It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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Author Archives: iansales


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Irony in Action

They say Americans suffer from an “irony deficiency”, but I think recent events have proven that untrue.

While the neocons are busy trying to redefine fascism as left wing in order to distance their own right wing politics from such jackbooted nastiness, Bush is demanding that travellers to the US ask nicely for permission to visit from Homeland Security before booking tickets. He also wants information on passengers over-flying the US – not landing in the US, just flying over US territory.

So there you go. With each passing year, it seems the US drifts further towards the left –

No, wait.


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Jackboots in Space

I’ve always believed that Paul Verhoeven’s response to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was the only sane one. He made a satire of it. (He also never bothered to finish reading it either, which is probably even more sane.) I saw nothing wrong in holding this opinion even though I’d never read the novel myself.

Recently, however, I decided I was being unfair, if not hypocritical. I “knew” the book was crypto-fascist, despite every mention of it on the tinterweb claiming that it isn’t.

Well, I’ve now read it. And…

Starship Troopers isn’t even a novel. It’s a lesson in military operations and Heinlein’s crypto-fascist politics wrapped in the thinnest of stories. Rico is a stand-in for the dumb reader, who is lectured in every chapter on how fair and democratic is the Federation, and how effective a military force is the Mobile Infantry. We know this because we’re told it. Repeatedly.

The plot, such as it is: Johnny Rico graduates from high school, and follows a friend into Federal Service. He is assigned to the Mobile Infantry. Earth goes to war against the Bugs. Rico fights a number of battles and rises up the ranks.

That’s it.

Military sf Starship Troopers almost certainly is. But does that make it crypto-fascist? Let’s examine the evidence (all page numbers and quotations from the 1998 NEL film tie-in paperback).

Exhibit 1:
Only veterans of the Federal Service of the Terran Federation have the vote. Heinlein apologists claim that Federal Service is not necessarily military, but this is not true. When Rico signs up, and is given a physical, the doctor says to him:

“No offense. But military service is for ants … And for what? A purely nominal political privilege that pays not one centavo and that most of them aren’t competent to use wisely anyhow.” (pp 32)

Further, the recruiting sergeant on duty when Rico signs up has no legs and only one arm. Because, he explains:

“… suppose we do make a soldier out of you. Take a look at me – this is what you may buy… If you don’t buy the whole farm and cause your folks to receive a ‘deeply regret’ telegram.” (pp 30)

Exhibit 2:
According to Heinlein, spanking produces well-mannered moral children. After a page or two discussion on the best way to raise puppies – when they make mistakes, scold them, rub their noses in it, and spank them – Rico’s “History & Moral Philosophy” teacher, Mr DuBois, explains that the same methodology should be applied to children. Because not doing this led to the lawlessness of the Twentieth Century:

“Back to these young criminals – They were probably not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes … This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and visciousness…” (pp 101)

Exhibit 3:
Heinlein directly references fascism. Once again, Rico – and thus the reader – is being lectured in “History & Moral Philosophy”. During this, the instructor explains the actual meaning of the vote:

“Force, if you will! – the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.” (pp 155)

The Rods and the Axe, of course, is the fasces, the word from which Mussolini derived the term fascism.

Exhibit 4:
Any society which is authoritarian, elitist, militarist and nationalist fits the characteristics of a fascist state. The Terran Federation as described in Starship Troopers certainly meets that description. As Mussolini himself said, “Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.” True, Rico is in the military and at war, and so his interests are firmly aligned – by training and indoctrination – along the lines demanded by the Terran Federation. But that continues to hold true should he leave the Mobile Infantry, because only someone who has served is part of the political process.

It’s been said that just because Heinlein posits a fascist state in Starship Troopers that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s his own personal politics. For most novels and novelists, this is certainly true – Robert Harris, for example, wrote Fatherland, set in an Europe in which Germany won WWII, but that doesn’t make him a Nazi. But in Fatherland‘s case, Nazi Europe was the setting for the plot. Starship Troopers is not a story, it’s a poorly-disguised lecture. Which suggests to me that Heinlein adheres to the politics described in Starship Troopers.

I have now read Starship Troopers. My opinion on its politics remains unchanged. Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation< is greatly superior to the book.


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Så får vi önska våra lyssnare, god natt och tack för i dag

I saw one of my favourite bands perform live last night, Dark Tranquillity. It’s the fourth time I’ve seen them, and I’ve no intention of it being the last. This time it was the official tour for their latest album, Fiction (I picked it as one of my best albums of the year – see here). Um, we’ve had Fiction, and before that Character… What’s next? Plot? Exposition?

