Etymological space

My friend Suetekh once told me that she collects definitions of science fiction. Ones where Star Wars isn’t allowed, or that start with Frankestein, Poe or the Iliad. Ones that try to draw a line between sf and fantasy or sf and magic realism. Ones that try to impose some moral purpose on stories, underlining science, speculation or gedankenexperiment. Ones that even have the balls to argue sf is everything, and all other writing merely its sub-genres.

We laughed. We had more cake. We went on to talk about the mad-looking things that live at the bottom of oceans.

I must admit, I was never very bothered by any of that definitions stuff. Sure, it helps to be able to ring-fence an area that you’re writing or talking about, but there’s a fundamental difference between something being about rockets and it being any good or interesting. Too often definitions are merely a territorial marker, the definer staking a claim to the kind of stuff he likes, as a tiger might mark a tree.

In my own recent researches, I’ve noticed all kinds of effort to define the sub-genres of sf, or even to explain – as if to a sick relative – that they’re not sub-genres at all.

The main one is what we call the “what if” sorts of story, set in worlds where Hitler wins the Second World War or where Martin Luther ended up Pope. Just as with sci-fi, there’s those who argue that this isn’t just about coming up with wheezes for good and strange stories. Oh no, they say, if Winston Churchill was writing this kind of thing, it’s got to be serious, academic history.

But what are these kinds of stories called?

Those who call it “alternate history” need to look in a dictionary. Alternate means “every other”. “Alternative history” is better, but still carries a sense that there’s only one possible other option.

“Counterfactual” makes me think “lie”. “Parallel universe” misses the point that most of these kinds of stories include a revelation about where their history diverged from our own. In geometry, parallels don’t ever meet. (Hence the title of “Parallel Lives”; people who are not as close as they seem, so that [Spoiler] falls through the cracks.)

I quite like “allohistory” – meaning “other” in the same way as “allegory”. But people don’t use this very often, and can look puzzled if you do. Ho hum.

Another common term is “utopia”, which literally means “no place” and tends to describe any fictional ideal – do you see what Doctor Who did there? The saint who coined the term in 1516 meant an island of sunshine and sheep, and generally people know what you mean. But what about something like Nineteen Eighty-Four which is evidently the opposite? Or that staple of science fiction, where what seems to be an island of sunshine and sheep turns out to be all monstrous?

These are surely two different things; the state that’s in no way a utopia, and the state that says it is and yet is not. I’ve seen critics carefully define these two terms from each other, labelling them “dystopia” as opposed to “anti-utopia”. The trouble is, different critics apply the labels different ways round.

There are also different kinds of utopia: heterotopia, extropia, techno-utopia. It all gets rather fiddly.

Tom Moylan’s “Demand the Impossible” also argues that utopias can’t be fixed points; that in fact they breakdown if they ever stop striving to be better. What he calls a “critical utopia” is continually self-assessing, asking difficult questions. I argued in Foundation a long time ago that that’s exactly what happens in Iain M Banks’s Culture stories, since we usually see the utopian Culture through the eyes of someone off-message.

Utopia is, then, the journey not the destination. It is the aspiration to make better worlds, the methodology, processess, questions. Literally, it is the state of being, not the place.

Bisy

So, says Scott, what am I up to? And I realise I haven’t posted one of those sorts of posts in ages. So here goes…

I’m almost at the end of a month’s contract working full-time for a Government department, writing and editing things. Next week I start three or four weeks on a part-work magazine.

By Friday, I need to have fully proofed “How The Doctor Changed My Life” – I’m on page 162 as of this moment. I’m monstrously delighted with how it’s all come out, a testament to the hard work and brilliance of the 25 first-time authors. We’re embroiled in discussions of marketing and stuff, and I’ve seen a first draft of the glorious cover. More on all that very soon.

I was meant to have until 6 May to finish something that’s not been announced yet, but the editor’s asked if I can get it in sooner and I likes a challenge. It currently includes the words “Sugar Puffs”, “micturate” and “Noel Edmonds”.

I’ve got two other unannounced things to be in on 12 May. One of them was given to me as a sort of replacement for something I pitched for which didn’t seem like it would happen. And then this week it did – I’ve now got until the end of May to finish it. So all in all I shall have no evenings or weekends until the beginning of June.

By then I shall not be freelancing during the week and can concentrate all my energies on the three sizeable projects that will be taking up most of my summer. Two of them haven’t been announced yet but the third is my very own, original novel, which I am determined to actually spend some time on. I’ve got, since people aren’t asking, about 10,000 words of it not very well written and a small universe of notes.

I’ve got two short films to write for Codename Moose, and a short story for Sin Deniz. And after that, we shall see.

Creature, I name you…

What the internet can tell us about the names of Dr Who’s friends.

• Rose
  Well, duh, it’s after the pretty flower. But it might also come from the Germanic “hros” – or horse. No, really.
• Adam
  The Hebrew word for man; there’s maybe some Biblical punnery on similar Hebrew words meaning “red” (the colour, apparently, of human skin), “making” and “earth”. But the Biblical Adam was also tempted by new knowledge. Was that Nurse called Eve?
• Jack
  Shorter form of Iohannes (also the source of John), derived from the Hebrew for “God is gracious”. Which goes with him being brought back to life by shiny-eyed goddess Rose. (But then it’s not his real name anyway, is it? Considering his brother, I think Jack’s really called Pinkish.)
• Mickey
  Michael is Hebrew for “like God”; in the Book of Revelation he’s the leader of Heaven’s armies and the patron saint of soldiers.
• Martha
  Aramaic for “lady” or “mistress”. But not in the sense of being the other woman.
• Donna
  Means “lady” in Italian. And as a feminine version of the old Celtic “Donald”, it means “ruler of the world”.

I went ape

For reasons of research on something I cannot yet speak of, I have been looking into physics. Specifically, I have been learning about orbital rendezvous and delta-v calculations – the sorts of tricky manouvre one does in rockets in space. You know, real space travel, not all those sci-fi cheats.

The Dr has patiently zoned out of my efforts to explain some of this stuff. She ignored almost all of the DVD of In The Shadow of the Moon, though she was rather moved by the former moon-walkers having trouble coming back to reality. They found God, they drank, they just fidgeted about – though none of them got a job in the music industry in the way that Polly ffaze-Avatron did.

As I’ve said before, the Dr considers all this space stuff to be “moon porn”. Not even my top facts impressed her – like that it took the Apollo missions three days to reach the moon; less time it took the first passenger flights to reach Australia.

