Today's choice is from a writer who is a hero of mine - master of noir nastiness - creator of hitman hero Avery Cates. Yes it's the wonderful Jeff Somers. Jeff and I have become e-buddies over the last few months; I admire him and his work hugely. And, thanks to those great guys at Orbit, Jeff and I are currently cooking up a joint venture together, which looks set fair to be a marriage made in heaven. More of that anon...

Over to you Jeff...

Jeff Somers writes:

Queen “'39”

One of my fave songs overall, and a rare folky-rock song that tells a
story. A sad, shattering story ("For my life's still ahead, pity me.)
OMFG, it makes me weep every. time. I. hear. it.) of time dilation and
dying earth, which is my favorite type. I was actually unaware of it for
an embarrassingly long time despite being quite devoted to much of
Queen's catalog; I came across it in a random Googling of something or
other and my life has been different ever since. I hear it's quite a
fave for buskers to play on the streets of London, though that's hearsay.

What I love about the song, too, is that it has a short-story
sensibility, telling the story and then hitting you with the crushing
final line - no epilogue, no repeat of the chorus, just that chilling
thud and you're left sitting there, tears streaming down your face,
bottle of courage clutched in one hand. Er, I assume. It's never
happened to me, of course, as I laugh in the face of danger and
soul-chilling emotionally charged songs of dark SF.

The fact that Brian May is an honest-to-god Astrophysicist just makes
this all the better.

In the year of thirty-nine
Assembled here the volunteers
In the days when lands were few
Here the ship sailed out into the blue and sunny morn
The sweetest sight ever seen
And the night followed day
And the story tellers say
That the score brave souls inside
For many a lonely day
Sailed across the milky seas
Ne'er looked back never feared never cried

Don't you hear my call
Though you're many years away
Don't you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I'll take your hand
In the land that our grand-children knew

In the year of thirty-nine
Came a ship in from the blue
The volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news
Of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the earth is old and grey
little darlin' well away
But my love this cannot be
Oh so many years have gone
Though i'm older but a year
Your mother's eyes from your eyes cry to me

Don't you hear my call
Though you're many years away
Don't you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I'll take your hand
In the land that our grand-children knew

Don't you hear my call
Though you're many years away
Don't you hear me calling you
All your letters in the sand
Cannot heal me like your hand
For my life's still ahead, pity me.

The radio play is a sequel to my art fraud drama The Art of Deception. And (as you may have spotted) I've been running a regular series of Paintings of the Week on this blog over the last year, as part of my ongoing research on art-related stuff, including some rather racy material. 

Just now, I'm reading a wonderful book about Pablo Picasso by artist Francoise Gilot, who was his lover. The book is evocative, moving, and brilliantly written - Gilot claims to have near perfect recall. And her book conjures up the spirit of the iconoclastic, manipulative, brilliant, egotistical Picasso with astonishing vividness.

Francoise was clearly a remarkable woman - and a major talent in her own right. For more on her, here's a link to her website.  And, to give a flavour of her talent, are images of some of her great paintings (which I reproduce here on a non-profit basis under the rules of fair use):

Like the Sound of Oars

Red and Gold

Self Portrait: Figure in the Wind

Here's a Queen song chosen by Brian Ruckley, which is by way of an intro to NEXT week's choice by my buddy Jeff Somers, which you will also love.

Take it away, for a second time, Brian:

Brian Ruckley writes:

Here’s some musical fantasy from a creator who was himself a unique, larger than life, vaguely numinous presence in the last quarter of the 20th century: Freddie Mercury. Lots of Queen’s songs have a slightly science fictional or fantastical vibe – elaborate concoctions fuelled by a shifting, vivid, sometimes surreal imagination – but The Seven Seas of Rhye is a rather different beast.

This is explicitly epic, secondary world fantasy fiction done as a brief, grandiose rock song. Rhye and its seas existed, but only in the minds of Freddie Mercury and his sister, who dreamed it up together when they were children. Others might settle for imaginary friends; they invented a whole world, and stories to inhabit it. Rhye is the setting for several early Queen songs (including the brilliantly titled Ogre Battle, which sounds like it ought to be a D&D soundtrack), but The Seven Seas of Rhye is the (modest) hit that immortalized it. And with lyrics like these:

Be gone with you, you shod and shady senators
Give out the good, leave out the bad evil cries
I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours
And with a smile I'll take you to the seven seas of Rhye

Doesn’t it sound as though there’s a hell of a book in there somewhere?

Fear me you lords and lady preachers
I descend upon your Earth from the skies
I command your very souls you unbelievers
Bring before me what is mine, the seven seas of Rhye

Can you hear me you peers and privy counsellors
I stand before you naked to the eyes
I will destroy any man who dares abuse my trust
I swear that you'll be mine, the seven seas of Rhye

Sister, I live and lie for you
Mister, do and I'll die
You are mine, I possess you, I belong to you forever

Storm the master-marathon, I'll fly through
By flash and thunder-fire I'll survive, I'll survive, I'll survive I'll survive, I'll survive
Then I'll defy the laws of nature and come out alive
Then I’ll get you

Be gone with you, you shod and shady senators
Give out the good, leave out the bad evil cries
I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours
And with a smile I'll take you to the seven seas of Rhye

I'll be back online in a week's time;  but I've slyly programmed an SFF Song of the Week to pop up midweek. Just to satisfy your craving....

Jennifer Rardin writes:

Warning: If you are a fan of The Killers, or somebody who’s really into grammatical correctness, or even interpreting stuff the way artists say it should be done—you will be pissed off by the following. So don’t read it. At all. Go pick up a comic book. Preferably something by Bill Watterson because he’s hilarious and will make you feel better pretty much instantly. As for the rest of you? Strap in, baby. We are about to go alien hunting.

The Killers - Human
I did my best to notice
when the call came down the line
up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
and sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door
close your eyes, clear your heart
cut the cord
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human or are we dancer
pay my respects to grace and virtue
send my condolences to good
give my regards to soul and romance
they always did the best they could
and so long to devotion, you taught me everything I know
wave good bye, wish me well
you gotta let me go
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human or are we dancer
will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight
there is no message we're receiving
let me know is your heart still beating
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer

Are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human
or are we dancer
are we human or are we dancer
are we human or are we dancer

As an English major I was brainwashed, uh, trained in the ways of interpretation. I could, by golly, read a buncha words and tell you exactly why the author mentioned shadows forty-seven times among all those other words. Which is why I’ve taken the liberty of becoming your expert in song interpretation for the next five minutes. After which you can burn me in effigy if you want. Just remember, because detail is always important (even in effigy-related projects) that my hair is red.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think Human is about how Americans have raised their kids to be manipulative shits, i.e. “dancers” at all. I don’t even buy the theory that the song is inspired by the work of Nietzsche, despite the fact that it would give us something fun to debate over coffee and scones (mmmm, scones) for the afternoon. I’m here to suggest that Human is actually about aliens.

First clue: One time I read this cool sci-fi short about an alien who came to earth and danced with a perfectly average woman, who then shot out of her shell and became a fabulous painter. He came back to dance with her the day she died. It wasn’t even sad, because you knew without his dance she never would’ve led such a momentous life. My point? The Killers get it. We are dancer—but only after we’ve been activated by the touch of our alien kin.

Second clue: Remember that old, awesome TV series, V? Holy crap I loved that show. Anyway, most of the lyrics reminded me of those moments when the aliens would peel off their human skin to reveal their true nature, riding just beneath the beautiful outer layer. I always knew, deep down, that people were a lot more like those lizards than they were the rebel heroes who fought them. Which is why neighbors of serial killers are always so surprised that awful smell wasn’t a gas leak but rotting corpse instead. “Because Bob was such a quiet, respectful man”—who kept his mask on nice and tight dontcha know. I bet his hands were cold all the damn time. Are we human? Do we even really know what that means anymore?

Third clue: Ghosts. Come on, my friends. You know they’re really shadows of people from parallel universes who’ve stepped into the thin air between our worlds. And who have already figured out that we’re actually the aliens. We are, as usual, the last to know.

And my final bit of proof? Here ya go:

Even stripped down to our essentials we can’t help but decorate ourselves. Because it’s too scary, too real, to look at what we are. But being human’s not scary. It’s freaking wonderful. So then, really, what are we?

My theory? It’s not complete yet. I’m not an old, wise woman. But no, I don’t think we’re human. We simply aspire to that calling. A rare few have made it. But generally we manage to assassinate them before they can force the rest of us peel off our skins and face the steady drumbeat of our own alien music. Maybe it’s best that way. I think The Killers, at least, have figured that out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MICHAEL
  (pained)
No.

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

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

DON CORLEONE
Accept what's happened, Michael.

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

DON CORLEONE
No, I wanted other things for you.

MICHAEL
You wanted me to be your son.

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

MICHAEL
Then why have I become a man like
you?

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

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

DON CORLEONE
What else do you believe in?

MICHAEL doesn't answer.

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

MICHAEL listens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MICHAEL
It's good for you, Pop.

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

MICHAEL
Very happy...

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

MICHAEL
No, not at all...

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

MICHAEL
He's good --

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

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

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

MICHAEL
I did it already, Pop.

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

MICHAEL
Pop, I took care of that.

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

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

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

MICHAEL
Another pezzonovante...

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

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

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

Yeah, it's better isn't it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio is a strange old fashioned medium that seems to have leaped into the digital age with one bound; because you can now listen to plays on your computer, or your mobile phone or whatever iGadget you happen to own.  And there's something very comforting about drama that depends just on voices; if it hadn't been invented, someone would invent it round about now.

It's still the Cinderella medium however.  TV honchos turn up their noses at radio dramatists; and it's rare for the front page of the Radio Times to be devoted to a radio programme, rather than a TV show.  The good news is that radio is still a place where the dramatist's voice is still treated with respect.  On TV, there are fewer and fewer outlooks for quirky maverick voices creating original stuff - the Pennies From Heaven/Edge of Darkness/Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment  kind of weirdness.  But radio drama thrives on originality, and vision, and passion.

I'm about to start work on a new radio drama (er, already missed one deadline so I really HAVE to start) which is a sequel to my art fraud drama THE ART OF DECEPTION starring David Schofield and Indira Varma.  This 'further adventures of' piece is a five part serial about a devious art forger and his various nemeses; it's the kind of piece I've been wanting to write ever since I saw Stanley Donen's CHARADE. 

After that, it looks as if (provided the budget is approved) I'll be writing a 3-part radio drama about war games, for transmission in 2012/13 (yes, that's years away, but radio execs like to schedule ahead!) This is no less than a mega state of the nation project about the decisions that go into the fighting of wars; it's inspired by seeing how THE WEST WING handles major setpiece action sequence ie entirely through dialogue. 

I love TV and am keen to do more week in that medium at some point; and my film projects are simmering away nicely.  But it's my radio plays that give me a chance to do things that are different, and contemporary, and politically challenging.

And I'm looking forward to the day when the BBC finally (finally!) gets its act together and puts the radio archive on line as a permanent resource.  In fact, they could start to do it now, if they were smart enough to embrace an open source strategy - let writers put their own plays on their own websites!  But that's never going to happen, so unless you embrace the illegal download approach (hardly illegal if you pay your licence fee!) then there'll be a long wait before radio dramas start to emerge from dusty closets and take on a new life again. 

Even out of print books can be bought second hand; but most radio plays, once transmitted, just vanish; which is a real shame.  And I'd truly love to see my previous plays get a further life - such as GIN AND RUM, my first play, a ghost story set on a roof; my wild adaptation of Spenser's fantasy epic poem THE FAERIE QUEENE; or my 'cleverer than Sherlock Holmes' detective drama about Isaac Newton, THE KING'S COINER. 