Anyway, while the set obviously focused on material from the new album, they did play songs from earlier releases. Including, for the first time for me, a track from Projector, ‘ThereIn’. They also played a song from their 1995 album, The Gallery. I don’t know of many bands who will happily play old material, and introduce it with “this is what we sounded like ten years ago”.

Anyway, here’s a video from Dark Tranquillity‘s Youtube page for you to enjoy. Or not.


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I Did This So You Don’t Have to

Several months ago, I purchased two 50-movie boxed sets of crap sf films. And no, I don’t know why I did. I have now watched all of the films in the first set, SciFi Classics. First of all, I should point out that not all of the films are actually science fiction. Neither are they all crap. Some are… well, “interesting”. Describing them as “good” might be a bit of a stretch. The quality of transfers was also uniformly bad.

But at 25p per film, I’m not going to complain.

Gamera the Invincible – Gamera is a giant turtle, who can fly. He can withdraw his legs into his shell, and the leg openings become rockets. How he manages to fly forwards when all four rockets are firing is beyond me. Sometimes Gamera is good, sometimes he’s not. In this film, the turtle is a rampaging monster, only prevented from causing total destruction by a small boy who has an empathic link with him.

Hercules Against the Moonmen – what do they call these sorts of films? Spaghetti and sandals epics? Something like that. During the 1960s, Italy churned out thousands of them. In this one, some random bodybuilder plays Hercules. He ends up fighting the evil queen of Samar and her alien allies, the Moonmen. Lots of feats of strength… and strange rock-like monsters which are far too slow to actually catch people… so those being chased by them have to trip or fall so they can be caught and crushed. I’ll admit I’m no expert on Greek mythology, but I don’t recall rock creatures from the Moon in Hercules’ twelve tasks. I suspect the ancient Greeks were right to leave them out.

Assignment: Outer Space – the interestingly named Rik Van Nutter plays a loud American reporter on an assignment aboard a rocket crewed by English-dubbed Italians. When a runaway spaceship threatens to destroy the Earth, he pitches in with the rest. This film’s transfer was so bad, I’d watched half of it before I realised it was supposed to be colour. Interesting production design, though – a mix of Destination Moon and Space: 1999.

Laser Mission – this wasn’t sf by any stretch of the imagination. Brandon Lee stars as a secret agent who must rescue a kidnapped scientist from some African dictator. It’s the sort of film Channel 5 would broadcast on a wet weekday afternoon. Ernest Borgnine was in there somewhere too. I think he was supposed to be Russian. It was hard to tell from the accent he put on. I’m fairly sure the villain was South African, though. Brandon Lee is accompanied by an attractive woman who proves to be an excellent shot and very good at evasive driving. It comes as no surprise to learn she’s a CIA agent sent to assist him on his mission. A mission in which, strangely, no lasers feature…

Cosmos: War of the Planets – ah, now this is the sort of film I was hoping to find when I bought this boxed set. It’s a 1970s Italian sf film, and it’s completely incoherent. The spaceships appeared to be made out of Lego and egg-cartons. The plot is incomprehensible. Star John Richardson thumps his superior and is sent on a mission. Someone has disappeared on a planet, where there are green bald people and a huge robot controlling them. At least I think that’s what it was about. I vaguely recall a sex scene in there somewhere too. One of the green bald men ends up as a crew-member aboard Richardson’s spaceship. Then everyone gets killed. I think.

Destroy All Planets – another Japanese film featuring Gamera the flying rocket-propelled turtle. An alien spaceship attacks Earth, but Gamera sends it on its way. Meanwhile, two boy scouts rewire a miniature submarine so that forwards becomes reverse, etc. The alien spaceship returns, Gamera fights it, and… I lost the plot somewhere about then. It ended up underwater I seem to recall, but I may be mistaken. Gamera destroyed the alien spaceship anyway.

Eegah – a young woman driving through the California desert is confronted by a seven-foot caveman. She returns the next day with her father and boyfriend. The caveman is called Eegah, and he’s played by Richard Kiel (Jaws from James Bond) in one of his earliest film roles. They take Eegah to Palm Springs, but he goes on a rampage and smashes things. So they hunt him down and kill him. Any resemblances to King Kong are probably intentional.

The Astral Factor – also known as Invisible Strangler, because it’s about, well, this invisible bloke who strangles women. A prisoner on death row develops psychic powers, which he uses to make himself invisible. He escapes from prison in order to have his revenge on the five women who testified against him. I’m surprised Stefanie Powers and Elke Sommer haven’t had all copies of this film destroyed. Perhaps they tried – certainly the transfer in this boxed set was terrible. The picture was all scratched and faded, as if it had been dug out of the bottom of a bin.

