The Occasional Blog of Phil Masters

Views Over Sydney

2012-01-22T11:58:00.000Z

I've finished posting another day's pictures from last October's big antipodean holiday, specifically those from the 21st of October. Which was basically a day spent wandering around central Sydney. The morning was spent grabbing some breakfast in the Rocks area, taking a look around the vicinity of the hotel, then heading down to the main shopping area - largely for practical reasons, but we did get to discover things like the Strand Arcade and the General Post Office there.

Then, after lunch in an Italian place on Circular Quay, we worked our way back around to the Rocks, and eventually up the Bridge Stairs - which put us on rather than under Sydney Harbour Bridge for the first time. Which meant that we could walk over the bridge and get into north Sydney, with some superb views on the way.

(In case anyone wonders; we considered paying to climb to the very top of the bridge, but when we looked at the small print, it seemed to us like you spent money, a few hours, and some effort to get a marginally better view - but then, you weren't allowed to take a camera with you in case you dropped it on someone. So we passed on that. The views from the walkway were actually plenty.)

Having reached the north side of the harbour, we mostly just strolled around for a bit, but that strolling did take in Luna Park, the dramatically-sited 1930s amusement park that we'd been glimpsing every time we looked north across the harbour since we reached Sydney. We're not really amusement park people, but this one did score some points for authenticity of feel and lack of tackiness; instead of tired Disney characters (or even more dubious copyright-skirting images), this one actually looked like a colourful, well-maintained period amusement park surely ought to look. Okay, the clown-face gateway that acts as the park's landmark verges on the scary, but that's all part of the style, isn't it?

Then, as dusk approached, we headed back over the bridge (glancing over and down and up at various sights of Sydney on the way), and wrapped things up by finding our way up to Observatory Hill. It was too late by then to look round the old Observatory itself, but this gave us another set of variant views of Sydney as darkness fell.

And it even left us not too far from the hotel, so we could head back there for a short while before heading out for a good Thai dinner at a place nearby.

Expand, Contract (35)

2012-01-21T20:09:00.000Z

As Sean Punch has already mentioned, I turned in the final draft of the new-edition Discworld RPG yesterday. Not that I expect that to be the last I'll see of it before publication; there will be stuff arising throughout the inevitably lengthy editing process, I'm sure. Plus, there will be the illustration to discuss, and maybe more pullquotes needed than I've supplied...

(I'm trying to ensure that all the pullquotes come from Terry's writings, by the way. With those available, quoting myself would seem vain, in many ways. I just have to persuade the layout people to contact me when they need one, so I can burrow into my bookshelves.)

But still, I can step aside for now, take a deep breath, tidy my office, and see about editing Wings of the Rising Sun.

Views Over and Under the Mountains

2012-01-13T10:22:00.000Z

Most of our trip to Australia last October was quite consciously pre-planned. I'm not saying that we knew exactly what we were going to see before we got anywhere, but there were a lot of things that we knew in advance we did want to see, and we made sure we fitted them in.

The trip to Jenolan on the 20th of the month, though, was a bit of serendipity. When we were booking various segments of the holiday, we discovered that we could get another coach trip for not much extra, on something like a buy-one-get-one-free deal, and Jenolan caught our eyes in passing. Which just goes to show something, I suppose. Okay, these caves are one of New South Wales's major tourist attractions, it seems, but I don't think that they're really known in the UK. They should be.

The coach journey out to the Blue Mountains had some good stops and sights on the way, too. After a moderately early start, it took in a flying visit to the Blue Mountains Scenic World, at Katoomba. This is basically an old coal mine close to a town up in the Blue Mountains, which, as it's no longer working as a mine, has been converted to a kind of mini-theme park, with the old mining track down the side of the mountain converted into a ride that claims to be the world's steepest passenger railway. Or an angled elevator, if you prefer, really. Whatever. The views of the mountain scenery were great, including the "Three Sisters" (a striking triple rock formation with a couple of supposed aboriginal legends, probably fake, attached), and the tree-fern forest was wonderfully subtly alien.

Then it was back up the hill by cable-car, back on the coach, past the Hydro Majestic Hotel (which we'd seen a week or so before from the train), and down a narrow winding mountain-valley road to Jenolan. Which would just be a striking little Edwardian resort hidden in the mountains, until one discovers why the hotel was built there; the caves. And by "the caves", it turns out we mean "some of the oldest publicly-accessible caves on Earth, possibly as much as 400 million years old, with limestone formations that have clearly been developing all that time".

I've posted a fair number of the photos we took on the tour (which only covered a partial segment of the whole complex - there are several tours available), but it's really very difficult to do these things justice with a camera - it's all underground, with restrained but effective lighting (not many garish coloured lamps, I'm happy to say) reflecting off masses of damp textured limestone. It comes out weird with flash on and grainy and orange without, and it's very hard to convey the scale of the thing. Let's just say there's cave after cave of stalactites, stalagmites, sheet/curtain formations, and bizarre textures, plus some areas of jumbled broken rock for variety. The result is bizarre, almost Lovecraftian at times but strangely beautiful and fascinating.

Then, just after the coach had set out back towards Sydney, the driver announced that, if we didn't mind a brief diversion, there was a place where we'd have a good chance of seeing some wild kangaroos, if we were interested? Funnily enough, on a coach full of tourists in Australia, this didn't need much of a vote. (Cry from the young female British tourists at the back: "Yay for Skippy!") So we pulled over to the side of the road, and the driver took us for a short walk through the woodlands to a clearing with some chalets that are rented out to holidaymakers. And the kangaroos didn't let us down; there was a mob of what I gather were eastern grey kangaroos, sitting or standing around casually grazing and entirely happy to be photographed. (I assume that this group are very used to people; apparently, the species normally avoids humans.) They were even happy to live up to the full stereotype; there was a mother with a fair-sized joey in her pouch, its head sticking out cutely. So our Aussie-experience meter ticked over another notch.

Then, once we'd been back to our hotel, we went out for dinner, strolled past a sight or two, and ended up eating in a place on top of the Customs House by Circular Quay. Eating out on the balcony was a little cool that evening, but the view more than compensated, and the food was good.

So, yes. Serendipity.

Fragments of 2011 (and earlier)

2012-01-05T18:53:00.002Z

[[Oh dear. Oh dear. Time to clear out some old junk.]]

[[I've been quite busy over the last year or so, and highly prone to displacement activities. Which has meant, among other things, that I've left a whole bunch of draft posts never being completed or posted. Well, we now have a new year, so I'm resolving (despite the fact that I do not do New Year Resolutions) to clear house a bit. These posts are highly incomplete, and they're going to stay incomplete - I'm just going to post them all in one go, as fragments and sketches falling out of my brain over that year or so. I may or may not have tidied, revised, or edited parts of them. Take them or (perhaps better) leave them.]]

[[The first actually goes right back to October 2010, oh dear...]]

Recent Reading: I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett's "Tiffany Aching" books, in the "younger readers" sub-category of Discworld stories, have always suffered from the danger of falling into a fixed pattern. While wandering around her home chalk downlands area and developing her skills, young witch Tiffany Aching encounters a supernatural threat ...

... But Pratchett is too canny a writer to fall too deeply into too rigid a pattern, and this fourth and latest book in the sub-series appears - probably - to show him quitting while he's ahead. Tiffany has aged as a character through the series, and now she's sixteen ...

[[By June 2011, I noticed that I wasn't getting everything I meant to do, done:]]

Catching Up: Late June (Going to Extremes)

I've fallen way behind on my blogging, to the point where the next few entries won't represent diary entries so much as notes made before I forget everything. [[Hah!]] My Flickr photostream is quite a bit more up to date; tinkering with photos seems to work much better as a displacement activity than jotting down text. Yes, I seem to have been keeping busy.

Anyway, the first un-diarised event in question was a trip westwards. I hadn't been to Cornwall since childhood holidays; it didn't feel as personally resonant as Charmouth and Lyme, but it still felt odd not to have seen the place for quite so long. So we booked a few days in Falmouth.

Okay, so we were in a boutique hotel within sight of a branch of the Rick Stein empire. That wasn't terribly reminiscent of childhood caravanning holidays, but it did permit a few very nice dinners. (The first being very, very good fish and chips. I get the idea about good fried fish melting in the mouth, but this is the first time I've had to use the same phrase for chips.) The hotel was good, too, apart from a shortage of parking, and also the seagulls in the morning, which showed the limitations of the place's sound insulation. ...

[[A little after that, I barely started another post:]]

Theatre: All's Well That End's Well
Shakespeare's Globe, 30/6/2011

On a very occasional theme of trips to the Globe Theatre for lesser Shakespearean drama (i.e. plays by him that we haven't seen often if at all before) ...

[[In July, we got back up to London.]]

Literary Sources and Resources

British devotees of SF sometimes like to think that this country has a special place in the history of the genre. Well, it's true that we did produce Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, and H.G.Wells, so we have little to be ashamed of - but the "special" role of British SF is ultimately defined by a negative; we didn't create the pulp magazines (or their contemporary successors, the big-screen Hollywood FX action movies) that still define SF to so many people outside of fandom. Along with those founder-figures, though, we have also produced some extraordinary visionaries in more recent times. The British Library currently has a pair of exhibitions that illustrate all this, and on the 9th, we went along to both.

Why does the BL run such things? Oh, they have the resources - and we also took in their permanent exhibition rooms, which we'd missed out on before ...

[[The two exhibitions were a small one about Mervyn Peake and a large one about British SF in general, by the way. And they were interesting.]]

[[In October, I started blogging about our big antipodean trip. My Flickr photostream is covering that better, actually, albeit long after the event.]]

To the Far Side
October 7-???

... The trip began, on the Friday: taxi (to the coach stop)-coach (to Heathrow)-747 (to Singapore). That was with an afternoon start, so it was a night flight, on which I finally got to see Green Lantern (some smart revisionism regarding goofy Silver Age comics conventions and metaphysics, fuzzy FX visuals in an attempt to get the Green Lantern power to look right, plot all over the shop thanks to Hollywood Oedipal obsession) and Paul (current British ubergeek auteur possibly slips over the edge into self-indulgence, certainly shows rather painful media-geek tin ear for the subtleties and niceties of written SF and its exponents). I also managed an hour or two's sleep before arriving in the future in mid-afternoon.

Well, I suspect that some people would like Singapore to be their vision of the future. It's a bit hot for me - but then, it does have plenty of air conditioning to compensate. The difference between indoors and outdoors is ... extreme. ...

... Tuesday was our one full day in Perth, so we tried to work out our personal highest priorities in the city. First stop was the Perth Mint, a former outpost of the Royal Mint set up to process gold from the gold fields. These days, it's been handed over to the Western Australian state government, it no longer handles gold coinage provision for much of the British Empire, and the refining and casting operations have moved out of town, but the city centre building still has some impressive-looking machinery and a few museum features - including the world's largest collection of gold bars. (Okay, just a couple of rooms' worth - but still.) It also has the facilities to cast a single gold bar, as demonstrated by one of the staff several times per day (using the same gold every time). Okay, so this is basically just a short fireworks display - but an expensive one.

Then we moved on to the city's museum district, to discover that the big Art Gallery no longer opens Tuesdays. Hey ho, the big Museum was open (some good info on the history of the region, Victorian stuffed animals, a pretty good collection of meteorites), and then came lunch in the Gallery cafe, then a short bus ride to big Botanical Garden ...

...
Wedenesday was packing, checking out, and heading out to the rail terminal to get on the Indian-Pacific rail service, departing eastwards just before noon. This is a pretty comfortable way to spend three days crossing Australia, albeit in a compact cabin ... but the food's pretty good. So we spent the afternoon making our way up the valley of the Avon River, and that night, the train stopped for a few hours in Kalgoorlie, so we took a one-hour coach trip in the dark. Much of this was about the driver being flippant about this mining town, but we did get to stop at the biggest hole in the ground in the world. Sadly, this open-cast mine wasn't very active this night, so all we got to see was a couple of distant (very distant) giant (very giant) trucks in patches of spotlight as they went about their gold-gathering business.

Then we hit our bunks to try and catch enough sleep before Thursday, when we were set to cross the Nullarbour plain. Okay, so I was a little disappointed on principle to see a few trees when I woke up, but we moved into a zone of arboreal nullity soon enough. ...

[[Then I got through to November before I started another post.]]

Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

... We must have seen many of these pictures before - they're on loan from museums we've visited over the years - but ... Among other things, we must have Vermeer's Lacemaker in the Louvre, but seeing it in the flesh felt fresh - and showed (or reminded) us that it's actually rather small; the reproduction print we have on the wall at home is actually twice as big. (Banners outside blow these pictures up to huge size; actually mostly rather small.) The Fitzwilliam clearly know what the selling point of this exhibition is ... despite title, only a couple of Vermeers in the show, but plenty of other good stuff ...

[[And there, I leave things and make a fresh start. Hmm, I never even started posting about the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival open air Macbeth, which was good, but which featured one big curious inversion of effect. The evening we went, the first half got played in daylight, while the second half was played in darkness. But the first half is where you get most of the serious plot darkness, as the two lead characters plunge into evil; the second half is basically a political thriller in which light is restored.]]

[[Oh, and in the unlikely event that anyone's wondering; I can no longer be bothered to even say anything about Doctor Who.]]

Views from a Busy Day

2011-12-28T19:43:00.000Z

The 19th of October this year was, I see in retrospect, a busy day for us.

As previously noted, we started at my brother's place, and after a run up Lawrence Hargrave Drive and onwards, we arrived in Sydney, dropped off the hire car, and found our way to our hotel - which was located on the harbour, in fact in a converted warehouse on the quayside below the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Good location!) Then we set out for a walk, under the Bridge (which is as impressive a piece of engineering as you may have heard), round Circular Quay (which is, if you look at the map, kind of square - I'm thinking Aussie humour here), and up to the Opera House (which is as impressive a public building as you may have heard, from a distance or close up).

That put us at the north end of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, so we walked down through those in the late afternoon, taking in flora, fauna, and statuary. A kind of high point was seeing fruit bats roosting in one set of trees, even if the gardens seem to regard them as a borderline pest... Then we headed back up through the city, past assorted historic buildings, and back to the hotel, before heading out for dinner in an open-air oyster restaurant on Circular Quay.

Okay, it was basically a day sightseeing. But you'll notice we ended up with a lot of pictures.

Views South of Sydney

2011-12-20T16:58:00.002Z

I've now put up a batch more photos from our October holiday up on Flickr, this time covering the 15th-19th of October. On the 15th of the month, we arrived by train in Sydney, picked up a hire car, and went to visit my brother David and his wife Shirley south of the city, in the area which turned out to be describable as the Illawarra/Wollongong region. The next day, Dave and Shirley showed us around some of the local sights, and we caught up with their family.

The serious sightseeing started on the 17th, when Dave and Shirley contrived to show us some serious views in the Southern Highlands. We took in the Illawarra Fly, an amazing treetop walkway with views across the forest and the coastal plains to the coast, the stunning scenery at Fitzroy Falls, where a river has carved a canyon out of the edge of the highland plateau, and yet more views at Cambewarra Lookout, where what looks like a pleasant rural tearoom garden (okay, with palm trees) suddenly plunges over the side of a mountain, with a view across to the Pacific. To wrap up, we went down to that ocean, specifically for a short visit to Seven Mile Beach.

Then, on the 18th, we got back down to the coast again, pausing in Shellharbour (and photographing some pelicans) and then looking round Bass Point, which is basically an attractive sea-shore park (with protected nurse sharks off shore, apparently), and a war grave/memorial. Then, after a pause to take in the Kingsford Smith Monument and the view down the coast at Gerroa, we had an excellent lunch at Coolangatta Winery. On the way back, we saw Blowhole Point at Kiama, and especially the blowhole itself - a striking natural formation where the sea drives in through a covered channel eroded in the rocks, then erupts upwards (though the day was calm enough that we didn't get soaked by it). We got pictures of that and of the helicopter that came past overhead, but unfortunately the whale that was swimming past that day was visible only at a considerable distance.

Finally, on the 19th, we were scheduled to head back to Sydney, so we drove up the coast a ways in convoy with Dave and Shirley. This took us over the striking Sea Cliff Bridge, up onto Bald Hill (scene of Australia's earliest aviation experiments, courtesy of Lawrence Hargrave), further up for a stop at Governor Game Lookout, and then into the Royal National Park, where we said our goodbyes at the Hacking River.

And then we drove onto Sydney. It had been a great few days with a lot more striking sights than we'd perhaps expected; the scenery in that part of the world turns out to be stunning. But there was more to come.

I Talk

2011-12-20T11:40:00.001Z

If anyone is actually digging round here out of interest in me - Victorian Adventure Enthusiast have just run an interview with me.

Concert (+ CD): Magazine

2011-12-07T18:06:00.000Z

The Junction, Cambridge, 2nd November 2011.

Posting this a month or so late, but what the heck.

To start with, a boast. I first saw Magazine in (I think) 1978 at a gig in a university hall, and then again in 1979 at the Corn Exchange. So, having made it to their gig at The Junction, I think I must have seen them every time they've played Cambridge.

Actually, the '79 gig was one of Angela's and my first dates, so we weren't going to miss this one. But first, we got hold of No Thyself, their first new recording as a band for thirty years. I'm not sure if anything on this is quite up to their best work c.1980, but it's definitely real Magazine, recalling, say, the menacing pulse of "The Light Pours Out of Me" in "The Burden of a Song", and the deliberate four-letter shock effects of "Permafrost" (only more so) in "Other Thematic Material". The pushing-for-accusations-of-bad-taste lyric of "Hello Mister Curtis (with apologies)" might almost count as something new, except in that it fits with Howard Devoto's general, habitual post of punky irony. (Though that his disdain clearly extends to punk: "No decadence, no cheap thrills of hate from me...") Some of the songs could probably grow on me quite a lot, in fact; they may look like conscious recreations of the band's old style, but in the worst case, that's a fine model to emulate.

(I was amused when some critics detected a new maturity in "Of Course Howard", incidentally, given that I recognised some of the lyrics from the introduction to a collection of other Magazine lyrics published thirty years ago. Actually, the song seems to represent a dialogue between Devoto today and his younger self, which is interesting in itself.)

