Grey alerts

After a long day forging sense from the senseless yesterday, I had a chilly wait for the homeward-bound train. Freelancing for such disparate and worthy places, my brain tends to wander off anyway. Was thinking of devious forthcoming Benny things when a bored voice interrupted:

“Customers are reminded not to leave items of unattended baggage anywhere on the station concourse or on trains. Items of unattended baggage may be removed without warning and could be destroyed. If you notice items of unattended baggage at Victoria, please alert the nearest member of staff or British Transport Police.”

I’ve heard this on occasional loop forever, but this time it manages to register. Ooh, says my brain, that’s a bit careless. The same awkward phrase used three times in three sentences.

And what a mouthful it is. You need a punchy, distinct bit of imagery if you want people thinking, “IS THAT RUCKSACK A BOMB?!?”

“Bags” and “packages” are easily imagined. The word “suspect” would add some good jective.

But if you really want us to take notice, how about the one from old 2000AD?

“Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave!”

I realise they don’t want to alarm anyone with something phrased too distinctly. The Evening Standard is more than enough to fill our journeys home with MAD PANIC. But still, it’s not really much of an imperative.

Perhaps sounding a bit bored and management-jargony make us heed the warning subconsciously. Like times tables, it goes in because it’s repeated and not because we have to take any notice.

In balancing the “watch out” with the “don’t start a stampede” it’s a lot like “Inspector Sands”. This openly secret code-word alerts staff when things are kicking off. “Fire!” would start everyone screaming at the prospect of being vividly barbecued. But Sands gets a mention we stay meekly where we are, at most thinking, “Oh, just get on with it.”

There was an Inspector Sands incident at Victoria earlier this week, too. I watched an entire busy platform of subterranean passengers wearily roll their eyes.

Court out

Hello from amid a giddy whirlwind of activity. A festive bout of man-flu suggests that perhaps I should have some sleep, while deadlines and commitments wave cheerily from my peripheral vision.

Got a couple of things I really need finished by this time next week. Especially because it looks like I shall be spending the rest of the year marking competition entries. Oh lor.

Had a nice time in the pub last night, hearing Paul Cornell rabbit on about life. Met some people I've not seen in ages and made several splendid new chums. Judging from the Chiswick-addled scrawl I've just found in my notebook, I've also got press-ganged into joining the British Science Fiction Association.

Declined the offer of clubbing and pottered off for the last train home. Where an interesting letter awaited me. A court summons due to unpaid council tax on somewhere I don't live.

Last night my thoughts were, "You could have written to me before it got this far." This morning it's a slightly less cheery, "Why are you even writing to me at all?"

Ho hum. More of life's litter tray to be double-bagged.

Mike and the mechanics

Am re-watching Michael Palin’s adventure Round the World in 80 Days. It’s, ahem, research for a current writing project, which means seeing things I never before thought of about how these things get made.

Like Verne’s Phileas Fogg 116 years before him (though not actually in real life), Michael has to get round the globe in just 11.4 weeks or forfeit £20. He’s not allowed to travel by plane, and he’s got to make something watchable as telly in the process.

It’s a bit strange to realise he’s now been doing these travelogues 20 years. And it’s also odd to see him not yet the established traveller, taking tips from Alan Whicker on how the job is done.

(Whicker’s advice: only ever speak English, and make sure you’re always comfortable.)

The authoritative baton of BBC adventurer is passed on to the uncertain Palin. I’m not sure whether it’s his doing or just a fact of the times that what follows is a completely different style of documentary. Where telly travel used to be classy and exotic, now it’s a celebration of the primitive and “real”.

We see the hardships and misunderstandings and – famously – the diarrhoea. Crucially, it’s at its best as telly when things are most going up tits.

It’s part of the special character of the piece that Michael must also plot his own course, struggling to find transport that will keep him on schedule. Spurning air travel means how he gets there is as much of the story as what he sees along the way.

The world in 1988 seems a very alien place, at once unsophisticated and innocent. Communications are by chunky, squawky phones and its tapes of Bruce Springsteen on a fat old Walkman that show Michael to be the technophile Westerner. There’s a passing reference to war in Iraq, and they don’t even yet mean Gulf War One.

Palin offers an insightful and generous perspective on the world and we’re with him every step of the way. But the makers seem uncertain of him on this first venture. There’s some oddly judged gags worked into the editing. A sound effect added to the scenes in Venice suggest he’s fallen off the quayside just out of shot.

It’s not needed – there’s plenty of laughs from Palin’s onscreen antics, the unfolding story and all the odd things they really see. The Dr was delighted to see her precious Venetian lions being used by a tramp for a bed.

As I said, a current bit of work means I’m all eagle-eyed for detail about the mechanics of how it got filmed.

For example, at Bombay Michael leaves a dhow (though only old colonials call these little boats that). He’s taken off in a little launch, and we watch him from the dhow he’s just left.

What happened to the cameraman who shot that sequence? Presumably he got a later launch and had to catch up. Or did Michael’s launch come back for him, after they’d filmed that bit?

Often the camera is ahead of Michael. We’re watching from across a busy office as Michael first steps inside. Did they all negotiate to set up the camera, then get Michael to duck back outside the door, telling the workers to pretend they’ve not seen him before?

When buying train tickets in Bombay, we see Michael struggling to find the right queue, and then getting to the window to buy his single ticket. This is a conceit because we already know he’s travelling with his own "Passpartout" – a cameraman, a soundman and their director.

