliens, by contrast, are a Good Thing. For they are 'primitive', at one with nature, in touch with their feelings, and receptive to the gaia of the planet in the way that rich materialistic Westerners (like me and, quite possibly, you) simply aren't.  

Well okay, it's a movie, and that's the story, and I'm not going to knock it.  But there's something about this vision of the sacred primitive that has always got my goat.  Because in reality, lots of ancient and primitive cultures have been violent and warmongering.  Some civilisations, like the Maya, died out because of greed and war.  The Incas and the Aztecs were also brutal violent cultures; and their Spanish invaders were no better, morally speaking, but also not that much worse.

And that's humans for you. We are a violent, predatory, competitive species, and there's never been a time in history or pre-history when that hasn't been the case.  And no wonder: we are products of an evolutionary system that privileges survival over all else.  Nature is red and tooth and claw - damn, I wish I'd said that! - and the only way to stay alive is to kill better, flee better, or hide better than all the rival species. 

If primates had remained in the trees, and jackals had become sentient - would the world really be a better place?  Would capitalism be more humane and fair, if snarling hyenas in suits ran the banks and the financial institutions?  Would the streets be safer if wolves were in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme?  Or wouldn't they just - being wolvish by nature - steal and kill and mug unsuspecting elderly wolves?

Lions are the kings of the jungle; but they are lazy, arrogant and savage beasts.  Would sentient lions do a better job of this planet?  Or wouldn't they just sleep for eighteen hours a day then nuke all the other lions for two or three hours before going to bed again? 

Evolution is a cruel schoolteacher; and for that reason, my guess it that most aliens we encounter - all of whom will have been subject to evolutionary forces - will be just as violent and selfish and brutal as we, as a species, are.

Of course I like to believe that humanity is capable of better things.  Humans can be wise, poetic, liberal, gracious, and kind.  (I'm not saying I am any of those things though.)  But generally, I would say - looking around a post-Iraq War world, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, at a time when greedy bankers who almost destroyed our financial system are being rewarded by massive bonuses and new highly paid jobs - I'd say we are a species that has a long way to go before we can call ourselves a civilisation. 

In Avatar,  the balance of nature is vividly dramatised as a bond between all living things.  In evolution, I would more cynically argue, the balance of nature is that if there are too many herbivores, the predators will catch them more easily and then there will be fewer live herbivores.  And if the predators get too skilful, they'll kill too many prey; and then they'll die of starvation. 

Evolution is a battlefield littered with corpses; it's really NOT that nice.

That doesn't mean I'm defending the humans in Avatar.  Nor am I denying the beauty of Nature, and the extraordinariness of the way so many diverse creatures sustain life in a complex web of inter-relationships.  But 'one-ness' with Nature only gets you so far; it takes hard work, and moral courage, to pursue and enact the ideals of justice, peace, cooperation, democracy and fairness. 

So we, as a species, have a long way to go; but I'm betting that most other species in the universe will have the same problems, and the same flaws, as we do.  For that reason,  I'd prefer a less rose-tinted view of alien life.  Let them have flaws; let them make mistakes.  Let them be the slaves of their own evolution - whether they are predators, prey, parasites, or symbiotes. 

And let's also hope that they, and we, learn to work together and with others, to build a culture that isn't based around the desperate desire to thwart and humiliate others, in order to be 'top dog'. 

Movie Zone: Guest post from Archie Tait

I've recently started opening up this debatable space to guest blogs...most recently, Stuart Angell McGregor's splendid piece on The X-Files and his own original, never-broadcast show The Flashlight Department.

Watch out for more of these guest pieces, which will generally be grouped under the heading of Movie Zone, TV Zone, and Book Zone.  And if you look to the left of this page, under Debatable Archives, you can enter any of these zones to read these blog-essays, or 'blessays', as I like to call them, though I doubt that word will catch on. 

And here, in a mighty blog, is Archie Tait - cineaste and producer, who has worked as a pioneering film distributor and scheduler (at the ICA Cinema in London), and as a television producer and executive producer has created a staggeringly large and diverse body of work - from Bomber, to The Paradise Club, 99-1, The Uninvited, Chimera, and Heartbeat.

Archie and I have been talking a lot in recent years about science fiction and movies and,  well,  all sorts really.  And here's his take on
 

Why Science Fiction Movies Aren’t More Like the Written Word

Take it away, Archie....
***************************************************************************

Any Science Fiction maven, however old or young, knows the complaint.  Science Fiction is an enormous genre, covering philosophical, metaphysical, sociological, psychological, historical and spiritual speculation.  So why do so many people, not Science Fiction mavens, still think it’s about men in shiny suits shooting ray-guns?

Hmmm.  Maybe it’s because of this kind of thing…
 

 Or this kind of thing…. 

 Could be this….

 It doesn’t even have to be men, and the suits don’t have to be shiny…

 
 But it’s all pretty much the same image isn’t it?

In a recent Movie Zone blog  about The Watchmen, Philip Palmer concluded with this hope: ‘…that we get some rich science fictional variety in the movie theatres in the years to come - character-based SF that moves us, and touches us, existing side by side with Snyder-style (Watchmen) eye-banquets.’

 I agree with Phil’s pluralist demands.  Still, Science Fiction isn’t just one or the other – emotions or images.  It’s about ideas too. Isn't it?

In passing, though, I have to admonish young Philip on his late-onset adolescent infatuation with Snyder's soft-core eye-candy in WATCHMEN.  The extended sex sequence not only stops the story dead in its tracks  but also quite contradicts the overall theme of the film: ageing Superheroes, and how they decay physically and morally.  In a film that has so much story, it can't afford the time for any asides,  Snyder takes an extraordinary dog-leg away from the thematically-driven narrative to reveal that,  far from ageing,  Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg are actually remarkably well-preserved hot young things, who recover their youth and get it on before you can blink an eye.  I am certainly not against sex (where would we be without it),  and not at all against sex sequences in movies (which are always entertaining). But I am against filmmakers who include sex sequences that contradict their own narratives and themes, to placate an imaginary audience of adolescent boys who can't watch any movies that doesn't feature this scene.

Ahem... Now, where was I? Yes -  can Science Fiction movies articulate or develop ideas? Or will it always be about the power of the movie image to astound us?

 Let’s consider this question…
 

Ray-Guns

 Science Fiction by its very nature is a zone of infinite possibility.  So what about these ray-guns?  Why do these action-packed, violent images hold such sway in the popular imagination?

 The short answer is – the movies.

 Whatever else the movies do – they move.  They require action.  Science fiction in the movies tends to involve marauding monsters, alien invasions and star-fleet battles.
 

Back-in-the-Day-Guns

 But hold on – surely even before the Movies, the very template of the genre was set by Jules Verne, the Father of Science Fiction, who yoked together the Speculative with Adventure?  Verne’s scientists – Professor Lindenbrock in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871), Michel Ardan in From the Earth to the Moon (1867), Nemo in 20,000 Leagues (1872) and The Mysterious Island (1874)– were explorers, adventurers in the world of the Future.  Men of Action.

