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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.


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The Survival of Artistic Modes…

In an interview at Focus on Science Fiction and Fantasy, author Jack Campbell (AKA John G Hemry) says: “I think SF has a good future as long as it doesn’t take itself too seriously. By that I mean it has to remain focused on telling the story, rather than trying to be Literary.”

Which is where I do my impression of Ben Kingsley from Sexy Beast (here: warning – not for the easily offended or faint of heart.)

Rather than refuse to take itself seriously, science fiction needs to grow up. The word “literary” (capitalised or not) is not an insult, and should not be used as such. It is an aspiration. As long as sf continues to trivialise itself and its ambitions, then it will be seen as the province of children and sad nerds in anoraks. And that’s an image those of us who are serious about the genre having been trying to throw off for decades.

Just because mainstream critics and readers sneer at science fiction, that’s no reason for reverse snobbery. That’s no reason to take the complaints levelled at sf by mainstream critics and proudly claim them as the genre’s defining characteristics. We shouldn’t celebrate crap characterisation. We shouldn’t claim that lumpen “transparent” prose is superior to any other form. We shouldn’t privilege “idea” because it’s unique to the genre – and so that’s a competition we’ll always “win”. Neither should we privilege world-building, just because that’s an area in which we’ve had so much more practice…

I’m not saying we should dispense with story, or no longer consider it important. But neither should other aspects of fiction be ignored. Science fiction is not exempt from the rules of good fiction. If anything, it’s harder to do well because there is so much more which must be done well to succeed.

Also, it’s not about the genre surviving. Genres evolve, and that’s how they survive. It has nothing to do with taxonomy, or what letters publishers put on the spine of a novel. It’s about individual works surviving. A century from now, will people still be reading supermarket bestsellers? Or will they be reading the “serious” works? The history of literature so far suggests the latter. I don’t see any penny-dreadfuls still in print… but Dune is, 42 years after its first publication.

Science fiction is capable of so much more than trivial action-adventure tales dressed up with spaceships, aliens and robots. Why limit ourselves? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of sf? That there are no limits?


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Last of the Favourites Challenge – Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany

People either love or hate Dhalgren. This is not all together surprising – it’s an experimental novel, it’s pornographic in parts, and it’s only peripherally science fiction. On its publication in 1975, some sf commentators hated and condemned it. Harlan Ellison said, “When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do… I was supposed to review it for the L.A. Times, got 200 pages into it and threw it against a wall.” (Ellison hating it is a good reason to like the book, if you ask me.) And yet Dhalgren proved to be Delany’s biggest-selling novel, finding a huge audience outside the genre.

The plot, what little of it there is, is simple: a young man who cannot remember his name enters the city of Bellona. Some catastrophe has taken place there, and only there, reducing the city to a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland. In this wasteland live a few hundred anarchic survivors. There is a commune of do-gooders in the park, gangs of scorpions roaming the streets, and Roger Calkins, publisher of the Bellona Times freesheet, lording over it all from his walled mansion. The young man – who is quickly named Kidd, the Kid, or Kid – meets various of Bellona’s residents. He helps the Richards move apartments. They are trying to continue their lives as if everything were normal, but it’s proving very difficult. Kid enters into a relationship with harmonica-playing Lanya. Eventually, he ends up as the leader of a nest of scorpions. And he becomes a poet, and has a book of poetry published by Calkins.

The prose operates at a very detailed level, with almost every itch, breath, or passing thought documented. Occasionally, it’s clumsy. Sometimes, it’s serviceable. Mostly, it’s good, but never quite brilliant. The characters are, by their very nature, chiefly ciphers. Bellona itself is probably the best drawn character in the novel. Some of the cast are merely mouthpieces. The prize-winning poet, Ernest Newboy, for example. The name itself is a giveaway. At several points in Dhalgren, Newboy discusses poetry with Kid – both the writing of it and people’s responses to it. I haven’t read enough of Delany’s non-fiction to spot if Newboy is reiterating Delany’s own theories. I doubt it, because Newboy’s theories are pompous twaddle. For instance, he tells an anecdote about how his appreciation of two writers was changed by personally meeting them. The work of one he found bland and dull, but after interviewing the writer, revised his opinion – he could now hear the author’s voice when he read, and what was anodyne he now saw was ironic and incisive. And vice versa for another writer, whose work he had always admired, but found near unreadable after getting to know the author. It’s complete and utter rubbish, of course. You might as well expect a soap opera star to behave in real life the same as the character they play on television…

Dhalgren is only peripherally science fiction. No explanation is given for the catastrophe which has befallen Bellona. The various hints Delany gives are not rational – a second moon in the night sky, a day when a vast sun fills the sky, the way the city seems to randomly change, the unreliable nature of time within the city… I’ve seen it suggested that much of this can be explained through Kid being schizophrenic. But there are other sfnal elements in the novel. The scorpions are so called because they wear holographic “light shields”. These were initially holograms of scorpions, although by the time Kid arrives in Bellona they’re all manner of colourful and mythical creatures. This use of science fiction ideas, without the underlying process, is what angered some sf commentators – Delany was breaking the “rules”.