What’s more, we watch him buy his ticket from the other side of the ticket kiosk, looking over the shoulder of the seller and at Michael’s face peering in at the plexiglass.

Presumably the filmmakers have negotiated to get inside the ticket office, and so they must have explained what they were up to, where they were going and sorted out tickets for the four of them.

Because of that trickery, you start questioning other things. They say they’ve not got reservations on the train they want, but are merely on a waiting list. And Michael later tells us that someone’s claimed his seat.

But there’s no footage to corroborate any of that, and when we do get to see him, he’s rather comfy in first class.

It's all a tissue of lies!

Yes, of course I can see how it makes for a more engaging picture. But I’d kind of assumed that documentaries were about veracity. In fiction, you can’t get away with such cheats in your storytelling.

Like Chinese Girls in YOLT

Full of cold and feeling stupid, so here’s one I started elsewhere.

“Full of challenging ideas you want to argue with,” is how Joan Bakewell described “Straw Dogs”, which J. leant me over the festive period.

John Gray’s book collects together various writings about mankind, our position on the planet and our future, and it’s not exactly comfort reading. Gray pulls down authority after authority, concluding that we’re frankly a bit rubbish.

He talks, for example, about how machines and computers are obviating humans in industry, so that,

“we are approaching a time when ... almost all humans work to amuse other humans.”

John Gray, “Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals”, p. 160.

He continues:

“Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives it is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay. Where affluence is the rule the chief threat is the loss of desire. With wants so quickly sated, the economy soon comes to depend on the manufacture of ever more exotic needs.

What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices. The economy is driven by an imperative of perpetual novelty, and its health has come to depend on the manufacture of transgression. The spectre that haunts it is glut – not of physical goods only, but of experiences that have palled. New experiences become obsolete even more quickly than do physical commodities.”

Ibid., p. 163.

(The Granta website also lets you read the chapter, “Science versus humanism”.)

I suspect the book is meant to be contentious and provocative, especially given its habit of generalising that “Everyone thought…” or “Christians are…”. Some of it certainly made me cross (though not as mouth-foamy as it got Terry Eagleton in the Guardian).

I found myself often disagreeing with Gray, but in doing so articulating ideas I’d not been conscious of believing. Humans are different from animals because of the footprint we leave behind us. As Dr Bronowski says in the opening episode of “The Ascent of Man”, other species leave behind fossils of themselves, we leave behind things we have made.

That doesn’t make us better, though. Just different. And with a moral imperative to do better. That we know ourselves to be the most aggressively destructive species on the planet is really not enough.

It also raises the old chestnut that atheism and science are to blame for Nazism and the Holocaust – which I shall address another time, when I’m not feeling so bleurgh.

Late as ever, but...

Alerted by m’colleague Paul Cornell, I have paid my 79p to iTunes and now own Neil Hannon singing Murray Gold’s “Love Don’t Roam”. It’s the song from the disco in the recent Droo Christmas special, and it’s just possible that if more people can say “Yes Paul” it will be in the Top 40 on Sunday.

The wheeze is that Droo fans might influence the UK pop chart what with its new rules about downloads. Must admit I am curious to see it happen, and merely for the same price as a litre of milk and not quite a loaf of nice bread.

Next week will probably be the turn of Hannon and Gold’s “Song for 10” from the Christmas one before, which I think I prefer anyway.

And after that perhaps m’colleagues’ entirely extraordinary “Children of Tomorrow”, as featured in Saturday’s “The Horror of Glam Rock” (hear it on BBC7’s listen again service until Saturday). It’s by Tim Sutton and Barnaby Edwards, belted out by Stephen Gately and Clare Buckfield, and it’s one of the maddest and most amazing noises ever to flood my head.

The same story's glam version of the Droo theme tune (by Ron Grainer and originally arranged by Delia Derbyshire, since I’m doing credits) is pretty spanking too.

For tortoises

It has all been a bit hectic recently, with people's birthdays amid a leviathan of work. The best mate, whose birthday it was on Saturday, tells me I look pretty crappy and so I've planned a morning off. He also bought me my very own spongmonkey, which was swiftly claimed by the cat.

Have a story to finish and a script to edit, two websites to rebuild and a proposal to make sexy, a new encyclopedic gig and some additional need from the regular employment.

In the meantime, I've had a novel rejected after providing extended synopses (though my friend S. has been commissioned, so hooray), and I've agreed some decisions that will radically change my working life in a few months' time. There might be some sort of announcement round then, so I shall keep it now.

And then there's two projects that I'm keen to make happen though they both face impossible odds. They are begun and I merely await the lashing of the Fates.

It would help if I could get this all done by the end of January as then I've got the new writing competition to co-mark. 282 x 2,500 words in already. Will give up sleeping for Lent.

Getting the builders in

Being a Big Boss, you often get to tell at your legions to Jump.

"How high?" they will say. Or more often, "How many words, by when and what is the money?"

One thing I've tried to do with Benny is give clever authors a bit of a framework in which they can invent and build. On the Benny books, this has basically meant coming up with a frame that requires no linking material on my part. I come up with the rough sort of wheeze and the authors go off and do the hard bit.

Which is like being told "Jump" and going off to construct a complex network of interlacing trampolines. And then watching in horror as I tear through the springy mesh with my unflinching, unforgiving red pen.