 It was from Jules Verne that the Movies borrowed not just plots, but the template for the Science Fiction Serials that developed the iconic figures of the Mad Scientist, opposed by the Two Fisted Adventurer.  FLASH GORDON (1936 and onwards) was the pinnacle, but dozens of others were churned out by poverty-row studios, incorporating stock footage plundered (usually abandoning any sense of continuity) from newsreels and European spectacles.

 The Serials and the Poverty Row Programmers are the movie equivalent of the literary Pulps.  But unlike the sometimes beguiling, haunting and intellectually challenging stories that appeared from time to time in Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, the Serials were all about Action.  Frequently contradictory in their story-telling, often senseless in their characterisation, the Serials are concerned only with moving to the next cliff-hanger, from which the Hero is extracted with little regard for science or logic.

 From the serials, Science Fiction movies adopted the templates of Adventure and War.  Adventure plots would lead to the discovery of unknown monsters [KING KONG (1933) remains the greatest]; the War template was used for alien invasions [EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)]. Spectacle is the name of the game.
 

But it all came from the Father of Science Fiction himself…

Dad                                                                           Mum

Attack of the Five-Foot Woman

But hold on again.  Let’s go further back into the pre-history of the genre – to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  She published ‘Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus in 1818 – fifty years before Verne published his first novel. Obviously her tag-cliché should be ‘the Mother of Science Fiction’ (though it’s not).   Here is an iconoclastic Explorer – Frankenstein – who through science questions the rules and assumptions by which we all live. Once he takes that step, and unforeseen forces are unleashed, it is not long before we meet Science Fiction’s equal and opposite requirement of the Active Protagonist – the fear that ‘There Are Some Things Man Is Not Meant To Know.’

We have entered the realm of Transgression:  an essentially moral arena,  a world of consequence,  in which our protagonists encounter the philosophical and the metaphysical.  We are going down a different road here.  We will not meet any ray-gun-blasting,  shiny-suited spacemen on it.

 The Incredible Two-Headed Monster

 In Frankenstein, we discover the invention of two major movie genres in the same story. Not only the Science Fiction movie, but also the Horror movie.

Though Science Fiction is generally about ‘The Outward Urge’, and Horror generally takes us into Inner Space, it is an indication of the richness of the genres that Science Fiction can take us on inward journeys [John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966)], and Horror movies can take us outwards on a huge scale [George Romero’s LIVING DEAD movies; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s PULSE (Kairo) (2001)], Horror and Science Fiction are two sides of the same coin. They are parallel explorations of speculative fiction through the rational and the irrational.

And it’s often hard to tell one from the other.  The SF Serials are themselves warehouses of the irrational; Arthur Crabtree’s FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) and Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979) are at least as much Horror movies as Science Fiction.  And over on the other side, the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN cycle, a key set of horror iconography, is an extended portrait of scientific ambition and discovery.

It is arguable in this Horror/Science Fiction overlap – in these smaller films –  that the cinema often finds its equivalent of those beguiling, haunting, intellectually challenging stories of the Science Fiction Pulps.

Literary Gold to Movie Tinsel: Alchemy in Reverse

Olaf Stapledon’s remarkable Science Fiction novels range from the then-unprecedented scale of ‘Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future’ (1930) and ‘Starmaker’ (1937) to the inner richness of ‘Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ (1935) and  ‘Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord’ (1944).

In ‘Last and First Men’ he traces the history of humanity across 2 billion years, and 18 successive species of humans; ‘Starmaker’ is nothing less than the entire history of life in the Universe.  By contrast, ‘Odd John’ is the life of one man, from birth to death, an intellectual superman; and ‘Sirius’, probably still his best-known work, the life of a dog born with the intelligence of humans, yet with entirely different instincts.

 It is no accident that Stapledon was a moral philosopher; his novels are philosophical fictions of a radical kind.  In cinema, only Kubrick and Clark’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) has attempted anything approaching the enormous scope of ‘Last and First Men’, and then only in snapshot.  Despite the scale of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpieces METROPOLIS (1927) and WOMAN IN THE MOON (Frau im mond) (1929), he was never able to tell stories on the sheer scale of Stapledon, Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert.  Arguably, only the Serials would have had the time and scope to be able to tell such epic stories, had they not been bound by budget and market to two-fisted ‘space western’ stories.

Since Lang,  cinema’s storytelling,  derived from silent movie grammar,  has speeded up,  but not advanced significantly beyond the narrative devices evolved by Edison,  Griffith,  Pudovkin and Eisenstein.  In fact, it could be argued that cinematic story-telling has actually regressed since Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) and Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927).  It has devolved back into the earlier story-telling tropes of Lang’s (still eye-popping) earlier films DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER (Dr. Mabuse der Spieler) (1922), SPIES (Spione) (1928) and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) (1933).  In these films Lang created the Mad Scientist / demagogue figures adopted by the poverty-row serials, and subsequently by the James Bond movies.

 Small is Beautiful

Instead, it is in pockets of relative obscurity that we find cinema’s ability to tap into the most poetic and challenging areas of Science Fiction – in  

Chris Marker’s LA JETEE (1962) [the source for Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS (1995)]; and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (Solyaris) (1972), STALKER(1979) and SACRIFICE (Offret) (1986).   And in those boldly dystopian small movies that invariably failed to find an audience when first released (Arch Oboler’s FIVE (1951); John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966); Joseph Sargent’s COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970); George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971) and Saul Bass’s PHASE IV (1974).
 


 
 
 
These are all ‘small movies’ – character-driven movies, scratching under the surface of their protagonists. 
 

The Shrinking Man With the X-Ray Eyes

Let’s consider two beautiful, small-scale Science Fiction movies whose narrative trajectories are strikingly similar (and along the way, continue to consider how movies differ from prose).  Richard Matheson’s screenplay THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), directed by Jack Arnold; and Ray Russell and Robert Dillon’s original script X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963) directed by Roger Corman.  The titles are pure pulp exploitation.  The films are exciting, haunting and sad. Both are small-scale stories about single protagonists; yet each film metonymically invites the viewer to contemplate huge subjects.

 The Shrinking Man Becomes ‘Incredible’

 In Richard Matheson’s original novel ‘The Shrinking Man’ (1956) and in his own adaptation THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, size and scale are themselves the subject.  Scott Carey inhales insect spray, and is accidentally exposed to a radioactive cloud.  Then he begins to shrink. 
 

That’s just about all the ‘science’ in this ‘Science Fiction’ story, which Stephen King argues in ‘Danse Macabre’ (1981), would be more accurately classed as a fantasy.  (I’d say he is largely correct, though when we get to considering the story’s conclusion, it’s really not quite as cut-and-dried as that).

The story, told in both versions from Scott’s point-of-view, is about what happens to your perception of yourself when something you have always accepted as immutable turns out not to be the case. Scott’s shrinkage is a great, multi-valent metaphor for just about everything in life we accept without too much thought.  It is a story about change – in ourselves, and in the world around us – and how we choose to adapt to it, or not.

Book vs. Film

Although both novel and film tell almost identical stories – the Big Events in the film are all drawn from the original novel – the book and the film have different emphases, and different outcomes.  And it is interesting to note Universal’s insertion of that extra word into the title.  As though the novel’s content – extraordinary as it is – weren’t quite enough.   As though for the movies, credibility isn’t quite enough – they have to be incredible; they have to challenge the very suspension of disbelief on which they rest. 
 