One day...

Over to you Richard...

Richard Morgan writes:

Song of the Week: Beat the Devil's Tattoo.

I'm far enough into my forties now that I can't pretend I'm a young man anymore, and I've been waiting for this album like a sixteen year old. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are - no hype - the finest rock band in the world. They define exactly the edgy mix of soul and power that rock music delivers whenever it gets loose of market defined trends and complacent power chord pomp. For every blasting, feedback howling track in BRMC's armoury, there's a plaintive, lyrically defined acoustic ballad to match - and as often as not you'll find those two contrasts co-existing in the same song. References to the Jesus and Mary Chain are inevitable, but for me the best point of comparison is the Rolling Stones circa Beggars' Banquet and Let it Bleed - it's the same dark energy, the same virtuoso guitar work, the same re-working of blues heritage, and the same subtle political and cultural echo chamber. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club provided me with the soundtrack to both Black Man/Thirteen and The Steel Remains, and this title track from their upcoming release showcases every reason why. Listen here:

It's the story of a son who agrees to donate a kidney to his sick father...and how that affects the family relationship. The wonderful cast includes Philip Jackson, Ashley Kumar and Daniela Nardini...director was my favourite Russian, Sasha Yevtushenko. 

It's not science fiction...but it IS the kind of story I most love; a tale about characters in crisis.

Here's a song I LOVE, chosen by the gifted Emma Adams, screenwriter and stage dramatist. Over to you Em:

Emma Adams writes:

Carpenters – Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft

Thought One – Karen Carpenter, you’re really weird but I think I love you.

So while I’m happy to admit to my big love for Suzie Quattro in her rock and roller jump suits, I have never been able to bring myself to admit my secret-weird-soft-spot crush for Karen Carpenter. Until now that is. Because, there is something very very wrong with Karen isn’t there? Her terrifying blank, too cute all American grin. Her skinny, get a meal boneyness and of course her really really strange hair and terrible frocks… But still, I find I can forgive her all of this because of two things. Her total cool ass drumming and her absolutely amazing beautiful voice. A voice that is instantly recognisable in a way that only a handful of voices are. And no matter how bubblegum light the lyrics are, she conveys great warmth and tenderness when she sings. There I’ve said it. I’m out of my Carpenter Closet. Karen Carpenter may not exactly rock but she gently sways my world.

Thought Two – I’m so glad that the Carpenter’s believed recording this strange song was a good idea. It probably wasn’t, but nevertheless it gives me hope.

It’s not so much a song as a series of pompous musical postures that get more and more ridiculous as it goes along. It is to my mind a fantastic example of pop genius gone mad and for this reason alone I take great delight in it. For me the descending Beatlesy orchestration at the end is just fantastic. It’s the bit I wait for. And it always makes me smile.

Thought Three – The CIA refer to unintended misfortunes coming out of ‘well meant’ foreign policy moves as ‘Blowback’. I wish Karen had known this before she went into the recording studio.

You will have noticed by now that the lyrics of this song are very bad. But when I listen to it, I can’t help worrying that they could create a consequence far worse than mere aesthetic unpleasantness, promoting as they do a dangerous untruth. To be specific, Karen on several occasions directly addresses Aliens, reassuring them in no uncertain terms that:

“We are your friends”.

Now let's be clear. I don’t think for a minute that lovely, skinny, mixed up Karen was actively lying when she sang these words. She had a lot of issues in her life. But we also know that sometimes those who have the best intentions can create the most harm.

I can’t help worrying what could happen if Aliens actually heard this song.

Will they know that humans when encountering new civilisations always announce “We are your friends” just before embarking on a big stealing, killing frenzy?

I can only hope that they are more clued up about human history than Karen was.

In your mind you have capacities you know
To telepath messages through the vast unknown
Please close your eyes and concentrate
With every thought you think
Upon the recitation we're about to sing

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft

You've been observing our earth
And we'd like to make a contact with you

We are your friends

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary ultra-emissaries

We've been observing your earth
And one night we'll make a contact with you

We are your friends

Calling occupants of interplanetary quite extraordinary craft

And please come in peace, we beseech you
Only a landing will teach them
Our earth may never survive
So do come, we beg you
Please interstellar policeman
Oh won't you give us a sign
Give us a sign that we've reached you

With your mind you have ability to form
And transmit thought energy far beyond the norm
You close your eyes, you concentrate
Together that's the way
To send the message
We declare world contact day

Repeat (*)

Calling occupants
Calling occupants
Calling occupants of interplanetary, anti-adversary craft

We are your friends

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.

Jesse Bullington writes:

Metal and fantasy have long been confederates but few bands have fused the two as successfully as Bal-Sagoth. They take their name from a story by Conan creator Robert E. Howard and their creative cues from him, as well as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other pulp favorites, but rather than simply regurgitating the works and words of their heroes Bal-Sagoth has gone on to create their own complex SFF mythology that allows them to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos as well as the forgotten empires of the earth. Further differentiating themselves from other bands, each album by Bal-Sagoth is an epic collection of tales, not a random assortment of songs...and when I say epic, I mean it: how else do you describe a record titled Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule? What's more, a single album is often not sufficient to contain the glorious legends in their entierty and so a single tale will span several albums--the heroic archaeologist Caleb Blackthorne III appears on two albums, and those dread Guardians of the Astral Gate feature prominently on five. In selecting a single song from their body of work I decided on "Arcana Antediluvia" because in many ways it captures the essence of the band while still standing alone, so that the novice may appreciate the tale without foreknowledge of the mythology at hand--though a sequel track on an upcoming album is rumored...

[Act I: The Argosy on the Eldritch Sea]

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
And so it was written, that rage would carry him like a howling wind, leaving only frozen corpses,
Their bones rattling in hollow armour, to tell their tale in his wake.

[The Black Mariner:]
Behold, my blackened, grim and gory axe, the searing glow of trenchant steel.
I'll notch another widow to my haft, and wreak red vengeance 'cross the waves.
Tales of black-sailed argosies, bedeviled by base treachery!

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
His gaze is as fire, his words are as spear-points, his voice is as thunder, his touch as the plague!

[The Black Mariner:]
Storm-prow cleaving, dragon rending, nighted deeps far, far below,
Hail-scur scouring, sea devouring, sunken realm's ethereal glow.

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
And one night, there came a storm, a storm with searing red winds.
Fire and steel rode within it, and vengeance writ in thunder and blood!

[The Black Mariner:]
Down sixty fathoms, from stygian coral-clad tombs, the pitiless abyssal sea disgorges its shambling mold-mottled dead,
Dank innards blackly acoil with nests of slithering things!
Ghosts aglide upon the eldritch seas, unfathomed voyage to ascendancy,
Traitorous blood, the surf roils red, churning crimson, thrice-cursed dead.

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
'Tis enough that men might dream of being kings without aspiring to the power of gods.

Richard Morgan

Jennifer Rardin

Jesse Bullington

Aidan Moher

Some other people - look there's a list somewhere, I'll find it eventually.

Look out for this Wednesday's choice...

In the meantime, I wanted to add a few small comments to the debate about Orbit's digital short story publishing initiative. I met Tim Holman, Orbit's publisher, last night, and we talked about it a good while. And this is a sceptical if not downright hostile post about it from John Scalzi, with many comments, including some from Tim.

The daftest comment/question is: have Orbit thought about [X,Y, Z]?  Well of course they have; whatever your views on this venture, this particular publisher does not rush headlong into things.

I regard the initiative as a wholly good thing.  It's a clever innovation that creatively liberates published Orbit authors - allows us to stretch our wings by giving us guaranteed publication of our short stories. If I had more time, I might self-publish on Kindle; but hey, producing a movie is enough of a headache!

But the key principle is: I do actually make a large chunk of my yearly income from Orbit's advances for my novels, as do all their authors.  So a bit of gratis work is no big deal - in the expectation of getting paid IF the story is popular.  If no one reads it, well, fair enough; I had the fun of writing it and that's enough. 

For me it's a creative challenge - an opportunity to really get to engage with the modern possibilities of the short story format without the irksome horror of having to send stories off and not knowing if they'll be rejected. Some stories might go viral; has that ever happened yet?  Or only to stories published free on websites?

It's fair to ask questions of Orbit; but trust me, I've worked for crooked evil corporations in the past, and will do again; Orbit just ain't that.  Theirs is a genuine attempt to try something new; to create a market that wasn't there before. 

Anyway, let's see how it develops; and I'm aiming to test it out myself by drafting a few short stories over the coming months, once I've delivered the various things I'm writing. (More info soon - once I've done the darned work!)

PS I once hid a short story on this website; no one ever found it. Ha! What a pathetic bit of self-publishing, eh?

Check it out here.

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.

Stephen Hunt writes:

As a child of the 1970s (and the 80s), the quote ‘The past is a
foreign country: they do things differently there’ was, I venture,
never so appropriate. It was pre-internet, pre-video recorder, pre-PC,
pre-mobile phone, heck, it was just about pre-everything. Teens and
tweens didn’t spend seven hours solid with their eyes locked on the
screen of a DS or playing MMOGs, or texting, or happy slapping, or,
for that matter, scoring free music tracks using P2P software.

We did have hoodies, but they were called parkas and made you look
like Kenny from South Park, never a good look at the best of times,
even then.

But we had other consolations.

Hot summers and jumpers for goal posts, perhaps? No. Dungeons and
Dragons had just crept into the UK’s model shops alongside all the
Airfix kits and Hornby railway sets, disco was sweeping the country,
and the Vietnam war was just winding down, as, regularly, was the
electricity, when rolling strikes turned the country’s lights out.

Ah, indeed, the bookshops had maybe half a shelf of fantasy & science
fiction books (Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, James Blish, E. Doc
Smith, Philip Jose Farmer, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Gordon Dickson,
Tolkien, Clifford D. Simak, Arthur C. Clarke and a few other
stalwarts), and for a decent selection of comic-books you could only
go to ‘Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed’ in London’s Soho. Yes, slap
bang alongside all the sex shops – scoring SFF was a lot like scoring
porn in those halcyon days, and equally sniffed at.

Them were the days. And alongside Thunderbirds, Space 1999 and Doctor
Who (some things never change), we also had the consolations of a
bunch of lycra-wearing leotard-clad lovelies prancing about our newly
colour TV set with its three solitary channels. Yes, Hot Gossip. A
dance group that appeared on The Kenny Everett Television Show and Top
of the Pops, along with some strange new concept called the music
video.

As a burgeoning fan of the female form (we lived in the world of Gene
Hunt, so being politically correct was de rigueur), Sarah Brightman –
before Andrew Lloyd Webber sunk his supine claws into her soul –
cleverly managed to combine two of my favourite interests: girls
poured into their skin suits and science fiction. A feat not repeated
until Erin Gray slinked into the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century.

Beautiful raven-locked Sarah Brightman, who thumped out a 1978 single
written by Jeff Calvert and Max West of ‘Typically Tropical’ fame (who
also wrote Barbados, covered by the Vengaboys in 1999 as We're Going
to Ibiza.).

So, pop fans, tone up, prepare for a blast of static electricity as
you slip into your cat suit, because you are now clear to go
hyperspace on the disco dance floor with…

Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip: I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.

(Editor's note: The best version of this is on YouTube and can't be embedded, so copy this link into your browser....Lyrics are below. Phil.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE6YR9QbrqI

Or try this Star Trek version which is hilarious:

Speaker 1:

Arcaida
X-ray X-ray delta niner niner zero
This is Starfleet Control
You are clear to go hyperspace
Acknowledge

Speaker 2:

Affirmative, Star Comm
We have situation gold

Speaker 1:

Niner niner zero, roger
You're looking good for trans-light

Sarah singing:

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Oh...

