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Swing, clang!, shuffle, swing, clang!, shuffle, swing, ow!

Between 1993 and 2002, I was a member of a long-running sf APA called Acnestis. Each month, we’d write a couple of sides on genre-related subjects, make 30 copies, and then send those copies to the administrator. Who would then send out a parcel containing one copy of each member’s contribution to everyone. Today, I was hunting through some of my contributions to Acnestis, and stumbled across this review of George RR Martin‘s A Game of Thrones from 2001. Enjoy…

There is little in A Game of Thrones that can be counted as truly original. The setting is stock high fantasy: a mix and match of Dark Ages peasantry and Camelot-style pageantry. There are, fortunately, no elves, dwarves, gnomes or (gag) hobbits. But there are dragons (although they only appear near the end), and lots of mediaeval hack-and-slash swordsmanship.

Where A Game of Thrones may be traditional high fantasy in terms of setting, it’s not in terms of structure. Unlike the Wheel of Time, Martin does not use the “hero’s journey” template but builds up his story from a number of narrative strands, only some of which actually intersect.

First, there are the various members of the Stark family, lords of the Northern wastes. Lord Eddard Stark, head of the family, is a rigid, honourable man, traditional in his views, and a good friend of King Robert Baratheon. The king has been outmanoeuvred increasingly often by his wife, Cersei, and her family, the Lannisters. When his advisor dies, King Robert turns to Stark to take over the position and bring his reign back on track. This, of course, upsets the Lannisters. Stark moves to the capital, King’s Landing, to take up his duties. There is much politicking and corruption, and, well… any more would constitute a spoiler.

Jon Snow is Stark’s bastard son and, while he is acknowledged as fruit of Stark’s loins, he can never inherit the family title or possessions. So he joins the Night Watch, a Foreign Legion-type organisation which guards the Wall far to the north. Winter is coming (seasons appear to last several years in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire), and mysterious, probably magical in origin, creatures are attacking the Wall and threatening to invade.

The other members of Stark’s family include: Bran, who is crippled after overhearing something he shouldn’t and who looks set to develop powers of some kind which could help later in the story; Robb, the heir, who takes over when his father heads south to the capital; Sansa, the eldest daughter, betrothed to King Robert’s son (who is spoilt and cruel, and takes after his mother, Cersei); and Arya, Stark’s other daughter, who is something of a tomboy and more interested in sword-fighting than courtly intrigue and pomp and circumstance.

On another continent, Daenerys, last of the Targaryen dynasty, the previous rulers of Baratheon’s kingdom until he had overthrown them, has been married to Khal Drogo, lord of a Mongol-type horde. Her brother, who is a real nasty piece of work, is hoping the khal will provide him with an army to take back the throne “stolen” by Baratheon.

The novel alternates chapters between these (and a few more) characters, and all of them in some way affect the story-arc and the novel’s resolution. Despite the size of the cast-list (and Martin includes a sizeable dramatis personae at the back of the book; and, of course, a map at the front), it’s easy to keep track of the major characters. (I had to keep on referring to the dramatis personae for some of the minor characters, however.)

This technique of multiple viewpoint-narratives is one that’s commonly used in techno-thrillers, which is itself a best-selling genre. It’s also better-suited to the complex political nature of Martin’s story than the traditional hero’s journey structure would be. This, however, doesn’t really explain the book’s appeal.

It’s either the setting, or the story. The story owes more to dynastic historical or semi-historical fiction than it does to high fantasy. There’s no Quest, no object which can save or destroy the world, no army of darkness, nor even some vast prophesied change which must be helped or avoided. In that respect, A Game of Thrones is really quasi-historical fiction. There’s little in the way of derring-do, or real heroics, and certainly no one person upon whose shoulders the fate of the world rests…

Which means, I suppose, that high fantasy must sell more because of its setting than any other factor. The question is, is it the details of the particular world, or the mere existence of the particular world, which appeals? Will any old mediaeval land do, or is it the differences between the fantasy land and the historical model? There is, as I said earlier, little that’s all that original in A Game of Thrones. The cities, villages and castles are straight from the Dark Ages. The combat, arms and armour are straight from the Matter of Britain…

Which raises an interesting point. In many high fantasy series (and A Song of Ice and Fire is one), both hack-and-slash sword-fighting exists alongside thrust-and-parry. Historically, in the West, one developed from the other; the two techniques did not really exist alongside each other. During the Middle Ages, swords were big, heavy, often required two hands, and had cutting edges. They were, effectively, sharp-edged clubs. You swung them, as hard as you could, at your opponent. If you were strong, skilled, or lucky, you inflicted a wound. By the reign of Elizabeth I, sword-fighting had become cut-and-thrust, the mode perhaps most familiar from “swashbuckler” movies. Swords could cut, but they could also wound or kill with the pointy bit at the end. The cutting-edges gradually disappeared over time (because a blade without cutting-edges was stronger), until during the Renaissance sword-fighting focused almost exclusively on the pointy end—i.e., the rapier (a corruption, via the French, of the Spanish espada de ropera, or “town / dress sword”).