 In the novel, a medium in any event able to convey the detail of characters’ thought-process and state of mind, the emphasis is on Scott’s self-perception.  The metaphor of shrinkage is identical in both book and film.  But in the book Scott is not only married, he has a daughter; and his daughter has a teenage babysitter. As Scott shrinks, his relationship with his wife changes – his dominance in the marriage, as in the home, recedes, and with it his sexual confidence.  The sexuality of his marriage becomes nightmarish as he perceives his size – his ability to satisfy his wife sexually – shrinking.  As sex becomes a no-go area, his wife begins to treat him asexually, as a child; which puts the reverse-dominance through another cycle. 
 
 Scott becomes infatuated with his daughter’s teenage babysitter, but his knowledge that he is continually shrinking, more than his moral qualms, keep him from doing anything about it.  Finally, even his own 5-year-old daughter becomes a threat – she treats her father like a doll.  Compared with this, the next phase of Scott’s traumatic descent – threatened by a cat, and fighting off a giant spider with implements from a sewing basket – seems almost like a respite.

 None of this psycho-sexual detailing is available to Matheson the screenwriter.  In the mid-50s, even if any Universal Pictures studio executive wanted to explore sexual themes in a special effects picture (they didn’t), the MPAA Production Code precluded them from doing so.  In the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, Scott and his wife have no daughter, so no teenage babysitter either.  Scott’s wife’s attitude moves directly from shock to sympathy.  The movie is therefore quite short (81 mins), and more interested in Scott fighting off giant beasts.

 However, this is not to dismiss the movie as inferior to the novel. The movie is simpler than the novel, and because of that, the huge metaphor of the Shrinking Man, expressed visually, has its own remarkable power.  Shorn of much of the inwardness the novel allows Scott, the film allows us to form our own ideas about the significance of his shrinkage (though the movie does have a voice-over narration that simply and powerfully allows us access to Scott’s thoughts and feelings).

The novel achieves a remarkable intertwining of the stages of Scott’s realisation of his changes (derived from a parallel time-structure, as the story unfolds simultaneously in the present travails of a Lilliputian man, and in ruefully accounted flashback).  He is dogged by regret, and driven by anger.  In the present, he fights the spider for survival, constantly alert.  But he is constantly diverted by thoughts of the past – regret for what he didn’t value, or didn’t achieve; anger that his future has been stolen from him.

The movie follows a linear course from the encounter with the glittering cloud, through Scott’s perception that he has changed, which no one else shares; and through his ever-diminishing incarnations.  In the movie, we need no prompts, no inward reflections: we see the metaphor in action, unexplained. We understand Scott’s dawning fear, his realisation of sexual inadequacy, his loss of dominance in society and in the home, and his increasing apprehension of further weakness.  The metaphor of shrinkage, simply observed, signifies different meanings at different stages – it is a shifting metaphor, but enormously powerful because of that.

Stripped of the searing intimacy of Scott’s memories, which constantly interrupt his quest for survival, the film becomes an oddly contemplative journey towards accepting fate. It is in all ways a more positive account of Scott’s journey, making the stages of his descent a journey, towards the transcendence of all his previous beliefs. It is dark poetry, a parable, emotionally moving in its embrace of the inexorable, and the inevitable. It strips away from its protagonist all physical limitations, all human relationships, to arrive at spiritual simplicity.

 (We can compare THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN with the shifting, unspecified metaphor of Jack Finney / Don Siegel’s magisterial INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS (1956) – a metaphor strong enough to induce cold sweat after dozens of viewings, yet unspecific enough to be justifiably interpretable as both anti-communist and anti-McCarthy).

 The differences between the book and film become clearer as both move on to Scott’s encounter with a character common to both versions – the midget girl, Clarice.  In the novel, Scott has a sexual affair with her – he discovers that he has not lost his sexuality with his height – he is still ‘himself’. In the film there is no sexual dimension to their friendship – Scott discovers that he is not a human freak – he finds acceptance.  And just as important as his acceptance as a fully viable person, is where he finds it – in the carnival.

 Dark Carnival

 In American movies, the carnival is invariably ‘the Other Side’. It is a place of night in a brightly-lit society; it is the violent and unpredictable obverse of a rigidly organised, stable world; it is the world of the impoverished and the dispossessed, outsiders from the ‘overground’ world of wealth and comfort.  When Emil Jannings’ stuffy professor is ruined by his infatuation with Dietrich’s Lola-Lola in von Sternberg’s THE BLUE ANGEL (1929) he ends up in the carnival. Tyrone Power starts as a carnival barker in Edmund Goulding / Jules Furthman’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947) – so how can he fall further?  We see how far – he ends up a geek, biting the heads off live chickens.  When psychopathic playboy Rob Walker murders tennis-star Farley Granger’s errant wife in Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), it is at the carnival; to which Granger must return to exorcise his guilt by destroying it.  And it is where Ray Milland’s Dr Xavier finds his home after exercising his hubristic power in Corman’s X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963).

When Scott gets to the carnival, he has fallen beneath the lowest level of American society: he has joined the Underclass.  In the novel, he regains his sexuality – and loses his wife’s love.  In the movie he discovers – as Todd Browning had mapped 20 years previously in his long-suppressed FREAKS (1936) – that ‘freaks’ are human too: more so than many ‘normal’ people. (It is probably significant that in the movie’s more upbeat account of Scott’s encounter with Clarice, he meets her not at the carnival, but in a diner next to it – a lighter, brighter place.)

 The midget girl and the carnival mark the end of the metaphor of ‘descent’.  Whatever Scott’s shrinkage means from now on, it is understood relatively.  He is going through stages of understanding his human condition – and of the Human Condition.
 

The End – And Beyond

And finally – the end of the book and film are different, in significant ways.  Actually, both end their narratives in the same way – there is no end.  There is no arrest of Scott’s shrinkage; certainly no miracle cure, no reversal, no return to former social and personal equilibrium.  Those things are left behind.   Particularly for a film in 1957, this is an astonishingly radical conclusion.  The horror the story elaborates turns out to be never-ending;  but also, when fully embraced, beautiful.

 The novel ends with a haunting passage, as Scott recounts his realisation that his journey through change will not end even in death – and that it is a good thing.  Unlike his former existence, his life is an unending process of reinvention and discovery. 
 

‘But to nature there was no zero. Existence went on in endless cycles.  It seemed so simple now. He would never disappear, because there was no point of non-existence in the universe.

 ‘It frightened him at first. The idea of going on endlessly through one level of dimension after another was alien.

 ‘Then he thought: If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence.

 ‘He might not have to be alone.

 ‘Suddenly he began running towards the light.’

 And it is here that the novel, from its cursory beginnings in a ‘scientific’ explanation of Scott’s condition, re-connects with the concept of Science Fiction.  In this, it is more Science Fiction than Stephen King gave it credit for.  As Einstein observed, there are always new worlds to be discovered. (1)
 

 Say Hello to God

 The ending of the film is haunting too, in a different way.  In a voice-over passage reportedly added by director Jack Arnold, Scott’s constant transformation is accounted significance by being recognised - by God.  ‘And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears locked away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God there is no zero. I still exist.’