But it’s not just the “rules” of science fiction that are broken in Dhalgren. Many of the “rules” of fiction are also carefully broken. The voice is third person, but occasionally lapses into first person. The final section “The Anathemata: A Plague Journal”, is presented with interlinear comments, and in parts reads like an edited manuscript. Kid’s character too is very different to that presented in the rest of the novel. The novel’s opening line, “… to wound the autumnal city” is actually the latter half of the novel’s last line. The narrative’s chronology is confused and confusing – Kid loses entire days at a time, and yet the novel’s timeline never quite adds up.

One of the interesting aspects of Dhalgren is not that you find something new every time you read the book, but that you consider the book itself anew. Each reread changes how you think about the novel as a whole. This time, I found many of the characters less appealing than I’d remembered. Newboy was a pompous arse, astronaut Captain Kamp (based on Buzz Aldrin? in places, he seemed to be) was patronising, George Harrison was almost a caricature, and most of the scorpions were unlikeable yobs. And yet, on this read, I learnt something new about Dhalgren: it is filled with references to Greek and Roman myths. Such as the opening scene, in which Kid has sex with a woman and then visits a grotto and finds a strange chain of prisms and lens – a reference to Daphne. In many parts of the novel, Kid’s story references that of Apollo. Dhalgren is more myth than literature, and in some respects its construction reflects that.

I still find the novel fascinating. There’s something primal in the story which appeals to me. As post-apocalyptic novel, it’s completely different to George R Stewart’s Earth Abides. Dhalgren is never dull. It hasn’t even dated, because it’s one of those sf novels – like van Vogt’s Undercover Aliens – which carries the time it was written around with it, irrespective of, and in addition to, the time in which the story is set.

So, that’s it – I read one of my favourite science fiction novels in each month of 2007. I’m glad I did. It went something like this…

January: Undercover Aliens, AE van Vogt (1950)
This one remains a favourite. Every time I read it, it never disappoints – perhaps because it has no pretensions, so my expectations are always met. It’s a lot of fun.

February: The Ophiuchi Hotline, John Varley (1977)
Whereas this one did disappoint a little. This time, I found the characterisation thinner than I’d remembered it, and the multiple copies of Lilo a little unnecessary. There are still a lot of great ideas in the book, though – even if the best one is thrown away in the last couple of pages. All the same, it’ll stay a favourite.

March: Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick (1991)
The first one to get demoted. I remember being blown away when I first read Stations of the Tide back in the early 1990s. Sadly, I wasn’t this time. Refusing to name the protagonist now seemed like a gimmick, parts of the story were lifted straight from a Southern Gothic, and the sections set in the Puzzle Palace were confused and confusing. A very good book, yes; but not a favourite any more.

April: Where Time Winds Blow, Robert Holdstock (1981)
I was in two minds about this one. The central conceit – Kriakta Rift, where strange winds blow through time, depositing unknowable artefacts from past and future – is a stunning invention. The central triumvirate of characters are handled with skill and compassion. But. But. But. It’s that last section, where the time winds are “explained”. It sort of spoiled it for me. On balance, however, I think it remains a favourite – because the first three-quarters overshadow the final quarter.

May: Soldier, Ask Not, Gordon R Dickson (1967)
Another book gets relegated. I bunged this one on the list to make it up to twelve, and chose it chiefly from fond memories of the trilogy and a recollection that this was the best of the three. And so it is. Unfortunately, those fond memories were a little rosier than I’d guessed. Dickson seemed more concerned with his historical theories than he was with his story, and the end result reads like a pulp sf action-adventure tale wrapped around some oddball lecture.

June: Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
This novel was once described to me as “a beautiful book badly written, or a bad book beautifully written”. The remark impressed me at the time – I was a callow youth then. Kairos is actually neither. Like many literary sf novels, there are sparkles of beauty and brilliance in its prose. But more than that, it is tightly plotted and the characterisation is superb. The story unfolds with the same remorselessness with which the eponymous drug unravels the world of the story. A favourite it is and a favourite it shall remain.

