We have a crisis in the time-space continuum. Daleks just aren't scary any more, and apparently not even the Moffat Magic can make them so.
Or maybe it can, it just chooses not to. Whatever the facts, Moffat Daleks have inherited the biggest flaw of RTD Daleks, which is that they only exterminate the unimportant people, for no other reason than Plot.
In days of yore, the Daleks were frightening in part because all the actors acted as if they were frightening. Especially the Doctor, because he had seen their bad side once or twice before. We the viewers knew they were touchy inferiority-complex ridden psychopaths with hair-trigger death rays and we held our breath whenever it looked like one of them might get more than slightly grumpy, because we knew someone was going to get it.
Almost always, the Doctor sidled into their foul schemes undetected: they had invaded or annexed somewhere for their own nefarious purposes, often making an alliance of convenience with the worst examples of humanity which would all end in over-exposed negative-effect tears, that being the best effect the Beeb had in those days for death rays. Somewhere along the way there would be a slightly potty scientist who begrudgingly, reluctantly came over to the Doc's side and probably paid for it with his life.
Of all the New Who adventures to date, Victory of the Daleks really was the one that would have benefited most from the old school 4-part, 25 mins each treatment. It bore a strong resemblance in places to Power of the Daleks, an adventure sadly lost to the video archives but still available in audio format (which is how I first heard it), and could have learned from it. In that one the Daleks also ingratiate themselves into human affairs, aided by the worst examples of humanity for the latter's political reasons, and of course it all ends in over-exposed negative-effect tears. With Victory of the Daleks in old-school format, the Doc would take at least two episodes to establish his good guy credentials, with even (or perhaps especially) a highly sceptical W. Churchill ranged against him while all around him strange things were happening that the powers that be just didn't get. He would have been incarcerated at least twice. Those two eps would also have been used to establish the spin-off Dalek tech also in use by the British during WW2. And there would be extermination, left, right and centre. It would start slowly, mysterious death by mysterious death, with victims gradually increasing in importance.
Maybe the cliffhanger at the end of part 2 would have been the veil of niceness being withdrawnand the pepperpots revealing their true colours, about to zap the Doctor. Though to be honest it could have been spun out to the end of part 3. Instead of zapping two extras, as shown, the Daleks would turn their guns on the entire British high command, Churchill included, and it's in saving them that the Doctor proves his point.
Part 4 could go pretty well as the rest of last night went, except that if the Doctor simply had to have a long talk with them, he could do so from within the safety of the TARDIS forcefield.
And the potty scientist would have paid for it all with his life.
Let's not do it down entirely. There were some good lines and an especially good portrayal of old Winston. The new Daleks look funky and hopefully will revert from now on to suitably Dalek-like behaviour. Indeed, the whole concept of WW2 Daleks in olive green, offering cups of tea, was wonderful. It's shame it was dispensed with in the first ten minutes.
It's also a shame we never got to see the answer to the biggest question of all, which is how exactly does a Dalek take stuff out of the webbing pockets around its waist? The most logical solution is that they pair up and take stuff out of each other's pockets, which is a bit too like a party game to be all that serious.
Update: see here for unkind but funny speculation about the nu-Daleks.
There is a paradox that while the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis was undoubtedly their most inspired, their best album was A Trick of the Tail, which was their first post-Gabriel's departure.
My opinion, anyway.
The first track of which was "Dance on a volcano". Can't think why it's been on my mind over the last day or so. Dual drumkits, everyone with long hair, Mike Rutherford almost dwarfed by his double-necked guitar ... It's the seventies!
Can I just say that if all UK air traffic has to be grounded due to the presence of a vast cloud of volcanic ash in the skies above us, the least it could do would be to look exciting? You'd think? Something vaguely glowy, looming and pyroclastic, maybe? Huh?
However, Best Beloved did recently spend 6 days in Sweden and I'm very glad the volcano waited to blow until she was back.
In completely unrelated news, but it saves me doing a separate post: from the Department of How Do You Solve A Problem Like the 5-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, what the world needs more of is kung fu nuns. Oh, yeah.
A bid is in for London to host the world science fiction convention in 2014. This would be 9 years after the UK's last worldcon outing in 2005, which itself was 10 years after the previous in 1995. So, the cycle is about right and I intend to support it. (If Best Beloved reads this at work, it will be the first she's heard of it: well, I would have told you this evening, my love ...)
Here's the official site, and here's the excellent promo video. Geeky points increase for identifying every programme or movie used. (Excluding possibly generic aerial shots and combining multiple scenes from one show, I score 18 known [with a lot of Dr Who] vs probably 14 unknown and a couple of guesses.) It's astonishing how badly Big Ben comes out of all this ...
Long-term readers may remember I had a five-day holiday in New York with Bonusbarn back in 2008, after which he flew home and I flew on to Denver. I had heard Things of US Immigration and I was acutely aware I would be travelling with a minor (albeit a 16-year-old minor, legal for most purposes) with whom I had no legal or blood connection. We went in on the visa waiver programme and I took with me a letter signed by his mother, saying he was travelling with me with her permission, and I was married to her, and giving precise itinerary of places, times, dates and flights plus her contact details for home and work. We tried to get it notarised but left it too late so we made do with a witnessed signature.
And I never even needed to take it out of its envelope. The Immigration guy at JFK looked at us together and said, "family?" I didn't want to make a technically incorrect statement on the record so I stated, "stepfather and stepson." He looked at me and said again, in the kind of voice that positively sheds hints, "family?"
"Family," I agreed. And lo, we were in.
All comes to mind because within the space of the last month I've read three very harrowing tales from the US border, one by someone actually known to me, none with happy endings. The utterly lovely Cheryl Morgan, caught in a perfect bureaucratic storm that means she will probably never be able to return there; SF writer Peter Watts, who actually managed to fall foul of border guards whilst leaving the country [and the result]; and a Kiwi lady I've not heard of before, whose tale linked from Cheryl's blog sparked off this train of thought.
No big conclusions to draw: just the reflection that we might have been much luckier than I realised.
Such is the fate of the Westboro Baptist Church - the church led by the not very Revd but extremely revved Fred Phelps that engages in such entertainments as picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq, said deaths being a sure sign of God's judgement on the US for its toleration of homosexuality.
Though that's not the only thing they picket. According to their schedule this month they intend to picket sundry churches, schools, synagogues and (yes, really) Bon Jovi. Their language is coarse, vulgar and abrasive; you get the feeling they are the kind of people who can only speak by thrusting their faces an inch away from yours and challenging you as offensively as possible on everything. There is nothing remotely Christ-like about them. See, for example, their subtly woven, intricately crafted exposition of why John 3.16 actually means that God hates (most of) the world. (Maybe they have a similar way out of Colossians 4.6: "Let your conversation be always full of grace ...")
I first heard of these individuals, I think, when they unleashed God Hates Sweden.com on the interwebs. Having a Swedish wife and a half-Swedish stepson I was curious to find out why. Apparently Swedish police had arrested pastor Ake Green who was laying down an OT-oriented view of homosexuality (and even he, I gather, has since repudiated this lot). The case was reinforced with cast-iron supporting evidence showing photos of King Carl XVI Gustaf looking "goofy" and Crown Princess Victoria in a low-cut dress. Well, that proves it.