 This lurch into religiosity is entirely typical of American movie Science Fiction, and is a hallmark of the genre’s representation in mainstream cinema. It occurs almost identically in the George Pal / Byron Haskin version  of H.G. Wells'  WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), written by Barre Lyndon.  WAR OF THE WORLDS is at the opposite end of the budgetary spectrum to HE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. Wells’ ‘scientific’ deus ex machina – exposure to the common cold destroys the invading Martian war-machine – is characterised by ‘germs – the littlest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon our planet.’  H. G. Wells wrote the line, almost verbatim; but it was written by a character, it was not Wells’ judgement on the story; and it was not accompanied by a swelling hymn and chorus.

X-Ray Eyes 

 Roger Corman’s 1963 film X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES is based on a screenplay by Ray Russell and Robert Dillon, from an original idea by Roger Corman. It began as a saleable exploitation title in the imagination of James H. Nicholson, who with his partner Sam Arkoff ran the legendary drive-in studio American International Pictures.  AIP produced many of then finest examples of off-Skid-Row pulp SF movies, many directed by Corman.  Their titles are a cornucopia of ‘must see’. Many don’t live up their monikers, but many do: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS,  I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF,  THE BRAIN EATERS,  HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER,  PANIC IN YEAR ZERO. And Corman and Richard Matheson’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, from HOUSE OF USHER (1960) to THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (1965).

 But if THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES (1955) turned out to have rather fewer (no – let’s be honest – it is one of the shabbiest monsters ever seen), at least TEENAGE CAVEMAN (1958) had a spectacular final twist, hijacked to historic effect by Rod Serling for his 1968 adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel PLANET OF THE APES.

 And X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES  is a film that dwarfs even its magnificent title.  Ray Milland is Dr Xavier, who experiments on himself with a serum be believes will cure blindness.  Xavier is a driven scientist, whose own blindness is moral – he cannot ‘see himself’.  His punishment for hubris is success; and his ‘success’ will reveal to him ‘What Man Is Not Meant To Know’.

 Xavier’s experiments lead to an addiction – he wants to see better, he wants to see more:  soon he discovers that he can see through solid objects and materials.  At first the discovery is the source of illicit fun – the promise of nudity (unfulfilled) the movie was selling to its drive-in audience. Then it puts him further at odds with his medical colleagues when he uses his new powers to contradict their diagnoses.  But Xavier’s addiction leads him accidentally to kill his boss: he flees, confident his newly acquired power will protect him from the law.

This is where Xavier’s ability to ‘see through’ things acquires a metaphorical resonance.  Pursued by the law, rejected by sympathetic friends and fellow scientists he insults and demeans, he is forced, like Scott Carey in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, into the sanctuary of the carnival, where he uses his X-ray powers to diagnose illnesses.  And here he re-discovers his affinity with ordinary people – re-discovering his original vocation as a doctor.  Just as in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, the carnival is a place of re-orientation; but it is also, in more conservative movie terms, a place of damnation. 

 The metaphor of ‘seeing through’ is growing, it cannot be stopped:  Xavier ‘sees through’ people to their psychic pain, and it begins to swamp him. He flees to Las Vegas, enriching himself through his ability to see when slot machines will pay out, and the next card to be dealt; he justifies his acquisitiveness by claiming to ‘see through’ the casino’s system for fleecing ordinary people.  

 There is a further level of seeing for Xavier to penetrate. He has seen through the physical world, ‘seen through’ its false ideology; ‘seen through’ the masks people create for themselves.  Now he begins to see through ‘reality’ itself – and he has the increasingly inescapable sense of ‘being seen’ himself.  Dimly at first, then in a horrific blast, he sees God.

In their indispensable Overlook Film Encyclopedia Vol 2 – Science Fiction (ed. Phil Hardy), Hardy and/or Paul Willemen have many perceptive things to say about X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES and the metaphor of sight, a theme they first explored in their book Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision (ed. David Will, Paul Willemen). But their final observation that X’s special effects are ‘weak’ is a quite inexplicable judgement.

 The visual effects of this very low budget ($250,000 says Corman – probably even that is an exaggeration) are really outstanding.  Cinematographer Floyd Crosby’s prismatic colour separations are simple, but exceptionally strange and disorienting.  They are highly effective throughout the film, and it says a lot that Xavier’s ultimate vision tops them all.  Xavier’s vision is not a benign God.  Abstract colour has rarely been used to such effect in cinema.
 

 Xavier is driven by this vision to his final apocalypse.  It takes place in a fundamentalist religious gathering on the edge of the desert.  It is Old Testament, utterly punitive.  Shocking though it is (and I still remember my jaw dropping and my hair standing on end when I first saw it) there is speculation (by Stephen King, supported to an extent by Corman) that the original ending went even further.

Like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and WAR OF THE WORLDS, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES begins in the realm of Science Fiction, but unlike them, it is then drawn inexorably into the supernatural.  The film lives in the overlap between Science Fiction and Horror.  It seems fairly easy to reconcile Science Fiction and the Spiritual.  While it is possible for Science Fiction to co-exist with the supernatural, it is not possible for Science Fiction to embrace it.

 However, this takes us right back to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (and it is worth remembering that Roger Corman’s final film as director was an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound – a story by a Science Fiction absolutist, directed by a man who could only direct THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE and THE RED BARON (Von Richthoven and Brown) as horror films.

In Science Fiction there is also Horror – but it is horror of the rational and material kind. From Fritz Lang to David Cronenberg, it is a legitimate pedigree.  Yet from the same sources, pushed further than the spiritual into the supernatural, we find the connected but distinct realms of fantasy and horror.

It is important to say that while ‘…that God in his wisdom…’ and  ‘To God there is no zero.’ may invoke the supernatural, neither story relies on it.  It is equivalent, in the development of English philosophy, to Bishop Berkeley’s answer to the question of how we know the world around us actually exists, and it is not merely an imaginative construct of the mind. He concludes that we understand that the world still exists, even if we cannot see any more of it than our own vision reveals, because of the existence of God.  God sees all.  Therefore he sees the World.   Therefore the World exists.

We would say now that Berkeley was mistaken: that there are many other scientific proofs of the existence of the material world, independent of our perceptions of it; and that even if he were unaware of those proofs at the time, his proof is based on unproveable faith, which he could not see beyond.  (Yet if Berkeley were alive today, he could still legitimately argue that ‘scientific proofs’ might equally be the product of imagination.  Just a really good imagination.)

 We should also compare the Bishop’s idea of God with the view of Stanton Carlisle, played in Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film by Tyrone Power, in William Lindsay Gresham’s original novel ‘Nightmare Alley’ (1946):  ‘What sort of God would put us here… in this stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy who likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly?  It’s a nut house.  And the biggest loonies are at the top. (2) ’

 Needless to say, that speech did not appear in Jules Furthman’s still searing screenplay of the film.  Gresham’s idea of God is close to Xavier’s vision in X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.  Corman’s film may embrace the supernatural, but it is not conventionally religiose.

