SF & F
I recently went to see Michael Winterbottom's new movie The Killer Inside Me, which has been the subject of much controversy because of its graphic scenes of violence towards women. It's based on the noir novel by Jim Thompson; and many have attacked it as being misogynistic and excessively violent. Others have defended it on artistic grounds, while conceding its violence makes it 'troubling'. And there are some who have defended the film, on the grounds that it shows the brutal reality of domestic violence. Which means it's a healthy corrective to all those Hollywood movies which routinely glorify violence.
I admire Winterbottom as a film-maker - his Twenty Four Hour Party People is a masterpiece - and I love noir in general, and the books of Jim Thompson in particular. To be honest though I found the film a bit of a yawn; BECAUSE IT WASN'T NEARLY VIOLENT ENOUGH.
I am in fact staggered at some of the reviewers who felt it was the most shocking thing they'd ever seen in the cinema. There's a scene where Casey Affleck bashes up Jennifer Alba; and there's a second assault scene; and that's about it really. Compared to what you get in many thrillers and action movies and horror flicks, it's very mild stuff.
What IS weird however about both 'beating up women' scenes is that the women don't fight back - which makes the violence feel oddly detached, and not-credible; and hence makes it hard to care about the story and its characters.
I think there's real merit in the argument that Winterbottom has created cliched female characters who don't respond in the way that real people would. There's a hint that Alba's character in a masochist; but if so, that should be dramatised. She should BEG to be beaten, which would truly shock us; and I would strongly argue that there's nothing inherently misogynistic about showing masochism in a woman. Because masochists DO exist. I was once the fly on a wall in a Metropolitan Police investigation into a group of masochists who did the most appalling things - one chap hammered a nail through his own penis - and no one can deny it's a real psychological phenomenon. (What would be unacceptable, however, is to hint at the lie that ALL women like to be hurt - that gets you into the immoral/indefensible territory).
I think the real issue for me here is that Winterbottom is a cerebral arthouse director who hasn't mastered the basic concept that violence in cinema is there to be ENJOYED. We love to be scared, appalled, terrified; we enjoy getting inside the head of evil serial killers; we relish being pursued by a psycho who has killed all our friends. That's how violence works in genre cinema, and even in 'serious' cinema. The violence in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall gives energy and adrenalin to this brilliant study of the last days of Hitler. The violence in The Godfather - not your common or garden gangster flick but a true masterpiece about organised crime - is deliciously awful. Luca Brasi having a knife in the hand before being garrotted! James Caan being plugged full of holes!
The horrible cop getting his head shot apart by Michael Corleone!
These acts of violence function as essential elements of the overall pleasure that cinema offers. And it's not just Hollywood movies which allow us to "enjoy' violence. One of my favourite films of last year was the verite arthouse movie A Prophet by Jacques Audiard, an unflinching study of life in a French prison. Except it's not really a 'study' or an 'analysis'; it's a movie, and a gripping one, with savourable sequences of ghastly violence that keep you glued to the seat. In particular, the murder committed in the first third of the film is one of the most compellingly enjoyable pieces of cinema I've ever seen; it doesn't 'glorify' violence, but boy, it's fun to watch.
What I'm saying is; let's stop pretending. Of course violence, when it's in fiction rather than in life, is fun. It's part of the imaginative experience; imagination is our way of living other lives, and since we can do so without incurring actual injury, the more violent the better. It's cathartic, it's exhilarating, it can be beautiful; but the key point is; IF YOU'RE A SANE AND MORAL PERSON, WATCHING VIOLENT MOVIES DOESN'T MAKE YOU VIOLENT. Reality, fiction; fiction, reality: two different things.
And, as a writer of action SF, I have to concede that violence is my business. I write violence, I read violent books by other authors; I spend large parts of my day wondering whether a character should die by having his head blown up, or whether it would be more fun to have him eat a live snake and be consumed from the inside out.
Adam Roberts, in his masterly and very funny novel Yellow Blue Tibia, explains how the science fiction writer approaches the art of violence, as a group of Russian SF authors (including the first person narrator) plot a story of alien invasion:
'Let's have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine, ' [said Frenkel], 'That would be the best option.
How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually? This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one....Writers, you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in that respect. A realist writer might break his character's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day through his life. How can this not produce calluses on the those tenderest portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?
Adam is bang on here; science fiction writers, and their close allies, fantasy writers, are truly evil creatures. We are the people who cannot bear to write crime novels about serial killers because the body count is so darned low. We celebrate the intellectual and extrapolative essence of our genre whilst shamelessly wallowing in atrocity and horrific acts of barbarity, evisceration, beheading, and worse.