July: Against A Dark Background, Iain M Banks (1993)
Like Undercover Aliens, this one appeals because it’s fun. And every time I read it, it’s still fun. Not content with charging headlong through space opera tropes, Banks also subverts the standard fantasy quest template. Each time Sharrow wins a new plot coupon, she goes and loses it or has it taken from her. And yet Against A Dark Background is not in the least bit a frustrating read. Still a favourite.

August: Metrophage, Richard Kadrey (1988)
I’ve maintained for many years that the publication of Metrophage locked and bolted the door on cyberpunk. There was nothing more that needed to be said. Neal Stephenson’s piss-take of cyberpunk, Snow Crash, was only a bit of fancy icing on the cake – all sugary colour and no substance. And yet, rereading Metrophage, it occurred to me that what Kadrey had actually done – as I wrote in my original post on the book – was fold cyberpunk back into science fiction. Still a great novel, still a favourite.

September: Coelestis, Paul Park (1995)
There’s no doubt in my mind about this one. Each time I read it, it impresses me more. It stays a favourite.

October: Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
I had to add two titles to my original list to make it a year’s worth of reading. And while I’ve read Dune many times, and enjoyed it each time, I’ve never really held the book in high enough regard to consider it a favourite. For one thing, it’s the start of a series, but not the strongest book in that series. But I decided to add it to my favourites challenge and… my opinion on it remains unchanged. I read it, I enjoyed it, I’ll likely read it again. I like Frank Herbert’s writing a great deal… but he’s written better books than Dune, and has written books with better writing in them than in Dune… Unfortunately, the Duniverse overshadows all his other creations. For the time-being, Dune will remain on the list. But at the bottom, ready to be relegated should another sf novel really take my fancy.

November: Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990)
I’d forgotten how good this novel really was. I’d remembered the too-pat ending, though. But that’s minor. An engaging heroine, a clever homage to pulp sf, and some lovely prose. This books deserves to back in print. It remains a favourite.

December: Dhalgren, Samuel Delany (1975)
See above. Yes, Dhalgren remains a favourite.

So there you have it. Of the twelve books, two didn’t make the grade, and one is ripe for relegation. I still have that list of also-rans, which I may work my way through. Having said that, the few from it I did read last year weren’t good enough for promotion. But then the list was chiefly put together from nostalgia, which is never a good indicator…


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One Year Ends…

… and another one begins.

2007 was a bit of a mixed bag. Book-wise, I read 175 books, but bought more. Both figures are up on last year. I need to spend less money on eBay. Mind you, I’ve been saying that for years. However, new to 2007 were books on the Apollo programme and mediaeval Arabic literature. Hopefully, those two “enthusiasms” should keep me going through 2008, and so limit my book purchasing…

Of those 175 books read, around half were science fiction. Brian Aldiss and Lawrence Durrell tied as most-read authors (5 books each), closely followed by Eric Brown with 4 books. Actually, Alan Moore was most-read, but that was graphic novels (11, in fact). Prior to 2007, all I’d read by Moore was Watchmen (excellent) and Batman: Killing Joke (meh). But last year I discovered Tom Strong, and loved it. Other authors new to me in 2007 were John Jarmain (see here and here) and Leigh Brackett. I can’t read more of the former – I’ve read everything of his that has been published – but I will read more Brackett. There were other writers new to me, but those two are the notables ones.

On the music front… myself and a friend, Craig, resolved in January last year to attend one gig a month during 2007. That plan fell flat – the first band we saw live was Mostly Autumn in April. But by the end of the year, I’d managed seven gigs and a metal festival. Not counting those at the festival, here are all the bands I saw perform in 2007: Glow, Mostly Autumn, Ted Maul, Cephalic Carnage, Akercocke, Kramer, Blind Ego, Pallas, Engel, Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir, Sonic Syndicate, Caliban, Dark Tranquillity, Soilwork, Ella, Fell Silent, The Final Sigh, Opinicus, Asuras, Coliseum, Pelican and High on Fire. The festival was Bloodstock Open Air… and I enjoyed it so much I’ve already booked tickets for 2008.

Films – since leaving the United Arab Emirates in 2002, I’ve been really crap about visiting the cinema. Admittedly, it was easy there. I lived around the corner from the best cinema in the city, and finished work at 3 o’clock, so it was easy to catch the afternoon showing. I usually had the auditorium to myself, too. With the exception of The Golden Compass, seen at a cinema in Leeds on 23 December, every film I watched in 2007 was on DVD or telly. Last year, I also became a fan of the films of Elia Suleiman, Werner Herzog and Ingmar Bergman.