But anyway... For those who don't know them, Magazine were a group who evolved out of the punk scene when lead singer Howard Devoto decided to do something a bit unashamedly smarter, then vanished when Devoto apparently just got bored of the whole business, leaving a legacy that took the rock world decades to acknowledge. Unfortunately, since 1981, John McGeoch, the band's authentic post-punk guitar hero, has died. Also, when they reformed in 2009, Barry Adamson, their bass player and other most strikingly capable musician, rejoined, but he's since evidently decided that his career in film music and so forth means more to him, and walked away. The replacements, Devoto's occasional collaborator Noko on guitar and "Stan" on bass, are entirely capable of emulating the originals' playing well enough, but whether they can emulate the original synergistic, innovative brilliance is another matter.

Not that the audience at this gig were too worried (and I speak as one of them, believe me). We may not have had associations with the two guys on his left and right, but that was Howard Devoto in the middle. Okay, a lot of us were clearly there to be reminded of our youth. I haven't seen this many grey hairs and this much male-pattern baldness since ... um ...the last folk gig I was at. And I guess that Devoto, who's gone from "high forehead" to "bald" in thirty years, could feel entirely at home in this company. But enough tacky irony. That's Howard's job.

The set consisted of a mixture of old and new songs, in pretty conventional rock gig style, really, not that I'm complaining. It even used staging tricks I remember from thirty years ago, notably hitting the audience full in the face with white spotlights behind the band for "The Light Pours Out of Me". Among the new songs, "Hello Mister Curtis" was dedicated, a little strangely, to Terry Pratchett; I assume that the point there is that the song is about facing up to mortality, though whether its pose is one of acceptance or defiance - whether the lyrics are addressed to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain in tones of wry admiration or contemptuous sarcasm - seems unclear. Clarity has never been the point with Magazine, mind; during the first song, Devoto was at one point wandering around the stage with a placard say "You Do The Meaning".

And we will, Howard, we will. Whether we were here for abrasive surrealism, or wry and twisted humour, or to be reminded of our student days, or just because we know the band will rip into that guitar riff in the encore of the monumental classic "Shot By Both Sides", we all likely went away satisfied.

The support, incidentally, were In Fear of Olive, whose country-tinged rock was competent enough, but seemed on this brief exposure to lack sufficiently memorable tunes, aside from the fact that they really didn't look to have much in common with Magazine. But the support act in '79 was Simple Minds, and I didn't think very much of them, so what do I know?

More Views: Ocean to Ocean

2011-12-01T12:51:00.000Z

I've now finished posting the set of photos covering our trip on the Indian-Pacific railway, which involved leaving Perth on the 12th of October, with a brief and under-lit visit to Kalgoorlie that evening. Kalgoorlie being a mining town where the main sights on a coach tour are a giant hole in the ground (sadly under-lit while we were there - apparently they'd had a minor landslip, so the usual round-the-clock work was cut back) and the red light district.

On the 13th, we passed a full-scale airport with a staffing level in single figures, crossed the Nullarbor Plain, and stopped in the ghost town of Cook. Then, on the 14th, we reached Adelaide - early in the day, but still a bit late, so we took only a flying coach tour of the city with limited opportunities for photography through rain-streaked coach windows. It looks like a pleasant sort of city, going purely by the central area, even if the statue of the founder has its back to visitors, and the local habit of laying claim to Don Bradman seems to lead to heckling if one mentions it anywhere else in Australia.

Later in the day, still running late, we had only a few minutes in the remote mining town of Broken Hill - just time to get a few photos from the station platform. Finally, on the 15th, we descended from the Blue Mountains (nice views) through small town like Medlow Bath, into Sydney, from where we were set to drive down to visit family.

Yes, it was quite a trip

Views of Perth

2011-11-20T21:52:00.000Z

Next up in the photo uploading to Flickr; our couple of days in Perth, from our arrival by air to our departure by train.

It's an attractive city, in ways that I hope that the pictures hint at. And we knew we'd reached Australia when, on our first morning there, we were woken by a weird raucous noise that, when I was conscious, I identified as a kookaburra.

Missed seeing: the art gallery (closed in the time we were there), much of the outskirts. Saw: the Mint (founded as an outpost of the Royal Mint, to provide the Empire with coinage courtesy of Western Australian gold, and the big thing about a visit there is the demonstration of molten gold pouring - essentially a fireworks display, but with really expensive fireworks), the museum with a fine collection of meteorites, the botanical gardens, the bell tower...

Views of Singapore

2011-11-08T14:40:00.000Z

My, we came back from that holiday with a lot of photos. It's going to take ages to put the good ones up onto Flickr (with appropriate editing). In fact, I've only just finished those from our day in Singapore. Well, that was a fairly full day.

I ended up with a lot of flowers. (Hotel exterior, Botanical Gardens, Fort Canning Park), and a lot of skyscrapers (Singapore). It's an interesting city, in a very tidy sort of way. Warm, too, being within a degree of the equator and all that. But the photos probably sum up our experience of the day.

And... We're Back

2011-10-29T19:36:00.000+01:00

I've not been very good about posting here this year, for all sorts of reasons, largely involving distractions, but my silence of the last three weeks has had more solid justifications, which kind of run Singapore-Perth (mk.2)-Indian Pacific Railway-Visiting Family-Sydney-Ayer's Rock-Sydney-Hong Kong.

It was fun. We're home now. Right now, we've been awake for c. 21 hours, most of them on an airliner, so don't expect much coherence or many words immediately, but at least your e-mails or whatever now have a solid fighting chance of being answered. Or at least read.

Hopefully, there will be retrospective blogging eventually. Or at least, about 6 gigs of image posting to the Flickr photostream.

(First thoughts on Asian cities: Somebody said to me during the trip that Singapore is a beehive, Hong Kong is an ants' nest. Yeah. Alternatively: Singapore seems to be about making money, while Hong Kong seems to be about spending money.. Or, perhaps: If you show Singaporeans the city scenes from Blade Runner, I think they'd say "Yes, that is a horrible warning of how things might go if we don't regulate matters very carefully." If you show those scenes to someone from Hong Kong, the response would surely be "Hey, really good ideas with the flying advertising there!")

(Oh, and the Jenolan Caves are freaking well amazing. While Uluru has a simple job, which is to just sit there on a geological scale, and performs it brilliantly.)

Expand, Contract (34)

2011-10-11T14:57:00.000+01:00

Oh yes, I neglected to mention last week when it happened; my Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 is now out from e23.

Expand, Contract (33)

2011-09-04T20:21:00.000+01:00

Oh yeah, I hadn't mentioned... If anyone who's interested hadn't heard, revised drafts of the new edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game (by me) and Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun (by David Chart) are both in and currently being subjected to various sorts of playtesting and review.

Which is the kind of thing that's been keeping me busy these last few months, and so providing me with an excuse for not keeping this blog at all up to date.

Expand, Contract (32)

2011-07-18T17:30:00.000+01:00

Well, the Discworld RPG manuscript is back from Sean Punch - with 100+ pages of initial commentary to act on. And other stuff of mine seems to be moving along in other people's hands.

Also - the Ennie Award Nominations are now out. These never seem to include much GURPS material, which means that little of my work ever rates a chance of a mention. However, this year, my modest but non-trivial contributions to Gatecrashing, from Posthuman Studios, mean that I can at least claim a part-share in three nominations.

Expand, Contract (31)

2011-07-06T20:33:00.000+01:00

I'm not getting a huge amount of writing or editing done myself at the moment, largely because I've got a whole bunch of stuff to do towards Consternation next month. However, Sean Punch has now made entirely public something that I thought wasn't a very secure secret; that my big project of the last few months (and next year or so) is a new edition of the Discworld RPG.

(About which, I am happy to talk a bit. However, I'd prefer to avoid games of Twenty Questions with obsessive fans who are trying to extract the entire content of the planned 400-page book from me a paragraph at a time.)

Also, I have been fielding a few questions from the author of a new Transhuman Space supplement which hasn't been announced yet. Ah, the fine art of fitting GURPS rules to a high-tech setting and getting character creation to look right...

Expand, Contract (30)

2011-06-17T11:21:00.000+01:00

Just one thing this time; Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries, which I edited (and which is in a line of which I am the line editor) has just been published on e23.

Klonk!

2011-06-15T11:07:00.000+01:00

I'm on Amazon UK's mailing list (surprise), and for some reason, their algorithms apparently not only have me down as a Discworld reader, but a serious fanboy. Why else, after all, would they tell me when they've got German editions of the books available?

But this does mean that I get to find out when I could be purchasing Klonk!: Ein Scheibenwelt-Roman.

It sounds so much cooler than Thud! somehow.

Doctor Who 2011-1

2011-06-14T17:25:00.000+01:00

First off, to damn with faint praise, Doctor Who has been better this year than for a while. For much of this first half of this year's series, I have been able to watch it with actual interest, rather than feeling that I've been suckered by a title borrowed from a series that was significant to me in my teen years, and that I'm being insulted by self-indulgent junk. It's become light science fantasy with a bit of style, some functional plots, and decent characteristation.

Well, the first half of the first half, anyway.

The core problem with NuWho resurfaced in episode 5. It wasn't just the skimpy, predictable, but painfully implausible plot, the ropey science and the frenetic hand-waving; it was the sense that all of these things were familiar. They weren't just repeating Who-at-its-worst; they looked like an almost-conscious homage to Who-at-its-worst. In other words, this was Who written by someone who'd seen far too much Who, and who thought that repeating stylistic stuff from over the last fifty years with nary a thought to how stupid it might look today was the way to go. Given that, the decision to stretch the story out over two episodes, when many better plots have been jammed into one, was just adding insult to injury.

(I notice that some more serious fans are complaining about moral inconsistencies in the Doctor's behaviour at the end of this story. This seems to me to be missing a large point. Before you can worry about moral logic, you need simple consistent logic - without any and all inconsistencies being hand-waved away.)

Then, strangely enough, along came episode 7. Oh dear.

You could say that this made a similar mistake, seeming at times to be paying homage to the worst bits of Davies-era NuWho. But I'd be simpler than that. This episode resembled nothing but the worst sort of fanfic.

It was overloaded with guest appearances that made less and less sense the closer you looked at them, and introduced a whole bunch of new characters who the writer thought would be cool (a sword-wielding Silurian detective in Victorian London!) or funny (a Sontaran nurse). Unfortunately, none of it was half as clever as it thought it was, and surely even the youngest of fans will noticed that they were being pandered to - ineptly - by the end?

Okay, I'll watch the second half of the 2011 series when it shows in a few months. I'm hoping that the nature of this war against the Doctor will be explained in more detail, and that his enemies' need for a baroque and implausible plan in order to create a bizarre weapon to use against him will turn out to have an interesting explanation, instead of just being another stupidly complicated attempt to destroy him (when they could have shot him or blown him up at various points during this episode). I'm hoping that the Headless Monks will have an interesting explanation and history, instead of just being another bunch of nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters. (Actually, it's a terrible thing how nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters have gone from being wonderful to being a cliché in a few short years). We'll probably get some half-decent episodes. But frankly, I think that I'm going to be stuck damning with very faint praise again.

Photos on Flickr

2011-06-09T11:18:00.000+01:00

Just for the interest - I've just finished putting up a couple of new small batches of pictures on Flicker:

Old Stuff in Museums

2011-05-31T11:50:00.000+01:00

When we - the general public - go to museums, we tend to think of them in terms of the stuff that we see on display. Which is fair enough, but - to a degree doubtless varying with the museum - also wrong. There's a whole load of curating and preservation and additional material and scholarship going on behind the scenes, which we glimpse in dribs and drabs if we pay attention.

The Fitzwilliam's current big exhibition of Italian Drawings, which we went to see on Saturday, reminded me of this, with something of a kick. It draws largely from the museum's own back rooms - items which aren't normally on display. But one motive for going to see it is, frankly, something akin to name-dropping. It's not often that one gets a chance to see art by (among others) Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Vasari, and Modigliani, all in the same room, within a dozen miles of one's front door, after all. Okay, so what one sees is actually a bunch of, well, drawings, ranging from quite stylish but dashed-off pen-and-ink pieces to tiny preparatory sketches and doodles. But the raw density of art history in that one room is quite impressive.

That's one fairly dimly-lit room, mind. One reason that some of these highly significant pieces can't regularly appear on display is clearly that, even more than a lot of art, they're fragile. I won't quite say that they're disintegrating before one's eyes, but some of them certainly look lucky to have lasted this long, and despite all the technical brilliance of modern museums, I'd guess that they have a finite lifespan, even if it can still be measured in centuries. There's a definite sense of the memento mori when one looks at a tiny, fading sketch that was in fact dashed off by Leonardo when he was thinking about how to depict horses and riders, five hundred years ago.

Then, on Monday, we went to a completely different museum which has an equally important backroom function - the Shuttleworth Collection in Old Warden. For those who don't know it - this is a fairly substantial aircraft collection, but most impressively, it's got some old aircraft. That is to say, they have a couple of planes, in actual flying condition, which are over a hundred years old. This puts them in the business of restoration and preservation as much as any museum, which is something they happily talk about; for example, they have a Spitfire (pretty much inevitably, I guess), and one can see it in one hangar - in bits. It needs sprucing up, it seems.

Mind you, aircraft restoration evidently involves a lot of refitting and replacement work. The displays talk about the art of fitting new fabric surfaces (so with some of these aircraft, most of what meets one's gaze is actually new) and the necessity of replacing, say, thousands of magnesium rivets with something newer and less lethally corrosive. But aircraft are machines, built to do something; a restoration process that kept more of the original but left it incapable of flight, would perhaps be too much like taxidermy.

(I grabbed a fair few pictures on Monday, incidentally, of aircraft and also of the adjacent Swiss Garden and Bird of Prey Centre. I'll try and get them up on my Flickr photostream reasonably soon.)

Conspiracy Theories

2011-05-26T13:22:00.000+01:00

Blogger suffers its second problem in a fortnight, leaving me unable to sign in to my account. Then, after a couple of days, I have a bright idea and try using Chrome instead of Firefox - and lo and behold, I get in.

Thus are conspiracy theories born. Google must surely be trying to force people away from the competition and onto their software. Fortunately, (a) I hear that Internet Explorer works too, and (b) I've even been able to get in using Firefox from another computer.

Still, two service collapses in consecutive weeks? Aren't Google supposed to be better than that?

Thor

2011-05-20T12:27:00.000+01:00

The superhero movie fashion continues...

Cranking through the list of their major characters as a preparation for the Avengers movie (with lesser Avengers popping up to fan service effect - here, "Agent Barton" spends a couple of minutes on-screen with a bow, just to confuse the non-geeks) and just because, the Marvel films people run head-first into the difficult one. Most superhero movies can be presented as slightly over-exuberant technothrillers, but, well, what the heck can you do with Thor?

Throw a posh British Shakespearean director at it, maybe? Just for Odin's sake don't try to make the original '60s costume work on screen. Which is presumably how Walt and Louise Simonson earn themselves credit mentions alongside the '60s Marvel names, having given the (Marvel) God of Thunder his vaguely plausible suit of armour and his beard. Still, it's all about dropping a clunky modern-fantasy reading of Norse myth into the modern world, and there's only so much anyone can do with that - the script tries a bit of waffle about magic being sufficiently advanced science, but that really doesn't survive a moment's scrutiny - this is sufficiently advanced science that can generate immovable objects, execute conditional operations based on moral judgements made from beyond line of sight, and operate at the mutter of a patriarchal guy in an eye-patch several light-years away. Oh well, at least they didn't try any mumbles about nanotech.

And let's be fair, from a geeky point of view - the visual realisation of a lot of stuff from the comics is really pretty good. The movie also moves fast enough to stop anyone worrying about the obvious glaring logical holes so long as it lasts. (What language do the Asgardians speak? Does Bifrost have a Tardis translation circuit? How old are Thor and Loki? How did they get into human myth if they were born after regular contact between the Nine Worlds ended?) The Casket of Ancient Winters is reduced to a canister of pure distilled Maguffin, though, doing nothing except sit there glowing blue and being important for as long as it's needed; one wonders if early script drafts did more with it, but I wouldn't even bet on that. The visual design for much of Asgard is certainly fun, especially in 3-D - a garish high-fantasy cityscape, rendered with a bit of budget. Bifrost, though, looks like a bad '80s home computer visual effect given unwarranted solidity

The cast is over-qualified, of course, even given that it has some relative newcomers - Chris Hemsworth has fully adequate charm and charisma as well as the body for the lead role, and Tom Hiddleston brings ice-blue eyes and icy elegance to Loki, aided by good direction and costume design which recalls his horned helmet from the comics without getting goofy. (The film has a relatively complex treatment of that character, actually, even if the psychology is a bit Hollywood-routine.) Anthony Hopkins does dignified, Natalie Portman does her best with the career-upgraded Jane Foster, and Idris Elba gives Heimdall plenty of deific dignity. They're fun to watch, but they can never quite suppress the impression that this film exists because the comic exists, and not because it has any great claims to interest in its own right. Still, we get that fight scene between Thor and Loki...

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

2011-05-18T18:15:00.000+01:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;(&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>(Another old post finally being finished...)

To begin with a confession, I suppose - I haven't seen The Mummy, or some of the Indiana Jones movies, or any of the Tomb Raider films, and nor have I read the French bandes dessinées on which this film is based - so I'm probably even less entitled to comment on it than usual. But this blog is only supposed to be about personal reactions anyway, so here we are.

Actually, I think it's the last omission which probably ought to count against me most. I can see why reviewers have been invoking those English-language reference points, but really, this isn't much of a Hollywood-style action movie. Luc Besson may have had some influence in Hollywood over the years, but he's always been a bit too Frenchly odd, and with its lack of a proper villain and focus on a style-soaked female lead, this is very much a Besson movie. More to the point, with its peculiar sense of partial detachment from any sort of reality, its weird dialogue and disregard for much in the way of psychological reality, it's extremely reminiscent of any number of BDs that I have seen, so I suspect it's pretty faithful to its source.

In case you were wondering, Adèle Blanc-Sec, played by the inevitably winsome Louise Bourgoin, is an Edwardian-period adventuress who is, as it turns out, looking for the mummy of an ancient Egyptian doctor so that she can get it resurrected by a loopy academic psychic, because she knows that the ancient Egyptians had the medical knowledge she needs to cure her sister, who is in a coma with a hat-pin through her skull. Unfortunately, though, the psychic has already resurrected an ancient pterodactyl egg, and the pterodactyl is terrorising Paris. Not that Adèle cares about Paris or anyone else much, it seems - family comes first, and Adèle sets out to deal with her own concerns before anything else, leaving a trail of chaos and one or two accidental deaths in her wake...

It's all rather self-consciously French, too, what with the politicians having affairs with cancan dancers and the gendarmes who insist that they are wine connoisseurs and the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I guess it could even be called charming. Or at least, charmant. Not without its interest, even. More a curiosity than a masterpiece, though.