I even foolishly attempted to explain to her the late Craig Hinton’s theories that Martian civilisation would have seemed somewhat Egyptian, what with the Ice Warriors and Khufu both being under the yoke of the Osirans. She likes Egyptians. She’s even quite tickled by the idea that the pyramids came from space. Just so long as it wasn’t from mid-70s low-budget Doctor Who space.

She’s also not a great fan of monkeys, and points out that they’re always the baddies. See, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean or the apes that kidnap Mowgli. Against this, I can offer… er… Muggle Wump in The Twits and... um… Cheetah off of Tarzan. And Bernice’s friend the lemur.

Can anyone do any better?

More importantly, what a marvellous conjoinment of the Dr’s two horrors is this news of space monkeys.

The title for this post is, of course, the greatest Knock Knock joke ever.

London under London

I’m a bit of a sucker for the tunnels of London. There’s the space-age aluminium and toughened glass all through the Jubilee line extension that I put into The Time Travellers. Compare that with the hand-made feel of the oldest Tube stations, where the tunnels themselves have kinks in them because horses would freak out if they saw the whole corridor in one go. There’s the echo of the Greenwich foot tunnel and the strangeness of London’s ancient rivers – the various prefixes of bourne, Effra or the Fleet – having once been the highways of the boating city and now all packed up in pipes.

There are few enough opportunities to explore these strange places – a few guided tours, sometimes just tracing the route above ground. And so I’m rather envious to read Neil Gaiman’s description of the brickwork in the Victorian sewers, which he got to explore while researching Neverwhere.

Neverwhere was, originally, a BBC TV series. I must admit it’s not one I remember well – neither fully nor fondly – and I don’t even know how much of it I stuck with. As I recall, it had an awkward, stagey and video feel to it, at a time when telly drama was otherwise all coarse-grained and gritty. It’s not just that it was of its time; it was failing to keep up. The theatricality of fantasy seemed retro in the late 80s when the BBC produced their Chronicles of Narnia. That had featured animated (e.g. cartoon) special effects, like your watching pre-viz placeholders.

Which I suppose just shows the amazing affect digital grading and CGI has had on telly. And in some ways I’m glad there was no Droo in the 90s because it could only have looked cheaper and worse.

The book version of Neverwhere is not constrained by the production values, nor by budgets or regular episode lengths. I don’t know how much Gaiman has expanded or revised the plot but it doesn’t feel like a novelisation – there’s too many characters, too much strange incident, too much you couldn’t pull off in telly. Or, perhaps, it’s very faithful to a script that would have been a huge headache to realise.

The basic wheeze is that a bloke called Richard finds himself in an underground London which mirrors and warps our own. There’s a real Earl at Earl’s Court and Hammersmith is a bloke with a hammer and anvil.

Structurally, it’s very like Gaiman’s later – and, I think, better – Stardust. In both, a rubbish bloke is punching above his weight in the girlfriend department, getting all attached to some posh, demanding girl. She has him jump through all kinds of hoops to please her – but really she just doesn’t like him being him.

I can’t imagine why this bit early on struck a chord:

“Richard found himself, on otherwise sensible weekends, accompanying her to places like the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, where he learned that walking around museums too long hurts your feet, that the great art treasures of the world all blur into each other after a while, and that it is almost beyond the human capacity for belief to accept how much museum cafeterias will brazenly charge for a slice of cake and cup of tea.

‘Here’s your tea, and your éclair,’ he told her. ‘It would have cost less to buy you one of those Tintorettos.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ said Jessica, cheerfully. ‘Anyway, there aren’t any Tintorettos at the Tate.’"

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere – author’s preferred text, p. 11.

Then, being a bit naïve and well-meaning, rubbish bloke ends up on the wrong side of the divide between the real world and the fantastic. It’s all magic and dangerous strangeness, and he’s hardly equipped to survive it. But his well-meaning naivety and all sorts of chance events and encounters mean he gets by okay. And everyone’s after this sulky, gothy girl for her her special powers. But our rubbish bloke comes slowly to realise that he just wants her for her.

(Four years ago today, I married the sulky, gothy girl what drags me round museums…)

The book is a mish-mash of warped London history and elegant flights of fancy. It kept reminding me of other things – Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld is in many ways this book on its head, while the visceral feel of the undercity is very Perdido Street Station.

It’s goth and nasty and people abruptly die or disappear, all shackled to strange and terrible rules that don’t quite meet with logic. It’s also brimming with vivid images and smells – curries and sewer-folk, leaking wounds and vomit. I’d be tempted to mention Bakhtinian ideas of “grotesque” body horror, if I could remember those bits of my degree.

(I must also point out to the ladies of fandom that on page 260 there’s a shopping trolley that goes “squee, squee”.)

There’s candles and mirrors like in lots of Gaiman’s work, and some elements like the angel could have been lifted straight from Sandman. Like Stardust, for all the not-as-random-as-it-seems violence and viciousness, the easy-going nature of the protagonist rubbish bloke and his desire for no more than an easy life gives the whole thing a warm and enthusiastic feeling. Very RTD, I thought.

What’s also like new Doctor Who – and still rare in other fantasy telly – is how good it is on roles for black actors. London Below is just as much a cultural melting pot as the London upstairs. I guess that’s down to the TV version being produced by Lenny Henry’s production company, just as Gaiman admitted Anansi Boys came about because Henry bemoaned the lack of black characters in horror movies.

It’s an atmospheric and enjoyable book, but sometimes the narrating voice is too knowing and though there are great set pieces it never quite surprises. Perhaps it’s merely lacking an edge that’s there in Gaiman’s later novels. Perhaps if it hadn’t first been written for telly the reveals could have been wilder. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this very good book had one better just under the surface…

Genesys

The editor occassionaly known as Cindy Knees has posted details of his forthcoming anthology, In The Footsteps of Gilgamesh. Due out in April 2009, it’s a collection of science-fiction stories with an Assyrian twist.

And one of them will be by me.

I do my moves, I do my moves

Drat and double drat. Having cut shapes in the temple of dance Friday night for the benefit of some very special ladies, I now discover my trademark styles are on the internet for everyone to scouse. Or, alternatively, laugh at.

No thanks at all to Will for spotting these.

“I like to play with things a while before annihilation”

Regular viewers of the Sci-Fi Channel may have seen my ugly mug recently, maconieing on “The Flash Gordon Story” for Free@Last TV. Did the filming back in January and got to meet Peter Duncan - for almost long enough to say hello and things.

One bit they didn’t use in the final cut was my answer to the question “Isn’t Ming, you know, a bit racist?”