In A Game of Thrones, the noble male characters wear full-plate armour, often ornately decorated (and, judging by Martin’s descriptions, some of them probably have to be seen to be believed…). It is very difficult to kill someone in full-plate with a rapier. The blade simply isn’t up to piercing it. You’d have to find a weak spot (inside the elbow, for example), and hope you manage to hit it before you get brained with a mace or morning-star. Plus, of course, rapier sword-fighting requires you to be light on your feet—difficult when you’re weighed down with a suit made out of sheet metal. So, two knights in full-plate who want to cause damage have little choice but to swing at each other with hefty swords with cutting-edges (a great sword, bastard sword, sword-and-a-half, or something similar). Personal combat would be pretty much fixed in this mode.

And the mode used in personal combat would carry across into group combat or battles. Peasants, of course, would not have swords—swords are, after all, expensive, and certainly cost more to replace than your average peasant. No, the peasants have sharpened sticks. Put a bit of steel on the end and you have a pike (or put a short curved blade on the end, and the peasant’s weapon becomes doubly useful: he can chop up your enemies or reap the harvest with it). Alternatively, give your peasant lots of small pointed sticks, and a bow, and he becomes an archer, a “long distance” weapon.

Presumably Martin wanted to give his ersatz Dark Ages world some colour, and so threw in Arthurian pageantry. Which happened to go well with the social system he had set up. But, Arthurian pageantry demands full-plate and bastard swords; full-plate and bastard swords do not lead to exciting fight scenes—swing, clang!, shuffle, swing, clang!, shuffle, swing, ow!, shuffle, etc. The swashbuckling style of sword-fighting is exciting. So he threw that in as well…

Perhaps it’s this element of mix and match that lends high fantasy its appeal. It is, to some extent, the romance of the Middle Ages, without all the nasty stuff—squalor, rape, pillaging, disease, short lives, etc. The nearest high fantasy gets to this is in the combat, which is only one minor aspect of the period lifestyle. And so writers of high fantasy pick out all the romantic imagery of the Middle Ages, suggesting a low-maintenance lifestyle of well-earned hardship (never comfort), little responsibility and a level of self-actualisation that’s keyed to bringing in a good harvest. But you can’t have serfs without liege-lords and, it has to be said, there’s something equally attractive about the life of luxury led by the nobility: little or no fruitless work (that’s all done by the peasants), no decisions made by others, a very direct responsibility for lifestyle maintenance (everyone gets what they deserve), and all conflicts or problems are purely personal and can be resolved at the personal level (even in battle).

It’s all very well grinning with pride at a job well done, and looking forward to a hearty dinner of cheese and ale, as your sons bring in the bountiful harvest. But let’s not forget that your liege-lord could choose that very moment to come riding down onto your (clean, of course) hovel and rape your wife and daughters for a bit of sport. And there’s nothing you can do about it. In high fantasy, only villains of the darkest stripe would do such a thing, and their serfs are evil by association, so they deserve it.

It is, when you dig deep enough, American Rationalism that’s informing the various worlds of high fantasy best-sellers. Rewards are earned, never a function of position. Unless you’re a villain… in which case, you get your just desserts, anyway. One man can indeed change a world. Except, of course, he doesn’t. He leaves it exactly as he found it. The hero is there to maintain the status quo.

If there is a lesson here, it’s that a best-selling genre novel should boast: a) a world in which individuals can have a very real impact; b) said impact has to be earned through hard work and steadfastness; c) said impact is welcomed by all; d) the danger is always immediate and personal, as are the rewards; and e) there should be lots of colour.

A Game of Thrones, it goes without saying, features all of the above. As does Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The actual writing itself is immaterial. It need only be immediate. Themes and motifs only get in the way. Which might explain the merely competent writing that seems a given of high fantasy.

A Song of Ice and Fire is actually better-written than most of its ilk—although the line on page two, “A cold wind was blowing out of the North, and it made the trees rustle like living things”, initially seems to suggest otherwise (a Thoggism, if ever I saw one). Martin’s use of language may not be perfect, but his command of narrative structure is far superior to that of best-selling authors such as Robert Jordan, or David Weber. The prose is uniformly tight, without the extended introspective passages beloved of lesser writers. The dialogue is natural, and remains true to the characters uttering it. For those reasons alone, A Game of Thrones is a superior example of its type. Add in Martin’s departure from the standard template, and you have another reason for appreciating the novel in and of itself. But when you include the world he has built, the very sub-genre he is working in, well… you have a best-seller. Of course.