Source Code

2011-05-17T17:54:00.000+01:00

((Many thanks to the people who sent me copies of this article, after I failed to keep one and Google lost it.))

(More catching up on posts I should have made a month ago. I can just about remember what I meant to say...)

Obvious note; the problem with commenting on this movie is that it's hard to do so without spoilers. And it's honestly good enough not to deserve that.

But, okay, the reviews and trailers have (unavoidably) given away a bit. Not everything, though; a certain amount of layered revelation is part of this film's charm. It's widely described as a time travel story, but what emerges fairly early is that this isn't quite true - or perhaps it is, as it turns out. Choose your own definitions. More annoyingly, a lot of comments seem to describe it as complicated or hard to follow, which suggests to me that too many people's brains just shut down when they're confronted with skiffy ideas about time or any kind of game with causality, because I really didn't see much complexity at all. The explanation of how things seemed to work, and eventually of the film's conclusive twist, struck me as very straightforward, even linear, even if the protagonist did replay the same few minutes of apparent time repeatedly as he went along. Nor was the film quite as rigorous as comments suggested; several of the eight-minute replays that were necessary to the plot would have been too repetitive for any audience, and so were skimmed over.

(Anyone who finds this film unpleasantly hard to follow really, really needs to avoid Primer, by the way.)

In fact, the relatively rigorous approach to plot logic made this a true science fiction story (as opposed to "heroic fantasy in space" or "action thriller with extreme special effects", which is what Hollywood tends to mean by "science fiction" these days), and with Source Code following on Moon, it seems that director Duncan Jones has a genuine and fairly unusual interest in the genre. This isn't hard SF, mind; the core idea of the plot is handwaved fairly frantically, involving as it does multiple scientific and technological jumps far beyond anything that could be made to look hard-SF plausible in the modern-day setting.. In the end, it's using the word "quantum" a lot to justify a fairly arbitrary story with a large dose of wish-fulfilment, even if one could argue that what it does is opt for the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics without being so crass as to say so (or to even mention Schrodinger's cat).

Nor is the plotting entirely immaculate; looking back over the film, one can identify significant unanswered questions of both logic and morality. (What could one say about the fate of the original occupant of the body which the hero borrows, for a start?) Still, it is a film about an idea, even if that idea is a bit shaky.

The cast, by the way, are good, and the leads are given enough to get their teeth into. Jake Gyllenhaal makes an effective hero, confused and stressed, far from infallible but ultimately capable enough; Michelle Monaghan is an attractive overt object of desire; Vera Farmiga really carries the film, balancing professionalism with sympathy. Only Jeffrey Wright really has a problem - not that the actor isn't fine, but his character seems unfairly treated. He's vain and unsympathetic, to be sure, but I couldn't help feeling that a man who invented such mind-bending technology would have the right to a very large dose of vanity indeed, and even if that is his main motive for employing it and exploiting the hero, he is actually trying to save thousands or millions of lives in the process. Making the scientist into something of a villain, with silly physical preening to match his intellectual hubris, was the one place where this turned into cheap, bad Hollywood SF.

But if that's the one place, well, we can't complain too much, can we? This isn't the film of the year - probably not even the SF film of the year - but it's a film that I could wish a lot more films were like.

The Cloud Ate My Homework

2011-05-17T12:22:00.000+01:00

Just in case anyone noticed a post about Source Code (the movie) here a few days ago, and is wondering what happened to it - evidently Google/Blogger had a little problem late last week, which meant that they had to roll everything on Blogger back a couple of days, then restore stuff one thing at a time.

Oh well, stuff happens.

Then they announced that they'd got just about everything restored by the end of Saturday or thereabouts. Evidently, my last post didn't fit under "just about everything". (Nor, to judge by the support boards, did a fair number of others.) Google are being deeply silent about when the remaining stuff will be restored, if ever. I'm not bothering to reconstruct that post from memory yet, because you never know, they might yet actually deliver on their initial promises.

One criticism of the whole trendy concept of "cloud computing" is that you're trusting your data security to some other party. (Conversely, one thing to be said for it is that it provides inherent off-site backups.) Well, all I've lost, at worst, is an hour or so's opinionated noodling. No big deal. But that loss has reminded me that I need to keep my on-site backups up to date.

(It's also shown me that Google's support people are as prone as any to go into vacuous cut-and-paste arse-covering BS mode when trouble strikes. Big surprise there.)

Concert: Neil Innes

2011-05-09T20:01:00.000+01:00

(More catching up on a bunch of posts that have been sitting around half-finished for far too long.)

The Junction, Cambridge, 29th March 2011.

At 8 o'clock in the evening of March 29th - the scheduled start time, good heavens - an amiable old buffer in a waistcoat and beret ambled on stage and launched into a show which lasted a couple of hours, with an interval...

The last time I saw Neil Innes on stage was thirty-something years ago, when he was basically playing the good stuff from his TV series of the time. This older, plumper, greyer Innes was playing something a bit less formal and structured and a bit more relaxed. I think that there was stuff from a radio series, but I confess I'm not familiar enough with his repertoire; there was certainly little sense of product to sell, except perhaps for retrospective collections. There was a bit of chat between songs, some of it going back to the foundation of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (basically, a bunch of London art students bonded over a taste for not-very-good pre-war British trad jazz) and including recollections of that band's somewhat edgier leading light, Viv Stanshall, as well as some mention of Monty Python and the Rutles. It was all very pleasant. Innes, it must be said, clearly isn't very edgy at heart. Gentle comic melancholy is more his style. There were some comments that might have been taken to relate to contemporary politics, but they were at the level of general benevolence than satirical ferocity.

And yet - it wasn't hard to remember that this man has provided musical underpinnings for the defining Anglophone comedy of the last half-century. This is Sir Robin's minstrel and Ron Nasty. This is someone to catch up with from time to time.

Trailer Trash (in 3-D)

2011-05-09T17:31:00.001+01:00

Went to see Thor on Saturday, about which I may blog more properly in due course. However, because I went to see the 3-D version, I also got to see a bunch of 3-D trailers.

Oh, dear.

As I may have demonstrated here in the past, I do have a certain horribly naive fondness for this technology, although I'd some time since begun to notice that it worked best in computer-animated movies which were designed that way from the beginning, and which could make amiable jokes about the subject. Thor, incidentally, uses 3-D fairly well, or at least harmlessly - there's a vague sense at times that one has a lava lamp exploding in one's face, and it probably makes the big early fight scene even less comprehensible than it would be in 2-D, but on the other side, there's a pleasing sense of grandiose fantasy art coming to LIFE, kerrpow!

Anyway, from the trailers, well, the 3-D in Kung-Fu Panda 2 is probably likely going to be mostly tolerable, because it's another computer animation - I may well go see it (and yes, I have just expressed moderately keen anticipation for a film called Kung-Fu Panda 2.) But the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides made me utterly determined that, if I go see it in a cinema, it'll only ever be in 2-D.

The problem is clearly the post-processing of a live-action film, shot in 2-D, into the third dimension. This doesn't have to be done too badly, to go by other films, but the visual effect in this case was quite horrible and a bit surreal. It was like watching full-colour cut-out pictures of Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz being slid around a toy theatre lined with similarly flat background pictures.

Priest, by the way, appears from its trailer to be a bad joke.

Theatre (sort of): Frankenstein

2011-05-06T15:39:00.001+01:00

(I'm catching up - partially, slowly - on an embarrassingly long string of blog posts that are sitting on the system in incomplete draft mode. Hence the age of this one)

National Theatre, London, transmitted to the Arts Cinema, Cambridge, 24/03/2011

Another live broadcast from the National Theatre to the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, and this time it's the hot ticket of the London theatre season - Nick Dear and Danny Boyle's stage treatment of one of the key modern myths. Which turned out to be pretty good and quite well suited to high-definition broadcast to cinema, with a certain amount of playing with camera angles and viewpoints, and enough chances to observe the stage design, especially the giant chandelier laden with as many different types of light bulb as someone could find.

It was all a pretty consciously stagey sort of production, with a consciously brave wordless extended opening scene as the creature was born, a brief outburst of steampunk as it encountered some horrified urban proles, and lots of colourblind casting. One problem, perhaps, was that Jonny Lee Miller looked merely rugged and a bit scarred as the creature, while everyone who met him was obliged to react as though he was some kind of nigh-Lovecraftian abomination; even given the level of abstraction in the visuals, I found it hard to suspend disbelief quite enough there.

But we all know that the monster is hideous, don't we? Like I said, modern myth. It's been a while since I read the novel, and once or twice I found myself trying to remember whether some elements came from there, or whether they'd sneaked in from the films - the elderly exiled intellectual in the woodland cottage is in the book, of course, but was he originally blind? Actually, yes - Dear follows Shelley quite faithfully in that scene, but in so doing, can't help but remind audiences of the movies (including Young Frankenstein). No great matter, to be sure, but it's all a reminder of the potential complexities involved in adapting a text as time-crusted as this one.

But yes, Dear's script did cleave to the core myth fairly well throughout- although it always seems a shame that Robert Walton, the Arctic explorer, so rarely makes it into adaptations, even when, like this one, they end in the Arctic. (The absence of that observer made the ending a bit anticlimactic, I'm afraid.) The one rather jarring and consciously "modern" - though actually rather dated-seeming - inclusion was some pointedly feminist stuff about Frankenstein being a heartless male scientist who needed to pay more attention to nice intuitive feminine ethics, or at least to listen when his fiancée asked if she could learn about his work. Okay, okay, so Mary Shelley has a significant part in feminist history, and certainly, if you look at Frankenstein's behaviour at all seriously, he treats Elizabeth abominably - but if you're going to treat that relationship at all logically, then there's no good reason for her to put up with him at all (apart from the dominant influence of the rest of the family). The only effect of this added stuff, for me, was a sense of 1970s right-onnery lurching into the middle of this Georgian gothic-romantic lunacy.

Probably, in fact, the production should have gone all-out for gothic effect, and forget any attempts to inject a modern moral consciousness or to explore the relationship between creator and creature. (Benedict Cumberbatch was more than fine as Victor, by the way, leaving me curious as to how the alternate-nights presentations, with him as the monster and Miller as Victor, played out. The idea felt wrong, but that may just say something about Cumberbatch's skill as an actor.) Mary Shelley was being entirely morally serious, yes, but on a topic which has been thrashed out every which way and tackled by two hundred years' worth of political thinkers and science fiction writers. At the risk of sounding all post-modernist, it really isn't the same story now that it was then, even if you tell it in the same words.

But it's a story that's survived for a good reason, and it's always interesting to watch experts having another go at this sort of thing. And nice to see technology being expertly and benevolently applied to bring it to a wider audience.

Expand, Contract (29)

2011-05-05T16:19:00.000+01:00

Just a note in passing - the first draft of my latest (big) project finally went in on Monday. So now I'm catching up on a whole stack of non-writing, non-games stuff that had been pushed aside.

Hopefully, another (small) Transhuman Space editing project will be along fairly soon.

Sorry I can't really say much more about this stuff just now.

Cities on the Edge - After-Note

2011-04-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

Just a note in passing, as I suspect one or two people coming here might be interested; Cities on the Edge has been the subject of a few posts and pages elsewhere on the Web. Author Anders Sandberg has blogged about it, and co-author Waldemar Ingdahl has done so twice, once for gamers and once for futurists. It's also sold well enough to merit a mention on RPG Countdown, among other places.

Also...

The book ended up with (mostly) original line art commissioned by Steve Jackson Games. However, at one stage, when the art budget looked a little questionable, I suggested that some processed B&W photographic imagery might work. The company disagreed, but for those who are curious, here's what might almost have become my first art credits in the RPG business after thirty years of writing:

Rango

2011-03-20T20:09:00.000Z

It is a well-known fact that, because of the insane amounts of money involved in making a Hollywood movie, the companies are terrified of taking chances on anything at all unlike that which has made money in the past. Which explains why the dull predictability of so much Hollywood output.

However, every once in a while, a director with a record of financial success can slip something odd past all those filters. And animation is partly immune to the problem because the money people don't understand it yet and anyway they expect it to be a bit weird...

"It's a post-modernist surrealist western, set in the modern day, with Johnny Depp as a delusional chameleon on a vision quest."

"Okay."

I mean, the @$*#?

It's also utterly beautiful, by the way, with truly astonishing creature designs and the most gorgeous landscapes I've ever seen in a computer-animated movie (which is saying something for a field which has let quite so many skilled artists have quite so much fun in the last ten years). It seemed that, every time the plot started becoming predictable or conventional (which it does from time to time), the animators were instructed to make the pictures on the screen even more breath-taking. And it's frequently utterly hilarious. I'm just glad that I didn't have to explain it to a ten-year-old being taken along to see a funny-animals movie on a wet Saturday afternoon.

Expand, Contract (28)

2011-03-10T22:54:00.000Z

Just a quick mention; Transhuman Space: Cities on the Edge, one of my little editing/line-editing jobs, has now made it out the electronic door. Being co-written by Anders Sandberg should give this one a bit of extra cred, I hope. Anyway, I think it's good.

Concert: British Sea Power

2011-02-21T18:10:00.001Z

The Junction, Cambridge, 20th February 2011.

British Sea Power are one of those bands that come along every few years to reaffirm one's faith in the basic guitar-band model of rock - even if they do have a cornet and an electric viola underpinning the guitars, and sing love songs to Antarctic ice sheets or create new soundtracks to 1930s documentaries. So when they turned up in Cambridge, I went along to see how they were live.

But first, there was the support band, Bo Ningen, who I guess can be described as some kind of mutant Japanese thrash metal. They opened with the sort of apocalyptic noise that a heavy metal band might use as a climax, then carried on from there. Works for some people, I guess.

Then, after half an hour in which the roadies attached assorted foliage to the mike stands, British Sea Power were on, kicking off with "Who's in Control", the opening track from their latest album. They turned out to be a well-rehearsed, capable bunch, albeit that their down-the-line rock approach on stage lost some of the breathy atmospherics of their recorded work. It's what the crowd wants, of course, and they may have given something of a hostage to fortune with the football-chant refrain in "No Lucifer" - the front rows of the audience were anticipating it some time before it came along - but there's no denying it's a good song, and they followed it with the punchy "Stunde Null" to hammer something home. That was around the middle of the set, after "Larsen B", "Something Wicked", and "Lights Out", and some of the subsequent songs weren't quite so interesting, making me wonder if they'd shot their bolt rather - but then they delivered "Living is so Easy" followed by "Waving Flags", which nailed that worry. "It Ended on an Oily Stage" showed up, too.

From where I was standing, British Sea Power seem caught in tension between being a crisply efficient, conventional guitar band, following the fifty-year-old script of "finishing" and then playing an encore and so forth, and being something a little bit more idiosyncratic and whimsical and British-rock-surrealist, with decorated stages, violas, and back-projected movie snippets. But they're actually rather good at both, so I'm not complaining at all.

English, Evolving and Evolved

2011-01-06T18:49:00.002Z

Recently visited (well, last Monday, actually); Evolving English, an exhibition at the British Library.

Actually, this felt a bit like two exhibitions. The first, smaller room was about the emergence of Old English, and then its evolution into Middle English - illustrated by stuff mostly (I assume) from the Library's own collections. This was where one got to see an ivory plaque carved with ancient runes, the original manuscript of Beowulf, samples of Henry V's handwriting (apparently he was the first English king to send letters in English), an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle... Little things like that. A small exhibition, but kind of in-your-face seriously impressive.

Then there was the second, larger room, which was less chronological and more thematic, full of relatively recent texts and manuscripts and sound recordings playing over headphones. I mean, Tyndale Bibles and Caxton printed books (and copies of Viz and John Betjeman manuscripts and "Murder on the Dancefloor" as allegedly the first pop hit to be sung in pure RP), to be sure, but less sense of mists-of-time depth than the first room. On the other hand, it was fascinating stuff; see the Web page for some of the star items. The Shakespeare texts read in what is believed to be period style (i.e. kind of West Country rural) were fun, certainly; the bit of King Lear was oddly less disconcerting than "Now is the winter of ooor discontant.." Nicely presented, too, even if one of the two screens playing TV and radio comedy as examples of the way English can be used was on the blink. (So I had to wait awhile to see Fourcandles and the Goons.)

Anyway, generally recommended if you're in London in the next few months.

Dr Who 2010(a)

2010-12-29T12:00:00.003Z

Generic criticism; "science fantasy" is a bastard genre that lacks any inherent discipline. If anything is possible, nothing means anything.

Case in point...

Oh, okay, the Christmas Special wasn't that bad. It was done with a certain amount of panache, and it had its moments. It was also interesting as perhaps the first Who Christmas Special that really tried to be about Christmas in some significant way - although I imagine that all the stuff about midwinter festivals may make it a hard sell in Southern Hemisphere markets.

But the structure was all over the shop. The snag with the 21st century Doctor-as-demigod pattern is that it's hard to present him with a truly worrying challenge, and this story got wildly arbitrary in the attempt to get around that. When your magic-wand-sorry-sonic-screwdriver can do anything to any machine, having it not work on some not-very-wizzy-looking contraption is just unconvincing. When your hero's vehicle has towed whole planets around, being unable to rescue one modest-looking spaceship which is crashing very slowly just looks incompetent. And when you're running round history as a plot convenience, having a heroine suffer from a 19th-century-opera terminal disease - one that gives her one day to live but no visible symptoms - is going to look plain goofy to even the eight-year-olds watching. Maybe it is incurable, in all of time and space, but somebody ought to think to try.

Which reminds me, general hint to TV writers; virtually everyone knows how long the programme they're watching will run for. Therefore, having someone announce that your hero has got "just under an hour" to solve a problem at the start of the episode slices suspension of disbelief into tiny bleeding ribbons. See Nick Lowe's The Well-Tempered Plot Device for further discussion.

Also on the matter of time; it's been observed before, by smarter people than me, that Steven Moffat really loves plots that play games with time and causality. Sometimes, this has produced very good stories (starting back with Coupling). But putting him in charge of a series about a guy with a time machine may be too much like putting a child in charge of a sweetshop. Sending the Doctor up and down someone's personal timeline is the kind of time-meddling that Doctor Who has customarily avoided - and allowing people to meet older and younger versions of themselves is usually, canonically, treated as a bad thing. This thing about time is beginning to look like Moffat's hubris.