And the thing is, yes he is. He’s a terrible stereotype in the style of Fu Manchu and the opium-guzzling East what crops up in Sherlock Holmes and other Very British and American stories (leaving aside for the moment who it was growing and pushing the opium). But Ming is part of the naïve exoticism of Flash, where every instalment needs to be filled with colour and wild new things at which to gawp. For all Flash is not in Kansas any more, he seeks out and embraces the strange – that’s why we follow his adventures, to see what he’ll meet next. The oriental is just one of a hodge-podge of sources that make unlikely cohabitants in Flash’s stories. “Real”, lab-coated scientists get equal weighting to pointy-hatted wizards, while there’s chatty lion-headed people alongside actual lions…

Which makes Ming and his sultry daughter less the imperialist cliché of contemporary pulp shockers and like other gaudy newspaper strips of the time, such as Rupert the Bear. So Princess Aura is sort of sister to Pong Ping.

ETA: Lordy, this is my 600th post.

Sacred flame, sacred fire

“How many London tour guides, one wonders, will be speaking Mandarin in 2012?”

Jonathan Clements, Beijing – The Biography of a City, pp. 146-7.

Thus speaks my friend Jonathan of the extraordinary transformation being wrought on Beijing in the lead-up to this summer’s Olympic Games. He’s a witty, energetic guide on what’s a break-neck walking guide through merely several millennia. And since this guide at least speaks Mandarin, we’re privy to all kinds of additional insights about what the locals are saying.

It’s not just the massive programme of learning English that concerns Jonathan; he addresses the contraversial building programme that’s demolishing people’s homes in favour of Olympic hotels and facilities. He connects this to how the country has always demolished its past – the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the ebb and flow of different kingdoms and dynasties, built on each other’s ruins. There’s a particularly good story about the fall of the last emperor, and his family’s name being mothballed… But you’ll have to read the book.

It’s an often bloody story, full of tyrants, their spectacular and costly follies and of failed assassins. But Jonathan – as you’d know if you’d employed him – constantly makes bright connections between the most disparate elements. The brutal grand narrative is peppered with wry observance and top fact. Mulan, for example, was actually a Mongol and went home to her parents by camel.

It’s a fascinating if brisk journey, from the cave in which were discovered the teeth of Peking Man to the aftermath of the student protest in Tiananmen Square. And key to that protest was the students’ understanding of compelling, iconographic imagery – their makeshift Goddess of Liberty being dismantled by police; one man and his shopping bag against a tank. Images that lit up the whole world.

And of course today and yesterday Beijing has again been the subject of potent and embarrassing images. The Olympic flame surrounded by concentric rings of burly security in London, and snuffed out in Paris today.

“One wonders who in the Chinese politburo had the clever idea of sending police into Tibet heavy handedly in the first place, because without that most assuredly the protests would have been much smaller. And whoever remembers now that Steven Spielberg resigned from the Beijing Olympics not because of Tibet but because of Darfur.”

Jon Snow, Snowmail, 7 April 2008.

Jonathan says the Chinese hoped to pour luck on the Beijing Games by beginning them at 8 minutes past 8 on the 8th day of the 8th month – 8 being thought a lucky number. And yet, given there are subjects they really don’t want addressed (Tibet, Darfur, HIV, human rights, a free media…), they’ve rather shot themselves in the foot with even their own logo.

“The city has not one but five mascots … a menagerie of Chinese creatures, conceived as ‘collectable’ for all those capitalist visitors whose children should pester them to bring back not one cuddly toy, or action figure,or key chain, but five. … Foreign visitors can collect the entire set as if they are Pokémon or some other consumerist craze, form the ubiquitous panda and the predicatble fish (for water sports) to a politically sensitive Tibetan antelope.”

Clements, pp. 145-6

The protests don’t merely raise attention to Tibet; they mock the heftily corporate image of the Olympics themselves. As well as gazing in amazement as Konnie Huq got mauled on telly last night, the Dr berated the footage of the Athenian ceremony where the Olympic flame first got lit. No, the ancient Athenians wouldn’t have employed any gracefully moving, toga’d women. The birthplace of democracy didn’t include women in the vote until as late as 1952. If you want to be authentic, the Dr explained in all sobriety, you’d want lots of naked, oilly boys.

And yet I think the Olympic Games can serve an important purpose. The 1936 Olympic Games were famously held in Berlin by the relatively new Nazi regime. Goebbels introduced such fun things as the logo of overlapping rings and the chase with the Olympic flame. And there were many protests and demonstrations against what these co-opted Games might stand for.

Yet two things. First, the Nazis had to applaud Jesse Owens winning his gold medals – proving very publically the falseness of their ideas about racial superiority. And also, for fear of offending foreign visitors, the persecution of Jewish people and industry was damped down while the Games were going on. I don’t think even the Nazis knew to what terrible extremes their racial policies would lead over the next decade. And yet even at this relatively early stage, they knew that what they were doing was wrong.

That’s certainly not to say that there shouldn’t be protests; rather that that protests can have very real effects. Sport can expose the contradictions of politics, because it’s at heart about fair play and equal chances. The playing field is a great leveller. The Olympic Games holds that principle sacred, which is why – I would argue – its such a powerful stick with which to beat a host nation.

Exposed at last

Appearing round London from today and in a special exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery are Franklyn Rodgers’ splendid portraits of 30 black British actors. It’s part of the 4 The Record Initiative which seeks to raise the profile of black British talent, celebrating them as positive role models.

The Dr has been the initiative’s Learning Officer for over a year now and it’s all very exciting to see it being real.

She’s not quite as excited as I am about how many of the actors featured have also been in Doctor Who – and not just the new series and Big Finish. Earl Cameron was in nothing less than The Tenth Planet (and Thunderball and an episode of The Prisoner, which makes him pretty damn cool). I helpfully pointed the Dr in the way of DWM’s covers featuring Mickey and Martha, and also Gary Gillatt’s brilliant essay on race in Old Show in Doctor Who From A to Z.

And – hooray! – they get included on page 28 of “Getting a Credit” (PDF 7 MB), “the story of Black British actors on television … aimed at A-Level Media and Theatre Studies students and teachers”.

P.S. I am also quite excited about Doctor Who tomorrow. And Torchwood. And the Doctor and Donna on Jonathan Ross’ show. Woo and eek and squee.

Trause: a snake

My post two years ago on The Brooklyn Follies suggests Paul Auster’s work is all aimiable stuff with little incident but musing and conversation. But I realise that’s not right; there’s a terriific sense of threat in a lot of his work, of contentment living on borrowed and overdue time. And another quality that makes him so addictive: Auster is really weird.