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Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it

I probably know what every Brit my age knows about Rudyard Kipling – born in India… The Jungle Book… Nobel Prize for Literature… ‘If–‘… He’s supposed to be the quintessentially British Empire writer. And yet I’ve only seen Disney’s The Jungle Book, and never read anything by him. Which is why I picked Kim as my March reading for this year’s challenge…

Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, brought up as a beggar on the streets of Lahore. One day, he meets a Tibetan lama, and becomes his chela or disciple. The two set off on a religious trek around India, searching for the River of the Arrow which will free the lama from all sin. In the past, Kim has also run errands for Mahbub Ali, a Pathan horse-trader who works for the British secret service. Through Ali, he becomes involved in the Great Game, the covert war for control of Central Asia between Russia and Britain throughout the Nineteenth Century.

During their journey, Kim stumbles across the regiment his father belonged to, and is identified as the son of a Sahib. He is sent to school, but then recruited by Mahbub Ali’s superior officer. He sends him to a top school for Sahibs in Lucknow. After several years there, Kim returns to his lama, and the two continue their religious trek, this time up into the foothills of the Himalayas. There they stumble across a pair of Russian spies and Kim does his part for Empire.

If British sf authors followed in the footsteps of HG Wells, after reading Kim I have to wonder if US sf authors took Kipling’s path. There’s something about its depiction of India during the days of British Empire which reads more like early US-style space opera than historical fiction. The mix of strange cultures, the historical info-dumping, the somewhat archaic language (all thee and thou), the nobility of purpose of the characters… It’s a rich and heady stew and every bit as exotic and adventuresome as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom or Leigh Brackett’s Mars.

The prose is… odd. It’s not just the archaic language – you soon cease to notice that. But it almost falls into reportage in places, and Kipling frequently breaks the illusion between reader and story – at one point, for example, he even adds authorial commentary to an expression used by a character:

‘The house be unblessed!’ (It is impossible to give exactly the old lady’s word.)

A lot of the plot is carried in dialogue – as it is in a lot of early science fiction, where characters explain intentions and actions and consequences to each other. It’s never done crudely, like sf’s infamous “As you know, Bob,” info-dump. But I did wonder if such poor exposition in sf was born from a bad attempt to emulate Kipling’s style. Also, Kim‘s plot features a hurried tying-up of plot-threads and an abrupt resolution – yet another characteristic sf shares with Kim.

Despite all that, the landscapes in Kim are vividly-drawn, and the writing is at its most evocative and impressive when the story moves into the Himalayas. Perhaps some of the characters are a little over-the-top, especially Hurree Babu and Lurgan, two of Kim’s colleagues in the British secret service. And perhaps some parts of the story are glossed over a little quickly, such as Kim’s school years in Lucknow. But what is there has its compensations. It’s a fascinating world Kipling describes; but while there are enough adventurous elements to the story to keep you reading, there is also a lot of instructional dialogue.

I suspect I’ll not be reading Kim again. However, the (cheap) edition I bought also includes The Jungle Book. I think I’ll give that a go one of these days… and then stick the book up on bookmooch.com.


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Mazel Tov

It takes a brave man in the US to criticise Israel. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon has been even more courageous – in the world of his novel, Israel does not even exist. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an alternate history – or “counterfactual”, if you’re a literary snob – in which the Jews were booted out of Palestine in 1948, and so David Ben-Gurion never unilaterally declared on 14 May 1948 the establishment of the nation state of Israel. Instead, the US provides land in Alaska for temporary settlement, Sitka, on a sixty-year lease.

(There are clues in the story indicating that the world of the novel diverged further from our history than initially seems the case – a republic in Russia, mention of an atom bomb being dropped on Berlin in 1946, and references to a war with Cuba during the 1960s.)

Like Robert Harris’ Fatherland, Chabon uses his alternate history to tell a story whose resolution is dependent upon knowledge of real history. And also like Harris’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union reads like another genre entirely – in this case, a hard-boiled detective novel. Meyer Landsman is an alcoholic homicide detective living in a fleabag hotel. When a fellow tenant is murdered – executed, in fact, by a shot to the back of the head while high on heroin – Landsman investigates. Since Sitka is weeks away from “Reversion” – i.e., the end of the Jews lease on the Alaskan land, and thus the end of their “homeland” – Landsman’s superiors want him to drop his investigation. He deliberately disobeys them… and uncovers a conspiracy which reaches all the way up to the United States’ president.

The Sitka of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is – as the title suggests – a Yiddish culture, rather than the real-world Israel’s Hebrew. Chabon does not translate the Yiddish, but the meaning of the words is clear from context. Anthony Burgess did something similar with Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange – even going so far as to say his intention was to “brainwash” the reader into understanding the borrowed Russian terms much as the protagonist Alex was himself brainwashed not to inflict violence. Given that Chabon has said in interviews that the inspiration behind The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was an article he wrote about a Yiddish phrasebook, this is perhaps not unsurprising.