(Also, I guess having the special effects shark spring forward with jaws agape may just have been a conscious reference to Back to the Future 2, but if so, it was tempting fate. Who FX aren't so good these days that you can afford to remind people of famous lines about crap special effects.)

But regarding science fantasy... The defence of such things, when they're compared to science fiction, is that (like most competent fantasy) they invoke poetic and emotional truths rather than brute rationalism. Well, maybe. But aside from the fact that, when you're deploying the rationalist paraphernalia of science fiction, this is in danger of looking like mawkish tosh, the fact is that you have to make the poetic truths convincing. Chucking in a lot of carol singing and a carriage pulled by a flying shark doesn't cut it.

In other words; Bah, humbug.

(The trailer for next year's episodes after the credits looked moderately amusing, by the way, with no daleks or cybermen even. But I did glimpse a bloody ood. Unless we're going to get a story in which an arch-villain intervenes in their evolutionary history to transform them into the most stupid race in the history of biology, I shall be very cross.)

Expand, Contract (27)

2010-12-23T09:27:00.000Z

Well, one more thing I worked on has made it out the door in 2010 (in electronic form, anyway); Gatecrashing, for Eclipse Phase, has ten or fifteen thousand words of mine in there somewhere.

The hardcopy version should come later, but right now, the PDF is on DriveThruRPG.com. You can buy the book alone, or the "hack pack" which includes some extra stuff.

Spanish Photos

2010-12-06T13:41:00.001Z

Just a note - I've finally finished sorting through our photos from last month's trip to Spain and putting the interesting ones up on my Flickr Account.

The Orange and the Red

2010-11-15T19:19:00.005Z

Spain, October 31st-November 5th.

One snag with being a bit averse to overly hot weather - by UK standards - and thus prone to taking holidays in places that are climatically temperate, is that quite a lot of stuff that one really doesn't want to miss in a lifetime is draped around the Mediterranean.So, this year, we decided to try a workaround; taking a short break to points south in a cool month. Pictures are going up a few at a time over at my Flickr pages; consider this to be the supporting notes.

Sunday: We took an afternoon flight out of Heathrow, followed by a couple of buses through Seville, and we eventually tracked down the hotel we'd booked. La Casa del Maestro turned out to be a lovely little nigh-boutique place tucked away down a side street on the slightly scruffy north side of central Seville - but then, as we realised the next morning, everything in central Seville is tucked away down a side street. The major streets are tucked away down side streets. Honestly, I thought that I'd seen medieval street plans before, but then I saw Seville...

This being Spain, we had no difficulty finding a dinner quite late in the evening, albeit a snack-ish - sorry, tapas - sort of dinner, in a little nearby bar-restaurant that the guidebook suggested. And we slept okay despite a local church bell that seems to keep going on the hour and half-hour all night.

Monday: We'd only booked for a day and a bit in Seville, and examination of that guidebook suggested that the Real Alcazar was the number one priority. So we made our way down the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that counts as a street plan in those parts (people drive in this place? aargh), passed the fancy city hall and the gigantic Gothic cathedral (complete with repurposed minaret as its bell-tower), and joined the short queue...

A few hours later, we staggered out in a state of mild aesthetic overload. I mean, I've heard of the idea of a building as a work of art in its own right - but I'd never actually experienced anything quite like this. Touring he entire palace complex (and attached gardens) is like being on the inside of a giant, exquisite jewel box, a Moorish-Spanish masterpiece of screens and arches and pools and tiles. It's a work of abstract art, mind you, with the Moorish influence ensuring that there was very little representational going on, but utterly breathtaking as an exercise in pure form. This decorative style ensured that moving from the carved or moulded interiors to the palm-filled gardens felt utterly natural, too. The realisation that history was made here - that Columbus and the colonial projects that followed him were sent from these interlocking chambers - was, well, not exactly icing on the cake, because this is one well-iced cake already.

After that, a stroll round the city seemed in order. We basically started in the Jardines de Murillo and struck north, past that cathedral and some other central sights and eventually crossing the River Guadalquivir and getting into the old ceramic-makers' district. (And with all the tiles around this city, it was clear that this was an important district in its time.) Then we headed back southwards, eventually re-crossing the river to pass the old Royal Tobacco Factory (thank you, Merimee and Bizet) and reach the Parque Maria Luisa. We had time for a quick look at the park and the huge Plaza de Espana (left over from the great Exposition of 1929) before dusk began to encroach, and we headed back to the hotel.

Oh, and after steering round a late-night religious procession, complete with band (just to confirm that we were in Spain, I guess), we had dinner in El Rinconcillo, which is supposed to be the oldest restaurant in the city, dating back to 1670. Decent southern Spanish stuff, I'd say. The restaurant apparently sometimes claims to be where tapas was invented, but I'd imagine a lot of Ancient Roman popina-keepers raising an eyebrow about that.

Tuesday: Our train was at 11:50, so we had time for another quick look around Seville, with another look at the exteriors of some buildings we'd missed the day before - then we were off to the railway station.Judging by the two we caught on this trip, Spanish trains are fine, albeit a bit basic and with little in the way of on-board catering, so we spent three hours rolling across an increasingly rugose Mediterranean countryside of olive groves and the odd cactus, and reached Granada by early afternoon. Then we spent rather too long trying to track down our hotel - we really should have downloaded better maps before we set out - before we found ourselves next to a taxi rank, and resorted to just getting into a cab and asking to be taken there. The Hotel Guadalupe proved not to be quite as cool as the Casa del Maestro, being rather more of a stock tourist place - but then, it was significantly cheaper, we got a positively cavernous room, and the place was more or less right outside the entrance to the Alhambra. Not that we were going in there that day; rather, we strolled down and round the hill to look around the Albaicin, Granada's old town. "Picturesque" is the keyword there.

Dinner, in Ruta del Azafran in the Albaicin, should have been good. Traditional southern Spanish dishes with a modern twist, in a stylish restaurant with views of the floodlit walls of the Alhambra. Furthermore, the execution was highly competent. Okay, my Remojón Granadino was maybe in the "try it once for the interest" category - a salad of potatoes, olives, and salt code is fine, if a bit bland here, but adding orange just seems perverse, even if it is "traditional" - but it was no more than the menu promised, and it was by no means unpleasant.

However, at some point during our three-quarter-hour wait for my dessert (a rather nice dark chocolate cake, not too sweet, accompanied by a matching custard that I'm happy to believe was actually Cava zabaglione like the menu said), long after the dessert wine had arrived and been consumed, I began to notice too much about the place. The atonal avant-garde music on the hi-fi, for a start. Then I went to the loos, which were labelled "boys" and "girls" on the door in multiple languages... Yeah, two unisex cubicles, except that the lights in one were gone and nobody was doing anything about it. On the way back to the table, I managed to suppress my invisibility-to-waiters field for long enough to prompt ours, much to his surprise, which is probably why the cake arrived before midnight. When we subsequently got the bill out of a different (but equally black-clad) waiter, it didn't include the dessert, which I chose to take as an apology- but it did include a couple of Euros for the two bread rolls which had arrived at the table automatically, as if free...

I'm prepared to believe that what we had here was a highly competent kitchen being let down by a front-of-house organisation so far up itself that those waiters only see daylight when they yawn. But then, I dunno who cocked up the dessert order (though I know who neglected to say anything to us about it). We only left a token tip, which was probably a mistake; none at all would have felt justified.

Wednesday: There's one reason to come to Granada, really, and our hotel was just yards away from the entrance. The Alhambra has a reputation as another building-as-artistic-masterpiece, and that's fully justfied - but primarily by two specific parts of the hilltop complex. Our timed entrance tickets for the Nasrid Palaces were for late enough in the morning that we had time to stroll through some of the grounds, pass through the Puerta del Vino, and visit the Alcazaba - the medieval castle at the tip of the hilltop complex, with magnificent views over the city and across to the mountains,

And then there was that Palace. Yup, it lives up to the hype. Well, the standard tourist route takes you through some merely impressive rooms first - then it hits you with the Court of the Myrtles, which is one of those justifies-the-trip things. The only snag with our timing was that the Court of the Lions is being massively refurbished, so we found the lions themselves in a side-room, showing off the radical clean-up that they've received, while the Court itself had a lot of scaffolding. (Made me feel like I was back in Cambridge...) Maybe we go back in a few years when they've got that little architectural gem back in full working order; even in its current state, the small forest of slender arches and carved screens still hints at the genius of the thing.

Anyway, after a stroll round the apartments where Washington Irving stayed, and the chance to admire the views and all, we wandered out into the merely superb remains of the Partal Palace, before making an indirect way to the other unique architectural masterpiece - the Generalife. (This is in the guidebooks as a separate site, but actually it's all part of the Alhambra deal.) Angela notes that you can't open a book on garden history without finding pictures of this, and it's really not hard to see why. It's kind of an exercise in gratuitously elegant Islamic garden design. With fountains. Twice. With extra beautiful stuff around it.

Having perhaps become a little Alhambra'd out, we headed down the hill again for a quick look round some other historic buildings in the main part of Granada, including the exterior of the cathedral, and the Corral del Carbon, a building that - despite being in current commercial use - is recognisably a medieval, Moorish-era caravanserai. Then we wandered back through the Albaicin and up to the Mirador de San Nicolas, a small square with the best views in the city - across to the Alhambra and down on the city, all with the mountains as a backdrop. It understandably seems to have become an evening hang-out for tourists and students.

Dinner that night was a simpler choice in a little bar-restaurant, including crepes and sherry.

Thursday: First priority this day was to find a shop where we could pick up a new suitcase, one of ours having lost a handle in transit, and then we decided that there was only one thing to do with this last day of sightseeing; we went back into the Alhambra. We aimed to focus on the stuff we'd missed of skimmed the day before, and succeeded, taking in not only the Palacio de Carlos V (a striking Renaissance palace dropped into the middle of the older site, with a great circular court in the centre - something that would be a significant place to visit in most cities, but here ends up looking like a discrepant afterthought), but also the Museum of Fine Arts which it houses, and which is currently hosting an exhibition of Matisse's work (on the reasonable excuse that he once visited the Alhambra and was inspired thereby). Oh, and some other lesser buildings, and more gardens.

And for dinner, we decided to treat ourselves to the restaurant at the Parador de Granada, the very swish hotel within the grounds of the Alhambra. This, I'd recommend; a high-end meal with some local touches. Okay, the amuse-bouche consisting of a tiny segment of Spanish omelette was probably trying too hard, but the chilled almond and garlic soup and the roast kid were great. Angela spoke well of her tuna, too.

Friday: The railway and airline timetables not being too full of options, we had a fairly early start (too early for the hotel's breakfast service - hey, it's Spain, they don't believe in 7am), and spent the morning descending once more into the plains of Andalucia. Then, it was a bus to Seville airport, lunch there, the flight, and a coach from Heathrow through the English rain. Hey ho, home again. At least with weather like that, we didn't regret missing any firework displays.

Recent Reading: PS238: When Worlds Go Splat!

2010-10-16T18:34:00.000+01:00

Somebody once pointed out that there's a problem with serial genre fiction - in any medium - which starts out as a lot of interesting images and entertaining episodes, but then goes on. What happens is that the creator feels obliged to give it some structure and a coherent plot, which has to explain all the interesting stuff from the early, incoherent episodes... And it's all downhill from then on. It happened to The X-Files, which started out with a couple of pretty FBI agents running through amusing stock horror plots and encountering weird stuff, then slumped into a tiresome and horribly extended load of drivel about horridly powerful government conspiracies which still failed to do anything about the annoying heroes (punctuated only by silly bursts of religiosity). And it happened to Planetary, which started out as a string of beautifully depicted, inexplicable episodes in which a team of super-non-heroes observed the remnants of a world of twentieth century genre fiction - then slumped into an unconvincing battle between the non-heroes and an evil but not very competent version of the Fantastic Four.

In his own way, Aaron Williams has displayed an above-average gift for handling these difficult transformations. Nodwick started out as a string of gags about an archetypical D&D party and their long-suffering, much-resurrected henchman, then turned into a moderately exciting and oddly surreal fantasy saga, which even ended before it had outstayed its welcome. And PS238 started out as a string of gags about a school for the super-gifted children of a generic superhero universe, but evolved into a genuinely readable comic. The plots actually worked as slightly twisted superhero stories, without losing track of the fact that many of the protagonists were primary-school-age kids, and the jokes remained good. Even some of the characters from the early short gag episodes developed into, well, two-and-a-half-dimensions - notably Zodon. Initially appearing as a flying-wheelchair-bound, would-be-world-conquering scientific genius who, being trapped in the body of a small child, found himself subject to a sophisticated form of parental discipline, Zodon has never exactly been a sympathetic character - he's a selfish megalomaniac intellectual snob, after all - but his frustration at being trapped in a world which he never made, and his sarcastic perceptiveness, must appeal to the long-suffering intellectual snob in us all. Even the non-powered, rather Nodwickian Tyler Marlocke, a poster child for excessive parental expectations, avoided becoming cute, but grew into a genuine child hero without losing too much of his childishness.

The latest PS238 trade paperback, When Worlds Go Splat! - volume VIII, collecting issues 40-45 of the comic - may represent a tricky and unfortunate turning-point, though. This no longer reads as the story of a school for "metaprodigies" and its pupils, but as a story about a rather blandly generic superhero universe, which happens to feature the school when it suits the plot. Much of the focus of this volume is on the origin stories of two of the parents; Atlas, who discovers that his origin is much less like that of Superman than he thought, and Emerald Gauntlet, who discovers that his origin isn't at all like that of Green Lantern, really. This brings their sons to the fore; Ron, who has at least long been a major figure in the series, but whose main feature for a while has been his troubles over his parents' divorce, and Kevin, who's never been much of a character at all. But they don't drive the plot much, and indeed, the most interesting character for much of the book is the recently-introduced Alexandra von Fogg, older sister to Zodon's chief rival, who gets to handle the smart-cynical-adult viewpoint role, while defending her family from the pious criticisms of heroic adults with a certain amount of passion.

Well, we also get more of the likeable 84, whose inferiority complex slowly seems to be coming under control. Unfortunately, there's not a lot more to her, and when much of an episode is taken up with her and Kevin running a dull maze, things really have slumped. And we get some of Tyler - but he's now been equipped with an array of gadgets by his tutor, the Revenant (Batman with the angst taken out and replaced by a little wit), enabling him to fend off Superman-level opponents on occasion, and he's been forced to accept lumps of responsibility, so he's not quite the uncomfortable, battered, sympathetic Tyler of early episodes.

Like I said, this volume makes PS238 look distressingly like an ordinary superhero comic. Even the good new minor characters - the useless Atlas 2.0 and the ludicrous Near Mint - are adults. And the need to have the characters jump into heroic action from time to time leads to some iffy moments, as when a bunch of eight-year-old kids are apparently applauded by the writer for taking on what might be an alien invasion of Earth and might be an embassy from an alien species, while two other young characters who responsibly hold back are dismissed as pathetic and lacking initiative. It's also dangerously symptomatic that the back of this book is taken up with a joke-free series of in-character descriptions of the comic's universe, which hardly seems necessary given how little it differs from the stock Marvel/DC pattern. I think that PS238 needs to go back to school.

Miniature, Epic

2010-09-21T21:15:00.000+01:00

... What have we to do
With Kaikobad the Great, or Kaikkosru?
Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to supper--heed not you.

Anyone who reads at all around medieval Persian culture or history, and who pays any attention to art credits, must get to recognise the title of the Shahnameh after a little while. In my case, it was my adolescent interest in military history that acted as the key; those flagrantly gorgeous contemporary painted depictions of the arms and armour of noble Asiatic cavalrymen usually had that title attached. It then came back from time to time, and I came to learn what the book signified; it's the Persian national epic poem, the "Book of Kings", composed in the 11th century but based on older myths. Think of a combination of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Matter of Britain and the legends of Hercules, and you'll get the idea. Except that, as this one was immensely popular in much of the Islamic world for several centuries, it frequently appeared in exquisitely illuminated forms.

So when the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge runs an exhibition entitled Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, what they're actually offering is a couple of rooms full of classic Persian and Indian miniature painting (plus a few ceramics and such for variety). It's not a grand or sweeping theme - it's quite tightly focused, really - but it's well worth an hour or two, even at the level of casual and under-informed browsing and contemplation. And, to be fair, the museum's labeling does a fair job of making up for any visitor ignorance.

Not that one gets an especially full feeling for the full plot of the Shahnameh, mind. That's not the point of the exercise, and it seems that certain specific scenes from this lengthy epic were especially favoured by artists (or maybe by the curators of this exhibition). The great hero Rustam, his very superior horse Rakhsh, and his tragic duel with his unrecognised son Sorab, recur frequently, as does the scene of the night of Sorab's conception. (A princess in a castle where Rustam has taken shelter comes to visit him in the night, seeking to bear a hero's son.) Yeah, all the classic stuff - violence, tragedy, sex - and especially the bits where those themes emerge turned up to 11. I'm not sure where the recurrent scene of one hero fishing another out of a deep dark pit fits in with this pattern, though maybe the Freudians could have some fun with it.

The feel is thus quite reminiscent of the Arthurian cycle, at least at that level, but the art styles throughout this exhibition are distinctly eastern, with reams of beautiful calligraphy on pages dusted with gold and embellished with richly coloured inks. This does lead to problems for the show, mind; all these centuries-old books obviously need very careful treatment, so the room lighting is kept respectfully low, so maybe it's hard to catch the full impact of the artistry. The illustrated books and postcards on sale in the gift shop may actually provide a better clue as to the sheer technicolor pizazz of this artistic tradition. Still, there's a lot of rarefied boasting points to be had from seeing all those originals gathered together.

Gone Postal

2010-09-21T02:07:00.000+01:00

Going Postal, the third of Sky's adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (recently released on DVD), is the first that really seems to work quite right. The first two (Hogfather and The Colour of Magic) had their virtues, but the problem with genre fantasy on screen is that it's hard to avoid it looking silly, in a bad-'80s-Conan-clone sort of way - all those robes and swords and medieval towns are hard to make convincing, and "It's meant to be a joke!" doesn't save things the way it does on the page. With a recent Discworld novel like this one, however, the style of the setting has moved forward through history very significantly, and the production design could go for something much more Victorian than cod-medieval - which looks fine, even cool, without being unduly distracting. This in turn means that, for example, the cast could be as ludicrously good as in the earlier movies, while looking like a bunch of good actors who've been cast for their suitability for the roles, rather than a bunch of famous thesps doing panto. They were clearly able to get their heads around their lines and deliver them with some conviction, rather than seeming to wonder what they were doing here.