And it’s odd that it’s two years since I last read any of his stuff having been so devoted. But really it’s just ‘cos I’d pretty much read everything, and was saving his latest one. (There’s a new book out in August, and also some more films, too; see Paul Auster news.)

Travels in the Scriptorium has the same eerie feel as The Music of Chance and In The Country of Last Things. There’s the same sort of man caught up in a world of strange rules which hint at terrible violence. There’s the same doubt about whether these rules and repurcussions are real or just in his mind. There’s the same eerie sense that he may be imprisoning himself. It is a mystery story where, to the protagonist, everything is mysterious.

In this case, we don’t even know the guy’s name – he’s just referred to as Mr Blank. He spends the whole of the book in one room, but for trips to the toilet. And his main concern – without ever daring to find out – is whether they’ve locked him in.

“He can't remember how long he has been here or the nature of the circumstances that precipitated his removal to this place. Perhaps he has always been here; perhaps this is where he has lived since the day he was born. What he knows is that his heart is filled with an implacable sense of guilt. At the same time, he can't escape the feeling that he is the victim of a terrible injustice."

Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium, p. 2.

Blank is an old man with a past he can’t quite remember. That might be due to the coloured pills they feed him, or maybe they’re limiting his decline. As the book continues we learn Blank once had great authority, sending people out on gruelling missions. Though this seems to have done them terrible harm, none of them holds it against him. Or do they?

Anna, the pretty nurse who he’s known for at least 20 years, is said to be the only one of his visitors we can trust – but how do we know that for sure? The other visitors – another nurse, a policeman and a lawyer – all offer tantalising glimpses of Blank’s life, without ever explaining who or what he is. And always events are being watched by hidden cameras and a microphone.

Our job as readers is to piece together the tantalising hints. There are, as always in Auster, stories within stories that inform our thinking. In this case, Blank has a manuscript to read, an allohistory of a different Amercian civil war, where people are sent on missions that are not what they seem. The implication seems to be that this is Blank’s own story – he wrote or inspired or informed it. A clue to his identity is the name of the given author, John Trause; another of the anagrams of or playings on Auster’s own name who crop up as writers in his stories.

In counterpoint to the unfixable and unknowable there are arresting, vivid moments. Mr Blank breaks his fingernails as he tries to peel off a label, and there’s a lot of detail about his pissing and erections. This intimacy helps us to share Blank’s own sense of dislocation; we are trapped inside his muddle as he is.

It reminded me quite a bit of the feel of Lost Highway or of a few things by David Cronenberg. You know things aren’t right, that rules are being transgressed, but there’s a dream-like lack of certainty about what.

Spoilers…

… for …

… the …

… ending …

… coming …

…up.

The ending, I think, suggests that Blank is the author, his missions the stories he’s written and his characters now in charge. There’s a sense of the inmates taking over the asylum, of roles somehow being reversed. It’s a clever-clever po-mo conclusion, and not long ago me and D. were discussing how we’d both written plays about a guy realising he’s in a play ‘cos we’re both so original. But I’m not sure that’s what the book is doing, and it’s the uncertainty that lifts my slight disappointment and keeps me pondering on.

There’s also something chilling about the nature of his confinement; all he and we’ve discovered in this single brief day will be forgotten by tomorrow. I fear how my own characters might set upon their creator. Especially the one I killed so many times.

Plain speaking

There is a theory I am quite drawn to that humans have factory settings. The idea is that Homo sapiens developed and evolved to fit particular circumstances and that we still fit that specific groove. Depending on where you measure from, that means our default mode is the one that corresponds to the Great Rift Valley or an area just north of Johannesburg. We are built to escape from lions.

It’s an idea explored a bit in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. A bloke called Frank links the things that stimulate him – going for runs, trying out different foods, solving problems and getting himself laid – to the behaviours that would ensure early man prospered.

Running, goes the example, is ingrained in us because back on the savannah you’d chase after your meals and sometimes things would chase after you. A varied diet is a useful thing to like because you’d always be on the move. It helps if you can live off what’s on offer. Problem solving and curiosity leads to experimentation, tool use and becoming the planet’s dominant species. And getting to pass on your genetic sequence is the only way these qualities survive. That we get a thrill from these things explains how we’re not extinct.

It’s a nice idea and one that I’m more drawn to having been to Africa. I understand all the things other people have said about how you feel drawn to it, in your blood. Yes, it’s all very romantic and just the kind of absolutist genes-make-us-do-what-we-do guff that often has me throwing books across the room. But it’s a nice idea. I can see its use in stories. And I’ve already used it in my other work. Because it helps explain what the written word is for.

Words tell us what stuff is doing and where it is. The simplest proper sentence is a thing and what it’s doing – or, to use the technical terminology, a noun and a verb: “Simon writes”. The smallest version of this construction in the English language, and so the smallest proper sentence, is “I am”.

Pretty much everything else – adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions – is just qualifying this construction, placing the thing and what it’s doing in the context of other things and actions. It’s all about making sense of where things are.

(We also need something to help flag up when this is especially important information or in need of an urgent response. These are called interjections.)

I’ve heard some people object to this reductionist idea, saying that language is for all other kinds of expression. And yet poetry struggles to find the best and most concise expression, so that it can’t pack the same meaning into fewer words. The best prose can use the richest vocabulary to precisely, vividly position you in a scene – or even the opposite when the author wants you caught up somewhere strange.

Our language is, then, fit for purpose, doing no more than it needed to back in our early days in Africa. A system for explaining where things are is good for hunting, good for teamwork, good for survival. It allows something that most animals cannot do, the sharing of individual solutions. And in its abstraction from the real, it works as a model for testing new ideas.

This can all be achieved simply and easily, the complexity of a sentence never more than it needs to be. So when you’re writing think of early Homo Sapiens, just getting used to being out of the trees. If he doesn’t keep things simple, specific and straight-forward, he’s going to be something’s lunch.

It doesn’t need to be harder than that. Indeed the whole point of Sir Ernest Gower’s “Plain Words” is that is shouldn’t be harder than that. But I don’t think he used “plain” to mean “savannah”.

Starship pensioners

John Perry has had a good innings. He goes to visit his wife’s grave one last time; they had 40 years of pretty good marriage until a sudden stroke killed her. He says goodbye to his son, who is doing well and a mayor. He does a round of seeing people and closing off the threads; apologising, explaining, sleeping-with where he needs to. And then he joins the army.

John Scalzi’s book “Old Man’s War” takes 100 pages for its hero to get off Earth, and another 50 before he’s fighting aliens – by which time we’re halfway through. But essentially this is a novel about Space War, and Scalzi acknowledges his debt to Robert Heinlein and et cetera.