This was followed up by God Hates Ireland.com (did I mention half-Swedish Bonusbarn is also half-Irish?). An Irish student union had invited Phelps to present his idiosyncratic viewpoint to a meeting, which he interpreted as a cunning plan to lure him out of the US so he could be arrested under Irish anti-hate laws.
After that they decided to go the whole hog with God Hates the World.com, where you can click on any country of the world (work still in progress) to find out why God hates that particular place. To save my UK readers (the majority) the trouble, he currently hates us because their church was banned from entering the country to picket "the fag propaganda play, The Laramie Project" in Basingstoke. Remember what I said about their way of speaking:
"You British Bastards will not have Jesus Christ to rule over you, and think you can issue bans and pass laws to remove God's word from the landscape. You do greatly err, not knowing the power of God; and, you do that against your own interests. It is a great kindness to have God's prophets in your land. But, you ungrateful brutes despise knowledge. It is too late for the UK. God Hates You! God's wrath and destruction is all that's left for you, thanks to Secretary Smith. Toodles!"
Sighs. I'm a Brit. It's our nature to mock our enemies. It's what we do. I remember a couple of Dave Allen jokes from my childhood (I know, he wasn't a Brit but he had a good audience here) which actually served to increase my awareness of the world. In one, God asks a rather depressed Catholic outside Ian Paisley's church why he's upset.
"He won't let me in!"
"I know, I've been trying for years ..."
In another, a Dutch Reformed pastor is horrified to see an African kneeling in front of his altar.
"Oi! What are you doing?"
"I'm just cleaning the floor, sir."
"Oh, that's okay, I thought you were praying ..."
For the same reason we had Spitting Image and Dead Ringers and we could sing "Hitler has only got one ball" during WW2. But even that individual had some comedy value, if you looked deep enough. Maybe I'm just not looking deep enough here but I'm really not seeing that much.
William Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World' illustrates the words of Revelation 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." It shows a rather drippy, pre-Raphaelite Jesus knocking at a door. There is no outside latch on the door - it must be opened from inside, or not at all - and the door is half overgrown, suggesting Jesus has been knocking for a long time.
There must be a veritable forest outside Westboro Baptist Church by now, but Jesus has long arms.
Editorial note: due to the unusually large proportion of links to utterly loathsome web sites in this post, I've coded them all with tinyurl.com - just in case this blog shows up in a Google Alert somewhere for all the wrong reasons.
After due consideration following my earlier post on the topic, I've decided I'm not going to sue Steven Moffat.
I'm going to let George Lucas do that instead, for pinching not one but two of the iconic Star Wars scenes and combining them. His lawyers are much more high powered and it will be far more entertaining.
But while it lasts, this guy is good. "The Beast Below" could have been so unbearably silly: in fact it was just enjoyably silly, and moving at the same time. The scene where the Doctor talks about not forgetting, in a gentle, kind, wise voice that politely chides Amy while also making it clear she has done a very silly thing - that could have come from any Patrick Troughton episode. Any other Doctor bar 2 and 11 would have just lectured, over-acted, postulated or otherwise just not done it so well.
Yep, this guy is good. And he'll have to be even better to stop me yawning when guess-who glides back onto our screens next week ... Which he probably will.
The Bible is quite big on the Cross, and why not? It's kind of the point of the whole thing, really. I have a palm cross by my desk at work - not for the supernatural aura of protection that it exudes, but for conversation, and to remind me that there are higher things than the latest quarterly report, and (oh, all right) for decoration. And when I think of everything it's meant to mean, I actually feel quite proud of it.
I hope I would have the humility to remove it if anyone found it offensive, though. From this I discount my former Jehovah's Witness colleague, because lovely guy that he was, I don't care if I wind up the JWs in general. At least, not in any areas of specious and/or totally made-up theology. But in other areas ...
All this sparked by a recent blog post from Hal Duncan, a writer with whose work I am not familiar. An Open Letter to the Usual Suspects is a little more polemic than I would usually go for, and probably contains no words that your children don't already know (but let's not pass judgement), but it makes a couple of good points that I have not thought of before.
The recent hoohah over the nurse forbidden to wear a cross with her nurse's uniform tends to miss the point that dangly jewellery is a good vector for germs and diseases, and her freedom to witness to her faith is not the same as her freedom to give her patients MRSA. I don't know if this has been taken into account or not, but feel it's worth mentioning.
(The big one.) The cross really is offensive to some people with good reason - specifically, as cited by Mr Duncan, gay or transgendered persons who have been on the receiving end of so-called Christian hate. I also think of Palestinians who lost loved ones in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, children abused by priests ... I suspect the list could go on. Wearing a cross really is not going to get you any friends here. Hal puts it thusly: "every cross is a burning cross."
Yes, yes, the burgeoning black pentecostal church, made of people whose forebears were persecuted by the Klan, seem to have got over it. Not the point. The getting over it was up to them, not imposed on them by others. I'm not taking my palm cross down on the off-chance that someone who once heard that Christians aren't meant to approve of Teh Gay and fancies people of the same gender might get hurt. Hopefully exposure to me will by contrast bring a bit of love and light into their life, and if that positive exposure is amplified by contrast with their initially negative expectations then so much the better. But Hal's post gives me cause to think twice before keeping it up, and to tune the antennae more sensitively should someone pass by who really has been hurt in the past.
St Paul can bang on a little about the virtues of the cross, and he was no great fan of homosexuality, and if you asked him about transgendered people you would have just got a blank look. But he also gives the exemplary advice of 1 Corinthians 10:23-33: our freedom to do stuff with a clear conscience does not come at the expense of other people's hurt. Other people are more important.
I heard Nurse Chaplin on the radio this week saying that she put her cross on when she got confirmed and doesn't want to take it off again. She is proud to witness for her faith. Well, fair enough. But putting your cross away, if it genuinely hurts people, is a much more powerful witness than displaying it come what may.
It's a good thing we had Nan the Great cremated. Otherwise the people of Salisbury would currently be experiencing minor earth tremors due to a rapidly rotating body in a grave somewhere. The makers of Scrabble, so the Today Programme reported this morning, have changed the rules to allow proper nouns. To put it another way, for the benefit of the kind of people who need this rule change, you can use names now innit.
Nan, who would pass the time by memorising the approved list of two letter words (and there are a surprising number of them), would not approve. In fact she forced us to introduce a new family rule, which is that the player of the word must at least know (or have a good idea; appeal to other players is permitted) what the word actually means. That way we might still have all been thrashed on a regular basis but it was with a bit more dignity. And educational.
One of the reasons I dislike point-and-shoot video games is that you might get hit and killed by the enemy, but guess what, suddenly you're back! Or you can carry an infinite array of weapons around that you change with a click. This is not challenging. Games are meant to combine a measure of luck (e.g. what letters you have in your bag) with skill (e.g. what you do with them) and those two factors combined make it a challenge. This rule reduces the challenge level of Scrabble by about 75%. I will stop now before I start sounding like the Daily Mail. I have my pride, in case you hadn't gathered.
One question mark over the BBC report: it says Mattel are bringing out a version of the game with new rules but will continue to sell the old version. Presumably the only difference between the two is the rulebooks and the boards stay exactly the same? Hmm. It couldn't be a cunning marketing ploy aimed at the kind of people who need to use proper nouns ... could it?
Okay, the world can release its bated breath now because I'll tell you what I thought of the new Dr Who.
