Beware the plastic Cyborg Cop: the cover of Version 43

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...

A Great Year for Historical Fiction

It was, I am pleased to report, another great year for historical fiction.

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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....
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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
 **************************************************************************************************
(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.

On Version 43

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.

Sensual SF

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

On Red Claw

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...!

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.

On Debatable Space

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.

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.

Finally, the sexy aliens…

I've written a new Orbit post about one of my favourite subjects - aliens.  Take a look here.

This post prompted ace webguy Darren Turpin to send me a link to this fabulous story.

Best of 2009?

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....

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...

On Myth

Some great comments from Cara on myth...I was planning to write this exact same blog and now I have to dig in and think of something fresh to say on this topic.

The Writer’s Quest, Part 1: Find Yourself

I've been mulling about the Robert Jackson Bennett post about How to Write a Story over on the Orbit website. It's a funny, brief and utterly brilliant little essay.  And it's makes me feel a warm glow of anticipation about this guy - I haven't yet read Robert's debut novel Mr Shivers, but this blog alone marks him out as a talent to watch. 

Tattoos! Who'd have thought it?

It's focused my thoughts on a feature I'd like to start running on this blog - about the art and craft of writing, both for the screen and the printed page.   I've been lucky enough to spend a large part of my life working with other writers, as a script editor and teacher of screenwriting.  I've read the books, most of 'em, I've worked with some great talents like Murray Smith and Geoff Deane, and I've generally hung around with people who know what they're talking about.   And I can recommend a few sites and resources for those who want to learn more about writing and screenwriting - Danny Stack's blog for instance, or the Writers Store Zine (email ezine8@writersstore.com to subscribe),  or the Wordplay site run by the guys who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean. Indeed, there's a whole flourishing subset of the blogosphere called the scribosphere, a phrase allegedly coined in the course of this blog thread.

 And to kick things off, over the space of four long-ish blogs, I have some ideas which I would recommend to new writers:

Find yourself.

Find your story.

Find your structure.

Find your audience.

Most books about writing deal entirely with point number 3) - structure.  And as far as screenwriting is concerned, there are books that tell you all you will ever need to know about act structure, turning points, mid points, inciting incidents, negating the negation and going to the end of the road.  Many of these books are quite good - but they never give the whole story about the craft of telling stories.

Writing,  as  we all know,  is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration - but perspiration is easy. Any fool can sweat buckets. And the sheer dogged discipline of sitting down at a computer and typing out words, and revising them, and revising them again - well it can be fairly hard work. but it sure beats commuting for a living.

But the 1% - that's infinitely harder.

One of the first jobs I ever had, in my early 20s - soon after leaving my plum job as a lavatory attendant at London Zoo (er...) - was as literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, which was then and still is one of the pre-eminent new writing theatres in the world.  And that's where I learned about Finding Yourself.

I learned it mostly from meeting other writers. I read an astonishing script by a writer called Nick Darke which was set in Cornwall, in rich idiomatic Cornish dialogue, and it brimmed with humour and life-force. Then I met the writer and - damn it all  he was brimming with humour and life-force and was born and bred in Cornwall. Nick was the first and best hyphenate I ever met - he wasn't just a writer, he was a writer-lobsterfisherman.  And the extraordinary quality in his scripts was an extraordinary quality in him. 

Many writers are less extrovert and less extraordinary than Nick was - in fact, I  doubt there's ever been anyone quite like him.  But all writers have a special quality inside them - over and above their talent -  and it's what emerges in their work.  David Hare has an extraordinary attentiveness, he absorbs from those around him, and you can see it in his plays.  Hanif Kureishi is seductive and charming - and his work seduces, and charms.  Caryl Churchill is quietly brilliant and, like a Marvel superheroine, absorbs the best from those around her and creates something even better.

Shy Writers who wouldn't say Boo to a commissioning editor will - if they have talent - also have a secret power of some kind, a special quality that defines and makes unique their work.  And that's what makes the work sing.

