I’m not much moved by the cult of fame. Like a lot of modern life, it really, really annoys me. Many celebrities don’t do much by way of justifying their exalted status. Authors in general do more to deserve approbation than some of our planet’s famed sons and daughters, toiling away on their own, but even they can be less talented than they believe, and can let their success, should the fickle vagaries of fate bestow it upon them, go to their heads. You’ll not see many posts like this from me.

Ray Bradbury was one of those who thoroughly deserved the plaudits heaped upon him, and more besides. He was one of the loose handful of SF writers whose work transcended their favoured genre and can genuinely, whole-heartedly be described as art.

Bradbury apparently had a great love of life, but what always stays with me from his work is the sense of melancholy at life passing that it evokes. Long summer nights giving way to autumn days, the bittersweet exchange of childhood for adulthood, of youth for middle-age; the thrilling slip of experience as it runs through our hands, inevitably dragging time and, ultimately, the cessation of experience behind it. Naturally, the brassy light of apple days is predominant in works he wrote later in his life, but it was always evident. Something Wicked This Way Comes epitomises these feelings for me, whose teenage hero literally sees his childhood end, as does the Martian Chronicles, where the venerable Martian civilisation has to make way for something new, as do all things in their due time.

This was a powerful message for my teenage self. I read many of his short stories and novels in the late ’80s as my own boyhood ticked closer to its conclusion. They infused my own utterly indulgent and somewhat risible sense of adolescent sorrow with a touch of nobility.

Bradbury was one of the great prose stylists of 20th Century American fiction. He had a knack for phrases that stick long in the mind, and a powerful way with imagery. There are moments from his work aplenty that have taken up permanent residence in my head – A man planting trees on Mars and an automated house’s valiant attempts to survive post-apocalyptic Earth in The Martian Chronicles. Alien guns that fire bees (bees!) from the same. Calliopes, a carousel of wishes and the balloon-borne Dust Witch sniffing her way over town in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the warped writing and chemical tang on the air encountered by returning chrononauts in “A Sound of Thunder”, Guy Montag discovering reading in Fahrenheit 451. And of course that golden sunlight.

Bradbury died yesterday, on my 39th birthday. I never met him, but I did speak to him on the phone. I tried to arrange an interview with him while on a US trip, from the LA offices of Alliance Atlantis who had produced Ray Bradbury Theater. This was in 1999, and he had not long before suffered a stroke. If I recall correctly, it was my foolish insistence on a picture (magazine policy, but a more experienced me would have known to disregard it) that prevented our meeting. Such a wasted opportunity, and one I will forever regret. Still, I feel privileged to have spoken to him at all.

My book Champion of Mars was very much inspired by Bradbury, although my talent (I’m cringing inside even using that word in relation to my own work) is like a molehill to his mountain. He’s one of the writers that opened my eyes to the fact that books could be far more than just entertainment, and how truly magical writing can be. If it weren’t for him and others like him I wouldn’t be a writer at all, and I’ll always be thankful for that.

I don’t have any reviews or pieces about Bradbury’s work directly, but here is a review of the 1980 TV mini-series The Martian Chronicles. I loved it as a child and loved it again recently, although Bradbury himself famously called it “boring”.

Hunter’s Run (book) – Great SF adventure collaboration between George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham.

Dark Alchemy (book)  – Magic anthology about wizards by fantasy’s brightest and best.

300 (film) – Zac Snyder’s take on Frank Miller’s take on the Battle of Thermopylae

Perfect Creature (film) – Interesting if confused New Zealand steampunk, alt-reality, vampire movie (I did say it was confused).

Blade: House of Cthon (TV) – The pilot of the TV show of the movie of the comic.

Time Trap: Quatermass (TV) – All-round information on that other great British SF character, Bernard Quatermass, who was like a more grown-up Doctor Who.

If you haven’t already, check out the other reviews I have here, there are quite a lot of them now, and still only a fraction of what’s to come.

www.sfx.co.uk

The True Nature of the Catastrophe

Cosy catastrophes? Not on your nelly! Here are some terrible ends to UK civilisation, all from off of that telly.

You might have heard the term “cosy catastrophe”; coined by Brian Aldiss in his book Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, it refers to that very peculiarly British form of apocalyptic SF where civilisation is laid low by some terrible event, leaving only a few plucky survivors to pick up the pieces and build anew. Somewhat mocking, but Aldiss does have a point. There’s more of a hint of the jolly Robinsonade in British science fiction, where some plucky chap, and they’re nearly always chaps, keeps his sense of right as society degenerates into barbarism all about him, usually leaving us at the climax of their story to head off into rising sun to relaunch civilisation in comfort afforded by the decimation of the population. His chin up, motley family substitutes manfully protected, he has it somewhat easy.

That’s fairly cosy. But that’s only part of the story. British science fiction has postulated some brutal ends to our society. In even the The Day of the Triffids, which Aldiss singled out as particularly cuddly, violence and horror abounds, and the protagonists of these tales really do have to have the toughest of moral fibres.

For all the romance of it – the idea of being able to start afresh in a less crowded Britain – it’d be hell, and telly does not let us off lightly. Apocalyptic fiction is often at the more realistic end of SF, properly speculative. Think on this, some of it could just happen, and most of us just would not cope.

Here we’re going to take a look into the alternate worlds imagined by British SF where things really didn’t work out quite as well as they did here (crikey, it’s arguable things aren’t going brilliantly on Earth Prime). Buckle up, there’s some scary stuff ahead.

Survivors

Vector of Collapse: DISEASE

Broadcast: 1975-1977 and 2008-2009

Was it any good?: The original was a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pipe-dream paradise without ghastly proles, the new one decidedly average.

Cosy factor: Four (of five) sofas.

Likelihood: Four (of five) mushroom clouds.

Every other year there seems to be some major panic about a flu pandemic, primed to carry us all off to our (mass) graves. Survivors, in both its incarnations, posits exactly that.

Originated by Doctor Who writer and Blake’s 7 creator Terry Nation, Survivors has a genetically engineered virus accidentally released to kill 95% of the world’s population. Initially following the adventures of Abby Grant (Carolyn Seymour) as she searches for her lost son Peter, the show had a different feel to each of its three series. The first is very much a depiction of the aftermath of “The Death”, the second depicts the survivors trying to establish a community, the third takes us on a journey across a Britain made up of many different, small societies linking up and reinitiating trade and steam-powered railway travel. Derided for being middle-class and overly concerned with self-sufficiency tips at the expense of drama, Survivors is nevertheless fondly thought of.

Nation himself only stayed on for the first year, leaving after he fell out with the series producer. He wrote a book based on this initial run, with a radically different ending: Abby finds Peter, only to be shot by her own son as he does not recognise her.

A remake was launched in 2008, although for legal reasons it was billed as being based on Nation’s book, and was written by Adrian Hodges. To better reflect Britain’s changed ethnic make-up, two muslim characters were introduced, and Tom Price was reimagined as a convict on the run. The show managed good character dynamics, but was ultimately undone by a convoluted plot involving a secret society of scientists hiding out somewhere, who may have been responsible for the plague.

In some regards the cosiest of all catastrophes, Survivors still engenders unease – its mass, disease-prompted die off is worryingly plausible.

Class War

Is the original Survivors a middle-class Good Life fantasy? You decide…

Points for:

Most of the characters are posh.

Many scenes take place in large kitchens with agas in them.

In the second episode, Anne says “and then father had to send the servants away.”

Tom Price is the only “commoner”, and he’s a shifty Welsh tramp.

Arthur Wormley the show’s big bad, is a trade unionist.

The first episode has Peter Bowles in it.

They all seem quite happy pottering about in the garden, making their own beer.

Points against:

Um…

The Day of The Triffids

Vector of collapse: CELESTIAL PHENOMENON/GIANT CARNIVOROUS PLANTS

Broadcast: 1981 and 2009

Was it any good?: 1981 version very, 2009 version not so much.

Cosy factor: Three (of five) sofas

Likelihood: Two (of five) Mushroom clouds

Pity poor Bill Masen, he’s been hospitalised by giant tulips plenty of times now, chalking up two TV series and a film, with another cinematic outing in development. He’s the hero of John Wyndham’s classic, a triffid farmer spared the blindness that afflicts most of the population after they observe strange lights in the sky. Masen’s laid up with his eyes bandaged after an accident in a lab involving triffid venom, and awakens to a world suddenly thrown into chaos. Masen struggles against man and triffid – giant, ambulatory plants of unknown origin which are farmed for their oil – before finding refuge on the Isle of Wight where he mulls man’s inhumanity to man.

The Day of the Triffids was not Wyndham’s first book, but it was the first under the Wyndham name, and remains his most famous.

Both TV adaptations were made by the BBC, the first in 1981 starring John Duttine as Masen. In the main the plot of the book was followed closely, unlike the 1962 film, and is still highly regarded.

Not so the 2009 remake, which departed considerably from the book’s storyline. Masen (played by Dougray Scott) gets bolt-on emotional baggage in the shape of an estranged dad and a mother killed 30 years ago by a triffid in Zaire, an event replayed in clumsy flashback, a move typical of our touchy-feely times, as if the end of civilisation isn’t enough to generate empathy in a modern audience. Masen, who’s a scientist in this version, has the opportunity to halt the killer plants by retrieving information from a triffid farm. He still ends up on the Isle of Wight, though.

Did you know?

John Wyndam Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was the triffid creator’s full name, and proved handy for generating pseudonyms.

Triffic Triffids

In all many versions of the story, the Triffids have different origins. In the book it is intimated that they are the product of Soviet experimentation. They walk on three stumps, have a whiplike sting, a flower head and clackers that knock on a large bole at their base (speculated to be for communication). The 1981 BBC show followed this closely, with plants made in the main from fibreglass, operated by a man crouched in the base.

In the 1962 film they are from outer space, seeded on the Earth by comets, their sting is a projectile propelled by gas, and they are vulnerable to seawater. In the 2009 adaptation they’re from Zaire, rendered in glorious CGI with strangling, prehensile roots rather than foot stumps and a cluster of agave-like leaves. The 2009 triffids also weep oil, rather than being processed for it.

Terrifying Telly

The Day of The Triffids is not the only Wyndham book to have received the TV treatment. Creepy, unnerving and on after school, Chocky is a different kind of story altogether. Matthew is a boy whose father becomes concerned about his invisible friend, Chocky, especially when he undergoes a period of rapid mental development. And rightly so, for Chocky is actually an alien communicating telepathically with the boy. This contact puts Matthew under a great deal of pressure, worse, Chocky is of ambiguous intentions, and their link is of interest to the government…

Chocky (written in 1968) was adapted by Anthony Reed for Thames TV in 1984. An ’80s staple, the show generated two sequels – Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge. It was seriously spooky stuff. The opening titles began with a bloodcurdling scream, the show’s star, Andrew Ellams, turned in an excellent performance as the haunted Matthew, while the series’ themes of madness, isolation and fear were intensified by Chocky’s eerie, disembodied voice (Glynis Brooks).

The Tripods

Broadcast: 1984-1985

Vector of collapse: ALIENS

Was it any good?: Good effects (for the time) didn’t stop it dragging.

Cosy factor: Two (of five) sofas.

Likelihood: One (of five) mushroom clouds.

Samuel Youd is the great purveyor of global catastrophe, although you probably know him better as John Christopher. Youd is a prolific man, having written more than fifty novels from 1949 on. The Tripods trilogy is, doubtlessly, his most famous.

In the future, mankind has reverted to an agricultural existence. There are no cities. Technology is unused. Why? Aliens have taken over our brains! Exerting a form of mind control via “caps”, implanted at the age of 14, the Masters rule the Earth, awing the yokelised locals with their tripedal terror machines.

Only young Will (played by John Shackley) doesn’t want to be capped, and sets off to uncover the truth behind the tripods, discovering that the aliens are not content with ruling from their cities, but wish to xenoform our world for themselves…

The Tripods TV series was broadcast in 1984 (seven episodes) and 1985 (eleven episodes). Only the first two books were made; plans for an adaptation of the third volume were underway, but never realised. In many regards the series was faithful to the book, but was at times interminable, with the appearances of tripods few and far between as our three stars (Ceri Seel and Jim Baker joining Shackley) trudged across France. However, the sequences set within the fabled city of the Masters were pretty cool by any standard, its effects impressive for the time and the show brave in its use of non-humanoid aliens.

Killer Chris

Youd had a fine line in cataclysms. Here are some more.

A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965)

Tectonic activity redraws the map, with seafloors upheaved, and lands drowned. Survivors struggle to find loved ones and fail.

The Death of Grass (1956)

All grasses die, as that includes most of our food crops, we’re stuffed. Tragic fratricide ensues. Filmed under its alternative title, No Blade of Grass, in 1970.

The Prince in Waiting (1970)

Volcanic activity has reduced the world to medievalism, where birth defects abound. Our hero, a deposed prince, overcomes innate knobbishness to effect a new technological dawn.

The World in Winter (1962)

Solar-induced global cooling sends Brits packing to Africa, where they’re treated as second-class citizens. Protagonist doesn’t like it, and escapes to come home.

The Empty World (1977)

An ageing disease kills most people off, leaving kids to fend for themselves. Much horribleness happens, but a bright future beckons. Televised in Germany.

The Last Train

Vector of collapse: METEOR STRIKE

Screened: 1999

Was it any good?: A curate’s egg of a show; dodgy science did it no favours.

Cosy factor: One (of five) sofas

Likelihood: Three (of five) mushroom clouds

Penned by Mathew Graham, the co-creator of Life on Mars, The Last Train is an oddity, an SF series from a time when SF on British television was approached with something approaching nervous apprehension. “It’s not science fiction,” said the series producer to SFX on a set visit “it’s post-apocalyptic fiction”.

Naturally, it’s about as science fiction as you can get. The inhabitants of a train travelling to Sheffield are frozen in time when a canister of cryogenic gubbins clatters from lead character Harriet Ambrose’s (Nicola Walker) bag as the train conveniently enters a tunnel. Convenient, as the Earth is pummelled by a meteor strike that very instant.

The characters, a motley band including a thief, a cop, a pregnant girl and an unbalanced businessman, emerge into a changed world. They have one hope, a place called The Ark, built by the government in anticipation of the catastrophe, and to which Harriet is connected.

The show was a little silly. The cryo-fluid was implausible, as was crim Mick Sizer’s (Trevor Etienne) van starting up after 50 years in a shed, while the production’s attempts portray topographic and climatic upheaval were mainly restricted to hoiking an increasingly sorry collection of tropical plants from location to location. In any case, a meteor strike of sufficient size to cause that much devastation would have made a much bigger mess. Still, a brutal (two of our heroes are locked out of The Ark and crucified) if safe (they get rescued) finale for the show and a cracking first episode lift its quality.

Did you know?

The series working title was Cruel Earth, which is much, much better, really.

Ringing The Changes

Magical mayhem, thanks to Merlin

The Last Train might have taken scientific liberties, but that’s as nothing compare to the outrageous apocalypse employed in The Changes.

Based on the series of books by Peter Dickinson, this 1975 show depicted a Britain suddenly gripped by anti-machine hysteria, where technology is smashed to pieces and becomes taboo. Nicky is a girl whose adventures lead her to discover the cause of all this grief – Merlin the magician!

Sounds daft as, but it’s a successful idea (although more so in the books than the drama). Better, perhaps, to embrace out and out fantasy than embrace dodge-tastic science, a la The Last Train…

Threads

Vector of collapse: ATOMIC WAR

Screened: 1984

Was it any good?: Terrifyingly so; a harrowing depiction of nuclear war.

Cosy factor: One (of Five) sofas

Likelihood: Five (of Five) sofas

The 1980s might seem all glam and greed and Ashes to Ashes now, but our current nostalgic phase for the decade misses one important point: We were all shit-scared of nuclear apocalypse. Threads, made in 1984, helpfully made us all that little bit more frightened. And they showed it in school. Thanks for that.

Speculative fiction in its truest sense (to this day, no one is entirely sure what the aftermath of a nuclear war would be like) Threads has it all – milk bottles melting in firestorms, animals writhing in agony, frantic surgeons performing amputations with wood saws, mass panic, machine gun-armed traffic wardens, nuclear winter, deformed babies, and the collapse of language itself. It is really not much fun, but absolutely fascinating.

The film presents this cheery scenario from the point of view of we ordinary joes, and follows the fates of two families ­ the Becketts and Kemps, whose children are due to be married following an unplanned pregnancy. Until they all die.

The main character, Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher), dies blind and prematurely aged after scratching about in a field. Her mentally compromised daughter survives, has ungentle sex, and later produces a stillborn horror in a grim boarding house with one lightbulb.

Threads was not so much a prophylactic piece of SF as a snatch of the zeitgeist. People in power knew that nuclear war would be beyond terrible, and it never happened. And yet, it’s more likely than an alien invasion, isn’t it?

Did you know?

Threads was the third attempt by the BBC to make a nuclear war docudrama. The first was stalled by Winston Churchill, the second, The War Game (1965) remained unscreened for twenty years, being deemed too disturbing.

This particular piece appeared in our “New Gods” profile slot. Unfortunately, the 2009 release date he gives at the end of the article for The Power of the Dark Crystal has come and gone, but I live in hope we’ll see it some day. You can read my review of the original The Dark Crystal here.

I interviewed a number of artists for Death Ray, and will be posting the articles here in due course. Hopefully, should I get permission from the artists, accompanied by some of their glorious illustrations.

Froud was a really nice chap to talk to (my rule of thumb is that artists and writers are great to speak with, actors less so), and yes, he really does see fairies…

The Goblin King

A quarter of a century ago, Muppet Master Jim Henson tracked down Brian Froud to provide art direction on The Dark Crystal. We talk to the master of faerie painting about this film, his artworks and his encounters with the other…

Brian Froud paints fairies. His pictures, influenced by the pre-Raphaelite movement, Arthur Rackham and Swedish artist John Bauer, are a mass of detail, of otherworldly faces peeking into the human world.

“I left college as a jobbing illustrator,” he says, “and did all sorts of things for about five years – magazines, book covers, and I got fed up with it. I used to have battles with art directors, until I discovered that any project that I art directed myself I would win awards for. As soon as I created my own things it just worked.”