The prose is very Chandleresque, although it occasionally struck me as a mite too calculatedly so. Some of the turns of phrase, the off-the-wall similes and metaphors, read a little forced. The relationship between Landsman and his partner, Berko Shemets, however, is handled beautifully – some of the best characterisation I’ve read in recent years, in fact. Interestingly, Chabon originally wrote the novel in the first person. Third-person present tense, I think, works much better. The tense gives the story an immediacy which pulls the reader along and over the hurdles created by unfamiliar Yiddish terms or Jewish practices.

Again like Fatherland, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ends with an event which comes as little surprise to us from our knowledge of the real world. Chabon handles it at a remove, which lessens its impact. Landsman’s cynicism also acts as a barrier against the shock we should feel. But then, to have made him naive and credulous would have meant he could not follow the plot to its conclusion. As it is, the climax slips past little too quickly and easily.

Where The Yiddish Policemen’s Union really shines is in Chabon’s creation of Yiddish Sitka. It’s a fascinating alternate world, and described with a depth and level of detail uncommon in many alternate histories. Perhaps this is because the novel’s focus is very narrow – i.e., a single city and its environs, rather than an entire world. All the same, it’s an impressive invention.

Minor quibbles aside, I was much impressed by The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Much has been made of Chabon’s sensitivity for the genre, and that attitude is very much clear in this novel. He has written a story that is quite clearly science fiction, without pandering to the snobbery of either the genre or its detractors. If only more writers would do the same…


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Lies, Damned Lies and… Lesson Plans

They say history is written by the winners. We’ve hardly “won” the war in Iraq, but the government is already trying to get their own version of it down in the history books. According to a lesson plan commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, Iraq was invaded because it had not curtailed its WMD programme. The invasion was also, apparently, “necessary to allow the opportunity to remove Saddam, an oppressive dictator, from power, and bring democracy to Iraq.”

Let’s see… the WMD claim was flimsy before the invasion, and subsequently proven unsurprisingly bogus. And regime change as a justification for invasion is illegal under international law, so it was never used. Bush and Blair have both claimed that history will show they acted for the best. Could this be the first step in their plan to ensure that this will be the case?

There are enough lies and distortions in the history books already. What do a few more matter? We live in a fictional world anyway – the future exists only in sf; the present is increasingly becoming the product of propaganda and spin, and so might as well be invented; and the past has always been open to interpretation, distortion and fabrication. At the very least, it adds an interesting dimension to consensus reality.


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Black Man / Thirteen

When I started this blog, it was not my intention to post reviews of the books I read. Well, not unless they were part of some annual “challenge” I’d set myself – and where I’d be charting my response to the challenge as much as writing about the books themselves. There are plenty of other places to find book reviews – both on and off the tinterweb. (Including my other blog, A Space About Books About Space, which is specifically about non-fiction books about the Space Race.)

However…

At some point during the Easter weekend, I’ll likely be voting on the novels shortlisted for the BSFA Awards. Unusually for me, I’d read half of the shortlist before it was announced. And I’ve now read another two from it – Black Man by Richard Morgan and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. And here’s what I thought of them…

When a novel opens with a man on a spacecraft travelling between Mars and Earth eating the other passengers in order to survive, you know it’s not going to be an easy read. And so Black Man proves. Morgan‘s premise is that some 20,000 years ago humanity bred some sort of super alpha male out of the gene pool as the type was not suited to the newly-created mode of agrarian civilisation. But during the late Twenty-First Century, various nations genetically engineered a generation of these “variant thirteens” to be super-soldiers. In the UK, they were known as Osprey, and in the US as Project Lawman. Later the programmes which had created them were outlawed, and the surviving variant thirteens restricted to secure reservations.

But not all of them.

Some were exiled to Mars. One of them, Carl Marsalis, went to Mars but returned. He now works as an agent for the United Nations, tracking down and killing rogue variant thirteens. One such rogue has escaped from Mars – the cannibal mentioned earlier – and is now on a killing spree in the US. Marsalis is co-opted by COLIN (Colony Initiative), the pan-national agency responsible for the settlement of Mars, to find the killer.

Morgan pulls no punches. His US of the Twenty-Second Century is a grim, corrupt and selfish place. It’s two parts American history to three parts a European’s view of the country as it is now. The North and South have split, and the South is now a backward Bible-bashing regime cynically known as “Jesusland”. The Western seaboard has also seceded, and remains the economic and industrial powerhouse of the continent. From this side of the Atlantic, it seems all too frighteningly plausible a future.