Battle of the Worlds – oh dear, how the mighty have fallen. Claude Rains stars in this as an astronomer who discovers a planet which is fast approaching Earth. Actually, he doesn’t discover it, although he did predict its appearance. He also predicted the fleet of flying saucers which then attack Earth. What a shame he didn’t predict that his career would come to this. Definitely not the start of a beautiful friendship…

The Brain Machine – there’s this facility somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and a group of volunteers who are having experiments performed on them. And a powerful computer – well, a wall of flashing lights. This is 1977, after all. It all goes badly wrong because one or two of the volunteers are evil, and the experiment itself is pretty unethical. I think a Brain Machine is required to actually watch this film.

Wild Women of Wongo – the boxed set says “SciFi” on the cover, but there’s nothing in this film which qualifies as science fiction. It’s set in some primitive Polynesian village called Wongo. A prince from a neighbouring kingdom visits and asks for help to repel raiders. The king of Wongo refuses. The raiders attack Wongo, but the women manage to escape. They make their way to the neighbouring village, and discover that the raiders have not attacked there. The Wongo women are more attractive than that village’s women; and the men of the village are more handsome than the Wongo men. I suspect this film was more fun to make than it was to watch.

They Came From Beyond Space – the title may sound like the worst kind of B-movie, but this one is actually pretty good. Some meteors have landed in the south of England, but the scientists sent to investigate have begun behaving strangely. One man – an astronomer, American, with a steel plate in his head – suspects foul play. Especially when the scientists recruit more people, put up barbed wire around the meteor site, and all the American’s colleagues and friends start treating him like an enemy of the state. It’s aliens, apparently – they’re using mind control. They have a giant rocket underneath a pond, and they use it to send enslaved humans to the Moon to help fix their spaceship which crashed there. Despite the silly plot, this is actually a good Sunday afternoon sf film.

Prehistoric Women – a bunch of prehistoric women – well, women in make-up and furs – overpower and enslave their men. But one man escapes. He discovers fire and returns to use it to drive off a giant pterodactyl which has been attacking the tribe. As a result, the women release their men as they can’t all be bad. So if your relationship is in trouble, all you have to do is fight off a giant pterodactyl…

The Phantom Planet – this one started quite well. A rogue planet has entered the Solar System, so a rocket is sent to investigate. But it crashes on the planet. Which is actually quite small. One of the crew survives and discovers… a race of tiny people. They even shrink him to their size so he can talk to them and fall in love with the daughter of the leader of the little people and save the day, etc. Apparently the tiny people can steer their planet too, but they still live in caves. Any sufficiently advanced technology, I suppose, is indistinguishable from authorial bollocks.

More films to follow in another post…


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Bargain of the Month

I was in a charity shop a couple of days ago, and I saw a copy of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, the first book of the Raj Quartet, for sale. I thought I’d have a go at reading it – I have vague memories of the television series, and I suspected I’d enjoy the book.

Then I spotted the other three novels – The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils – and decided to get the entire Quartet.

Then I saw the price. Paperbacks 69p. And it was also “buy one get one free.”

The entire Raj Quartet for £1.38.

Result.


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An Unexpected Challenge

The last Friday of the month, and the sf group decided to have a literary evening for the monthly meeting. We had to take along something we’d read in the last six months which impressed us. This proved harder than I’d thought it would be. The most impressive books I read during 2007 were rereads (my 2007 reading challenge). And while some others might have fit the bill, they didn’t do so in a way that I could get across by reading out a short excerpt. Besides, most sf writers aren’t great stylists, so there’s not much that’s going to wow people at a sentence-level.

After much thought, I picked a short story by Keith Roberts: ‘The Lake of Tuonela’. It was first published in 1973 in New Writings in SF 23, edited by Kenneth Bulmer, although I’d read it in Roberts’ collection, The Grain Kings. I chose the story because I think it has some lovely prose in it. It’s not Roberts’ best-known story – that would be ‘Weihnachtsabend’ – but I feel it is a better one.

Mathis is a member of the Terran colony on Xerxes. Although the Terrans (Brits in all but name) have only been on the world for a generation, the technology they have brought has completely changed the natives’ way of life. For example, the ancient and extensive canal network they previously used for transport has fallen into disuse. And the culture of the Boatmen, or Kalti, who lived and worked on the canals is in danger of disappearing.

Mathis gets permission to traverse the continent by canal boat – to both experience the Kalti culture firsthand, and to demonstrate that the canals are still viable. The trip is not a success, although Mathis finds himself at peace for the first time at its conclusion.