Froud had always yearned to live in the countryside, so he upped sticks and headed to Devon. The folkloric book Faeries, produced in conjunction with artist Alan Lee (who lives in the same village) came out in 1977. He’s not looked back since.

“When I moved to the country, my response to nature was to paint fantastical creatures, fairies and trolls. It just haunts me, I’m fascinated. I can’t help it. I’ve a book coming out in America called Brian Froud’s World of Faerie. It’s thirty years of my work. It’s a journey through time – my earliest stuff up to the very latest. But it’s also a journey deeper into fairyland, as my art has become more about the spiritual aspects of fairies.”

This journey has taken to Froud to the edge of Faerie itself… The artist says he now sees the little folk. His good-natured tone becomes a little more self-conscious.

“It was just after finishing Good Fairies, Bad Fairies, I was on tour signing and I spontaneously started to see fairies.”

And these positive experiences generally?

“Erm, yes,” he says tentatively. A chuckle breaks his reticence. “Until the white van arrives!” He explains, “As an artist there are various techniques you use to get across an idea, but it has to contain an element of truth. And it’s fascinating to me that when I’m doodling in sketchbooks, I’m looking at these faces, getting them so I can say. ‘Yep, there’s something true there,’ rather than something I’ve made up.”

Ah, so he communicates with the fairies through his art…

“No, no. I am seeing them. Everyone says they want to see a fairy, and they want to see it with their eyes, you know, but you see it with an inner eye. They are psychic experiences. It doesn’t happen all the time, and I can’t make it happen, and it’s always a bit surprising… It’s hard – I paint fairies that feel right, but to paint fairies that look right is difficult. The experience involves so many other things.”

Wherever his art springs from, his appreciation of nature, his own imagination or through a communion with the world of Faerie, Froud’s pictures do have a glamour about them, and carry a lot of emotion for his fans.

“This could be self-delusion,” he says “but my sense of the ‘rightness’ of the pictures comes across from the response I get from people. It’s often about family, their mothers have given their books to them, and they’re going to give their books to their children, or that the books have helped them through terrible experiences, even abuse. The books have given them a safe world to flee into. I’m very humbled and proud that they’ve had such an effect on people.”

Froud’s also known as a conceptual designer on Hensons’ fantasy classics The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Storyteller, and for him these experiences remain a high point of his career. Jim Henson saw a picture of Froud’s on a book cover, and thought the artist would be perfect to help him bring to life an idea for a world he’d had. Froud jumped at the chance, and not only because he is a huge fan of the Muppets.

“I’d always wondered what it would be like if my art moved. I figured that traditional animation would not work, because my art doesn’t have depth to it, and so I’d actually thought, well maybe puppets is the way to add that depth.”

Ironically, after hiding himself away in the country, he was to spend much of the next five years in New York and London. But it had many benefits, not least that he met his wife Wendy, a puppeteer, at Hensons.

“Being in the Muppet workshop was like being in heaven. Colours, glue and fur and stuff! Jim and Frank [Oz] would come in and talk about the world, about the sort of creatures that might populate it.”

Froud oversaw every aspect of the design, drawing and sculpting on The Dark Crystal. Initially beginning with a small team, as the crew grew to 360 people, the lone artist had to learn to collaborate, the most satisfying part of the experience.

“It took five years of my life in the end. And I think that’s what makes The Dark Crystal unusual, we did literally build the whole world from the ground upwards. A whole world that had history, it had a religion, it had different animals. Jim was financing it himself until really quite late in the day. That gives it its freedom of expression. Nowadays everything is driven by accountants, I don’t think you’d ever get that freedom again. We made this film for ourselves, it caused confusion when people saw it – they wanted to know who it was for. But we though we didn’t really know, I think it affects everybody.”

This lack of a clear target audience and the release of ET meant that The Dark Crystal was a modest financial success. Froud and Henson’s next  foray into fantasy, Labyrinth (1986), bombed. But both have gathered a large cult following, and Froud expresses amazement at the diversity of different editions he signs at events. Over the years a sequel to The Dark Crystal has been mooted, but it’s only recently that Froud was approached to design creatures for a second film in the series. He was initially less than taken with the idea.

“My first thought was ‘Why’? I’m always up for going on forwards, not going backwards. If we’re going to go back to this world, there’s got to be a reason. Talking to David Odell, who scripted the first, we came up with a reason. When we left this world it was paradise. Now we’re returning, something’s gone wrong; why? For me that’s the intriguing nub of the story. At the moment that’s in the script, but who knows what will happen! Anyway, I’ve done some designs for various creatures, Gelflings and things like that.”

Currently the film is going under the name of The Power of the Dark Crystal. Hensons literature reveals that a much older Jen and Kira, the heroes of the original, are rulers of the Castle of the Crystal. A fiery girl named Thurma from the centre of the planet (early development of The Dark Crystal featured underground civilisations, according to Froud) requests a shard of the crystal to revitalise the inner sun. The Gelflings refuse, so Thurma steals one, leading to the re-emergence of both Mystics and Skeksis.

“They’re still getting the final funding in place,” says Froud. “I spoke to Cheryl Henson at Comic-Con the other week. And she’s confident we’re talking about a 2009 release.”

Star Wars: A very modern myth

 Star Wars smashed into screens 30 years ago, changing the course of cinema history and making George Lucas one of the wealthiest men in America. A whole new galaxy imagined in minute detail and presented through special effects, the scale of which dwarfed anything that had ever graced the cinema screen. Brand new matting techniques developed by George Lucas’s freshly minted effects house, Industrial Light and Magic and a revolutionary camera technique pioneered by John Dykstra, enabled space visuals to be realised with unparalleled dynamism. The film’s look inspired dozens of imitators, and its success changed the way films were made and marketed by Hollywood. Star Wars  invented the modern event movie, instilled the penchant in modern filmmakers for effects-driven blockbusters, and established merchandise as a valuable revenue stream for film studios (indeed, it was the almost accidental retention of the toy rights by George Lucas that made him a large part of his fortune). Innovation gleamed on the prow of Star Wars, and success trailed hard in its wake.

But it was not this novelty that secured Star Wars its place in history. It was not entirely the flashy effects that guaranteed its success with a whole generation of children. Its deeper success, its enduring success, comes not from the new, but from the ancient.

It is commonly said that Star Wars is “mythic” in scope, that that is why it enjoys enduring success. But what exactly does that mean?

The human mind is a marvellous thing, capable of processing vast amounts of information. However, the reality we perceive is not the flawless universe we experience. Our brains cheat, they weld things together, bend the truth, show us what we expect to see. Our worlds are not objective or constant, but subjective constructs individual to each of us. The way our brains process our sight, our memories, our perceptions of others, is by constructing a narrative out of fragmentary data. This is why you may sometimes misinterpret a jumper on the floor as your cat. This is why things are remembered differently by different people. We perceive the world through a set of preconceptions we build into narratives. So powerful is this tendency of ours that even when we sleep we join the most unlikely, disparate elements into stories. We love stories – gossip, films, books, speculation about our neighbours – because we perceive the world in the terms of story.

Not all stories are equal. Some are vastly more powerful than others.

The aphorism “There’s nothing new under the sun” is a truism. It has been said that there are but seven stories, something perhaps best described by Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots, plots which cut across cultural boundaries. We don’t have the space to go into each of the seven story types here, but suffice it to say, Star Wars is one of these stories – it is number one, “Overcoming the monster.” It is a compelling argument, especially when you attempt to fit a number of narratives to these templates yourself.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) suggested that in all the world’s mythology there is but one plot, what Campbell called “the monomyth”, a concept laid out in his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. George Lucas, as he says in his contribution to Campbell’s biography, was trying to utilise mythology in the conception of his film, as he felt that there was little being done with this ancient art of storytelling. As he read Campbell’s book, he says he was struck by how many similarities there were between the monomyth and the script for his film.

Myths have a strong religious or supernatural elements to them, they are culturally powerful stories that try to explain why the world is. Creators of modern novel and films had turned their backs on the mythic, in favour of storytelling that focusses on the individual (it’s worth pointing out that though nearly all books and movies still follow one of the seven basic plots). The two greatest trappings of mythic storytelling: fate, and supernatural influence on the world, gave way to first modernist narrative – that the world can be objectively and accurately described in a logical manner; and then to post-modern narrative – that the world is not a consensus experience, but a subjective one that has no real end or beginning.

Our hunger for mythic stories remains.  The likes of Tolkien and Lucas might be  systematically pummelled critically for not conforming to current intellectual trends, they are much-loved. In some respects the art establishment sees itself as having moved on from such primitive, didactic fictions. With its fated heroes and meddling gods, myth pits itself against both modernism and postmodernism. The arc-plot of Star Wars – the creation, downfall and redemption of a messianic figure (Anakin) who has been created by a supernatural agent (the Force) to bring balance to itself is antithetic to both. It is naïve in its scope, hearkening back to a time when men cowered in caves while gods hurled thunderbolts at one another across the heavens.

But we love the naïve. We like stories with clearly delineated sides, where the good cowboys wear black hats and the bad cowboys white, or soap operas with caricatured paragons of good and evil roaming loose in the local community. This comes down to human being’s fundamental sense of fairness. It is hardwired into our genes. Without it, we would not be able to live in such numbers, in such proximity with one another or in such relative peace. We enjoy simple tales that accentuate this, that tell us that good will out and that all will be right in the world. When this sense of right/wrong is exemplified, when it collides with story, when it helps explain the world to us in simple terms we find intrinsically not only comforting but just, well, that’s powerful medicine indeed.

George Lucas and JRR Tolkien succeeded because they deliberately sought to explore the mythic. Most importantly, they sought to do this because the mythic appealed to them.

The critics are right to call it simplistic, to criticise the works of both men for their lack of insight into the human condition. But they’re not there for that. They tap into powerful needs bred into us over millennia.

The purity of these tales can, however, be their undoing. If we’ve seen it all before, we tend to get bored. We’re contrary creatures, we like to see the big stories, we enjoy the sweep of fate, but we also want constant novelty. Star Wars gave us both. It was an old, old tale in frighteningly sharp new clothes.

Heretical Texts

Intricately detailed universes are not the sole province of lone authors. They can also come from games.

After 30 years in business, Games Workshop’s toy soldiers are now a part of many people’s childhood; the motifs of its Warhammer 40,000 (or “40K”) have imprinted themselves upon the public conscience, not least in the shape of those multi-coloured guardians of humanity, the Space Marines.

The worlds of GW began as disparate scraps, concepts dreamt up or borrowed in isolation to provide backstory to a model or rule. But by the cumulative efforts of many creative minds over many years, these elements have grown together into something vibrant. Publisher The Black Library was set up to explore these rich worlds in novel form, it was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to the Horus Heresy, one of 40K’s most important events.

“The weight of responsibility is huge,” says Dan Abnett, one of the series authors. “This is the mythology of the 40K Universe (although Horus Heresy is set 10,000 years earlier, so we refer to it as ‘30K’). It’s been mentioned in background text for more than two decades, sometimes in quite contradictory ways. We’ve got to make sense of the facts and weave a story that doesn’t disappoint anyone. The rules are very different to mainstream 40K novels, there’s a lot more to invent, and the scale is bigger: these are galaxy-changing events, not ‘just’ big space wars. Plus, it’s a team effort. Authors, who are solitary beasts by nature, have to work with other authors. It’s great fun, but you have to leave your ego at the door and come to the table in collaboration mode.”

With several of the books entering The New York Times bestseller list, the series’ appeal has reached far beyond the gaming fraternity. Author Graham McNeill maintains this is an SF epic the equal of anything. “The Heresy novels are exciting, chock full of interesting characters, high stakes and a plot that offers as many inventive twists and turns as any other series out there. In fact, when you think you know it back to front, that’s when you’re more likely to get surprised.”

Senior range editor Nick Kyme sums it up. “The worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 have a certain rigour and identity that our fans clearly love. In worlds that are so utterly bleak, the heroes shine that much more brightly, their deeds are more heroic, the conflicts greater and tragedies more cutting. There’s depth to them, a gravitas brought about by a weight of imagination and creativity over thirty years. The Horus Heresy is the seminal event that sets up what comes after it in the Warhammer 40,000 ‘now’. That has resonance.”

In fact, it’s all that and more. It’s nigh on impossible to get across the complexity of a universe like Warhammer 40,000 here. It truly is one of the richest collaborative worlds out there – Star Trek and Star Wars are frankly simplistic in comparison. And the Horus Heresy is its greatest story.

“Imagine a science fiction Paradise Lost,” says Abnett. “It’s a HUGE scale, epic story of the fight to control a massive empire. It’s set in a gothic universe that’s brilliantly realised. And despite the fact that there’s a large amount of thunking action going on, it’s pretty clever stuff with great characters and ideas. You don’t have to be a fan or player of Warhammer 40,000 to get into it.”

Future Imperfect

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

In the 41^st Millennium mankind stands upon the brink of utter destruction.

In these dying days, the human Imperium is beset by aliens, but the greatest threat is that of Chaos. A second universe of energy exists alongside our own. Travel and communication through this “warp” allows interstellar civilisation, but it is not empty. The warp’s energy is moulded by the emotions of sentient beings, aggregating into four powerful consciousnesses – the Chaos Gods.

The Imperium’s Emperor is a psyker of godlike power, but he is near death, his shattered body trapped in stasis for 10,000 years. His multitudinous servants try to interpret his will as best they can, but without his direct guidance, mankind is doomed.

It was not always so. The Emperor once walked among men. In the 31st Millennium, a time when the wonders of the Dark Age of technology were millennia past, and humanity was deep in an age of barbarism, the Emperor revealed himself. From where he came, no one knows, although some say he was an ancient immortal and had been manipulating history for long ages. The Emperor resolved to save mankind, creating twenty superhuman sons from his own genetic material to aid him.

As these “Primarchs” grew, the powers of Chaos stole them away, scattering them across the galaxy. Thinking his sons lost, the Emperor proceeded with his plans. From the genetic templates of the Primarchs, he made legions of super soldiers, the Space Marines. With these he conquered Earth, and headed into the heavens on his Great Crusade.

As his armies advanced, The Emperor rediscovered the Primarchs one after another, and appointed them leaders of the legions. Returning to Earth, the Emperor left his most favoured son Horus to lead the reconquest of the galaxy.

Terrified of the Emperor, the Chaos gods set a conspiracy underway to seduce Horus. The Primarchs had not been untouched by Chaos during their childhood transit through the warp, and under Horus’ influence half of them renounced their oaths, turned on their brothers, and plunged the galaxy into civil war.

The Horus Heresy had begun.

Forbidden Knowledge

The novels of the Horus Heresy

Horus Rising (2006, Dan Abnett)

The seeds of heresy are sown

Horus is appointed “Warmaster”, and leads the Emperor’s armies to victory.

False Gods (2006, Graham McNeill)

The heresy takes root

Horus is wounded by a Chaos-tainted weapon. His fate is sealed.

Galaxy in Flames (2006, Ben Counter)

The heresy revealed

Horus, corrupted, becomes brutal, destroying the planet of Istvaan IV with virus bombs. The Luna Wolves, World Eaters and the Death Guard legions turn traitor, but loyalists within their ranks stage a desperate fight back.

Flight of the Eisenstein (2007, James Swallow)

The heresy unfolds

Captain Garro of the Death Guard witnesses Horus’ betrayal and flees in the frigate Eisenstein to warn the Emperor.

Fulgrim (2007, Graham McNeill)

Visions of treachery

Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor’s Children is perverted by Chaos. The book is also the first to detail the dropsite massacres of Istvaan V, a pivotal event in Warhammer 40,000 history.

Descent of Angels (2007, Michael Scanlon)

Loyalty and honour

The early life of the Primarch Lion El’Jonson is revealed as a future schism in his legion, the Dark Angels, is hinted at.

Legion (2008, Dan Abnett)

Secrets and lies

The twin Primarchs of the Alpha Legion, Alpharius-Omegon, join the Warmaster but their motivations are perhaps not what they seem.

Battle for the Abyss (2008, Ben Counter)

My brother, my enemy

The loyal Ultramarines attempt to stop the Word Bearers assaulting their homeworld of Ultramar.

Mechanicum (2008, Graham McNeill)

War comes to Mars

Horus tries to subvert the Techpriests of Mars to his cause.

Tales of Heresy (2009, edited by Lindsey Priestley and Nick Kyme)

A collection of short stories providing background to the Horus Heresy, the Great Crusade and The Imperium.

Fallen Angels (2009, Mike Lee)

Deceit and betrayal

As Lion El’Jonson tries to prevent Horus seizing control of an important world, the Dark Angels’ homeworld of Caliban is riven with strife.

A Thousand Sons  (2010, Graham McNeill)

All is dust…

Magnus, cyclopean Primarch of the Thousand Sons, has a thirst for arcane knowledge. Despite being forbidden him, Magnus uses magic to warn the Emperor of Horus’ perfidy, but only succeeds in enraging him…

Nemesis (2010, James Swallow)

War within the shadows

Treason in high places is revealed as super-assassins clash.

The First Heretic (2010, Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

Fall to Chaos

Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers, turns to Chaos when the Emperor rebukes him for worshipping him as a god.

Prospero Burns (2011, Dan Abnett)

The wolves unleashed

Much is revealed of how the Chaos plot came to be, leading up to and covering the destruction of the Thousand Sons’ homeworld by the Space Wolves legion.

Age of Darkness (2011, edited by Christian Done)

Short stories covering the seven years between the Istvaan V massacre and the campaign to seize Terra.

Middle-earth at the Movies

With the Hobbit on the way, it’s high time to look at other tales from Tolkien’s legendarium that might make top filmic fun.

Within the broader sweep of Middle-earth there are dozens of stories, and there’s some cracking potential films in there. The juicy stuff comes from The Silmarillion, released posthumously by JRR’s son Christopher, with a little bit of help from Guy Gavriel Kay. This mythic cycle covers the first Dark Lord Morgoth’s endless attempts to seize control of creation, his eventual downfall, and Sauron taking up his reins. It might seem like a good idea to film the lot, but The Silmarillion covers thousands of years, has hundreds of characters, and the movie would be like, well, decades long. Better to be picky, eh?

Beren and Luthien

The pitch: Middle-earth’s greatest love story

Time: The First Age

Location: Doriath and Angband

Hooks: Love! Big dogs! Fatherly disapproval! Amputation by wolf bite!