Two such eager swots are Nick Wallace and Phil Purser-Hallard, who really went overboard in contriving Collected Works. And all to it's benefit, of course.

Phil has just posted the Quire background material he and Nick worked our between them. Surprisingly, it's chock-full of them spoilers.

Pass the sprouts

Have been comparing the post-Christmas tummy with m’learned colleagues, as well as sharing methods for working it all off.

One chum restricts himself to 10 units of booze this month, another has joined a gym. I have cut down my nights out significantly and will be gyming again once some work deadlines are seen off. No, Dr, honestly.

Golly I didn’t half eat well over the festive season. Some people say we miss the true meaning of Christmas these days, usually so as to remind us about that Jesus fella who was born on 25 December 0000 in a snow-strewn stable in Bethlehem to a blonde and blue-eyed mum while robins and holly looked on. Oh, hang on…

Christmas is, of course, a pagan festival co-opted by the Christians – who have a thing for nicking parties. Even Santa Claus as we know him today owes more to anglo-germanic traditions of the green man than he does to the real St. Nicholas of Myra. We celebrate with trees, the threat of punishment to naughty children and enchantment from mistletoe.

In more primitive times, it was good to have a knees-up around the shortest day of the year, when the world seemed at its bleakest. I wonder if Celtic man would follow the feasting with a vow to lose his new porkage, making a virtue of the lack of thrilling food for the remainder of the winter.

Anyway. This made me think about the Prime Minister’s recent interview with Sky News, where he,

“admitted he would be reluctant to pressure people to stop taking overseas holidays – or indeed to stop flying himself. He explained:

‘I personally think these things are a bit impractical to expect people to do. I think that what we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less.’”

Number 10: “Tackling climate change begins at home” – PM, 9 January 2007.

This answer was described as “muddle-headed” by Jonathon Porritt, chair of the Sustainable Development Commission (oddly not capitalised in the BBC News account), and came up again at the Prime Minister’s press briefing:

“Put to him that the Prime Minister therefore believed that the threat of global warming [...] could be dealt with without consumers really affecting their lifestyles, the PMOS [said that we had to] find more effective, energy efficient ways of doing what we do. Hence the investments that were already being made in energy efficient measures and hence our overall energy review, and the emphasis placed on both renewable and cleaner forms of energy such as nuclear. What should not be done was to address climate change by harming the world economy.”

Number 10: Morning press briefing from 9 January 2007.

The argument seems to be that we can’t expect people to give up their fun stuff for the sake of not breaking the weather. And anyway, Science has come up with some pretty neat tricks which will sort things out.

This thinking depends on two very wrong assumptions:

• That Science will continue to come up with innovations as and when they’re needed
• That the stuff Science comes up with can be implemented almost immediately

But worse, it assumes that we need not do anything to curb our rapacious behaviour because the boffins are on the case. We must not stop consuming.

People are not merely consumers, as some would have us believe. A “consumer” is just a mouth, and to concentrate on just the part of the process implies, wrongly, that there’s no consequence to stuffing our faces.

The mouth is just the start of the process, which leads through digestion to excretion. I guess in this model digestion could be seen as “value” – measured by the ratio of what it is being eaten to the benefit to the body doing the eating. As a consequence of that equation, the less that’s pooed out the other end the better. It is more elegant that way.

A rich and varied diet means lots of fibre and roughage to help clear out the system, because just eating cakes and sweets and Breakfast 3s from the local greasy spoon ends up clogging up the system until it drops down dead. This ends the consuming process once and for all: a bad thing.

That’s not to say we must never eat cakes, but there needs to be some balance. Ideally, we feast only sparingly, and match the excesses with leaner periods. Say, for example, following Christmas with a diet and the gym.

Likewise, when our lifestyles affect the weather, we do damage to ourselves. If the floods and thunderstorms don’t kill us, they at least damage the economy because of the excessive insurance claims, breaks in supply chains and general ensuring misery. The evidence seems to suggest that we either curb our eating habits voluntarily, or Nature (aka cause and effect) will have to do it for us.

TB’s view of consumption (dyswidt?) seems to be that people can’t be expected to mend their ways. But he’s also campaigning against obesity, and Government policy has targeted drink, drink-driving and smoking with considerable success. So sorry, but that’s bollocks.

There’s an argument that we cannot be forced or coerced into behaving less like walking cancer. But I also know a fair few smokers who are glad of the forthcoming English ban on smoking because it gives them the last resolve to quit. They knew they ought to, they had even given it a go, but the new rules make it easier by removing the temptation.

This is how I feel about air travel – which I haven’t half exploited in the last couple of years. There’s offsetting programmes, and the justification that it’s for work to some degree, but it would a lot easier if the flights weren’t quite so doable, and more of luxury.

Back in the mists of time when this post began, I said I’d stuffed too much recently. This gorging included a sizeable volume of Brussel sprouts, which are rather yummy. (They’re best when they’re cooked to not-too-sulphurous softness, and you can also serve them with bacon. Mmm.)

Though I like them a great deal, they don’t half carry a penalty. The Dr and I have held wars of attrition, attempting to asphyxiate one another. Which is why I’m only allowed sprouts in the festive season. It would be too dangerous any more often.

To finally get to the point, flights are like sprouts. Our actions have consequences, and you ignore the ensuing noxious emissions at your peril.

One man can make a difference

Blimey, this is my 400th post.