I started writing short stories again in 2007. Not many – I was never prolific. In fact, that’s one of my resolutions for 2008 – be more prolific. One story racked up five rejections – including the dumbest rejection ever. Another one… I’ve still not heard back from the magazine. Fingers crossed. I also had a bash at poetry in 2007. Not something I’ve ever done before. One last buff and polish, and I think I’ll submit it somewhere this year. And, of course, there’s the novel… (It’s almost done, John.) Book two of a trilogy, and better than the first one, I think. Could this be the year? If I kick the writing into high gear, then perhaps it might be…


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Challenges

My 2007 reading challenge was to read one of my favourite sf novels each month. Done that. (I’m currently in the middle of Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren, the last of the twelve, but I’ll have it finished by the end of December.) For 2008, I thought about doing the same for my favourite non-sf novels… except I couldn’t think of twelve favourite mainstream books. There’s The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell… The Master Mariner, Nicholas Monsarrat… How Far Can You Go?, David Lodge… The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe… and… Gah. That’s about it. There are others I’d like to reread – Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers, for example – but I don’t know that I like them enough to call them a favourite.

So, I came up with a different cunning plan. In 2008, each month I will read a book by a classic and/or literary author I have not read. (This is where bookmooch has come in really useful.) So far, I have Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Highsmith, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. I also want to try, but have yet to pick up books by, Ayn Rand, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis. And, er, someone else. I suspect that list might change as the year progresses.

Sometime during 2008, I also might try watching one of my favourite films each night over a fortnight. Science fiction one month, non-sf the next month. And these films would be:

Alien, dir. Ridley Scott [1979]
Delicatessen, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro [1991]
Brazil, dir. Terry Gilliam [1984]
Dune, dir. David Lynch [1985]
Fahrenheit 451, dir. Francois Truffaut [1966]
Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow, dir. Kerry Conran [2004]
Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky [1972]
Star Trek: the Motion Picture, dir. Robert Wise [1979]
Until the End of the World, dir. Wim Wenders [1991]
Starship Troopers, dir. Paul Verhoeven [1997]

Divine Intervention, dir. Elia Suleiman [2002]
To Catch A Thief, dir. Alfred Hitchcock [1954]
Sliding Doors, dir. Peter Hewitt [1997]
Man Bites Dog, dir. Belvoir, Bonzel & Poelvoorde [1992]
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, dir. Tom Stoppard [1990]
Das Boot, dir. Wolfgang Petersen [1985]
Lawrence of Arabia, dir. David Lean [1962]
No End, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski [1984]
The Right Stuff, dir. Philip Kaufman [1983]
Leningrad Cowboys Go America, dir. Aki Kaurismäki [1989]

Oh, and I have to read at least one book from space books collection each month, and review it on my other blog.


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The Year in Question: 2007

best adj. those albums, films or books I enjoyed, appreciated or admired the most during the year

It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the books I read, the films I watched, and the albums I bought and listened to. And then I pick the best five from each medium. For me, one of the interesting aspects of this exercise is that each year I find myself picking some authors, directors or bands new to me – proving that I’m not solely focused on stuff that I know I like.

For example, of this year’s five books, four authors were new to me – and two of them sparked off “enthusiasms” (which is what I call it when I find myself buying loads of books on a subject because I’ve found that initial book so fascinating). After reading The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, I went and bought a bunch of books on mediaeval Arabic literature. And Moondust rekindled my boyhood interest in the Space Race, leading to the purchase of several autobiographies by astronauts…
Music too includes two bands new to me in 2007. New to everyone, in fact. It’s their debuts that I’ve chosen on my best of the year. And in films, only one is by a director whose work I like a great deal. I watched the others because of their story… although one not only was picked as a best of the year but also became a favourite film.

Books
Ascent, Jed Mercurio (2007)
A review of this in a daily newspaper piqued my interest – a novel about a cosmonaut in which, the reviewer complained, the level of detail was so dense it made the book a difficult read. The subject matter appealed to me, and the reviewer’s comments reminded of a complaint often levelled at science fiction by mainstream critics. So I bought a copy of Ascent, read it, thought it very good, and decided it was indeed science fiction and that the reviewer in the newspaper was a bit of a twit. I blogged about it here.