Hey, Captain Strange, won't you be my lover
You're the best thing that I've ever discovered
Flash Gordon's left me, he's gone to the stars
An evil Darth Vader has me banished to Mars

Tell me, Captain Strange, do you feel my devotion
Or are you like a droid, devoid of emotion
Encounters one and two are not enough for me
What my body needs is close encounter three

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space

Listen, Captain Strange, what's our destination
The scanners seem to indicate a small deviation
Static on the comm - it's Starfleet Command
Requesting your position, it's their final demand

You're intentions are known, they've found out at last
So if you're gonna take me, please make it fast
Touch me, feel me, do what you will
I want to feel that galactic thrill

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space

Speaker 1:

Niner niner zero
This is Star Comm
We got a problem
On your vector
Request status check
Over

Sarah singing:

Oh, baby...

Speaker 3:

Arcadia
This is Strategy Control
You have course deviation
At five mark six
Acknowledge

Sarah singing:

I love you...

Speaker 1:
Arcadia
We show condition red
Confirm

Sarah singing:

Love me...

Speaker 3:

What's going on out there

Sarah singing:

Oh...
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Oh...

Space suit is lying on control room floor
Pulse rate increasing as the heat factor soars
Take me, make me feel the force
Ignore the computers, we're locked on course

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space

Speaker 1, while Sarah sings the previous lines repeatedly:

Niner niner zero
This is Star Comm
Be advised
You have serious vector deviation
I repeat: serious vector deviation

Arcadia
Niner niner zero
Do you copy

This is Starfleet Control
To all ships in sector five
Be advised
Arcadia
Niner niner zero
Is off course
All ships squawk ident

Starship Arcadia
This is Starfleet Control
Squawk ident
I repeat: squawk ident.

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.

For more details of what SFX will be doing in their mags and online shop as part of their excellent campaign, click here.

Over to you Lee...

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. Oh

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff's gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene'er they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name. Oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giants' rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. Oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

I was looking for a movie to watch last night, and I saw this write-up of Repo Men in my paper, the Guardian:

'The nasty but futuristic business of retrieving artificial organs from broke people is given a nasty but futuristic treatment in this silly, violent sci-fi'. 

Well, that didn't sound very good, and I was all set to go and watch Centurion.  But the times didn't work so it was Repo Men after all; and naturally I feared the worst.

But what a joy, and a relevation, it proved to be!  This is the funniest, most brilliantly satiricial science fiction movie since Robo Cop. It's a dystopian vision with its tongue in its cheek; the acting is immaculate, the dialogue zings; the twists keep twisting. 

This is cinema for grown-ups who can appreciate wit allied with violence; and the Guardian reviewer is clearly utterly tone-deaf. Because this is a film which changes tone and genre constantly but subtly, in a way that allows the viewer to think about morality and social justice and STILL enjoy vicious kick-ass action.

The script is by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, from the novel by Eric Garcia; the director is the stylish Miguel Sapochnik, who has a background as an art director

There's absolutely nothing I can say about this film that won't spoil the experience of watching it; so I'll just conclude by saying this is the best science fiction movie I've seen since...um... Inglourious Basterds. 

Manhattan Project by Rush

Ken MacLeod writes:

The libertarian rock band Rush have often used science-fictional, fantasy, or dystopian themes in their songs, but this one (of the relative handful I've heard from their vast repertoire) has always struck me as the closest to the spirit of SF, despite its being about an event in the past. It looks beyond fission power's violent and horrific sin of origin and first use, to the vast possibilities it opens up for humanity. 'The hopeful depend on a world without end whatever the hopeless may say.' I'm with the hopeful.

Imagine a time when it all began
In the dying days of a war
A weapon that would settle the score
Whoever found it first would be sure to do their worst.
They always had before...

Imagine a man where it all began
A scientist pacing the floor
In each nation, always eager to explore
To build the best big stick
To turn the winning trick.
But this was something more...

Chorus
The big bang took and shook the world
Shot down the rising sun
The end was begun and it hit everyone
When the chain reaction was done
The big shots tried to hold it back
Fools tried to wish it away
The hopeful depend on a world without end
Whatever the hopeless may say

Imagine a place where it all began
Gathered from across the land
To work in the secrecy of the desert sand
All of the brightest boys
To play with the biggest toys
More than they bargained for...

Chorus

Imagine a man when it all began
The pilot of Enola Gay
Flying out of the shockwave on that August day
All the powers that be, and the course of history,
Would be changed forevermore...

And for general details of the festival  - screenings, coffee with writers, panels galore - click here.

And this is a wonderful and extremely spooky song choice.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood writes:

Marquee Moon  by Television

 Some songs stay with you because they remind you of a time, a friend or a lover. A few songs hook simply with their strangeness

For me, Marquee Moon was one of those.

I bought it in 1977, long before I saw Television or Tom Verlaine on stage. And decades before I saw him support Patti Smith at London’s Festival Hall. A gig where half the journalists and fans in the front rows looked exactly as I remembered them - just older, and fatter and balder.

 This song doesn’t remind me of anyone or anything. But my memory of hearing it for the first time and realising I hadn’t the faintest fucking clue what it meant - but that didn’t matter - still sends a shiver down my spine.

Lightning, graveyards, rain, Cadillacs.

A ghost dragged back to the cemetary. Who knows.?

All the ingredients of the dark side of the American dream locked into one song. An epic ten-minute rock-guitar heart for the album of the same name. All anyone seems to agree is that, not only does Marquee Moon means whatever you want it to mean, it means it with a fierce intensity.

You give the listener (the reader, the viewer) the words. They bring their own emotion, reading and interpretation to the work. It’s a lesson for songwriters, novelists and artists everywhere.  

 Television came out of the New York CBGB scene that produced the Ramones. Yet their sound couldn’t be more different. The interlocking interplay of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s guitars, Fred Smith’s bass lines and Billy Ficca’s drums, the elliptic self-referencing lyrics that mean so much or nothing at all, split fans and critics. (Being called the Grateful Dead of Punk probably wasn’t meant as a compliment.) But there’s no doubt that much post-punk wouldn’t have happened without them.

 I used the strangeness of this track in Stamping Butterflies; a novel set in an analogue of Guantanimo Bay, and a Chinese empire in space; in which the two main characters, Prisoner Zero and the emperor are dreaming each other. And an echo of my being hooked back in 1977 found its way into a key scene.

 ‘A madman wants to kill me and no one can tell me why. The Republicans are targeting my son’s girlfriend. My wife thinks I need a trip to the vet. The coffee around here tastes like dishwater. Apart from that everything’s fine.’

The black woman smiled. ‘I’ve just called in the transcript of the very first interrogation, the one when he was first asked why he tried to shoot you.’

 ‘And what was his answer?’

 ‘He was listening to the rain…’

 ‘What?’

 ‘That’s what he said. He was listening to the rain. We’re not talking conspiracy here. We’re talking lone nutter. That’s what Ed doesn’t want widely known. Conspiracy plays better.’

 ‘And what was he hearing?’

 Paula looked puzzled, then understood. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Something else, I guess…’

I remember
how the darkness doubled
I recall
lightning struck itself.
I was listening
listening to the rain
I was hearing
hearing something else.

Life in the hive puckered up my night,
the kiss of death, the embrace of life.
There I stand neath the Marquee Moon Just waiting,
Hesitating...
I ain't waiting

I spoke to a man
down at the tracks.
I asked him
how he don't go mad.
He said "Look here junior, don't you be so happy.
And for Heaven's sake, don't you be so sad."

Well a Cadillac
it pulled out of the graveyard.
Pulled up to me
all they said get in.
Then the Cadillac
it puttered back into the graveyard.
And me,
I got out again.

But look out on Wednesday for the swift return of this feature, with Jon Courtenay Grimwood's eloquent intro to his SFF Song of the Week. Followed soon after by some other great choices and remarkably rich and detailed intros from, among others: Jesse Bullington, Ken MacLeod, Richard K. Morgan, Jennifer Rardin, Stephen Hunt, and Nicole Peeler. Yes, all the best SFF writers are HERE, and their toes are tapping.

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.

I spent a day copy editing Version 43, which meant re-entering and re-feeling that whole weird scary universe...

I'm now close to critical mass on Hell Ship, my current book, which is an epic science fiction story and also an epic science fantasy story...to research it I'm rewatching Star Trek, Farscape, reading Conan and H.P. Lovecraft. This I realise is a my chance to pay hommage to ALL my favourite subgenres of SF, in the context of a mad high concept which I'm hoping you guys are going to like...

I'm also working on the budget of Inferno, checking out DPs, and I'm close to watching the entire first season of Dollhouse with only a day to go before Blockbuster Video want it back...

All this is by way of saying...this is going to be another quiet blogging week on Debatable Spaces. I've got a great guest blog on Mad Men, SFF Songs of the Week galore (including a magnificent new entry from Jennifer Rardin), and much to write about, including Aeonflux and Kickassitude in general. All that's to come - starting from next week!

See you guys soon I trust....

Check out what I and others have to say on this subject by clicking the magic word, here.

But after two days away from my desk, I'm running to catch up at the moment. And, in particular, I've spent the last two days proof reading Version 43 (so strange, and so nice to  read your own book again.)  All this however has placed me in severe blog debt - so no new blogs and no SFF Song of the Week this week. Sorry!

Normal service will resume next week, with a fabulous guest blog by TV writer Peter Lloyd on Mad Men, and an SFF Song Choice from Jon Courtenay Grimwood,  and some other stuff from me.

Yes, it's happening now...the 2010 Eastercon, held at the Radission Hotel, Heathrow.  I'll be there most of the weekend - signing books on Saturday 1-2, and sitting in on a panel about writing radio drama on Sunday.

For a full programme of events, have a prowl around on this site.

I'm looking forward to it hugely. A weekend away from writing! And a chance to meet new faces, and catch up with old friends.  Apparently, this year it's a tee-total event, so that'll be fun too.

I'll give my thoughts & views  about my Odyssey experience early next week...

SFF Song of the Week:                                                

Blogjay: Adrian Reynolds

Song: Sonic Attack by Hawkwind

Also this week:

ANIME HEROES : Part 1                  

Guest blog by

Stuart Angell McGregor

PREVIOUSLY ON DEBATABLE SPACES:

 SFF Song of the Week: 

Blogjay Archie Tait

Song: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by Flaming Lips

How to Write Action SF           

                                                 A Great Year for Historical Fiction

The Naked, the Nude and the Sexy                    

      Is Urban Fantasy Really ALL About Sex?

Screenwriter and blogger Adrian Reynolds has been a regular visitor to this site, and contributed a fabulous guest blog about Spider-Man not so long back.   I asked Adrian to come up with an SFF Song of the Week, and he came up with this amazing choice.

Adrian Reynolds writes:

There've been a few of these SFF songs now, and one name is conspicuous by its absence. The band I'm thinking of did one album with a gatefold sleeve that folded out into a warrior's shield, of all things. They frequently sing about spaceships, and their live shows feature a wealth of original and plundered sf imagery. OK, so they've not troubled the charts much, but they're still remembered fondly for a single about a marvellous device that helps its owner ride through space and time -- a Silver Machine.

The band is Hawkwind of course. They didn't just dabble in science fiction -- they lived it. Early on, the band were based in Ladbroke Grove, where they got to know another Notting Hill resident in the form of Michael Moorcock. It's the stale aroma of science fantasy paperbacks and bearded writers that probably keeps people at bay from Hawkwind -- Half Man Half Biscuit nailed popular response with their lyric "Mention the Lord of the Rings once again/And I'll more than likely kill you/Moorcock Moorcock Michael Moorcock/You fervently moan."