Obviously, I can’t quote the entire story, much as I would like to. However, here are a couple of very short extracts. This first one describes the entrance to the canal tunnel system beneath the Antiel range:

The opening itself was horseshoe-shaped, its throat densely black. From fifty yards he smelled its breath, ancient, and chill. Mathis rubbed his face, then swung to the cabin top to start the generator.

This was the Tunnel of Hy Antiel.

This next one is within the tunnel, through which they travel for two days:

For some time now a deeper roar had been growing in intensity. He saw its source finally; a curtain of clear water, sparkling as it fell from the roof. At its base the surface boiled and rippled, throwing up wavering banks of brownish foam.

This was the fourth airshaft he had seen.

Roberts’ description of the canal boat’s journey through the long tunnel of Hy Antiel to the titular lake is very effective. He manages to evoke both the claustrophobia of the tunnel and the boredom of travelling through unrelenting darkness. When the boat enters the lake, Roberts successfully evokes both its great age and the marvel of its construction.

Like Paul Park’s Coelestis (see here), I would call ‘The Lake of Tuonela’ post-colonial science fiction. There is that same sense of Empire’s fading light, as sensitivity to other cultures begins to chip away at the ruthless expediencies of keeping an empire running. And, in common with many British sf stories and novels of the 1960s and 1970s, there is a considered and literate feel to the prose. Mathis, for instance, does not gurn or grimace. His emotional state is not told to the reader; it is instead conveyed through his thoughts, actions, and dialogue.

I don’t know that I’ve done ‘The Lake of Tuonela’ much justice in this post. Judging by the sf group’s reactions, I don’t know that I did it much justice at the meeting. But perhaps that’s just me. It’s an excellent story, and worth seeking out.

This is unrelated to Keith Roberts’ story but… the day after the meeting, I received an email telling me a message was waiting for moderation on the writing group mailing list. The subject was “glasshouse”, which was the title of the book (Charles Stross’ Glasshouse) I was reading and had had with me at the sf group meeting. Except the message was… spam.

They’re getting fiendishly clever those spambots, you know…


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Award Frenzy

Gosh. I’ve been a member of the British Science Fiction Association for nearly twenty years. And… they’ve just announced their shortlist for the 2007 BSFA Awards. Plenty of others have already repeated the lists below, and/or commented on it. But I thought I’d do it anyway.

Best Novel:

Pretty much all of the above I’d planned to read anyway. The Execution Channel and The Prefect I’ve already read. My sister gave me Black Man for Christmas, and I bought her Alice in Sunderland. The rest… I suppose I’ll have to buy copies before Eastercon. I was going to buy them anyway.

Could this be the first time I’ll have actually read all of the BSFA shortlisted novels before the award is handed out? I’m not sure what that says about the sf novels published in 2007. Normally, I’ve heard of every title on the shortlist, but there are one or two I’ve no desire to read.

Best Short Fiction:

And, bizarrely, I have all of the stories on this shortlist except Ian Whates’, which was published online anyway. I suspect Chiang will win, although I thought ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ was weak for him. But that may have been because I read it after finishing Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare.

And uniquely this year, there is also:

BSFA Fiftieth Anniversary Award: Best Novel of 1958:

I believe I’ve actually read all of these, although many years ago. Three of them, I notice, are in the SF Masterworks series – A Case of Conscience, Non-Stop and A Clash of Cymbals (as part of the Cities in Flight omnibus).

Having seen what else was published that year (see here), I think the best was shortlisted. I mean, half a dozen pseudonymous novels by Robert Silverberg, and the same number under his own name… Eric Frank Russell’s The Space Willies (!)… The Languages of Pao is not one of Jack Vance’s best. Mind you, Equator is one of my favourite Brian Aldiss novels – it’s a fun sf thriller with little or no pretensions. It’d probably make a great film. Wilson Tucker’s The Lincoln Hunters was, I thought, well-regarded, although I’ve never read it. Given some of the names on the BSFA list of eligible novels, I suspect there are either a few hidden gems there (Edward Eager? Hugh Walters? Mervyn Jones?), or a lot of deservedly obscure novels. Now, there’s a reading challenge for another year…

Update: Interzone have now made Alastair Reynolds’ ‘The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter’ available on-line, so I’ve added the link.