The Mission Song is another corker from John le Carre – not exactly a huge departure from his previous work, but a thrilling and intelligent read.

Salvo is a Congolese-born translator of various African languages, living in England and enjoying life – and a wife – at the top. She’s a high-flying journalist, white of the old stock, and gives him everything materially and socially British he could ever hope for.

No sooner does Salvo start cheating on his Mrs than he’s invited to a top secret meeting out in the North Sea. The future of his own country is being decided and they need someone who speaks the right language… But Salvo, who has begun to question the virtues of his English luxury, isn’t sure that what’s on the table is what is best for Goma.

"A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, Brother Michael liked to say. A bad man survives but loses his soul."

John le Carre, The Mission Song, p. 303.

Like a lot of le Carre, the book is at its best pitting one man against the whole system of spies and files and heavies. Salvo’s a richly drawn character with a distinctive narrating voice (and Le Carre’s first black protagonist, or at least the first I’ve got to). He speaks with the precision and good vocabulary of someone to whom English is a second language – and much is made of his never quite being fully assimilated.

The rest of the very varied cast is well observed and often funny, Le Carre’s stuff has always worked well in adaptation because he always gives good character actors something to get hold of. Often they leap off the page like Dickens – though that does tend to make his baddies rather comic-book villainous, with nothing to redeem them but their immaculate table manners.

The book is about the rape of Africa’s resources under the cover of humanitarian work. As such, it’s a highly emotive story with plenty to play for. Like The Constant Gardener (which it reminded me of a lot), the officials aren’t too worried about the deaths of a few thousand natives if help sustain the profits.

It paints a pretty nasty picture of institutional abuse abroad, but is also highly critical of the attitude of not only UK foreign policy but of the people of Britain too. Racism is monotonously widespread – Salvo treats it as a given and is not proved otherwise – and much is made of how unnewsworthy Africa’s troubles are.

But le Carre is also good at showing how what happens over there directly impacts on us, and why the fate of Africa is so close to British interests.

"Why else does coltan have place of honour in my head? Go back to Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 2000. Play Station 2, the must-have electronic toy for every rich British kid, is in desperately short supply. Middle-class parents are wringing their hands, and so is Penelope on the front page of her great newspaper: WE SET OUT TO NAME AND SHAME THE GRINCHES WHO STOLE OUR CHRISTMAS! But her anger is misplaced. The shortage is not due to the incompetence of the manufacturers, but to a tidal wave in killing which has engulfed the Eastern Congo, thereby causing a temporary interruption in the supply of coltan."

Ibid., pp. 136-7.

The real trick of the book, then, is to involve us with a character and politics of apparently so little interest to the common Westerner. It certainly makes me feel ashamed of my paltry knowledge of the region, and connects a lot of dots I’d sort of understood.

I’m curious how much was influenced by Mark Thatcher’s alleged coup, and by those well-meant Live 8 wristbands that seemed to promise a solution to all the planet’s ills.

I made this

Things you can do with your Doctor Who Money, as made available at the fun-packed official website of official fun-packed Dr Who:

Happy Phil Collinson :)

Sad Phil Collinson :(

(Sorry about the rubbish photos. Am getting a new phone soon.)

"It kind of makes sense but yet is completely wrong"

Today's heading is from my friend and one-time colleague R., in response to a post on the Outpost Gallfrey forum. I've spent a lot more time there recently, answering queries about our writing competition.

And R. perfectly sums up what it can be like.

So, blimey. 2007.

2006 was a bit crappy, all told. And busy and full of calamity. I'm not telling you this year's resolution yet because certain people need to know first. All in good time.

The new year started well with a fun night out in Dundee, and a text to say two chums are getting married. Hooray! Was feeling all chipper and chilled and ready to get back to business.

The train to London was then appallingly packed and we had to stand the whole five hours. Got in, dumped bags and hurried off to a birthday drinks in a rather spiffing new pub down the road. And probably made no sense to anyone for being so stupidly knackered. Went home early 'cos of work the next morning, and arrived in the office as if I'd never been away, only with more acheing limbs. Bah.

And then things started to happen...

M'colleague S. has got his first novel commissioned and is suitably over the moon. The Dr and I have heard back from various things we've applied for, and all of them saying "yes". And there's more of that in the works.

I've had a cheque for something I wrote 2½ years ago and thought would never happen, and I'm due some more cash in the next few weeks because 1,009 people borrowed "The Time Travellers" from libraries.

Eddie Robson's "The Empire State" arrived in the post this morning, ending my first year as King of Bernice Summerfield. Here is a picture of the Big Finish things I worked on last year. Eight books and 10 CDs, and I need to rethink my shelving.

I said things had been busy...

Oh, and in a showbiz exclusive, I'm off to LA next month as a guest at the Gallifrey convention. At which I hope to meet lots of the mad gaggle who fill the OG fora.

And what do you do?

Sci-fi futures, even those set only a few days away, are often without a monarchy. The only one I can think of that’s not got some comedy king is the opening panel to 2000AD’s Invasion, in which a hairy-lipped Charles III exhorts his people to resist the not-quite-Nazis as they spill onto our beaches.

Otherwise there are rather feckless kings with little real power who seek petty praise and parties and miss the glory days. Sci-fi that can be so reverent of even the most hokey-religions still tends to think monarchy-of-the-future vapid and redundant.

