That was a good weekend, that was. Friday was a performance by the Osiligi Maasai Warrior Dance Troupe at Christ Church in Warminster: 90 minutes of hypnotic close harmony singing and chanting and dancing and jumping. They do it to raise money for their community back home and very good they are too. Like a low-budget Peter Gabriel concert but even better.
The Saturday was BristolCon, which I enjoyed more this year than last probably because the discussions seemed more book-themed than media-themed. Also I wasn’t spending the sessions beaming ineffective telepathic death signals at the prune from SFX who gave The New World Order such a braindead review. And I got to meet Philip Reeve.
And in the 45 minute train journey from Warminster to Bristol I read a brand new copy of Paddington Abroad, which I found in my parents’ spare room. Apparently it was a freebie giveaway by the Daily Telegraph. I even remembered bits of it from when I was 5 or 6, though my reading speed may have improved since then. It's one of the first books I remember.
The gist of it – what we would nowadays call the story arc, I suppose – is unsurprisingly that Paddington and the Browns go abroad, on holiday to France. This was in the days when you drove your car onto a plane, which dates it a bit. I remembered bits of it, like Paddington going to see a fortune teller, who tells him to cross her palm with silver. He obligingly does so. She explains that he’s meant to stop halfway and let the coin go. She is then puzzled by his very long lifeline, which turns out to be a chunk of marmalade.
I also remembered the cheerfully Francophobic scene where the Browns tuck into a delicious dish of escargots, prepared by Paddington, before reacting like any smugly complacently ignorant middle class Brit would when learning what escargots are.
I had forgotten the pictures – the wonderful line drawings by Peggy Fortnum who manages to catch everything that is so earnest and loveable about our hero bear in just a few lines. There was one that made me laugh for a good five minutes. Paddington is invited to play the bass drum in a French marching band, but because the drum restricts his view he doesn’t realise when the band have turned round so he keeps on going. The picture stretches across the top of both pages. At top right is the band, just very small silhouetted stickmen, marching off the page in one direction. At top left is a very small silhouetted bear marching off the page in the other, still earnestly beating his drum.
But the real gem which has stuck with me all these years is the second chapter, where Paddington goes to the bank to take out some money for the trip. I remember my father explaining the jokes to me.
The bank is called Floyds. I learned there is a bank called Lloyds.
First he learns that his savings have accrued about 10p of interest, which he doesn’t find very interesting. I learned about interest.
He is shocked to find that the number on the note he is given is not the same as the number on the note that he handed in. In fact, the coins are different too – different dates and not highly polished like his were. I learned about the fungibility of money, though probably not the word "fungibility".
The cashier also explains that his old notes has probably been burned by now. I learned … well, in short I got a pretty good idea of how banks work. For a 5 year old.
Paddington complains that his note had a promise to pay bear the sum of five pounds on demand. The cashier explains that the word was bearer.
Of course, this being Paddington it all ends in chaos, with him convinced that his savings have all gone up in smoke and the emergency services being called in. Quite prescient, really.
Eventually all is smoothed out and he is offered a nice new bank note to make up for it all. He prefers to keep the old one as he now has so little faith in the banks he would rather have a note that’s been tested.
With that off my chest here are the Osiligi Maasai warriors again, singing in a church somewhere (not ours). This was a more restrained performance, possibly because it is apparently a hymn they are singing.
What I love about (a) fandom and (b) the modern age is that you can casually bump into someone in Oxford that you last saw in Montreal 9 months ago without batting an eyelid, and then not have to waste time with catch-up chat because you've already read their blog anyway.
You can also have conversations like:
"Ben, have you met Geoff?" (That would be Geoff Ryman, founder member of the Mundane Movement, amongst his many other strengths.)
"Yes, I last saw him having breakfast at Résidences universitaires UQAM, 303 boulevard René-Lévesque Est, Montreal when we were both staying there in August, and I wondered if his choice of meal would trigger another mundane movement."