The plot: Remember that bit in The Fellowship of the Ring, where sad-eyed Aragorn sings a song in the marshes? This is that ballad.  Beren the man falls in love with elf Lúthien. Her father Thingol is having none of this and says they can only marry if Beren accomplishes the impossible and steals back one of the Silmarils, holy jewels taken by the Dark Lord.

What’s in it for Weta: Beren and Lúthien’s journey to Angband has echoes of Frodo and Sam creeping into Mordor, only Angband is scarier. Morgoth himself puts in an appearance, while the hunt for Carcharoth the giant wolf at the climax would be thrilling.

What’s in it for us: A big dose of lurve, and there’s a happy ending as Beren and Lúthien are resurrected to live together. Aww.

The Children of Húrin

The pitch: Romeo and Juliet, with dragons. And incest.

Time: The First Age

Location: All over Beleriand

Hooks: Amnesia! Curses! Brotherly loving! Dragons! Petty Dwarves!

The plot: Morgoth catches the human hero Hurin. The Dark Lord curses his children, Túrin and Níniel, and forces Húrin to watch them suffer.

What’s in it for Weta: Battles with hordes of Orcs, before Túrin meets Glaurung the dragon in single combat, besting the beastie with cunning and trickery.

What’s in it for us: As this fragmentary story was finessed into a brilliant novel by Christopher Tolkien in 2007, it’s probably the most screen-ready. It’s truly tragic, with Túrin’s curse dooming all who aid him, and him unknowingly marrying his amnesiac sister. Then it’s suicides all round. Sad.

The War of Wrath

The pitch: The greatest war of all time

Time: The very end of the First Age

Location: Beleriand

Hooks: Demons! Gods! War! Apocalypse!

The plot: Elves and men band up to finish off the evil Morgoth once and for all.

What’s in it for Weta: This apocalyptic smackdown at the climax of the First Age makes that spat over the One Ring look like a children’s squabble. Think Smaug will be cool? What about Ancalagon the Black, the father of all winged dragons, who is so huge that when he’s downed he flattens a mountain? He leads an entire squadron of winged fire drakes into battle with hero Eärendil’s magical flying ship. The land battles dwarf anything in The Lord of the Rings, as the Valar (Tolkien’s angels) themselves stride the land and fight dozens of Balrogs.

What’s in it for us: An awesome spectacle, and a bittersweet victory. All of Beleriand is laid waste and sunk under the sea. Look at the map in The Lord of The Rings. See those mountains by the coast past The Shire? There used to be a whole lot more west of that. Then there’s Morgoth’s defeat. His feet are cut off, his iron crown hammered into a collar, he’s bound by a magical chain and shut out of creation for all time. Satisfying.

The Fall of Numenor

The pitch: The drowning of Atlantis, plus Elves

Time: The Second Age

Location: Númenor

Hooks: Envy! Betrayal! Human Sacrifice! The world remade! God gets angry!

The plot: The greatest human civilisation of all is brought low by the lies of Sauron.

What’s in it for Weta: There’s a titanic struggle at the beginning, where the lords of Numenor sail to Middle-earth to capture Sauron. Later, there’s evil king Ar-pharazon’s massive invasion fleet, and the biggest tsunami in fiction.

What’s in it for us: A fantastic tale as the island nation of Númenor descends into evil, all because they envy the immortality of the Elves. Watch as a noble people turn their back on creator god Ilúvatar and his Valar to worship the outcast Morgoth. Sauron in this is Grima Wormtongue on divine steroids, while the anger of Ilúvatar when Ar-pharazôn attempts to invade the holy Undying Lands is cinematic wrath-of-god at its most terrifying. It also sets us up for the The Lord of The Rings, with survivors like Isildur and Elendil establishing the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. They play their part in the first downfall of Sauron, bits of which we’ve already seen on the screen. Neat.

I interviewed Gygax once. Like a lot of Americans involved in fantasy, Gygax was bearded, large and voluble, but possessed a level of interest in others that made his bluffness charming rather than irksome. A very nice man.

Time Machine – Dungeons & Dragons

You enter a rough stone corridor. It looks unsafe, and the wall runs with moisture. Ahead of you is poorly made, if stout, wooden door. Approaching warily, you hear a series of muffled scraping noises and a low growl. What do you do?

If you’re one those who has played Dungeons & Dragons then this kind of statement will be familiar to you. If it isn’t then that’s exactly the kind of dilemma those odd spods with the funny shaped dice used to face, usually weekly, while you were off partying.

Actually, the perception of RPG’s as the domain of the uber-nerd is just one of several misconceptions about the game ­– in reality D&D is no special interest, saddo passtime, but the vanguard of a great gaming revolution that ushered in an age of mass-market wargames, collectible card games and computer gaming – all of which are now multi-million pound industries. Not so nerdy now, eh?

But despite this legacy, D&D the game has had a rocky history. At the height of its popularity, every school had a D&D group (as did many other institutions. “At one time every nuclear submarine had a D&D group,” co-creator David Arneson said in one interview), but then it virtually disappeared off the cultural map. Lawsuits and debt litter its history, and it came to find itself almost destroyed by the industry it created. The story of D&D is almost as hair-raising as an encounter with a Level 19 Gold Dragon in a bad mood.

Dungeons & Dragons was the brainchild of gaming buddies Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax had long been associated with various groups and magazines, including Guidon, a wargames mail-order company. Gygax published various games through Guidon, including 1969’s Chainmail. Written in concert with Jeff Perren, Chainmail allowed players to stage small-scale battles in the Dark Ages. It was not an RPG, but a traditional wargame. However, when Gygax started to add magic and monsters, and Arneson ran a Chainmail game involving a castle sewer (underground adventures are a D&D signature) Dungeons & Dragons slowly began to come to life…

In 1971, Arneson and Gygax completed the first true incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. But they had difficulty finding a distributor – their earlier publishers thought that the game’s referee or “Dungeon Master” would be so busy running the game he would never have any fun, so it wouldn’t work. Gygax, however, had more faith in their creation, and he and set up Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), with childhood gaming chum Don Kaye. In 1974, with funding from Brian Blume, another old-gaming buddy, they launched D&D’s first edition. The 1000 hand-assembled copies sold out in under a year.

The game was a curious grab bag of ideas. Chainmail and its child were heavily influenced by the models that were available to Gygax and his friends. Back then, there were no large firms making fantasy models, so Gygax and co relied on plastic historical figures. Fine for one’s warriors, but for the monsters the gamers turned to cheap Chinese toys – poly-bagged selections of badly executed dinosaurs and weird flights of fancy. This magpie nature had serious repercussions, as the eager proto-roleplayers also included rules for monsters and creatures from the likes of Michael Moorcock, HP Lovecraft and JRR Tolkien’s works. Lawsuits and quiet words inevitably followed, with the result that various beasties, deities and demons were struck from later editions of the game.

Kaye passed away in 1975, leading to the dissolution of TSR. Gygax then set up TSR Hobbies, Inc, to continue the publication of the game. This was initially on his own, but by the mid-seventies Brian Blume and his son Kevin had a two-thirds controlling interest, something that was to eventually lead to Gygax losing control over his creation…

But for the next few years, D&D was to go from strength to strengh. A more complicated version of the game, named Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, was released in 1978. This was a huge hit, and became the model for the many copycat games that were to follow. But it was not without its problems. It was beast of a gaming system, requiring multiple books and a maths degree to play. It also unwisely split D&D into two streams, upping production costs and dividing its audience, a problem that was not to be rectified until years later. Finally, AD&D also precipitated a falling out between Gygax and Arneson in 1979. The two went to court over who owned what of their joint creation. Though the dispute was settled by 1981, it was but the first of many business disputes to hit TSR.

And if arguments over Mammon weren’t bad enough, God soon got in on the act. A series of suicides, murders and a missing persons case were all erroneously blamed on the game, and the powerful Christian far tight roundly condemned it as, well, here’s what Christian Life Ministries had to say about Dungeons & Dragons: “Instead of a game [it] is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship, gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and many more teachings, brought to you in living colour direct from the pit of hell!!!” Hallelujah.

Gygax appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the charges, only to have his answers edited and rearranged, or so he maintains. His complaints to the show after his interview was aired went unanswered.

“There here wasn’t a shred of evidence or veracity in any of those claims,” Gygax said recently. “One of the mothers of the children who had committed suicide said the only reason that her son didn’t kill himself sooner was because he enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons and that this was all just a cock-and-bull story.”

D&D was demonised. At the height of the hysteria, the TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982) came out. This told the story of one youth (played by a very young Tom Hanks) driven mad by gaming. The game in the film may have been called Mazes and Monsters, but everyone knew what they were really talking about. The controversy rumbled on for years, leading TSR to excise references to many of the more dread powers of hell from the second edition of the game, published in 1989.

Despite all this, nothing seemed to dent TSR’s armour, and it began to explore other opportunities for D&D, with Gygax heading off to Hollywood to tout the property. It was a hard slog. Mineral-water quaffing entertainment execs were not easily won over by the mid-western hobbyist. But he persevered, and in 1983 the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons was broadcast on CBS. The Dragonlance novels followed in 1984. These too, were a massive success and transformed TSR into a major player in the booming fantasy publishing market.

However, back at base trouble was brewing. TSR had accrued debts in excess of $15 million, and Gygax discovered his partners had tried to put the firm up for sale. He forced one partner, Kevin Blume, from office, but the problems didn’t stop there. Another court battle ensued as Gygax struggled to retain control, but the law found against him, and he sold his controlling interest in 1985.

After Gygax’s departure, a number of proprietory worlds were developed, and licenses acquired – Marvel Superheroes, Conan and Indiana Jones amongst them; and new gaming avenues, such as card-based play, explored.

But the company’s fortunes could not last. As the decade began to wind down, dozens of games jostled for custom in a crowded market. Worse, RPGs were getting more and more complicated, fewer kids were getting involved, and the average age of gamers increased. With no new blood coming in, revenues dropped, and many companies went under or sold off their RPG properties.

TSR survived, albeit with a smaller, increasingly niche audience, soldiering on through the 90s, until, stuck deep in debt, it was bought out by Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WoC was in turn purchased by Hasbro, who consolidated it with other gaming properties to create a gaming division operating under the Wizards tradename.

This marked something of a new start for D&D. A new edition – version 3 – of the rules was created in 2000. This scrapped the division between AD&D and D&D, creating one game. It dispensed with many the different dice the game used, settling upon the 20-sided variety. Gygax, who has undergone a change in thinking over the years, maintains the system is too complicated and damages group co-operation by focussing too much on power-play. Nevertheless, it has proven to be popular, and Wizards have wisely decided to make the system free for all games publishers to use, breaking down walls in the RPG community and generating fat loads of advertising for D&D.

Now, though the game will never be as big as it once was, Wizards estimate that around three million people a month play the game in the US alone. It appears the adventure of D&D will run for some time to come…

A D12 of D&D

Roll your twelve-sided dice to generate a random Wandering D&D Fact!

1. The game was penned under the uninspiring title of “The Fantasy Game”.
2. Gary’s surname (his parents were German) is pronounced “Guy-gax”, not “Guy-jax”, as many a poorly informed wannabe wizard would have it.
3. The name “Dungeons & Dragons” was, according to popular legend, suggested by Gygax’s wife.
4. Gary Gygax also created GenCon, now the world’s largest gaming convention, and launched Dragon magazine.
5. Fantasy movie  Krull (1983) went under the name Dungeons & Dragons for part of its developmental cycle, despite having nothing to do with the game.
6. Though Gygax originally started to put fantasy elements into Chainmail, it was D&D co-creator David Arneson who first restricted players to one model each in his games, establishing the link between player and character.
7. The game has a magic system where the wizard must memorise spells. Once he has spoken them and set them off, he forgets them. This was directly inspired by the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance.
8. Although the term “Hobbit” was removed from the game to stop infringing on JRR Tolkien’s rights, the term “Halfling” remains.
9. D&D had no setting when originally launched, instead it provided gamers with hundreds of monsters, demons and beasts with which one could create one’s own world. Many of these were drawn from mythology. Tiamat, the multi-headed dragon in the cartoon and game, for example, is a Babylonian deity which represented the salt ocean, symbolic of chaos.
10. D&D has sold more than 20 million copies, and generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
11. Many potential RPGers now play online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games. The biggest, World of Warcraft, has six million gamers. A D&D MMPORG was launched last year.
12. Gygax is not a big fan of Tolkien, finding his books dull. The works of Jack Vance, Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber have had far more influence on the game.

D&D on the screen

Not so well done, cavalier

 D&D has had many brushes with the silver and small screens. Not all of them positive. There of course was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show, which ran for three years and 27 episodes, but we had to wait until 2000 for a real Dungeons & Dragons movie, and then wished we hadn’t. A diabolical mess that featured a bored looking Jeremy Irons (paying for renovations of his Irish castle), that forgettable dude who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois and Clark, Thora Birch, Richard O’Brien and hod-loads of crap CGI, it was closer to the game but further from quality than the cartoon. This is a crying shame, as it was director Courtney Solomon’s life-long ambition to make a D&D movie. He acquired the rights to make the film in 1990 aged just 19 and spent 10 years putting together the money. All for nothing, because it really is awful.

There was a sequel in 2005. Don’t ever see it if you have even one iota of self-respect.

Time Machine: Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers – all white teeth, innuendo-laden badinage, fey robots and tight jumpsuits. That’s what the name means to most of us, remembering as we do the low-brow, high-camp 1980s series from the vast stables of Glen A Larson, whence many a wonky nag and almost thoroughbred SF TV show came trotting onto our screens. The show followed Larson’s “fire and forget” approach to producing, appearing with much fanfare and running for a mere one and a half seasons before sinking into a quagmire of high mediocrity, becoming a something that today seems laughably bad. But Buck Rogers was once much more than this, entrancing several generations of Americans in magazines, comic books, radio and screen, and the sad whimper that his last hurrah endured does a great disservice to his legend.

Anthony Rogers first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. Penned by Philip Francis Nowlan, the tale was entitled “Armageddon – 2149″. It was a clever piece of science fiction that had the forces of the future waging war on one another with a variety of military inventions that have since become commonplace – infrared ray guns for night fighting, jet planes, bazookas, paralysis rays and more, though Buck’s flight-endowing jumping belt is still sadly unavailable. The famed Hugo Gernsback, at the time editor of Amazing Stories, firmly stated of the tale: “We have rarely printed a story in this magazine that for scientific interest as well as suspense could hold its own with this particular story. We prophesy that this story will become more valuable as the years go by. It certainly holds a number of interesting prophecies, many of which, no doubt, will come true.”

Buster Crabbe plays it straight.

His prophesy was a good one. Soon after the story’s publication, newspaper mogul John Flint Dille commissioned Nowlan to create a comic strip featuring the adventures of the hero. Entitled Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, the strip began its run on January 7th 1929. It was to be a phenomenal success, running in over 400 newspapers simultaneously at the height of its success.

Many of the Buck staples are present in the original stories. Buck Rogers, an ex-WWI American fighter pilot, is a surveyor in Pennsylvania who gets trapped in a cave-in and is put into suspended animation by a strange radioactive gas. When he awakes 500 years in the future, the heroic Buck becomes a pilot once more, a secret agent and head of the Rocket Rangers. He lives in a futuristic city of “metalloglass” full of marvellous devices. His enemy is Killer Kane, an evil Mongol who is trying to dominate the world, and his ally Ardala. Buck’s cohorts are the genius Dr Huer, Wilma and her younger brother, Buddy.

By 1932, when the spin-off radio serial was launched, Buck memorabilia crammed the bedrooms of American boys. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to listen to the adventures of the space hero four times a week, whose gadgets and gizmos were simulated on the airwaves by the clever use of power tools (his psychic disintegration ray was an electric razor, for example). Buck Rogers was, in all ways, a household name.

In 1939 Buster Crabbe, who had played Buck’s imitator Flash Gordon, donned the robe of the time-displaced adventurer for a cinema serial. This Buck’s origin stepped up the science fiction wow-factor – he­ is flying a dirigible with his colleague Buddy (changed from his earlier role as Wilma’s brother) when they go down over the Artic. The ship is carrying an experimental gas, Nirvano (a shameless piece of McGuffin pinched by ITV’s poor 1999 drama The Last Train). The pair are instructed to inhale the gas in order to preserve their lives. Of course, when they wake up, they’re not in early 20^th century Kansas any more, so to speak. This serial – of the kind that ran before the main feature in the days before televison – had Buck and Buddy revived in 2440. Killer Kane is again the villain, this time at the head of a band of super-gangsters which rule the Earth. Buck joins the freedom fighters, and, in a complicated plot, seeks aid from the planet Saturn. The 12-parter was recycled endlessly, being cut together for a 1953 film release, Planet Outlaws and edited again for television in 1953 in the shape of Destination Saturn. It even ran in the ’70s and ’80s on British TV. Though virtually indistinguishable from the Flash Gordon serial, it was far more polished than other SF offerings of the time, and had a kind of muscular vitality the ’80s version lacked. The wiry Buster Crabbe, an athelete, was a world away from the toothy avuncularity of Gerard.

The TV show that followed in 1950 was, by all accounts, a disappointment, though it is difficult to gauge as there are reputedly no copies of this long-forgotten piece of TV history. It was only the second ever TV SF show after all (the first being Captain Video and His Video Rangers), and the signature elements of Buck Roger’s universe, the constant action and clever gadgets, were severely hampered by the static, live nature of television.

The TV show finished in 1951, and Buck went into a slow decline. Nowlan had long left the comic strip behind, and it lost much of its power. Though it ran until 1967, it was confined to but a few newspapers. “Buck Rogers”, once a commonplace synonym for all that was futuristic in the speech of Americans, became a derogatory phrase applied with the same level of disdain as someone might have said “Doctor Who monster” ten years ago.

There was no Buck for 12 years, until maverick producer Glen A Larson got his hands on the property, launching a new

What science fiction needs is more comedy robots.