And what I thought was good, made better by the fact that my approval went steadily up as the episode progressed. Pre-credits: oh dear, oh dear, yet more of the RTD-era (see how it's already an era?) codswallop. London by night. Doctor doing silly things with TARDIS. Oh come on.
Thankfully it ended, progressing into the new credit sequence which was ... um. And ahem. Endoscopic is the first word to come to mind. And indeed the last. I mean, did Moffat have a certain procedure performed whilst exercising his brain as to how the new sequence should look, and happened to glance at the screen, whereupon he leapt off the couch (ouch!) shouting "That's my new sequence!" We may never know. This is probably good.
But then we get some classic Moffat - lonely little girl, creepy house, things unseen - only briefly interrupted by more RTD silliness (I thought the food gag would never end) and then it started getting really good. And what makes it better is: it wasn't just good because it was a Moffat script, it was also good because it had a darned good actor in the leading role. The Doctor of old always had a certain authority that let him walk into any situation and, sometimes unaccountably, be taken seriously. Tennant, for all his strengths, never quite had that. The Boy Smith does. He also has nipples and a scattering of chest hair, not that we needed to know that. (Mind you, so did Pertwee - and a tattoo, if you look closely around the 50 second mark.)
But, back to those credits. The very first Dr Who credits were simplicity itself yet hugely evocative: abstract whooshes and curls generated by the simple feedback of pointing a camera at its own monitor. Thereafter they got more sophisticated - Doctor's face added, introduction of colour, then slit-scan - until their apotheosis in the Baker-era credits, which are timeless even today. But always abstract. This came to a screeching halt at the end of the Baker-era with the introduction of new, computer generated credits - that's 1979 computer generated - which looked rubbish and dated from the word go, emphasised the space bit as opposed to the time bit and from which the series never really recovered. The New Who credits went some way towards rectifying this - they kept the space but brought back the abstract - and now ... well, I'll say this much, it's new. Neither time nor space, just ... endoscopy.
This month I have been mostly reading about Napoleon, for reasons of my own that may one day be shared with the world.
It's very inconvenient to have your preconceptions overthrown by facts, though that is what was achieved by Vincent Cronin's Napoleon. This was only slightly offset by a more traditional / prejudice matching view of the man in Christopher Hibbert's Napoleon: His Wives and Women. My view had always been: fine while he stayed at home in France, stabilising the country after the madness of the Revolution; batty but forgivable that he became Emperor; bad when he decided to export the benefits of his rule to the rest of Europe, mostly against their will. Either way, a lesser man than, say, Cromwell, another successful revolutionary general who ended up assuming supreme power but did have the humility not to accept the crown when it was offered to him; and a mere shade of, say, Washington, a successful revolutionary general who served two elected terms as the first president of his new republic and then quietly retired.
Well ...
Hibbert's is the more accessible book because it is mostly about the personalities involved and just assumes that you know the gist of the history. Thus he can make throwaway lines like "the Russian campaign was a disaster" or "Napoleon had decided to escape from Elba". But Cronin's book actually looks at the whys, not just the whats, and it suddenly gets more complex.
Why had Napoleon decided to escape from Elba? After all, he was happy there. He was a strong believer in fate; he was quite ready to accept that it was no longer his time to be Emperor of the French. The Treaty of Fontainebleau set him up as King of Elba and he was quietly, happily modernising the island under relatively enlightened rule. But he was slowly going bankrupt, because even though the new French regime had undertaken to pay him a pension for the rest of his life, not a single franc of it ever emerged. It was a bit of petty parsimonious spite on behalf of the restored ancien regime that could so easily have been rectified and spared everyone so much trouble.
The Russian campaign was indeed a disaster and he made a lot of bad decisions - but why did it happen in the first place? Because like almost every war Napoleon got involved in after becoming Emperor, he was attacked first. Napoleon badly wanted peace, but of course he wanted it on his terms and allies kept turning against him. The best form of defence is attack. Problem was, the other European powers loathed him. He was showing that you can overthrow your divinely constituted hereditary monarchy and still have strong, stable government. This was not a message they wanted to see spread about.
Napoleon made his reputation as a general in a series of European campaigns – which were technically conquests, but very often he was throwing out another occupying European power and got greeted by the locals as a liberator. He would then set up a buffer state which, yes, would be a French satellite but would still be a republic based on egalitarian revolutionary principles which were a lot better than what had gone before.
Hibbert says Napoleon returned from the Egyptian campaign, his last outing as mere General Bonaparte, determined to take power in France. Again, Cronin goes a little deeper. When Napoleon left France for Egypt (to cut Britain off from India: perfectly understandable tactic) France was at war with Britain only. Then there was a long period of several months when he was cut off from home with no news; and then he learned that the revolutionary government had brilliantly managed to get itself into a war with five other powers besides. What was he supposed to do?
And so he went home, and overthrew the government, and got himself set up as First Consul. And he did manage to make peace, at the Treaty of Amiens. It broke down after a year with fault on both sides.
He may have been a little to eager too accept the offer of becoming Emperor when it was made: but the fact is, it was made, by the Senate, which had been elected by the people in as fair an election as you were going to get anywhere in the Europe of the day. Who elected King Louis? Napoleon made peace with the church, he let the exiled emigres return without having their heads cut off, and for the next ten years (if you overlook the ongoing European wars) France flourished socially, culturally and scientifically as a meritocratic republic.
Before going into exile, he remarked that if the returning Bourbons had any sense, they would change nothing but the sheets on his bed. They didn't, of course, they tried to roll back the clock as if the last 30 years hadn't happened. And look how well that turned out.
But, before you start wondering who has kidnapped Ben and hacked his blog to start writing all this francophile bilge, let's look at a few other harsh facts. I've been talking about Napoleon the Emperor. Napoleon the man was without doubt a git: infantile sense of humour, socially inept, coarse, quite astonishingly vulgar, chauvinist and hypocritical in his philandering while expecting his wives to be unerringly faithful to him (though he's not unique here ...) and unable to trust or share power to anyone other than his own family. He was a brilliant general, at first – but his enemies learned off him and adapted to his tactics, while he just kept using the same tactics over and over again.
I'm, prepared to forgive him a lot, though, for the sheer entertainment value of his remaining years on St Helena, taking childish delight in winding up the po-faced British governor. The poor man had to be able to guarantee at any time of the day or night that General Bonaparte was still on the island. Napoleon would hide behind closed shutters so that no one outside the house could be quite sure.
One thing neither book mentions is that the principle medical officer on St Helena, and one of the men who signed Napoleon's death certificate, was Dr Thomas Shortt, whose descendants include yours truly. A minor oversight in two very absorbing and complementary insights into Napoleon's life.
My favourite anecdote is from Cronin's book and does not actually involve Napoleon. After the restoration, an aristo wandered into the navy office one day in Paris and announced that he wanted to be a Rear Admiral. His reasoning was that he had been a cadet officer before the Revolution, and had he stayed in the navy he would have enjoyed a glittering career and would be a Rear Admiral by now. So, kindly see to it.
The navy officials thought about it, and came back with a pretty good answer: yes, in the parallel universe where there was no Revolution, he did indeed enjoy a glittering naval career ... right up until the time he tragically died at Trafalgar. So, no promotion, sorry.