I must admit I’m not a great admirer of the meatheaded antics of buzzcut Starship Troopers, and Scalzi manages to nick all the high-action thrills and violence yuou’d expect while by turns deepening, subverting and generally make good on the generic conventions.

Faced with a uiniverse of unrepetant evil aliens (many of them with fanatical religious motivations) Earth is using anything’s it got to stop its colonies being wiped out or swallowed whole. And one way of doing that is to enlist the old-folk; people who’ve had good lives and lots of varied experience, and are on borrowed time. It’s difficult to say much more without spoiling the many brilliant surprises.

Helpfully, John Perry soon teams up with a retired physics teacher, who can explain or at least speculate about the various physics bits. We get some fun about the space-life “beanstalks” that get recruits off planet Earth, and there’s some clever stuff about the consequences of travelling apparently faster than light. The aliens encountered are all successively different, weird and horrid so the fighting half of the book is backed with mad and thrilling incident.

I especially liked the scale employed; this is a huge conflict against very tricky foes. And at one point Scalzi nicely undercuts the wish-fulfilment wonder of his sci-fi army’s toys and gadgets. The coolness of their weapons isn’t just a write self-abusing; it’s used to further mark the huge scale of the problem.

“‘There has never been a military in the entire history of the human race that has gone to war equipped with more than the least it needs to fight its enemy. War is expensive. It costs money and it costs lives and no civilization has an infinite amount of either. So when you fight, you conserve. You use and equip only as much as you have to, never more.’”

John Scalzi, Old Man’s War, p. 138.

The brutal, epic violence that ensues is also matched with a goofy wit, characters cracking self-effacing jokes and generally not taking things too seriously. As a result, what could have been – and usually is in tales of Space War – bludgeoningly gruff tale of hellavu-tough heroes is more about the troubled lives of ordinary Joes.

It’s great fun and a rip-roaring read, but three things niggle. First, John is continually blessed with guiding angels. He’s the one who just happens to become leader of his gang; he’s the one whose old life just happens to get another officer onside; he’s the one to survive a particular incident, to solve a way of killing a particular baddie, and he’s the one to have a billion-to-one chance encounter that otherwise never, ever happens. The growing implausibility of this plot-convenient luck loosens his hold on being an ordinary Joe. I think it bothers most because it makes him much more like the gracelessly lucky and boasting heroes of generic Space War shlock.

Second is the relentless evil of the monsters. They have no redeeming features whatever – and one man suggesting we might at least try negotiation is very quickly dealt with in gruesome, comic style. Many of the aliens seem driven by fanatical religion which never really aspires much about crude cliché.

The human soldiers seem to have no religion at all. Where they can, they collect the bodies of the fallen but they don’t seem to go in for funerals or memorials – we’re told there are posthumous medals. People are legally dead when they sign up, so marriage effectively doesn’t happen either – as John himself acknowledges. And though there’s a mention of Hindu and Muslim conscripts early on, they are clearly not in the same take-up as John and are never mentioned again. A sergeant major barks that there’s no ethnic minorities in this war, and a computer says there’s counselling for those with ethical concerns. And that’s it; the whole tangled issue of different beliefs is conveniently brushed aside.

There are already sequels which are now added to the list of things I must somehow get to; a queue of books now snaking away beyond the haze of the horizon. Books Two are too often a diminishing return, so I don’t feel a great urgency to see what happens next. But this first instalment is a rip-roaring read and will be loved (to nick a line from Jonathan Ross) by teenage boys of any age or sex.

Sunday night gore

Spent the weekend writing things that needed being writ. Was still tocking away on the laptop last night as we settled in to watch telly. And one week before the return of Droo, cor, isn’t telly good?

First off, Tiger – Spy in the Jungle in which elephants filmed tigers being peed on by monkeys and having a scrap with bears. I remember when how they filmed nature documentaries was a separate programme, but these days the mechanics is just as much part of the show as the efforts not to anthropomorphise. And naw, hooza fuffy meow-cat?

Then Casualty 1907, a drama based on real cases from east-end hospitals just a century ago. For all it’s standard cops-n-docs with lashings of frocks and stiff collars, it scores many points for being so unpleasant. As I argued last week, the past is all a bit horrid. The Dr couldn’t watch David Troughton treating a broken leg, where he left splinters of bone lodged in the soft tissues for fear of doing more damage trying to fish them all out. And with the gangs and booze and squalor it helped give the lie to the idea that the country is now going to the dogs.

I also liked the use of a medical sun lamp to treat blemished skin – and the juxtaposition of the doctors’ own excitement about modern technology and lady smokers, and our own horror from What We Know Now. We were asked at a panel at Gallifrey to come up with new Droo spin-offs and I suggested a late Victorian Torchwood – where they’d be scandalously racy by seeing each other’s wrists. And that’s exactly the sort of thing I would have done: wireless telephony and women having opinions all part of the wild sci-fi madness.

Having watched the headlines (and does it strike anyone else as odd that planes crashing into houses doesn’t happen more often?) the Dr asked to watch Torchwood. Yes, she asked to watch it. Voluntarily. Because she’s got into it this year. I can’t think of any higher testament to how splendid this season has been.

Thought Fragments brilliantly rationalised and explained things I didn’t like about series one. We understand why Owen was a pathological shagger, what with having been so shagged by life. I liked how Ianto’s story didn’t mention but fitted round Cyber-girlfriend, and how Tosh (my favourite character, by the way) came to be studying space-pig for UNIT while at the same time being Torchwood.

(Nimbos, meanwhile, specualtes that Bernard Cribbens may be ex-UNIT, based on his having a red hat and a winged-looking badge. We shall see…) Am very excited about the Torchwood finale – though please no spoilers if you’re watching it live; I shall be out clubbing. (See how I slipped that in there, like I am still among da yoof?)

Then Storyville, in which Henry Marsh used an ordinary Bosch hand drill to do brain surgery on a conscious man. The documentary about his efforts to help with neurosurgery in the Ukraine made less of his opposite number being called Igor, and of the drill being low on batteries, than the news story implies. But the conscious patient’s sudden fit mid-operation was edge-of-seat appalling.

The Dr again couldn’t watch much of this and despairs at the consultant’s son who is twistedly unsqueamish. I am quite content watching the inside of people’s brains and faces, and am happy eating spaghetti bolognese in front of a TV screen that seems to be showing the same. It’s the threat of pain that gets me. The Dr once thought it hilarious when I went white at a description of Samuel Pepys being cut for a bladder stone. But as much as that was to do with having your old chap macheted open, it was the horror that Pepys probably only survived because his wife was rather house-proud. As a result, the dining-room table on which the op was done had been freshly scrubbed that morning.