Black Man is also an extremely violent novel. You have to wonder what Anthony Burgess would have thought – the forty-year-old A Clockwork Orange‘s “ultra-violence” seems tame in comparison to that in Black Man. Of course, the violence is there because the variant thirteens are sociopathic killers. I’m not quite convinced such behaviour would have been useful 20,000 years ago, never mind during the late 21st Century. And to have one as a sympathetic protagonist and another as an immoral villain is a difficult balancing act. Morgan pulls it off – just about. He perhaps uses the fact that Marsalis is a Brit a little too much as justification for his more sympathetic character. No reader, of course, would identify with a true variant thirteen – although I’ve seen blustering reviews by one or two on the Web who seem to think they’re kindred alpha male souls. It’s all bollocks, of course (no pun intended). Marsalis might as well be an alien – and as any sf writer knows, make your alien too alien for your readers… and you’ll have no readers. Morgan is a smart enough writer to know that Marsalis can’t carry the story if he hews too close to the line of his central premise.

There are other viewpoint characters – such as Sevgi Ertekin, a Muslim Turkish-American COLIN detective; her partner, Tom Norton; and even a believer from Jesusland working illegally in California, Scott Osborne, who gets caught up in the plot (and later disappears from the story, only to pop up near the end). To me, Ertkin seemed more like a stereotypical NYPD cop, and not that much different from Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Her background struck me as one of Black Man‘s few weak notes – as well as the unfortunate inspiration for some unnecessary and over-long info-dumps when the story takes the characters to Istanbul.

World-building and premise aside, Black Man is a tautly-plotted thriller. Morgan is in control of his material throughout the story. Perhaps one or two of the clues necessary for resolution are a little too peripheral, making the scenes in which they appear seem somewhat unnecessary. But that’s a minor quibble. The writing is strong, with several nice turns of phrase. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the central premise – or rather, I wasn’t convinced that variant thirteens would ever be useful or necessary. I suppose that’s little different to believing time travel will ever be possible, but I’m not sure I can let it go enough to choose the novel above Alastair Reynold’s The Prefect or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

My thoughts on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to follow soon…


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Game Over

Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, and thus the concept of the role-playing game, has died. I was introduced to D&D in 1980, although I never became a big fan of the game. Its rules were torturous and overly complicated, and its background was little more than a mix and match of high fantasy clichés.

I was a big fan of role-playing games, however, throughout my teens and twenties. But the science fiction ones – especially GDW‘s Traveller. And later their Space: 1889 and 2300AD. I still own a substantial collection of rulebooks for those three games – including all of Traveller‘s incarnations.

During my late-twenties, I was a member of a role-playing games club in my home town. We’d meet every Sunday in a room belonging to a parish council’s community centre. Usually, a number of campaigns in different RPG systems were being played on any one Sunday – Runequest, Pendragon, AD&D, Tunnels & Trolls, Champions, Traveller… But we didn’t always play RPGs.

One Sunday, most of us actually playing a WWI aerial dogfighting game, using model biplanes on sticks on a table-tennis table. Two blokes walked into the community centre, and asked by name for the organiser of the club. They then told him that they believed role-playing games were “bad for our spiritual well-being” and they were planning on asking the parish council to refuse us the use of the community centre. We tried to explain that they were wrong, but they wouldn’t listen. It was clear they’d been expecting to find a bunch of sixteen-year-olds worshipping Satan, instead of a group with an average age of twenty-six playing with aeroplanes on sticks. But even that didn’t change their minds.

The two bigots – there’s no other word for them – did as they’d promised. The club was banned from the community centre, and subsequently split up.

Soon after, I stopped playing RPGs. And years after that, I learnt that GDW, the games company whose products I’d liked the most, had gone bust. Killed, ironically, by a game invented by Gary Gygax.

This was Dangerous Journeys. Which, to tell the truth, was actually pretty good. I have the six rulebooks published for it. I also have the six issues of Journeys, the GDW-published magazine dedicated to it. The game was intended to take place in a multiverse, covering multiple genres, but GDW went under after only the fantasy mileu had been published.

Gygax also wrote a trilogy of novels set in the game’s world – The Anubis Murders, The Samarkand Solution and Death in Delhi. Gygax‘s prose is barely serviceable, but I found the background quite interesting. PlanetStories have now republished these, plus a previously-unpublished fourth novel in the series, Infernal Sorceress. One of these days, I’ll see what it’s like – I owe that much to the inventor of the hobby that kept me entertained throughout my teens and twenties…


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The Future’s So Bright

A couple of nights ago, I watched Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World for the first time in many years. I first saw this film back in, I think, late 1993 or early 1994. I thought then its depiction of 1999 was one of the most realistic and plausible depictions of the near-future I had ever seen.

But that was before the year in which film is set. I’ve now watched it again almost a decade after the year in which it is set…

Wenders apparently wrote Until the End of the World to be the “ultimate road movie”. It’s set in the months leading up to the start of the new millennium. An Indian nuclear-powered satellite is out of control, and could fall from orbit, causing widespread contamination. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) is returning to Paris from Venice when a traffic jam prompted by the impending crash of the satellite forces her off the beaten track. As a result, she is involved in an accident with a pair of friendly bank robbers. After giving them a lift to the nearest town – her car survived the crash, theirs didn’t – they ask her to take their ill-gotten gains to Paris for a 30% cut. En route, Claire then meets Trevor (William Hurt) and gives him a lift to Paris… but he steals some of the money.