Moondust, Andrew Smith (2005)
I freely admit I was a space nut when I was a kid. I had posters of astronauts and launch vehicles on my bedroom walls. Around the age of 11, I discovered science fiction, and my interest in real spacemen began to wane. However, reading Ascent reminded me of that childhood interest. I dug out the few non-fiction books on the subject I still owned, and then went hunting for more recent works. And found Moondust. This is not a book about the Apollo programme, or the Space Race; it is a book about the nine surviving men (of the original twelve) who walked on the Moon. It is about how that experience changed them, and how they coped – or failed to do so – on their return. It’s also about how we feel about those men and their achievements. In one telling scene in the book, Smith goes to see Dick Gordon (Apollo 12 CMP) at a Star Trek convention. Gordon is sat alone in a corner of the signing room, while long queues stretch before the tables of TV actors. Gordon, a man who really went to the Moon, is ignored. I know which person’s signature I would treasure more…

The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, Robert Irwin (1999)
I bought this on a whim – saw it on the shelves of my local Waterstone’s while I was looking for a copy of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, and decided to buy it. I had no idea what to expect. Like most people (I suspect), my idea of classical Arabic literature meant… 1001 Nights. And that’s despite growing up in the Middle East. I soon learnt there is a wealth of literature from the mediaeval Arab world, mostly epic poems. Irwin’s commentary is entertaining and educational. As mentioned earlier, after reading this book, I hunted down some more books on the subject. I also read The Middle East by Bernard Lewis shortly afterwards, to get a better idea of the historical context.

Sea-Kings of Mars, Leigh Brackett (2005)
This collection is No. 47 in the Fantasy Masterworks series – which is odd, because Brackett writes science fiction. It’s a type of sf no longer popular – planetary romance. I think that will change soon, however – if only because of the John Carter of Mars film currently in pre-production at Pixar. Whatever the future of swashbuckling amongst ancient ruins on Mars or the jungles of Venus, Brackett was the best writer to work in planetary romance, and this collection contains all her best works. Brackett was a better writer than her choice of material suggests, and it shows in these tales.

The first four picks for this list were easy. The fifth one was… Well, I reread my favourite sf novels during the year, but they don’t count. I also read a lot of very good novels – L Timmel Duchamp’s Alanya to Alanya, Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect, Eric Brown’s Starship Summer, M John Harrison’s Nova Swing, Emil Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers… but I can’t pick one above the others. So instead, I’ll finish up with two excellent anthologies:-

The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (2007)
Does just what it says on the tin. Admittedly, New Space Opera is no longer new, and at least one story in this anthology fits no known definition of space opera (the Kage Baker one; and she can’t do Brit characters, either), but this is still a strong anthology with some good stuff.

Text: Ur, Forrest Aguirre (2007)
This is allegedly a themed anthology, although the only common link between the stories that I could see was that they were mostly experimental. And, as is the nature of experiments, some succeeded and some failed. Toiya Kristen Finlay’s ‘The Avatar of Background Noise’ was probably one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read this year.

Albums
Martriden – Martriden (2006)
Although death metal arguably began in the US, I’m not that big a fan of the US style – well, except for Morbid Angel and Nile. I much prefer the North European variety. Martriden, however, are a bit different. There’s some NWOBHM and some progressive metal mixed in with their melodic death metal. This debut EP is only 4 tracks, but I’m looking forward to the album (The Unsettling Dark, due for release in March 2008).

The Lucifer Principle – Pitch Black Dawn (2007)
A new Dutch band, The Lucifer Principle play NWOBHM-influenced death metal. There are some great tracks here: ‘Soul Saviour Throat Cut’ has some excellent shredding, and ‘Burn’ goes funky in the middle eight. It didn’t take long for this album to become a favourite.

Fall of the Leafe – Aerolithe (2007)
They split up. Bah. Fall of the Leafe release this great album, and six months later they disband. I can understand why they were an acquired taste, and perhaps not all that popular. But I liked their extreme metal-influenced sort of goth Finnish metal, and this last album was their best to date. Since it seems every band on the planet is reforming at the moment, perhaps they’ll decide to get back together. I hope so.

Dark Tranquillity – Fiction (2007)
The last three albums from Gothenberg stalwarts Dark Tranquillity had been… a little disappointing. Fiction is a welcome return to form. Many of the songs are a little… unsettling, inasmuch as they don’t progress in quite the way you’d expect. In some respects that makes Fiction a more experimental and progressive album that it first appears. The band have said they deliberately retrenched when it came to writing Fiction. Which makes the final result even more remarkable.

Mithras – Behind the Shadows Lie Madness (2007)
This band’s last album was in my top five last year, and this year’s release is even better than that one. There’s more spacey ambient strangeness, more insane drumming and guitarwork. The most annoying thing about this band is that it only has two members, and they’ve yet to settle on a line-up for live perfomance. I’d go see them if they toured. I think they should tour.