Buck onto an unsuspecting public in 1979. Many of the main elements of the story remained wholly intact, but the concept was retooled for the age of disco. “The original space man! The ultimate trip! Buck Rogers swings back to earth and lays it on the 25th Century!” screamed the jive-talking tagline. But disco was not the only innovation since Buck had last entertained the masses – feminism had come along in the meantime and grabbed the world by the proverbials. In response to this, Deering was promoted to Colonel, (though the character was always in need of rescuing and actress Erin Grey had to a) Dye her hair blonde and b) prance about in a shiny catsuit – feminism was yet to be fully integrated into the popular consciousness) and had an arch relationship with Buck with more than a hint of “mother knows best” to it. Ardala too was given preminence over Killler Kane, who was reduced from emperor of the world to henchman. She was now a sexually bored yet ultimately dangerous Princess, daughter of King Draco, evil overlord of one of Earth’s antagonistic ex-colonies. Again, empowered as actress Pamela Hensly was, Ardala was required to prance around in a whole range of adolescent-bothering outfits. Not that this upset Gerard, who had the pair of these lovely, self-determining chicks fighting over him in the show.

“All those beautiful women were one of the reasons I had such a good time doing it! It was in my contract ‘scantily women only’. We were kind of kinky, a little ahead of our time,” He told SFX in a 1999 interview.

Originally intended as a pilot for a TV show, Buck Rogers went on general theatrical release in the US where it tapped into the public’s fondness for the character, grossing vast amounts of cash.

“The figures are burned into my mind,” Gerard told us, figures tripping off his tongue as he recounted his glory hour. “It took 35 million in one month, before being removed from screens because it had been pre-sold to cable. It was one of Top 5 grossing pictures in 1979. In the opening weekend alone it took 12 million dollars, and this was three dollars a ticket at the time.”

(These big figures, predictably, prompted the third re-release of the old Universal Buster Crabbe serial).

Feminism's advent had a minimal impact on the new Buck Rogers. The last Wilma might have been a capable colonel, but men were encouraged to look at her tightly clad backside.

Unsubtle flirting aside, this Buck was a different man. Though he was known to floor the odd Tigerman with a well-aimed punch, he was also a caring, sharing gentleman. The series writer’s bible said of him “As a character Buck Rogers outwardly presents a flip, sardonic, devil-may-care guy, and an adventurous spirit. Beneath this facade is a serious and caring man who is alone. For all of the marvels of the 25th century, Buck Rogers is cut off from everyone he loved or cared about.”

And what marvels! Actually, no. The keyword with Buck Rogers’ 80s incarnation is ‘fun’, and that in the lightest sense. Behind the recycled, unused Battlestar Galactica concepts (another Larson show) and Ralph McQuarrie spaceships, the stories suffered from the curse of syndication – the need for the series to be shown in any order at all cut out any character development or story progression, with many narrative inconsistencies between episodes. The future looked like a bad nightclub furnished by early Ikea, so soulless and plastic that when Buck paints faces on his furniture many viewers must have empathised. But the show illustrated one important social shift – the idea of relentless social progress through science had taken a beating, and it was often Buck’s knowledge of the old ways that got him out of scrapes. This aside, the show relied heavily on comedy, particularly from Twiki, Buck’s mentally deficient midget robot sidekick, and this did not make for the gut-wrenching tale of one man lost across the centuries. Even when the film tried to capture this aspect of Buck’s character, when he sneaks out of New Chicago to his ex-girlfriend’s grave, it slips into pathos.

Worse was to come. Glen A Larson had become little more than a name in the credits once the film had aired, and, as much of a magpie as he was when it came to other’s ideas (Gerard affectionately called him a “bandit”)  the TV series lacked his screwball creative energy, and Gerard allegedly argued with the chief writers on the project. Then came the second series…

Where the first series was goofy but fun, the second was risible. Buck joins the crew of the Searcher, a spaceship commissioned to search out “the lost tribes of man”. The first series’ bible made much of Earth’s relationships with her former colonies, though these were never satisfactorily explored, but this level of plagiarism from Battlestar Galactica, was too much. The second season retrod old western and Star Trek plots. Mel Blanc, the cartoon genius who had voiced Twiki in the first series, was replaced by Bob Elyea for much of the second series, to fans’ mystification and outrage, and the little bot’s limelight was stolen by Krichton, an awful robot who owed much of its ancestry to a standard lamp. Buck wasn’t the only anachronistic throwback on board either, a bemused Wilfred Hyde White was wheeled onto the show to stammer and dither his way through awful lines, in a cardigan! Not very sci-fi. Gerard rages against this new direction.

“Our new producer John Mantley had no idea, one of his ideas was to replace Mel. A complete rip off of Star Trek was another. We ditched all those classic characters – Ardala, Killer Kane, the Tigermen. I was saying ‘Look, I’d really like Buck to stay on Earth. Why would he want to leave? He’s been gone for 500 years. The man needs to look around for a while, not go flying off again. John Mantley did not know what he was doing. He did the last part of Gunsmoke. To hear him tell it he reigned during the headier days of Gunsmoke, but he simply presided over the demise of that and the demise of Buck Rogers. He actually bragged about the fact he ripped off one of his Gunsmoke scripts for the Hawk episode. He actually bragged about it, he thought it was really funny that he cast Barbara Luna in both roles – she was the Indian princess and she was Hawk’s wife. The thing is, to actually laugh about it, to have so little respect for the audience, as to say, fuck ‘em”

The audience got the message, and deserted the show in droves. It was canned. Buck disappeared from the popular awareness, only an RPG, published in the late eighties, keeping his memory alive.

But his tale is perennial one, that of a man out of place, in a new world that presents many opportunities as much as it makes him yearn for that which he has lost. With TV SF reaching new levels of sophistication, perhaps it is time for some enterprising producer to take up the torch of Buck Rogers, and carry it once more to light the darkness of the future for us all.

Buck Facts

• Buck has been played by Matt Crowley, Curtis Arnall, Carl Frank and John Larkin (radio series); Buster Crabbe (cinema serial); Kem Dibbs and Robert Pasteme (’50s TV show) and Gil Gerard (’80s TV show)
•  Buck is a nickname, the character’s real is Anthony Rogers
•  Buck has been put into suspended animation by radioactive gas in a cave, experimental gas in an airship, and by being frozen in deep space when his probe is lost
• In the ’80s version, Buck’s Deep Space Probe, Ranger 3, was modelled on the space shuttle. The series introductory narrative explains it was launched in 1987. In reality, there were no shuttle launches in that year because of the prior year’s Challenger disaster
• Gil Gerard worked with Glen A Larson once before. Larson’s band, “The Four Preps”, played at Gerard’s college. Gerard’s band supported them
•  Gerard was originally going to be a teacher before deciding to take up acting
•  Buster Crabbe appeared in the 80s episode “Planet of the Slave Girls”.
•  The first Buck story, Armageddon-2143, appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories as the first part of EE Doc’ Smith’s “The Skylark of Space”.
•  Though they are often seen as contemporaries, Buck Rogers came before, and inspired, Flash Gordon
•  At his peak, Buck commanded the loyalty of thousands of fans. The Radio serial had several giveaways with it. The first of which, a map of the planets, had 125,000 requests. A later offering of a space helmet could only be gained by sending in seals from Cocomalt cans, the show’s sponsor, even so 140,000 of these pieces of tin were sent in, and this was during the Great Depression.

Find out everything there is to know about Buck Rogers at the excellent www.buck-rogers.com

There are a couple of interviews about Champion of Mars due soon, one at Solaris the other at I Will Read Books. In anticipation of that, I thought I’d post this article I wrote for Death Ray on William Hope Hodgson, as his work was a big influence on Champion of Mars. This piece appeared way back in 2007 (sheesh, time flies). I haven’t put it up until now as I had no copy on file and had to TYPE IT IN, so I hope you enjoy it. If you’ve not read Hodgson before, I seriously recommend him. I read the Gollancz collected novels of Hodgson whilst travelling around India on honeymoon, which was interesting. Nice bit of romantic, light reading.

Terrors of the Sea

Some of the all-time greats of SF are all but forgotten. Guy Haley puts the case for William Hope Hodgson, whose tales of the occult paint a powerful picture of a wolrd threatened by unseen horrors…

On occasion, at ist very best, science fiction is a genre of truly impressive  wonders. But only infrequently  are the heights of imaginative excellence scaled, and all too often the writers who accomplish the feat soon languish forgotten.

One of those rare visionaries was William Hope Hodgson, an early 20^th century author, sailor, photographer and bodybuilder whose work deals with big stuff – no less than the spiritual perils of the outermost darks, and the fate of humankind.

Hodgson’s stories crackle with muscular energy, and his prose can –at its best – attain a stunning majesty. His work bears comparison with the later HP Lovecraft, and shares similar themes; notably that there are powerful alien creatures out there, and that their very existence is inimical to human life. As Lovecraft himself said, “The work of William Hope Hodgson is of vast power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life.” But unlike Lovecraft, Hodgson’s books brim with the indomitability of the human spirit, and his heroes are men of action who often survive their adventures to tell the tale.

Hodgson was born into the family of an Essex clergyman in 1877. At the age of 13 he attempted to run away to sea, and though initially unsuccessful, by 1891 he was allowed to become a cabin boy. He remained a sailor for eight years, and this career had great impact upon his character.

The sea appears in much of Hodgson’s fiction, although he professed to hate it. He wrote many nautical poems and stories, but it is in two of his better known novels, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) and The Ghost Pirates (1909), that his interest in sailing and what he termed the “ab-natural” collided. The first is the more haunting (if harder going) of the two; a dark tale of shipwreck survivors who find themselves tormented by pallid creatures on an island swathed by entrapping seaweed.

Despite this recurrent theme, his finest creations actually have little to do with the sea. The House on the Borderland (1908) is a short novel that tells of a mansion built upon a metaphysical faultline, a liminal building that is neither of this world nor truly of the present. A diary reveals that the last occupant experienced an out-of-body experience there, which led to terrifying  encounters with “swine-things”, finally culminating in an almost psychedelically described trip to the end of time (a trip reminscent of that in HG Wells The Time Machine) and the house’s destruction.

It is the far meatier The Night Land (1912), however, that is generally reckoned to be his finest work, and should be read by all who enjoy weird fiction.

The Night Landis set millions of years in the future, a time when the sun has died. The ancient Earth is shrouded in blackness haunted by monsters, granted ingress to our own realm by the meddlings of aeons-dead science. Against all the odds, mankind survives in a vast pyramid known as the Great Redoubt, living in peace with one another, even as time marches on toward their unavoidable extinction. The story concerns a man who receives a message from a woman he believes to be his reincarnated wife, and he sets out to fetch her from the long-lost Lesser Redoubt.

True, The Night Land is written in appalling cod-archaic English and includes a great deal of what China Mieville – in his introduction to The House on The Borderland, the Gollancz Fantasy Masterwork collected works of Hodgson – calls “egregious romance”, but it triumphs over its self-imposed limitations to give us a quest story of breathtaking power. This is truly one instance where a writer can be seen to triumph in spite of himself, and Hodgson’s vision of this alien, inimical Earth remains in the mind long afterwards.

Other creations of note by Hodgson include Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, a collection of short stories which detail the adventures of a paranormal sleuth. Carnacki is a tough customer. While a Lovecraftian protagonist often ends a story with his sanity is tatters after an encounter with some horrifying monster, Carnacki chases after it with his revolver.

William Hope Hodgson was killed, aged 40, in The Great War by a German shell. With characteristic bravado, he died executing perilous, voluntary duty. He left behind only a relatively small body of work, but one which has had a lasting impact.

Here’s a couple of elderly websites with more on Hodgson. For general information go here, while The Night Land is devoted to, you got it, The Night Land and has stories penned by other authors. Gollancz’ collected edition of Hodgson’s novels, mentioned above, is a bargain and a great place to start.

I warn you, there are more questions than statements in today’s blog. The topic is: Pirates – evil sea-rapists who terrorised shipping for a century, or lovable cultural memes and suitable subjects for children’s parties?

1. Entitlement

Referring to the first part of my previous blog, it seems that an awful lot of people feel entitled to download free things off the internet. From a strictly “Thou shalt not steal” point of view, that’s baaaad. But is it as simple as them being very naughty, amoral villains, and me being a poor little author? Shall we see? Okay then.

2. Try before you buy

There’s suggestion (not just you lot, but research and that) that some pirates are super-consumers, ie, they’ll consume creative stuff, and if they like it enough, they’ll pay for it. If they like it a lot, they’ll pay for a lot of it. They just might try it for free first, or pay for it when they feel like it, but enough of them generally contribute money to a creative venture to make it worthwhile.

The problem is for creators and publishers is that this removes all control (control is a loaded word, I choose it deliberately). How do I know if my book will be paid for by the majority of people who try it for free, or none of them at all? This is frightening for me, and my mortgage.

3. This is not a new problem, and is it a problem?

Copied tapes, bootleg videos, unauthorised reprints of Dickens – this has been going on forever. Is it, even, a necessary corollary of the distribution of entertainment? (Let’s leave other idea “sharing”, like patent infringement, out of this). One comment on my other post suggested pirated copies should be regarded as shrinkage/wastage. Maybe it should.

Here’s a positive example, again inspired by a comment – the entire anime SF subculture in the west might never have been as big as it is were it not for those bootlegged, home-translated videos of Japanese shows doing the rounds in the 80s and 90s. I’m no otaku, but I’ll bet there are still self-taught anime freaks translating the latest Naruto before the official DVD comes out and banging it on the web. Without that, there’d be no action figure, spin-off/original manga or dodgy little schoolgirl cosplay costume sales. Or even legit Naruto sales. Is anime an entire geek subculture, a lucrative one at that, founded in piracy? I don’t know, answers in the comments box please.

4. Someone is making money

Whether it’s the operators of upload sites coining it in off advertising (have you seen how many advertisements are on those site?) or it’s the more obvious villains selling copied DVDs at a car boot sale, someone is generally making some money off the distribution from illegal copies. You might do it because it’s free, if you’re of a particular mindset you might think you’re getting one over on “The Man” – those Hollywood coke-snorting whoremasters, or Wicked Publishers Inc, but instead you’re giving money to criminals. At the lower, non-internet, car-boot (yard-sale) end, a lot of this cash goes into more serious crime. So, er why not just give the money to the person that made it?

I’m not for a second suggesting upload sites should all be shot down in a cyber-orgy of digital destruction while we all wave the Stars and Stripes (why the hell would I do that? I’m English) and hit people offenders in the face with rolled up SOPA manifestos. Upload sites do have legitimate uses, I use them for such. However, I don’t have the facts, but I’d be really surprised if the majority usage is legit… Still, they do have legitimate uses. Like guns, yeah.  You can shoot targets with them, not just people! (I’m joking, chill out). And the people who run them can stop it dead themselves: Don’t allow illegal crap on your sites. Easier said than done, but if there’s enough legal threat, they’ll employ people to do just that. Enough legal threat to outweigh the ad revenues, at any rate.

On the other hand (there’s a lot of hands in this post), the advent of the digital age actually cuts out revenue for baseline crims. A copied physical book sold on by Mr Dodgy does not the same social impact as Joe Average getting my book for free.

I still don’t get paid mind, but I’m thinking bigger. Isn’t that big of me?

5. This is not just you

I’m no psychologist, but a large number of the responses I’ve had (except for the one in Spanish that told me to have sexual congress with my dear old ma – funny, I didn’t approve that one) have come from people who are attempting to justify copying. I use justify, because they kind of sound like they know they’re doing something a bit wrong. But it’s not just you. What about those corporations who advertise on upload sites which have a large amount of illegal content – they know that site has a large audience because of its illegal content. Do they care? Um, not really.

6. Fair usage

“But I loan books!” Yep, so do I. And DVDs, and I copy my CDs onto my computer, and I buy second-hand books. So what? But, someone, originally paid for even that secondhand book. That’s the killer difference. And it’s legal.

My industry relies on sharing, it’s called word of mouth. More on this later. It’s the killer question, I’m saving it for last. Is potentially millions of people not paying for something the same as lending a book to your sister? No, but then I ask myself, is it really “millions” of people downloading this stuff?

7. The nightmare scenario

This is the thing that keeps scaredy pants like me awake at night: What if we get to a situation where NOBODY EVER PAYS FOR ANYTHING EVERY AGAIN. And I don’t mean in a Captain Picard “Oh, hero Cochrane from the past, we do not have money anymore, we’re all communists now, and it works!” kind of First Contact way. I mean in a culturally inculcated, why should I pay when I kind have it for nothing,?kind of way. It doesn’t matter if it’s still there when it’s been taken, if no one pays, no art, and no job for me. This is happening in some countries/ cultures.

8. What will happen

But honestly, do I think this will happen? No. I think people are in the main too moral. I think people who enjoy the kind of stuff I write aren’t that stupid. I think people are of this mentality: “Hey guys, if we like oranges, let us pay the orange growers to grow oranges and we can all have yummy oranges forever and a day.” And not the “BURN ALL ORANGE TREES AND STEAL THE FURNITURE!” Viking-types (heck, even the Vikings were more of the former, not the latter, unless you were a monk. I don’t think they ever really saw the point of monks).

People do pirate, have pirated, and always will pirate. But it’s important it does not get out of hand. SOPA and the rest are not the answer, that’s a 20th century solution to a 21st century issue.

People pirate not just for free stuff, but for flexibility, to try things out, to experience new, foreign stuff. The solution to the “Oh Christ, they’re downloading my crap for free!” is one of accommodation. The current situation has arisen from an imbalance between what people expect, the technology that enables them to do what they want, and the slow response by the industry. The equation’s a complex one, but it can add up for everyone.  Rock stars might not be living it up quite like they used to, but then I don’t see many begging on the streets either.

And “free” can work. Spotify? Artists get money per play. Libraries? You actually get money every time someone takes your book out. Very cheap and instantly available works even better. iTunes? I buy a ton more music than I ever did and funny, all of it is legitimate. Do I think Ebooks are overpriced? Absolutely. Would I rather sell ten million books for £1.00 (at my 8% I’d get £800,000) or ten thousand for £7.99? (I’d get £6392) What the hell do you think?

9. Publicity and exposure

The internet is a very powerful tool, that’s for sure. I was advised by my publishers to start this blog. I use it as a kind of diary, and an archive of work I’ve done –there’s a fragment of my journalism here, but when I have chance, I put more up. (By the way, the copyright on that I do not own, but I asked permission to reprint it). On average, I’d say I get about one hundred hits for every post.