The two leads - Richard Coyle as Moist von Lipwig and Claire Foy as Adora Belle Dearheart - weren't the most famous of these people, of course (that would probably be Charles Dance, completely walking it with casual ease as the Patrician), but both managed very well indeed. Special mention, though, has to go to the perfectly chosen Tamsin Greig as Sacharissa Cripslock - a piece of casting that makes me dream of a prequel production of The Truth, just to see Greig playing Sacharissa as a developing character rather than a cameo/plot device.

Of course, compressing a full novel into three hours of film requires a certain amount of brutal surgery, which was mostly executed quite well here, leaving a film that worked on its own terms - although the psychic power of the undelivered letters ended up seeming less subtle, and the big emotional thrust of the book - Moist's redemption and discovery of his own conscience - certainly became a much cruder process, being largely forced on him by visions inflicted by the letters (rather nicely depicted in the form of black-and-white silent movies, but still). Likewise, Adora Belle seemed slightly softened - she was still a dangerous character, but her hardness was depicted entirely as a reaction to family tragedy; likewise, perhaps inevitably these days, her cigarette addiction was shown as coming from the same source and as something she really needs to discard, rather than being an integral feature of her character which Moist's emerging masochistic side could find attractive. Less crucially, but rather sadly perhaps, there was no room for Anghammarad the Golem, while Moist's visit to Unseen University was gone, its expository role being filled by a visit from Archchancellor Ridcully - giving us the joy of Timothy West in that particular role, but should the Archchancellor show up in the Post Office at the beck and call of a golem?

But that's quibbling - and a really successful screen adaptation of a Discworld novel is too good a thing to deserve excessive quibbles. If Sky are going to continue doing these adaptations once a year, I hope that this one sets a pattern.

Miniature Architecture

2010-09-17T18:45:00.000+01:00

Recently, Angela opened up one of our compost bins which hadn't been touched for a while. and discovered this structure...

I think I've seen similar before, but it's still mildly weird. An emergent product of whatever it is that ants do to optimise their nest systems, of course.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2010-09-16T17:51:00.000+01:00

Going to see this was in large part an exercise in trying to get the hang of what the kids like these days. I knew in advance that it would really require a working knowledge of things like video games (which I don't have) to get most of the jokes, and I gathered that the whole thing was probably largely about the experience of being young (which I'm not). However, I write and edit roleplaying games material for a living (of sorts), and this is clearly the geek thing of the moment, so I feel a certain obligation to keep up with some of the references.

Plus, I can't help but feel a certain admiration for the work of Edgar Wright, going back to (and still largely focused on) the classic TV Spaced, so I was curious about this movie.

And, yes, it was genuinely entertaining, even if I didn't happen to know exactly which video games involve those particular martial arts movies, or defeated opponents disintegrating into coins, or whatever. (And, okay, no, I haven't read the Scott Pilgrim comics either, mea culpa.) Like Spaced, this film finds the essential, universal comedy in a specific and personal situation - and doesn't bother denying the essential comic gormlessness of the archetypal slacker-geek - so one doesn't need to get every reference to get enough of the jokes. I laughed, I might have cheered a bit, I didn't feel that I'd wasted my time.

The only thing that I would say is that the plot suffered slightly from the standard problem of slacker-romantic-comedies; with a male lead who's a bit of a clueless loser, it's hard to see what the self-assured, assertive love object was supposed to see in him. Admittedly, in this case, said object of desire had her own problems - the standard reading of the plot seems to be that it's really all about helping her to get over her hang-ups and to get rid of the ghosts of her past - but at least those are adult sorts of problem; compared to somebody who'd moved from city to city, learned to at least recognise her own emotional failings, and acquired some kind of proper paying job (making her "kinda hardcore"), Scott Pilgrim is just a child. Compare and contrast, say, Spaced, in which most of the characters have some kind of viable employment while all being at approximately the same level of psychological incompetence.

But, heck, the visual gags and stylistic tics were quite funny (see the aggressive female character who's perforce acquired the ability to generate her own verbal censorship effects) and occasionally clever, as were some of the one-liners (such as their drummer's introductions to Sex Bob Bomb's various performances). And I spotted the Princess Bride reference. If we're going to have stylistically flashy slacker-rom-coms for the video game generations, this will do for a start.

Stockholm Photos

2010-09-16T10:53:00.000+01:00

I've finally finished uploading a photo diary of sorts of our holiday in Stockholm last month on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phil_masters/collections/72157624614004147/

I probably ended up posting more pictures than I should have, my selections may be a bit arbitrary or sloppy in places, and I'll leave it to others to judge my editing and post-processing. But it was a good holiday, and Angela and I both photographed some interesting stuff.

Recent Reading: Alexandria

2010-09-15T16:38:00.000+01:00

by Lindsey Davis

I've been picking up Lindsey Davis's Falco novels - when the paperbacks appear - since forever, but really just as light reading. Even by those standards, though, this one is a lightweight. Falco and immediate family make their way to Alexandria-in-Egypt, stay with some more distant family, meet some people from the library, and run into a murder mystery, which eventually gets sorted out in a rather discursive fashion. Then they go home again.

The book seems to exist for two reasons; to let Davis unload some research she's done about Roman Alexandria in a moderately entertaining fashion, and to allow her a small joke about detective story forms. The Falco stories started out as time-displaced hard-boiled noir exercises with a reasonable amount of grit, but as the hero has settled down as a family man, and Davis has come ever more fond of her supporting cast, the requisite darkness has rather faded. Here, in fact, we get (a) a body in a library, and (b) a locked room murder mystery. But Davis can't do Christie-esque cosy puzzles particularly well, I'm afraid. The best scenes are actually a couple of set-pieces involving sudden death and night-time chases through the streets, which may not achieve serious levels of tension, but at least manage to be interesting.

I gather that the next in the series involves a return to Rome - and with any luck, we'll get Falco's honest-cop pal Petro back, and maybe a few brutal gangsters and some cynical court politics on the mean streets around the Aventine. Then, I'll feel less like my time-filler is a time-waster.

Recent Reading: Rainbows End

2010-09-10T18:33:00.002+01:00

by Vernor Vinge

I picked this up a few months back, but I took a while to finish it, with various interruptions - which may be a sign about how much enthusiasm it didn't inspire in me, but could of course just be a sign of the men-over-45-don't-read-many-novels syndrome.

I was interested in it because I've quite liked some Vinge I've read in the past, and I was curious as to what he would do, as a fairly seriously hard SF writer with an interest in genuine futurology, with a near-future setting. The problem, perhaps, is that what he does is a bit too much like some of his far-future stories. He wants to tell a sprawling multi-stranded tale of wonders, but he tries to cram it into the more constraining bounds of an international espionage tale and a school story.

Yes, both. The plots are also crammed together with a story about an aged Alzheimer's victim who turns out to respond exceptionally well to new medical treatments, and who therefore finds himself more or less restored to youth. The strands are interlocked moderately competently - the restored geriatric is obliged to attend the school in order to learn his way around the brave new world of 2020-ish, allowing for a certain amount of low key touring of the balloon factory, while his family become the key to a multi-layered espionage plot - but there's a sense of excessive coincidence, and some moderately odd behaviour from one or two characters that mostly happens to drive the plot. Vinge plays with some interesting ideas about near-future developments in computer interfaces and large-scale networked decision support, but this leads to some odd, unexamined problems; for example, if a character is engaging in a deeply secret, incredibly illegal and morally dubious long-term project, could he really maintain a large network of online consultant-advisers without worrying whether one or two of them might, you know, work out what they're involved in and blow the whistle in a fit of conscience?

In fact, the human elements are some of the least convincing parts of this story. The central character, the rejuvenated geriatric, comes across as an annoyed hard-science academic's parody of an annoying, self-indulgent artist-intellectual, and is only patchily convincing, either in himself or in his response to his situation. We also get the bizarre situation of a school full of teenagers, plus some elderly people in newly youthful bodies, one of them that self-indulgent, emotionally manipulative poet-intellectual, where nobody even seems to think about sex for almost all of the book. I wasn't look for soft porn or bad comedy, but I was looking for either plausible human behaviour or some explanation why human norms might have changed so radically by this point in the near future. But answer came there none. Libido suppressants in the water supply, maybe.

Vinge's view of the information-saturated future isn't that deep, either. After most of the book has talked about such matters, the climactic scene is largely driven by someone's attempts to extract a physical object from a sealed location - a physical maguffin whose information content is all that matters, really. Also, about half-way through the book, some of the characters discuss whether one of the others might be, well, something which William Gibson established as a bit of a cyberpunk cliche decades ago. The characters dismiss the idea out of hand. It's not giving away much to say that it seemingly turns out to be correct. How this could have come about in the time between now and the novel's present isn't very clear to me, mind, but that's another of Vinge's problems; he wants all these wonderful things to have come into existence in the near future, but his plot needs them to have been around for a fairly long time, so that they can have had consequences. (It also needs a few moderately substantial political shifts, such as India becoming a global power player.)

The novel does have some decent ideas, and one or two characters it's possible to care about, for good or ill, even if a lot of them are a bunch of smug, shallow technocrats. But then, in the end, it shambles to a slightly confused and incomplete conclusion, leaving the fate of some of those characters unclear and with enough semi-loose ends that I wonder if we're supposed to be looking for a sequel. I'm not, though, really; I suspect that Vinge is at his best when he looks into the far rather than the near future. It's a shame; I was hoping that he could write short, snappy books that I could enjoy, as well as his interesting but physical-strain-inducing doorstops, and I hoped that he could do some good near-term futurology. But he's really not as sharp or convincing as, say, Greg Egan, or the better cyberpunks; for all his forward-looking pose, he's an older-generation skiffy writer, and it shows.

Theatre: Twelfth Night

2010-09-07T11:59:00.000+01:00

Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, 28/8/2010

(Note to self; you enjoy Cambridge Shakespeare Festival productions, Philip, so you really should get to them earlier in the year. The last night of the last performance looks like brinkmanship. Fortunately, the weather held, this time.)

And it's back to Robinson College gardens for another comedy - more unambiguously comic than last year's, mind. It's still a nice venue for theatre on a nice evening, although this production doesn't seem quite to have got the hang of working with the space - lines were getting lost in the shrubbery, cast members were trying to interact from too far apart. Still, mostly, they were pretty good. Mind you, I've seen some not-very-similar Violas and Sebastians in my time, but these two really were exceptional - about a foot apart in height, and with no other similarities. Hey ho, accept the theatrical convention.

The director's line here seemed to be that Illyria is almost entirely inhabited by foppish loons - not just Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, Duke Orsino is pretty much as bad. This explains why Olivia isn't very interested in him - she's trying to be a sensible person and is still genuinely in mourning, but none of the aristocratic layabouts around her will be sensible - and why she falls so promptly for Viola/Cesario, who acts moderately seriously as well as being quite charismatic. (This Olivia then flips over into a state of girlish lust, abandoning black like a shot now she's got someone she can be cheerful rather than silly with, but then throwing herself very energetically at the object of her affections, which must be nice for Sebastian when she grabs him but doesn't look very consistent.) However, this then leaves a problem of explaining why the smart Viola should fall for the goofy Orsino... I know, she just does, okay? It's a Shakespeare comedy.

And, to be fair, quite funny in this production - notoriously not always the way with Shakespeare comedies, and not just because of Malvolio's character story (marginalised at the end in a faintly embarrassed way here). The Shakespeare Festival continues to make Shakespeare productions that are worth going to see. Must try to get to it more efficiently next year.

Expand, Contract (26)

2010-09-02T19:06:00.001+01:00

Well, one of the big-ish Transhuman Space projects has now progressed to the rough layout stage. Looks highly promising.

Edit: As Kromm has now revealed the title in his blog, I can happily confirm that this book is Cities on the Edge, by Anders Sandberg and Waldemar Ingdahl.

And I have a fully signed contract for the big project which I can't really talk about yet, but which may make these sorts of posts relatively infrequent for a while (while making me quite happy).

Toy Story 3

2010-08-31T18:22:00.001+01:00

First, the easy bit. This film is brilliant. Funny, fast-paced, ironical - people have talked about Wall-E or Up being among the major films of their years, but to my mind, this is the big-time computer animation that really has a claim for that sort of standing; notably, when it tries to be moving, it usually does so without being too blatantly manipulative.

However, it also left me glad that I don't have children, because that means that I didn't have to try and explain this film to them. Aside from the fact that the whole thing is about maturity and loss and the prospect of death, there are the three-eyed green blobs with their religious obsessions and eventual apotheosis, or Buzz's Spanish alternate persona and its curious appeal for Jessie. One also imagines generations of children growing up into their first encounters with the prison movie and PoW film genres, and suddenly realising what much of this thing was all about - and that's not just the minor cliches, it's also big-ish things about the corruptions of petty power. The film's direction also repeatedly employs the semantics of the horror genre, with the blank-eyed zombie Big Baby and the culminating plunge towards a hellish pit. And, of course, there's Ken, concerning whom one might choose to explain subtle concepts like metrosexuality and '70s disco fashion to the sprogs, if one wanted to get more complicated than just saying that he's evidently gay. All this is much of the point of the movie, mind, and I think that it's in more danger of befuddling kids than of seriously traumatising them, but it really does feel like a film about a box full of toys, written for a non-child audience - something that may confuse some parents as well as their offspring.

I saw it in 3-D, incidentally, and that proved unintrusive without being at all necessary in this case. Which I guess could be taken as the sign of maturity in the technology, or just money wasted.

Sherlock

2010-08-24T12:18:00.000+01:00

Sherlock definitely accomplished what it set out to do - to update Sherlock Holmes and his surrounding myth to the 21st century. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were good enough as Holmes and Watson that I wondered vaguely how they'd do in a period-costume version, although Holmes's nigh-sociopathic callousness was maybe over-emphasised - the original would at least observe the social niceties when interviewing a distressed client, and would sternly declare his opponents to be abominable before diving into the clues. Maybe someone thought that this was just a mask, and a modern Holmes wouldn't bother. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters had enormous fun working stuff from the original stories into the modern-day version, doubtless seeing how much they could include that would make the people who just think they know Holmes accuse them of gross distortion before the people who've actually read the stories jumped in to point out the truth.

But oh dear, it was rushed. I got the feeling that the writers wanted a full multi-week series and pitched a story arc on that assumption - and the BBC said "great, you can give us that in three 90-minute episodes". So in the first episode, we got the Big Meeting and the basic relationships framework, and Holmes heard the name "Moriarty"; in the second, Holmes cracked a case (with the aid of one stonking big coincidence, if you were paying attention) and unbeknown to him, the leader of the villains was collaborating with someone who signed himself "M" and who employed a sniper (doubtless name of Moran), and in the third, Moriarty decided that Holmes was both threat enough and entertaining enough that he gave him an episode's worth of arbitrary puzzles at huge cost to himself and his credibility, then emerged from the shadows to reveal himself to be a bit of a loony, eventually setting up an arbitrary To Be Continued.

Okay, now BBC; it works, okay? That much should have been obvious from the first, but anyway, if you're prepared to believe it now, give Moffat and Gatiss at least a dozen or so episodes to expand into, let them wrap up the Moriarty nonsense with one mighty bound in the first (Moriarty was always a dull and cumbersome element to the original Holmes mythos, after all - making him a big feature of the modern version was a bit lazy), and let's see Cumberbatch and Freeman weave their intellectually sinuous way across modern London the way that Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke made Victorian-Edwardian London look so damn good.

Otherwise, don't bother.

Notes from a Holiday

2010-08-20T14:39:00.001+01:00

Angela having a couple of weeks booked off, it was time for a break.

Starting, on the last day of July, with a day at the Cambridge Folk Festival. This was less laden with names I knew in advance than previous years, I must admit, which didn't make it any less fun - and at least the weather was decent, the day we happened to be there. I quite enjoyed Pink Martini - I know that some people wouldn't consider them to be folk, to an even greater extent than a lot of performers who show up at the Festival, but hey, I'm happy to regard 1930s lounge lizards who like doing covers of Ravel's Bolero as my kind of folk - while Kathy Mattea, doing what seemed to my untrained ear like a traditional sort of American folk-country, with a lot of songs about coal mining, was very good at what she did. Anyway, a good day.

The next day (our wedding anniversary) was lunch with friends, and the day after that was packing, because on the Tuesday, we flew out to Stockholm. I'm mostly going to record this in the form of a photo log on Flickr, which is still a work in progress right now, and may take a while to finish (I have a lot of digital images to sort through and tweak), but anyway, for the record, we stayed in the Hotel Rival (strongly recommended, even at the cost of directing yet more cash into the great Abba money maw - and by the way, if the Swedes are so proud of their internationally successful exports, how come I kept seeing references to Abba but none to the Cardigans?), which was located in Sodermalm, Stockholm's Bohemian quarter. By the way, "Bohemian" in Swedish turns out to mean "was poor working-class a few hundred years ago, and now has rather a good selection of nice little restaurants".

Stockholm actually turned out to be a great city for a holiday, if not the cheapest place to eat (and an even more expensive place to drink, thanks to the Swedish government's tax-based attempts to stope the Swedish people from drinking to dull the pain of living in an orderly, prosperous society). The generous supplies of good-quality coffee, sometimes actually free, compensated somewhat for that. The preferred building style often suggested a peculiar fixation on Renaissance Italy - a better model than most, in truth, although the local light wasn't exactly Mediterranean in intensity, which maybe reduced the effect rather - but the city's real advantage is that it's wrapped round and threaded through a lake and bay and archipelago; there was a feeling that the first thing one should do each morning was check which cruise liners were dominating the skyline that day.

Highest points of the holiday included the extraordinarily well-preserved centuries-old ship Vasa in its own museum, ascending the tower of the fortress at Vaxholmen for a beautiful view over the inner archipelago on a summer day, and strolling round the extraordinary outdoor museum and zoo at Skansen. Anyway, a good ten days.

And then it was back home.

Doctor Who 2010

2010-07-31T09:04:00.000+01:00

So I've finally got around to watching the last episode of this year's season of Dr Who (definitely no question mark as it seems these days), by which time all the serious fans have already blogged about it, sometimes at extreme length and occasionally with useful insights. So anything I'm going to say is going to feel deeply superfluous.

But since when did that stop a blogger?

One thing that those fans spotted was that this season seems to have been largely about Steven Moffat doing the sort of things that Russell T Davies previously did with the show, but doing them well. Now, while this is vastly preferable to many other things (such as, doing them the way that Russell T Davies was doing them), it wasn't what some of us were at heart hoping for (which was, at minimum, him doing Steven Moffat things well). Still, this approach produced some episodes that I enjoyed well enough... Until the last two.