Some honorable mentions:
NahemaH – The Second Philosophy (2006)
When an album by a band I’ve never heard of features a sticker quoting resemblances to Opeth and Dark Tranquillity, there’s no way I’m not going to buy it. Except, NahemaH don’t actually resemble either of those two bands. So when I first listened to The Second Philosophy, I was disappointed. But I kept returning to the CD because I suspected it would be a grower. And so it was. A couple of months after purchasing it, it became a favourite.

Rotting Christ – Theogonia (2007)
These Greeks play a fierce style of black metal that sounds somewhat similar to old-style Swedish death metal acts like Bloodbath. I’m not a big fan of black metal but this album I thought was excellent from the first listen – aggressive and otherworldly.

Rise to Addiction – A New Shade of Black for the Soul (2007)
I saw these live at Bloodstock, and they gave one of the best performances of the weekend. The album is heavy groove metal, with some excellent guitarwork, infectious riffs and anthemic choruses.

Films
Divine Intervention (dir. Elia Suleiman, 2002)
See here for all you need to know about this film.

Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
I read the PD James novel on which this film is based many years ago, and was not impressed. James’ ridiculous protestations that it wasn’t sf impressed me even less. But Cuaron has turned an ordinary book into an excellent film. The opening scene is indeed a shocker, but unlike Swordfish (which also features a shocking explosion in the opening minutes) Children of Men does not turn into some sort of implausible wish-fulfilment action-adventure. It’s a solid gritty near-future film that transcends its origins.

The Prestige (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006)
Here’s another book I read when it was published. But then I’ve been a fan of Priest’s writing since the publication of The Glamour. But when I first read The Prestige, it never occurred to me that it was filmable. Christopher Nolan, however, has managed it. Some of the subtlety of the novel might have been lost, but this is still an excellent film.

Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2006)
I’ve always enjoyed Verhoeven’s films. And yes, Starship Troopers is a great film. Hollow Man, which followed it, wasn’t as good. When I heard Verhoeven had returned to the Netherlands to make a film, I guessed I wasn’t the only one hoping we’d see a return to the Verhoeven of The Fourth Man, Soldier of Orange and Katie Tippel. Black Book is perhaps not as good as those three titles, but it’s pure Verhoeven through and through. And Carice van Houten is superb in the lead role. There’s none of that Hollywood silliness, either.

Fahrenheit 451 (dir. Francois Truffaut, 1966)
And conversely, I’m hardly a fan of Truffaut – I found both Jules et Jim and Les Quatre Cents Coups somewhat dull. I’m not a big fan of Ray Bradbury’s fiction either, and have never really understood his great popularity. And yet, I thought this film was superb. I only bought it because it was going cheap in a sale, I’d never seen it, and it’s considered one of the great sf films of the 1960s. And when I watched it, this happened.

An honorable mention:
From the Earth to the Moon (1998)
It’s not a film, it’s a miniseries. About the Apollo programme. I’d never seen it before, but bought it because of my newly rekindled interest in the Space Race. Each episode covers an Apollo mission, but the writers have cleverly found a story set in and about it. This is no documentary, it’s proper drama. But it is also technically accurate.


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Having Plenty – Rereading Favourites, November 2007

It’s been a fun exercise rereading a favourite sf novel each month this year, although there have been disappointments. But there have also been pleasant surprises – such as Colin Greenland‘s Take Back Plenty.

I remember the buzz when the novel was published back in 1990. It “reinvented” space opera. Arguably Iain M Banks had done that three years earlier with Consider Phlebas, but Take Back Plenty was different. Colin Greenland‘s novel was a reworking of – and homage to – pulp sf tropes. Mars was habitable and had canals. Venus was habitable and had jungles. There were aliens everywhere.

Certainly the book was successful. It won both 1990’s BSFA Award and 1991’s Arthur C Clarke Award.

In brief, Take Back Plenty is the story of Tabitha Jute, captain and sole crew of the barge Alice Liddell. While on Mars, she inadvertently causes a near-riot, and is subsequently fined by the authorities. She doesn’t have the money to pay the fine. Fortunately, she meets up with Marco Metz, leader of the cabaret act Contraband, and he contracts her to take him and his band to Titan. First, they stop off at Plenty, an alien artefact orbiting Earth. It had been built by the alien Frasque, but they’d been booted out of the Solar System by the Capellans – highly advanced aliens who’d bootstrapped humanity into space, and now kept everyone sealed within the orbit of Pluto.