By deliberately choosing something contentious, like piracy (heartfelt though, it’s not fake, I wouldn’t do that, but I did think about it), I’ve had well over six hundred hits. I’ve sold books. A lot of people who have no idea who I am have at least glimpsed me, even if some of them think me a jerk. That’s me exploiting the internet, not the other way around.

By that extension, is the wide availability of my book for free on the internet actually good for someone like me? Or is stealing simply wrong?

I give work away for free for publicity. Here is a sample from Reality 36. Here from Champion of Mars, here’s a free Richards & Klein short story. Here’s another free short, and another. There’s plenty on this site, I’ll be putting more here over time.  But that’s my right to do so, it’s not a pirate’s right, because it’s my frigging stuff.

And I will say, people do expect to have everything given to them for nothing. And I will also say, when my book is available as cheaply as you want, as conveniently as you want, when there are free samples of it here and on my publisher’s site and it meets all the other halfways and market forces we’ve been discussing and you still choose to download it for free? Then you really are ripping me off.

It’s all going to change. New encryption systems and bigger computers will eventually put the lid on this (mostly). I wouldn’t be surprised if every piece of entertainment in the world has free elements, but then quantumly encrypted, embedded programming demands payment every time you get past that. Whatever, I reckon this whole debate will be of far less importance in a few years time. Seeing my work given away for free by people who have no right to do so upsets me right now, though. Still, creators and consumers will meet halfway.

Thanks for reading, and commenting.

One of the four pitches I’ve worked up is a fantasy series. I’ve wanted to write a fantasy for a while, but have struggled to find an idea that I have not dismissed as risible. This desire got a little stronger in the wake of the success of Game of Thrones on TV, if I’m truthful. Then I thought about how big Raymond E Feist’s house is. Or how rich Terry Brooks is. Get the picture? I am sick of being poor… I thought harder. My mice of ideation are dead and crippled in their little wooden mind-wheels (you know, the ones in MY HEAD), but they perished in to good end. I have a pitch. I can always catch more mind-mice. Maybe I’ll steal yours, eh? EH? Hehehehehe. (Look, I had a really stressful Christmas).

Over the last year or so I’ve spent a degree of my precious thinking time thinking (well, duh) on what makes the most successful fantasy stories – successful in terms of merit, as well as monies — really, there is art as well as Mammon in here somewhere. In tandem to this, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what annoys me about that second rank of fantasy that is not brilliant, yet still hugely successful. ACtually, I’ve probably spent more time on this. I’m talking about the kind of fantasy pedaled by authors who look all pleased with themselves for creating second-rate dreck because it comes with a big pay cheque. And frankly, that’s a state of mind I could live with. I could detail my musings at tedious length, but here’s the crucial bits (they are blindingly obvious, in the main):

Category 1: Narrative factors in bestselling fantasy

1. Multiple, definite, compelling viewpoint characters.
2. Multi-linear plot structure driven by the characters.
3. Richly structured, “whole-cloth” world.
4. Graspable rules that define the unique characteristics of said world.
5.  Strong influences from historical and/or mythical precedent.
6. Genuinely unexpected reversals.

Secondary are the following tropes:

Category 2: Tropes in most fantasy

1.  Secondary dramatic situation that shapes the characters’ initial actions.
2. A hidden primary threat that appears distant or unreal at first, only gradually becoming unveiled, and which impels the characters’ second round reactions and drives the main plot.
3. A sense of cyclical diminishment of the majesty of the world, and/or thinning of magic, and/or lessening of moral purity.

That’s the bare bones, methinks.

Category 3: What I don’t like about a lot of fantasy

There is a shitload of stuff that I don’t like about modern fantasy. Here’s some of it. Most of my ire is sparked upon the yielding stone of American “High” heroic fantasy trilogies:

1. Strong female characters whose very strength is anachronistic and inexplicable in the surroundings laid out by the author.
2. Characters who are possessed of or become possessed of ever-increasingly superheroical attributes.
3. Worlds which seem to function only as an adjunct to story – they do not exist in the readers’ or authors’ mind as separate to the narrative.
4.  Special relationships with special horses. Or cats. It’s always cats and fucking horses, isn’t it?
5. Women who just don’t know how beautiful they are, and think they are oh so ugly, but really they’re like totally beautiful.
6. Endless sequels that outgrow the inventive powers of the author.
7. Worlds that fail to obey their own rules.
8. Bad prose of all kinds, but especially that embossed with cascades of amethystine magnificence; lo! laden with a majesty of adjectives that are supposed in their countless, multitudinous companies to evoke the richness of strange lands and exotic kingdoms, but are instead evocative of saying the same thing three times in a glittering triptych of different ways. And of the lack of self-editing.
9. Recycled cliché.
10. Poorly employed dramatic irony.
11. Multiple species all living together in one tiny space for no good reason. Elves and Orcs and Dwarfs and trolls yadda yadda.
12.  Ecosystems that consist entirely of dangerous predators.
13. Morally unambiguous characters.
14. Off-the-peg, “Medieval Fayre” worlds.
15. Lack of social realism (all our peasants are clean, heck, there are no peasants).
16. First person perspectives.
17. World maps that owe about as much to real geological processes as they do to toilet brushes (Good world maps: Yay!. Odd world maps with unusually generated magical/ technological/biological geography: Double yay! Maps that owe their features to authors saying: “Let’s have a forest here”. SHITE)
18. Not-so-bad dickhead rogues with a merry quip always upon their half-smiling lips.
19. The entirely egregious injection of contemporary mores into poorly invented societies.
20. Fantasy that owes more to Mills and Boon than it does to Conan the Barbarian. That’s a lot of it.

Crikey, I could do this all day. I’m going to stop. You might poke me hard in the ribs with your best walking cane and say “I say old boy! This is fantasy, it’s not supposed to be realistic!” To which I’d say: “Fuck off you Edwardian wannabe! Good fantasy has to have realism as a base in order to create a compelling fiction whose fantasy elements appear to be real, and not merely a regurgitated crowd-pleasing ticklist of genre staples. And I’m talking about fantasy, not steampunk, so kindly remove yourself, your cane and cod archaic manner of speech.”

So, I want to write a fantasy that follows the tropes we all expect (Category 2) utilising the toolkitand themes the very best use (Category 1) and avoiding the bollocks that even some very popular writers employ (Category 3). That’s popular folks, not necessarily good. I concede, that kind of writer might write an entertaining story, but it won’t have the power of A Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings —it won’t break out of the fantasy ghetto.

Crucially, I think the most important attribute of all commercially successful fantasy, meritorious and meretricious, is that it is true to itself as a creation. That’s not the same thing as being true to the mind of the author. Fantasy, more so than science fiction, has to exist in its own space. Being apart from real life is one of the main points for it to be. I love fantasy, in many ways it was my first literary love. I dearly want to love it more, but so much modern fantasy leaves me cold, while a significant minority makes me murderous. Can I do better? Can I even get one published? Maybe, maybe not, but I’d be a twat to pour scorn on it and not try myself, wouldn’t I?

Laters, oh! and a Happy New Year, eh?

I’ve been reviewing “tri-genre” (I’m trying for a new buzzword. D’you reckon it’ll catch on?) titles now for 14 years. My very first review ever was for Mount Dragon, a techno-thriller, which I wrote while doing work experience for SFX.

In the time since Mount Dragon  I have written critiques of hundreds of books, films, videos (yes! it’s been that long) DVD’s, games, RPGs, comics, conventions… I’m going to be mainly talking books here, but most of what I mention below applies to all.

Now, some of these reviews have been bad. Not badly written (at least I bloody well hope not, although there’s bound to have been a few), but negative, critical drubbings with low scores attached to them.

Ah! The power! Lodged in my ivory tower of critical impunity, I have lobbed shit-bombs unashamedly at the creative works of others, and sometimes, dare I say, with palpable glee. Because there are those books that make you froth madly at the mouth just at the mere actuality of their publication.

All well and good, until your own stuff gets the spike of disapproval… This is going to be a long post. I’ll get back to that.

First off, I’m going to talk about writing reviews for large magazines, because there’s a lot of nonsense surrounding the marks and so forth given out by publication. The below applies to SFX, for whom I’ve done the majority of my reviews, and Death Ray.  Some others aren’t so honest…

We’re doing bullet points, people! Let’s go.

• All reviews are subjective There is no such thing as objective criticism, not truly.
  
• There is no “official magazine position” All reviews are written by individuals, and different people like different things. Often what opinions people have on a particular product differ wildly within a magazine. Someone like Ian Berriman on SFX will do his hardest to place the right book with the right person, but still,  reviews are entirely subjective.
• My five stars is not your five stars People ascribe marks for different reasons. Grades mean different things to different people. Five stars to me might mean four stars to you. Editors will try to equalise this, but you only have to look at games mags, which supposedly  mark out of a hundred but rarely stray below sixty per cent, to see how this can get out of hand. Reviews are subjective. Do you see a pattern here?
• Advertising has little affect on review marks It would be naive and disingenuous to say that monies from advertising deals have no affect whatsoever on reviews, but on the magazines I have worked on, it’s had surprisingly little. Only on one occasion have I felt compelled to adjust marks to suit an agenda (not on SFX I hasten to add), and  that was very much against my principles. Companies cannot “buy” good reviews. If that happens, journalistic integrity and the whole reason you buy your magazine go down the toilet. On the other hand, having furious advertisers ring up and berate staff for bad reviews is extremely common.
• Sometimes other things do have affects If the book is bad, but the author shows promise, I might be more generous.  If I have a shitty hangover and argued with my wife, I might be more of a harsh penman than if I’ve spent all night dancing with angel-faced women with nice bottoms in tight, shiny dresses. Sometimes I’m nice, mostly I’m only human.
• “You obviously haven’t read the book!” Yes I have, and I hated it, so fuck off.
• Self-published? Don’t bother Only very, very rarely will a self-published book get past a reviews editor. I have reviewed only one I can recall, and that was because it had sold loads of copies. Most self-published work is awful. Even the one I reviewed sucked hard. We magazine people don’t have time to find the few pearls within the heaps of shit that make up this particular ego-mountain. That’s your job. Be the gatekeepers of this modern age! Things are changing.  By all means, tell everyone when you find a corker. They are there.
• Space is at a premium Another reason why self-published books don’t get much airtime, or books that come from small presses, or limited print runs, or arrived on the wrong Tuesday. There just isn’t enough room for everything. If selection can seem arbitrary beyond these factors, that’s because it sometimes is.
• Know your market If I didn’t like a book, but I know that lots of people do like this author’s books and this particular one seems to be a good example, I may be kinder than my true opinion dictates. Like, I really loathe urban fantasy. I mean, I can’t tell you how much, with its endless sex, stupid were-panthers, too-many-boyfriends and what-to-wear dilemmas and sparkly vampires knobs. But I can tell a good one from a bad one. I think.
• Sometimes I use a pseudonym Is there something that could possibly be construed as a conflict of interest by picky cyber-trolls? Then I write under a different name. There never is a conflict of interest, by the way, I’m always as subjectively objective as I can possibly be (or do I mean objectively subjective?), sometimes to the point of personal detriment.

So, that’s out of the way. Where was I? Ah, yes, bad reviews. As I worked harder and harder at becoming an author, and it dawned on me what a monumentally soul-crushing experience trying to get published is, it definitely made me less hard on the work of others. Not necessarily in the score ascribed, but perhaps in the way I explained myself. I’m less likely to go for a cheap joke now. I reread some of my reviews, especially those from my “Bitter Period” (where I’d gone to work for The Big Hobby Company, wondered what the hell I’d done to my career, and was disenchanted with my attempts to publish) and they are really spiky. Funny, but too cruel. I think I was trying to be AA Gill. Why?

The overwhelming majority of reviews for Reality 36 have been very positive. I have, however, had three bad ones. One was from a guy who was incensed by the cliff-hanger nature of the end, which is fair enough. I was warned about it by my publishers, but the story was just too big to fit in one book. If I’m honest, I thought a cliff-hanger might pull people back for the second, so didn’t worry about it too much. A misjudgment? Maybe, maybe not.

The others seem less fair. One, on Amazon, give the book a generous one-star rating and is titled “Unending Tedium“. Nice. But, er, technically incorrect, because it does end, eh? Says the close-to-tears, slighted student twat in me. You know, one in a wanker’s scarf that has just been punched by a townie for being a pretentious little prick.

The other came after SFSignal gave me a new author spotlight. Hurrah! A bad review immediately followed. No!

This spirited fellow gave the final line:

I say to the author, do not give up, but stop and give ideas a good think and draw them out to their logical conclusion. You can ask me for free!

To which one’s immediate reaction is “You can go stuff your cock up your own bumhole! For free!”

But then, I can’t say that, can I? So I didn’t say that. Oh, did I? Whoops.  Their opinions (reviews are subjective, remember?) are as valid as anyone else’s. You have to take the rough with the smooth. The temptation to answer a bad review is almost overwhelming, to say with trembling bottom lip: “But Otto isn’t weary of fighting, it clearly says in the book several times he loves it!” or “Just because an emotional sense isn’t conveyed by machine telepathy doesn’t mean you can’t use emotive language” or “Richards isn’t supposed to be a gumshoe, it’s a character beat. It’s supposed to be unconvincing, like all of us he’s trying to find a shape to his life.” Or any other rebuttal to the points they make. Bad. Idea. It just makes you look like a child who can’t take his beatings.

A setback. I mean a setback. No child beating here. No sir.

The bottom line is they don’t like it, just like I don’t like every book I’ve ever read, some of which have been loved by lots of other people. It’s impossible to please everyone. In direct support of this is that one reviewer thought I over-detailed the technology, the other that one aspect of it was under-detailed. Go figure! (Excuse me a moment while I cry into my keyboard like a fat girl whose ailing pony has just been shot in the head by the vet and turned into dog meat. Bye bye Blossom >sob<).

Every reader brings half the story to the collaborative book party. “Unending Tedium” bloke seemed to have been expecting something else – he mentions the Big Sleep, and first person perspectives, for example. I can say the book’s not supposed to be a futuristic Chandler, but so what? Fact is, what I wrote didn’t chime with what was in their heads. There is a mismatch there. A good author/ reader synergy is like a relationship. A book cover is a smooch, it asks you to undress it by cracking the cover. Sadly, sometimes we’re disappointed. You don’t marry every girl you ever smooch. I’d have two wives if that were the case! (Hohohohoho. I jape. I’d, er, still have one).

But hang on, Mr Helpful wrote a skit parodying a section of the story. How dare he! I would never do such a thing! I… Oh, hang on. I have done it. Lots and lots and lots. I must be a real bell end.

To get back to my mildly sexual analogies, not every blind date works out. Should we vilify everyone that does not like us? Of course not. I reckon if more people had raised the points Helpful and Tedium had, I might take them on board and modify my writing. I mean, I don’t think I’ll be doing a cliffhanger again. That gripe has come up a lot. What these guys say hasn’t, but I’ll keep a weather eye out. You never know, techno-shoes may too become a big no-no in future books.

Where’s this leave my own crit? Answer: I doubt I will get any more gentle than I already have. Sorry, authors, I’m going to continue lobbing bricks around my glass house. It’s the only way I can cope with my own pain.

No, but what’s really worrying is all the comforting things I tell myself above there, you know what? They apply to all the positive reviews as well.

Appreciation of entirely subjective reviews is entirely subjective, after all.

Actually, I have not been painting my goblins The Army Painter way. Let me explain.

I’ve been meaning to get hold of some of The Army Painter’s funky dip for some time. Dip? Army Painter? Okay, if you’re not in the know, here’s a quick Army Painter 101.

Wargaming’s pretty big in Scandinavia, with an emphasis on the gaming side. There are a load of tournaments and events and so forth up there – long winters, y’see – and that means lots of models need painting. It just won’t do to play at an event with unpainted figures, oh no. Now, some of the very best miniatures painters in the world come from Scandinavia, but they also like to get their models done quick. Painting models is a lot of fun for the likes of me, I experience the kind of floaty zen buzz you can only get from total concentration on a task. Unlike playing a computer game or some other geeky pass time (of which, my friends, I have several) producing a finished model gives you something to look at, something you’ve done. It’s a real sense of achievement, I tells ya.

Contrarily, painting an ENTIRE ARMY is a massive pain in the balls. What do you do? You could paint every model the best you can. This is my favoured approach, with some compromise. Big drawback – you never get enough painted models on the table. Alternatively, you can slap a load of paint on them to get them up to “Wargaming Standard”.

I look at the models, the beautiful, beautiful models, and then I look at most people’s “wargaming standard”. What we’re really talking is three-colour, mass-produced Chinese toy standard. It makes me sad for all the little goblins to see that, it really does, with no eyes painted on and quick daubs to show up their lovely sculpting. Poor little goblins.

The Army Painter offers a third way. The idea is that you paint on the basecoat of a model (non-wargamers, a basecoat is a flat block of colour, not highlighted or shaded or anything), then dip it in this magic dip. The dip’s a varnish with a brown pigment in it that simultaneously shades (by dint of the pigment running into the cracks) and protects (by dint of being a varnish).

The idea came from America, where serious hobbyists were using floor polish to do the same thing. A couple of Danish guys I used to work with at GW – Bo Penstoft and Jonas Faering – decided to make something tailored to the task. They also make coloured primer sprays. Most people prime with white or black spray before painting. You have to prime, normal acrylic paint will rub off the model without a primer. Having a primer in the model’s majority colour instead saves more time. This is actually a seriously old-school wargaming technique used by historical gamers, like my dad.

Anyway. I have an all-goblin army. None of those orcs, no sir. The thing is with all-goblin armies is that they are HUGE, really HUGE. Hundreds of models. A horde army, in the hobbyist lingo. I’ve long used a lot of inkwashes, especially brown, to speed up my painting. Inks are pooh-poohed by top-range painters, but to me they’re a good short cut to an army with a reasonable standard. Indeed, I wrote a couple of articles on this for the UK edition of White Dwarf when there was such a thing, and I was its editor.

What I like about it

Smell

I love the smell of it, takes me right back to my earliest hobby days when I used to use yacht varnish to protect my models. I pinched this off my father, who used it to thin down oil paints to paint his own models. Army Painter dip smells exactly like it. Ah! Nostalgia (anyone who reads this blog regularly knows how much I hate nostalgia. But no, this is good nostalgia).