Maybe I didn't say that last bit. I said that we passed on the escalators in the convention centre.
The occasion being the fifth anniversary celebration of the Write Fantastic, a thoroughly deserved pat-on-the-back event in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Centre of St Hilda's College. The centre has a distressingly sports centre-like vibe, all modern brutalist bare brickwork and large plate glass windows. Thankfully it lacks the smell of chlorine, sweat and fear and instead has a rather nice, cosy auditorium for the panel sessions. The stage includes a small little statuette of du Pré + cello which I wanted to have on the panel sessions too, but was over-ruled.
Chaired by Juliet McKenna, "Politics and Genre - fantasy conservatism vs SF radicals" started (once Juliet had explained what it meant) with everyone rightly disagreeing with the perceived trope of "sf = cutting edge and incisive, fantasy = cosy", citing counter-examples, and then getting into the realities of how politics, economics and other real-world factors would be in various imagined worlds. En route discussion touched on the infinity slappability of the ever-whinging Starbuck, having separate kitchens for the winter and summer in parts of Canada, and the different points at which The Phantom Menace really lost it for various viewers. (For me: the bit where Liam Neeson's Konky Jonky or whatever he's called carefully explains to Anakin and his mum that even though he is a very powerful Jedi Knight and can do just about anything he likes, he can only take Anakin with him and his mum will have to stay behind as a slave because that's the only way the plot will work ... and they both calmly accept this.)
"Reflections on a life in writing" was meant to be me effortlessly moderating by pointing Chaz Brenchley, Liz Williams, Geoff Ryman and Ian Watson at the audience, pressing the "go" button and letting them entertain us with anecdotes of their writing careers. It was a bit harder than that because, again, no one was quite sure what the session title meant, but the audience seemed to be entertained anyway. Earlier, Kari Spelling had shared the fact that a reviewer once said her characterisation wasn't as good as Mercedes Lackey's. Now I was on stage I could trump this with the Amazon review that said the characterisation of His Majesty's Starship isn't as good as Rama II's. The audience's resident IP barrister offered to put me in touch with a few defamation experts that he knows.
So, good fun, the required level of silliness, seeing old faces, putting old names to new ones, and books to buy. And may I mention, cudos to the Cape of Good Hope pub on the corner of Cowley and Iffley Road for managing to serve the 50-odd guests who turned up without warning, mostly within the allocated 90 minute lunch break.
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?
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.
Two months ago it was an American convention centre the size of an airport. Yesterday it was a converted fishmarket in Northampton, just off the market square. The latter is much more fun for a convention.
The Fishmarket has been converted into an arts venue by the council but retains its character. It's an L-shaped building and both arms distinctly slope down towards the corner - a relic of the time when it had to be sluiced down at the end of each day to get rid of scales and guts. As an acoustic environment it is, um, challenging. Vast amounts of space above, in front of and behind you for speakers' voices to get lost in. This was the initial layout for the panels, everyone facing lengthways down one of the long bits.
Thankfully, after the first panel they turned it 90 degrees so that the speakers had a wall behind them and everyone could sit a little closer to them.
The sloping floors aren't the only remnant of the fishmarket past. At one end, where the book dealers dwelt, they still have the old marble topped counters.
(That thing looking like a bizarre sex toy is in fact a cuddly knitted Saturn V ...) Master of ceremonies was Kevin the Jester, sometimes on stilts.
And the con? My favourite kind. Small scale, personable, interesting panel topics and a chance to meet and chat with everyone you want to. I counted a total of 7 people who had been at our wedding - 8 if you count young master Simon F, who is 18 months old now and was enwombed at the time. Guests of honour were Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Storm Constantine and Paul Cornell. Topics were on the usual range of subjects like which medium holds the future for science fiction, space opera, fantasy, yadda yadda yadda but for once I was getting a real feeling of the future being shaped as we spoke. Everyone was going home with a slightly firmer idea of where we all stand, which for a writer is no bad thing.