Of course, there are quality-less hacks with no talent who still manage to get commissions - but that's a separate argument.

And, of course, talent and 'specialness' are no damned use unless you have a great story and know how to tell it.   But that's the 99% bit, which I'll talk about another day.

As part of my job at the Court I ran a series of writers group workshop, inspired by the ideas of former Court Literary Manager Keith Johnstone about improvisation and mask work  - his book Impro was our starting point.

And I learned in these workshops a huge amount about creativity, and how to tap into it.  We had an exercise called the Five Minute Play which basically meant picking a title out of a hat and writing a play, there and then.  There was nowhere to hide; you couldn't do the hoovering to avoid writing; it just had to come. 

Then, the perspiration work, we worked on the plays, we got actors in to perform them and improvise around them, and we even did a performance of these short plays on the main stage of the Royal Court. 

Some years later, however, I was hoist by my own petard.  In all the Royal Court workshops, the writers did the work, I was just the facilitator.  But then I took part in a writers group run by a company called Paines Plough; and in the final session, we had a 'lockdown' in which we weren't allowed to leave the building until we'd completed a stage play. 

Space was at a premium, so I was forced to write my play on the roof of the building, overlooking the London boulevard the Aldwych, with pigeons flocking above the fire escape and dancing in air near the pigeon nets. And so I wrote a ghost story set on the roof of an office block, with pigeons dancing overhead and a pigeon net, and a fire escape which features prominently in the story. The play was called Gin and Rum, and after the Paines Plough readthrough it was optioned and produced by BBC Radio Drama. The script evolved a little bit but the final version was pretty much what I wrote in a day on the roof, and it's one of the pieces I'm proudest of.

And because of that experience, and my Royal Court experiences, I do tend to have scant patience with writing gurus who obsess about inciting incidents and mid-points. Yes, I do use these concepts as a screenwriter; and yes you do need to know them  But the hard work of building up a story is the easy bit; it's the easy bit that's hard.

It's Finding Yourself, as a writer,  that's hard.

Because, of course, you can't 'find yourself' by looking.  That's the worst thing you can do! Instead, you have to immerse yourself in the kind of stories you love, and immerse yourself in life, and try and fail a while, until the note sings pure.

And when you Find Yourself, you're not engaged in some namby-pamby spiritual quest.  Your objective is pragmatic, and hard-headed; you're finding a Voice. A tone, a note, a style, an approach, that is exclusively and undeniably You.

It's the Writer's Quest, it is a great and noble thing, and it has three stages:

Find yourself as a writer.

Sell your writing.

Live off the interest.

But sometimes, writers who've found themselves manage to lose themselves again, and start writing dross.  This can be a) because they neglect the vital 99% - writing really is a job, or b) because they just forget what it is that makes them Them.

I've mentioned this before - and I hate to bang on about it - but though Stephen King is one of my favourite writers ever (along with Dickens, Willkie Collins, Margery Allingham and Larry Niven) I really really HATE Wizard and Glass, which is Book 4  of The Dark Tower.  I hate it not because it's terrible (it's actually much better than The Waste Lands, which is Volume III).  I hate it because it no longer sounds like Stephen King.  His tone is missing, his personality is missing, the indefinable 'yarning away the day' feel is missing. 

Here, for me, is the real Stephen King:

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

      They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroen sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. 

This is the opening of 'Salem's Lot. It' s not first person narration,which King uses often elsewhere, but it feels like it is. It feels like a guy is leaning on a fence post, looking us dead in the eye, and drawling out a yarn.  'Folks around here, we all reckoned they were...' -  it's that kind of tone.

And when King's books have that tone - whether first person or third person -  they are unsurpassable.  The Gunslinger, Book 1 of The Dark Tower, has a very different style to King's other books - but it's the same Voice.  Direct, focused, looking you in the eye:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

     The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like all eternity in all directions.  It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.