J.K. Rowling is being sued (again) for alleged plagiarism. In this case the estate of the now-deceased author of the 30pp self-published Adventures of Willy the Wizard (published 1987) claims (a) that by some miracle Rowling became aware of this opus and nicked bits of it for Goblet of Fire, because (b) it is inconceivable, inconceivable I tell you that anyone else could possibly imagine a society of wizards taking everyday life as we know it (sports competitions, chess, trains) and adding their own magical twist to it. QED.
Prognostications for the plaintiff are not good and this may well be the last you hear of it.
If you want a case that just might have merit, however, tune into BBC1 on 10 April (and make sure you do because I'm calling you all as witnesses), which is when "The Beast Below", the second episode of the new Dr Who series will be shown. According to the Beeb's publicity lords:
"The Doctor takes Amy to the distant future, where she finds Britain in space. Starship UK houses the future of the British people, as they search the stars for a new home."
Sound of screeching brakes. Now, hold on just a minute! Starship UK? Starship UK?? Why, that's almost exactly the same as:
"UK-1 ... the largest spaceship ever built – seventeen massive wheels in space spinning around a common axis. The last redoubt of the exiled House of Windsor." (His Majesty's Starship, 1998)
Note that even though HMSS was published in 1998, I sent it to my agent in early 1995. Later in 1995 I spoke on the phone to Steven Moffat, then a mere script writer a decade before he would achieve the status of Hugo-winning Dr Who Deity with "The Empty Child" and 15 years before he would take over series production from Russell T. Davies. Now, my memories of the conversation are mainly that we coordinated ideas for our forthcoming stories in the Decalog 3 collection: but I put it to you, is it entirely impossible that the conversation could have gone:
[Gentle Scottish burr] "So, Ben, what else have you written?"
[Crisp, eager, slightly naive English accent] "Well, I've just turned in my first novel, which includes the UK in space, based on a giant spaceship and ruled by the guy who would be king if Britain was still a monarchy."
[Slightly more acquisitive Scottish burr] "Fascinating! Tell me more ..."
Not at all impossible, I'm sure you'll agree. The fact that I don't remember it is obviously because I dismissed it as unimportant. The phone call was about our stories, after all, not my novel, and anyway, I trusted the man, trusted, I tell you.
I will hold my horses for the time being. I have still to watch this episode, and I'll wait for Willy the Wizard vs Rowling's inevitable dismissal, because I wouldn't want my chances affected by any perceived similarity to such an obviously futile, money-grabbing case.
-but otherwise they're completely the same. I refer to two movie themes by Ron Goodwin, both beloved of Classic FM: 633 Squadron and The Trap (aka the London Marathon theme, played this morning). Orchestration the same, key changes the same ... just the notes are a little different.
This is one of those posts where lots of separate strands of thought are whirling around and I need to write them down to see what I actually think. So, in no particular order and not in a way that maximises coherence:
A simple Google search to seek out the meanings of what I'm sure are very clever German jokes in Unseen Academicals led me to a Russian site with the full text of the book on it, copyright page and all. It's an Adobe Digital Edition, September 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-194203-7, but I will bet at least a fiver that it's not supposed to be on that particular site.
Hugh Cornwell, ex-frontman of the Stranglers, advocates giving away creative content for free online, as it will only stimulate sales. And he has some quite convincing statistics of follow-through sales to back it up. It's scary to think that the Stranglers could now be the kind of thing listened to by the parents of a generation old enough to vote – Hugh Cornwell and Val Doonican are in the same box – but his logic is sound: there's a whole generation now that could enjoy his music but probably hasn't heard of him, so how best to get in touch?
There is surely – isn't there? – a difference between me giving you something for free, and you taking something of mine because you like the look of it and for which you may or may not subsequently choose to pay. With anything other than creative online content, the latter behaviour would be theft, pure and simple. The only reason it isn't automatically theft here and now is ... well, what? Perception? Possibly.
The matter has been bouncing around the world of publishing for some time now, always given a little extra impetus by the like of Cory Doctorow, who is probably the leading advocate of "give it away for free and somehow make money from it too". It certainly works in his case: he seems to make an adequate living from doing just that. Or rather, perhaps, he makes an adequate living from being Cory Doctorow – a man of immense talent and energy with multiple income streams. Not everyone is gifted with being Cory Doctorow. Or Hugh Cornwell.
I am contributing to this in my own small way, though I don't think I'm big enough for my experience to generate reliable data one way or the other: my short stories are available, for free, online. My logic was that I had got all the money I was going to get from them, so why not? You can, if you want, buy them in a separate volume with value added in the form of authorial endnotes: for that you have to pay, but only enough to cover the cost of printing the thing in the first place. Likewise, His Majesty's Starship is (currently) available at cost only.
Of course, I don't need to be paid: I have a reasonably salaried job which I would probably want to hang onto even if the writing income suddenly skyrocketed. However, it would be interesting to see Mr Cornwell's reaction if young fans, having got hooked on his free downloads, started turning up at his gigs with the expectation of getting in without paying. The money that pays for the venue hire, for the equipment, for the salaries of the stagecrew and other staff ... well, that just comes from somewhere, dunnit?
Yup, it comes from you. Likewise, books and movies don't magically appear out of the ether. They are all the result of the work of many people. All those people need paying.
But always, always, always we hear that people expect stuff to be free ... A lot can come of expectation in the face of what established authority would like you to have. Magna Carta. The separation of power in democratic government. Things like that.
At the moment the governments of the UK and the US are tackling the matter: us with the Digital Economy Bill, them with the DMCA. This isn't the place to debate the rights and wrongs of these acts – see links at the end for that – but in terms of nutcracking they are both towards the sledgehammer end of the spectrum, and they are both far too friendly towards the big industry interests rather than the little guy. Put another way, they think little to nothing of criminalising innocent users as long as their income doesn't suffer. To the Mandelsons of this world that is a perfectly reasonable point of view. Further down the ladder, however ...
Let's go back to Magna Carta. No country has ever had a revolution out of perversity or because the people felt bored. Revolutions happen because of grievance. Those regimes that adapt to the revolutionary demands, by and large, continue, though with reduced power. Like, us, after the Restoration. Those regimes that don't adapt, don't even budge, fail. Like, the French monarchy. To retain overall control, you have to let go of a little of it.
So, I've finally decided what I think. It is right that publishers and other rights holders should make a profit from their activities – obviously. It is right that artists also make money for their endeavours – obviously. But, no one actually owes those artists a living, either. Harsh but true. If the creative income isn't keeping you alive: sorry, get a real job.
I'm not – yet – going to make my currently in-print novels freely available. However I won't rule it out as a future course of action if that finally, irrevocably seems to be the way the industry is going; and if my publishers decide to do it as some kind of promotional strategy, I won't stand in their way either. Let's be the Republic, not the Ancien Regime.
Sorry, ladies, the suddenly blingless fourth finger of my left hand means nothing at all. Well, nothing except that after three and a half years of marriage we have finally got round to getting our rings engraved. Nothing fancy, just names and the date of the event should either of us ever reach the stage of being unable to remember.
So, for the next fortnight I will have no way of communicating my marital status at a glance, and I will just have to revert to my bachelor habit of fighting off the women who throw themselves at me on a daily basis. Tchah!