 Religiose or not, we are still in the world of Science Fiction.  More than being logically possible, it is logically probable that there are new worlds, presently wholly unimaginable, awaiting discovery.  These are not only physical worlds, presently defined, like distant planets, or beneath the oceans.  There are also worlds that may exist within and between the  dimensions we currently believe we know and understand. The worlds waiting for us, in Gene Roddenberry’s immortal split infinitive,  ‘to Boldly Go’…

The Beginning of The End

This blog started out asking whether Science Fiction movies could articulate or develop ideas, and ends up pitting William Lindsay Gresham against Bishop Berkeley.  Who will win?  There's only one way to find out!  Fight! Fight! Fight! (3)

So - yes, these movies invoke ideas, and trigger new ones.

However, the question of whether movies can develop ideas, in a more complex 'dialogue' with the audience, is still open.  In the comparision between the novel the Shrinking Man and the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, we can see that in the movies, action tends to replace reflection.

Except for Bruce Lee, to whom action IS reflection.

This does not mean that ideas are evacuated, replaced by images: it means that ideas are expressed in images, edited together.  Ideas expressed in images tend towards the general: towards big, inclusive statements.  Moving images lead us towards the biggest, the most abstract (and most vague) commonly understood ideas - hence the sudden lunges towards religiosity. This is not a quality that leads to the development of debate or ideas.

      Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Contact: 'Big, Abstract and Vague' - we love it.

Yet, while we have seen how long-form movie serials are resolutely uninterested in anything other than thrills and action (pleasurable though they are), TV series have engaged in extended debate with the audience. Most obvious in this respect is LOST, which triggers in the viewer an extended series of speculations on 'What's It All About?'  Also BATTLESTAR GALACTICA explores a post-9/11 metaphor of building a New World Order.  HEROES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, over their many seasons, have developed a complex set of rules and qualifications for teenagers dealing with their supernatural/emotional sides: for their target audience, the equivalent of scanning all the relevant bits of Freud and Salinger.

Finally, The End

And to return to the movies: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES - just because the images are often bold and simple does not mean that they cannot reflect quite complex ideas. The ideas are metaphoric: they conjure ideas in the mind of the viewer, in the memory as much as through direct viewing experience.

Those images become embedded in the reflective consciousness of the viewer, in an effect more akin to the experience of poetry than of prose. We are haunted by them, and they trigger in us unexpected moods.  Chris Marker's LA JETEE may be only 28 minutes long, but it is as rich in imagery as any feature film, or many novels.

So Scott Carey's reflection on his continued experience at the end of Matheson's novel can apply also to the different qualities of ideas expressed by movies and prose.  They are parallel but different; different but connected. Each produces a different quality of meaning, uniquely through its medium.  The proposition is not 'either/or', but each alone, and both together, in the expression of the genre Science Fiction.

The Final Question

The Final Question: would you trade the existence in the world of the novel The Shrinking Man for the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN?

Of course not.

And that is why Science Fiction movies shouldn't be more like the written world.

 - Archie Tait, copyright 2009
 **************************************************************************************************
(1)   While writing this blog, I came across Zack Handlin’s splendid comparison of Shrinking Man book and film on badmovieplanet.com/duckspeaks.  It was a bit like the American astronauts finding a ragged Union flag on the moon at the beginning of First Men in the Moon (but the other way round).  Of course I think it’s splendid – we say very similar things.  But Zack says them more briefly and wittily.  Which is why I leave my acknowledgement to the end.
 
(2)   Quoted in Woody Haut’s terrific essay in Eureka Video’s characteristically immaculate Region 2 DVD Nightmare Alley (2005).
 
(3) A British joke.  Apologies to non-UK readers.

Avatar’s Astonishing Success

Avatar has become, in a relatively short time, the 2nd highest grossing film worldwide ever.  It's the battle of the titans now...Cameron has himself to beat, because Titanic is the No. 1 highest grossing film worldwide ever.

Purists might query whether these figures are adjusted for inflation (if they were, I think Gone With the Wind might be in the top spot.)  But even so!  This really is astonishing.

Sensual SF

I think SF should be sensual...if you want to know why, have a peek here.

Fantasy rules?

Numbers aren't everything, but here's an interesting breakdown from our friends at SF Scrowsnest on the dominance of fantasy movies at the box office.  

Maybe SF epic Avatar will change this...it's currently breaking box office records all over the world.

Best SFF Film of 2009

It's coming to that time of year when the pundits start issuing their lists of the Best of '09...I thought I'd add to the pile with my own three favourite SFF films of 2009.

Well actually I can't manage 3 - I have to stretch to 4.  And in reverse order:

Number 4) is District 9, a wonderfully funny and also terrifically exciting action SF set in South Africa, in which the hero turns into an alien.  Peter Jackson executive produced this gem, and it was directed by Neil Blomkamp and written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.

Number 3) is Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman.  I've seen some negative comments about this on the web - on the lines of,  it's 'just' a Hollywood blockbuster.  But I thought it was fast and furious and funny and very clever.  I love the fact that Abrams - with his US TV background - has the courage to mix slapstick humour, like Kirk's balloon hands, in with moments of intense drama. I watched this in a packed cinema, and the audience oohed and aahed just as audiences ought to...This is space opera and it rocks.

Number 2) is The Watchmen, a faithful (thought purists might say otherwise) version of Alan Moore's comic book which was visually extraordinary, and morally challenging.  Some found it a bit slow-paced and digressive; I thought it was a work of drama that had the courage to take its time.  And it was sexy too - great to see a Hollywood movie that isn't afraid to admit that humans have bare bodies beneath their lycra.

But up there as number 1), my favourite film of the year, as well as being my favourite SFF film, is Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. 

Despite the dumb spelling of the title (it's an in joke that is so "in" only Quentin gets it),  this is a serious, intelligent, thought-provoking, exciting, hilarious piece of a work from a film-maker who just gets better and better.  (Death Proof worked perfectly, in my view, as a B movie with real characters and great performances; and Kill Bill is kick-ass action rendered into astonishing visual poetry.)

I read quite a lot of hostile reviews of Basterds, taking exception to the fact that a) Brad Pitt's men keep scalping Nazis, which is not very nice, and didn't happen in real life and b) the final sequence has an event (I SHAN'T SPOIL IT!) that also didn't happen in real life.  Oh, and lots of reviewers seemed to think that Tarantino had lost his mind, and simply shot random scenes from different films then tried to splice them together in a last minute frenzy.

However, I found it to be a very carefully constructed, rich, and utterly entertaining piece  of cinema.  And I loved the fact it is  based on an alternate history scenario in which the course of the Second World War was changed by a bunch of characters out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. (The fact the film uses alternate history means that - like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle - it most emphatically counts as SF, not just 'war movie.')

Basterds begins with a shockingly suspenseful sequence in which a Nazi colonel murders a family of  Jews - all bar one, Shosanna, who escapes, and plans a dark revenge.  She is the heroine of the movie, and the best thing in the movie; this is a luminous and wonderous performance from Melanie Laurent, who is even better than Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa.