Though the two episodes in the story in question were annoying in different ways. The first was just padded - okay, so bits of it involved classic Who thrills, but all the stuff with the Romans felt rather desperate, and when you're playing for these stakes, some running around and screaming with one (1) damaged Cyberman feels a bit feeble. It also involved some amazing incidental mental thickness; okay, the Doctor might somehow might be expected not to notice the obvious about his little speech about what was in the Pandorica, but you'd have expected one of the two smart-arse companions present to react with "sounds like you".

The plot felt cobbled-together and implausible, too. Okay, hoping for plausibility in a Who plot is a bit forlorn, but there has to be some kind of break point, some chance that stuff might be explained in such a way to make one go "ah!". The Alliance of Enemies had some credibility problems, too; there's infinite comic potential in trying to imagine their planning meetings ("THIS MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER!" Later. "We have a cunning plan. He's going to cause the end of the universe because of these crack thingies, so we're going to raid his assistant's brain through one of these cracks, construct a hideously complicated plot to attract his attention, and then capture him." "And then we exterminate him?" "No, we lock him in a box that any idiot with a sonic screwdriver can open." "Can't we exterminate him a little bit?" Later. "What are the Silurians doing here? We thought that he liked you lot." "You mean, apart from giving us a scientific name that puts us in the same genus as those monkeys?" "Yes." "Well, he put us into hibernation, and set the timer so that we woke up in the 31st century - just when he knew damn well that solar flares would be sterilising the solar system...").

The second part, on the other hand, showed the severe difficulties with fairytale-style wild science fantasy, by just not doing it very well. If anything is possible - anything that fairytale magic might bring about, anything that wide-screen baroque space opera might conceive - then the most that you can get on screen is pretty pictures and over-acting. This was all-too-Daviesian NuWho, the Doctor as a demigod who can save the entire universe with a bit of dubious technobabble and some pained claims about self-sacrifice, and the assistant du jour as the mostest important magic girl in all the universe who can restore things which have been wiped from history by wishing hard enough. It just wasn't satisfactory.

This series has also given too damn many hostages to fortune. Another thing that some proper fans noted about the whole series was that Steven Moffat seems to like time travel stories - that is, stories in which stuff happens in the wrong order, cause and effect are chopped up for dramatic or comic effect, and so on. Actually, I think that the time travel is just an excuse, a convenience; Moffat simply has a lot of fun tinkering with causality within narrative structures. My favourite script of his, ever, anywhere, remains episode 1 of season 4 of Coupling, "Nine and a Half Minutes", which is essentially Rashomon as an urban sex comedy. However, Who has usually been a little bit careful about time travel stories, in this strict sense; to this show, time travel is just a way to get our heroes into an infinite variety of places and times, and any suggestions about going back in time to stop bad things have been clubbed down with pronouncements about the Laws of Time or Causal Loops. And there are several good reasons for this caution, given Who's nature as a mass-market TV show; time travel stories tend either to confuse casual viewers by being difficult to follow, or to bug the bejasus out of attentive geek types by being sloppy and illogical. Furthermore; they present huge problems for the long-term design of the show, in the way that excessively powerful technology does; if the Doctor can use time travel to solve one problem, to determine which flat to rent to find the monster of the week, why doesn't he use it every time a problem is serious enough to, say, involve the deaths of a few dozen people? The rule has been broken on occasion, of course - Davies broke it once or twice - but Moffat seems happy to plain ignore it. It'll come back and bite him, I tell you.

Anyway, Steven Moffat is definitely engaged in reinvigorating a classic British popular culture hero for television in the 21st century, and doing a fine job of it from what I've seen so far. Unfortunately for this blog post, the hero is Sherlock Holmes. This jury of one is still out on his work on Who; let's hope that, now that he's worked through the unhappily established conventions of 21st-century Who in his first season, the second will do something really worthwhile. The presence of, for example, an actual married couple on the Tardis (a first, I think) does at least suggest that we might get some proper Moffat foibles instead of the tired old Davies foibles.

Expand, Contract (25)

2010-07-29T09:58:00.000+01:00

Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 (or whatever exactly it ends up being called, but me I like that title) is now off to SJGames, my final draft editing being done - so I take a deep breath and look at the as-yet-secret possible project that now seems to be coming together. Oh, and I deal with a little Pyramid article I said I'd write. Just a short one.

Inception

2010-07-27T17:11:00.001+01:00

"His subconscious has been militarised!"

Indeed.

The genius of this film is its solution to a deep-seated Hollywood problem; how to reconcile the Therapy Model of Plot (the idea that the only real point of the stuff that happens to a protagonist in a movie must be to solve some deep-seated emotional problem) with the demands of the action genre (which doesn't leave time for that nonsense if it's being done right). Past solutions have involved carefully paced talky intermissions between the explosions, kids needing rescuing, villains who represent (or just plain are) The Father, and so on. Inception skips all that in favour of something much more literal; it sets out to explore the subconscious - somebody's subconscious, anyone's subconscious - and promptly discovers that it's made up entirely of gunfights, explosions, car chases, and at the deepest level, a rather nifty, slightly grimy post-Bondian alpine villain base, complete with skiing guards.

And it does it gorgeously. Christopher Nolan lives up to the old Welles line about a movie set being the best train set any boy could have, and adds on the best computer game level designer kit that boy might want today. One tip; go see this movie on a reasonably large screen with a proper sound system - I doubt that it'll be anything like the same without wall-to-wall visuals and a seismic bass undertone. Admittedly, nothing later in the movie quite lives up to the early, fabulous poster-moment when Paris folds back on itself like so much well-designed cardboard packaging, although a late, bleakly exquisite landscape of abandoned mega-skyscrapers tries hard. But as his Batman movies showed, Nolan loves his cityscapes with an infectious passion, and can shoot a decent action sequence too; given the chance to combine the two, he's in his element.

Here, he shifts the scene to Mombasa for a while for no real reason other than that it lets him do a street chase scene with a new aesthetic edge (okay, maybe owing something to Casino Royale).That's during the early part, when the movie is still running through a highly traditional "assembling the team" phase, which reminds me; the movie also shows Nolan's knack for casting. The leads all do their best with often slightly thin characters, even Ellen Page, who spends the first third of her screen time being on the receiving end of some mandatory exposition, and the rest being the empathetic girl genius, manages to make something of her part. However, the plot is all about Leonardo DiCaprio's character, who's a damaged soul... This isn't a character movie.

What it is, is the action movie re-imagined as a Chinese philosophical parable, Freud with big guns in a cyberpunk world. The soul of the thing may be a little flimsy to justify the scale of the structure built to support it, but that's Hollywood movie dreams for you - and it is a big-budget SF movie with the sort of serious ambitions we've mostly come to associate with smaller-budget SF movies in recent years. The two-and-a-bit hours certainly went by for me in a glow of admiration.

High and Low

2010-07-19T19:13:00.001+01:00

Hmm, no, I don't seem to have been saying much here lately. I've been a bit busy. There's a couple of things I will just make a note of, though.

For one, on the 28th of June, we got to the British Museum for the "Fra Angelico to Leonardo" Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition. (Well, there was a lot of stuff you'd otherwise have to get to the Uffizi in Florence to see.) This turned out to be a very technical sort of exhibition - there were explanations of the various techniques used, samples of paper and parchment one could actually touch, and comparisons of some of the drawings that were actually preparatory works for paintings with images of the finished paintings themselves. And for the first stretch, it maybe felt a bit too technical; the drawings from the early years of the Renaissance weren't bad, but they weren't exciting either, and were often formalistic copies of standard designs. And I'm still no fan of late medieval art, with all its stiff religiosity, even though looking at drawings rather than paintings saves one from the usual surfeit of gold halos.

But then, well, the exhibition kind of proved that art evolved for the better in the Renaissance, and after the path through had hit the Leonardos around the mid-point, well, I was sucked in. Stunning stuff, some of this, and all of it certainly never less than technically interesting.

And on 11th of July, we got to see Shrek Forever After at the Cambridge Arts. We previously saw the first couple of Shrek films, but we missed the third, so this was a fairly casual interest, but we enjoyed the movie; it had the usual density of reference to both fairy-tales and other sources (amazingly for an American series, the Shrek movies hadn't thrown in anything from the Wizard of Oz until this final episode, so far as I recall), the usual grossly over-qualified cast (I missed noticing the presence of the wonderful Jane Lynch until the final credits), and the usual torrent of good jokes. The 3-D, while effective enough, was pretty much an irrelevance here - a few hurtling broomstick-mounted witches are nothing compared to, say, Monsters vs. Aliens' games with scale - and the movie as a whole was nothing like as sophisticated as, say, The Incredibles. Whereas in that movie, the hero is aware from the first of the ambiguities in his discontent with family life, and the solution to the problem is a complex process which requires adaption by all the parties involved, Shrek is just an understandably put-upon-feeling husband, father, and citizen, who gets a chance to see what the bachelor life would be like, enjoys it for a short while, and then gets hit over the head with the Hollywood presumption in favour of domesticity. It's an unearned moral, mere moralising.

One shouldn't think too hard about the alternate history plot structuring, either. Technically, it creates a whole universe full of people with their own lives and troubles and hard-won triumphs, and then obliterates them with a kiss, in a casual act of cosmic genocide. Although it was the even more casual death of the Gingerbread Man that might actually worry more viewers. Also, I was probably too taken with Rumpelstiltskin's palace - a gilded Versailles-for-dark-lords - and his wigs - all wiped out by the plot's tide of narrative Tipex. Still, yeah, don't think too hard and it's certainly huge amounts of fun.

Expand, Contract (24)

2010-07-14T18:40:00.000+01:00

And yeah! The finished edit of Transhuman Mysteries is off to e23. I don't know when exactly it'll appear, but it's off my hands now. Good book, by the way.

So it's back to a couple of my own writing projects now...

Expand, Contract (23)

2010-06-20T10:56:00.000+01:00

Oh yeah - Transhuman Mysteries is now in editing.

Other stuff (that I may have mentioned in the past) is waiting on various necessary administrative things. Further updates will probably be posted when those bottlenecks are cleared (and not before). There are also some possible major projects coming into view; if they come together, they'll take much of my time for months, and I won't be able to say anything about them for a while. So don't worry if these posts turn infrequent.

Concert: Blondie

2010-06-11T14:05:00.000+01:00

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 11th June 2010.

I was at university from 1978 to '81, so Blondie are naturally an important part of my past. However, I never did get to see them back then, so the discovery that they were going to be playing Cambridge (I think for the first time ever, although I may have missed something in the last few years) was an opportunity to fill that gap in my life.

The evening began in appropriate '70s style; first, everyone had to queue up outside until the doors opened at the concert's advertised start time, and then the support band (Little Fish) turned out to be a three-piece (guitar/vocals, drummer, keyboards) with a female singer-guitarist playing jagged, slightly punky little songs; they weren't bad, but I found I was old-fashioned enough to wonder if they'd be better with a bass player to round out the sound.

Anyway, one interval later, Blondie hit the stage, starting with the inevitable assorted thin, slightly anonymous male musicians and then - Debbie Harry, wearing a platinum wig, shades, a black dress with a conical layered knee-length skirt, and Doc Martens. In other words, she looked a bit like some kind of crazy cat lady, if your neighbourhood crazy cat lady was a living goddess of power pop - complete with the voice we all remember, that coolly amused New York drawl. Actually, the voice may not be quite the subtle power tool it once was; during "Atomic", the crucial repetition of the title was first spoken, then handed over to the audience, then replaced with an apocalyptic guitar solo. Still, there was no doubt who this was.

The set actually turned out to contain a fair amount of new material - the band have a new album coming soon (and the new material sounded very Blondie) - which is great; this isn't just a self-tribute act, although many of the classics were in there too, to varying effect; this was a rock band with decent keyboards, not a synthesizer band, so "Maria" and "Call Me" were fine, while "Heart of Glass" was, well, rockier than the studio version. I never did catch who the line-ups lead guitarist was (Chris Stein, the long-time mainstay of the band, seemed to be leaving a lot of the lead work to this other guy), but he was a little bit prone to axeman exhibitionism. But that wasn't the point, was it? The audience of forty- and fifty-somethings (and some of their kids) were there to see the cool, streetwise blonde who was there before any of your Madonnas or Gagas. And we got what we came for.

Recent Reading: Recklessly Yours

2010-06-10T03:01:00.002+01:00

by John Allison

Well, I suppose that this isn't technically very recent reading, given that I first read these strips at the time that they appeared in Scary Go Round. And a lot of what it requires isn't reading so much as looking, Scary Go Round being a comic strip and all. But anyway, the book collection appeared recently, enabling one to re-read the contents more briskly than one page per day - which does, all else aside, sometimes enable one to follow the details of what passes for a "plot" a little more effectively. For example, I now understand why Desmond Fish-Man attempted to recite an obscene limerick at the climax of the Jeremy Kyle Show. You can't put a price on that sort of understanding.

Furthermore, these collected strips are accompanied by brief notes from the author, John Allison, which together help explain why they turned out to represent the final year of the strip. Allison comments that he started the period in a positive frame of mind, but the narratives show that his mood - always crucial to his quirky brilliance - was changing from very early on, and it shifted radically even towards the very end.

There are five "stories" (often a rather loose concept in John Allison world) in this book, and the first two, "Carrot vs. Stick" and "Extra Income", show Allison's tastes in subject-matter moving towards the low-key tales and younger characters that have turned out to characterise Scary Go Round's successor strip, Bad Machinery. The first, a school story about the stress of growing up and the difficulties of maturity, substantially expands the role given to such previously minor characters as Carrot Scruggs and Sarah Grote. The second starts out with The Boy, for some time an interesting viewpoint character, seeking a part-time job and becoming entangled with sleazy businessman Hamilton Percy, but Allison evidently got bored with that idea, and shifts the focus to an unexpected romance between Sarah and Ryan Beckwith, which in turn leads to a brief outburst of drunken idiocy from Carrot - and the story ends.

"The Estate", on the other hand, sees Allison developing an almost social-realist interest in the actual community of the characters' home town of Tackleford, and making some vaguely thoughtful comments on its underclass - albeit with a plot centered on the moronic and obnoxious Desmond. While this is all a long way from the sort of story that made Scary Go Round popular, it's often very very funny indeed. The story also introduces Charlotte Grote and Shauna Wickle, two child characters for whom Allison evidently developed an affection, as they would become central to Bad Machinery.

Then, Allison made one last attempt at the kind of wide-screen-rococo, junk-movie-tribute tale that web comic fans like his so often love, and which he'd often started well and then ended rather abruptly as he ran out of the necessary bubbling energy. Actually, "Looking for Atlantis" is pretty good of its kind. Starting with a completely futile attempt to discover Desmond's origins, it brings in a dubious ex-Nazi researcher who takes Desmond, plus central characters Shelley and Amy to, yes, lost Atlantis. There, Shelley's idealistic optimism (plus some general human stupidity) causes chaos and destruction, despite Amy's desperate attempts to balance it with cynical realism. Allison claims that this story showed him that the plan he'd been developing, to replace Scary Go Round with a strip about Shelley's adventures as a time traveller, wasn't going to fly because he just couldn't face writing about Shelley's sunny sociopathy - although it appears that he kept the idea going until quite near the big break point.

Which comes, not surprisingly, at the end of "Goodbye". This brings back The Child, previously a quasi-supernatural agent of chaos, but here redrawn as a more mundanely manipulative brat, whose previously shadowy and Rasputin-like father-figure turns out to be a Michael Jackson doppelganger. Allison's notes say that this story was massively revised in the wake of Jackson's death and the ensuing public hagiographising, but it's hard not to see this as more of an excuse, because the original plot outline which he discusses here (with rough sketches) looks out of kilter with his shifting mood - and also uncharacteristically bitter as well as dark. Personally, I'm glad that he didn't use that plot, although this may be sentimental of me. Admittedly, he was planning to end things with a story involving a high school prom (not very traditional-British, that, though) and both Shelley and Esther going into action in Tim Jones/Matsushita Corporation battlesuits ("It's the Matsushita Gothnaut 1 - it can only be driven by someone Very Dark") - but he was also going to kill off a number of major characters, for one or two of whom I felt considerable affection. Instead, we get a lower-key precursor of the gentler wit of Bad Machinery, entangled with some life changes for other characters, with shifts and closures that almost verge on the moving. Mind you, the hopeless Carrot gets to suffer to the very end.

After this, Bad Machinery started slowly, and while I've stuck with it, I wasn't too surprised to hear that it had some trouble keeping the old strip's audience. It's a new angle on Allison's odd, sweet, dangerous, skewed world (which I haven't even attempted to describe in this review, because, well, you have to get to know it for yourself), suggesting a maturity which Allison shows largely through the eyes of child characters - although Amy and Ryan, once among Allison's least responsible adult characters, have survived and attained their own peculiar form of maturation. Hopefully, there'll be printed collections of that strip, too, documenting that rebirth into adulthood as this one documents the end of one era for one eccentrically brilliant writer.

Going West (Temporarily) - Sun, Sand, Fossils, Food...

2010-06-01T17:35:00.001+01:00

Note: some photos relevant to the following are up on my Flickr stream.

It must be about forty years since I last visited Lyme Regis, and Angela had never been there - and in those forty years, the place has gained a twist of enhanced fame thanks to John Fowles (assisted by Meryl Streep) and Jane Austen (assisted by the BBC drama department). So when we wanted to take a long weekend away, we decided that we ought to head down there and see how many flashbacks I might suffer.

But first we had to get there, and the drive down involved a stop for lunch. Fortuitously, Angela looked at the map and realised that a service area on the way, at Popham, happened to be the location we'd seen on TV when Heston Blumenthal attempted to kick-start the Little Chef chain towards higher quality in front of the cameras. It's not often we structure our itinerary around a Little Chef... Fortunately, Blumenthal's efforts at this place turned out still to be working. I don't think that I'd ever tried ox cheeks before, but the dish I ordered had the texture (literally) of a fine piece of slow cooking. Everything else there was competent at the very least, and often very good. I don't know if the chain have tried or are trying to extend this approach to other branches, but if they managed it, they could in theory accomplish a mind-boggling improvement in image.