Protection

I like the fact that it covers the model in a tough protective coat. Sure, you need to take the shine of it, because it is super gloss. Army Painter do a proprietory spray, but I use paint-on, Windsor and Newton artist’s matte varnish. A lot of my models are metal, some are even the old lead alloy. I’ll be painting them until I die. Varnish this tough should stop that annoying chipping, especially on all those pointy goblin hats! It also binds the basing material to the base really strongly.

Shading

The shading does actually work. Kind of. I’ll explain what I mean later.

Equalising

It’ll blend rough highlighting or drybrushing nicely, meaning you can be quicker and less neat.

What I don’t like so much

Price

£20 a tin. I was expecting something the size of an emulsion pot, but it is a lot smaller. I can just about live with that though.

Drying time

Like varnish, it takes forever to dry – 24 hours. Pick up a metal model before then and you’re in danger of the paint coming off with the tacky dip. Also, beware of windblown fluff and unexpected falls into modelling detritus.

Dipping

I don’t dip. The guys recommend dipping with pliers and  flicking the excess off for best results, but this makes a shit load of mess and is wasteful. Their other method, painting it on and sucking up pools with a clean brush, is the one I employed. I’m finding it hard to gauge how much to use, but that’s my fault, not the product’s.

Dimming

Strong tone takes the warmth of a colour down, and reduces the brightness of the hue. Like, my goblins’ skin looks more like orc skin. But easily solved, I’ll use brighter paint in future at the initial stage.

Shine

It is super shiny! Get the shine off takes a while, no matter what you use.

How I use it

Amry Painter make three shades – Light Tone (light brown), Strong Tone (Dark Brown) and Dark Tone (Black).I’ve been using the very Danishly-named Strong Tone (we Brits would probably have gone for something less macho, like mid tone, or tea).

I find myself employing the dip as a kind of shortcut, but not a panacea to the ills of painting a million models. For me, the end result of applying it directly over a basecoat isn’t quite good enough. It works really well on flesh, browns, reds  or bone. Check out their website for some seriously cool Skaven, Skeletons and historical models. What it doesn’t look so hot on is goblinoid flesh tones. Not because the dip doesn’t work with green, it does, but because the best goblin-y paint jobs have quite a high contrast between highlights, and the dip doesn’t deliver on this score. Then there are things like metal, which it looks fine on, but which a little extra work will make look more splendid.

What I’ve been doing then is painting my models as normal but as with inks, omitting several stages. Army Painter dip is better than ink too, as it mostly collects in the crevices of the model. Like GW’s newish washes. But a lot cheaper.

I’ve been painting Night Goblin Squig Hoppers, both old Kev Adams jobs and newer-school Brian Nelson ones. The older models took longer, as there is more detail on them. Here’s a breakdown – all the paints I use are Citadel Colour. I glue sand on the base and undercoat first.

Robes: Drybrush grey over black primer

Squig: Mechrite Red with Blood Red/ Bronzed Flesh drybrush

Teeth/ rope belts/ horns: Deneb Stone

Metal: Boltgun Metal

Squig eyes: Iyanden Darksun

Goblin eyes: Blood Red

Goblin skin (a bit more involved, as this is the focal point of the model): Knarloc Green basecoat, 1st highlight Gretchin Green 2nd Highlight Gretchin Green/ Rotting Flesh.

Pouches: Brown (from the scenery painting kit – I love my big bottle of “Brown”)

Sand base: Brown

Wood: Brown/Chaos Black/ Bronzed Flesh mix (to get a kind of grey/green)

I then paint on Strong Tone.

Painting time is not as quick as the Danes intended, but I’m not using it like they say. Result is, it still looks nice, and it’s quicker than it would have been as I’ve saved myself three or four stages all told. So I’m happy.

For less prominent models, like the thirty or so archers I have to paint, I’m going to cut even more out.

///UPDATE///Since I wrote this post a couple of days ago, I have finished more Night Goblin Squig Hoppers with flat Gretchin Green for the skin and a couple of other stages taken out. They look great, and were very fast to paint. ///UPDATE///

If I can sort out my shitty photography, I’ll put up pictures. For now, you’ll just have to take the word of a 30-year wargamer/ ex-White Dwarf Editor that Army Painter dip is damn cool stuff.

I will try not to lapse into rage-fuelled profanity, but I may slip up.

For a start, the tax system is mind-bendingly overly complicated, and complication can only lead to abuse. Kudos is due to HMRC for their online tax form , because it actually makes the complex relatively simple. On the other hand, you can see how large companies with wily accountants can avoid paying all but the most nominal amounts of tax.

My shock at my tax bill actually came about because I’d misinterpreted one of the few loopholes available to we lesser people, you know, people who aren’t banks staffed by braying rich bastards. To whit, if you’re a creative like me, then you can spread your tax over two years. Great! I thought. Then: Ooh no, shitbollockswhat? as it turns out you can’t be doing that unless you’ve been self-employed since before April 2009. Fucking awesome. Bang went me low tax bill. Added to that one of my main contractors was compelled to put me on their payroll during 2012 in a manner that does not take into account my citizen’s right to £7000 tax-free earnings, thus sapping two-thirds of the money I intended to save for my 2010-2011 tax. So, higher bill, no money put aside.

We were looking at a very deep hole indeed my friend. Still, I soldiered on, and I discovered many weird exemptions along the way. My favourite example: Did you know divers and diving instructors are exempt certain bits of tax? What high-powered lobby group did they employ to get that?! Did Neptune, King of the Sea write to his MP and promise wrath and tidal waves and so forth if they didn’t get a flipper allowance?

I exploded into rage when I discovered that not only did our government want me to cough up all of 2010-2011′s money owed, but also half of 2011-2012′s tax bill, all by the end of January. NO FUCKING WAY. I couldn’t pay my tax bill because I’d been heavily taxed at source during 2012 and now it looked like they wanted that tax AGAIN. I’d get it back, but as they wanted this “payment on account” before I’d fill in my 2011-2012 return and explain that I’d already paid up, I’d have to claim it back. Not that I’d be able to claim it back, because I wouldn’t be able to pay it in the first place. Mostly because they already had the money.

My fury at large companies that can have cosy little chats with high-up civil servants and talk their way out of funding our massive, uneducated underclass so I can do it instead became bloodthirsty and priapic (not me, my fury. What it was going to do with that hard-on of anger I shudder to think).

Luckily, it doesn’t work like that, I’d effectively already paid this part of next year’s tax, and so didn’t have to cough up the payment on account, so that was okay. But it wasn’t immediately apparent. Of course, I could have paid a tax consultant to make it immediately apparent, but I can’t afford to.

Later, in a bit of a break, a friend told me that my contractor was as obliged to pay me holiday pay as they were obliged to tax me (and pay national insurance to employ me etc, all because I do a minimal amount of work in their offices). Maybe they feel hard done by, because they don’t actually tell you this, you have to find it out for yourself. I felt some sympathy for them. Although I have the legal right to holiday pay do I really deserve it? But then I thought about all the massively long hours I was expected to work when I was employed full-time at this same company, with no renumeration, and that their freelance rates haven’t gone up for 14 years, and I thought, sod ‘em.

And that’s what had me in a funk. We’ve so many rights, our companies have so many obligations, and there are so many special interest groups trying to weasel their way out of either, or both. We wage serfs try to eat and afford one shit holiday a year, our employees try to stay competitive enough to pay their board members ludicrous wages, and the government has to carry on paying Sharon from Lakeside to have a thousand badly behaved children because if they don’t they’ll be more riots. Oh, and they need the money to wage a few post-imperial wars. It’s got to come from somewhere, and it’s certainly not coming from our tax-havened megarich.

What happened to the simple equation of: I work eight hours, you give me £40, I give the government £5, I go home in time and get to have a life? Instead we have: We pay you to work eight hours, but we actually pretty much demand you work eleven, because IT has meant the forty people that used to be needed to do your job in eight hours has been reduced to three, and we thought we’d make it one. Anyway, we have to give you stuff we aren’t going to tell you about unless we have to, and our CEO wants three Porsches. Then you can give the government £4.57, unless you have a tractor, the King of The Fish has your back, or it’s a Tuesday.

And why is it like this? Because we’re all egocentric twats. Me included. Society is a glorious wooden temple riddled with the worms of self-interest. I have enormous sympathy for the recent strikers, and the same time I think they are being monumentally selfish. We’re all in the shit, what makes you so special? Oh, sorry, it’s you.

What further boggles the mind is that nobody had the foresight to see that in a world where wages are the highest cost part of a process, the jobs will always go where its cheaper to do whatever those people doing those jobs are doing. That the more rights a workforce accrues, the more expensive they become, and the more likely those jobs are to leave. And why does this happen? Partly because our corporate mindset has become detached from the societal body it sits in, but mostly because we as ‘consumers’ (Jesus, I hate that term) would rather pay £50 for a pair of trainers made in some sweatshop by a worker on $1 a day than £70 for a pair made by a worker in Bury with full rights. That’s as big a reason as the company that makes them demanding a 70% mark-up.

We are all. Selfish. Twats. It really isn’t just the bankers. And that applies equally to The News of The World phone hacking scandal (who bought the papers and created the demand? The morally outraged Great British Public) as it does to the rising cost of what was horribly under-priced milk, rubbish on the beaches, the plague of  hoody youth crims and so on. Everyone must have prizes, so nobody actually does. Except bankers.

The effects of the industrial and informational revolutions continue to ripple around the Earth. In an ideal world, the upheaval stops when everyone is equally prosperous. What will probably happen is that prosperity will slosh dangerously across the globe like water in a rocked bowl, leaving environmental degradation, overpopulation and social collapse in its wake. The cycle will then start anew from a lower basepoint. Repeat until Earth is dead. In a century’s time the Chinese will be employing starveling Mancunians to make novelty plastic apes for peanuts. In two centuries’ time we’ll be smashing each other’s faces in with rocks to steal peanuts.

When will we learn? We’re all monkeys. The sooner we stop insisting we can just groom ourselves, the sooner we’ll stop falling out of the fucking tree.

Go on, think beyond your own interests. At the very least it’ll make my tax return easier to fill out.

I address some of this stuff in my books Reality 36 and Omega Point. I’m not Charles Stross or Cory Doctorow, but it’s there dudes, it’s all there.

I speak of Games Workshop, the Very Big Hobby Company, for whom I once worked as editor of Fictional Albino Shorty magazine, and for whose publishing arm I now write books (this is my disclaimer, so you can add your own bias to the following musing, like that sachet of soy sauce to a pot noodle. I reckon these posts have around the same nutritional content). I’ve been playing GW fantasy and science fiction wargames since I was very, very young. I’ve grown up on its worlds, which led me on to many other things. I’m a devotee, you might say.

Gaming was cheaper then. This was a time when a fantasy skeleton warrior made of toxic lead alloy cost you less than ten pence. Models in those days came in a plastic bag, not dissimilar to those that are often used to house drugs (this is a measured analogy), stapled to a piece of card. I’m sure there are many old bearded males even balder and grumpier than I who feel that “Those were the days”.

Back then, the range of models to be had was quite small, and if you ever did get to put an army together, it weighed so much you needed to buy a donkey or similar pack animal to carry it to a friend’s house. Said friend had to be a very good friend, because you’d be staying there for two weeks, the average duration of a wargame. Now, the games are fast and furious, the models genuine works of art (and light as feathers).

The reason I’m writing this is that this very evening I put together a battlescape for Warhammer 40,000 – for those of you not in the club of sad old dice rollers, never mind. It’s a piece of decoration for a battlefield. This piece, not even a toy soldier, you understand, is so awesome it made me do a little giggle putting it together.

It was also £15.40. That’s cheap in this world, bub.

10p doesn’t buy you much any more, the average model is well over a pound whatever it is made out of – and there aren’t a great many models in GW’s many ranges that deserve the label “average”. There have been an endless series of price hikes that have sent elements of the hobby community hopping mad, not least the last.

This last came in the wake of the company replacing their last metal models (long made of a tough, modelling unfriendly, yet non-toxic, alloy) with a cold-cast plastic resin dubbed by GW’s miniatures brand Citadel as “Finecast”. That this stuff is almost certainly cheaper to buy than metal is neither here nor there, the opportunity arose to put up the prices again, and so they did.

Why do they do this? It drives some of us mental. But let’s look at it objectively. The boom times of The Lord of The Rings movie releases, that brought a lot of money in to GW, are long gone (I saw some unwise choices made there toward the end, but that it was a bubble, and that it was difficult to capitalise because of its transient nature, is undeniable). Their attempt to turn their niche hobby into one that appealed to a mass market was a noble failure. They’ve got to make their money somewhere, and looking in from the outside it looks suspiciously to me like GW is repositioning itself as a business that deals in a niche, high-cost hobby that sells to a small group of customers. Like it used to be, in fact.

Apart from the high cost bit.

Yet £10-20 pounds for a SINGLE character model? Come on! The sad fact is that Warhammer and its sister games are no longer a pocket-money hobby. At today’s prices one could buy a basic regiment every couple of weeks on average pocket money, but to play the game you need a minimum of around five or six things of £20 or so, and that’s not including the paints, scenery, glue and rulebooks.

So why do I continue to shell money out on this ravenous coin beast? And I do, even though my attic is stuffed full of as yet unpainted soldiers. Simple really, the models they make are just so damn cool. The standard of sculpture some of their kits exhibit is breathtaking, and get better every year. Never mind that, say, their ace Blood Dragon Vampire Knights are £61.50 for five (£12.30 each. £12.30 EACH!). They are amazing pieces.

As an aside here, not all their models are that expensive. I am very sure that the price of a particular model has nothing to do with its base production cost, and everything to do with how spectacular it will look in an army, and how powerful it is in the game. Though there is also the less exploitative consideration of price per (manufacturing) unit. Something like the aforementioned regiment is a one or two purchase per undead gamer, unlike for example skeleton warriors for the same army (£15.50 for ten) which would be a multiple purchase. Therefore the cost of the sculpting time, moulding etc is proportionally lower per model for skeletons than vampire knights. I’m not sure we hobbyists always bear this in mind. (Is it 806% lower? Probably not, but still).

I won’t sugar coat it, I had a tough time working at GW, and I found some of the things they did distasteful, a couple downright personally damaging. But then, I suspect I’d find the same in most businesses. I am not cut out for a corporate environment perhaps, or rather, I’m not prepared to embrace my inner bastard in order to flourish in a corporate environment. I’ve seen dark-side Guy, and he’s an A-grade twat. Let’s leave him in his box. But this is not an evil company by a long chalk.

Is GW exploitative toward its customers? Maybe a little. Yeah, I know the ludicrous margin they demand each of their products provide, no, I’m not going to tell you. Are they out to get as much of my money as possible? Almost certainly. But the company doesn’t hold a gun to my head, it gets my cash by making exciting games, models that make me pee myself a bit, and setting them in immersive, complicated worlds. Who cares that these worlds exhibit widespread borrowing from every major SF and fantasy property ever, sometimes very poorly disguised? They were dreamt up by people playing games, and that’s what people do when playing games. The settings have grown well beyond their roots now, and become influential in themselves.

It doesn’t matter. Y’see, if I had £61.50 to spare, I’d probably get me some of those knights, or something similar. The fact is that I don’t have any money at all any more, but if I had, I would. Things are worth what people will pay for them. Hard truth of capitalism, live with it (at least until the end of Western civilisation, which seems scheduled for next Tuesday).

For you angry gamers out there, the crux of the matter is this: Can you really say that someone is abusing you who makes something you want, something you still pay for even while bitching about how much it costs? Not something you need, just would like. Something you can live easily without. To read some forums you’d think the company bosses were pulling a chocolate company stunt on African baby milk, you really would.

The whole thing reminds me of the hobby grumblings back in the 90s that laid the demise of RPGs at GWs feet. This was not really true, the decline of RPGing as a mass passtime is a complex thing. Look what survived though – the very same Amazing Models inc. Why? Mainly because they made really cool stuff, not because they stopped selling Runequest.

There are a lot of miniature producing firms out there now, and some make very good models at much lower prices. But GW’s are still far and away the best. This is why they survived the gaming implosion of the early 90s, and why I still pay up.

Today I went into a Games Workshop and bought some things. Was I horrified by the prices? Hell yeah. Was I excited? Oh indeedy. Am I exploited? Nope.

Damn you Games Workshop, I love your toys. That’s why you’ll always get your hands on my cash, although I reserve the right to weep and swear as I hand it over.

What I’ve been up to (list non-exhaustive)

I started my next book for the Black Library nine days ago. I don’t think I can tell you what it’s all about, but it contains an awful lot of goblins. This is due to be handed in by the end of January, and I think it’s coming on quite well. I’m looking good to hit my deadline comfortably . For once.

A Richards & Klein short story is underway! I’m halfway through. I’m actually going to try to place it with a short story magazine, but if this fails I’ll have it up here. It concerns Richards’ secretary Genie, a ghost, and a gunfight in an illegal fish and chip shop. Once that’s done I will write another, as I’d like to build up a collection of R&K cases.

I have written two features for the next SFX special. I don’t think the topic of the mag is public yet, but think spooky. One is a genuine account of a terrifying experience I had, and I look forward to sharing that with you even though it still gives me the collywobbles.

I’ve also been confirmed to attend the next SFX Weekender, which is shaping up to be the premier multi-media SF event in the UK. If you’re dithering about buying ticket, you now have a reason to come! (I say with ironic self-deprecation, naturally).

Inspired by the Game of Thrones TV series, I have begun the initial phase of plotting on a fantasy epic (stage 1: in my head). I may write a little diary thing on this if I get the time, and post samples and stuff of that ilk so you can see how it works. We’ll see.

I underwent many palpitations at filing my latest tax return, and at one moment looked to be stuck in a deadly mine cart screaming all the way down to the hells of penury. Luckily, I used my guile to escape. I’m guiled out, but I think I won’t go bankrupt. I am going to blog about this.

Lastly, I have taken the opportunity to update my site today. I promise I would. I’m only two weeks late, which seems to be about normal for me. Included for your excitement are:

An interview with Joanne Harris.

An interview with Robin Hobb.

A featurette on Flesh, the 2000 AD dino series, including a good chat with creator Pat Mills.

Several reviews, including one of Hyperdrive.

Magnus finally has his own page.