Jeremy Paxman’s book, “On Royalty”, addresses this thorny problem (well, he doesn’t exactly explore the science fiction angle). It’s about the modern state of monarchy: its appeal, its limits and its future. But Paxman also addresses kingship in history, and the fact that as far back as there’s evidence, there seem to have always been kings.

“There is a story in ancient history, sometimes told of Philip of Macedon, sometimes of the Roman emperor Hadrian. While travelling on a journey he was approached by a woman who demanded he listen to her. The woman was insistent. But the emperor replied that he had no time, he had to be on his way. To which the woman replied, ‘Then do not be king!’ The emperor stopped, turned around, and listened.”

Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty, pp. 219-9.

The book is highly engaging, full of great stories and insights. It’s told very simply, too – a wealth of hard work and research deftly concealed from the reader.

Paxman has been quoted widely (including by me) on his research into the meaning of royalty having swayed his own republican views. And his reasoning is pretty persuasive.

The divinity of kingship may just be a childish story, a reaction to the misery of tribal existence: we deify the biggest bully because it makes us feel less like saps. It’s not very rational to have kings and princes, but the we are not entirely rational beings (for all we’ve made slow increments to make our lives more so).

So what harm is there from our royal family? The problem, Paxman argues, is for a constitutional monarchy to find a role.

The Windsors live reasonably modest lives – their Tupperware being famous – compared to other chieftains of state, while at the same time producing their weight in national loyalty, glee and hope. Paxman talks to the army about exactly why they’re more unswerving in their allegiance to the crown than they would be to a career politician. He also explores the many charitable and worthy works that gain column inches and merit by association.

“It would take a very bleak view of human nature to argue that this promotion of causes which fall between the paving stones of ordinary life was anything but a good thing.”

Ibid., p. 230.

And the problem for republicans is to show how we’d be better off without them.

Look at the tawdry bureaucracy and corruption of secular states – those ordinary folk in charge still have their sumptuous palaces. I’ve spoken before about why Holyrood’s palace has made a mockery of why it was built in the first place.

Homely, unostentatious for all they have castles, the Windsors fare rather better.

Paxman’s argument seems to be that theirs is largely a problem of public image – and one they’re themselves horribly aware of. A candid interview with the Duke of Edinburgh reveals some fascinating stuff about how his changing relations with the press. As the Duke sees it, the press are rude and intrusive in the same way a man hunts a tiger, thinking, ‘If I can shoot a tiger then I’m as powerful as a tiger.’

And because they’re not given any right to reply, the Windsors are very easy targets. At least tigers can bite back.

It’s not helped that the royals’ love lives and opinions on brickwork are constantly, endlessly raked over. They’re treated as easy page-filler, like any other tinsely celeb (in Stephen Fry’s definition: “Celebrity: someone you recognise but don’t quite know why).

Celebrities are not real people like you and I – just being in the paper to be read about puts them above all us riff-raff. That grandeur means there’s a “story” in them doing the most ordinary things: snogging someone, having a meal, maybe drinking too much. We can enjoy accounts of their weight gain and haircuts as we once did a new look for Barbie or Han Solo toys.

Because these people are an escape from our mundane lines, a princess can’t be allowed to have just died in a car crash. That’s too depressingly ordinary. No, it must have been a plot by her in-laws and the Government and a few groups of evil space alien…

And it’s why, throughout the book, people are surprised on meeting the Queen that she seems so very “human”.

I’d no great particular love for the trappings of monarchy, but I’m compelled by Paxman’s own argument: they are people doing their best in the circumstances. And let’s see you do any better.

The Canterbury Tales… in space!

M’learned chums keep on at me r.e. books I have not read. This is not entirely unfair, as I’m on at them back about The Sparrow and Riddley Walker, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s wintry new threesome.

But I have finally read Hyperion, and it was not all I’d been led to believe.

A gang of unlikely priests, mystics and warrior women out of a sci-fi B picture are on their way to the strange planet Hyperion, home of the mysterious and savage Shrike. Each pilgrim has an agenda for being on this pilgrimage / suicide mission, and they take it in turns to tell why.

For example, a priest had been to Hyperion and made contact with a primitive tribe – but it was he who was inducted into their strange religion. Or a non-nonsense soldier kills thousands of baddies, but his dream girl is more of a nightmare, and she’s part of the sinister planet…

Some of it is very good indeed. I especially liked the scholar’s tale, which felt a lot like The Time Traveller’s Wife (I was going to say “which is reminiscent of”, but Hyperion was written a decade earlier). In it, a young girl visits Hyperion with her boyfriend then starts to age backwards, losing another day’s memory every time she wakes up.

She forgets her boyfriend, who sets out to find a cure only to return to an unrecognisable and pre-pubescent child. She stops recording herself messages after playing back too much loss. And the worst part is that the story’s told by her put-upon father, while he cradles a baby.

Another favourite is the consul’s tale, which is so bitter about the cost of expansionism.

"I laughed and locked the wheel in. ‘Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there’s petroleum there. We don’t burn it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still essential for the production of plastics, synthetics, food base, and keroids. Two hundred billion people use a lot of plastic.’"

Dan Simmons, Hyperion, p. 444.

It’s nicely in contrast to the usual sci-fi stuff in which humanity eats space up like a cancer. Yet the stuff about oil also makes it feel oddly close to home, and not sufficiently distant to convince of the 29th century.

The recommenders have usually mentioned Simmons’s brilliance at world-building. It’s certainly a complex and layered envisioning, but I found it all a bit contrived (the problem with any story about heroes who share the same convoluted destinies).

