Here is the recent round table discussion I took part in to discuss the Salt British Fantasy 2013 collection. I acknowledge that I look like a miserable bugger in the still above, but actually I had a lot of fun.
It was brilliant to meet the blokes from SciFi London and especially EJ Swift (I'm reading her book Osiris now) and Lavie Tidhar (whose Central Station stories I know and admire from Interzone). They were a great deal more interesting than me and excellent to have a pint with after.
If you'd like to discover how little I know about British Fantasy, this is a great place to start.
Every now and then another article appears about a scientist, futurist or engineer who has a beef with gloomy scifi. The latest I’ve encountered appeared in Wired Magazine, where Professor Keith Hjelmstad lamented the “wet blanket” effect that dystopian science fiction apparently has on scientific innovation.
My instinctive reaction to such claims is part surprise, part fury. The first part finds it extraordinary that the advance of science might be so influenced by its practitioners’ scifi intake. The second wonders how these folk expect chirpy moon-shot optimism from the genre, when current news points to a future man who is not so much the pioneering star pilot as a carefully monitored data stream.
Then I relax and try to look at the criticism rationally. On reflection, it’s easy to understand where Hjelmstad and others are coming from – I have recently read Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, Adam Roberts “By Light Alone” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, and while all were brilliant, they had little if anything positive to say about the way science will shape our future. The genre can be rather grinding in its relentless bleakness, and I certainly rarely read two pure scifi novels back to back.
I suppose the most optimistic imagination I have come across (in my admittedly limited reading) is found in the Iain M Banks novels. His Culture dominates space through a utopian society based on complete personal freedoms and benevolent artificial intelligence. I remember being delighted when I first encountered the cocky strut of the Culture’s people, especially enjoying the freedom they enjoy to do anything with their time, from death defying sport to changing sex. It was a refreshingly different setup, and a wonderful trick the great, much-mourned Banks pulled.
But even he couldn’t make much of a story out of that society - the majority of the action in his novels takes place outside the Culture, set among its imperfect and intolerant neighbours, be they Chelgrian or Idiran. Why? Because Banks needed an adversary with which his characters could grapple.
The same goes for Star Trek. Sure, all races and creeds work together in Roddenberry’s vision. But even devoted viewers of both the original and TNG series spend a lot of time half asleep, waiting for an episode where Kirk and Spock to fight to the death, or Ryker goes mad in a space asylum.
This is where moaning about miserable futures is really missing the point. To propel a story you need conflict. So when writers create new worlds they are naturally drawn to oppressive, cruel futures. These offer their characters restraints to struggle in, overlords to flee, injustice to fight and most of all, intrigue. All these elements are essential if you are to get your readers flipping pages.
So it does niggle when the suggestion creeps in that science fiction writers are just miseries who can’t see the benefits of science. That’s not the case at all, they are simply wondering how human drama might play out under different conditions. If the stories they created only took place in healthy, corruption-free meritocracies run on abundant clean energy, you’d quickly have your readers yawning.
And I’ll tell you now:
I want scientists to spend their days absorbed in dystopian fiction - those who do are far more likely to innovate for a better future. A scientist who is uncertain about the future is a cautious scientist.
It’s the confident ones you have to watch out for.
Thrilled to say that my story "Lips and Teeth" opens the new Best British Fantasy 2013 collection from Salt Books - smart little collection available here.
I’ll start by coming right out and saying it: I am a big Wrath of Khan fan. For me it is the only completely satisfying Star Trek film before the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot.
There are other honourable efforts. The Undiscovered Country (Star Trek VI) has a great story, but the cast are so wrinkled and puffy it rather lacks vigour. First Contact, the only good Next Generation movie, is another favourite of mine - but the supporting cast’s performances are a wink away from panto standard and this often causes me to fast-forward entire sections.
So it was that when I saw the first Abrams Star Trek effort, I was rather pleased. It found a simple, elegant way to respect the legacy of the original cast, yet go on to tell its own stories with the same characters.
Of course the actors filling the roles had to be good to pull this off - and Chris Pine as Jim Kirk more than delivered, nodding to the best of Shatner’s outlandish style without descending into outright parody. I was genuinely shocked and delighted by his performance, having been certain that I would loathe any attempt to replicate or replace Shatner.
True, the other parts failed to achieve the same heights - Spock wasn’t quite there for me, while Scotty and Bones produced little more than misfiring impressions – but all in all I was stunned to have found the thing such a pleasant experience, and recognised that there was plenty of space to develop the other characters in future instalments.
The plot was slight, but I could forgive that because the film looked great, barrelled along (which Star Trek rarely achieves), and at least recognised the Kirk/ Spock dynamic as the heart of the piece. It was a decent start. I had big expectations for the next movie.