Of course, Contraband isn’t really a cabaret act and Tabitha is forced to flee Plenty with the members of the band. They crash-land on Venus, are rescued by pirates, and then delivered to the Capellans. And to say anymore would give away the novel’s resolution.

I’d forgotten how good the writing is in Take Back Plenty. Here’s part of the description of Venus:

“The coral reefs of Erebus rise in great jagged spires from the sticky sea. Etched, eroded ridges spiral and veer, running for ten, twenty kilometres through smoke-black water. Where they meet they throw up frozen, warty explosions of barbed knots and clusters of mineral teeth. On these serrated edges the medusas, globs of muscular mucus as wide as tabletops, hang stranded and expiring, thrown up by tempests that rend the glutinous, tideless waves. The cliffs of the coral are thickly stained with their ichor.”

Plot-wise, perhaps, Take Back Plenty is slightly less successful. The setting – the pulp-populated Solar System – is a great deal of fun. But poor Tabitha seems to spend much of the story being chased from A to B. She has very little control over the plot. The ending too reeks of old sf serials. The cavalry arrive, there’s a sudden reveal and subsequent explanation, and it’s all over. While all the clues have been set, it does feel a little too pat.

However, there is one nice post-modern touch to the novel. Take Back Plenty is clearly a narrated fiction. There are even authorial interventions. But the identity of the narrator is kept secret until the end of the novel – and makes perfect sense within the confines of the plot. It’s not hard to figure out, but it does add an extra dimension to the narrative.

As do the conversations between Tabitha and Alice, the Alice Liddell‘s AI persona. In these, Tabitha tells stories of her past – which serve to entertain, to explain her background, and to help map her character. It’s an effective technique.

Unfortunately, in retrospect Take Back Plenty seems a bit of a one-off. Yes, there were a further two books – Seasons of Plenty and Mother of Plenty – forming a trilogy. Colin Greenland also “reinvented” the planetary romance with Harm’s Way in 2000. But during the 1990s, it seemed no one else mined pulp sf for tropes. Instead, we had Banks-style widescreen space opera, or Alastair Reynolds‘ hard sf space opera. No one leapt on Colin Greenland‘s bandwagon…

… until recently. In the last couple of years, there have been a few books by US authors which are based on and around old pulp sf tropes. A sort of return to the old sf action-adventure paradigm of the early Twentieth Century. Interestingly, while some have put a modern spin on this inasmuch as they provide a contemporary scientific rationale for their tropes, none have put a post-modern spin on it in the same fashion that Colin Greenland did. To my mind, that makes Take Back Plenty more interesting as it’s privileging story not setting. It’s probably also worth pointing out that Consider Phlebas is still in print, but Take Back Plenty is not. And given the recent interest in re-imagining pulp sf tropes, perhaps it’s time for a new edition. Or perhaps it should be included in the SF Masterworks series?

I have my copy, and I’ll be reading it again. Take Back Plenty is definitely a book that will remain a favourite.


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Buy this Book?

It’s not very often I post responses to something I’ve read on other blogs – in fact, this might well be the first time. But sometimes, it’s the only thing to do.

First, here’s an excellent piece from the Kenyon Review on book reviews, which makes some interesting points about customer reviews on Amazon. The author is careful not to say, however, that those who struggle to understand novels by Joseph Conrad or Toni Morrison should probably look to themselves and not blame the writer. If they don’t like a book, and can articulate why – then, fine. But to not like it because they don’t understand it? That’s not useful information.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous: Dave Hill (novelist) celebrates the imminent demise of the hardback on the Guardian blog. According to him, “Literary fiction even has its very own format to signal that it’s a cut above the vulgar crowd – the hardback edition, which conventionally precedes the paperback by a year.” So the loss of the hardback format is good because “the ‘literary’ demarcation stinks” and, further, “plenty of so-called literary fiction is overrrated”.

This is complete rubbish. First, the hardback is not limited to literary fiction. In fact, books of all genres are published in hardback. Even Harry Potter. And second, plenty of fiction from other genres is overrated. Such as Harry Potter…

There is also a certain amount of prestige attached to being published in that format, rather than as a “paperback original”. But that’s hardly surprising – they’re more expensive to produce, and correspondingly priced higher. So publishers will only do that for those authors they expect to sell well. Or perhaps the publishers want to signal to the market that an author is something special. Irrespective of genre.