Likewise, Marsh was dead-eyed in horror at conditions in the Ukraine, and it was heart-rending to see the long queue of patients, so grateful even when nothing could be done. Medicine is full of grisly drama about young and pretty people who just cannot be saved, but there was a constant awfulness that if the same cases were seen in the UK, something better could be done.

How much we take our own health service for granted. And how much we stand to lose. Marsh’s tetchiness often came from the stress of trying to help people despite monumental odds. But it was far more bitter and despairing at how petty empire building and office politics too often got in the way. That’s something where I suspect we are no better than the Ukraine.

The final part of the documentary saw Marsh and Igor guests of honour in the home of a patient they didn’t save – one Marsh seemed to say he’d made a grievous mistake with. After the brutal, unreasonable sickness and conditions we had witnessed, there was an incredible added weight to them drinking each others’ healths.

Majestic and Coronet

While flying across the Pacific just a month ago, I read Codename Downfall – The Secret Plan to Invade Japan. Jonathan Clements had recommended it to me after I’d asked him to help with my homework, and it’s a fascinating and detailed account of what might have happened had Truman not dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Authors Thomas B Allen and Norman Polmar effectively disagree with AC Grayling’s thesis in Among The Dead Cities that those bombings were war crimes. They follow the slow, island-by-island crawl of Allied troops towards Japan, the high casualties suffered by both sides and the Japanese refusal to surrender or even to acknowledge protocols like not shooting at stretcher bearers or those brandishing white flags. Islands commited mass suicide rather than give in to the Americans; on one island Japanese soldiers were still resisting invasion until the 1970s.

Admittedly, tales of the horrors suffered by Allied POWs and the spread of a particular photograph of a beheading meant that the Allied troops weren’t exactly prone to winning heart and minds, let alone taking prisoners. But the general idea is that an invasion would have been a Bad Thing.

Had the bombs not been dropped, Codename Downfall would have been carried out in two distinct parts. Operation Majestic (formerly Olympic) was the invasion of the south island of Kyushu. This would have established air and army bases (perhaps at the strategic port of Nagasaki) that could then lead to Operation Coronet – the invasion of the main island of Honshu. Plans were well advanced by the time President Truman made his decision about the hydrogen bomb, and the book examines the attitudes, knowledge and estimates of those involved to piece together what might have been.

On 16 June 1945, General MacArthur was asked to supply estimates for battle casualties in the invasion of Kyushu. He sent back his expectations of dead, wounded and missing from the day of landing: in the first 30 days, 50,800; in the next 30 days, 27,150; the next 30 days, 17,100. There were also 4,200 ‘non-battle casualties … for each 30 day period.’

MacArthur was what people sometimes call "single-minded" when what they actually mean is "a shit". He'd got his plan and whatever the evidence, alternatives or men-who-would-be-killed, he was not going to budge.

When he realised that these figures had been requested for the President, who was considering other options, MacArthur,

“back-pedalled from his original estimate, saying it had been ‘a routine report … for medical and replacement planning purposes. … I regard the operation as the most economical one in effort and lives that is possible.’”

Thomas B Allen and Norman Polmar, Codename Downfall – The Secret Plan to Invade Japan, p. 241.

But MacArthur knew full well what a horrid war this would be, and tended to speak less in numbers of casualties as ratios of Japanese to American killed. The authors explain the ideological underpinnings of ‘special attacks’ – i.e. suicide planes, submarines and individuals. The original ‘kamikaze’ or sacred wind was a hurricane that had wrecked Kublai Khan’s invading fleets in 1274 and again seven years later – the last time anyone had dared try an invasion on Japan.

We get details of the civilian population trained to use bamboo spears, “flame bottles” (Molotov cocktails) and “spider-holes” (fox-holes). And all I could think of was another civilian population being bigged up for imminent invasion with encouragement to fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and streets, and in the hills.

“We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940.

Despite this impossibly hostile force, MacArthur resisted any suggestion that they might conclude the war another way.

“[MacArthur] had absolute confidence in his own battle plan, little confidence in any information that came from Magic or Ultra, the code name for intercepted Japanese military communications. Willoughby had recently reported that US air forces were not doing enough to stop Japanese reinforcements from reaching southern Kyushu. But when MacArthur wanted to refute Ultra’s penetration of Japanese Army movements in his message to Marshall, he proclaimed his faith in air power’s ability to knock out the Japanese reinforcements coming to Kyushu.”

Allen and Polmar, pp. 266-7.

The authors argue that MacArthur disliked Ultra for two reasons: it had proven him wrong about Japanese strengths and intentions; and the intelligence came via the US Navy – MacArthur’s rivals in leading US troops through the Pacific. I wasn’t just horrified that these office-politics wranglings about who had the biggest willy were going to greatly increase the numbers killed and wounded. MacArthur was also adamant about who he’d be sending to their sudden deaths.

“By MacArthur’s personal orders, only American troops would go ashore for the climactic invasion of the war. And all the assault troops would be white.”

Ibid., p. 300.

Oh yes. But before we start daring to think that this madman was also some kind of racist, he did explain his thinking.

“The British initially proposed that British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Indian divisions participate in Coronet, but General MacArthur objected to the Indian troops – ‘I doubt the advisability of employing troops of native origin in this complex operation where homogeneity of language within the corps is required … Likewise, there is a question of the advisability of utilizing troops in a temperate zone without an extended period of acclimatization, hence the acceptance of Indian troops is not concurred in. The British division [sic] should be Anglo-Saxon.”

Ibid., p. 160.

So, er, Asians should not fight in Asia because they wouldn’t cope with the climate. It’s obvious, isn’t it? And also it’s not like the Indians in the British Army could be expected to speak the language.

MacArthur also had views on the make-up of troops under his own command.

“Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, had complained to President Roosevelt about the Army’s treatment of black troops, focusing on a division serving under MacArthur – the 93rd Infantry. MacArthur, attacking White as a ‘troublemaker and a menace to the war effort,’ said the 93rd was inferior to other divisions ‘except in the matter of motor maintenance,’ with poor morale – ‘as evidenced by courts martials, homosexual activities, selfmaiming, alleged discrimination, etcetera.’ MacArthur said his decision to order was ‘not, repeat not influenced in the slightest degree by race or color…’”

Ibid., p. 237.

Got that – he’s not a racist because he said so himself.