The story of Brad Pitt and his Apache style guerrilla warriors is woven around Shosanna's story, skilfully and beguilingly.  But Tarantino - a master of postmodern genre-mashing - is too smart to make a dumb 'scalping Nazis' movie.  He makes the dumb scalping Nazis stuff his enjoyable B-movie-style subplot, and THEN builds a structure of complex drama around it. 

I adore Brad Pitt for giving such a selflessly comedic performance; he stomps around like Popeye in an Ingmar Bergman movie. He knows it's silly, and Tarantino knows it too. That's the gag; diversity of tone and clashing of genres are the things that light Tarantino's fire.

So here's to the Basterds!  And let's hope next year brings as many great movies.

My Number 4: Beware, spaceship over Jo'burg!

Er, Mum, I have a lobster's hand, is that normal?

Why can't I get my head into this poster?

Space...the final frontier....SO cool.

The Watchmen, in their jim-jams.

He's definitely a basterd.

 

Actually, she's not, but she fights on their side.

 

And this is Shosanna, our feisty Jewish heroine.

Movie Zone: The Red Shoes

As a post-Christmas treat, I went to see a classic movie at the BFI (formerly the National Film Theatre).  It was The Red Shoes,

by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, an oldie and goldie.

It's a sweet, colourful, beautiful film with acid in its veins.  It tells the story - the deceptively simple story - of a young composer who writes the music for a ballet based on the Hans Christian Anderson legend of the red shoes.  And it intertwines that with the story of the young ballerina who dances the lead role in that ballet, and is acclaimed.  It's the classic 'star is born'  formula which Simon Cowell milks to this day, but which he did not invent.

As always with Powell and Pressburger's movies, I watched this piece growing amazement.  For the films of these two men - close collaborators who wrote, directed and produced their films jointly in Coen Brothers style - are not structured or conceived in orthodox ways; they don't fit the template for 'popular movie'.  They are simple, yet complex; conventional, yet bafflingly weird. In A Canterbury Tale, the main story concerns a man who pours glue on women's hair in wartime England; but the real story is about England itself, its buildings, its music, its people.  And in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp we are introduced to the old fartiest of old farts - an elderly, bald moustachioed military man (who resembles the period newspaper cartoon caricature known as 'Colonel Blimp', a by-word for reactionary military types) and then we flash back in time to see what the old fart was like when he was young, and dashing, and magnificent.

I saw a screening of Colonel Blimp in front of an audience of young screenwriters in Yorkshire - and they were visibly stunned at the strangeness of the approach, and the acidity of the wit.  These Powell and Pressburger films are the most bizarre blend of hokey oldfashionedness and audacious art. 

And so The Red Shoes - which I saw many years ago, and vaguely remembered as being a rather pretty ballet drama - slowly and eerily evolved into a tragedy about the mania of art.  The driving force of the story is Boris Lermontov,  impresario and chief of the Ballet Lermontov, whose genius is such that he can transform other, ordinary mortals, into geniuses.  He's a talent spotter and a mentor rolled into one; he inspires the young composer Julian Craster into creating a work of shimmering wild brillance; and he has total faith in an untested ballerina who he has discovered, despite the reservations of all his trusted advisors - and his judgement is totally vindicated as she dances with passion and grace and terrifying frenzy.

A long section of the movie consists of an uninterrupted but edited version of the final ballet, merging stage magic and movie magic, and conjuring up poetry and colour in motion of a kind that would give James Cameron's Avatar a run for its money.

And that, pretty much, for a good hour or so, is the story of the movie!  The ballet company goes about its business. They stage a ballet. It's successful. And the legend of the red shoes - magic red shoes that dance and dance and dance until the dancer who wears them dies of exhaustion - helps launch the career of two artists.

But then, slowly, the real story unfolds.  I won't give away the final twist;  but I will say that there's a reason this is one of Martin Scorsese's  favourite movies.  For this is a movie about power, and about art. And above all it's about the mania of art - the belief that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more than creating beauty that will last for eternity.

This, of course, is not true.  Friendship is more important than art; love is more important than art; raising a child is a greater achievement than writing a poem, or making a movie, or writing a novel. 

But it doesn't always feel that way.  Every time I read a blog or an article about the process of writing, I can smell the heady exhilaration of creation; the supreme conviction that nothing matters more than the white-hot frenzy of creating a work of fiction, or a piece of screen drama.  Often, for much of the time in fact, the process of writing is boring; much of it is sheer hard labour; but every now and then, the work writes itself - the characters come to life - the dancer becomes the dance - and very few things can beat that joy.

That's why writers write; it's not for fun, it's for the opposite of fun. It's for those moments of exaltation.  Creativity is a dangerous drug; though, fortunately, a legal one.

And this is the real story of The Red Shoes.  It's about a man - Boris Lermontov - who forsakes his humanity in order to enable others to create great art.  He is of course a madman, and a fool, and a devil.

But sometimes, I have to admit, it seems like a tempting trade...

Fantastic Times Ahead

More great movie SF in the pipeline it seems - James Cameron is to produce (but probably not direct) a version of the fab 1996 movie Fantastic Voyage, featuring a bunch of miniature explorers inside a human body. The same advanced motion capture technology used in Avatar will be used to the full.

I actually have a novelisation of this movie - written by Isaac Asimov!

The Rebirth of Cool SF?

Mark Charan Newton has written an excellent recap of the firestorm of comment that followed his controversialist piece on why SF is dying, and fantasy kicks butt.

I've added my two penn'orth to this debate; and in a nutshell, I feel that great SF is being written at the moment, but for some reason it's not at the cutting edge of that elusive thing called 'zeitgeist'.

Maybe this will change very soon when Avatar hits the cinema screens, which is very soon now.  This could be the SF movie that does what the movie of Lord of the Rings did.  (I can still remember audibly gasping at the shot of  Gandalf on the high tower - it felt as I'd stumbled up into a whole new level of cinematic intensity.)

Early reports suggest that Avatar is the cinematic experience of a lifetime; though the story isn't as strong as it might be.  And if that's so, it's a pity. But just on the basis of the trailers I've seen, this is a film that exhilaratingly makes the audience feel what it's like to be an alien on an alien planet.  And that in itself has to be worth the price of admission.

When I was out in LA about a year ago I was told by an exec in a company that was famous for doing big science fiction movies that SF was now 'out'.

Since then, however,  Roland Emmerich is now slated to direct a movie of Asimov's Foundation trilogy, there' s a whole slew of SF projects in development involving aliens in American high schools, and now we have Avatar.

A new dawn, or a minor blip? Let's see...

Okay, this is war!

I've just read Mark Charan Newton's fiery blog on Why Science Fiction is Dying and Fantasy Fiction is the Future.

Normally I take a very mild attitude to other people's point of view. If that's what you think - then fine, go ahead and think it.

But on this occasion, Mark has hit me where it hurts.  It's a very low blow indeed.

And I am enraged.  

Science Fiction is not dying! Fantasy Fiction is not the future!  And I can prove the fallacious error of Mark's thesis with two compelling arguments.

Firstly, I don't want this to be the case.

Secondly....

Actually there is no secondly.  I don't want this to be the case - but Mark is quite right. SF sales are diminishing - not by much, but they're certainly not growing. And fantasy sales are booming.  And hence, the genre I love so much is shrinking, and becoming less 'cool'. 