The film then develops into a chase, with Claire and her boyfriend Gene (Sam Neill) following Trevor to retrieve the stolen, er, stolen money. Trevor is also being chased by bounty hunters, since he apparently stole an expensive prototype camera from a US lab. This camera records the brainwaves associated with seeing. Trevor is using the camera to record his relatives for his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau). The film finishes up in the Australian Outback, where Trevor’s father (Max von Sydow), the inventor of the camera, has a secret lab.

Then the Indian nuclear-powered satellite explodes, causing an electro-magnetic pulse which wipes out all unshielded electronic equipment…

When I first saw Until the End of the World, I was very taken at the way in which it showed technology integrated into everyday life. Cars had electronic maps on their dashboards, computers were small and portable, videophones were the norm, software programs had animated avatars as user interfaces and could search global data… And yet other aspects remained unchanged. Cars looked a sleeker but a lot of old models were still being driven. Cities appeared to have changed very little – more neon and glass, perhaps, but no real substantial changes. And the way in which people lived their lives had not altered…

Science fiction has never been about predicting the future – that’s futurism. But watching Until the End of the World now, eight years after it was set, seventeen years after it was made… it’s interesting seeing just how close Wenders was.

Cars do indeed have electronic maps on their dashboards – GPS. Desktop computers have not changed greatly in appearance in ten years (unless you include the introduction of TFTs), but laptops certainly have. They are a great deal smaller and more powerful than they were in 1991 – the Asus EEE, for example, is 22.5 x 16.5 cm. Admittedly, the animated GUI for the search programs shown in the film are crude; modern CGI is far more sophisticated and realistic. But the search through global data itself is not so far from Google and the like – don’t forget that when Until the End of the World was released, the WWW did not exist. And while videophones have yet to really catch on, mobile phones with cameras are common, as are webcams.

Despite this, the film still doesn’t feel like it was actually made in 1999. There are enough near-misses to indicate its true age. And, of course, the central conceit, the camera which records brainwaves, is pure science fiction.

It’s still a damn good film, however. I’m not sure I’d call it a favourite – the plot feels a little like two stories badly-welded together, and both William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin seem curiously blank throughout. And the edition released in the UK has no subtitles, despite there being a lot of French dialogue (which is a little too fast and fluent for me). But I’ll certainly watch it again.


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The Heart of Matter

NOTE: THIS POST INCLUDES SPOILERS

Matter is Iain Banks‘ first Culture novel since Look to Windward in 2000. So there was a great deal of eagerness – and not just by myself – when it was announced. Orbit clearly realised that Matter‘s publication was an event – Waterstone’s has been selling the hardback at half price since a week or so before the official publication date.

There are, it has to be said, a certain number of things you expect to find in a Culture novel. And one of those things is a Big Dumb Object. In Matter, this is the Shellworld called Sursamen, which consists of a series of vast concentric spheres, each of which is in effect a planetary surface. Shellworlds were built for reasons unknown by a race which has long since vanished.

The Sarl, a human race, live on Sursamen’s Eighth level. They are at war with the Deldeyn, another human race, from the Ninth level. Ferbin is heir to the throne of Hausk, a cod-mediaeval Sarl kingdom. He’s more of a playboy prince than a suitable candidate for ruler, however, so when Ferbin inadvertently witnesses his father’s murder after a battle, he flees for his life. He determines to seek help from Xide Hyrlis, a Culture representative who had been a friend of King Hausk many years before. He also decides to track down his sister, Djan Seriy, who left to join the Culture, and now works for Special Circumstances.

There are three main narratives in Matter, centred on the three surviving offspring of King Hausk. Ferbin and his manservant Holse escape Sursamen and track down Hyrlis. Djan Seriy returns to Sursamen to learn the truth of her father’s death. And Oramen, youngest son and now prince regent, follows the invading Sarl army to the Ninth level and the Nameless City, an ancient metropolis slowly being revealed by the great Falls of Hyeng-zhar.

King Hausk’s murder, the war against the Deldeyn of the Ninth level… these are all part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Hausk’s trusted adviser, friend and murderer, tyl Loesp. He is working for the Oct, the alien race which control part of Sursamen. Their objective is not revealed until a good three-quarters of the way into the story, and its result is certainly not the intended one.

The Oct are mentored by the Nariscene, who are in turn mentored by the Morthanveld. Whose civilisation is equivalent in technology and advancement to the Culture. This civilisational hierarchy is important to the plot of Matter.