Here's a sample of some of the stuff I've been reading recently:
Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs. The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arch of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.
He came in with a pulse-blade, ghettho style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid end of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the other three worrying Johnny.
(from Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons)
There were heads and arms and legs and halves of bodies writhing and squirming and cursing under foot, and headless bodies dashing about the room colliding with friend and foe indiscriminately. If ever there was a shambles it was there in the great council chamber of the seven jeds of Morbus.
(from Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
I launched myself into the one I'd decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side.
(from The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers)
Hell, I read this stuff all the time, and what I write is often WORSE in terms of gruesome barbarity. (Red Claw got a great review from a site called Emotionally Fourteen, which then graded it 10 out of 10 for Number of Eviscerations- and I'm actually proud of this.) So does that mean I have calluses on the tenderest parts of my mind, the bits that are used to focus empathy, as Adam so beautifully if cruelly phrases it?
Well perhaps so. But on balance I feel that constantly wallowing in imaginative violence has made me not one whit more aggressive, or capable of violence. I remain as timid, fearful, and cowardly as I have always been. I would happily slay a Barsoomian plant man with my long sword; but I am not in the habit of mugging elderly ladies, or randomly shooting people in pubs.
This is why I get very wary when kind-minded commentators praise a film like The Killer Within Me because it shows the 'reality' of violence. It does nothing of the sort! It's just a movie. Real violence is what happens in the real world, and I abhor it; and I don't need films to tell me it's undesirable. (That doesn't mean fictional stories should be immoral; the art of writing violent fiction is being able to shock the audience with gory stuff without losing track of the real moral values we, the authors, believe in.)
But why, I am forced to ask, does violence in fiction appeal so strongly, to me and to so many of you? Why do we not daydream about peaceful characters, who broker peace and leave a trail of concord and amity behind them? Why do we prefer the Man with No Name, or Conan, who are more inclined to leave a trail of corpses behind them?
I guess the answer is obvious; we're never more alive than when we are in fear of dying. And to experience that intensity of life while reading a book, or watching a film, and without any ACTUAL possibility of dying, is vicarious ecstasy.
So I will continue to read books and watch films that glorify and revel in violence; I will splash in blood and gore as my protagonist hews a path through his or her enemies with a broadsword, or a plasma gun; and I'll continue to treat senseless murder as a staple element of my daily entertainment.
And let's not forget, violence can be wonderfully beautiful - WHEN IT'S NOT REAL. Tarantino shows this in his magnificent Kill Bill, a glorification of violence in all its forms and traditions. So I'll end with some images from that, one of my favourite violent movies ever.
The legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, who created such memorable images of Conan, Tarzan, Vampirella and more, has died aged 82...and, to honour his memory, I've been taking a look at some of his great paintings and covers. Here's a selection from the Frank Frazetta Unofficial Art Gallery.
Sadly the Sci-Fi London Festival is over, for now; but there are a number of great events scheduled by the guys in the future, including screenings at the NFT and another Oktoberfest.
I attended the Festival last Saturday as part of a workshop on film treatment writing, together with SF author Tony Ballantyne and scientists Simon Park and Jon Cowie. It was a brainstorming event - Jon and Simon and Tony provided the brains, and I chipped in with a few observations about writing and thinking for film.
It was an extraordinary event really; the air burned with amazing extrapolations. Jon talked about a concept known as the Perfect Storm, which is a well founded prediction that sometime this century the world will go to shit, thanks to the confluence of all the bad things happening together (climate change, overpopulation, global poverty, etc etc.) And we brainstormed how movie scenarios could be generated from this basic extrapolation. (Which is more of a firm prediction to be honest - beware the future, guys.)
And Simon Park spoke with passion about his favourite creatures on God's own earth - bioluminscent bacteria and slime moulds. Again, these ideas can be the basis for original stories; or they can be the backdrop for a future world scenario in which our ideas about mankind's role as the dominant species are challenged (bacteria kick our ass as 'dominant species on Earth', easily.)
There was a lively group of attendees, many of whom had already written screenplays; and the intention is that some or all of them will come back to us with 10 page movie scenarios. Of course, each of those stories will be different - but the future extrapolations on which they are based will be similar, and based on our workshop debates.
Tony Ballantyne spoke rather brilliantly about what a story actually is; and how some concepts can yield great stories, in the hands of the right storyteller. Ask Tony about the Jar of Tang; it's his speciality subject.