Stick with them though, and Hawkwind -- particularly early Hawkwind -- reward attention. To my ears there's not a lot to distinguish between some of their music and that of celebrated German hipsters Can. Only, where Can's electrifying primitivism was produced by musicians who had jazz chops and classical training, Hawkwind's was the result of giving electricity to primitives. The results were intermittently brilliant, particularly on the celebrated Space Ritual tour of 1973, which is where this Michael Moorcock penned piece comes from. Sonic Attack is an interlude in the chaos of their show, delivered by Robert Calvert with a backing you could either describe as musique concrete, or what happens when drug-addled loons are given primitive synthesisers. Put on your loon pants, light up a joss stick, and enjoy...

In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules.....

If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm
simultaneously
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,
but do not panic.....

Use your wheels. It is what they are for.
Small babies may be placed inside the special cocoons,
which should be left if possible, in a shelter.
Do not attempt to use your own limbs.
If no wheels are available, metal, not organic, limbs
should be employed whenever possible.....

Remember, in the case of Sonic Attack, Survival means every man for himself.
Statistically more people survive if they think only of themselves.
Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones.
You have only a few seconds to escape.
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.
Do not panic.
Think only of yourself....

These are the first signs of Sonic Attack:
You will notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating.
You will notice a vibration in your diaphragm.
You will hear a distant hissing in your ears.
You will feel dizzy.
You will feel the need to vomit.
There will be bleeding from orifices.
There will be an ache in the pelvic region.
You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter.

These are all sign of imminent Sonic destruction.
Your only real protection is flight.
If you are less than ten years old, then remain in your shelter and use
your cocoon.
But remember:
You can help no-one else, No-one else, No-one else......

Oh please! Don't pretend you've never thought about this.  It's the first daydream of every card-carrying SFF fan. The entire genre depends on wish-fulfillments fantasies...we all grow up dreaming of being a superhero of some kind or another.

(Or, if comics aren't your thing, then you may have dreamed of being a warrior, or a beautiful kick-ass princess, or a daring space captain,  or a vampire, or a werewolf....tick box as appropriate...)

I always wanted to be this guy (NOT THE WEEDY SWOT, THE BIG MACHO ONE!):

In retrospect, this is embarrassing.  It would have been cooler to want to be Spider-Man. He might have icky-sticky webbing - hello, sexual metaphor alert! - but at least he doesn't become hugely engorged and large and green, i.e. (using the celebrated Palmer metaphor translation device) Angry Hulk =  monstrous erection the colour of a frog. 

When I was older, and knew better, I wanted to be this guy:

Wolverine of course has a variety of powers; strength, feral rage, a healing factor, and an adamantium skeleton. But his main superpower is that he is cool.  He is Indiana Jones with added attitude; he is the ultimate bad-ass.  He even smokes cigars (cigars make me cough, and I hate the smell they leave on your clothes - but this is a daydream, right?)

I have never, however, daydreamed of having this guy's superpower:

Stretchy limbs, a stick  up his arse, and grey hair blooming at his temples? What's the fun of that?

Even Johnny Storm's power was dorky; Flame on!  It's somehow so juvenile.  I'd much rather be the Beast - especially when he had the coloured fur.

But most of all, I wanted the full package; the super-power, and the inner torment.  The Hulk is not a happy superhero; he's tortured, hated, mocked by society.  Peter Parker is insecure.  Wolverine has a dark back story (revealed over a billion comic stories, and rather oddly synopsised in the movie X Men Origins: Wolverine.)  The key common factor - for the adolescent me, daydreaming of being a superhero - was the notion of being a loner, an outsider, 'not understood, 'special'. 

The essence of being a teenager dreaming of having a superpower, in other words, is to feel just like you do when you DON'T have a superpower. 

In one of my favourite ever SF novels, however, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, the characters have a rather different superpower.  Six characters who separately are confused and unhappy creatures are able to join together to form a new kind of entity  - a homo gestalt.  Lone - the Idiot as he's known in the early chapters - is the first person who is able to make the gestalt 'blesh';  but it brings him little happiness.  Bonnie and Beanie are two twins who can teleport but cannot speak; Baby, another member of the gestalt, is a mongoloid baby with the mind of a computer. 

It's a masterly book, in my view; one of the greatest SF novels ever. But it's not the stuff of which daydreams are made. Here's the first paragraph:

The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.  His clothes were old and many-windowed.  Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.

Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them.

Lone has a superpower - telepathy - but more than that, he is a vital piece in a new kind of human species, a gestalt entity that is larger than the sum of its (human) parts. But who would want to be this sad lonely freak!  It's  a dystopian vision; the superpower as curse, not blessing.

The recent Brit TV show Misfits also, darkly but hilariously, created a gang of superheroes who are cursed not blessed. Simon has the power of invisibility; but since he's such an annoying dork he was pretty much invisible anyway.  Sexy, charismatic  Alisha  is cursed with the power to make men desire her when she touches them; which means she's constantly subject to attempted rapes, and can only make love to her boyfriend though mutual, non-touching, masturbation.  And Kelly, the chav (for US readers - chavs are way lower down the social scale than trailer trash), is telepathic; which means she spends all her time hearing people think, 'God what a slag SHE is.'

Wolverine is cursed too of course - but I would LIKE to be cursed the way he is.  I'd love to be haunted, lonely, an outcast from society, but still able to kick-ass and lord it over my enemies. 

The Sturgeon vision, however - and the Misfits vision too - makes us experience what it would be like to have special powers that don't make you feel special.  You' d be better off being ordinary, than having THESE crap powers.

It's the difference, of course, between wish-fulfillment genre stories and darker, more satirical explorations of the same subject matter. But it makes me aware of how very hard it would be to be 'more than human'.  Because it's our human frailties - our insecurity, our vanity, our ego, our petty jealousy of others - that makes us want to be superpowered in the first place.  If we really did evolve, to become better, wiser, more profound people - then Marvel Comics would go out of  business, and superheroes would go out of vogue.

This for me is one of the problems with Series 3  of Heroes, which I am watching at the moment (long after everyone else of course - Always The Last One To Catch On to a Cultural Phenomenon truly is my superpower.)  Because - without giving away actual plot details - I would say that one of the story conceits in this series is the idea that ANYONE can have a superpower. And in surprise twist after surprise twist, characters change powers, lose powers, and acquire powers when it was their role to be the character WITHOUT a power. All of this undermines the series' original genius, its ability to create superheroes with original character traits. In the early eps, for instance,  Peter Petrelli, for instance, was gifted with the power of being able to see in 3 D despite having an annoying lock of hair dangling in front of one eye; and his brother Nathan was gifted with the power of looking like he had his elegantly cut suits sprayed on every morning. 

But once characters lose their traits, and change their powers - it's hard to root any more.  Because 'rooting' is at the very heart of this 'which superpower would you like to have?' game.  You define yourself by the character with whom you most empathise.  It works for Marvel Comics characters; it works equally well with Buffy characters. Are you Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Angel, or Xander? (I'm Giles - the annoying swotty one who never hits anyone. I'd like to be Xander, but in my heart I know I'm not good looking enough!)  But of course, in my dreams, I'm Buffy. (This is fantasy, changing sex is allowed...) 

So let me answer my own opening question. 

If I could be a Misfits character I'd be - well I wouldn't be any of them actually. AARGH. Nightmare. I guess Curtis is the coolest, but his ability to turn back time would make life SO complicated.  It's hard enough to keep track of just the ONE life...

If I could have the powers of any character in the series Heroes, it would have to be Hiro. 

Not because he looks like me (I'm much closer to Peter Petrelli Parkman) but because stopping time is so cool.  Life rushes past so fast - wouldn't it be great just to freeze it, and take a proper look!  (Time-travelling is less appealing to me, since, as with Curtis's powers, it results in stories so complex they make my head hurt.) But Clare Bennet's powers are also great - because they're so limited! She has a healing gift, she can't die, but has no superstrength and so has to use a gun or a taser against bad guys. And the sheer FRUSTRATION of that puts me in that character's head, and makes me feel her inner torment. (The characters who can replicate other people's powers, however, are TOO powerful.  There's nothing 'feel-special' about that power; they're all armour, no chink.)   

And if I had to be a character in More than Human, I would be Lone.   Even though he's a character who has no character; but I feel for his loneliness. I empathise with that.  It's not wish-fulfillment - it's connection.  I connect with Lone, the superhero who never defeats a supervillain, and lives and dies in sadness. (Damn, that sounds awful - honestly I don't spend ALL my time in front of a computer - I really do have a BIT of a life...)

But all in all, I would rather be the Hulk.  Because the Hulk's power is an inability to control rage within acceptable boundaries; and that's exactly what I would love to do when I'm stuck on a country lane and the other car won't back up an inch or so to the nearest passing place, and I have to reverse back half  a mile.  Or when I get stuck on hold calling the telephone company, and they play that annoying music. Or when...

You get the idea. There are moments when Hulk Rage would be nice.

Palmer....Kill!

Well, maybe not; maybe gentle snarky irony will always be my one and only superpower.

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.

Archie Tait writes:

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the title track of The Flaming Lips' tenth album, released in 2002. Split into two parts, it is the third (and fourth) of the three linked songs that open the album.

The first song, Fight Test, sets the tone - this is Psychedelic Power-Pop by grown-ups, very beaty, very Sunshine. It's a melancholic reflection on Cat Stevens' 1970 song Father and Son: its heritage indicates a clear point-of-entry for those old enough to recall the original, and it's a throat-tugger.

I'd have chosen Fight Test itself for this slot, except it's only recognisable as a Science Fiction song in retrospect (though once that connection is made, it becomes even more powerful). It's a reflection on violence - is it ever right to fight? Though Fight Test is a song about love lost for the lack of commitment, it is also a reflection on violent resistance - that sometimes it's not only right, it's necessary to fight.

The next two songs reveal that Fight Test is also an introduction to the idea of violent resistance against the Pink Robots, resistance for humanity.

The second song, One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21, introduces the robots - 'One more robot learns to be something / More than a machine...' This song is sympathetic to the robot's desire to love, and compares to human uncertainty about the condition of love, the robot's uncertainty whether what it feels is love, or just an artificial simulacrum.

Now we come to Yoshimi. The narrator (the boy who revised his opinion about non-violence, also the man uncertain whether his definition of love and humanity is any different from a robot's) now relies on the girl Yoshimi to protect him from the robots, and to destroy them.

The Flaming Lips have been around for a long time, in pop terms - since 1984. Like Roxy Music, they have become a pop group for grown-ups.  Roxy always had Bryan Ferry's reflective melancholia and diverse culturals referents, anchored by Paul Thompson's resolute yet inventive drum-beat.  The Lips pull similarly diverse influences together without revealing the joins, anchored by drummer Steven Drozd's utter dedication to the beat, producing music that simultaneously excites and intrigues. Wayne Coyne's lyrics are allusive, often based in science metaphors.  The Flaming Lips incorporate California Sunshine Pop and psychedelia (they are from Oklahoma).  They can transform from driving rhythm to anthemic operatics and back again, mid-song. They have a one-handed drummer. Their 1997 album Zaireeka is a four-disc set, all four discs to be played simultaneously.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a nostalgic reminder of 8os anime, those big-eyed, glistening, primary-coloured teenagers who saved the world from monsters, aliens and robots, before the genre 'grew up' with Akira and Urotsukidoji - Legend of the Overfiend. It asks whether a mature man, who has lost the compass of his own humanity, can be saved by an innocent cartoon. The 'story' ends after just three songs. It is barely more than a narrative premise; it has no development, no climax and no resolution. By refusing to elaborate, to pin itself down, a ludicrous conjecture is rendered haunting, and touching.  Allusive, repetitive, precise, it echoes in our memory like other such 'mystery' songs with unfinished narratives - The Jaynetts' Sally Go Round the Roses, Jerry Jeff Walker's Mr Bojangles, Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe.