So it is that I feel a little crushed by Star Trek into Darkness. The movie’s defining image, of the Enterprise hurtling powerless back down to Earth, is an appropriate one. It’s an odd film, because it surrenders all the fresh, virgin territory it fought so hard to win in the first movie - in favour of a creatively bankrupt reheat job.
I had deliberately read nothing about the movie, or even watched more than the original trailer, so what Khan rumours I had heard didn’t concern me when I took my seat in the cinema.
I actually ran with the movie for the entire first half, delighted to see Peter Weller taking up an aggressive bad guy part and intrigued by the possibility of a really strong Klingon based story – perhaps some brilliantly conceived box of tricks that would build to the outbreak of war and set up a third movie.
Then Cummerbach said “Khan” and everything raced off into a shrieking muddle. Suddenly it was grasping at the coat-tails of an illustrious predecessor in a way that the first Abrams movie, whatever you think of it, had made entirely unnecessary.
A performance this big would always
hang over Cummerbach
There is, from a writer’s perspective, no need for the film to become such a deformed and inbred creature. No need at all. Even as it stands the plot is doable without the weird swerve into impersonation and leaden homage. Cummerbach’s villain could have survived almost unchanged as an entirely new character without affecting the arc of the story.
So what is the purpose of stamping him with the name of a much loved figure from the past? It doesn’t help the story along, only pulls it in several directions – and I assume it can only have made those who know the original cringe.
At its worst, the film’s tribute act is plain embarrassing –witness the switcheroo re-enactment of the conclusion to Wrath of Khan. It plays like a drunken fan fiction experiment, then tosses any trace of impact via a resurrection device worse even than planet Genesis. At its best the film is merely laughable, like some wretched youtube tribute act – just watch Spock’s Shatner howl, if you dare.
The other problem is that the characters simply haven’t progressed. Pine’s Kirk is now so busy running around shouting that he really could be any character in any action movie. Scotty and Bones continue to provide nothing more than weak, weak comedy relief, and Ohura still does nothing but look good and emote – where what is required from the only female crew member is a bit of charisma, a touch of attitude.
I don’t think Abrams will make a third Star Trek, and critically at least he seems to have gotten away with this. And I suppose to someone who has never seen Wrath of Khan, Into Darkness might have played well. Perhaps a different director and a whole new set of writers will make a success of a third and we can put this unpleasantness behind us. I do think the cast have a genuinely good film in them.
Abrams belongs with Star Wars. There’s a franchise whose fans are well used to feeling dirty. Kirk, after all, hasn’t yet trekked into the darkness of a Vodaphone ad campaign.
The War of the Worlds, Invasion fantasies and Hollywood.
I spend a great deal of time youtube-ing away the small hours, typing in the names of my various heroes and seeing what marvels emerge from the ether. Recently I happened upon a radio broadcast from 1940, named “Orson Welles interviews HG Wells” - the occasion when the two met to discuss Orson’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds".
It’s a remarkable recording.
First there is the simple pleasure of hearing the mutual admiration shared by two great men. It runs throughout their conversation as HG’s kindly, croaking voice contrasts with Orson’s refined, rumbling tones. More importantly there is the fascinating example it provides of fiction’s role as a mirror to powerful nations’ anxieties.
Wells’ 1898 original was part of a surge of British “invasion literature”, a string of works imagining the destruction of the British Empire which were produced during or shortly after the severe “Long Depression”. Wells’ book stood apart from the jingoistic malice of much of the genre, allowing it to be embraced and retold for a US audience, but it still echoes the genre’s uneasy sense of ebbing power, of imminent decline.
The 1940 interview was made during the realisation of those fears. At the time of the recording Great Britain, once a mighty empire, was on the verge of invasion by Nazi Germany. The US stood apart, widely sympathetic but unwilling to be embroiled.
Listening to it now, during similar troubled economic times, it’s hard not to note the remarkable surge of invasion narratives bursting out of today’s weakened giant, the United States.
Hollywood has never been so busy imagining attacks on the homeland, either from Earthly powers (White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, Red Dawn), or from aliens (Battleship, Pacific Rim).
Perhaps these new invasion tales may herald a crisis of American power in 30 or 40 years time? More importantly, do any of them match up to Wells' work?
The Writing of the Wars
Having dug out my old copy of the novel and read it again, I would say the answer is no, they don’t.
The book is so accomplished it’s easy to see Wells as a kind of Nostradamus figure. There’s the spooky similarity of his Martians to the German invaders who would threaten British shores forty years later, their hearts hardened by the “pressure of necessity”, their dreadful technology reminiscent of perverted Nazi science.
Then there’s the novel’s environmental awareness. Wells’ Martians come to Earth because their planet is dying, made cruel conquerors by force of their hostile environment. Yet Wells is at pains to point out that humanity are hardly “apostles of mercy”, justifying the extinction of entire species by invoking divine or genetic destiny.