Anyway, yes, we did eventually reach Lyme, checked into the hotel, and went out for a walk. And yes, bits of it trawled memories up from the depths of my brain - not often too bizarrely, although I'm pretty sure that a shop called "The Toby Jug" was there in the '60s, with the same sign, and the aquarium out on the Cobb definitely was. Mostly, though, and I suppose predictably, it was the smell of the seaweed cast up by the tide that felt so familiar, along with the beaches full of soft grey tide-smoothed pebbles.

Lyme itself is attractive enough, and the paeleontogical importance and the Jane Austen connection give it ways to draw in tourists. It doesn't half cash in on those options sometimes, though, especially the fossils - there's ammonite imagery everywhere, and multiple shops selling the things, (with stock drawn from all over the world if you look closely - the beaches near the town have been picked clean, absent any recent landslips). The town museum holds maybe more historical stuff - a dense clutter of local history, in fact - and that was where I discovered that Charmouth, the village along the coast where my family used to stay, was where Harriette Wilson stayed while working on her memoirs. That's rarely mentioned. Personally, I think that the tourist trade ought to make more of it.

Oh, and the seafood is good. By Sunday, though, we were ready to head further afield. We paused briefly at Charmouth, but my memories notwithstanding, I didn't see enough there to justify spending time and parking charges. In fact, we'd decided to take a look at the Royal Signals Museum, over at Blandford - which is a pretty good museum, especially if you can enjoy a fair-sized collection of vintage motorcycles and other vehicles, though there's plenty on military signals generally if you're enough of a tech-geek. Heading back from there, we took in quick looks at the Cerne Abbas Giant and Dorchester, and then stopped off at Maiden Castle nearby - another location I remembered from childhood holidays; a great wind-swept sheep-field surrounded by earthworks, the biggest Iron Age fortification in the UK. It's impossible to capture the scale of the place in a ground-level photo, but it was worth a stroll.

Anyway, we got back to Lyme in good time for the booking we'd made to treat ourselves at the Hix Oyster and Fish House. This is, well, a very good restaurant, and a part of what makes it is actually the location, overlooking the bay and the coast through floor-to-ceiling windows; eating while the marine horizon fades to darkness is definitely an experience. The cooking was good, too, if quite militantly rustic-local; my nettle soup was, I think, rendered pleasingly oleaginous by the snails, while Angela vouched for her deep-friend sand eels... My main course of hake seemed a bit salty, and the service seemed relaxed to the point of being off-hand at first, but overall, the treat was a treat. One local ingredient that was definitely used well was Somerset cider brandy, incidentally, especially in the "shipwreck tart" that I hit for dessert - a Hix creation of pastry and nuts where the warming glow of the brandy provided a definite twist on the standard walnut/pecan pie formula.

We headed home the next day - but by the scenic routine, taking in a few more sights, starting with Abbotsbury Swannery (a tourist attraction that knows what will attract tourists; the roads for miles around were dotted with signs saying "Baby Swans"), and then going onto Bennets Water Gardens (very pleasant to stroll around in the hot weather), and lastly reaching Portland Bill. This last was one more location I remembered from childhood; I think that it was the first lighthouse I ever visited. What I didn't remember was how windswept, almost bleak, it was; it's the last low slope of a lump of rock projecting south into the Channel, and was probably always pretty austere, but by the looks of things, the Victorians turned into into a quarry for Portland stone, and it's never quite recovered. Still, on a hot day, it has a sort of blasted charm - and the lighthouse looked much as I remembered.

Anyhow, we made it home. And I didn't suffer any catastrophic flashbacks.

Concert: Ray Davies

2010-05-16T20:52:00.000+01:00

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 13th May 2010.

If I'd wanted to give this post a smart-arse title, I'd have been spoiled for choice, wouldn't I? "Well-Respected Man", "You Really Got Me", "Not Like Everybody Else", "Loud, But Never Square"...

Or, to put it another way - well, it's not too hard to see some of the surviving legends of Ray Davies's form and era - from the far side of a stadium, at considerable expense. But in a venue the size of the Corn Exchange, for local-venue prices? That wouldn't really have been sensible to miss.

Of course, Ray Davies was one of the lesser Big Names of his era, being the most quintessentially British of the British Invaders. But I'll put him up there with any of them, for influence as well as talent. I don't really like "If no A, then no B, C, D, or F" comparisons - influence and history don't work like that - but subtract the Davies/Kinks influence and where are you with Bowie, or the Jam, or the Pretenders, or Blur? And the blighter was productive, too; every now and again at this gig I was thinking "Hey, he's used most of his big hits already, where's he going from here" - and then out would come yet another classic pop song.

Which said, being limited to the resources of a small-ish touring band did restrict the range of effects that Davies could apply, to the point where (whisper it) some of the songs were in some danger of sounding the same as each other. He started with just himself and another guitarist, playing mostly acoustic but seriously amplified, and then brought on the keyboards, drums, and bass; the classic rock/pop configuration, playing in fairly conventional style - and at one point performing a string of heavier numbers (yes, including "You Really Got Me") that would remind one that the Kinks also got some credit or blame for Heavy Metal. (Although to be fair, they probably gave it a useful sense of melody and some wit.) The other notable feature of the performance, though, the one off-beat stylistic touch, was the way that Davies used the audience in his arrangements.

I believe that he's long had some tendencies this way - live albums with the audience sounds mixed high, and so on - and I don't think that it's exactly egotism; rather, Davies treats his more exuberant fans (and the front row at this event were definitely exuberant) as part of the show and therefore part of the music, letting them provide vocal fills when they want to. The trouble is, a bunch of dedicated rock fans aren't the most precise of instruments... Still, it was often fun, and many of the songs could stand it, including some that perhaps shouldn't have had to. I've said before that "Waterloo Sunset" can withstand pretty well anything, and that turns out to include this sort of live performance with the audience providing occasional backing vocals.

Anyway - repeatedly, throughout the show, Davies and the band would hurtle yet again into some neat little pop song that was also a small masterpiece of slice-of-life poetry. And this guy wrote all this stuff, and has been performing since about 1962. The place was full of people of a range of ages, all doubtless being reminded of important parts of the soundtrack to their lives. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Recent Reading: The Age of Wonder

2010-05-07T18:06:00.003+01:00

by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder has a subtitle: "How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science". Which is accurate enough, although the terror only really shows in the chapter on Frankenstein, and maybe occasionally in the stuff about the discovery of the true scale of the universe.

Richard Holmes is a biographer by trade, and this is scientific history as biography. The spine of the narrative is formed by the life stories of two figures; Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and his successor as the president of the Royal Society, Humphry Davy (1778-1829), around whom other stories twine in different chapters - with the Herschel family featuring in several of them. I'll admit that I learned an awful lot from this book; just for a start, I'd previously been aware of Banks mostly in connection to his contributions to the nomenclature of gardening, rather than for his status as the grand (ageing) man of British science over generations (or even for his activities as Coleridge's drug dealer), and of Davy as the inventor of the miners' safety lamp, which was certainly important but which rather neglects the stunning volume of work he did on the foundations of modern chemistry (the work which got the safety lamp project pushed his way, in fact). Blame the simplistic shorthand stories of British education in my schooldays, I guess.

Whether Holmes quite proves his stated thesis is another matter. His idea is that there was in Georgian Britain such a thing as "Romantic science", or perhaps more correctly a Romantic idea of science - science as the product of solitary geniuses, thirsting for knowledge at any cost, progressing by huge leaps at crucial "Eureka moments" and seducing that knowledge from the infinite mysteries of nature, but also objective and disinterested, willing to transmit their new knowledge to a wider public thanks to a new system of public lectures. The last part, though, seems to me to be the only place where "Romantic science" differs very clearly from the Enlightenment science of Newton and Descartes, although Holmes does trace the 18th century evolution of the myth of Newton's Eureka moment with the apple, and his story does culminate in the meeting where the word "scientist" was actually invented to replace the older "natural philosopher", retroactively fitting the likes of Newton with a new label. He might also have traced the relationship between British science and that of other European nations in more detail, but to be fair, the book has quite enough to talk about as it is.

But whatever. Holmes tells a good story, and reading more around the subject might well reinforce his case. Meanwhile, he draws an interesting picture of the "second scientific revolution" (as identified by Coleridge in 1819 - Coleridge is an important figure throughout this story). The primary sciences in this revolution were astronomy and chemistry, with the first largely driven by the methodical brilliance of William Herschel, an expatriate German musician discovered by chance making solitary observations on the back streets of Bath (I said that Holmes has a great story to tell). Herschel, aided by his sister Caroline (who became Britain's first professional woman scientist, as Herschel became personal astronomer to the king), redefined the universe; his discovery of Uranus (the thing about him that I learned in my schooldays) seems almost incidental, although helpful to his fame.

But before we meet Herschel, we get to know Banks, a fabulously wealthy naturalist who landed the job of botanist on Captain Cook's voyage to Tahiti. Banks comes across as one of those casually amiable aristocratic types who treats everyone with equal amounts of casual charm, whatever their social position or cultural background, and seems to have helped the slightly more stiff-necked Cook deal with the Pacific islanders he met; one ends up wondering if Cook would have survived his last voyage if Banks had been along to moderate his attitudes, instead of being kept off the ship by political chicanery in the Admiralty. (This is a handy book for devotees of the conspiratorial model of history, although it makes no deliberate efforts to support such silliness; fellow roleplaying gamers of my vintage will understand if I re-title it "When Void Seekers Ruled the Earth".) Instead, Banks became the patron of the new scientific movement, although his aristocratically conservative instincts maybe hardened into something less helpful as he aged. Indeed, the story of British science in the period emerges as one of older organisations growing sclerotic and being replaced by dynamic new groupings, as the Royal Society is followed by the Royal Institution, and that then leaves a gap to be filled by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. All very British.

Where the book maybe seems a little weak is in the actual science; Holmes comes across as having done the research and taken good advice, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that he's more interested in the people than in their work, occasionally digressing onto the lives of the Romantic poets with variable amounts of relevance, and he fails to really tackle more complex subjects in any detail; his explanation of Fraunhofer lines, for example, is limited to a footnote, where he calls them "similar to a supermarket barcode". Nor does he seem to understand why scientists get so irritated by Coleridge's bizarrely muddle-headed comments about mind being passive in Newton's "system", and one Shakespeare or Milton thus being equal to 500 Newtons. He also wanders off into specific subjects that barely qualify as "science" at all, although they were of some interest to scientists and to the Romantic poets; fortunately, these make for interesting chapters. One involves Mungo Park, an early explorer in central Africa who was to some extent backed by the old globe-trotter Banks, and who did appeal to Romantic poets; another, which I confess to finding sometimes hilarious, is the ballooning craze of the late 18th century. Lighter-than-air flight was actually invented by the French, but the British caught on fairly quickly (and told themselves that some of the chemistry involved was invented by Britons, so it was fairly British anyway, even if one of the pioneers in this country had the poor taste to be Italian); this being the Georgian era, early developments naturally included attempts to invent the Mile High Club, while more serious pioneers struggled to convince themselves that there were in fact reliable winds in any direction one might want at different altitudes, so given a bit more research, this technology could actually be made useful... Holmes actually misses an analogy which hit me while I was reading this chapter, between ballooning then and the manned space program today; ballooning involved new gadgets, public showing-off, and worries about national prestige and military applications, was basically about applied technologies but involved various scientists attempting to argue that it was all about serious scientific research, was a little bit too dangerous for comfort, and faded out rather after a few years as early promise came to little.

But the book begins and ends with sea voyages that facilitated vastly important biological research; at the start is Banks, vastly expanding the knowledge of European biology and returning a hero and a major public figure; at the end, as John Herschel dismantles his father's great forty-foot telescope (ending the age when Slough was a global centre of astronomical research) and young scientific radicals like Charles Babbage chafe against the Romantic establishment, a relatively obscure young enthusiast lands a job on HMS Beagle - and returns with ideas so dangerous that he doesn't dare publish them for decades. But Darwin's long-drawn-out Eureka Moment is a story that's been told well before, and largely lies outside the scope of Holmes's book. What is does show, and fascinatingly, is how the Georgians invented modernity, in this as in other ways - and then weren't quite sure what to do with it. It was left to their heirs to sort out that little matter.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-04T14:08:00.001+01:00

If anyone hadn't heard, Marvel Films are currently engaged in a speculative project; they make a set of movies featuring most of the original members of the Avengers, and assuming that these work well enough, at some point in the future, they make an actual Avengers movie. Well, Jon Favreau has evidently bought into this idea; Iron Man 2 is set in something much more like the "Marvel universe" than previous Marvel superhero movies, and not just because of the teaser scene after the end titles. Early on, someone tells Tony Stark that he can't continue operating as a lone gunslinger, that he should accept the help that his friends offer him; by the end, we're in Marvel Team-Up territory, with Iron Man and War Machine facing off against a horde of robots while Black Widow infiltrates the enemy HQ.

Yes, Favreau clearly loves him his superheroes, and he's been given the resources to express that love. The fights in this film could come straight out a comic - not just the noisy, dazzling high-tech power armour dogfights, but also Black Widow's deft and hyperkinetic demolition of a whole team of security guards. (Not that Scarlet Johansson's character is ever referenced by that name, and frankly she's pretty superfluous to the plot, except that she defines its parameters while giving us lots of high-speed judo in a catsuit, which is good enough for me.) He also seeds the film with stuff for the geeks; not only does it assume that viewers will have seen the first in the series (fair enough), it assumes that they'll have sat through to the end of the credits on that one, so that when Samuel L. Jackson wanders on set half-way through, he's not given anything as superfluous as an introduction. For that matter, I'm pretty sure that Tony Stark's father was carefully cast and made up to resemble Tony Stark in '60s-era comics.

But lots of directors can do decent super-fights. Where Favreau jumps ahead of the pack is, as in the first film, in the engineering. (Both films seem practically designed to make engineers into very happy bunnies. The heavy product placement of Audi cars fits very, very well indeed; Audi are a marque with huge engineer appeal.) Admittedly, the script tips ever further into comic-book goofiness here, as Stark synthesises a brand new element (gurggh) by improvising a particle accelerator in his lab, aligning it with a spirit level and what appears to be Captain America's shield (yes, really), and then hand-aiming it - but Favreau evidently reckons that, if you're going to do comics, you gotta do goofiness. And the actual physical action of those scenes, as Stark throws himself around his workshop, alternately playing with holographic models and tearing up the floor with a pneumatic drill, reinvents the cinematic mad scientist lab for the 21st century. Anyone planning a movie about a super-genius inventor will need to watch this one first from now on; I just hope that the makers of Doctor Who[?] are paying attention.

But all this narrative density (plus the obligatory tedious Hollywood father-issues sub-plot, damnit) has to have a cost, and what this film has lost that made the first so interesting is a sense of a relationship with real-world politics. At times, Iron Man threatened to say something almost significant about American foreign policy and the "War on Terror"; Iron Man 2 assumes that Stark is doing something worthwhile about these issues at the start, and then looks at what might follow for him personally - which is moderately interesting, but not something that binds so well to the newspaper headlines of our own world. That jump into a full-on "superhero universe" maybe leaves too much behind. Though one might see Stark as symbolising America this time round - ingenious, charismatic, solipsistic, obsessed with independence and free enterprise, terribly opened to attack from all sides when weaker opponents show that he's not actually invulnerable, subject to the demands of a military-industrial complex that cares only for profit...

And because it's still about just Iron Man, the film has problems finding interesting opponents for him; most of his fights are with other people or robots in suits of armour much like his own, which could get quite boring quite fast. (Mickey Rourke's "Ivan Vanko" - briefly referred to as "Whiplash" in the credits, but comics geeks will see him as owing rather more to the Crimson Dynamo - shows his face in his first appearance, but never quite explains how he can be so robust with that much bare flesh showing, and eventually dons proper armour.) The comics solve this by throwing much more colourful, less armoured gadget-users at Iron Man and then ducking the question of how they survive in a stand-up fight against him; this isn't likely to work on film. Meanwhile, Justin Hammer is the story's weak link, an incompetent twit who's somehow become CEO of a major weapons manufacturer - nothing like the suave Cushing-esque Hammer of the comics, and just a pale shadow of the first film's Obadiah Stane.

So, overall - not as good as the first film, no, and probably too specifically aimed at the geek market in the virtues it does retain. But it's still a film about a guy in super-powered armour, with good FX and fight scenes and a few good jokes, that also asks a few questions in passing about responsibility and power.It's probably as good as we deserve.

Expand, Contract (22)

2010-04-28T09:44:00.001+01:00

Oh yeah, it's been a while... But anyway, Steve Jackson Games have recently cleared a bottleneck in the contractual process. So I'm just signing a contract, which I think means that things are advanced enough for me to mention; said contract is for Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100.

And talking of the Transhuman Space line, I can probably also safely mention the Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries has now completed playtest and is into final draft work - I'll be editing this in due course.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010: Art in Standardised Forms, I Guess

2010-04-04T19:10:00.000+01:00

Afternoon: Mmm - it's been a while since we got to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and they've got some temporary exhibitions on, some of them set to end in the near future. Plus, they've finished the last round of refurbishment.

And yes, the Greek and Roman galleries are nice these days - we just wandered through soaking up (mostly) a collection of partial and damaged sculpture that reminds one that this stuff is one of the foundations of Western art. Then, it was off through the rather less grabbing (but doubtless very, umm, comprehensive) porcelain collection to the south wing, which is where they tend to put the temporary shows. There was a room full of netsuke, which is an extraordinary form of craft, and maybe of true art - I mean, those things are just decorative toggles for bits of costume, they seem to use fairly standard subjects, there's no apparent attempt to evoke deep emotions - but it's all bogglingly fine and elegant and skilled, at a level of effect which makes much conscious art look cack-handed. There was a room full of monotype prints by Lino Mannocci, which might appeal to me, in a minimalist, allusive sort of way, when I'm in the right mood. There were a couple of rooms now holding the museum's collection of modern art, of varying levels of appeal, but hey - Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, oh my. And there was an exhibition of works by Sargent, Sickert & Spencer, unified by slightly more than the fact that they were three English-speaking artists of the late 19th/early 20th century whose names began with "S". Just to state what I'm qualified to state - i.e. the bleedin' obvious and personal - I guess that Sargent is the most instantly accessible, even if this exhibition (being based on the museum's own collection) didn't feature some of his most lushly gorgeous portraits; Sickert came across as the most interesting, if only for his London urban images; and Spencer is the most "spiritual", if mutant personal religious imagery and unflattering self-portraiture is what floats your boat.

There was also this year's sculpture promenade outside. This didn't grab me quite as much as last year's, but there's some reasonably cool things there.