The Flaming Lips have Science Fiction form: their previous albums feature songs like What is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical (In Our Brains) by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the 'Big Bang' That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe (Soft Bulletin 1999); and Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (You're Invisible Now) (Zaireeka 1997).  Their most recent album is a re-make of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. According to Wikipedia, Aaron Sorkin is working on a Broadway musical version of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The name is Yoshimi

She's a black belt in karate

Working for the city

She has to discipline her body

'Cause she knows that it's demanding

To defeat those evil machines

I know she can beat them

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me

But you won't let those robots eat me

Yoshimi, they don't believe me

But you won't let those robots defeat me

Those evil-natured robots

They're programmed to destroy us

She's gotta be strong to fight them

So she's taking lots of vitamins

'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic

If those evil robots win

I know she can beat them.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me

But you won't let those robots defeat me

Yoshimi, they don't believe me

But you won't let those robots eat me.

Fight Test

The test begins NOW

I thought I was smart,

I thought I was right

I thought it was better not to fight

I thought there was a virtue

In always being cool.

So when it came time to fight

I thought: I'll just step aside

And that time would prove you wrong

And that you would be the fool.

I don't know where the sunbeams end

And the starlight begins

It's all a mystery

Oh to fight is to defend

If it's not now, then tell me when

Would be the time that you would stand up

And be a man

For to lose, I could accept

But to surrender?  I just wept

And regretted this moment -

Oh, that I, I was the fool.

I don't know where the sun-beams end

And the starlight begins

It's all a mystery

And I don't know how a man decides what's right

For his own life - It's just a mystery.

'Cause I'm a man, not a boy

And there are things you can't avoid

You face them when you're not prepared

To face them

If I could, I would

But you're with him now

It'd do no good

I should have fought him

But instead I let him

I let him take it.

I don't know where the sunbeams end

And the star light begins

It's all a mystery.

And I don't know how a man decides

What's right for his own life -

It's a mystery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that's crap also, so

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RULE 1:  ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST WITH AN ATTITUDE.

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

Here are some examples of what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's great action.

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

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

Rule Number 2:  Suspension of Morality

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

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

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

And also when your enemy is UGLY: 

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

 Or when your enemy looks like a vacuum cleaner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Justify your visuals

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

Jeez, those other guys have it SO easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take this, the opening of Asimov's Foundation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm talking about images like this:

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

Rule 4)  Define and escalate your jeopardy

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

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

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

But why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule number 5) Give your characters a break

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternal Idol by Rodin

Art historians like to make a distinction between the 'naked' and the 'nude'.  The naked is embarrassing and socially taboo; whereas the nude is beautiful, artistic, and morally acceptable.  Kenneth Clark argued:

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders [of the UK] that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.

While the poet Robert Graves, mockingly wrote:

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

It's a fairly bogus distinction really, a way of justifying the fact that most museums and art galleries are AWASH with filthy images of naked men and naked women.  But are they naked or are they nude? Well, they're both.  More interestingly, I would ask: are they sexy?  All too often nude paintings are far from sexy. Take this one for instance:

This ghastly nude of Cupid and Venus is a) immoral (Cupid is under-age) and b) gross (that's milk spurting from Venus's breast) and, in my view, c) utterly unsexy.  That's not because the lady is larger than a size zero - it's because she looks HORRIBLE.  And it's hard to conceive of an age where an image like this was considered erotic. 

Because of course nudes were a form of erotica; rich collectors had special cabinets with sliding doors made in order to conceal their nude artworks.  And pornography and art have always been chummy bedfellows; some of the greatest artists of all time have dabbled in filthy pornography. Take this for instance:

Yikes! Don't look at this when your mum is in the room. But no - it's okay. This is not p***; it's a masterly drawing by Picasso. 

This too is a masterpiece of art, dating from Greek times:

And here's another Picasso:

Yes this is the site where you can have your mind improved, your opinons challenged, and where also you can look at FIVE FEET HIGH COCKS and still be asssured that it's 'artistic'.

It's often argued that beauty is in the eye of the beholder...and that tastes in nude beauty have changed over the ages.  But it strikes me that - the ghastly example above notwithstanding - there is beauty to be found in the nudes of every era.  And nudes don't have to be beautiful to be beautiful.  Here's a selection of extraordinary images of male & female beauty; I'm selecting quite a few sculptures too because that's the art form in which the nude gets REALLY sexy.

Angelica and the Hermit by Rubens

A creepy, almost pervy one; but there's something pleasingly sensual about the image of this woman who clearly enjoys her nosh.

A Sleeping Faun, by Barbineri

Yup, this is the non-sexist, full-frontal nudity website.

Greek Marble Sculpture

This is an early example of the extraordinary sensuality of sculpture.

Donatello's David

And this is one of the most beautiful nudes ever created; it makes the Michelangelo sculpture of David look like a farmer's son.

La Forinara by Raphael

This sweet nude is by the perfect Raphael, who allegedly died of too much sex.

Boreas Abducting Orithyea by Rubens

Paintings then were movies now; the drama in this story is intense. It's a slasher movie on canvas. But it's not as graphic as:

The Rabe of the Sabines by Giambologna

Venus and Cupid by Velazquez

A more subtly erotic image of a lady's back.  Paintings of backs are virtually a subgenre, so here's a few more:

Le Violon D'Ingres by Man Ray

Nude with Calla Lilies by Diego Rivera

Yoko & John; and yes I KNOW this isn't a painting...

Mercury/Priapus

Just a reminder for the ladies reading this blog; THOSE were the good old days.

I said nudes don't have to be beautiful to be beautiful; so take a look at this:

Self Portrait with Patrick Preece by Stanley Spencer

And this:

Nude woman by Lucian Freud

A classic nude, perhaps the very definition of sexy, from Rodin:

This adorable image of sensuous woman is by Rembrandt:

Bathsheba at her Bath by Rembrandt

Girlfriends by Gustav Klimt

Something a little more modern from Klimt. 

And last, what I think may be the sexiest painting ever. It's also by Rembrandt, and depicts the scene in which the beautiful Greek maiden Danaë - imprisoned by her lunatic father in a tower - is visited by Zeus who magically falls upon her body in a golden shower and impregnates her; the resulting child, Perseus, goes on to kill Danaë's bonkers dad.

So let's be clear of this; this is a painting of ACTUAL SEX.  And in my view, it is heartstoppingly lovely, even though it's rather scary (did the poor girl WANT to have sex with a magic haze of gold?)

Danae by Rembrandt

I stand by my central thesis: urban fantasy is the only genre in which sexual metaphor is at the heart of the definition of the genre.  And yes, to the lady who pointed out in her comment that what vampires do is assault not sex.  It's not just assault, it's RAPE,  and often rape-murder.  Which is why the only moral way to write about vampires is to treat them as vile disgusting creatures with no redeeming qualities.

Except, um, no one does that.  Vampires are cool; we all love Angel-as-vampire more than Angel-as-good-guy.  There are also plenty of YA books about vampires which tone down the sex, to make appealing characters of of them; and clever writers like Charlie Huston, Charlaine Harris and Kim Newman employ conceits about vegetarian vampires and surrogate blood to make their monsters morally acceptable. But hey - they're still monsters!

There are exceptions to my urban fantasy thesis of course - Mike Carey's Felix Castor is not a sexual metaphor, but he DOES hang out with a succubus.  And Dante Valentine - as a private necromance - is by no means a monster.  It just that *blushes embarrassingly* I find the books very sexy.

And this is what I've learned. I read all the Dante Valentine books thinking that the love story between Japhrimel and Dante was at the heart of it; yet clearly some fans, and Lili herself, deny that this is the most important aspect of the book. And Nicole Peeler also refutes my assumption that the vampire Ryu and the selkie Jane True will fall in love. 

Indeed, Nicole has gone one step further, by betting me £50 (English sterling) that these two WON'T fall in love. And, sucker as I am, I took the bet.

The reason I'm a sucker is - Nicole is writing the damned books! So if there's the slightest chance of real romance, she's going to kill the damned vampire rather than risk paying me my fifty quid.  Don't deny it, Nicole! I know how sneaky you urban fantasy writers are!

Seriously though...       :)    It's true that sometimes a writer's characters take on a life of their own.  And it's also true that some readers see what they want to see. I don't know for certain which of those two scenarios is the case here; but I do know that when I read a book I ALWAYS look for the love story.

And the more two key and sexually-charged characters hate each other and don't need each other - the more I assume they will ultimately fall in love. 

I, am, frankly, despite the graphic gratuitious violence of my own novels, a big softie.

But both Lili & Nicole - and this is my big discovery - are, despite their romantic/sexual subplots,  first and foremost writing about tough and independent female characters.  That is, I have learned,  one of the driving forces behind their writing. 

I also, in my own work, write about independent female characters (however screwed up they may be) but I can't bear an ending in which love doesn't triumph. 

Hmmm....

So, looking to the future:  is Nicole going to break my heart?  We shall see. I've only read the first book in her Jane True series; now there's money on the table to incentivise me when I read the rest.  Can Nicole be so cruel and heartless as to leave Jane True without a soul-mate, the one person she will love forever?  Will she indeed kill off Ryu (undead though he is) just to thwart me? (But if she does - I win! There's nothing so potent as the love one feels for a loved one who has died.) 

Anyway, this is all good fun, and btw, huge grist for my own imaginative mill.

*sighs jealously*

In my very first posting on this site, I claimed to have had a colourful life as a spy, explorer, murderer, and film producer.  Students of Palmer irony will recognise this was largely a pack of lies; I've never done any of these exciting things!

Except, um, being a film producer.  Because, unlikely as it sounds, I actually am one.

This is, let's face, a cool kind of a job,  and I've written about it before on this site.  I've blogged about going to Cannes; and I wrote about my trip to the American Film Market, in LA, and conceded that being a film producer is indeed a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist.   

The truth is -  producing a feature film is HARD.  And no matter how much effort you put in, there's no guarantee of success. That's why being a movie producer is not a job for a sane person.

Hence - I qualify!

At the moment though, rather to my surprise in fact, I find the process of getting a movie made is happening all around me. Co-producers. A director. A casting director.  Cinematographers reading the script.  Funding sources identified.  Casting discussions. It's exciting as all hell and, let's face it, it's glamorous too. It's much cooler than my real life as a nerdy (nay, one of the MOST nerdy!)  SF novelist.

Here's a glimpse of the location for my movie, which is called Inferno:

This is an image of the steel works at Port Talbot - the visual inspiration for Ridley Scott's opening sequence of Blade Runner (he was driving past on the M4 and saw THIS.)  And this is the mythic landscape for my film about murder, sex, love and gritty working class life in a Welsh seaport.

This is the kind of movie I've always wanted to make - it's inspired by Double Indemnity and Body Heat and Chinatown and that whole noir tradition; and a passion for genre movies like those  is why I became a screenwriter.  But the film business is a extraordinary industry:  mad, criminal, incompetent, unfair, glorious, inspiring, and I LOVE IT.  And because it's such a mad business, the only way to achieve your vision as a movie writer is to GET OUT THERE AND MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.

As a novelist - especially if you work for the wonderful Orbit Books (*creep* *creep* but I do mean it) (and hey guys - how about a hike on that last advance?) it's much easier. The guys who run SFF publishing care; they are passionate; they take risks; they support creativity. 