Microcons aren't big (possible clue in the name, there) but Exeter University SF Society deserves huge credit for running them year after year after year - an unbroken line since 1982, indeed. The students get a gentle introduction to the harsh world of science fiction conventions. The - ahem - older guests get a reminder that there are still people out there prepared to love us, and put us up in a hotel for the night ("four star quality accommodation", they say, without specifying whose stars: oh, I like these people), and the joy of sharing our accumulated wisdom and experience.
Quite apart from a very nice meal at Exeter's Bella Italia - where paying the bill produced a nice real-world example of bistromathics - and my own talk, I particularly enjoyed Steve Green's valiant struggle with the laws of physics and optics to present some submissions to the Delta Film Award, in a room with no curtains, flooded with natural daylight. My two favourites are available on YouTube and I commend them to all my readers.
Pigeon: Impossible is just as good as those little shorts Pixar bundles with its big movies:
And now, because I know you're all kicking yourselves at missing out, here is an edited down version of my talk.
Life is too short for bad fiction Thoughts for this were sparked by a blog post from Charles Stross on 13 October last year, titled "why I hate Star Trek". In fact he wasn't specifically attacking Trek, rather he was attacking TVSF generally, and his gripe was the inevitable limitations of the TV medium for telling science fiction stories. Far too many of that post's 373 comments manage to miss the point completely, responding with something along the lines of "yes, what you say is true about every other show except [insert name of favourite show here]. You really ought to try it."
So, a couple of ground rules before I get into this.
First, please note: my purpose here is not to diss TVSF because unlike Charlie I'm quite a fan of it. So when we open this up to questions and discussions at the end, please don't put your hand up and say something like "yes, what you say is true about every other show except [insert name of favourite show here]. You really ought to try it."
Second, an acronym coined by Scott Adams: BOCTAOE – But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions. Nothing I say is intended to be the definitive statement of how things are, or even what I think. Feel free to tell me where you disagree, but don't tell me where I'm wrong because I probably already agree with you.
Third, although a lot of what I say also applies to science fiction movies it's primarily TV shows that I want to talk about. This is because SF movies don't even try to put the story first: by and large (BOCTAOE) they are all about the spectacle. If I want awe inspiring effects I watch Avatar – if I wanted a story I would watch Dances with Wolves. (As a discussion generating tangent, this is why so much New Who fails: RTD treats it as a movie when in fact it is a series. But this way lies diversion so I will get back to the point.)
[I'll cut that here because you can always just buy the book ...]
If you're following the description, I can guarantee that every one of you is imagining a different ship - even if you've glanced at the version on the cover, which astonishingly was drawn by someone who seemed to have read the text. If X is the number of people who read it then with 234 words of crisp, clinical prose I have created X versions of a spaceship. If HMSS was a movie - and the fact that it isn't I can only put down to oversight on Hollywood's part - they would spend far too much on generating an immaculate, highly detailed, utterly convincing CGI image to create exactly one version of the ship.
And in 10 years time, that CGI image would look so laughably dated. If you doubt me, look at an early episode of Babylon 5.
Now imagine - and believe me, I have imagined it, many times - HMSS got made into a series. It would have an ensemble cast, which is lovely, until one of the actors decides to move on or falls under a bus or is just not very good. They get replaced. This must be written into the plot. That was not part of the original story: therefore, the integrity of the storytelling is compromised. Babylon 5 again.
Or, a key development of the story, like the exciting orbital space battle, isn't quite up to the abilities of the FX department. You read it in the book and think - wow! You see it on screen and think ... nah. Blake's 7.
Or, the studio decrees 22 episodes but there's only really plot for 13, plus you have all these actors being paid to act so you really need to give them something to do. To make up for the extra you get endless padding and navel gazing from the characters that makes the viewers so irritated they just don't bother with the next season. Galactica.
Conversely the series is such a cash cow it is kept running long, long past the end of its natural life even when it's begging for euthanasia. Stargate SG1. (Note: may also apply to book series, Ms McCaffrey, Mr Jordan, Mr Herbert, etc.)
Conversely again, which technically brings us back to our starting point but you know what I mean, it's a series so fresh and new that it could run and run - but the idiot studio pulls the plug half way through the first season. Any guesses?
Or it can just take a series a while to get going. Another oft-repeated comment on Charlie's blog, mentioned earlier, where people who hadn't read the post were flocking to defend their favourites shows or attack other people's, was along the lines of "series 2 sagged a little but it really hit its stride with series 3", or "the first few episodes sucked but if you stuck with it then you really got into it ..." I don't have the time, or the inclination, to stick with a sagging series on the off-chance it might improve. I want a book to suck me in on the very first page, and I want to switch on the TV and have my attention hooked at once. Life is too short for bad fiction.
So, if you hadn't gathered by now, my contention is that because TV inevitably depends upon the real world limitations of budget and actors, as a medium for telling a good story it is immediately and by its very nature compromised. It may be compromised massively or very limitedly, and either way it is possible to make programmes that are perfectly watchable and enjoyable even by me. But it is still compromised, in ways books are not. Books have an unlimited FX budget and an infinite cast. TV may be pretty good: books will always be better.
The point of reading or watching SF is the SF. Very often, it's not that an SF show doesn't have SF in it: sometimes it has way too much, at an unexamined, superficial level. A single season can rattle through concepts at breakneck pace, each of them worthy of a novel all to themselves, but giving just enough time to introduce them before moving on to the next episode. While I was writing the novel that is even now in my publisher's inbox, an urban fantasy set in modern-day Salisbury, time and again I was thinking: "aha! I can ..." shortly followed by "... oh, but Buffy or Angel did that." In my novel, this development would have been a major turning point in the plot: my own modest contribution to the century old gestalt of modern science fiction. To Buffy, it was simply a way of getting out of one scrape and into another: they didn't examine it or think about it and had no intention of ever doing so.
Sometimes this is a very good thing indeed: sometimes it accidentally leads to greatness. First example: the TARDIS. This worked because, even though the simplicity of both the police box and the console room were forced on the BBC by limited budget, by their simplicity they became timeless. They were never examined that closely because in the very nature of the series, they didn't need to be. The Doctor is a traveller and a loner: therefore, 99% of the time the TARDIS was the only TARDIS around and the Doctor was the only Time Lord. In each adventure he was almost always stuck in what was, for him, a less technologically advanced society and therefore we never had to look too closely at the implications of the Doctor's own society, the possessors of such mastery of time and space. (And frankly it all went pants when they did.)
Second example: the Star Trek transporter. This was famously introduced because the FX budget didn't cover being able to show ships landing and taking off all the time. But, by the time we reached Voyager a transporter was standard equipment on any starship, even down to shuttlecraft, yet the show never explored the implications of that kind of technology in any kind of depth. I was impressed at one point in Voyager – quite possibly the only point that Voyager impressed me – when the doctor delivers a baby by transporting it straight out of the womb. I like that kind of thinking. (Sadly the child in question grew up to be the utterly dispensable Naomi Wildman but so it goes.) But, in a society that has mastered mass-energy conversion to the point where replicating a perfectly made cup of tea obviously uses less energy than boiling a kettle (because that's what they do), why do they still even bother with turbolifts to get between decks?
Time and again, TVSF bumps into what in storytelling terms is just sloppiness, because those are the inherent limitations of the medium. I enjoy TVSF and I enjoy books, the same way I enjoy pizza and chips and I also enjoy a good garlicy Bolognese that I have lovingly prepared to my exact specifications, washed down with a carefully chosen red wine. I might have the pizza and chips more often – but I still know which is better.