Simmons builds his world by chucking pretty much everything into the mix – private eyes, AIs and a robot clone of Keats, with rich pickings from Starship Troopers and The Mission. But rather than being convinced by the richness of the culture, I thought it too often too much of a mess.

Throughout, Simmons keeps off-handly mentioning all kinds of futuristic technical kit, the usual way of sneaking in the props that build a complex new world. We don’t need to know exactly what these things are – the very fact that we don’t understand them shows how primitively twenty-first century we are.

But such constant attention to these sci-fi doodads is also oddly fetishistic. Which is hardly helped by how, whenever we meet anyone (though especially when we meet women), we’re treated to a long, descriptive paragraph itemising their physical attributes.

We’re also dutifully informed on every instance of the hardening of women’s nipples, with all the matter-of-factness of pornography.

Chaucer was making a polemic point with his variously cipherous pilgrims, but these here in space are meant to be real, 3D people, and not just convenient avatars.

The ongoing mysteries are intriguing – enough to keep me reading to the end – but the reading experience is not aided by it being slow and clunky and often deadly serious, and told in very long chapters.

The pissed, sweary poet is an unlikely pilgrim and I assume is meant as comic relief. He is neither of those things.

When Simmons gets the characters right – people whose motives and emotional responses we really understand – the book is very effective. In the case of the scholar and the private detective, we really care about what’s going to happen to them.

And then Simmons cheats again with the ending...

(SPOILERS for)

(SPOILERS anyone)

(SPOILERS still)

(SPOILERS reading)

(SPOILERS this)

The whole thing is a great big set up for something that’s then never delivered. Having explained why they’re all on this ludicrous mission to face down mad and miserable certain deaths, they then walk down a hill… and that’s it.

I’m sure that’s sort of the point, but it still feels rather like cheating.

Cor, that’s all a bit whinging, isn’t it? I’ll speak of one I did enjoy next!

Man of mystery

Hope your Christmi were as splendid as ours, brimming with red wine and roast goose.

In amongst the exciting haul of goodies from yesterday, the Dr has left me a condundrum. My Droo Stoyrbook 2007 is signed by a mysterious stranger.

Anyone any ideas on whose hasty handwriting this is?

Off shortly to see Night at the Museum (it's research so the good Dr says). Expect an answer by the time I fetch back.

Not now, Bernard

“‘ People like to read about someone who is deeper in the shit than they are,’ [Bernard] said. In fact the real reason for his popularity was much less cynical and cruel: people like to read about someone who broke all the rules, who drank and smoked far too much, who was rude about feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities, who was politically utterly incorrect, who behaved outrageously, and yet who somehow survived and even managed to surround himself with an ever-increasing harem of beautiful women.”

Graham Lord, Just the One – the wives and times of Jeffrey Bernard, pp. 229-230.

I was first made aware of Jeffrey Bernard by reading a newspaper obituary. In the photo, a glut of uncommon celebrities jostled one another at the wake. And in the background, ignoring the camera, Tom Baker propped up the bar.

Tom was one of many contributors to Graham Lord’s 1992 biography. Jeff had just turned 60 when the book first came out (the link above is to a posthumous reissue), and it’s telling with what surprise his acquaintances saw him to lesser decades. He really did himself no favours.

The book is a catalogue of stupid and greatly pissed behaviour – Jeff being sick on the Queen Mother and shagging the wives of his mates. I struggled with a tale about a Christmas tree that got taken on a pub crawl because I kept expecting it to be some sort of euphemism. No, they really did mix a tree’s drinks.

Rude, snobbish and just as much lazy as pissed, Jeff spent years stumbling between jobs that would pay for his drinking before finding a role as a writer. He stuck broadly to just the two topics for all his subsequent career: racing and the “low life” of being out on the lash. Lord argues that really it was all just one topic: Bernard on loss as a loser.

One editor, Alexander Chancellor, says of him in the book,

“‘I can’t think of anybody else in journalism who writes only, only about themselves. It’s a considerable achievement, I think, to (a) do nothing at all except drink, and (b) be able to write about it ever single week and still be interesting.’”

Ibid., p. 230.

Most boozers just couldn’t do that. That you got something – a joke or a smile or an article – explains how Jeff persevered. He’d scrounge hand-outs and floorspace off anyone, and sex off girls who could surely do better.

For all he’s a monster and alienated his friends, Jeff knew how to turn on the charm. Irma Kurtz said he had a smile like

“‘a little devil caught out in an act of charity.’”

Ibid., p. 255.

Tom who, flush as the fourth Droo, bought him a couple of suits, says that Jeff at least sang for his supper. Bernard, not the drinking, was witty and exciting. He was an exception to the borish, dull alkie – a bit apart from the other self-destructing regulars. His writing can be keenly observant and hilarious, and even Jeff is often bored by his lifestyle. He is less a role model as a warning.

Yes, there’s something salaciously thrilling about someone who breaks all the rules. But I also think there’s an appeal in the distance – he’s funny so long as he’s happening to other people. Jeff could make those near him miserable, and was not very fond of himself.

It’s also affirmative and good for finger wagging to see the depths that beckon a man who won’t bother with bills and a mortgage.

(As well as talking to Tom himself, the book also makes mention of Jon Pertwee (p. 126) and David Tennant (p. 79).)