But it is the sheer quality of the storytelling that sets the book apart from our modern alien invasions.
The pace of the Wells work is masterful. It is not until days after their arrival that the Martians leave their pit and begin spreading chaos and destruction. For a time there is some question as to their intentions.
This pause is hugely effective. Boys, maids and Woking locals linger by the capsule, half curious, half distracted by daily concerns, building tension wonderfully. Obviously it is a time before radio, cars, and aviation, and the speed of revelation is necessarily slower - but it is still an effective means of building tension.
That's something Hollywood productions rarely accomplish.The aliens of films like Cloverfield, Battle of LA and Skyline are clearly aggressive from the moment they arrive. Only 1996's Independence Day emulates Wells’ calm before the storm, when the vast alien vessels hang over landmarks of the world - and it was one of the more effective sections of the film.
That’s not to say the novel is a slow affair. When the Martians do finally let rip, the story accelerates magnificently, the action surprisingly exciting. In Steven Speilberg’s adaptation of the book (which is only very loosely faithful) the tripods have a shield that renders all human weapons ineffective. Why? The book is so much better.
In Wells’ battles the 19th century armies actually manage to damage a couple of tripods - at Shepperton Lock with artillery pieces, and in the English Channel with the heroic action of the Thunderchild. Again, this is considerably more effective at creating suspense and excitement, as the reader is allowed to cling to the possibility of a turn in human fortunes, no matter how slim.
The novel also has an emotional complexity that is entirely absent from Hollywood invasions. Wells’ narrator is a man of “exceptional moods”, who finds himself at turns unaccountably angry with the wife he presumes dead, captivated by the artilleryman’s Facist fantasies, and homicidal in the company of a weak-minded curate. This makes him all the more human - a very far cry from the cut-out protagonists of Hollywood invasions, who are rarely more than flag-kissing soldiers, protective fathers, devoted scientists or speechifying leaders (“Today we cancel the apocalypse!” booms the Pacific Rim trailer - surely one of the weakest lines yet conceived in film history).
Above all, it is the conclusion to Wells’ invasion tale that has yet to be matched. One of the things I have found most frustrating about the recent alien movies is their complete failure to create interesting solutions to the implied technical supremacy of alien invaders.
Each of the recent movies has either lazily chosen to have sheer brute force triumph (Battle of LA) or doesn’t bother to explain how the invasion ends at all (Cloverfield). Independence Day at least makes an attempt to do something more interesting, with the infamous computer virus solution, but as well as being crippled by sheer implausibility it cannot hope to match the elegance of Wells’ solution - where instead of humanity saving the planet, the planet saves humanity.
This is not to say that Wells is perfect, or above the flaws of Hollywood productions. The novel has an amusingly isolationist viewpoint, with the rest of the world barely mentioned. It is simply taken as read that the Martians would open their invasion in Britain, (which is the best country after all), and go from there. Even if Wells had written the entire globe to be under simultaneous attack, you can imagine him referring to other nations with a dismissive, Hollywood-style line like: “Paris has been destroyed” - and then move on without shedding a tear.
But that doesn’t excuse Hollywood from attempting more thoughtful and inventive storytelling. The Wells novel illustrates that it’s possible to write an alien invasion narrative which sees contemplative scenes complement and even enhance spectacular action sequences.
Now obviously the screenplay is a different kind of writing to the novel, and obviously Hollywood is something of a soft target here. Wells wrote at a different time, when as he slyly notes, “even philosophical writers had many little luxuries”.
But the fact remains that Hollywood has yet to conjure a solution to alien invaders as magnificent as Wells' microbial infection. It seems more and more reliant on a rather facist notion of triumphant will for humanity to survive.
That begs a question:
Was Wells blessed to write during a unique period of discovery? Could early science fire the imagination in a way it cannot now, offering tantalising glimpses rather than high resolution images of the lifeless reality? Has our imagination become as stagnant as manned spaceflight?
When I was around 14, I drew my own 2000AD comic. It was called Falk Point, and it was about a group of rebellious British Judges based on the Falkland Islands. In my story the lead character did a “Long Walk’, just like in the comics. Only whereas in 2000AD Judges walk across an entire continent, my judge walked across... a small island. With some argentinian death robots thrown in. It was ludicrous of course, but at the time I thought it was ace.
Still, I think it shows how much 2000AD meant to me. When people at school teased me for reading scifi comics, I was quite content to dismiss them as hopeless fools. Nothing would drag me away from entertainment that good. I was an addict. I lost myself in the boundless worlds and future histories the comics created. They meant infinitely more to me than any of the Marvel or DC titles. They were more believable, more brutal and more fun. 2000AD characters weren’t heroes, they were killers and mutants. They didn’t moan about relationships or morality, they lived and breathed the worlds of their stories. I had my favourites: Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog, ABC Warriors and Maniac 5 spring to mind - but I also loved the more outlandish stuff.