In movies, however, it's all about being a distributor, stealing all the  money off creatives, and spending it on lap dancers, champagne and coke.  NO GUYS! GIVE US THE MONEY, SO WE CAN MAKE REAL MOVIES! (And, er, if there's any left over, I wouldn't mind a glass of champagne?) 

I used the 'V' word - Vision - just now, and that  sounds a wee bit pretentious I know. But you really have to HAVE to have one, or indeed several, if you're going to be a creative artist.  Obviously you have to listen, collaborate, accept that other people have valid points, take notes, etc etc etc.  But once you've done that: you must STICK TO YOUR VISION. 

My vision of Inferno is a lot to do with landscape, and a lot to do with myth. I mentioned the Ridley Scott story above - this is one of my pitches for the movie when talking to potential financiers.  And when I first read that story, in Empire magazine, I realised - this is my back yard - my home town -  and Ridley himself believes it's a mythic landscape. So why don't I do something with that?

Another part of my vision for the film is a rebellion against the dominant social realist verite-filmmaking tradition of the British film industry - the kind of lowkey, truthful movies that Ken Loach makes, and Andrea Arnold makes. I love many of these movies; but I don't want to make them. I'd prefer to create films that are visually rich, intense, utterly enjoyable, and which offer a rollercoaster experience with soul and passion. Movies like The Last Seduction, Body Heat, Grosse Pointe Blank, Sherlock Holmes (the recent one) and Kill Bill excite me far more than Brit flicks like, for instance, An Education. (Which is a lovely little film - but not for me THRILLING.)

My love/hate relationship with the British film industry goes back a bunch of years.  One of my first jobs was a script reader for major companies like Columbia UK and Granada Films, when I met wonderful producers like David Puttnam and Lynda Myles and Margaret Matheson and Scott Meek. I script edited a movie called The Bull Dance by the legendary Robin Hardy (who made The Wicker Man); though sadly the company who made it became kaput.   And Granada Films, one of my major employers at that time,  also went out of business. Goldcrest - slightly before my time - was the great UK film company, and they  too went bust (though, technically, they didn't declare actual bankruptcy.)

You get the idea; it's a volatile and unpredictable industry; just about as safe as building houses on volcanic rock, in the shadow of an active volcano.  And so, as I say,  you have to go out make your own chances. And that's what I'm doing now.

And all this helps to explain why I'm a gamekeeper turned poacher; a writer turned producer.  I have 3 movie projects in all; and  one of them - Inferno,  my Welsh film noir - is now at  that key stage where small platoons of people are behaving as if it will definitely happen.

Because that's the only way movies get made; a critical mass of belief and passion has to be there, key personnel have to be attached, vital creative decisions have to be made; and then the money magically falls into place. (Okay, it may be a BIT harder than that - but fortunately I have two seasoned co-producers on board with 20+ film credits between them, and they do actually understand the details of film finance, and have the contacts to access it.)

And what I'll be doing on this site, in irregular blogs like this one, is writing about the process of producing a movie.  How it works; why it often goes wrong; and why no stars EVER sleep with the screenwriter. The ups, the downs, the more downs, the sudden unexpected ups again. 

This is a story which doesn't necessarily have a happy ending - we may fail to raise the finance, the movie may never get made. Well, guess what; that doesn't scare me.  I can handle eventual defeat; NOT TRYING is the one thing that's utterly alien to my nature.

Or, alternatively, the movie WILL get made; in which case the readers of this blog will have been on the inside track of the genesis of a moderately major new British feature film WHICH YOU WILL LOVE. (Trust me on this!)

The next step is preparing a budget (in hand), and finding a cinematographer.  So watch this space....

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.

Robert  Grant writes:

'Where’s Captain Kirk' by SpizzEnergi (Rough Trade RTS04. 1979)

When Philip first extended the invite to choose SFF Song of the Week the immediate temptation was to reach across the huge back catalogue of some old prog-rock band like Hawkwind, ELP or Genesis or maybe something newer like Coheed & Cambria or Tool but two things stopped us: 1) they're a bit too obvious and 2) they're a bit po-faced and exclusive and for those reasons wouldn't really represent what SCI-FI-LONDON is all about.

But this, this is more us. It's a fabulous pop song, great fun, with real energy. Sure, it's a bit rough around the edges but from the opening guitar riff to the last shout of the chorus you cannot help tapping your feet, singing along and having a great time whether you want to or not. We used it for the festival sting two years ago and every time it played, the audience - no matter how many times they'd heard it - jigged in their seats and sang along showing exactly why it was named Single Of The Week by Melody Maker, why it remained at No.1 on the newly created UK Indie Chart for over two months and in the top 50 for the entire year and why John Peel called it the best Star Trek song ever in his BBC1 programme on the music of Star Trek.

Mojo magazine included it in their list of the best punk rock singles of all time and while it's been covered by a number of artists, most famously by R.E.M., and it's been remixed and re-imagined a fair number of times over the years as well, the original is still, and will always be, the best and when you're at this years SCI-FI-LONDON in May, whack it on the nearest juke box and you just might see a fat bloke dance!

I was beamed aboard the starship Enterprise
What I felt what I saw was a total surprise
I looked around and wondered can this be
Or is this the start of my insanity

Oh but it's true
As we went warp factor 2
And I met all of the crew
Where's Captain Kirk?

I went to the bridge and we were tossed about
In the storm of the vortex I was hit with a doubt
I saw in a dream in a memory of mine
Was it you was it me who was in all the time?

Spock pulled me through
As we went warp factor 2
And someone I saw I knew
Who's Captain Kirk?

So when I awoke from the dangers of space
I looked and I saw a familiar face
The time warp in space made a change in me
For I was the captain and the captain was me

Yes it's so true
As we went warp factor 2
The changes I had been through
As Captain Kirk
I'm Captain Kirk

Except, in fact, it's not; when vampires feed, they take fluid out; but when you have sex,  you...okay okay I'm moving on.  But the basic insight - which came to me when I was 12 or 13 - is this: vampirism is a compelling and unmistakable metaphor for sexual intercourse.

And, of course, I'm  not exactly the only person who's noticed this fact...

The American TV vampire series True Blood takes the implicit metaphor and really bangs it out there. It's sex, sex, sex all the way...the high point for me came when Sookie's brother takes vampire blood in a pill and gets a hard on so enormous he's in agony and has to have all the blood surgically removed from - no, no, that's another sentence I'm not going to finish.

The old Hammer vampire films were relatively tame ; it's not until you get to classics like The Vampire Lovers (1970) that it all starts getting steamy.  (Okay, film nerds out there, correct me if you wish!)  But the icky-sticky sexy stuff was there all along; for The Vampire Lovers was based on Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire short story Carmilla, arguably the first ever vampire story (okay book nerds, shoot me down there too!) Here's a flavour of Le Fanu:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever'. (Carmilla, Chapter 4).

Of course vampire stories and urban fantasy stories aren't necessarily the same thing; though to be honest, the distinctions seem elusive to me.  Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot is a definitive reinvention of the vampire myth; but it's not urban fantasy, it's small town America fantasy/horror.  And Kim Newman's great Victorian vampire novels Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron are awash with sex (like the vampire stripper scene in which  - no, I'm really not going to speak that one out loud) but they're aren't contemporary.  And as I understand, urban fantasy has to be urban, cool, & now. 

But the general point is this: urban fantasy is a booming genre, as publisher Tim Holman has conclusively demonstrated. And urban fantasy seems to me to be awash with sex.

And are those two things connected?

Of course urban fantasy is often (always?) horror, and horror is by definition a sensationalist genre.  But the thesis I'm reaching towards here is this: urban fantasy readers like sex - more than that they like stories about CHARACTERS having sex - and the whole genre is dominated by an assumption that stories have to be about people, relationships, and feelings. And - sorry, a four letter word is about to be used here - LOVE.

And this is why there's such a huge gulf between the hardcore SF reader and the died-in-the-wool urban fantasy writer. SF thrives on gadgets, gizmos, and huge space battles; urban fantasy is about characters and their emotions.

Wild generalisation? You bet!

I'm not, I stress, arguing that science fiction is prudish; far from it. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land tapped into the 60s free love ethos and its advocacy of polyamory still exerts a strong pull over the core SF readership.  Anyone who's on the mailing list for this year's Odyssey will know there has been a huge debate about the connections between science fiction/fantasy and bondage, polyamory, and other sexual life choices.

And modern SF writers are far from shy about writing explicit sex scenes.  Charles Stross' superb Saturn's Children, for instance, is written as a homage to Heinlein but is FAR filthier. It's set in a world where humans have died out, and robots are left behind; and these robots are horny and love sex.  It's an adorable tongue-in-cheek novel that's as amusing as it is graphic.

Or take Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void, in which  the character of Araminta has sex with a 'multiple human' - one personality shared between multiple bodies - called Mr Bovey. Araminta wakes from a dream to find the Mr Boveys are pleasuring her:

The gossamer breath of nebula dust firmed up into strong fingers sliding along her legs; more hands began to stroke her belly, the another pair squeezed her breasts. Sweet oil was massaged into her skin with wicked insistence. Tongues licked with intimate familiarity.

'Time to wake up,' a voice murmured.

On the other side of her, another voice encouraged, ''Time to indulge yourself again.'

(And after that, it gets REALLY steamy...)

So there's no way that the modern SF writer is shy about writing 'down and dirty' sex scenes in the far future; and all too often these may involve differently evolved human beings, or even acts of exophilia, ie sex with aliens.  (As in Eric Brown's masterly short story 'Star Crystals and Karmel' in the collection The Time Lapsed Man and Other Stories.)

But my point here is that in science fiction and traditional fantasy, sex is an element of the storytelling - it's something characters do in the course of the story.  But in certain subgenres of urban fantasy, sex IS the story. 

In other words, the very premise of a vampire story is a sexual metaphor; the deflowering of a virgin, the loss of innocence, the ravishing of a nubile woman or a virile man, often in bed, by a monster. 

And by the same token, the very premise of a werewolf story is also a sexual metaphor; the beast unleashed, the shapeshifting, the feet that grow (!!! that's called 'metonymy', think not 'foot' but some other body part) and the surrender to wild bestial passion.

Urban fantasy IS sex in other words.  

Of course sometimes the sexual metaphor is underplayed, and is drowned out by other metaphors.  Charlie Huston for instance is writing a terrific series about a vampire in a version of New York (I've just read the first, Already Dead) in which vampires run the gangs; here vampires are the Mafia, rather than being sexual monsters. There are some racy scenes, admittedly, but the dominant metaphor isn't sexual. 

But all too often, these two subgenres - vampire and werewolf stories - offer the writer a way to explore the human condition ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO HAVING SEX, and falling in love.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for instance, is many things; but the dominant strand (for me) is the story of a young woman's sexual awakening (the whole Angel romance) and her discovery of herself as a independently minded sexual being.  I love the fights in Buffy; but the moments and images I remember most vividly are when Buffy is haunted by sorrow because she has a broken heart. 

Nicole Peeler's heroine Jane True (in her series which begins with Tempest Rising) offers an intriguing variation on this 'urban fantasy is all about sex' approach. For Jane is not a vampire, she's a selkie - half-seal, half-woman - and let's be frank about this: that's REALLY sexy.  If you don't believe me, listen to THIS SONG (chosen by Nicole) about a murderous selkie, and then read Nicole's hot prose.  In fact here's an excerpt (note: Old Sow is the local name in this New England town for a dangerous whirlpool):

I used the riptide caused by one of the Sow's piglets to help me shoot up into the air so I could dive back down like a porpose.  I landed more heavily than I'd anticipated, the piglet forcing me into a strong current that wanted to carry me to her mother. I fought hard to free myself but the current had me in its vicelike grip. The Old Sow was nowhere near the most powerful of the Earth's whirlpools, but she was far too strong even for my freakish swimming abilities.