And my favourite, a rant about the infantilising effect of nostalgia in SF. Read that one, go on. I get mean.

Magic science really does wind me up. Except in Doctor Who, I can forgive the Doctor. There are innumerable examples of it – I don’t mention The Core, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012 below, for example. And although I freely own sometimes it is necessary to make a plot point (or create a parable, as below), a lot of the time it is lazy and, dare I say it, extremely rubbish. Bad science enshittens SF as much as bad writing. That’s right, enshittens.

The Magic of… Science!

Genes that can turn the evolutionary clock back! Radiation that gives you superpowers rather than cancer! Chemical rockets that can fly to a distant star system before everyone dies of old age! SF is rammed full of such magic science, and by golly, it gets on my goat.

Science fiction does precisely what the name says, it is fiction, with some science (though if we’re talking about the likes of Greg Egan, it is science, with some fiction). Except when it doesn’t.

The fiction part means we should expect reality to be bent, or broken, especially if the author wants to explore an intriguing concept or put forward a metaphor exploring one aspect of the human condition or another. This humanist side of SF is essentially fantasy, concerned almost solely with the soul, so it’s excusable. I doubt Stan Lee really believed that Peter Parker would turn into Spider-man when bitten by a radioactive spider, or that Richard Matheson thought a man could actually shrink, but these stories are not about those concepts, the concepts are only plot devices to help the authors get to what they really wanted to talk about: dealing with power, and dealing with losing it. Such things are the giants and the magic swords of modern-day parablists, and we can forgive them that.

But SF is not just the inheritor of yesteryear’s fantasticalities, it is more than Jonathan Swift with rocket boots. Some ‘scientist’ SF deliberately sets itself up a soothsayer for modern times. And this is good. Sure, people like Arthur C Clarke got it wrong a lot (a prime example would be his lunar dust seas in A Fall of Moondust) but at least such things are genuine ‘What ifs?’; solid speculation built on the theories of the time, and, do you know, they are occasionally right.

‘Magic Science’ then, is where the story insists it is doing the latter, does not have the insight of the former, and ends up peddling technobabble nonsense in place of both. Magic SF is not as clever as the scientist variety, or as wise as the humanist. Its tricks are neither the fantastical or the logical, but manufactured from ideas spun off the real or almost real, often giving us something that we know already to be rubbish. Mostly to provide some kind of backdrop to ongoing, inter-character wranglings. SF soap, with spangly lights of fake science.

TV SF is the biggest criminal here. Take Star Trek for example, if only because, until the late series at least, one week we’d get a solid, full on SF concept, like the Borg, the next, giant flying viruses (ST: Voyager ‘Macrocosm’, season 3). Now, forgive me, but aren’t viruses weeny, simple little things, and, um don’t possess things like stingers and mouths?

The very small components of biology were the source of much sinning until fairly recently. Take another Star Trek episode, ‘Genesis’ (season 7 TNG), where another virus (made of T-cells, big stuff at the time, and the inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise’s T Virus) interacts with ‘introns’ in people’s DNA to devolve them into creatures from their evolutionary past. Interesting. Hang on though, Lieutenant Barclay turns into a spider. I don’t recall the arachnid part of the human lineage, but never mind, because after a few doses of space medicine, everyone is just fine, with no after effects whatsover. This rapid there-and-back-again of total body transmogrification is a firm favourite of 90s SF, and it is, patently, nonsense.

All SF is a product of its time, and serves as an interesting historical footnote to the holders of hindsight. By which we mean, if a certain field is hot news, then it’ll crop up time and again in SF. It’s a trend thing.

Rapid advancements in biology brought genes to the fore, replacing a fear of the power of the atom, which in turn replaced a belief in it. So prevalent was the magic atom in the 50s and 60s that Matheson turned the ambiguous fog that starts the shrinking process in The Shrinking Man radioactive for its ‘Incredible’ film outing. Time marches on, and magic genes have begun to be replaced by magic quantum physics. I’d say nanotech, like that in the new Bionic Woman is also a contender, but though claims made for this are pretty crazy, their capabilities belong to some unpredictable Vingean futurity, so I’m going to let it off the hook.

Quantum shit, however, man that’s some spooky juju. Perhaps through quantum physics we will create Arthur C Clarke’s advanced, seemingly sorcerous technology. But then, confident assertions about the nature of the world to come are usually wrong. Ford made a mock-up nuclear car, after all (its proposed reactor sat waaaay behind the passenger compartment), and I don’t see those in the Tesco car park.

Once more, we have only fallen upon the quantum as it is newish and exciting, and, um very difficult to define.

SF reflects our fears and concerns in a mirror of current science, and in this case, it is the impact of each and every one of us on the world. Quantum physics says observe the world and affect it, our fear says our presence is harmful to the planet. Like Them!‘s radioactive ants standing in for fear of a nuclear apocalypse, blend quantum with green and societal fears and Donnie Darko, Butterfly Effect, The Fountain, The Prestige and even Back to the Future, are revealed as a kind of electric environmentalism, with misplaced humans rerouting their social ecology, sometimes consciously removing their worthless selves from existence.

This is scary science, science that can unravel the fabric of the universe. Though employed intelligently in the above films, quantum SF has the capability to be used in an even more magical way than the most outrageous DNA jiggery pokery. The sciences with the loosest parameters are the easiest to magic up, aren’t they?

Expect it on a small screen near you… now actually: Charlie Jade, Journeyman, Flash Gordon feature this in one cast or another.  All cancelled, interestingly. Perhaps high-end physics just isn’t sexy. (Yeah yeah, Quantum Leap, Sliders, Land of the Giants… They’ve all the alternate reality/ time-hopping thing before, but that doesn’t invalidate my comment that right now it is trendy).

Yes, all SF is speculation, some of it knowingly wrong, and it is entirely partisan of me to imply that magic science is only bad when used as a tool in bad fiction. But this is my patch, my rules. The futuremen will laugh up the sleeves of their togas whatever we dream anyway, saying it never happened like that, just as we smirk at the Victorian proponents of steam-powered velocipedes.

Then again, I’ve never said SF was actually about the future, have I?

Benny is three now, and today is his very first day at nursery (I just left him in the arms of a teacher, me with a lump in my throat) so I thought I’d put this up.

It’s doubly pertinent, as the very recent release of the Star Wars saga on BluRay has the SW fanbase enraged all over again (see? I’m being topical!). Why? Yet more tinkering, that’s why. Personally, I’d rather Lucas just left the things alone and made something new, but they’re his films. I find the geek rallying cry/ self-indulgent, spoilt-brat whine of ‘George Lucas raped my childhood’ to be utterly odious on several levels, its lazy, knee-jerk use of such an emotive term top of the list. And why hate the guy for providing you with years of entertainment? If he wants to overpaint his own work obsessively like some latterday Richard Dadd, let him. (At least he didn’t knife his father). Surely the impact of Star Wars on you as a child is more important than what it looks like now. I mean, I loved Krull, but I wouldn’t peg it as essential viewing, and I certainly wouldn’t call Peter Yates a retroactive pederast if he’d decided to add a CGI glaive to the proceedings (too late, he’s dead now).  Or aren’t we moving on? We’re not, are we?

Perhaps this is yet another indication of our culture’s intense juvenilisation effect, a step on the evolutionary road to idiot-Eloihood, and a time when our giggling, endlessly masturbating, Hello Kitty-dependent descendants will be feasted upon by giant intelligent rats who keep them high on food made entirely of corn syrup and the essence of superhero movie remakes.

Or maybe I’m being harsh, because I’m just a little sad that my little boy is growing up so fast.

Firstborn

No, not the story of Gor the Gorilla-boy, but the impending arrival of Guy’s new kid. A few days ago, crucial question of fatherhood reared its ugly head to vex our already troubled cheeky tyke…

The recent news that my wife is expecting our first child heralded a whole new wave of worries in the Haleyhold. Not only do you find yourself fretting over a lot of unpleasant potential pregnancy problems and imminent financial meltdown, but you find your mind racing ahead, past the gestation, vaulting over the birth and scampering far into the future, like some kind of terrified chrono-hare. What if baby inherits the coarser looks of dad, rather than the finer features of mother? Is it going to be stupid? The fretting ranges on  – Which university should I start looking at? What job will young Haley do? Then it gets silly. It’s a conscious effort to wrench your mind back to the present, and that’s weird enough as it is. It’s almost like science fiction. Like, there’s a tiny person growing inside my wife! Help! I feel like Kevin McCarthy at the climax of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, shouting an unbelievable truth at an indifferent world.

At least I don’t need to dwell too much on how the newborn is going to get out, unlike my wife.

A few days ago, a far more pertinent problem popped into my head: What SF am I going to show it first? This really is crucial. (Don’t think for a moment that, boy or girl, it’s not going to get an SF upbringing. There’s an awesome two foot high rocket, complete with moon rover and chewable space people, in the Early Learning Centre that has got my name, erm, I mean my child’s name, whatever that is going to be, on it). Like most kids, my very first exposure to the fantastical was through stories read to me by my parents, space toys and TV. As a preschool kid there was Thunderbirds, Space 1999, Star Trek, Bagpuss, The Clangers, Doctor Who, Chorlton and the Wheelies, Jamie and the Magic Torch, classic black and white RKO serials – a galaxy of SF and fantasy gems, opening the already wide eyes of 1970s tots to the pleasures and disappointments of the fundamentally unreal. But now, what awaits my offspring? A lot of badly drawn, shouty anime, by the looks of it, cut into meaningless, garish scraps by even shoutier adverts. And that purple frigging dinosaur.

If that were not a troublesome enough worry, I have had also to ask myself: which  Star Wars first? Tricky. Now it’s obvious Haley 1.1 will have to see these films, at least twelve times. It’s the law. But in what order? According to the narrative’s internal chronology, or classic trilogy first? Is it fair to make someone who doesn’t know who Darth Vader is miss out on learning the shocking truth of Luke Skywalker’s true parentage? Actually, is it fair to make someone new to the world sit through an animated tax dispute with some disinterested actors standing around in the foreground? Hmm. I think I have just made my mind up.

With kids too, there’s always the issue of the bizarre things that scare them. My brother Garth and I, for example, both loved the Muppets, but Sweetums and the other monsters freaked us out so much we used to hallucinate that they were standing outside our bedroom window. Screaming followed. You can’t legislate for these things, but Mrs. Haley’s collection of disturbing Scandinavian fairy tales is going on the top shelf, just in case.

Crumbs, I just thought, what if the kid likes Jar Jar? I think I’ll go back to worrying about the cost of childcare. It’s less upsetting.

Back to 2011.

FYI, Benny was born on July 12th, 2008, and I have been tired since July 12th, 2008. He was two weeks late due to some low level of incompetence on the part of the local maternity services (i.e. they forgot about us). His birth was terrifying. After an attempt at induction he was delivered by caesarean section. He’s a lovely lad, very cheeky, and clever. I laugh now at my brother for the impending arrival of his own offspring; real, wineglass-in-hand schadenfreude guffawing, because he has NO IDEA how much his life will change.

Fortunately, it is worth it. Which I tell him after I stop giggling.

As for watching space stuff,  we’ve tried both the original Star Wars (“Daddy! Want to watch spaceships!”) and the Phantom Menace. Star Wars holds his attention until we meet Kenobi. The Phantom Menace loses its lustre as soon as the younger Kenobi and his boss sit down for tea. Exploratory watches, but it says it all really. We also tried The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but it was  a bit too scary.

And yes, childcare has nearly bankrupted me. But we did get that rocket. And it is cool.

By the way, it’s always been my intention to use this blog as an archive for my work, but I’ve been a bit remiss of late in getting it online, so I am trying to get a few pieces up every day rather than playing computer games. There are a ton of new book, film and TV reviews. Just go look. Eventually, once I’ve worked through my backlog, there’ll be some more current pieces here. Won’t that be nice?

I immodestly figure that some of these articles make pretty good blog posts, like this one, so I’m putting them here as well as into the article archive section up top there. It saves me from having to write new posts. I am a scoundrel! Ha!

To be blunt, the more articles there are here, the more likely people are to visit, and there’s a chance they’ll buy my books. Then, just maybe, I’ll be able to afford an office rather than just working at the top of the frickin’ stairs…

Back to the writing then. I am galloping through Champion of Mars. Yesterday, I was at a dinner party at a science base on Ascraeus Mons. Today, I’ll be going to a gene blending unit a thousand years hence. No bad, I suppose, for a bloke who never actually leaves his landing.

The Ends of the World

Famine, Plague, War and Death get regular trots round the SF paddock. Numerous authors, from Mary Shelley onwards, have had a crack at the collapse of civilisation, the end of the human race or even the total destruction of the Earth itself. None of it’s happened of course, but given the young age of SF and the long, long life of the Earth, one or all of these scenarios are likely to come to pass eventually. We could survive, or our more depressive writers may prove to be right. But how right, and how soon?

End of the world doomsaying – millenarianism – is a given aspect of the human psyche. It’s a consequence of our evolution. On the one hand, it’s our monkey-like fear of death writ large and shared with our fellows. On the other, our causally-primed brain is a handy asset for surviving and making tools, but it does mean that we have to have a reason for everything. When something is beyond our immediate understanding, this has led to some mighty peculiar logical leaps. In the absence of science, terrible occurrences are explained as divine acts (most often punishment, because guilt plays a large part in doom-mongering). We feel bad for being, so disasters are all our fault, a punishment for our sins. God could be back to finish the job any time, so be good.

Basically, people have been fretting about the end of the world since the beginning of time, we literally can’t help it.

And though we now take a different view of the way the world works, the faulty reasoning of “Bad things have happened because we are bad, therefore bad things will happen again, and they will be worse,” is as true in Soylent Green as in The Book of Revelations. Only God has been removed from the equation. Now it’s our own petards that will hoist us.

The environment’s our current bete noir, it has been for forty years, with a brief break for nuclear terror. Global warming? Soylent Green, The Drowned World, The Space Merchants… all feature this most modern of worries. Other well-worn paths to doom include volcanic activity, global cooling, environmental collapse, war, plague, death of food crops, moral degeneracy, and of course, alien invasion.

Barring the alien invasion, all of these events are feasible. Looking at it, there are so many ways for mankind to be snuffed out it’s amazing we’re still here.

But we are, and we aren’t going anywhere. It’s easy to regard these entertainments are prescient. The disasters may be plausible, but their consequences are not. They aren’t warnings, they’re worries.

Cast your mind back at the 1980s. SF books and films predicted the nuclear destruction of the Earth as if it were an inevitability. The chilling drama Threads (Sheffield flattened by an atomic bomb, mutant babies, the horror) was regarded as a palpable truth. But this madness did not happen precisely because both sides in the Cold War knew that nuclear war would be madness, they even called the doctrine behind the arms race MAD (mutually assured destruction – a doctrine of immediate retaliation predicated on everyone dying if one side attacked).

Peer behind your own fears and you’ll see that there’s an assumption of the worst in all millennial thinking, your own included. The planet, we’re told, is overdue a supervolcanic eruption, and that would be very bad. But that assumes that there will be one soon, that we won’t do anything about it, and that our civilisation will be so battered by the event that it will inevitably collapse. That’s a lot of assumptions. The same for a modern plague, or for an asteroid strike or anything else. The case has been made that we’ve become overspecialised as individuals (come the end, how many of you would know how to catch, skin and cook a rabbit?) and that weakens us. But complex societies have undergone cataclysmic events many times before and survived.

Mayan temple cities wreathed in jungle are the poster images for apocalypses. True, the Mayans suffered several severe setbacks, but were they wiped out? No. The Mayans were in fact the last Amerindian civilisation to be vanquished  by European invaders, their final city falling in 1697. As a people, they’re still there today. The Roman Empire may have collapsed as a political entity, but civilisation did not cease to be. And the Black Death, which killed up to two thirds of the population in Europe, far from seeing the end of the world, actually helped kickstart the Renaissance by redistributing wealth.

Those fearful of the future may counter that our society is too complex, but surely a complex society is more able to develop complex solutions? Our culture, which is as alive we are, cushions us from fate. In a flood an animal will drown. We’ll make boats. If we don’t know how, we’ll be able to ask someone who does, or read how to. Culture is such a crucial aspect of our being that Stephen Baxter, in his book Evolution, had to fudge its removal in order to have mankind once more subject to the raw power of natural shaping. Culture insulates us, to a degree, from such forces. And, if the worst came to the worst, and no cultural transmission survived, we’d still be able to figure out how to build a boat from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong. Things could get worse. Much worse. People could starve, die of superflu, choke on pollution and a myriad other things. But there are six billion of us now. To destroy all modern learning and cast us back into a dark age would be difficult, to kill us all would require a catastrophe of stupendous proportions. We might well be facing our biggest challenge yet with our rapacious need to all have bigger fridges and cars and sod the whales, but do you seriously think that, collectively, we’ll let it get so bad we’ll die out? We point to our governments as being useless, and we are thus doomed, but that makes the assumption we’re stuck with them, or powerless. Modes of governance do change, and people act without them. Hell, rising fuel costs alone will make you change your life. You probably already have.

Perhaps there is an alternative path we will tread. Nothing in nature occurs in isolation. Why should life? But we see none nearby. Perhaps our fate is not to ultimately extinguish life here, but to actively spread it elsewhere. Perhaps that is why intelligence evolves in the first place. All life is is a complicated way of allowing some quirky chemistry to continue replicating itself. To conquer the sea, life grew fins; the land, legs and lungs; the air, wings. Nearly every part of this world heaves with life, but to get life more developed than a tardigrade (these tiny ‘water bears’ are so hardy they could survive a trip through space) off-world requires something more sophisticated than the asteroid bagatelle proposed by some panspermia theorists. Maybe humanity is not a cancer. Maybe we’re the gonads of the Earth… One day, perhaps, an alien Von Däniken will be writing books about us.

If on the other hand Christopher, Wyndham, Wells, Baxter, Matheson et al are right, within centuries it’ll be like we never were, and in 30 million years new species will have evolved to replace the ones we hurried off to an early grave. We’re surfing a wave of life, and if we fall off, well, it’ll be the job of the squids to take Earth’s seed to the stars. They’ve got 3 billion years to do it in after all, until the sun swallows the world, and that is unavoidable.