Do not fear fluffiness

Our Bumper Book of Daleks is just reaching people, a hair's breadth prior to Christmas. Hooray!

As a special bonus, you can read online for free - yes free! - the story I pinched from based on the Dr's own PhD. Mrs Guerrier, she so proud of me.

To read "The Eighth Wonder of the World", click on the link immediately below the book's cover at the webpage given above.

Babel-fish pizza

Entertaining, boozy meet with chums in Paddington last night, where I may have veered into ranty. Sorry, R., who will be reading this.

Much joy in translating the pizzas. "Fiesta del carne" sounds more posh than plain old "Meat feast".

But you could also read it as "Flesh party".

That’s no moon

Escape is a fixture in escapist fiction. Our heroes look sly and resourcedul when they can break out of cells, baddie bases and countries using only bits of tin can and their shoelaces.

In fact, it’s a bit of a cliché. One not uncommon criticism of my own “The Time Travellers” is that the austere detention centre on Byng Street is daringly escaped-from twice. (I argue (not entirely winningly) that this is in keeping with the spirit of Old Show.)

I guess escapology’s appeal comes from real escapes, most famously those during wars. Until recently, I’d always associated them with the second world war – and even the Imperial War Museum’s escape show last year focused on Steve McQueen’s moped and Colditz.

But Winston Churchill’s first dalliance as national hero was in 1899, when he escaped from a POW camp in Pretoria.

• “I escape from the Boers” – chapter 11 of Churchill’s “London to Ladysmith via Pretoria” (1900), as available off Project Gutenberg

More recently, Neil Gaiman admitted that he and magician Penn Jillette are working on a film version of a real First World War escape. Hilary Bevan Jones – whose Endor Productions won awards for the fab “State of Play” – spoke of it, too, a few years ago:

“My big ambition is to make the film of my grandfather's book, ‘The Road to Endor’. It's a true story of how he escaped from a Turkish prison camp during the First World War. David Lean had it optioned for years, but it's back in the family again. I only just feel grown-up enough to make it now!”

Liz Hoggard, “All my own work”, The Guardian, 21 March 2004

On Gaiman’s recommendation, I sought out the book via Abe.

Lieutenant EH Jones tells of a plucky confidence trick, played out over more than a year. As much from boredom as anything, the imprisoned Jones fakes a Ouija board session, and pretends he’s in touch with the spirits.

But rather than making his comrades laugh, they start to take him in deadly earnest. Jones, you see, can remember the board even blindfolded…

"The growth of a belief is difficult to describe, for growth is not a matter of adding one piece here and another there. It is not an addition at all, it is a process; and the most that can be done in describing it is to state a few of the outstanding events and say, ‘this marks one stage in the process, that another.’ … In any investigation each point as it is reached is subjected to proof. Once passed as proved it forms in its turn part of the foundation for a further advance in belief. It is the part of the investigator to make certain he does not admit as correct a single false deduction. If he does the whole of his subsequent reasoning is liable to be affected.

It is particularly easy, in a question like spiritualism, to allow fallacy to creep in. There is a basis of curious phenomena which certainly exist and are recognised by scientists as indubitable facts. But the investigator must be careful, in every instance, to assure himself that he is in the presence of the genuine phenomenon, and not of an imitation of it, and, as a matter of fact, this is sometimes impossible to do."

EH Jones, "The Road to En-Dor", p. 23.

Soon the Turkish warders have been snared in the scam, Jones and partner Lieutenant Hill winning small allowances for the other POWs. The camp itself is the former home of now-missing Armenians – the book speaks of the massacre quite openly. So Jones uses the promise of hidden Armenian treasure, and the threat of the spirits’ revenge, to attempt a brilliant escape.

Eric Williams (who wrote the best-selling “The Wooden Horse”) introduces the whole thing as, “for sheer ingenuity, persistence and skill … second to none among such books”.

It’s certainly a funny book, lively book full of vivid characters and set-ups. I was also surprised in the footnotes by how many of those comrades mentioned tried their own escapes – and went on to write their own books about them.

The mechanics of the trick and the ways they fool doubters are explained in some detail, and I can see the appeal to a mage like Jillette. The plan does not all go swimmingly either, and several times nearly kills the two tricksters. As a result, it becomes less about the scam but the steely determination with which the two blokes see it through.

That said, the telling is often disjointed narrative, jumping back and forth between years and incidents, so sometimes not easy to follow. There’s a hell of a lot of place names and people to remember, and the tangents and asides could have been more effectively edited.

Part conman’s handbook, part military history, part pot-boiling shocker, it’s a compelling – if not always easy – read. And cor, there’s a brilliant movie in there. So do get a shift on with that, Neil.

Sprained his wrist writing sonnets

(Just switched to Beta Blogger on the promise of all kinds of cleverness. Hope it doesn't not go snafu.)

Okay, I admit that I read 1599 to swot up for next year’s Droo. Pretty sure that’s why I got bought it, too. Not that I’m sure it will help:

“I cut myself off from reading anything about Shakespeare, went on what I knew already, and then checked afterwards. … I didn’t want to read James Shapiro’s book 1599 … in case I got bogged down.”

Gareth Roberts, interviewed by Rex Duis, “Script Doctors”, Dr Who Magazine 377 (3 January 2007), p. 13.