You see what I mean! If being caught up in a whirlpool as a half-woman, half-seal isn't a metaphor for sex, then I don't know what it is.  And okay, that's pretty extreme and kinky and, er, damp sex; but the sensuality of the language and the intensity of the 'surrendering to passion' subtext are, in my view, undeniable. (Unless, ahem, I'm just really odd?)

There are, I should add, some very graphic sex scenes between Jane and her vampire lover later on in the book; but my point is that it's the very premise that's sexy.  The whole concept of the book is about what it is to be a sensual beast; rather than being a sensible, cerebral geek in nerdy clothing (as I, for instance, am for most of the time.)  

I'm also, as readers of this blogsite will know, a huge fan of Dante Valentine, Lilith Saintcrow's ass-kicking private necromance character in the series of books which begins with Working fot the Devil. These books have a fabulously well worked out future history, and the action scenes are intense and exciting. But the whole point of the book, really, is Dante's love life; her passions, her confusions, her love/hate relationship with her various lovers. And, more than anything, it's about the intense and toxic love between a human being (who becomes part-demon) and an actual demon.  That's Japhrimel of course;  powerful, arrogant, wearing a black cape, patronising  to Dante yet adoring her, and terrifyingly protective of 'his' woman.  He's a demonic Heathcliff; a man so sexy he sizzles. 

And again there are exceptions to this rule; there are plenty of urban fantasy books (especially YA books) which AREN'T all about sex.  (Although even then, if you  think of Stephanie Meyer's tales about a celibate vampire - isn't the absence of sex another way of being ABOUT sex?)

My simple point though is that there's a strong subgenre of urban fantasies which are love stories as much as they are kick-ass supernatural thrillers; and that fact intrigues me.  You couldn't write a crime novel that was more about the sexual and emotional desires of the main characters than about the who-dun-it unfolding of the plot; but in SFF, all things are possible. 

And this is where the subgenre of 'paranormal romance' comes into the argument.  This is a subgenre that buds off from 'romance' rather than from SFF; there's nothing wrong with that in my view, though I've seen comments on the blogosphere that are deeply hostile to this whole literary trend.  Most people who love SFF are attracted to great stories, wonderful concepts, and compelling characters; we're not looking for 'romance' as such.

And yet - a good romance is possibly the greatest story which any writer can tell.  So I'm happy to read SF or fantasy or urban fantasy with sex and love and romance as vital story strands.

But I have to reluctantly concede that it's only the urban fantasy writers who get to write ALL about sex...

I never recognise myself in photographs; the tall, muscular, heroic man that I know myself to be always get strangely reduced into being a short tubby Welsh bloke.  This just proves that THE CAMERA ALWAYS LIES.

But self portraits by artists always intrigue me. It's said that to paint a great portrait, you have to see into the soul of your sitter.  To paint yourself, therefore, you have to know yourself; you have to see past the facial features to the essence of the man or woman beneath.

There is (or at least was) a  fabulous juxtaposition in the National Gallery between two portaits of Rembrandt - one as a young man, one as an old man. Because of the ways the eyes look to one side, you can stand and be stared at by both men at the same time. There is no more potent visual expression of how the boy becomes the man.

Caravaggio plays a similar trick in the self portrait below, in which he is both David AND Goliath; the young man and the older man in the same painting.

Here's a glimpse into the souls of some great artists.

Henri Matisse

Francis Bacon, 1973

Caravaggio as both David and Goliath

Artemisia Gentileschi: Self Portrait as a Lute Player

Lucian Freud

Claude Monet, 1886

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso on a bad day

Gwen John

Raphael

Michelangelo - self portrait?

Tolouse Letrec

J.M.W. Turner

Rembrandt Van Rijn as a young man

Rembrandt Van Rijn in 1660

In a nutshell, a bankruptcy examiner has concluded that Lehman Brothers may (MAY - it's not yet proved as these things have to be) have been engaged in dodgy accounting practices in the weeks before their collapse.  This is hardly news...but the good part is that the principle of Financial Sector White Collar Crime is Still Crime is being asserted here.  No one's arguing that Lehman Brothers can't be prosecuted because they're 'too big to fail'. (They already HAVE failed.)

No one is above the law in other words.

This week I was invited - thanks to those nice people at Working Title Films - to a cast and crew (plus invited guests) screening of Paul Greengrass's new film The Green Zone.  These screenings are always a treat, because you're sitting in the cinema with the people who actually made the film. There's not the usual rush to leave when the credits appear; in fact, applause breaks out every time a new crew member's credit appears.  And to cap it all, Paul Greengrass made an impressive and heartfelt speech at the start.

The film is a KNOCKOUT. It really is astonishing. And its themes resonate strongly with me. Greengrass is a man who is actively engaged in the Battle Between Good and Evil (see the Category on your left for my own blogs on this theme.) And this film is essentially a deeply political expose of one of the greatest lies ever told: WMD. The astonishing opening sequence has Matt Damon and his team of soldiers risking their lives to find WMDs in Iraq where the intel says they are - only to draw a blank.

That's because they never existed! The whole war in Iraq was launched on the basis of outrageous deception; it's one of the worst scandals of modern history. But, you know, politicians bank on the fact that WE FORGET THESE THINGS.

So Greengrass has come along to remind us...

This powerful political film also functions as perhaps the most exciting action movie I've ever seen; my God, Greengrass can really move that camera...as can his Oscar winning DOP Barry Ackroyd.  My one reservation is that to make this movie work as an action thriller Greengrass and his writer Brian Helgeland (who also wrote LA Confidential) have had to create a fictional story at the heart of the true story. And that's a slightly awkward fit. 

But even so, for me this is one of the best films of this, or any year.

The rest of my time this week has been taken up with this pesky little bugger:

Yes, it's the novel that Orbit are publishing this October; and not only did they force me to actually write it, they've now had the goddam temerity to ask me to do some REWRITES.  Polishes no less!  And that's been my week's work really.

It's strange when you revise a novel you haven't looked at for some months. It kind of felt like someone else's book. I kept thinking - Ooh, I don't remember THAT happening.  And it's subtly different to my first two books, Debatable Space and Red Claw; there's more of a single focus, and the style is less baroque. It is however still within the 'Debatable Space' universe; the three books together constitute what I call a 'triptych' (pretentous moi? un peu!) - not a trilogy in other words, and you can read them in any order. But if you read all three they should connect up in various (and hopefully interesting) ways.

I've also been looking at cvs for cinematographers whose work I love...yes, it's that stage in the on-going saga of the movie (Inferno) wot I am producing, with the aid and inspiration of a gang of film people who actually DO know what they are doing...Hope to have more news on that front soon.

I finished Jesse Bullington's fab The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, a full-blooded, blood-thirsty, witty and erudite medieval thriller with supernatural elements.  And I'm currently lost in the embrace of John Scalzi's splendid first novel Old Man's War, a hommage to Heinlein, and a great piece of storytelling.

Oh and I've just started watching Series 3 of Heroes, after a long gap. I'm struggling to remember what happened in Series 2 (ah yes - the girl whose eyes go black!) and I'm afraid I am having a sense of time standing still. Sylar is STILL the villain? But it looks great so I'm expecting to warm up to it soon.

Actually I prefer Trinity...brrr!  But let's not go there.

Neo is the coolest of the cool. He is Christ (aka the One), he is kick-ass, he wears shades, he has superpowers, and he is here to rescue us from the horrible terrible place that is The Matrix.

I love The Matrix; Matrix 2 (Reloaded) not so much, Matrix 3 (Revolutions), let's not go there.  But the first Matrix film came as an absolute shock; who could have thought cinema could be so kinetic, so visually wonderful, so like a comic book? 

There's a lot of great writing in the script by the Andy and Larry (or Lana, if you believe the rumours) Wachowki. Not great dialogue (why don't they get Joss Whedon to write dialogue for ALL science fiction movies?) but really clever ideas. The movie borrows ideas from Buddhism, Joseph W. Campebell's book on myth, Alice in Wonderland, and gnosticism.  And it weaves that into a narrative that makes computer geeks look cool. 

There's one flaw in the story - the good guys are all trying to destroy the Matrix. But I LOVE the Matrix. Who wants to live with the boring rebels in their boring hideaway, when you could be on the inside of a whizz-bang computer game where people can have superpowers?

The screenplay can be read here; and now here's some pretty pics of brooding Keanu in what may be his best ever role, following by the wondrous trailer.

I love his choice for today - my generation too! - but this particular song it's WAY too long to feature on this blog, or even on YouTube. So I feature an excerpt, with a link for you to buy the album if you want to hear more.

Mike Carey writes:

Supper’s Ready Part 2

In Supper's Ready (from their 1972 album, Foxtrot), Genesis created a sprawling sci-fi epic and played it out in the space of a suite of songs whose combined length is more than twenty minutes. Beginning with a first inkling of disaster to come when the narrator sees something alien and inexplicable in his lover's face, it escalates through total war, millenarian cults, extreme body modification and finally the end of the world - although we're not sure whether this is devastation or redemption.

The lyrics are elliptical, and it's never possible to paraphrase exactly what's going on, but the orchestration of emotion throughout is amazing, as is the bravura finish, which swipes the imagery of the Book of Revelations and puts it through its paces - so that when we come full circle to the announcement that "supper's ready", it's the supper of the king of kings, announced by the angel who stands in the sun. Pretentious? Maybe. But back in 1974 (which was when I discovered the album) that didn't put me off at all. I just loved it for the insane head-trip it was. Moreover, it paved the way for the greater glories of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway two years later - The Lamia, Lilywhite Lilith, The Colony of Slippermen et al.

Yes, kids, that's how old I am. I remember when Genesis weren't boring...

Lovers' Leap

Walking across the sitting-room, I turn the television off.
Sitting beside you, I look into your eyes.
As the sound of motor cars fades in the night time,
I swear I saw your face change, it didn't seem quite right.
...And it's hello babe with your guardian eyes so blue
Hey my baby don't you know our love is true.

Coming closer with our eyes, a distance falls around our bodies.
Out in the garden, the moon seems very bright,
Six saintly shrouded men move across the lawn slowly.
The seventh walks in front with a cross held high in hand.
...And it's hello babe your supper's waiting for you.
Hey my baby, don't you know our love is true.

I've been so far from here,
Far from your warm arms.
It's good to feel you again,
It's been a long long time. Hasn't it?

The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man

I know a farmer who looks after the farm.
With water clear, he cares for all his harvest.
I know a fireman who looks after the fire.

Can't you see he's fooled you all.
Yes, he's here again, can't you see he's fooled you all.
Share his peace,
Sign the lease.
He's a supersonic scientist,
He's the guaranteed eternal sanctuary man.
Look, look into my mouth he cries,
And all the children lost down many paths,
I bet my life you'll walk inside
Hand in hand,
gland in gland
With a spoonful of miracle,
He's the guaranteed eternal sanctuary.
We will rock you, rock you little snake,
We will keep you sad and warm.

Ikhnaton And Itsacon And Their Band Of Merry Men

Wearing feelings on our faces while our faces took a rest,
We walked across the fields to see the children of the West,
But we saw a host of dark skinned warriors
standing still below the ground,
Waiting for battle.

The fight's begun, they've been released.
Killing foe for peace...bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang...
And they're giving me a wonderful potion,
'Cos I cannot contain my emotion.
And even though I'm feeling good,
Something tells me I'd better activate my prayer capsule.

Today's a day to celebrate, the foe have met their fate.
The order for rejoicing and dancing has come from our warlord.

How Dare I Be So Beautiful?