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Had To Think Twice Before Posting This…

As I grew older, I always expected my taste in music to mellow. In fact, it’s done the opposite. At age eleven, I was listening to ELO and the Eagles; now, I listen to death metal – bands such as Opeth, Dark Tranquillity, Morbid Angel, Mithras, etc. I also go to metal gigs (I’m off to see Dark Tranquillity for the fourth time in a couple of weeks), and last year I went to my first metal festival (and I’m going again this year).

But.

There is one genre of extreme metal whose appeal completely escapes me: gore metal or gore-grind. I just don’t get it. The bands have silly obscene names, the album titles are also obscene (and the album artwork is worse), and the lyrics would probably be highly offensive if you could actually make out what the singer is saying.

I need only give the names of a few gore-grind bands in illustration…

WARNING: don’t click on the links if you’re faint of heart or easily offended.

(PS: normal service will be resumed shortly on this blog.)


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The Inaugural Post of the 2008 Reading Challenge

Bah. It seemed like a good idea. There are plenty of highly-regarded writers I’ve yet to read, so why not pick a dozen of them to try during 2008? Not contemporary authors, but a mix of classic and early Twentieth Century.

This is not as much of a break from my usual reading habits as previous entries on this blog might suggest. I’m a big fan of Lawrence Durrell (as should be obvious from this) and Anthony Burgess (and this). I also like a great deal the works of Nicholas Monsarrat, Helen Simpson and David Lodge. When I lived in the United Arab Emirates, I was a member of the Daly Community Library – in fact, I joined it during my first week there. Since the Library had only a small selection of sf novels, I was forced to widen my reading. Abu Dhabi was not well-served by book shops, either. All Prints seemed to buy in new stock only once a year. Isam Bookshop sold just remaindered books – as a result, while there were quite a few sf titles, they weren’t very good ones. And Al Mutanabbi Bookshop sold chiefly text books. Paperbacks were expensive too, typically costing amost double their Pound Sterling RRP.

Since returning to the UK, science fiction has continued to be my first choice of reading material. But I also read a lot of mainstream fiction. Unfortunately, as I now read mostly books that I purchase, I tend to stick to authors I have already read, and only really try new authors within sf. Hence this year’s challenge…

Anyway, I’ve so far picked up books by Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, DH Lawrence, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf… And the first book I chose to read for my 2008 challenge was… The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

I suppose it was a bit of a cheat, given that I’ve seen the film. My previous experiences of reading novels from which films were adapted hadn’t been entirely successful. Marnie by Winston Graham and The Commitments by Roddy Doyle spring to mind: I liked the films a great deal but didn’t enjoy the novels.

And so it was with The Talented Mr Ripley.

In fact, other than the unconventionality of having a sociopath as the protagonist, there’s little that strikes me as especially noteworthy about The Talented Mr Ripley. Highsmith seemed to want to suggest there’s an inevitability to Ripley’s murders, as if the story is a tragedy. But there was nothing I saw that’s unavoidable about them. Even Ripley’s self-justifications fail to convince on that note – he spends very little time on the reasons for the killings, and a great deal more on how he plans to profit from them.

That’s perhaps the chief weakness of The Talented Mr Ripley. The story is Ripley. It stands or falls as Ripley as a character stands or falls. Of course, he’s an unsympathetic protagonist – a sociopath and an opportunistic killer. But is it his character, or Highsmith’s skill in depicting it, which keeps you reading? I suspect it’s merely a desire to see how it all comes out in the end. You expect Ripley to be caught and to pay for his crimes… but you also have a feeling he’ll get away with it. It’s that seesawing expectation which pulls you along to the story’s climax. And as plot-engines go, it’s not a very powerful one.

In some respects, The Talented Mr Ripley is not unlike an episode of Star Trek – no matter what happens, you have to end with the principals safe and sound for next week’s installment. Ignoring the fact that Highsmith did write more Ripley books, you still get that same feeling throughout The Talented Mr Ripley. It’s as if she decided early on that he’s too good a character to throw over a waterfall.

Ah well. Perhaps I started The Talented Mr Ripley with too high an expectation. The film promised more than the book delivered. I should know better, of course. We’ll have to see what happens with February’s choice…


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The Naming of Parts

Call it what it is.

Science fiction: that genre of literature spawned from the community of writers and readers based about the magazine Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. Often abbreviated to sf, but never to sci-fi.

Sci-fi is considered a pejorative by science fiction fans. Perhaps because it’s used to put down sf works by some outside the genre. It might well be time we claimed the term back for ourselves.

It’s not speculative fiction. All fiction, irrespective of genre, is essentially speculative. Calling something speculative fiction (or spec fic) is just a feeble attempt at disguising its true nature. Why be embarrassed about enjoying science fiction? You can call them pommes frites, but they’re still bloody chips.