Iain Banks is one of the most interesting writers currently working in science fiction – but only in the sense of science fiction as a branch of literature. He’s not really an ideas man. Yes, the concept of the Shellworld is pretty impressive… but it’s been done before – in Colin Kapp’s Cageworld quartet. In fact, if anything, Banks has a tendency to pick up current ideas and slot them into his fictions, whether they fit or not. Look to Windward introduced nanotechnology to the Culture; and Matter introduces cyberspace. Neither had been mentioned prior to their appearances in these novels, and yet they are treated as if they had always existed. Which does make their sudden inclusion seem a little odd.

In some respects, the hierarchy of civilisations mentioned above also has the feel of an add-on required for Matter‘s plot to function – it’s not only reminiscent of David Brin’s Uplift novels, but it all seems so much busier a universe than earlier Culture novels had suggested. But denying the possibility of such additions and changes does smack a little of the “clomping foot of nerdism”. Fictional universes are as flexible and adaptable as required by the story.

What makes Banks really interesting is that his sf novels are not just simple action-adventures in a space opera setting. There’s enough detail in there to attract those who want immersion in a made-up universe, but he’s not one to slavishly follow genre story templates. Use of Weapons features two narratives running in opposite directions chronologically; Against A Dark Background has a quest plot, in which the protagonist loses every plot coupon shortly after winning it… but still manages to finish the course (but I’m not convinced that was done knowingly).

Having said that, Banks is less adventurous with the structure of Matter. It is, for much of its length, relatively traditional – something of a picaresque travelogue, albeit juxtaposed with high fantasy wargames on Sursamen’s Eighth and Ninth Levels… However, Matter ends with an appendix – a completely unnecessary dramatis personae and glossary. And after that, an epilogue. Which changes the final shape of the story. The appendix is there to hide the epilogue. Now, that is an interesting choice.

Banks usually has something interesting to say, too. Matter is no different in this respect. And, if I’m reading the novel right, it’s about Iraq, about whether so-called “developed” nations have the right to meddle in the affairs of other nations. The parallels are clear – should the Culture interfere in Sursamen? Unfortunately, Banks’ message is muddled. Matter‘s prologue shows one such intervention by Special Circumstances, and that later proves mostly successful. But the Culture’s refusal to interfere in the situation in Hausk – especially given how it progresses; and they are watching it, after all – leads to a situation which could destroy everything. The epilogue shows the Culture changing its policy.

This, then, is the message from the writer who chopped up his passport over the invasion of Iraq. According to Matter, he’s now saying it is good to interfere – if the interference prevents slaughter and destruction. Or perhaps he means only to interfere in the interference of the Oct, which has caused slaughter and destruction? Banks has pre-built the moral high ground into his universe – the more evolved civilisations, the Involved, are more advanced and therefore more moral. That’s part of evolution, after all. So it’s okay for moral – or advanced; or, perhaps, “developed” – civilisations to interfere, Matter seems to be saying, but not for less evolved ones. That’s not a good message. Because Banks’ universal hierarchy is a cheat – morality is treated as if it were a physical law, as if a civilisation accrued some kind of wavicles of morality as it progressed and aged.

Other areas of Matter worthy of comment… It is very talky. Characters waffle a lot. They often repeat themselves. The novel also suffers from a sudden flurry of small resolutions as the end approaches. Banks’ digressions are often his best bits – and some of the digressions in Matter are among the best he’s done – but it does mean that his climaxes frequently feel rushed. It does here. And, there is throughout the novel odd verbings of nouns and nunation of adjectives. Banks in part explains this, having Djan Seriy say the Sarl sometimes use “words oddly” – “we guilt you”, “he has been jealoused”. But there are occasions where even that is no defence – the neologism is neither in dialogue, nor even in a narrative set on Sursamen or featuring a Sarl character.

Oh, and why does Matter have double quotes for dialogue throughout, when normal British practice is single quotes?

One of the reasons Banks is an excellent writer is that despite all the above I liked Matter a great deal. It’s likely to be one of the most interesting sf novels published in 2008. Whether that makes it one of the best, I don’t know. Depends what else I read, of course. Unlike The Algebraist, Matter did not disappoint.


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I Did This So You Don’t Have To – Part 2

Here’s the next set of films from the SciFi Classics 50-Movie Pack.

Attack of the Monsters – another Japanese monster movie. Three kids find a flying saucer, two of them climb aboard and are whisked away to another world. They see a giant monster with a sword on its head fight a giant pterodactyl. Then they’re rescued by two women in futuristic costumes, and taken into the women’s base. But the women are evil, and want only to conquer Earth. Happily, Gamera the giant flying turtle arrives, kills the monster with the sword on its head, and saves the day. If you want to watch a Japanese sf film, watch The Mysterians. Not this.

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet – this film was created from a re-edit of the Russian film, Planeta Burg, with English dialogue recorded over it and a couple of scenes featuring Basil Rathbone added. A US spaceship arrives in orbit about Venus, but the first landing mission crashes. So a second one is launched to rescue them. While the film is badly-paced, and the story doesn’t make a great deal of sense, it all looks pretty cool. Well, except for the dinosaurs, which look like men in rubber dinosaur suits.