Wandering in the chaos the battle has left,
We climb up the mountain of human flesh,
To a plateau of green grass, and green trees full of life.
A young figure sits still by a pool,
He's been stamped "Human Bacon" by some butchery tool.
(He is you)
Social Security took care of this lad.
We watch in reverence, as Narcissus is turned to a flower.
A flower?

Willow Farm

If you go down to Willow Farm,
to look for butterflies, flutterbyes, gutterflies
Open your eyes, it's full of surprise, everyone lies,
like the fox on the rocks,
and the musical box.
Yes, there's Mum & Dad, and good and bad,
and everyone's happy to be here.

There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag,
he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.
The frog was a prince, the prince was a brick, the brick was an egg,
the egg was a bird.
(Fly away you sweet little thing, they're hard on your tail)
Hadn't you heard?
(They're going to change you into a human being!)
Yahoo, we're happy as fish and gorgeous as geese,
and wonderfully clean in the morning.

We've got everything, we're growing everything,
We've got some in
We've got some out
We've got some wild things floating about
Everyone, we're changing everyone,
you name them all,
We've had them here,
And the real stars are still to appear.

ALL CHANGE!

Feel your body melt;
Mum to mud to mad to dad
Dad diddley office, Dad diddley office,
You're all full of ball.

Dad to dam to dum to mum
Mum diddley washing, Mum diddley washing,
You're all full of ball.

Let me hear you lies, we're living this up to the eyes.
Ooee-ooee-ooee-oowaa
Momma I want you now.

And as you listen to my voice
To look for hidden doors, tidy floors, more applause.
You've been here all the time,
Like it or not, like what you got,
You're under the soil (the soil, the soil),
Yes, deep in the soil (the soil, the soil, the soil, the soil!).
So we'll end with a whistle and end with a bang
and all of us fit in our places.

Apocalypse In 9/8 (Co-Starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)

With the guards of Magog, swarming around,
The Pied Piper takes his children underground.
Dragons coming out of the sea,
Shimmering silver head of wisdom looking at me.
He brings down the fire from the skies,
You can tell he's doing well by the look in human eyes.
Better not compromise.
It won't be easy.

666 is no longer alone,
He's getting out the marrow in your back bone,
And the seven trumpets blowing sweet rock and roll,
Gonna blow right down inside your soul.
Pythagoras with the looking glass reflects the full moon,
In blood, he's writing the lyrics of a HIP brand new tune.

And it's hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue,
Hey my baby, don't you know our love is true,
I've been so far from here,
Far from your loving arms,
Now I'm back again, and babe it's gonna work out fine.

As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet)

Can't you feel our souls ignite
Shedding ever changing colours, in the darkness of the fading night,
Like the river joins the ocean, as the germ in a seed grows
We have finally been freed to get back home.

There's an angel standing in the sun, and he's crying with a loud voice,
"This is the supper of the mighty One",
The Lord of Lords,
King of Kings,
Has returned to lead His children home,
To take them to the new Jerusalem.

Download from Amazon here.

This week however I'm going to delve into the murkiest, darkest topic of all: the topic of how writers should deal with crap reviews of their work.

The truth is that all writers, however established, however talented,  get crap reviews from time to time. However, it's also the case that really CRAP writers get crap reviews, and deservedly so.  Thus,  every writer is disheartened, demoralised, and let's face it, humiliated when the stinky reviews come along.  Writing is a lot to do with maintaining self confidence and self esteem; and the crap review can often be the pin that bursts the balloon.

The great John Scalzi (I love this man - how the HELL does he write so many blogs, AND write novels, and consult for TV, and have a family, and still have a sense of humour?) has confronted this delicate issue head on by actually publishing crap reviews of his own books on his own website.  All the two star and one star reviews he gets on Amazon - he doesn't pretend they don't exist, he just prints them.  And a couple of other writers have followed suit. It's a great way to diminish the writer's agony;  a bit like easing the pain from a stubbed toe by breaking your own little finger.   

I haven't got that much courage, but I am going to give a link to a recent review of my novel Red Claw which is really REALLY bad.  In fact, I've never had such a bad review (well, apart from the Amazon review that said Debatable Space was 'the worst book ever written' or similar.)  It's a STINKER. And here it is.  (Be warned, there's a major - in fact THE major - plot spoiler dropped into the critique at about the mid-point.)

I've  read the entire review; it's intelligent, well argued, well written, and is a devastating demolition job of a novel I don't recognise.  But I can't deny that The Blogger Who Hates My Book is smart and sincere and entirely entitled to his opinion.

Other critics have been kinder, and the major press crits have been highly favourable (though the guy from SFX clearly thinks I'm really weird.)  But the views of bloggers are hugely important in this genre - bloggers tell it like it is, and I value that.  So to restore my battered pride I'm also going to link two reviews by bloggers who DID read the book I thought I wrote. So there's this one,  and this one.  

These things are subjective - blah blah. We all know that.  But I'm beginning to think there's something interesting about the way my work seems to polarise readers in the SFF community.  My publishers, Orbit Books. are also fascinated by this - they actually think it's a good thing! (Rather to my surprise.)  And they even published a flyer for Red Claw containing a blend of my good and crap Amazon reviews for Debatable Space. This came as something as a shock for me - as a point of policy, I stopped googling myself and reading my Amazon crits about a month after DS was published - so I hadn't even seen some of these negative crits.  I'd thought that everyone loved the damned book!

Gulp.

Anyway, the point is there are things about my work that some people love, and others hate.  In Debatable Space, it was Lena's story that divided people - for some it made the book special, more than just a space opera shoot 'em up.  For others, it was a foolish digression.  Stick to the point, you idiot! seemed to be the gist. 

The one critical comment that haunts me - from a blogger called Liviu - is the suggestion that Red Claw is in some way less maverick, less bold, less iconoclastic  than Debatable Space. I hope that's not true; but it might be.  But I guess I would counter-argue that with DS I never intended to 'break the rules' just for the hell of it.  All I wanted to do is write an SF novel that shocked and enthralled the reader.  And I think the only 'rule' I broke is a dumb and stupid rule, and it's this:

Everything should be about the plot.

This is a guiding principle of much mediocre television drama; the note producers and directors give to writers all the time, because they think they're being 'focused'.  (But watch a great TV drama by McGovern or Abbott or Russell T. and it's the minor characters, the digressions, the turns of phrase, all the things that create the texture of the world that make the stories come to life!)  And in my years working as a television writer,  it used to drive me mad.  Because plot is just what happens in the story; the story is why it happens. 

So in DS, the plot involves a war between Flanagan, Lena and the Cheo; but the story is WHY these people get involved in this war, and why we should care. So the 'digressions' about Flanagan's life, and the long sections with Lena, are about the Why. That's why these bits matter; they don't advance the plot, they advance the STORY. And, more than anything, the story of the book is the story of Lena - a thousand years of fucking up, getting it wrong, being too passive, being too arrogant, falling in love with the wrong guy, finally finding the right guy - that's the story that interests me.  The fact she gets embroiled in a galactic war is almost a side-issue set against all that.

That's how it seems to me anyway.  But I think everyone who hates the book hates it because they LIKE plot.  They like plot more than anything else.  And that's fine; but it's just not the way I write books. (In Red Claw, the Story begins with Hugo Baal writing about the biosphere of the planet - the thriller stuff is the plot but the STORY is that - scientific passion for the myriad forms of life on a world run by evil bastards who don't care about alien bugs and their morphology.)

Here's another thing some people seem to hate: Irony.  I use a lot of irony.  But some folks don't care for it, and maybe don't even see when it's there.  And that's fair enough.  There are plenty of books I love which have no irony. But it's clearly  something that's deep in my soul, a warped love of not saying what I mean but letting it emerge through the cracks. 

Here's an example of my kind of irony, from Red Claw. It's a diary passage written by Hugo Baal after the death of Jim Aura - a minor (very minor) character who Hugo, as a self-obsessed geek type, has never really noticed or cared about, until Jim's horrific demise.

From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal.

June 44^th

The death of Jim Aura has affected all of us badly. 

I didn’t know him well, I have to admit. I’ve never really connected with the Noirs.  And there was something about Jim’s staring black eyes that repelled me. Though he was a fine Scientist, albeit of a practical bent.  And, apparently, so I’m told, he had a wonderful singing voice.  A lyric tenor, of professional calibre. Though he never sang for us.  In fact,  to be honest, we hardly ever spoke to him.  Or at least, I hardly ever did.  He was such a reserved and distant individual.  He never got animated, even when the Fungists were in full rant.  He always wore black, and apparently he always knew he was a Noir, though he didn’t have his eyes and the tattoos done until we reached Xabar.  In fact, I think it was only a few months before the Hooperman attack that he made the final surgical commitments.  Though I might be wrong about that, I didn’t really notice him to be honest.

And, as I say, he never talked about himself much. Or, indeed,  at all.  He kept himself to himself, even after our shared trauma at the Depot. Though perhaps by that point, he was in mourning,  for the rest of the Noirs? I suppose he was, in a sense,  the last of his kind?

Even so, we all thought he was rather spooky. Or at least, I did.  Although, looking back, I wonder if -

Well,  I suppose. Maybe - 

But no. No maybe about it!  We definitely should have made more effort to talk to him.  After all, we’re all in this together aren’t we?

Except he’s not. Not any more.

But those black eyes! So alienating.  And yet -

Anyway.  His death has shocked us.  It was an unnecessary death. A foolish death.

The impact of Jim’s body hitting the earth created a vast hole in the ground, deeper than any we have dug.  We attempted to retrieve the body but a landslide took it away from us.  We have analysed soil samples and discovered that at a depth of forty metres and more the soil here is infested with and almost possessed by a complex interlocking micro-organism.  The soil in this region is, it seems, alive.

But I have no zest for analysing this in any more detail. Jim was a bright and brilliant  spirit, so I’m now told, and had a dark wit and a wonderful sense of humour, though I never experienced it myself, as well as black eyes.  I feel his death as though it were my own, well okay, not quite, but I am certainly very moved by it. 

Things are not good.

How does that advance the plot? It doesn't!  But have you ever had that shocking experience - of realising that someone 'ordinary' who you've barely noticed is actually complex and intriguing, and has just as much of a rich inner life as you do? And you've missed the moment to find out more, to get to know this person properly?   If so, you might like the way I write here. If not, well, not.

But my honest feeling is - and I know I shouldn't say this!  -  if you're someone who  likes everything to be about the plot,   and who  doesn't like irony, then please,  steer clear. Don't read my books.

(But do BUY my books; buy half a dozen copies of each in fact; and give them as Christmas presents to your enemies.  It will, trust me, be a hugely satisfying and deeply ironical revenge...)

That just leaves the question that started this blog: Are Shit Reviews Good for a Writer's Soul?

Curiously, I think they are.  I had three comments about Red Claw  over the weekend. On Saturday morning,  I spoke on the phone to my former Bill script editor - the smartest, most creatively impressive woman I know  - and though she' s no SF fan, she told me how much she adored Red Claw and the way it's written. Then later the same day, a female friend who is a social worker and who also doesn't read much SF told me she'd just read Debatable Space and loved it - mainly because of the portrait it gives of the flawed, fallible 1000 year old Lena.

And that's nice. Writers like to be praised. If fact, we like it too  much; we spend our days writing just IN ORDER to be praised.  And although praise is nice, it doesn't do much to help the quality of the work.

But that same day I read the piece by the Blogger Who Hates My Book - and it filled me with a huge creative energy.  It helped define me as a writer; it energised me in the writing of my new novel.

Without occasional shit reviews, in other words,  writers can get flabby, lazy, and timid. 

So I truly believe that a certain amount of virtriol - ah! I can taste it in my nostrils now! - can be good for a writer's soul.