From a review of Iain M Banks’ Matter by Edward Champion on Barnes & Noble’s website:

These conditions encourage these civilized sybarites to have more fun than a flighty Dalmatian discovering a chiaroscuro sea of spotty companions.

… is a review of The Dark Knight by some right-wing nutjob in the Wall Street Journal. It goes like this:

“There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.”

I wasn’t aware that invading a sovereign nation required “moral courage”. However, I suppose some “fortitude” is needed to trample over human rights, or torture people.

Oh, wait –

Batman is a vigilante. He operates outside the law. He’s a criminal. So, by the same argument, George W Bush must be a criminal too.

The article also says:

“Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror — films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” — which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.”

Hang on. Islamo-fascism? That would be right-wing Muslim extremists who blow people up and fly planes into skyscrapers, then. Who are apparently not the same as right-wing American extremists who advocate invasion, extraordinary rendition and torture. Right-wing. Fascism. They look the same from where I’m standing.

Anyway, here’s the full article. Enjoy.

I work with databases – I was a Database Administrator, now I’m a Database Architect. And I’ve always told the developers I work with that I’m responsible for the integrity of the database not the integrity of the data.

But.

Incorrect data really annoys me. Especially the sort which has a canonical source, is only wrong because some moron mis-entered it, and then that wrong data has proliferated across the Internet. If you look down to the right, you’ll see a selection of books from my collection on LibraryThing. Books are an excellent example of the kind of screwed-up data I mean. LibraryThing pulls its book data from several sources. And some of it is just plain wrong – mispelt, inaccurate, incorrect… And yet it would be easy enough to check. Just look at the book itself.

Frank Herbert did not write Threshold The Blue Angles Experience. He wrote Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience. The author of Tom Strong Book 6 is not “various” but Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse (well, they’re the two that get top billing on the cover, although others did contribute).

It’s not just books. It’s CDs too. Whenever I buy a CD, I rip it to MP3s so I can listen to it at work and on my Yeep. And yet half the time I have to go and correct all the mispelt song titles. The Black League did not record a song called ‘Better Angles (Of Our Nature)’ but ‘Better Angels (Of Our Nature)’.

It’s not difficult to get it right. You don’t see books in Waterstone’s with mispelt titles. Or CDs in HMV or Zavvi like that.

In fact, I don’t see why there can’t be a single canonical source of such data – which would be the publishers, of course. It’s in their interest to ensure it’s correct. After all, how can you order a book or album if they’ve entered the title incorrectly? So why can’t the publishers – the content providers themselves – publish correct data about their products, and allow free access to it by the likes of LibraryThing, GraceNote or last.fm? It’s not that difficult…

I’ve been a bit crap lately about posting here. Partly because I’ve been busy, but also partly because I’ve not been able to think of anything to write about.

Last week, I spent four days in Stuttgart for work, and I considered writing about that. But then I realised there’s not much you can say about Germany we don’t all ready know – it’s cleaner than the UK, it seems an all together nicer place, and it has a public transport network that puts the British one to shame…

Oh, and travelling through Manchester Airport was a nightmare. I’ve yet to be convinced that bottles of water are a danger to any aircraft. Or that all those queues serve any useful purpose – other than pissing passengers off, of course. As far as I’m aware, no X-ray machines or metal detectors were put in place in the London Undergound after the 7/7 Bombings.

Strange, isn’t it, that the people who make up these stupid laws are not themselves inconvenienced by them.

Anyway, I have in the past been asked to post more “funny stories” here. The following incident isn’t “funny”, but you might find it mildly entertaining. And thought-provoking. Or something.

It was in the late 1980s. I was studying at Coventry University. One dark winter’s evening, I was on my way home from the centre of town. My route took me between the two cathedrals – the new Basil Spence one, and the shell of the old one (photo by Tornad; taken from Wikipedia). As I passed the entrance to the old cathedral, I happened to glance in…

And saw a naked woman sitting on a big white horse.

Coventry, of course, was where Lady Godiva‘s famous ride took place.

As more of the interior of the cathedral came into view, I saw large spotlights and a camera crew. And I noticed that the woman wasn’t actually naked. I never did find out what was being filmed. But at least I wasn’t hallucinating. Nor was it the ghost of Lady Godiva I’d seen – I wouldn’t have liked to have suffered the same fate as Peeping Tom.

There’s an interesting article on the New Scientist blog pointing out that NASA’s workforce is greying. The average age of the organisation’s employees is now 47. During Project Apollo, most of the engineers and technicians were in their twenties. On 31 January 1971, when Alan Shepard walked on the Moon, he was, at 47, the oldest Apollo astronaut.

The greying of sf fandom is another established fact: the average age of people who attend sf conventions has risen each year.

I have to wonder if the two phenomena aren’t related. Of course, not all sf readers are rocket scientists and not all rocket scientists are sf readers. But both groups surely share a fascination with space exploration and space travel, with the universe out there. Away from planet Earth. The future, to both groups, lies in space, where humanity is no longer dependent upon a single fragile world.

Admittedly, space exploration is expensive and dangerous. But so is the War in Iraq. And many developed nations are happy to throw money into that. Of course, once – if – it’s all over, there’ll be vast profits to be made, rebuilding all the infrastructure destroyed by the invaders. But there are also huge profits to be made in space. The ROI on sending a M-type asteroid to Earth orbit from the Asteroid Belt would be phenomenal. And there’s all that real estate – not exactly habitable, it has to be said – waiting out there to be sold and tamed…

Is it that outward vision which society is slowly losing? There are no blank spaces left on maps of the Earth anymore – now we’re just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. And thanks to Google Maps, you can see anywhere on the globe from the comfort of your own home. You would think that now the Earth now holds so few mysteries, we’d go hunting for more away from the planet.

But instead we appear to be looking in and at each other. Even the War on Terror is just more inward-turned gazing: our enemy is hiding in our midst; watch each other; be vigilant; trust no one. Perhaps that’s the problem – all this overt and covert surveillance is taking the mystery out of our daily lives. And without small mysteries to sustain us, we can’t engage with the bigger ones. Pioneer spirit is like a muscle, it needs regular exercise…

Is sf engaging with those big mysteries? Looking at this year’s BSFA Award shortlist (see here), it would seem not. Three novels set in the near-future (Black Man, Brasyl, The Execution Channel), one set in an alternate present (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), and only one featuring an interstellar humanity (The Prefect). Oh, and a meta-fictional graphic novel (Alice in Sunderland). In fact, it appears these days that the most popular forms of sf with interstellar settings are military sf and space opera. And both chiefly involve war, both chiefly involve entrenched political systems falling apart or struggling to adapt to violent change.

It’s a cliché, albeit a true one, that sf inspired a great many young men and women to become rocket scientists. And it was those people who helped put men on the Moon. I don’t believe for a moment that sf’s role is inspirational or didactic – even if that’s what Hugo Gernsback intended when he first published Amazing Stories in 1926. Science fiction is a branch of literature, and it has no responsibilities other than those which attach to it as such. I’ll confess I liked the idea of Mundane SF as an antidote to increasingly right-wing military sf and shoddy space operas. But on reflection it’s only another call to look inwards, to ignore what’s out there. Writing about the possible is hardly engaging with the big mysteries. It’s giving small-minded solutions to small problems.

Sf needs to re-engage with the big mysteries. Maybe then we can start looking up and out again. Maybe then we’ll be allowed to look up and out again.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

• Bathtub Shitter
• Throb of Offal
• Splattered Entrails
• Putrified Genitalia
• Bowel Stew
• Hemorrhoidal Anal Suffering
• Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis

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.)