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women – this one uses the same footage as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, with the mystifying addition of several scenes featuring Mamie van Doren and a bevy of beautiful women in bikinis who are apparently the telepathic inhabitants of the planet. Their scenes don’t actually seem related to the rest of the film. Much of the movie is narrated by “director” Peter Bogdanovich. Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet was interesting but a bit dull; Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is near unwatchable.

Blood Tide – another one that wasn’t sf at all. James Earl Jones hams it up as a poet-turned-treasure-hunter on some Greek island. There’s an ancient temple accessible only via a sea cave, but it has some horrible guardian. Newcomers try to horn in on Jones’ treasure-hunting, the sea monster awakens, and the ancient temple is destroyed. A better transfer would have greatly improved this film. It didn’t actually appear that bad – although it was hard to tell at the time as the picture and sound were so poor.

First Spaceship on Venus – this is actually a badly-dubbed version of the East German film, Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star). Scientists analyse the debris of huge meteor impact, and discover a recording from a crashed spacesuit. They determine the spaceship was from Venus, and so send a mission to that planet. En route, they decode the recording. It’s an invasion plan… The production design is really good, with some excellent model work and some truly weird sets. I plan to get a copy of the original version – happily, it’s available on DVD.

Buck Rogers: Planet Outlaws – not the grinning beefy loon in a spandex girdle of the 1980s television series, this is the original one: Buster Crabbe. His prototype airship crashes on its maiden flight at the north pole, and he is frozen… and woken up centuries later. He ends up helping the inhabitants of an invisible city in their war against the evil Killer Kane. This involves such cunning ploys as hiding behind rocks, and jumping out at Kane’s men as they pass by. If you like Flash Gordon serials, then this is, well, exactly the same.

Killers from Space – Peter Graves of Mission Impossible stars as a scientist whose plane crashes during an atom bomb test. When he turns up later, no one believes his story of alien abduction and invasion. Unlike Whitley Strieber, it seems he’s telling the truth. This one wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

She Gods of Shark Reef – when the box cover says “SciFi Classics”, that’s what you expect: science fiction. By no stretch of the imagination could this film be considered that. Two gunrunners are shipwrecked on a Hawaiian island populated only by attractive women. When one of the women is chosen for the annual sacrifice to the shark god, the gunrunner who is in love with her tries to rescue her. Another film I suspect was more fun to make than to watch.

The Atomic Brain – a scientist experiments with brain transplants, including transplanting a woman’s brain into a cat, and vice versa. You can’t help but wonder how a human brain would fit into a cat’s skull, or what he used for padding when he put the cat’s brain in the woman’s skull. Judging by the woman’s acting, it was probably blancmange or something. This is the sort of film that gives B-movies a, er, bad name.

Son of Hercules: The Land of Darkness – another spaghetti sandal epic, and yet another random bodybuilder in the title roll. Except he’s not a son of Hercules, he’s actually Hercules himself. Although, for some bizarre reason, the English language dubbing calls him Argolese throughout. The blurb on the CD pack says, “Hercules falls for the daughter of a deposed king whose kingdom is held in thrall by an evil queen.” I know I’ve watched this film, but I can’t remember what actually happened in it.

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons – this is a compilation of two episodes of a 1954 television series. It shows. Rocky’s sidekick, Winky, is annoyingly stupid. The female, Vena Ray, might prance about in a miniskirt, but she’s surprisingly assertive for the early 1950s. The special effects – apparently expensive for the time – are a little better than Flash Gordon from two decades earlier, but not much. Forbidden Planet this isn’t.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians – the theme-tune to this film is great, a perfect piece of 1960s bubblegum pop. Sadly, it’s all downhill from there. Green-skinned Martian kids are addicted to Santa Claus on Earth television, so their parents decided to kidnap him. But Santa sets up shop on Mars, and wins everyone over with sacks full of cheap toys. I suspect that seeing the film as an allegory for the rise of Japan after World War 2 might be reading a little too much into it. Especially since it’s, well, crap.

Part one is here.


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2008 Reading Challenge – A Surprise for February

I tried, but I couldn’t do it. In what has to be a turn up for the books (pun intended), I couldn’t finish the novel I’d chosen for February for my 2008 reading challenge. I read about a quarter before giving up. And it’s supposed to be the author’s best book too.

The book was For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. And given his stature, I never expected to dislike Hemingway’s prose so much. But… the incessant repetition annoyed me, the Spanish syntax used throughout for the dialogue annoyed me, and when the book went into an extended flashback narrated by one of the characters, I couldn’t face any more.

Ah well, I suppose it means the challenge is doing what I intended it to. I may have expected it to introduce me to authors I would like, but I never meant that it had to. Perhaps one day, I’ll watch the film, or try another novel by Hemingway. But for now, it’s time to move on…