And it wasn’t that the Army didn’t have any use for black soldiers – they just weren’t going to be part of the actual invasion. Many soldiers in the US Army were discharged after VE Day, but there were exceptions for those with special skills or those who,

“had to be shipped to the Pacific ‘so swiftly that no opportunity is provided for replacing’ them … Many of the men in the ‘so swiftly’ category were black soldiers – the pick-and-shovel GIs who would build the port facilities and air bases needed for the invasion of Japan."

Ibid., p. 237.

But what really amazes me is that MacArthur seemed to think that getting yourself blown to bits in the invasion of Japan was some kind of high-esteemed privilege. Getting hacked to bits by the Japanese civilian home guard was not the sort of thing for just anyone.

Oh, and an entirely unrelated but interesting top fact: the Japanese attacked the west coast of the USA with explosive balloons, which mostly did no harm to anyone.

“But on 5 May 1945, Mrs Elsie Mitchell and five children were killed. While fishing in Lake County, Oregon, they found a Japanese balloon bomb that detonated when they examined it. They were the only casualties of enemy action on the US mainland during the war.”

Ibid., p. 222.

This reminded me of a thing in something else I’d been reading, about the space race of the 1950s and the not-often-spoken fact that a lot of the rockets in development were designed to carry nuclear payloads.

“But in 1957 came the shock of Sputnik. The psychological effect on the Americans was considerable… In the US it was felt almost as an invasion of the country. Britain had suffered bombing of London as early as 1916, but the US had never experienced hostile aircraft in the skies. Sputnik was perceived in those terms.”

CN Hill, A Vertical Empire – The History of the UK Rocket and Space Programme 1950-1971, p. 13.

Guerueruruererrier

I been mostly working in an office and when not doing that, writing and revising a few outlines. On the whole these outlines look as though they might one day be things that are real and tangible and can be talked about here.

But not yet.

Outlines are tricky because there's so much you need them to do. They've got to show a strong central concept (or, to use the technical term, Wheeze). They've got to show how that Wheeze works in a plot structure (or, Adventure). That Adventure has to include all the mechanics of discovery, revelation and twists (or, How). That How needs to include the way the disparate threads all conclude together (or, Ending), making the jagged and unpredicatable path of the Adventure look, in retrospect, a single straight corridor. And then, you gotta include some kind of disclaimer that this is just one option and you'd be happy to knock more ideas around (or, and in a timid squeak, Yes?).

So, in short, W-A-H-E-Y.

Thing is, you know your poor editor is very busy and so you have to keep it brief. You have to pack as much detail and excitement and off-the-wall-look-at-me-mad-idea-Roger-Rabbitry into as few words as possible. And the effect of this packing a whole universe into a half-sentence is to make you a bit starey-eyed and hyper.

More starey-eyed and hyper.

But it's worth it. The here's-an-idea... was the stuff that got me fired up writing as a kid. A chance comment or joke from my younger brothers and I could suddenly see a whole story. They of course would then be expected to read it, poor sods.

And even more exciting is that bit where an editor agrees to whatever you're proposing. (That getting the gig, and then getting the monies when it's been handed in, those are the good bits of writing. Let's just gloss over the bit that goes in between. Oh, and incidentally the Times has winkled out what I got paid for the Pirate Loop. )

And then there's the particular skippiness because folk like the effort you put in. Like Ionlylurkhere and the splendid LJers who have responded to that thread. (They can scroll through plenty of Badger facts and pictures by clicking the badger tag.)

I don't know what a LoM is but this Proper Who Writer (another technical term) certainly feels validated. Wahey indeed!

The anachronauts

As regular readers might know – and those who’ve listened to me whinging in the pub – I do not travel well. I don’t fit on buses or trains nor tend to sleep on them either. So I arrive feeling beaten up and tetchy.

It’s not that I don’t like new places and people. I just need a bit of time when I get anywhere to regenerate my limbs and brain.

There’s a classic question asked of Doctors Who in interviews that was being discussed in the pub on Saturday. It’s been discussed many times before. And yet one astute reader of this blog insists I’ve never blogged my answer. So here goes.

Time travel would be rubbish.

Take, for example, this country. Until the mid-1960s when the white heat of technology meant people bought washing machines, most people didn’t wash their clothes (or themselves) as often as we do. This sudden change in personal hygiene led to a new kind of advertisement – people whispering harshly about something called “B.O”. Until then, the vast majority of people really stank. (The Victorian solution to being stinky was just to button up more clothes.)

Until the mid-1940s when the welfare state kicked in, most people would not see a dentist or doctor until they absolutely had to. People’s teeth and breath was on the whole pretty awful. Watch old films and see what the heroes and heroines get away with in their mouths. Penicillin, aspirin and Bugs Bunny were all brand-new inventions.

The further back you go, the worse the knowledge of medicine and basic hygiene, so the worse off everyone gets. Those who can get good food aren't necessarily eating well. Education reforms haven’t come in so illiteracy and child labour increase as you head back in time. Sexism, racism, regionalism, superstition… all hold more sway in the past. People live shorter, harder lives. Even the rich are crowded by frequent, premature deaths.

No, they might not think of themselves as living in abject misery. But we, as spectators, would. And we would be unable to help them without over-writing our own times. It is better we cannot go back; or at least, that the only solace we can give is through reappraisal of history.

David Tennant had a good answer on the Parkinson show a while back, saying if he could go anywhere he’d go back just a couple of decades, and have a word with himself in his teens. Give a few pointers about opportunities coming up, moments not to screw up. And blimey there’s loads I could go back and do better. Was going to give some examples but I'll let you choose your own.

But, as I had him explain to Martha on page 172 of The Pirate Loop, changing stuff like this is “just a world of messy and complicated.” Without those screw-ups and missed opportunities we wouldn’t be who or where we are. If it weren’t for a particular row in 2005*, would Martha ever have met the Doctor?

(* In the original draft, the row was with someone called Joe.)

So what about the future? I think there are two reasons why seeing it would be bad. First, there’s how well you can fit it, with your backward ways and health and assumptions. Skip forward 50 years and you’ll bring with you the same attitudes as the old folk there once had. But theirs will have been weathered and smoothed by getting to that point the long way. They might not even remember thinking like you do, aghast that anyone can be so Neanderthal.

Secondly, there’s the issue of spoilers. A book’s a disappointment if you skip to the last page. (The Dr and at least one of my exes do exactly that – but they’re probably used to disappointment.) If things are good you’ve ruined the surprise. And if things are bad is there anything you can do?

I’m with Ian at the end of The Time Travellers, who has seen a terrible future just a year or two away but will make the most of what time there is until then. But, as the Doctor says in that book too, we’re all time-travellers anyway. We all move at one second per second, crawling our way through the minutes and days and years.

And until the loops, bracelets and police boxes are invented that make time travel possible, all we can do anyway is make the best of now, wary of what’s coming next.