My sole public contribution was on the space opera panel ("Is 'New Space Opera' just 'Old Space Opera' in a fresh set of clothes?") which I had a horrible feeling might turn into the Iain + Ken show plus three rabbits blinking in the headlights, a.k.a. Tony Ballantyne, Jaine Fenn and me. Ian Whates moderating. Shouldn't have worried, as Ian moderated well and Iain and Ken are both pro enough and nice enough guys to spread it all about. At one point I said that one reason I didn't write space opera any more was that I could no longer take the navies-in-space idea seriously, in this age when an airliner can take off from Heathrow and land the other side of the world without any necessary human intervention; interestingly, that sparked Iain into talking about his whole underlying philosophy for the General Systems Vehicles and other Culture craft, which I'd not heard before.
There was also my sort of dealers' room - not books stretching as far as the eye can see, which actually can be counterproductive, but a few select ones including but not limited to Erik Arthur from Fantasy Centre with a wide range of good condition ex-review copies at £4 each. At least, that was who I gave most of my custom to. I'm one of those strange people who don't usually come home laden with books but this time I made an exception.
Erik mentioned that a lot of customers my sort of age come in to buy old Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. "I realised I don't sell books," he reflected. "I sell memories."
Making me wonder what today's 18-year-olds will be buying in the 2030s ...
Be it known to one and all that Anticipation, the 2009 world science convention to be held in Montreal, starts the day after what will be my grandmother's 100th birthday.
I tend to go to the world science fiction convention only if it's somewhere I would like to see anyway. The exception to this was my first, San Jose in 2002, which was a business necessity, though I did get a day out in San Francisco which was nice. Thereafter Toronto in 2003, Boston in 2004 and Glasgow in 2005. I gave Los Angeles a miss in 2006 – though as it turned out I had other things to be doing that summer – and I don’t think wild horses could have dragged me to Tokyo last year.
I knew way back when – long before I was married or had a stepson – that I would probably be going to Denver this year. When I declared this intention the future Bonusbarn, then aged 12, declared that he was coming too and was going to start saving. And did, coins in a bottle, which was rather sweet. He has stuck to this intention, though not necessarily to the saving. Somehow he also wangled a promise to drop in on New York. This all swelled into a major family holiday when we got married. Via a long and circuitous route it has now dwindled to just him and me again, flying out to New York for a few days at the end of July; then he flies home and I go on to Denver to do my stuff. Our onward flights are on the same day within hours of each other from different airports ... could be fun.
Different people get different things out of cons. Some go for the room parties, which are a refined form of hell on earth. Some go for the costumes, which just baffles me. I go for the panels: I enjoy the throwing about of ideas and I get a mild dose of self-promotion. Okay, the social scene is fun too and it’s nice to see familiar faces, though most of them are Brits and I could keep in touch much more cheaply by staying at home. Highlights of previous worldcon programmes:
Learning on arrival that I was meant to be giving a reading from The New World Order, not having actually packed a copy, leading to an epic wrestle with the Boston public library system as I tried to print off the chapter I had put on the website.
Partnering Christopher Priest in "I'm Sorry I Haven't an SFing Clue" at Glasgow, vs. Ken McLeod and John Meaney.
Also in Glasgow, chairing a panel on young adult literature and what is and isn’t acceptable. Somehow – and I’m still not sure how – discussion turned briefly to rainbow parties. An artist on the panel pointed out they wouldn't work because if you mix lots of colours together they just blend into muddy brown. "In that case," said one of the panellists, a Mr Pratchett, "you use masking tape ..."
Today I learnt my programme items for this year. Only two panels, though I'll let them know I'm happy to do more: "Where are all the travelers? (If time travel is possible)", Wednesday, 11:30 and "Depicting Christianity in F&SF", Thursday, 11:30. Both good, stolid staples of paneldom. Now to see who I’m on with ...