The whole day was enhanced by the fact we were holding the workshop in the middle of the Hunter Museum of surgery, located within the Royal College of Surgeons. This Museum is an astonishing collection of body parts and skeletons which comprise one of the earliest successful attempts to turn medicine into a genuine science. (We had a wonderful guided tour.) And, trust me, this place is spooky as hell.
In the evening I sat in on a panel about media in 2050, with my old pal TV producer Archie Tait, media guru Nico Macdonald, and our charming chair Paul Raven. Aside from the fact that we panellists had searchlights in our eyes, making it impossible to see the audience, it all went well I felt. Archie and Nico focused on innovation in the arts; I (rather predictably) homed in on the issue of how artists (ie writers! people like me!) will be earning their living (HOW DO WE GET PAID!) by the mid 21st century.
It's often argued that the internet is a huge threat to the livelihood of creative types; I argued that it's crappy capitalist bureacracies (film distributors/ITV/take your pick) that are screwing up the media already. And so for me, the internet is a source of hope; not a thing to be feared.
There's a bigger debate to be had about this (The Internet: Black Hat or White Hat?) But I do think the future of the media will be an exciting one; and our very own Orbit Books looks set to be at the vanguard of that revolution. I couldn't say anything about this at the panel debate, nor can I do so in this blog, because it awaits an official announcement from Orbit. But there is Bold Stuff Being Planned as Orbit seek to find a way to use digital media to help creative artists, rather than being scared of it as a mere forum for 'illegal downloads'. (Discussion point: illegal downloading is like immigration. It IS a problem, but it's also hyped up by bullshitty media types as being more of a crisis than it actually is. Yes, no, or maybe?)
Anyway - more on this anon. I found the day hugely stimulating; and I'm hoping to hear more from the film treatment attendees once they have creatively simmered.
I've just been reading a fabulous post at Juno Books, which gives an excellent account of the urban fantasy, paranormal romance and sword & sorcery genres. And it also attempts a definition of that wonderful word 'kickassitude,' which Juno editor Paula Guran considers to be a defining ingredient of urban fantasy.
But what is kickassitude? Can only women have it? And who first coined this ridiculous but truly wonderful and adorably grammatically incorrect term?
It doesn't necessarily mean 'violent', ie kicking ass in the literal sense. But no one can deny that the little girl at the top of this blogpost has kickassitude in eponymous abundance.
But I would argue that one of the original kick ass dudes is this guy:
Philip Marlowe, the wise-cracking LA private eye created by Raymond Chandler, has attitude to spare. He's rude to cops; he makes fun of beautiful women; he's so smart, he's dumb. And I'd argue that Mike Carey's exorcist detective Felix Castor is totally in this Chandler wisecracking authority-defying tradition.
But kickassitude is also exemplified by this lady:
Yes, the classic femme fatale. Cool, deadly, scornful of authority. The femme fatale is sometimes attacked as being a misogynist creation, spawned by male writers who were afraid of female emancipation and who therefore regarded women as monsters to be feared. But hey, lighten up; femme fatales are female bad guys. They're fun roles; and these are empowered women. And they're funny too. Here are a couple more oldie but goldie kickass gals:
Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity
Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
In modern urban fantasy, you can spot the attitude from the cover; moody, brooding, cool, either dressed in jeans
or in sexy leather.
Or dangerously armed:
And go on, really spoil yourself, here's the Urban Fantasy Book Parade featuring a gallery of empowered ladies, together with a plethora of butts, backs, tattoos and moons.
One of my favourite kick ass characters is played by Charlize Theron in the mildly under-rated Aeon Flux (directed by Karyn Kusama, who went on to the direct the Diablo Cody-scripted horror Jennifer's Body.) Our heroine Aeon looks amazing, and utterly cool, with hair that never moves, no matter how many knock down fights she gets into. And most important, when she is violent, she is gracefully violent, and does an excellent multiple back flip that looks exhausting. This is violence choroegraphed like dance floor moves; and boy, it's great.
The essence of kickassitude is what it's not; these women do not crave approval, they do not flatter and plead, and they are not defined by their relationship to men. Men beg for their attention, not vice versa. (Just as it is in my own personal life!) So I would mark out Claudia Black in Farscape as a cool kick ass lady; she's a violent psychopath who's slowly discovering a conscience.