I have several hundred science fiction hardbacks on my bookshelves, and quite a few of other genres. I like hardbacks. They’re more… substantial objects than paperbacks. They last longer, too. Unhappily, British publishers these days tend to use glued bindings, and not stitched – which most US publishers still use – so modern hardbacks are not as hard-wearing as older ones. And because they’re longer-lasting, hardbacks are more collectible. I recently read John Jarmain’s Priddy Barrows, first published in 1944. Sixty-three years ago. I could find only two copies on the Web. I wonder how many I would have found if it had been published only in paperback? Some of the hardback books I own are now worth substantially more than they were on publication – and they’re weren’t published more than half a century ago…


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Forgotten Classic… or Just Forgotten?

After reading some poems by John Jarmain in Return to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections from the Middle East 1940 – 1946 (see here), I wanted to read more. I hunted down a copy of his book of poems – titled, of course, Poems – on Advanced Book Exchange, and purchased it. I also learnt he had written a novel, Priddy Barrows, published the year before his death. This proved even rarer than Poems, with only two copies available on Advanced Book Exchange… and all the other hits on the Web leading back to one or the other of those two.

Anyway, I bought one of the copies.

And now I’ve read it.

The title, Priddy Barrows, refers to a school for handicapped boys located on the edge of the Mendips and run by a Napoleonesque headmaster called Captain Nelson Hayes. The novel recounts the events of a year in the lives of the people connected with, or living near, the school. Gerald Trested is one such. He sold his bookshop in London to come and teach at Priddy Barrows is set in the late 1930s – Nelson Hayes fought in the Great War – but there is something about the story which makes it feel as though it were set earlier. The novel is not a typical beginning – middle – end sort of story. Trested’s arrival at the school is not the start, nor is his eventual breaking of his engagement with Linda Ysaye the end. Having said that, nearly every character in the novel does undergo some form of story-arc, each of which intersects as the characters’ lives intersect. (The exceptions are the Turls, who end the book pretty much as they began it.)

I wanted to read Priddy Barrows after reading Jarmain’s poetry. So it was Jarmain’s use of language which had attracted me – was his prose as good as his poetry? And the answer is… yes and no. In parts, Priddy Barrows prose is very good indeed. Unfortunately, the whole book has been presented in a weirdly old-fashioned style, with paragraphs comprising single sentences, punctuated by semicolons and colons rather than full stops. It makes for an odd reading experience. Here’s a good example of the prose – it shows both the odd punctuation, and Jarmain’s strength as a descriptive writer:

They were the skaters who came up from Wells and the vale to this frozen pond in the old mine working: they played the headlights of their cars on the ice, white upon the black, and waltzed and laughed and cut patterns in their little ring in the saucer of the black frozen abandoned hills. Their lights cross-crossed closely over the circle of ice, and spreading beyond it were swallowed in the huge blackness which they could not penetrate; their cries and their gliding movement were to Luke, looking down on them from the distant barrow, like the brief hectic activity of human life as a god might see it: their fixed swift motion within the little lit compass of the ice was perfectly self-centred; nothing existed for them of the grave-strewn dark immensity of the hills beyond the beam of their lights.

Another aspect of the novel which impresses is the handling of the central relationship between Gerald Trested and Linda Ysaye. Linda dominates the relationship inasmuch as she is certain of what she wants. But the tentativeness Trested initially displays is later revealed to be apathy. He is handled sympathetically, although his story leaves him in an unsympathetic position of his own making. I suspect the journeys taken by the characters in Priddy Barrows may in themselves be classical allusions, but if so they were beyond me. The novel’s dénouement, however, throws all that has gone before on its head. Which sort of reminds me of Lawrence Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet.

Coincidentally, Durrell is a writer I very much admire for his descriptive prose and use of language. For example, the two images described below I find very striking:

A white sailing boat lay like a breathing butterfly against the white mole.
(from The Dark Labyrinth, Lawrence Durrell)

and

In that clear hard enamel air the human voice carried so far that it was possible to call and wave to her from the top while she walked the Plaka streets below.

(from Tunc, Lawrence Durrell)

So, is Priddy Barrows a forgotten classic? Sadly, no.

Even for its time, it’s written in a strangely old-fashioned style. And the plot, comprising as it does a knot of character stories – each of which seems to flit between Brontë, Austen and Dickens – only makes the novel feel more old-fashioned still. Jarmain has a fine eye for landscape, he draws his characters with skill and economy (although rendering Vowles’ Somerset accent phonetically is a bit annoying), and at times his prose displays a wonderful turn of phrase. But Priddy Barrows is a debut novel, and it promises more than, sadly, Jarmain ever had the chance to deliver.

Yes, I will read the book again one day. And I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that I like and appreciate it more after that reread.