So, because I believe in only offering positive criticism (unless negative is the only viable option, or just more fun), let's look at how TVSF can – or could – do it right.
First, I gladly acknowledge that much TVSF plants seeds that can be further developed in the written form. A lot of my own science fictional development can be traced to the Target Dr Who novelisations. I have also already given examples of where TV series struck science fiction gold.
Sticking with moving pictures, though, one obvious way around the limitations of actors and FX budgets is to do something as an animation. That is why Futurama is so astonishingly good as science fiction. As in a book, an animated character only needs to change when the story requires it, not when the actor gets pregnant or fat or bored.
Futurama is of course obviously a cartoon and I wouldn't want to say that good TVSF can only exist in cartoon form. Let's get a bit ahead of where we are now, technologically. CGI is getting to the point where human actors and collections of pixels could soon be indistinguishable. I want it taken to the next stage – CGI actors that look utterly human but who have never existed before. (Bad luck on the human actors, but it was their career choice [and as someone pointed out after the talk, humans would still be needed for the body mapping].) They could have starring roles in a TV series where they can be watched and enjoyed without any audience preconception creeping in.
Dr Who's concept of regeneration, something else that has entered our culture and which made the show unique, was another of those serendipitous ways of getting round the real-world – in this case, the star of a show badly needing to retire at the height of his show's success. It wouldn't have happened if Dr Who had only existed in book form, but it happened in the series and it was one of the series's defining moments. But, now we're where we are, would it not be cool if in a couple of years Matt Smith were to regenerate into a CGI character? There would be no press releases about his choice of clothing, no scratching of heads and saying "who?" when we hear the good news – no distractions at all, in fact, to being able to sit back and just enjoy the show purely on its merits as a bit of SF story telling. And if they decided to pull another regeneration on us, it would be a complete surprise, in a way that hasn't happened since Hartnell became Troughton (and like Ecclestone was meant to be), not heralded over a year in advance like what's-his-name.
One more way TVSF could tackle some limitations of the medium is the mini-series. The 1984 movie of Dune had fantastic visuals but still sucked golfballs through a hosepipe because the movie had to be butchered down to usual cinema length. Whereas, the 2000 mini-series was actually quite good. It suffered from the occasional reused effect, and the Fremen's CGI blue eyes tended to wink back to normal if the actor turned away from the camera; but because it wasn't a big movie event, it could use cheap character actors, so you weren't distracted by familiar faces; it had the time to explore the source material thoroughly; and it had a definite beginning, middle and end so the cast weren't subject to real world vagaries like dying or getting fired.
So, to sum up: TVSF good, written SF better, any questions?
A.N. Wilson has been one of my least favourite individuals for a very long time. A man with nothing whatsoever useful or informed to say, he has epitomised all that is wrong with luvvie-journalism amongst the Hampstead set, in particular with his habit of popping up as an ever reliable prissy, over-enunciated talking head to do down any kind of religion that doesn't match his aesthetically perfect high church atheism. He has been religion's Brian Sewell, another example of the kind of man Gilbert & Sullivan might have had in mind:
"Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new and declare it's crude and mean, For Art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine."
There's a new translation of the Bible? A new prayer book? Get A.N. Wilson in to be rude about it! I would find myself yelling at the radio as the Today programme played: "you're an atheist! What's it to you that people who actually want Christianity to mean something have written a liturgy that people born this century can understand? You want to dress up in silly robes and spout 17th century English? Be my guest! There's no law to stop you! Have a party at your house! Invite a friend! Invite both of them! But belt up about the rest of us."
Except that ... apparently he's not an atheist any more and I find his account of his reconversion, or deunconversion, really quite moving.
Probably because I happen to agree with a lot of it. Consider lines like:
"... the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits."
Well, quite! What more can I say? (Later edit: the bit that I especially agree with is in bold. The evolution of language and music may or may not have a bearing.)
On other matters I suspect we never will see eye to eye this side of the hereafter, and I'm pretty certain neither of us would ever enjoy having the other to dinner. But this is a very good start.
This is me, in the front cockpit, flying a glider. I seem to have my left elbow resting nonchalantly on the rim of the cockpit which makes it look a lot more casual than I remember it.
I've just thrown out an old photo album from my childhood, containing mostly lots of not very interesting photos of not very interesting things. These, however, I scanned and kept.
I had a father, grandfather and great-grandfather all in the Dorsets, an infantry regiment, so naturally I decided to go into the RAF. My father puts it down to a desire to assert my independence; I put it down to a desire to fly aeroplanes. My four years in the school CCF got me to the grand rank of Cadet Sergeant with marksman badges for .22 and SLR rifles and, of which I'm most proud, my solo gliding wings (which very clearly say AIR CADETS just in case anyone in the grown-up world takes them seriously).
The week was spent in August 1982 at Predannack Airfield near the Lizard, in Cornwall, bunking in the evenings at RNAS Culdrose (which, yes, I know is a naval establishment). I don't know quite how the instructors did it but it was obvious in retrospect that the first few days were spent assessing the material at hand, and after that they concentrated on the ones most likely to make it, even though everyone got a more or less equal dose of flying time and ground duties. For some reason I was one of the chosen.
The instructor who adopted me might have seen me as his personal project. I remember him as a bad tempered, sour old git but he got results where a nicer, gentler instructor would probably have failed. On the last day of the week, I flew the required solo around the field and here is me being presented with my wings.
My smile would probably have been quite silly under any circumstances but it becomes even sillier because the distinguished looking senior military gent giving me my wings is my own father.
The family were staying with friends nearby and had come to visit me a few days before. The officer in charge of us didn't take long to work out that being presented with wings by a real live soldier, a Brigadier who had actually fought for his country in anger, was a lot better than the alternative which was getting the wings from a part time Flight Lieutenant (Reserve). My father could always be relied on to take a smart blazer and tie even on holiday, so having something appropriate to wear wasn't a problem. It was probably the first time he had ever actually seen me in uniform and he said that my too-small beret made me look like an Israeli.
And here are the wings themselves, with the qualifying log book pages. Still got 'em.
So, Nan lived to meet three directly descended great-grandchildren and enjoy being able to have conversations with a teenage step-great-grandchild. Somehow, being a great-Nan she became known among her youngest descendants as Nan the Great, and quite right too. She predated the Russian Revolution by 8 years and outlived the Soviet Union by 21. Her aunt once met someone who could remember seeing the fleet return from Trafalgar. Less than a fortnight before she was born, Blériot flew across the English Channel, and within three quarters of Nan's total lifetime, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Well into her seventies, she was jetting around the world herself.
100 years, 6 months, 12 days.
Nan loved to socialise and to network. Even when she broke her leg in her nineties, it took just minutes to establish that she knew the mother of the ambulance lady. Her friends were all of a similar background and nature to her – impeccably upper middle class and by today's standards very often quite dotty.
The family fortune was a memory but the breeding and manners lived on, combined with flashes of attitude from a bygone era. When hospitalised for a period a few years ago, she could still unblushingly refer to her doctor of Asian descent as a little brown man. (For the record she had often had people of similar ethnicity to stay as house guests.) Her idea of an ideal conversation was one that wittered on and on and on and preferably didn't touch on anything at all that's important. Any attempt to make it relevant or meaningful had to be resisted by dragging in yet another anecdote about someone no one but the speaker had ever heard of who did something utterly unimportant. I spent a lot of my prep school weekends with Nan; it may be why I find it very easy to stay silent and generally tune out if the point of a conversation isn't at least looming on the long distance radar after about a minute.