Damn, I appear to have punched myself on my own jaw, and am now reeling and blinking.

Let me tackle it a different way. Why are SF sales being whupped by fantasy sales?

Mark proposes four reasons, and three of them I think are incorrect.  The reasons are these:

1) More women than  men read books.

2) Culture has caught up with our imagination.

3) Literary fiction is eating up SF.

4) Modern fantasy audiences have grown up on the films of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

As far as point 2) is concerned: I really don't think this is true! Yes, computers and mobile phones have made the concept of  'cyberspace' an everyday reality not a fictional notion.  But we haven't colonised space, we don't have sentient robots, we haven't disovered aliens, we don't even have a colony on Mars or the Moon.  The future still has much to offer; and in any case, science fiction is much more than an extrapolater of events. It's a genre of fabulous ideas, in which the implications of future progress are explored in thrilling stories about real characters.  That's the kind of SF I read and  love.

Point 3) is a clever one; but the fact that Margaret Attwood has written an SF novel isn't going to affect the sales of established SF writers. If anything, it makes it more possible for SF writers to go 'mainstream'.

I'd dispute point 4) too. Yes Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have made fantasy into big box office. But what about 2012? Independence Day?  The Watchmen? Star Trek? All the comic book movies?  Not to mention all the amazing SF on TV.  Science fiction movies and TV series have a huge huge fanbase, and yet for some reasons viewers of SF movies don't read SF novels in the same numbers. (Why? Well I'm trying to figure that one out.)

Point 1) is a killer: yes, women do read more books, and it seems that by and large they don't read 'blokey' hard SF.   (I'm basing this on anecdotal evidence, admittedly  - if the publishers know more or different, I'd love to hear it.) 

However, I do recall being on a panel at a Sci Fi London event where a female fan asked, sweetly and devastatingly, why SF writers are always so obsessed with 'getting it [the science] right.' 

And her words struck me like a body blow.  Here was a fan who wanted to be told stories. She didn't want books which taught her all the science she'd so far managed to avoid by not doing physics and chemistry A Levels.  And so the whole geeky, anoraky dimension to hard SF was, for her, like a huge Keep Out sign.

And yet! SF - of the hard and space opera variety - is all about concepts and ideas and amazing extrapolations of scientific insights. Like the many-world theory, or the astonishing properties of black holes, or the commonsense -defying theory of quantum physics.  These concepts give a backdrop to a world of the extraordinary, where wonderful events can occur as a matter of course.   And it  is or should be no harder for the lay reader to grasp these concepts than it is for readers of Dan Brown to follow his historical and esoteric digressions. 

'Hard' SF , therefore, shouldn't mean SF that's 'hard,' and on which you will be tested by stern faced boffins.

And, personally, though I love the SF of ideas, I get bored when it's gadgety and geeky, all about the machinery (plot and otherwise) and not about the story and the characters.

But should we - those of us who depend on, let's face it, making a living out of this stuff - abandon all hope and start writing heroic epic fantasy?  Or is there a way to revitalise the SF genre, to make it be and appear to be less 'blokey'?

There's a killer argument here, and its name is Battlestar Galactica.  I was working on TV crime dramas when it first came out, and wasn't part of the first wave of fans. I then started watching it when I ran a writers' group in Brighton, after all the women in the group told me I had to watch it. 

At about the same time Zanna, my former script editor on The Bill - who is now an academic, a poet, and a theatre director, and generally the last person you'd expect to be an SF fan - also told me to watch it. She actually gave me the DVD of the introductory mini-series, and suggested (subtextually - she's a master at gentle, courteous subtext) that I'd be a fool and a wastrel and a knave if I didn't watch it.

So I did, and I was hooked, and I'm only a few episodes away from the climax of the final series.

But why is this show so beloved by female fans?  For it is a "blokey" show if ever there was one. It's all about hardware and spaceships - the Vipers, the Battlestars,  the Cylon ships.  There are even long scenes in the engineering bay in which spaceship mechanics talk about the mechanics of spaceships.  There is jargon aplenty.  All in all, there is little - very very little - of what one might call "girly" stuff. And yet women love it. They don't just love it, they adore it,  in their millions.  It's SF! It's Hard SF! Why????

I think there are three reasons.

First, it's bloody good. It's smart, complex, morally ambiguous, and has characters you can engage with, and care about, and be exasperated by.  Women fans are smart, just like male fans; they want stories that challenge them, and make them think and feel.

Secondly, it's sexy. Genuinely sexy.  It's not the old-fashioned pulp cliched stuff with big-breasted Amazons with no brains; the women in this show are sexy, the men are sexy, and the Cylons (Number 6! be still my beating heart!) are the sexiest of all. And it's sexy in a totally non-sexist way. The beautiful young women in this show are often seen in revealing vests; but the gorgeous young men wear the same uniforms. And the old guys - Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh - are also seen in the same revealing outfits, and dammit, they may be old and gnarly but they look good.

Thirdly, the women are just like men.  They can be vicious. They can be cruel.  Kara Thrace  (Starbuck)  is a swaggering arrogant jock who punches her senior officer and smokes a cigar - and we love her. 

My theory is that the show is made a bunch of men who know nothing about women, so they write them just like men. And women, it seems,  like that approach  - because it's not condescending, and reflects a fundamental truth about our genders: women can, and do, kick ass.

So I don't see any reason why contemporary SF  - which at its best is sexy, challenging, and full of great stories featuring real vital characters - should be tarred with the "blokey" brush.

But, it seems, it is. 

And my suspicion is that this is why fantasy sales are booming...the old fans are as loyal as ever (hence, great sales for Al Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, John Scalzi and other established SF types) but the newer fans tend to be women, and they tend to prefer the fantasy and urban fantasy genres. 

So, how to persuade these readers to try what's available within the genre I most love?

Well I don't know - I wish I did.  But I'll end by quoting Kim Stanley Robinson, a wise owl, who in this piece wrote:

 I say this as a happy fan and an awed colleague: the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing.

 Or to put it another way, Mark: Science Fiction kicks the ass of Fantasy Fiction!

On the Art of Name Dropping

I've been following the tweets and blogs of Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright recently, which are great value, though sometimes odd. But I've been hugely impressed at the casual way he name drops - 'as Quentin (Tarantino) said to me and Tim Dalton'  kind of stuff.  Which you'd expect of course from a film-maker who's broken into Hollywood; but it still impresses the hell out of me.

Neil Gaiman's tweets are also good at casually name-dropping - he saw an episode of QI recently, in the actual Green Room. Thus implying, without saying so in as many words, that he and Stephen Fry are bosom buddies.

Sigh. 

Sadly, name dropping is the one of the many things I'm hopeless at.  After working in film and television for a fair number of years, I've met my share of famous people.  But my casual name dropping anecdotes always manage to make me sound like, er, a dope.

For instance - I had dinner with Alan Davies and Josie Lawrence once, in a smart Soho restaurant -  and was seized with a violent coughing fit that lasted about twenty minutes.  Alan's gracious good manners never ebbed, but as the quarter hour struck I could see a hint of terror in his eyes.  Josie, bless her, dodged my coughy spittle adeptly.