Since Star Trek gave us Mr. Spock, you haven’t been able to put together a crew of space-faring explorers without including at least one alien. And why not? Mr Spock. He was a fine character in a cast of fine characters. This half-ET, coldly dispassionate scientist was a foil for Kirk’s loin-driven hotheadedness and Bones’ world-weary, and equally emotional, cynicism. Spock was often right, but also struggling with his human side. Culturally, he represented the calm of scientific progress set at right-angles with the messiness of humanity. It’s part of science fiction’s infatuation with progress, as old as the genre itself. Spock’s character eventually hit a gravelly-voiced balance between logic and emotion, and that was a kind of adult thing to do. But times changed, and aliens don’t quite represent what they once did.

Spock was a humanisation of the kind of brainiacs depicted elsewhere in the fifties and sixties, the bigheads from This Island Earth, the omnipotent Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dr Morbius of The Forbidden Planet. These were themselves different sides of the same coin – they are depictions of rationalists, and represent the fears of and hopes for science. Spock is by extension the humanisation of the scientist, a previously distant, powerful and sometimes terrifying figure.

Aliens became somewhat de rigueur in starship crews after Spock, especially in a certain kind of show – the Trek franchise, Roddenberry’s grave-robbed offerings and their clones (that’s what we’re really talking about here, the almost military space ensemble, they can be everything from last Thursday to Jesus elsewhere), and these reached their peak in the 1990s. But whereas Spock was an equal, and in many ways superior, to his crew mates, the aliens who came afterwards lack the same balance. They fulfill a different function. Aliens in ensemble casts increasingly came to signify certain human personality types, while the humans themselves become more and more  bland. There’s not much between Sinclair, Picard, or Sisko. They’re serious men doing a serious job, moments of ludicrously shoehorned levity aside. Their subordinates are worse. Is there really a massive difference between Riker, Chakotay and Garibaldi? With exceptions, these characters are almost unreal in their insipidness. They have nothing but the most artificial flaws or needs, and each has their own little pouch of trite wisdom. The roaring James Tiberius Kirk they are not. Instead we have to look to the aliens for any real representation of human traits. Aliens in the 80s and 90s allowed us to have contrite monsters like Andromeda‘s Rev Bem, emotional types like Troi, even buffoons like Neelix at a time when, suddenly, it seemed unacceptable for future people to be shown as anything but really, really nice.

By far the largest sub-grouping of alien hanger-on is that of the domesticated warrior. Worf, Star Trek‘s house-broken Klingon, has a lot to answer for on this score. Stargate and Andromeda have them in abundance in the sort-of-humans Teal’c, Ronon Dex, Tyr Anazazi and Telemachus Rhade. There’s even Bigfoot in Sanctuary. These creatures are handy in a fight, they are noble, they are loyal. Like Spock they struggle, but with rage. They are all also invariably patronised about their efforts to be more human. They are descendants of the noble savage encountered in much 19th century literature. All these aliens are emblematic of that great sense of rectitude once held by Western societies. They are a cultural residue, Victorian relics of racism. You can’t (thankfully) have a character say ‘Well done, Mr South Sea Islander, you have learnt that shoes are good!’ as was often the case in bygone adventure tales, but no-one gives a stuff if you do similar with a Talaxian. SF is retrograde in this respect, it recklessly rams the anodyne values of political correctness down speckled throats in a most un-PC way. The foibles of the aliens allow the humans to be flawless, to wear little half-smiles on their faces as they watch the aliens’ funny little ways or lecture them, bizarrely, on their inhumanity.

Humans in this kind of SF never complain, take the piss or get depressed. They don’t hold difficult beliefs or do anything vaguely shocking. They are really boring.  In these shows, humans are our parents, and we are the aliens. So Worf or B’Elanna can get really mad and break things because they aren’t human, Neelix is a cock because he’s not a man, Londo can be sly because he isn’t one of us. Ronon can kill because he is not from Earth. Mankind in this kind of SF is irreproachable, and that’s just bollocks. Some shows might make better use of their aliens than others (witness the balletic, almost Shakespearean interplay of G’Kar and Londo Mollari in Babylon 5) but that doesn’t mean their humans are much cop. Alien characters are tokenism in the worst possible way. They present the moral superiority of mankind. Actually, no, they present the superiority of post-modern, American, middle-class values, a tedious, humourless, bland existence. This sheer niceness might seem an irony for shows set aboard warships, but the flying living rooms of the future demand their conformity just as the armed forces of today do, albeit of a different kind. When captain Picard says to Worf, “Well done Worf, today you behaved like a human”, he is really saying “Well done Worf, today you behaved like an American.” Because a certain kind of American would like to believe that even in space, everyone wants be that certain kind of American, no matter how nobbly their foreheads. Like the Iraqis and the Taliban, the Klingons just don’t know it yet.

It’s probable now that this kind of science fiction has run its course. It is a product of the 90s, the ensemble show of nice but dull types, just as the 80s was ruled by lone, arrogant heroes with nought but a natty gimmick and a dollop of smarm between them and cancellation. (The Stargate franchise forms a seemingly endless rump to the exploratory space ensemble. In SG, the devolution of humanity has gone as far as it can, the people reduced to a band of indistinguishable nerds, barely competent to do their jobs, whose only real qualifications seem to be either a gruff voice or the ability to make bad jokes at inappropriate moments. Science fiction has always struggled on the seesaw between idea and adventure for all, of course, but at least the day before yesterday’s heroes had squarer jaws.  In Stargate, aliens have become even more infantilised, and the humans are seen through a perpetual child’s eyes.)

Thanks then, to the likes of Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Ensembles have, thankfully, changed. The rubber-nosed cypher has gone out of fashion.

But interestingly, the Spock archetype has never gone away. The balancing act between rationality and emotion (as opposed to acceptable and unacceptable emotiveness, which is what the alien is there for) has been taken up by the robot or AI. Bladerunner‘s Replicants and Data started this trend. The likes of the Holosuite Doctor and Romy took it up. These are the characters that can ask unflinchingly ‘Tell me of this human thing called love’. Their artificiality might ask us ‘What is personhood?’ too, for this is what our notions of ‘progress’ demands of us in the 21st Century, but when Arnie says, at the close of Terminator 2 “Now I understand why you cry”, he was speaking from the same therapy group as Spock. The Cylons, Cameron and others keep this debate alive to this very day. In real life aliens are as far away as ever, but machines become cleverer year by year, so this important theme is likely to remain central to SF for some time.

Hey, and it is! In my book! It was around the time I wrote this that I was writing Reality 36.

Over the past couple of years, I have particularly enjoyed FIFA’s  “Live Season” mode which allows me to play through the season of my team, one game at a time, with the correct formation, team selection and form, lovingly crafted for me each week by whatever funky gremlins they employ at EA.

Awesome as it is, the downside of this is that rather than being able to play a season at my own pace, I need to wait a week between games for the next one to first be played, then coded and finally arrive for download. This isn’t enough football for a natural obsessive like me and has required me to be more creative in my team choices.

My normal plan over the years has been to try to play with Grimsby Town FC, a lower-league English team from a town famous for being very cold and making fish fingers. Times have been tough for them lately, the fish-finger factory closed down after a fire in 2005 and I think that the team has dropped to a league so low that it no longer exists in the game. Even if they are still there, there’s simply too much of a time commitment involved in dragging them through 3-4 leagues to get to the top now, and playing with such poor quality players is fairly limited in terms of fun.

Plan B has been to try and find interesting teams from around the world. First up was Stabek of Norway. They were tempting because I’d visited their rather nice stadium recently, but after playing about a dozen games with them I realised that, like Grimsby, they were just too poorly skilled to have fun with in FIFA.

I then moved my attentions to the Russian league. This promised more skill, a bit of a transfer budget, and ultimately quite a lot of fun. I had a great time playing through a season with Rubin Kazan, terrorising Russian defences with the pace of Obafeme Martins.

But then what next? A little disappointed by the fact that Russia, like most leagues, has a massive disparity between the few good and many bad teams, I decided to try out the Bundesliga. The Bundesliga is one of the most evenly matched and athletic leagues at the moment, and certainly contains a lot more skill than I’d seen in my teams on the coastline of the North Sea.

The only problem though, is that I’ve never even watched a Bundesliga game and had absolutely no attachment to any of the sides. I searched through the teams, trying to find one that matched the style I liked to play with a couple of players I liked. I didn’t have much luck.

Then a friend of mine heard about a cheat that allowed him to get 2 billion dollars in career mode, he went on a spending spree buying a bunch of talented youngsters (he set himself a rule of no-one over 25) and started having a lot of fun as Kaiserslautern.

I didn’t want to cheat, but suddenly I was inspired. I liked the youth approach, and the idea of starting off with a team built to play exactly the sort of football I wanted. I wasn’t going to “cheat” too badly to get it, but what if I could do it in some sort of fair way?

The plan

So, I picked a side to be the shell of the team I would use. I decided fairly quickly on Wolfsburg because;

a) I always thought it was awesome that around 1998/99 they were coached by a man called Wolfgang Wolf,

b) It was fun to displace Steve McLaren as their coach

3) they are owned by VW, and I own a VW

I set myself three rules for the project

1. No players over 25 in the entire squad
2. No players from other Bundesliga teams
3. Every player transferred in must be replaced with a player out, of similar quality basic position (GK, def, mid, att), so the team should get younger, but not necessarily be much better in terms of ovr ratings.

Part I; building the team.

Wolfsburg had around 13 players under the age of 25, three of whom were a really solid foundation for the new team. These were

Dzeko, a lethal striker who in real life had been sold to Manchester City for big money mid season, I was not going to make that sale.

Diego, a skilful Brazillian attacking midfielder who also filled the valuable role of free-kick specialist

Kjaer, a monstrous Danish central defender, tactically sound and strong in the air.

It would be heartless to break this up.

Of the oldies I was trading out, the best were Benaglio, the Swiss goalkeeper, and Wolfsburg captain, and Josue a regular defensive midfielder for the Brazillian national side.  The rest were a mix of solid first-team regulars and fairly ordinary back-ups. I wasn’t going to be a galacticos, but as a 4-star (out of 5) rated side, I was going to be rather competitive.

After an afternoon spent scanning the FIFA player database I came up with the following side

GK,

Hugo Lloris (Lyon), taking advantage of the very high rating of Benaglio I snagged Hugo Lloris, despite being very young he’s captained Les Blues and is rated amongst the top few in the world between the sticks.

Mannone (Arsenal) a 6’3” keeper, currently on loan to Hull in real life.  22 yrs old and Italian, very much a back-up.

Marwin Hitz, young swiss goalie, already in the squad

Wing-Backs,

Kolarov (Man City), very good defensively and solid going forward, strength at left-back is important for dealing with the very fast and talented right-wingers I could expect in the Bundesliga.

Ilsinho (Sao Paolo) Capped once for Brazil, extremely skilful dribbler, an attacking threat of my own down the right.

Carlinhos (Fluminense), essentially a slightly watered down and left-footed version of Ilsinho.

Centre-Backs

Simon Kjaer, 6’2” Danish defender, 21 years old, already in the squad, has played 15 games for his national team.

Ranocchia (I got him from Genoa, in real life he’d been on loan to Bari and has just been bought out by part-owners Inter) 22 years old, 6’5”, has played one game for the Azzuri

Bonucci (Juve) 6’3”, 23 yrs old, can play centre or right, has played 8 times for the Azzuri

Zelao (Saturn Moscow) a 6’2” Brazilian centreback with good all-around ball-skills, figured he’d be useful for games where the other team sits back a lot and I need defenders to be able to open up space with passing.

Midfielders

Sami Khedira (Real Madrid), a direct trade for the defensive midfield prowess of Josue.  At 6’2” he gave me a very tall, strong, and happily in terms of keeping a Bundesliga feel, German presence in midfield.

Afellay (PSV, in real life has gone to Barca), don’t really need to say much about him, was happy for him to be eligible.

Montolivo (Fiorentina), I didn’t have a player to trade for him, but I was able to buy him with the transfer funds available at the beginning of the game. He’s my favourite young Italian player at the moment, 5’11” playmaker, 19 games for the Azzuri.

Marlos (Sao Paolo) Very skilful passer and dribbler, a back-up for Diego

Elias (Atletico Madrid), classic box-to-box type midfielder, good passing, dribbling, and stamina

Ja-Cheol Koo, only brought in because the club had acquired him in real life, was very much a back-up

Medel (Boca, although in real life has been traded to Sevilla) a defensively oriented Chilean midfielder, bit of a Mascherano type, has played 28 games for his country

Forwards and Strikers,

Diego

Dzeko

Doumbia (CSKA Moscow) speed, skill and finishing.  Shame he isn’t a little taller.

Hernandez (Palermo) 20 year old, 6’1” Uruguayan striker, a useful back-up with similar pace to Doumbia.

Diego Ifran (Real Sociedad) 23 year old 5’8” Uruguayan striker, a super-sub type player, quick, skillful and good at finishing, but not much of a physical presence.  Can also play in Diego’s slot behind the strikers.

John Rodriguez (Burnley) a project player traded with an old and slow guy that probably needed to be cut, not likely to start any time soon, but has some promising basic skills, he’s quick and 6’1”

Part II, Tactics and Formation

I grew fond of the team immediately. It was packed with players that I like, in the positions I needed to build my favourite strategies.

Over the course of the season I settled on three different formations, and a small variety of tactical set-ups.

4-1-2-1-2

A very narrow but effective formation. Made by slightly modifying the base 4-2-1-2 in the game by moving the CAM to CF. In my experience, CAM is actually quite poor in the FIFA AI, neither making attacking runs against the opposition defensive line, or hanging back deep enough to pick up balls deflected behind the strikers. By moving Diego up to CAM I had all three of him, Dzeko and Doumbia making dangerous runs through the middle of defense.

In terms of tactical settings, I borrowed the default settings for the German national team, with the small change of Chance Creation from Organised to Free Form. What this gave me was a high-possession but unpredictable structure as I passed through the centre of the field.

As a formation and tactical combination it was extremely effective against teams with a high defensive line, and most teams that played a 4-2-3-1 for some reason (which is a lot of the Bundesliga). It was terrible against teams playing 4-1-4-1, 4-4-1-1 and 4-2-1-2 as in all cases the midfield became too crowded to work in.

4-2-2-2

The Brazilian box formation. I’ve liked this formation in a lot of football games over the years, and once again it didn’t disappoint. The basic theory of it is that apart from the wing-backs, everyone has a central position, which provides a lot of strength defensively, and then a lot of room to run into down the flanks when in attack.

For this team it worked extremely well. Kolarov and Ilsinho thrived as wing-backs with all that space in front of them, while Diego and Afellay proved to be perfect LAM and RAM players respectively. Tactically I either used the same approach as above, or one that I’d modified with a much higher cross setting to make more use of the runs down the wing. This was a good formation for breaking down the 4-1-2-1-2 and 4-1-4-1 formations as shifting the creative midfielders to the outside moved them away from the defensive midfielder.

4-2-3-1

This is the vogue formation of the moment in real life, and particularly in Germany. It was the formation that dominated the world cup, being employed by Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil each in their own way. I chose the Brazilian variant, created by modifying the 4-2-2-2 above by shifting the second striker back to become a CF.

The result is a formation with a lot of skill and numbers in the middle of the park. It works quite well with the modified German tactics, and the crossing variant discussed above, and also with a copy-pasted set of the tactics from Barcelona. Mainly I found this to be a good formation to shift to in games where either the 4-1-2-1-2 wasn’t providing enough width, or where I wanted to shut the game down by maintaining possession. I did also settle on it as the formation from the start of games against 4-4-1-1 because with a 5 vs 4 outnumbering in midfield I found that it was completely dominant.

Results

Building a team to my own specifications proved to be both very fun and extremely dominant.  I won the Bundesliga by 14 points with a record of 26 wins, 8 draws, 0 losses, 86 points..  It was all over when with 4-5 games to go, I had a rather well-timed match-up against second-placed Bayer Leverkeusen who I thrashed 3-0 in their home stadium.

Dzeko finished the season with 29 goals, 11 more than the next highest scorer.  Doumbia was the 5^th highest scorer with 16 goals.  Overall the team finished with 63 goals for, 7 against.

The cup final was against Bayern, Dzeko scored early, within 30 minutes it was 3-0, and by the end of the game it was 4-0.

Overall it was a really great way of playing FIFA. A team I liked, playing the type of football I wanted, in a league that was actually really challenging along the way, despite the appearance of my dominance. As a play-style it fell neatly between the proper in-depth league simulation of career mode and the trading and grinding of Ultimate team. I strongly recommend it as an approach for anyone looking for a way to get a bit more fun out of FIFA or just to try out a wacky theory. In fact, right now I am in the process of setting up a second experiment, is it possible to win the English Premier League with an all-English team?

What does this teach us? That publishers are all individuals with their own tastes and opinions (as they freely admit), so if someone doesn’t like your book, someone else might; that if you listen to the criticisms of publishers it’s possible to salvage an idea – even if they, as in this particular case, think it unsalvageable; and that ideas, whether they be scenes, characters, plots, or settings, should never be wasted, but recycled. If found wanting, chuck them on the mental compost heap. You never know, they might bear fruit eventually.

You can check out my slightly embittered advice for would-be writers right here.

New York Cover

Cmd-T is a very useful shortcut. I use it every time I use my computer. It allows me to open a new tab in my web browser, allows me to investigate and explore and change direction whilst still working on my original task. If I’m reading an article and need to open wikipedia, for example, or if an email sparks off an idea in my brain, Cmd-T is there to help. However, within a few clicks I often find myself a long way from where I started. My attention is divided. The ‘T’ might well stand for ‘Tangent’.

In his thought provoking article Sam Anderson examines the influence of  new technology on the way we find, analyse and absorb information.  He explores the new ‘attentional landscape’ and asks whether we are now living in a state of ‘continuous partial attention’.  Can we really thrive on the internet, or do we simply wander around aimlessly, our minds frazzled by the constant sensation?

The article itself is a good example of how fascinating a wandering focus can be; Buddhist Monks, Twitter and the Boston Molasses Disaster all feature. It seems that there is a fine line between finding buried treasure and simply digging in the mud.  So close your tabs, minimise your IM and turn off your iPhone. Take a look at the article – your attention is precious and it certainly got me thinking about how I spend mine.

The link ->http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/