But let me not for a minute do her down.
My grandfather spent most of World War 2 in the Far East fighting the Japanese and having a whale of a time. Nan's memories of the war were always less rosy. His rather tactless letters back home were full of news about what fun he was having and very short of any share of the money he was earning to help keep his wife and child. So she crossed the Atlantic twice with her young daughter during the U-boat crisis, seeking a better life in Canada, not finding it and coming home again. Peacetime did nothing to reduce the long separations. She would have looked at today's 6-month tours of duty in Afghanistan and laughed a hollow laugh. After the war she found herself having to raise a mentally handicapped son; and when Granddad had a stroke in the 1960s she had to look after him too. She can be forgiven some quirks.
The funeral was held yesterday, in the Trinity Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral, where she had spent many years as a guide: quite by coincidence it was 35 years to the day after her husband's own send-off. It was the first decently sunny day for ages and the chapel, the pointy bit at the end of the building, is light and airy and full of space – the perfect setting. The music of the organ filled an almost empty cathedral, which has always looked good but at lunchtime on a term-time weekday looks absolutely stunning.
Nan's first intimations of mortality began over a decade ago when my parents went to New Zealand for a few weeks and Nan became convinced she wouldn't last until they got back. So, I was summoned to discuss her funeral arrangements with the then Vicar of the Close, who could barely keep a straight face at this obviously hale and hearty old lady convinced her time was nigh. All that really came away from that meeting was (a) no, she did not want "Candle in the Wind" and (b) I was to select and read a suitable Bible passage – she trusted my judgement and would be in no position to complain if she didn't like it. We managed both of those stipulations, and the passage in question was 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Being able to say "We believe that Jesus died and rose again", with your amplified voice echoing around a cathedral, is a powerful experience.
I also designed the order of service for the funeral, which she might just have understood as a concept; and I downloaded an MP3 of "The Road to the Isles" from Amazon to burn a CD to play at the Committal, which I would never have been able to explain to her in a thousand years. I mention all this because she was the one who set me on the path to computer literacy in the first place, by giving me the money for my 21st birthday with which I bought my first computer, my faithful and beloved Amstrad PCW. She was in tune with the modern world enough to ask me once to demonstrate 'an internet'. I chose the National Rail website as most likely to be understood as something useful. I asked her to name a town. "Salisbury." I asked her for another. "Portsmouth." I asked for a date. "Tomorrow." Click, click, click ... And behold, I could show her that there was a train from Salisbury to Portsmouth at 10.30 the next day.
"Well, I knew that," she said and thereby dismissed the Internet revolution from her consideration.
She might have enjoyed the slideshow at the reception afterwards: a PowerPoint montage of pictures that ran on a couple of laptops, showing photos of her from babe in arms to old lady in receipt of her telegram from the Queen (who looks almost equally grumpy in her picture). I had a brief crisis of conscience in assembling the pictures: should I include the arty one of her in her twenties, tastefully naked sitting on a rock by the sea (which really can't have been very comfortable)? Tact won out over truth: besides, there were a lot of her contemporaries among the guests and I wouldn't have wanted them on my conscience.
RIP, Nan, and I promise not to tune out when we meet again.
I hadn't realised how old I'm getting until I realised how long it's been since I had a decently silly theological conversation.
I had made the offer of transferring my collection of Dr Who videos to Middle Godson's family. Middle Godson's father and I were at uni together. At one point the discussion of the terms of the transfer, conducted devant une des enfants but phrased to avoid arousing excitement until a conclusion was reached, lapsed into New Testament Greek. The years just fell away.
MG's vicar father has also developed the Christingle concept for other festivals where the quotient of unchurched punters on pews might be higher than usual: Eastingle (chocolate eggs instead of oranges) and Harvestingle. This is an idea that could run and run. The higher forms of church could pick it up too. I propose Annuncitingle. Children could all clutch a parthenogenetically grown fruit on which they have drawn a very surprised face. Stick a cross in it, hold it upside down and you've got a ♀ .
I wonder if the student Richard Dawkins and his friends ever lapsed deliberately into really bad science just for the fun of it?
I look around at my co-workers on a Friday afternoon ...
Everyone seems so normal. We are mostly white and middle class. I would guess that the huge majority have a university education. No one here has ever really known deprivation or the breakdown of society. I'm sure we were all spanked by our mothers from time to time when we were naughty.
And yet, the forensic evidence suggests there is a male in this company who pees into the toilet bowl without putting the seat up. It's the kind of thing you could write a thesis on.
This chappie is 190cm high and 234cm across, which give or take about 0.5cm is the exact width of the living room wall behind it. Like God, Gaul and the Saturn V it divides into three parts, but the largest of those is 142 x 191cm, which also give or take about 0.5cm is the space available halfway up our stairs where two quickly successive 90 degree turns must be negotiated. But we managed, with the help of Best Man, summoned at an hour's notice (and after one failed attempt by just three of us to negotiate the 180 degree bend) under Emergency Friendship Protocols that allow this kind of thing.
Ex Mother in Law in Law is having a clearout and it would have been a shame to let this one go when we have so much junk that needs storing a wall so perfectly suited to taking it.
Should we move house, we either get removal men in or dismantle the house, whichever may be cheaper.
This is the man who has come to stop our roof leaking. It looks much scarier when you realise that he is standing beyond the gully of the two roofs, on a ledge that extends beyond the left-hand roof for about ten feet; and while the roof on the right extends to the end of the ledge, on his left there is a four-floor drop.
When he came to give us an estimate he calmly waltzed out onto the ledge, squatted down, checked the lead, stood up, pirouetted a couple of times, scratched himself and performed a quick interpretative dance to the tune of what I presume was the Czech national anthem. When he came today, lugging his flamethrower and associated gas tank, I expected him to get out onto the ledge by a series of backflips just to show that he can. Anyway, I was sufficiently convinced that this guy is used to working on roofs. It also helped that having seen the stains on the walls of the flat below, he could head straight for the site of the leaks and find the holes. Rather makes you wonder what the earlier cowboys did, doesn't it?
I've never expected to be wanted for my body and especially not at a funeral, but so it came to pass yesterday. My two cousins, with a combined height of about 4 metres, wanted to bear their father's coffin - but unless they did it all by themselves, this was going to present a problem, so they needed equally vertically gifted pallbearers to balance the load. As it was I was the only one they could find. The excellent undertakers, who can cope with practically anything, did what they could to even things out so the coffin was born in by me + senior cousin J (back), junior cousin R + tallest undertaker (getting a free ride) (middle) and two regulars at the front. There was a slight incline but nothing to worry about. You learn to walk like a duck so as not to kick the heels of the guy in front.
And what an honour it was. Afterwards I said I would try and reciprocate when the equivalent occasion comes up in our family, but that event might also include things like Union Jacks, guards of honour etc. so it might just be best to leave it to the professionals. They understood. Anyway, we'll cross that one when we come to it.