Well, it’s still a rich and lively book, whatever Gareth says. It avoids the usual failing of literary biography (as I’ve discussed with Wodehouse) – not so comprehensively linking the elements in his stories to influences surrounding him that it’s like Will was less creator than copyist. But Shapiro is also keen to show that Shakespeare’s work is not timeless, and that far all he was a transcendent genius, he was very much of his age.

1599 is when Shakespeare hits it big. The year begins with the construction of the famous Globe Theatre, in which he himself had a stake. Shapiro explores the mechanics and economics of that investment, and then the politics and practical necessities that influenced the writing of “Henry V”, “Julius Caesar”, “As You Like It” and “Hamlet”.

As well as some heavy-going analysis of particular snippets of play, it’s full of facts and detail. I discussed the relevance of 17 November back on, er, 17 November. Neat.

In exploring the adventures of the Earl of Essex and his ill-fated trip to Ireland, there’s something broader to be said about the fickleness of heroism. Essex’s collapse from grace is just as wild, explosive and tragic as the stuff what’s in Shakespeare’s writing.

We also get a sense of the wide, heady mix of high and low cultures which Shakespeare had to straddle. His works were performed for the old Queen amid the sumptuous decorations of Whitehall. Yet they also needed to win an audience from the bear baiting and cock fights crowding the rascally South Bank.

It’s little wonder then that his peers were taking risks, writing stuff that would get them fined or even land them in prison. Our Will seems to have deftly dodged anything too controversial, while retaining a verve and topicality that appealed to all classes of folk. (Shapiro’s also good on how plays would be taken off when events made them a little too topical…)

There’s also some fun detail about everyday practicalities – that bookshops would have very individual stock, and that without any copyright a book of Shakespeare’s poetry wasn’t necessarily all by him.

I was also enraptured by the consequences that follow from news being so slow to travel. There’s some mystery about how many weeks elapsed before Will heard of the death of his son. More fun is the courtly entanglements as London is unable to prove one way or another if England has just been invaded.

All in all, it’s a vivid animation of late-Tudor London, rich, sweaty and teeming with life. Especially so, as I read it in Florence, which I said had the same kind waterfront of crowded, timber dwellings seen in the cockney models of “A Knight’s Tale” and Olivier’s “Henry V”.

Two more top facts: 1599 was also the year that Oliver Cromwell was born. And I’m strangely pleased by the word crucifige (“Crucify him”), given on p. 208.

"I didn't want it to end."

Codename Moose summed up our feelings in those six words.

Pan’s Labyrinth is another wondrous strange creation from Guillermo del Toro: mesmerising, scary and brilliant.

Ofelia follows her very pregnant mother to an army camp deep in the woods. Mother’s new husband is a captain for Franco’s new regime, putting down the last of the communists at the tail end of the second world war. He’s violent and vicious and cares only for his unborn son.

But nearby in the wood is an ancient labyrinth, a dark and foreboding portal to powers ancient and terrifying. If Ofelia can complete three tasks for the Faun, she’ll be granted her dearest wishes...

Like del Toro’s previous "The Devil's Backbone", the film mixes up the real awful history of the Spanish civil war with fantasy no less alarming. It’s just as unsettling to watch the military barbarity as the gaunt, eyeless monster that guards a lush banqueting table.

It’s also reminiscent of CS Lewis’s "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" – especially the recent film, which made the second world war more explicit. Ofelia is a more put-upon Lucy, and this Faun isn’t offering her tea.

I talked not-quite-a-year-ago of how it’s only us adults who are freaked by horrid things done to and by children. We’re the ones to harbour fantasies of childish innocence and kindness. Children know, from school and everyday life, that children are full of vicious and untempered cruelty.

Still, we could also see why Neil Gaiman was in trouble for taking his littlest to see this one.

Speaking of which, this morning I finished his Fragile Things – a collection of short stories, poems and bits of idea.

Gaiman has often been rather cosily strange, with the feel of a Grimm’s fairy tale read by an open fire. Yet many of the stories here are thuggish and nasty, lacking what Susanna Clarke has called his "Wodehousian generosity of spirit", which made "Anansi Boys" and "Stardust" so appealing. There are zombies and gangsters and paedophiles and killers in this, with no redeeming features whatever.

Where Gaiman’s at his best is creating characters we care about, and then exploring the strange realms from behind their eyes. The final novella, "Monarch of the Glen" revisits one of the gangsters from a previous entry, who is no less powerful of scary than when we last met him.

Yet, by telling the story from the perspective of Shadow (the same character as from the novel "American Gods"), and detailing Shadow’s own qualms and uncertainties, it’s a much kinder feeling adventure.

"The Problem of Susan" is another haunting highlight, revisiting the spurned Queen of Narnia. It confronts her brusque dispatch in "The Last Battle" – where she’s the only one of her siblings not allowed into Heaven because she’s too fond of lipstick. More than that, it confronts the psycho-sexual elements implicit in that distinction, and the cruel way the other Pevensie’s find their way to paradise (Lewis kills them all off in a train crash).

"There is so much in the [Narnia] books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally as problematic … if from a different direction."

Neil Gaiman, Introduction to Fragile Things, p. xxii.

With reference to other strange children’s fictions like Mary Poppins and Dahl’s Mathilda, it manages to be something more altogether about the faults and something extra with which we fill up our kids.

Think my favourite is the opening "A Study in Emerald", which nicely twists the classic Holmesian short on its head. Not only does that there link let you read the whole story, but Wikipedia then goes and explains it.