Kara Thrace has kickassitude in abundance of course. But Elle in Heroes merely pretends to have it; she curls her lip rather well, but she does not command our fear. It need hardly be said that Buffy kicks ass - but I'll say it anyway - and one could certainly put up a case for Eve Myles in Torchwood as an exemplar of kickassitude:
These are Independent Women; capable women; scary women; and sassy women. And if you look on the urban fantasy and SFF bookshelves, you'll find them in abundance.
In modern Hollywood however - with a few exceptions - kickassitude is in short supply. There are still SO many movies where the women are token women, eyecandy and sidekicks, rather than being fully fledged heroines or co-protagonists. Even Io (Gemma Arterton) in Clash of the Titans, for all her godly wisdom, doesn't DO much; and she has no damned kickassitude.
So in my view, Hollywood hasn't cottoned on yet to what its audience wants from its female protagonists; butts, tattooes, backs, a vivid personality, and...attitude.
Inspired by Archie Tait's sublime choice of SFF Song of the Week - with its anime theme - I've decided to make it Anime Week on Debatable Spaces. Yes, I'm like that, wild and impetuous.
So today, and every now and then when we feel like it, are some fabulous images of anime heroes with intros from arch guest blogger on this site Stuart Angell McGregor - who, when he's allowed out into the real world, also write screenplays, makes films, and reviews comics and graphic novels. (Adding all those things up - he's clearly NEVER allowed out of the house.)
Stuart Angell McGregor writes:
ANIME HEROES (Part 1)
SHOTARO KANEDA (AKIRA, 1988)
I had a green jumper when I was a kid.
Not just any green jumper mind. Oh no, the front of this one was emblazoned with the loveable and furry face of my childhood hero, Dogtanian, the brave star of the Spanish/Japanese animated mish-mash ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds’.
I ate in that jumper.
Slept in it.
Cuddled it lovingly as I ran around the playground, all carefree and childishly stupid, fingers grabbing at the frayed cuffs.
I was happy.
And then I saw ‘Akira’.
You see, in 1981, the American actor Cam Clarke voiced the spunky little anthropomorphised rascal I loved so much, and it wasn’t until 1994 – as I pushed my VHS copy of ‘Akira’, bought proudly with many weeks worth of pocket money, into my Aunt’s fat player – that I would come to discover how far Clarke had moved up in the world.
Toward the end of the 80s he found fame as Leonardo – the most ‘vanilla’ of the ninja turtles, despite those awesome swords – but here I was now, watching open-mouthed and wide-eyed as Clarke romped through the neon-soaked mess of Neo Tokyo, popping pills and kicking faces, as the voice of Shotaro Kaneda, leader of the teen biker gang ‘The Capsules’.
Kaneda, and Clarke, expertly exude two of the best kinds of rebellion – 1) a total lack of respect for any kind of authority (watch as Kaneda bad mouths school teachers, police officers, and baldy, serious-looking army generals alike), and 2) the ability to drive big shiny bikes very very quickly towards other gobby teens.
Kaneda can be a wonderfully vacuous character at times. He looks cool, driven by aesthetics, wearing a great jacket and riding the best bike in the world (EVER!), but also displays amazing moments of charming stupidity.
However, as the landmark ‘Akira’ marches on, shifting focus from these ongoing violent biker conflicts, to the post – WW3 Japan’s abuse and betrayal of its army of young psychics, the sheer joy of Kaneda’s delinquency becomes tempered somewhat. His youthful alienation gives way to a sense of both place and purpose as he falls in with proud underground rebels, and the fate of the world comes to literally rest in his hands.
But then, that’s the problem with all teen rebels.
Ultimately, some day, they have to grow up.
Some day, they have to become us.
I've just been told of an exciting book tournament being held by BSCreview...It's a knockout competition between rival books and the last book standing will, presumably, win fair maiden.
Hey - great idea!
Details are here. And my novel Red Claw is one of 64 genre books selected to compete for the best genre novel of the year crown. I'm up against Dragon Keeper by fantasy novelist Robin Hobb and - hold on one minute? Is this fair! A tournament between a fantasy writer and an SF guy! Why not a space battle with plasma guns?
Leaving that aside; you can take part by voting (for Red Claw! Obviously! Pay attention out there...) on this thread.
Meanwhile, the cover (and indeed content) of Red Claw have been getting lovely mentions over at SF Signal in their feature on Recent sf/f/h Book Covers That Blow Us Away; look out for the contributions from Aidan Moher and SFF artist Bob Eggleton.
I've been longing to share this for some time - and here it see. Lauren Panepinto's cover design for my next book Version 43 (available in all good bookshops from October; or if you telephone me, I'll sell it to you a word at a time.)