It was a wonderful service at the Parish Church of All Saints Weston, full of love and happy memories for a life-loving man with a long and successful career. The readings - Robert Louis Stevenson and Ecclesiastes 3.1-13 - summed him up perfectly; my cousins kept their brimming emotions contained in their tributes in a way I'm really not sure I could match; and the Revd Fred Harte did wonders with bringing the Christian message of hope to a not particularly religious congregation, without issuing an altar call or invitations to Alpha.
Then to Putney Vale crematorium, which has seen off most of that side of the family over the last 30 years or so. The coffin moved off to Bunk Johnson's "Walk through the streets of the city", an exciting bit of New Orleans jazz I've not heard before. We were then expected to leave to the sound of Roxy Music's "Avalon", except that when the undertakers opened the door next to the sound console they knocked something and the music switched back from soppy 80s crooning to New Orleans jazz again. Would that all Bryan Ferry's works went the same way. If (and it's a big "if") I must have Roxy Music at my funeral, please make it something like "Love is the drug" or "Do the Strand".
Then home, to find that Bonusbarn had eaten the last pizza, so we did what we very rarely do and went out and bought fish and chips. And, stillfeeling keyed up from a long day, washed it down with a brandy. Extravagance! But fully in the spirit of the closing verses from the reading.
My father shared a memory that I wasn't going to mention to my cousins but afterwards thought maybe I could have, because they joked that thanks to my uncle's Eastenders connections, when the curtains closed over the coffin they could have played the famous intro drumbeat - duh, duh, duh-duh, duh, duh-duh-duh ...
So anyway. On the occasion of one of my great aunts being sent off at Putney Vale, the furnaces were obviously going at full strength that day. There was the distinct smell of smoke and bits in the air and it really was unpleasant. My uncle took a deep breath and remarked, "Ah, ze ovens are vorking vell today!"
He was bombed out by the Luftwaffe as a boy. He's allowed to say things like that.
My windows shiver as an ignorant nation bellows: "What is The Write Fantastic?" It is "an exciting initiative by professional authors aiming to introduce fantasy fiction to readers who have yet to experience the genre. Its mission is also to ensure existing readers know the full breadth and depth of current fantasy writing." Said professional authors include such lovely people as Juliet McKenna and Chaz Brenchley and it's all well worth it.
Anyway, I love mixing with people I first met on a panel of debut novelists at a convention over 10 years ago sharing our experiences about how we got our first novels published and who are now leading lights in their field with sales in a list of countries as long as your arm and not feeling remotely bitter about it (hi, Jules!).
And before that, on 6-7 March I'll be in Exeter for the university SF society's annual Microcon. Remembering the extremely steep hill you have to get up and down to arrive at or leave the campus, I expect to be marginally fitter on 8 March than I was three days earlier.
Lovely as it would be to see the same familiar faces at both these, I might start to worry that I'm being stalked if I do.
I wasn't sure how to tackle this because I really don't want to jump onto an Internet rumour hobbyhorse that later proves embarrassingly hoaxish. But my source is a level headed individual I know and I respect, and Snopes.com has nothing on it, so here goes:
It appears ToysRUs is stocking a toy ouija board. Said board is manufactured by Hasbro. It's aimed at little girls, so it's pink and frilly.
This is so far from a good idea that the light from a good idea will take several million years to reach it. And that's just the pink and frilly. I also have deeper objections. The reliable source I was talking about is the proprietor of a witchcraft shop in Glastonbury (don't ask) and they think it's a really dumb idea too. [What they have to say about it.]
Another site even has a picture of the thing, looking disturbingly like something from the back of an Ann Summers shop (I mean, ahem, I would guess) but aimed at girls aged 8+. Clicking on that page's product link to ToysRUs now gets a "not found" page, but search there for "oujia boards" and you do still get a glow-in-the-dark one, which is presumably for boys.
Boycott ToysRUs? Boycott Hasbro? Write to the Times, your vicar, your youth pastor? Pray hard? Write to Richard Dawkins? I don't really know: I leave it up to you. There is a boycott Hasbro page, but having seen some of the comments there ... Hmm. Even though I know the speaker is ultimately on the same side as me, the low-church Protestant in me does find sentiments like "St Joseph, slayer of demons protect us, St Michael, St Gabriel, St Raphael protect us, St Anthony protect us" to be not entirely different to the problem being discussed in the first place. But that may just be me.
This was my core science fiction collection as of 26 June 2006. Exercising ruthlessly stringent criteria I had whittled it down to these four simple shelves. Since then various of its components have come and gone but the quantity has remained the same.
Until last night, when it got whittled down by a further two shelves worth. We are inheriting a big kind of dresser-thingy which will take up most of one wall and comes up to the level of the second shelf: ergo, at least two shelves had to go. I was as ruthless as the first time round, with similar criteria honed after a further 3.5 years of life-changing events: am I really likely to read this again? And could anyone else benefit more from its ownership?
That second one was actually quite easy to answer, as Senior Godson has turned into quite the SF fan. About one shelf's worth went to him, the rest to a jumble sale for Haiti. I like to think my selection criteria made sense. Not too light? Not too heavy? Too much sex and violence? Not enough? Is this a classic that a developing young mind should read? And so on. I gave him all the Asimovs but kept all the Clarkes: getting rid of those would be tearing out a piece of my soul.
But. Two shelves down, about 10 titles in from the right, red text on a yellow spine - that would be my copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics (and here's how I came by it). Not really the kind of thing a godfather should give his godson, and not really the kind of thing I feel should be unleashed on the unwitting public via a jumble sale, even for a good cause. So I've hung on to it. Ironic that Senior Godson's father works for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority: now I begin to understand the dilemmas faced by other purveyors of toxic waste.
I was shocked - shocked! - that the winning team on last night's University Challenge can't do binary. St John's Oxford couldn't solve three simple binary sums, like 1100011 divided by 1001*, and express the answer in decimal.
Even stranger is that they were obviously using the same method I was using, except that I got it right: work out the value of each column with a 1 in it and add it all together. Not hard.
Even more shocking was learning that apparently I'm the only one in the family who could do this. This must be how my father felt when he learnt I can't do long division.
It's simplicity itself to work out a spreadsheet that will convert numbers into binary. However I can still remember Mr Turnbull's lesson on how to make a binary calculator with nothing more complicated than a pen, some paper, some Pritt and some scissors, in those long-ago days when no one had heard of spreadsheets and "do it in Excel" would have been meaningless. I may have to dust off this skill.
We all want to side with the underdog. When there's a clash of overdog vs uberdog I suppose the overdog's position is still relatively under, so that's why I say "excelsior!" to Macmillan and "ha ha" to Amazon.
In the space of 48 hours Macmillan and Amazon went from minor border skirmishes to all-out war, declared by Amazon and lost by same a short while later. Ultimately it all came down to Amazon's vastly inflated idea of its rightful place in the affairs of man, finally clashing with a publisher big enough to say "no". Amazon tried to impose terms on Macmillan, Macmillan weren't having it and so Amazon withdrew its listings for every single Macmillan title.
Macmillan controls a lot of imprints. Suddenly, with no warning or reason given, a very large part of the global book supply was unavailable through the world's largest book supplier.
I'm not published by Macmillan or any of its imprints: other than general principle, I have no declarable interest in this. But I am still smarting, nearly 10 years later, from the punitive discounts Amazon imposed on Big Engine in return for the privilege of receiving a basic competent service from them: one that listed my titles accurately, didn't unilaterally declare them out of print and so on. Now I feel those wounds healing. A little.