I met Harry Potter actor Richard Griffiths on the set of a TV show and we had a nice chat. (You see! That's not a proper anecdote!)

I was once horrendously late for the screening of a David Puttnam film, and the man who ushered me brusqely to my seat was, um, David himself. And he recognised me of course, though gallantly never mentioned it again.

I once script edited the great and legendary Colin Welland, and started out with the conviction we would become firm friends and rugby mates.   Instead, I decided he was a pain in the arse, and we've never worked together since.

One time, I met the beautiful actress and impressionist Ronni Ancona in a London club, and momentarily forgot my own name.

HER: 'Hi, I'm Ronni.'

ME: 'Um, um, um.'

On another occasion, I almost met Richard Gere when he gave a talk at the National Film and Television School, where I had a part-time role as a tutor; but I didn't.

I did meet Martin Sheen, several times, when he was doing a show at the Royal Court Theatre and I was working there.  And actually we had a few nice chats. But my only actual anecdote was about the time when I was watching a dress rehearsal of the play in which Sheen was the star (The Normal Heart), when a member of the backstage crew suffered a fit. All of us who were there backstage were frozen, not knowing what to do - but Sheen realised something was amiss, leaped off the stage, put the man in the recovery position, and galvanised the rest of us into helping. 

This is a great story about Martin Sheen of course - but I'm the Zelig in that anecdote. I just stood by and watched.

The people whose friendships I treasure tend to be other writers, who are famous among their peers and to their family, but not celebrity material.  I realise therefore I will never make the pages of Heat magazine; except, perhaps, in the back of shot, having wandered into a photograph on my way to the bar.

All in all, I name drop in much the same way that Inspector Clouseau drops priceless Ming vases.

On Misfits

Ep 4 of Misfits screens tonight. If you've missed it so far, you can catch up here.

I'm in love with this show. It's funny and dark and nasty, and all the main characters are totally unlikeable - and hence, I love them all.  There's the gobby Irish one, the gobby chav one, the sexy slutty one,  the socially incompetent nerd, and the (actually rather pleasant) black athlete - all of them serving Asbos,  They are the much feared underclass; if they moved up a social tier, they'd be yobs; and they are never ever nice to each other. But I care about them, each and every one.

The brilliant conceit of the show is that they all have superpowers which are useless for fighting crime, and essentially just exaggerate the anxieties and fears these characters have anyway.  The telepathic girl (Kelly) is constantly enraged when she hears people thinking she's a slag. The nerdy one (Simon) can become invisible - but no one notices him anyway.  And the black athlete (Curtis) can turn back time - and don't we all wish we could do that, when we see what a mess we've made of our lives?

Ep 2 was my favourite so far - so very rude, and shocking, and yet with a big big heart.

This show is made by Clerkenwell - producers of the John Hannah Rebus, and the supernatural drama Afterlife.  I worked with Clerkenwell 'head honcho' (as movie people like to say) Murray Ferguson during my time at Scottish Television - he's a softly spoken gent with impeccable taste. And my friend Petra Fried is now Head of Drama at Clerkenwell, and Executive Producer of Misfits.

Together with the equally rude True Blood, this is my favourite show on telly at the moment.

On Rebus

I went into Borders on Charing Cross Road last week... a sad experience to see such a lovely bookshop in its dying days.  I looked for bargains - but didn't have the heart to buy any.

But I was however mightily cheered up to see this for sale. It's the box set of that forgotten cult series - the Rebus episodes featuring John Hannah.  Of course most viewers now associate Edinburgh detective John Rebus with the wonderful Ken Stott, who plays him in the most recent version.  But almost 10 years ago Hannah did four episodes, of which I am proud to have writtten (strictly speaking, co-written, since I was the rewrite guy) one.

Television history records that Hannah wasn't 'right' for the role, and maybe that's true. But I think the gritty, atmospheric film noir approach of these four eps was wonderfully true to the spirit of Ian Rankin's brilliant detective novels. 

I had a double involvement with Rebus. Initially I was the development executive at STV in charge of getting the books to screen. I commissioned ace Scottish writer Mark Greig to work on a treatment, and we were lining up Ken Stott (!) for the lead role.

Then Hannah's company - Clerkenwell Films who now make the stunning Misfits - got involved and Mark and I, in the nicest possible way (Clerkenwell are one of the loveliest and most honourable indie production companies around) were elbowed aside.

But later, I came on board to do my co-writing  job on The Hanging Garden, and Mark wrote the next episode, Mortal Causes.  We were by then firm friends, and since we shared a villain - Cafferty - we both took the view we were in effect writing two halves of the same story. 

My episode screened four days before 9/11 and the Twin Towers terrorist attack, and got a great audience. The next episode, Dead Souls, appeared a few days after 9/11 and was bumped back in the schedules till very late because of the rolling news coverage, and (understandably) hardly anyone watched it.  And Mark's episode - Mortal Causes - was pulled altogether, because it had a contentious racial violence theme, and those were, remember, very tense times. Mortal Causes  wasn't screened till several years later, even though it's a truly fine piece of television drama.

So it's great to see all four eps together in a box set, a unified series at last...

Callan RIP

You may have seen this already...Edgar Wright's tremendous tribute to the late, great Edward Woodward. He was wonderful in The Wicker Man, and many other things, but for me he will always be Callan.

For the benefit of younger readers of this blog, Callan was a great British TV noir series, featuring hitman Callan and a regular 'snout' (informant) called 'Lonely' who, er, smelled, hence his loneliness.

On 2012

Roland Emmerich has just announced his new movie project - a disaster movie in which THE ENTIRE DAMNED SOLAR SYSTEM falls to pieces, spectacularly, and only a handful of A List Hollywood actors survive, floating on a plank in empty space. 

This is the only way he could top 2012, a disaster movie which features the end of the world, in astonishing graphic detail.  A supermarket splits in half; cities fall into the sea; the South Pole moves to Minnesota; and Everest looms in the middle of an ocean.

It's a great spectacle, but it's also a classic example of a Hollywood movie built by story engineers, not written by real writers. A real writer would have found some pain and pathos in this story of the End of Days.  A real writer would have created characters who you didn't want to punch because they're so damned noble. (The evil Russian oligarch with the big lips was the only character I liked - because he was so flawed.)  And a real writer would, quite possibly, have found a place for passion and eroticism and love, amidst all the falling buildings - because if the world's about to end, wouldn't you want to find a quiet place, and drink a bottle of wine, and make gentle elegiac love with your partner?  I mean - don't these people have any emotion other than blind panic?

But story engineers do know how to engineer a good story.  The thrills thrill, the spills spill; all the characters have journeys (from A to A 1/2), and yes, I did have a tear in my eye when Danny Glover did the noble thing half way through the story.

It's a shame, though, that Emmerich didn't feel able to call upon the many brilliant screenwriters in Hollywood who can infuse genre material with real truth and wit. 

Oddly, it feels like an oldfashioned movie because it's not in 3D. After Pixar's Up, I can't believe that all blockbuster movies aren't made that way.

For a fabulous image of Apocalypse, as painted by John Martin, see Paul McAuley's highly perceptive blog, and scroll down to 4th November.