Lauren has written some lovely stuff about her approach to this cover, and the whole issue of an author's 'look'. (In reality: scruffy, & ill coordinated - but I think she means the books).
Now I want to see the book on some actual shelves...
It was, I am pleased to report, another great year for historical fiction.
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....
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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
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(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.
I love most if not all genres of writing....and before I wrote SF I mainly earned my living from crime.
With my third novel Version 43, I took a step forward in time from the events of Debatable Space and Red Claw, to a future world where all is peace and harmony, and there is no crime or injustice.
And then I thought - phooey! - and created the Exodus Universe, where all the outlaws and misfits and bad guys live. Much more my style.
In this lawless realm, the law is enforced by a small team of cyborg cops. And our hero is one such - known as the Cop.
This book grew out of my love of crime thrillers and pulp noirs, including and especially the books of the great Dashiell Hammett, whose Continental Op rivals Sam Spade, and could knock spots off Philip Marlowe.
But this is not a crime novel with a few SF trappings - it's very much rooted in its strange future world.
Here's a visual sample of the scary, genre-mashing dystopic vision that is Version 43. Don't take the images too literally - this is what's called in the film business a 'mood board'. These are images which inspired me, or spoke to me, or which resonated with me for reasons that aren't entirely logical.
And you can find out more about Version 43 when it's published, in autumn 2010.
I think SF should be sensual...if you want to know why, have a peek here.
Here are some images which inspired Red Claw.
Red Claw is the story of science and nature on an alien planet, featuring a motley crew of obsessional scientists who are patiently and carefully cataloguing all the species. Then the Doppelanger Robots start killing them...
The first set of images are taken from Wildlife Pictures Online - for Quality Pictures from Africa, which I highly recommend.
Sunset over Kruger Park
Nature red in tooth and claw...
What SF author could have invented a creature as strange as this?
Or this?
A horse, with stripes?
I'm sorry, but this is just so cute...
Here's Arnie...
Meet the good guys.
And the bad guy.
And here's Arnie one more time...!
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.
As the New Year begins, I'm looking forward to an intense and exhilarating writing schedule, with a new 2-book deal from Orbit which means, um, I have to write another couple of books.
What's more, my already-completed third book Version 43 will be coming out this autumn, or in the 'Fall' as our American cousins quaintly like to say. After that, the next book out will be a massively violent space opera called Hellship. After that will be - well I'm working on an idea, but it's still at early stages. Watch this space.
Since I'm writing this on New Year's Eve I'm naturally thinking back a little bit, about my previous two novels Debatable Space and Red Claw and how I came to write them. (Where do you get your ideas, Palmer?)
I think in all honesty I'm often inspired by images. The idea for Debatable Space came when I was in the Science Museum in London, standing underneath a rocket that flew to the Moon. The idea for Red Claw came in a butterfly zoo, when I was surrounded by hundreds of those beautiful amazing creatures and thought, wouldn't it be great if these creatures were huge nasty monsters and could FIGHT each other? (No, actually I thought about the wonder of nature - but Red Claw is, I must concede, a bloodbath of a book.)
Anyway, enough words. Here, for the next few days, are a collection of images that inspired each of these books.
And I'm starting off with Debatable Space, my first SF novel, which will always be the book closest to my heart.
Here are two galaxies merging...the wonder of space!
And here's an asteroid striking the Earth (artist's impression). Such shit happens a lot in Debatable Space.
This is an actual image of the flare from a neutron stare lighting up the Earth's atmosphere. Hey, I must have missed it...
This is Galileo above the Earth.
And this is Captain Jack Sparrow. The simple idea of Debatable Space was - Pirates, in Space!
And this is a kick-ass SF movie that lit my fire.
My spaceship is old and battered, and has sails (to catch the solar wind...)
And here's another beautiful image from space (of the Cartwheel Galaxy).
This is a Pierson's Puppeteer, which appears in Larry Niven's Ringworld, a big influence.
This is science fiction being silly, which I love.
Joss Whedon, cool people, great dialogue - what's not to be influenced by?
And did I mention Willow?
This is Buffy with a big book. It amuses me.
This is the book wot I wrote.
This is pulp SF at its pulpiest.
And this is an Isaac Asimov cover by Peter Elson.
All images of space courtesy of NASA.
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.
Over at SF Crowsnest, they've compiled their list of the top 100 SFF novels of 2009....I'm glad to see Red Claw is in there, at number 17....
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!
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...