Harke & Burr by Dean Ormston
Harke and Burr was a brilliantly drawn curiosity by Dean Ormston, my favourite comic artist alongside Carlos Ezquerra. Calhab Justice was a gothic, creepy tale of judges in Scotland. Devlin Waugh “Swimming in Blood” was a stand alone comic that was quite, quite brilliant. And at the centre of it all, of course, was Judge Dredd. There seemed no limit to the inventive fun the writers and artists had.
I was always bewildered that nobody was making movies based on these extraordinary stories. When Stallone’s abysmal Judge Dredd movie came along in 1995, I was certain that its hideous failure would simply mean that a good Director would take over, dump Stallone and create an amazing second film. If they didn’t, I would do it for them. (My brother thought when I did I should cast Dolph Lundgren, as he was the only one out there with the requisite chin). Then, over time, it became clear no movie was coming. Furthermore, I wasn’t a famous director. I put my comics to one side and forgot about it.
Then, last year, came the new movie. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t go and see it. Perhaps I was worried about it stamping on my childhood the way its predeccesor had. Or maybe I was just too lazy. Whatever the case, I think my 15 year old self would have been quite disgusted if he found out I hadn’t gone to see it several times in the cinema. It was, after all, up to fanatics like me to ensure it got the audience it deserved. Now I learn that while it topped the UK Box Office, it tanked in the States.
And I feel terrible. I should have been there for the film. I have friends in the States and I should have hassled them all to go, and take five friends too. Because from what I read online, the outlook for a second installment doesn’t look good.
That’s a shame. It stands up really well. Penned by Alex Garland and directed by Pete Travis, it does just about everything right that the Stallone abomination did wrong, and proves that actually, it ain’t that hard to make a decent 2000AD movie.
Devlin Waugh, swimming in blood
First off, it doesn’t try to do too much - it puts Dredd in a kind of day-in-the-life-of-a-judge situation, introducing the character, without trying to cram in ten different stories at the same time. It has a good strong support cast as well. Olivia Thirlby is great as the psychic Judge Anderson, which is quite an achievement. Psychics are not easy to play - witness Diana Troy, by far the most irritating character in Star Trek TNG. Lena Hedley, of whom I am not normally a fan, also turns in a good performance as the crime boss, Mama. It even has The Wire’s Wood Harris in a major role.
Secondly it evidently has too small a budget to splash CGI all over the shop. When I saw the way the film presented Mega City One I could have kissed the screen. Instead of drowning everything in a mess of swirling CGI noise, Travis adds a dash of effects to augment very recognisable urban settings. He takes great pleasure in panning over an East Coast city, before revealing a huge Mega Block looming massively over everything around it. Dredd’s opening line has the feel the film is going for: “800 million people living in the ruin of the old world, and the mega structures of the new one”. Even when the perps are driving knackered VW vans it helps to ground the story, and give you the sense, just like 2000AD did, that this kind of lawless dystopia might not be too far away.
Thirdly, it takes itself seriously. It’s not garish or cartoonish, recognising that any Dredd film shouldn’t try to replicate the comic look but interpret it. Stallone’s Dredd wore an outfit so shiny he might have been a circus act. This Dredd wears body armour, with the eagle realistically moulded onto a shoulder pad.
Dredd also went to the States with an R rating, being true to the brutality of the comic books. That’s not just brutality in terms of bodycount, but of society in general. Judges order the mangled bodies of the just murdered to be recycled. A homeless man sits outside a mega block with a sign on his lap reading: “Will debase self for credits”. Mega City One is a terrible, frightening place. As one character says: “this city is a meat grinder. All we do is turn the handle.” Unfortunately the commitment to making an R Rated movie evidently helped to sink Dredd’s opening weekend in the US.
Finally, and most importantly, Karl Urban does a great job as Dredd. He has a few killer lines (“It’s all a deep end”) moulds his chin into a suitably preposterous appendage, wields the famous Lawgiver pistol expertly, and plays it with a certain ruthless cool that genuinely surprised me.
I could watch twenty more of these films, just like I read the comics. There is simply a limitless seam of stories waiting to be mined. Yes it’s not groundbreaking, yes it’s a bit like “the Raid”, but it tells an exciting story well, and lays the groundwork brilliantly for what could be an extended franchise. But after doing some reading, I’m afraid it seems that might well be it for Dredd.
And that’s a shame. Because the greatest accolade I can give it is that it made me remember my long lost love for 2000AD, that old friend that I somehow forgot.
If you haven’t seen it, buy the DVD or Blu-Ray and maybe it will help push through a second movie. Garland apparently started with a storyline about Judge Death, one of the spookiest and far-out ideas there ever was. Lets help him make that happen.