This is by no means "typical" Stephen King prose.  It's heightened, poetic indeed, and doesn't have the no-nonsense, 'yarn told by a man sitting on his front stoop' casualness we associate with his books.  It's not purple prose because the words are exceedingly well judged and the cadences are hypnotic ('all eternity in all directions'....'white and blinding and waterless and without feature'...'sweet dreams, nightmares, death'.)  But the first line is pure King - brief and tantalising and as perfect as faintly-faded denim.  And the rhythm is the same as the 'Salem's Lot opening lines - a one sentence first line to catch the reader's lip in the hook, a longer second para to reel the reader in. 

This shows that like most writers, King has several styles - he is not and never has been a one-trick palomino.  He can do conversational first person idiomatic; he can do third person poetic.  But there's a common quality to both books, to all the really good King books; it's his attitude to the reader.  King will always "We" the reader. He doesn't push us away - he invites us in.

In The Gunslinger - a bleak and seemingly immoral tale of a gunslinger who murders and massacres scores of people - he still manages to invite us in. His tone is not You, it's We.  He does it through his casualness of tone  ('He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing'.)  He does it through a folksy, homespun quality to his narration and some of his dialogue - his 'folks like us' quality.  And he does it through occasional strokes of writerly genius that compel us to share the story, not merely witness it.  In this book, it comes when the Gunslinger (aka Roland) is told the tale of the woman Allie, who is brought back from death by the Man in Black.  And Allie is told that if she wants to know the secret of DEATH, she merely has to say to her husband a single word: the word Nineteen. If she does, he will tell her the truth about Death, and she will go mad; so she knows she must never do it. She must never say the word NINETEEN.

Try it. Try it now. Try not thinking the word NINETEEN.  Close your eyes, and don't think it, now.

Agonising isn't it?

That's what I call genius; and the trick he plays there is the hallmark of how King tells story.  He makes us complicit.

Isaac Asimov, by contrast - still one of my favourite authors after all these years - uses a different trick. He 'I's the audience.  Not so much in his actual fiction, which is efficiently and almost dispassionately written, but in his forewords and afterwords and all the science essays in which his huge great ego beguiles us.  Asimov's personality was as great as his talent; who could not savour it?

At a dinner table, you can bet, King will tell some yarns, but he'll listen even more. Whereas Isaac will monopolise the conversation, and everyone will love it.  Their writing style and writing identity is defined by who they are; and they know it. Writers are guileful; they know the tricks they pull. Once they have "found themselves", they delight in revealing themselves to the reader with all the innocence and naivety of Gipsy Rose Lee.

Style, voice, favourite storytelling tricks and techniques, favourite kinds of story, dominant themes - these are all hallmarks of a writer, and constitute the gestalt  that define that writer.  It's a lot of stuff to know, and it can take years to "find" it - or it can happen very easily very fast.  It's like dancing. Some people, damn it all, can just do it.

And so there's a process, which you can often see very vividly when  you're following a writer's career, when it all "falls into place".   And suddenly you know who that writer is, and they know too.  The TV writer Paul Abbott began his career as Jimmy McGovern's producer, and his early work had the shadow of McGovern all over it. But by the time he wrote the series Clocking Off, Abbott was a truly original talent. You can nowadays count on the fingers of all the people on a busy Tube train the writers who copy him; but Abbott himself is a true original. 

In similar fashion, Neil Gaiman - one of my favourite writers ever - wrote very early in his career a book about Douglas Adams called Don't Panic.  And in his early novels, in my view,  you can feel in his prose that influence, those Douglas Adams moments and Adams-ish whimsicality of tone, peeking through.

But then Gaiman wrote more, and more - his range was  broader - his control of technique was so extraordinary - his imagination was and is so vast - that it's preposterous to think of him as under the shadow of anyone.  He exists in a tradition of English comic writing - but he also and equally exists in the tradition of Marvel comics - and he has embraced the land and history of myth and made it his own.  Gaiman is a unique talent; but it didn't happen overnight. He grew unique. 