This and that and whatever

I seem, touch wood, to have avoided the Dr's icky cold and yet am beset by an infection of my own. She pointed out last week that I keep saying the phrase "this and that and whatever". And since I'm not doing it consciously, I don't know how to stop.

I'm not even sure why this particular phrase has such appeal or even where it comes from - assuming it's been picked up from somewhere. But this blog has been a good place to exorcise the bits of nonsense that rattle round my brain.

Today I have been working on two revised outlines for things as yet unnannounced (I've signed a contract for one of them, the other might not even happen). I've also done a bit of proofing of the Dr's book and been to the gym. Got home before the heavens opened and the cat was freaked by hail.

Lunched with Scott Andrews yesterday who I'd not seen since last year due to our adjacent jettings off around the world. We got to swap notes on what unannounced and uncommissioned projects we both have at the mo and a chance remark - that he was thinking of doing something anyway - gave me the twist I was looking for in one of my outlines today. So hooray for Scott.

Last night, the Dr called me out to Brixton to join her and G. in The Prince. We talked of many things I didn't quite understand (museums and theory and, er, I forget) but my role was to advise G. on what is good in Doctor Who. To my great delight, the Dr was herself able to advise on what might be the Good Stuff. She even listened to Son of the Dragon yesterday, all on her own.

I think I have turned her. Bwah ha ha, etc.

So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died yesterday, is probably best remembered for getting his physics right. This is the bloke who, for a bit of a lark, worked out the height at which something in orbit above the Earth would match the planet’s speed of rotation. He did this long before there were such things as satellites, where being in what’s essentially a fixed position over the Earth is quite useful. And, rather sweetly, he worked it out as a fun mental exercise in a sci-fi magazine.

His Space Odyssey stories (2001; 2010; 2061; 3001) are also grounded in the latest discoveries from NASA’s missions into the void, accurately spelling out the time spent travelling between planets and describing the correct mineral constitution of moons. Many of the obituaries have stressed the link between his stories and his contributions to proper, real science.

Thing is, I’ve always preferred science-fiction to be more about the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the science isn’t important (or just that I’m not very good at it). But sci-fi is period drama, only not set in the past. The props and costumes conjure an atmosphere and lend flavour to the story but it’s the story that’s got to be the focus.

Think about the period drama on telly. It doesn’t wholly matter if your stiff-collared actors don’t shout into their candlestick telephones, or if a set designer’s decided that those phones look nicer without thick cabling like an elephant’s trunk. You don’t actively try to get it wrong and you should do your research. But period drama can easily get bogged down in the tedious detail of etiquette and sci-fi is at its most ponderous when dumping information about how its world works. Much better to get back to the gun-shoots and explosions.

Sir Arthur’s stories are often actually very good at doing just that. Like the very best writers, you don’t always notice the research that’s gone in to the engaging story. His early novel, Childhood’s End, is better known amongst my peers by two of its best rip-offs – Quatermass and the Pit and Doctor Who and the Daemons. It takes the central conceit of Joseph Campbell’s rather sloppy The Hero With 1,000 Faces – that all mankind’s religions and cultures are off-shoots of the same basic stories – and adds a twist – because early man was mentored by an alien.

The book pre-empts a lot of sci-fi of the 60s and 70s (and songs by Pink Floyd and Bowie) with it’s dawning of a new age for the teenagers which the old folk cannot dig. But its real joy is what theorists of sci-fi have sometimes called the “conceptual breakthrough”. This is the jaw-dropping, gosh-wow bit in good sci-fi where the author has spun the whole story on a massive change in your perspective. Oh blimey, you realise, our 10,000 year-old ideologies are all based on a spaceman with horns.

It leaves the reader open-mouthed like the dupe at the end of an episode of TV’s Mission: Impossible, all the sound effects and scenery revealed as a clever conjuring trick. It’s those big-concept surprises that make sci-fi so addictive.

(There’s a similar phrase from Iain M Banks’ Excession which is not entirely the same thing. An “outside context problem” – like what the Spanish were to the Mayas with their exploding fire sticks – is more total bafflement. A conceptual breakthrough is, even if just to the reader, a momentous revelation.)

Some more examples of the best conceptual breakthroughs. There’s one at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston finds a statue on a beach. There’s one at the end of Soylent Green when Charlton Heston finds out what the special foodstuff means to people. You can see the pattern – most top sci-fi hinges on one brilliant reveal.

The four in 2001: A Space Odyssey make up the structure of the film. An alien artefact teaches the apes; an alien artefact awaits us on the Moon; Dave’s beaten HAL and goes to meet the alien artefact; and, er, something about a huge space-baby. Everything else hangs off those freaky moments. It’s not just the physics that have been got right, either; the effects are amazing; the scale constantly enormous with tiny humans in the foreground. And, quite brilliantly, the humans twitter on about nothing in particular, minuscule and mundane. It is only the observing us that finds it wondrous.

But a really good example of the importance of gosh-wow over the numbers is a short story which, annoyingly, Neil Gaiman also linked to in his Clarke post. Unlike Neil, I didn’t meet Sir Arthur but I did once have his telephone number – and that was on a copy of The Nine Billion Names of God.

Spoilers follow so click the link, read the story and come back here after for my paltry thoughts.

Done that?

Right.

How’s that for a gosh-wow ending? Can’t you see Jim Phelps just escaping in his van, his props and costumes abandoned at your feet? And yet, when I first read it, a learned chum who was much more into sci-fi for the physics had a Different View.

For him, the great brilliance of the lack of fuss in that closing line was that that’s not how physics works. The stars are millions of billions of light years away – from us and from each other. It’s not just that you shout “Go!” and they wink off one by one. They’ll have been winking off for millions of years, all in a fiendishly complex and intricate order and just so that – to a computer programmer watching from the Earth – they seem to be extinguishing one by one.

The Clever Thing, said this learned colleague, was that the stars had been going out for millions of years, it just so happened that the time taken by the light of those destructions to register on Earth all rather neatly coincided – the implication being that it is not coincidence. So the programmer, his machine and its result have all been long-expected. This, he said, proved a mechanical universe operating like clockwork; the man-made computer just a machine in a machine. He didn’t agree with my gosh-wow reading at all, that the computer was rendered nothing to the magic truth of God. And we argued long into the night.

I’m not sure what this not-entirely-interesting anecdote might mean. But I’m rather sad I missed the chance to ever share it with Sir Arthur.

Spy Wednesday

Hooray! I was rather hoping for some James Bond news, today being today. Though I don't think Holy Week quite has MI6 in mind.