And, intriguingly, my favourite of Gaiman's books is American Gods, which is the only Gaiman I've read (apart perhaps from the glorious avant-garde Signal to Noise) that doesn't feel  like Gaiman.

Maybe I'm imagining that; so let's compare and contrast. Here's the Gaiman of The Graveyard Book:

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

And here's the Gaiman of Neverwhere:

'No, please. Stay just where you are,' said Mr Croup. 'We like you like that. And we don't want to have to hurt you.'

      'We do,' said Mr Vandemar.

      'Well yes, Mister Vandemar, once you put it like that. We want to hurt you both.'

And here's the Gaiman of American Gods:

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me-enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought about how much he loved his wife.

Those are tiny excerpts of course, but for me there is a tiny but significant difference in tone between the first two, and the third extract. The man with the knife - the man called Jack - in The  Graveyard Book is scary and evil and murderous - but not really! Despite the explicit menace of the words, this is a fairy-tale tone, a make-believe tone, as befits a book that is read by children as well as adults.  And Neverwhere - not a kids book surely? - has that same lightness. Mr Vandemar and Mr Croup are evil assassins - but not really!  It's just make-believe. They are comic villains, not real villains.

But as for Shadow - the hero of American Gods - yes, really.  He's the hero not the villain but he's scary. You do not fuck with this man. The menace is palpable, and isn't in inverted commas.  This is a deadly serious book, which takes us dark into the evil heart of America, and whose subject and subtext is myth  (there's a con artist called Wednesday - if I say "Don Blake", you'll guess the twist.) 

The genius of Gaiman is that he found himself early, and never lost himself. I don't think I've ever read a bad Neil Gaiman, or indeed heard a bad thing said against him as a human being.  And that shines through in his works; humanity distinguishes them.

Of course many great writers have been arrogant shits - Proust, for instance, or T.S. Eliot.  But "great" writers aren't always the ones we turn to when we want a story to savour; so writers with humanity can sometimes, I'm pleased to say, win the day.

In life, Finding Yourself is a process of epiphany and self-discovery; in writing, it's more pragmatic. Trial and Error is therefore very important.  You may be a very funny person, great at telling jokes; but if your comic fiction is a yawn, you haven't found your writing self.  Sour people can write funny scripts; funny people can write terrifying scripts. 

So as a writer you find out who you are through what other people tell you.   Hence, Woody Allen can't do Bergmanesque tragedies, though he yearns to do so. (But he can do "Woodyesque" tragedies, like his great movie Crimes and Misdemeanours which is drama not comedy, but has the same tone and similar verbal riffs as the comedies. It's in his range; Woody can reach those notes.)

Writers are arrogant buggers though (I know, I am one.) None of us like to think we are limited; none of us want to be pigeonholed.  But though it's possible for a writer to range from genre to genre, and to change styles sometimes radically, there's still that core of "rightness" you have to find. If you miss, you make Interiors, or you write Wizard and Glass.  But if you hit the mark, you  write His Dark Materials, or American Gods. You write the thing that's like nothing you've done before, but is still truly "You".

None of this is abstract  theorising; it's the day to day practical basis of trying to be, and then being, a writer.  You hunt  for the magic. You create circumstances that force you to be spontaneous.  You write stuff that isn't good for as long as it takes until you learn how to write stuff that is good. 

A piece of writing, essentially, is the progeny of mad passionate sex between the writer and the story. And if a different writer tackles that exact  same story, the DNA of the offspring will be different.

Or  to put it another way: the magic is the product of the magician and the spell.

So you have to be smart about who you are and what you are best at doing,  in order to control the magic. Because the 99% perspiration has to be in the cause of a story worth telling, which you can  best tell.

And tattoos - well, they certainly help.

How to write

Some fabulous insights from Robert Jackson Bennett on how to write.

On the Art of Covers