Evening: Oh yeah, the new Dr Who[?] season opener. (I note that the standard logo for the series now uses the letters "DW", with no question mark. Am I alone in finding this somehow deeply naff?) It wasn't bad - not great, but not enough to make me hide behind the sofa and weep for lost childhood things. While Matt Smith is definitely playing a younger, mutated David Tennant, he's trying to make the part his own, and at least he seems to be emphasising "weird" over "cute". The plot was essentially routine Who - much more noohoo than klassikhoo, but relatively good noohoo...

But on the other hand, Steven Moffat frankly seemed to be coasting a bit at this point, making it "good noohoo" by repeating stuff from previous good noohoo rather than by being original (and it's his capacity for originality that makes me hope that his Who will be worth watching). Notably, we had the bright, sparky kid who meets the Doctor and then encounters this half-disbelieved childhood imaginary friend again in adulthood - which was great in "The Girl in the Fireplace", but not needed a second time. We also got a reiteration of some of noohoo's worst features, notably including gratuitous cameos by ludicrously over-qualified thespians who were then completely thrown away - Nina Wadia being the worst example here, although as a Green Wing addict, I was also unhappy to see Olivia Colman reduced to playing Monster's Temporary Shape (even if said shape could be interpreted as Harriet Schulenburg). Then there was "the Doctor faces down dangerous aliens and scares the cr*p out of them just by identifying himself", which seems painfully self-aware at best, implausible at worst - and which was in any case done much better and more convincingly by Neil Gaiman writing John Constantine twenty years ago. Plus, we got the all-too-classic ur-Who clunkiness of monsters who really, really can't run for toffee, a new Tardis control room that tips over from the steampunk style of the last series into junk-shop silliness, with old typewriter keyboards and all, and a Portentous Comment by the monster which makes it clear that this series will have an overarching plot theme. Sorry, I know that this is supposed to be a way to keep us watching, but when you've already had seasons where the overarching theme was The End Of The Universe Is Coming or The Doctor Is Going To Die, doing it again is just superfluous and suggests a lack of confidence.

And - oh yeah - there's the new assistant. Quite sparky, quite charming, but still stuck with being the sparky, charming eye candy who's along to keep the Doctor company. Having grown up with assistants who were trained scientists or strong-willed girl reporters or fully certified geniuses in their own right, I'm afraid I do have to regard a kissogram girl as a bit of an anti-feminist retreat. (And can one even find kissograms these days? Not that I've gone looking, but ... I have a nasty feeling that we might have to think of Ms Pond as a pre-watershed euphemism for a strippogram.)

But no, it wasn't a disaster. It was adequate science fantasy, which may be what we should be asking from Who these days, because getting anything more would be pure bonus. Let's hang in there and see - for now.

A Moment in Time

2010-03-23T13:26:00.000Z

Like, I guess, a lot of people with a basically touristic relationship with London, I have a bad habit of thinking of the city in terms of a few square miles at the very centre. I'm aware that this huge conurbation spreads out far beyond the Circle Line, of course, and I often watch those part go past from the train, but I don't get off there much. Then something comes along and prompts me to get somewhere like the Estorick Collection, out in Islington, as I did last Saturday, and I'm reminded that I should try harder.

I'd never even heard of the Estorick before this year, but it's a small gem, perched on the edge of Canonbury Square (which itself well earns its paragraph in the guidebooks, and which features a fragment of an Elizabethan manor house, lurking like a reality shard among the nineteenth century terraces); specifically, it's a collection of 20th century Italian art, primarily but not solely Futurism. What I read about was a temporary exhibition, curated by Jonathan Miller, called "On the Move: Visualising Action", which fitted in this gallery because its theme - the attempts by artists to depict movement more convincingly in the age of photography - was something that preoccupied the speed-and-modernity-obsessed Futurists. The exhibition sits on the borderlines between art and science, drawing heavily at the beginning on the work of Victorian photographic pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, who developed the technology to show movement as it happened, thereby showing most painters that they'd been getting stuff like animal movement wrong for centuries. Some of these pioneers saw themselves purely as scientific researchers, but some of them clearly wanted to see themselves as traditionally artistic - Muybridge tended to photograph classically-draped nudes - and yet it was artists who wanted to break with tradition, such as the Futurists, who naturally jumped on the new ideas most enthusiastically, creating paintings and sculptures which imitated the photographic imagery.

The exhibition maybe loses focus a little as it moves on from those early days, finding a lot of quite interesting technical photographic work but less in art, as painters and sculptors in the twentieth century lost interest in representing movement (or anything else very literal) too much. Still, it's full of cool stuff, and for a bonus, you get to see the Estorick's fixed collection, which includes some slightly skewed Italian variations on styles like Impressionism.

The gallery has a good cafe, too, by the way, if it's not too crass to mention that.

Anyway, once we were done there, we walked and took a bus into the centre of the city, and ended up taking a stroll around the Native American and Asian sections of the British Museum. It struck me there that some gods seem far less discomfited by being captured and hauled off to Bloomsbury than others; Ganesha handles it all with elephantine dignity, whereas the Dance of Shiva becomes just a formal abstraction.

Dinner in Wahaca; Mexican food and tequila... And no inclination to relate that to the sinister Mesoamerican stuff I'd been looking at only a few hours before. Some gods are definitely best cast down and reduced to archaeological curiosities.

I have photos of the day up on Flickr, by the way.

Gabriel's Orchestra

2010-03-18T12:44:00.001Z

A covers album from Peter Gabriel has to be an interesting idea, but this is, well, Peter Gabriel; he's not one to take the entirely obvious route. Scratch My Back features a dozen interesting songs (some of which I was familiar with, some not) - all accompanied by modernist orchestral arrangements by John Metcalfe, and generally slowed right down to the point where Gabriel's singing occasionally approaches simple speech.

So it ain't exactly rock and roll. But it's good, in a self-consciously searing sort of way, and well worth a listen. It did occasionally remind me of Peter Sellers reciting the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" in the manner of Laurence Olivier's Richard III, though.

There's apparently also going to be a CD made by the various people whose songs Gabriel covered, covering some of his songs in return. That may be interesting - it should feature David Bowie, Paul Simon, the Magnetic Fields, Randy Newman, and Neil Young, among others.

The "Special Edition" version is well worth the extra money, incidentally, less for the second CD (which has remixes of three of the tracks, plus definitive proof that "Waterloo Sunset" is an absolute poetic and musical masterpiece which can withstand absolutely any sort of assault) than for its inclusion of a code that gives a free three-month subscription to the Society of Sound - which means free downloads of high-quality versions of a clutch of varied but often very interesting albums.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-09T18:53:00.000Z

First off, a digression. When one is introducing a new technology, it is wise to (a) think through the small practical details of the system so as to minimise inconvenience for your customers, and (b) make sure that the people you employ are completely familiar with the details of the new system and can perform basic maintenance and make simple adjustments with no fuss.

So, for example, with regard to (a) - if you're installing modern 3D technology at your cinema, and you decide that your customers should buy the required polarised glasses at your refreshments stand, you need to tell them so, with large, clear notices in the foyer and on your Web site and so on. You do not let them climb up two floors to the screen area, and only then have a harassed usherette tell them that they've got to go back down and queue up for the bloody things as the clock ticks. (Especially not when you're pushing a new electronic ticketing system that means they won't necessarily have spoken to any of your staff before that point.) And with regard to (b) - if there's a momentary power cut in the projector room, sure, the showing will dip out. There's no help for that sort of thing, we understand. But then you should pause the film showing, get the sound and the picture working again properly, and then rewind to the point where things stopped and start again at that point, not a minute later. You should not carry on showing the film without sound for several minutes, so that the audience misses five or ten minutes of plot (including cameos by half the British acting profession, in this case).

Stupid, stupid Cambridge Arts Cinema. Amiable amateurishness is not the name of the game.

Anyway, the movie...

I'm not, I confess, particularly a Tim Burton fan. I've got nothing against his brand of gothic whimsy, you understand, and I've greatly enjoyed several of his films; I just don't worship at the shrine. Likewise, I don't regard Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books as sacred texts. I recognise that they've become foundational myths for the modern age, mind you - distillations of surreal mathematician's logic for the age of relativity and quantum mechanics, amiable flights from reason for a world that finds reason a source of stress, anthologies of superb imagery with no excessive baggage of meaning. However, it's all too clear to even a casual observer that this film compromises both Burton's artistry and Carroll's vision in pursuit of the safe financial return that made it possible in the first place. The multiple star appearances and vocal contributions could well class as good casting (rather than stunt casting) and a sign of Burton's prestige in the business, and the decision to make this actually a "return to Wonderland" story with a 19-year-old Alice could be considered to represent Burton doing exploratory things with the myth, even if it does give us a heroine in a gauzy blue dress who can appeal equally well to small girls with a Disney-princess fixation and to their fathers. (Though it must be said that the way that Alice's dress refuses to change size when she and her underwear do could be interpreted as sleazy, assuming it's not just a symbol of her rejection of the role into which society is forcing blah blah blah.) But the Avril Lavigne song over the end credits is just too crashingly misplaced.

And honestly, the plot is just too bloody Hollywood wrong. Carroll's small girl is on a holiday from the confusingly rational adult world through a landscape of puns and surreal symbolism; this film determinedly transforms her into a teenage victim of social expectations, achieving anachronistic levels of self-actualisation (or something) by discovering her role as the Prophesied Hero of a cut-price knock-off War of the Ring (which ends very quickly when the literal and metaphorical Dragon from yet another Carroll source dies and the arch-villain's troops all promptly switch sides - gods, was Burton seeing how many TV Tropes entries and general iffy fantasy cliches which the Alice stories don't evoke or use he could drag in?); said War, by the way, is a struggle between playing cards and chess pieces with the chess pieces as the good guys, (which I guess is appropriately Victorian), and has evidently been on hold until Alice shows up; still, it seems to have transformed several of Carroll's innocent characters into expert sword-fighters. Then, in the end, Alice escapes marriage (this is technically a spoiler, but I doubt anyone will be surprised) into the world of commerce - and proposes to set to work opening China up to British trade.

Yes, problems of dating aside, this film suggests that Alice grew up to become an architect of the Opium Wars. Thanks, Tim, but are you sure that you've thought this through?

The ludicrously over-qualified cast do their best with this farrago, although Anne Hathaway for one is clearly struggling with the silliness of her part, and Johnny Depp, given the job of second lead (because this is a Tim Burton film), adopts a Scottish accent at random intervals. Oh, and yes, this is the latest big production to explore the possibilities of 3D technology. Unfortunately, the realistic sections end up suffering from a dolls-house artificiality, and the luridly coloured dreamscape-landscapes of Wonderland (renamed Underland when the script remembers) jumped into my face a bit too assertively.

Ho hum. I actually came out of this movie quite amused by the carnival flamboyance of it, almost willing to forgive the cinema their technical cock-ups, even. But it's too easy to see the problems even while you're watching it, let alone in retrospect. If some films suffer from logic holes - refrigerator logic - this one suffers from refrigerator surrealism. I'm prepared to give Burton the benefit of the doubt and assume that the problems arise from him taking the Disney shilling, but I really hope that he doesn't repeat the mistake.

Grey Becomes Black and White (is it true what they say?)

2010-03-08T16:50:00.000Z

Kettle's Yard, in Cambridge, currently have an exhibition, "Modern Times: responding to chaos", described as being of "drawing and film" from the 20th and 21st centuries. Actually, there's a fair amount of paint and other two-dimensional media involved, albeit almost entirely monochromatic, while the film too is largely black and white - short looping "art pieces", mostly I think from the inter-war era. It might have been more accurate to have described this as an exhibition of black and white art from the last hundred years. Still, and even for an art ignoramus like me, it's an interesting show.

The assorted movements encompassed by this collection of stuff - Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism - doubtless have their crucial differences, but judging them purely by what's on show, they would all seem to tend to minimalism and abstraction; the occasional almost-figurative piece is downright jarring in the context. Some of the pictures seem to verge on architectural representation, and judging by the labels, one or two of them were actually meant that way, but mostly this may just mean that a modern human mind reads "angular structure" as "building". And gosh, I do find myself going round these things trying to interpret that way... Sometimes with great pleasure, in fact. Early in the exhibition there's a big painting whose title and creator's name I forget, but it's a wonderful swirl of black and white paint that could have devoured my attention for hours. Is it a bird? Is it driftwood? Is it a wolf?

The film pieces, incidentally, look like the last survivors of a lost and stillborn art form, especially today. When a cheap computer and some software can allow anyone to cobble together mind-wrenching full-colour animations and manipulated images in a spare morning, the idea of some obsessive oddball in 1920s Berlin or wherever spending hours hunched over a collection of hand-crafted drawings, photographing them frame by frame in order to create - gosh - moving abstract pictures taking a full seven minutes or so to play out, just seems tragically quaint. But obsessive artistic oddballs having their vision eaten by the system is a theme for another post - probably my next one.

You Bought It, You Couldn't Wait, Could You?

2010-03-02T10:44:00.000Z

As some of my older friends can probably attest through gritted teeth, I've always had a very large soft spot for Magazine. This is partly aesthetic (they were, after all, one of the most important and talented bands of the post-punk era), and partly sentimental (I saw them twice in my student days in Cambridge, and the second time was one of my early dates with Angela). But Magazine were a band who quit while they were ahead, when presiding genius Howard Devoto evidently decided that life as a rock star didn't suit him and ran away to join a photo library. (His subsequent musical projects, in Luxuria and ShelleyDevoto, never seem to have been more than hobbyist exercises.) Anyway, I presumably don't count as a proper Magazine fan; I didn't get to the reunion concerts last year...

Still, I did eventually get around to picking up the DVD of one of those shows (from Wire-Sound), so I guess that I get some latent fan points. I also get a pretty good down-the-line concert DVD, simply but slickly enough shot and presented given the slightly marginal nature of the exercise. It turns out that the members of the band have lasted pretty well, absent the sadly deceased John McGeoch, as has the band's music (but we knew that). In particular. when the event kicks off with "The Light Pours Out Of Me", we are forcibly reminded that Barry Adamson provided much of the heart and soul of the band, generating bass lines that are at once thunderous and melodious. (I'm not sure about his current apparent taste for top hats, but with that talent, he could get away with wearing a tutu.) Across the stage from him, McGeoch's replacement, Noko (who previously worked with Devoto in Luxuria) provided a remarkably effective emulation of one of the great rock guitarists of the last thirty years, only occasionally slipping into conventional axe hero antics that McGeoch would surely have avoided.

But it's the man between them who counts, and who's ... not changed, indeed who looks amazing unchanged (but he always looked a bit like an ageless alien reptile), but illuminated by time - and the main thing we can now admit is what a (deliberately) funny man Howard Devoto really is. Actually, Magazine in general and Devoto's lyrics and stage presence in particular were always loaded with irony and flippant surrealism, but jokes weren't what smart post-punk rock was supposed to be about back in 1980, and Devoto's threatening songs, laden with alienated lyrics, chilly electronic soundscapes, and razor-sharp Adamson and McGeoch riffs, could seem terribly serious if you let them. Now, though, when Devoto shows up in a pink jacket and plus fours, and announces that he's reformed the band to impress a woman, the joke becomes a bit more explicit. We've all had thirty years to relax (well, I have - I hope and would imagine that Magazine have fans these days whose parents hadn't even met when I saw them at the Cambridge Corn Exchange), and we can allow ourselves a more open awareness of the ridiculous.

Which reminds me - one fannish note. "Model Worker", a love song in the jargon of Chinese Communism (yes, some of us got that joke even back then) includes the line "I know the cadre will look after me". This was widely misheard when it was first played as "that Carter", and in 1981, Devoto played along by singing "I know that Reagan will look after me" instead. In 2009, he sang "I know Obama will look after me"... The only other odd lyrical tweak I noticed was in "Permafrost"; in the first chorus, "I will" became "you want me to", and there were even mumbles about political correctness from the sofa. But in subsequent iterations, that still-chilling-thank-you chorus reverted to its original form.

Oh, and I wonder - were these the first Magazine concerts with a backing chorus line (of two)? One of these ladies - Rosalie Cunningham, I believe - took duet parts on one or two songs, and had the Magazine cool down just right, with a perfect combination of a detached gaze, a razor-sharp black bob, and an LBD - plus a tendency to sit down on stage to read a magazine when her voice wasn't needed. She deserves credit.

The extras on the disc are pretty minimal - one song from a rehearsal room, one from a different concert - and there was very little new; just a re-enactment of greatness. But no matter. Sentiment assuaged.

When I ordered this DVD, I also picked up the CD which was apparently indirectly responsible for the reunion concerts happening - keyboard player Dave Formula's new Satellite Sweetheart, featuring every surviving member of the band (and indeed featuring a McGeoch credit on one track - presumably a sample from an old recording or something), which assembly inspired someone to think that they could also do some stage shows - along with Live and Intermittent, a collection of live tracks from Magazine's heyday which Formula has recently assembled. The latter may be moderately interesting as a historical document, but it's a very rough recording; completists-only stuff, really. The former is, well, despite all those appearances (on different tracks), not really how one imagines Magazine would have evolved, even over thirty years; Formula is evidently one of those (extremely talented) rock band members who'd really, really like to be showing what he can do by playing something slightly different - in this case, something like lounge jazz, a lot of the time. Adamson has gone the same way at times over the years, to be sure, but he at least has a taste for the sinister in his atmospherics. There were times on Satellite Sweetheart when I was irresistibly reminded of Derek Smalls's excursions into free jazz, but without the thundering bass (or the stunned audience). Still, it does feature Devoto singing on "Via Sacra"...

Mara Aranda y Solatge: Dèria

2010-02-14T19:15:00.000Z

This one's a bit of a find.

I first ran across "Mara Aranda y Solatge" in the form of a single track, "Romanç De La Porquerola", on a freebie CD with a magazine. This caught my attention enough that I eventually, recently, purchased the whole album it was from, Dèria, in MP3 form.That was a good move.

The album is, as I understand it, a set of modern treatments of 16th century Aragonese Spanish songs in some kind of Sephardic tradition. That probably sounds terribly academic, and to be honest, there are times listening to this stuff when a combination of nasal Spanish vocals and the buzzing of what I think are Galician bagpipes gets a bit ... worthily unprepossessing. Likewise, the harp solos can be a trifle obvious in their emotional effects. But then some extra layers of instrumentation cut in, or the quasi-flamenco rhythms shift into higher gear, and I'll forgive them pretty much anything.

"Romanç De La Porquerola" is probably still my favourite song here, in fact; a 6+ minute track that, for the first third, sounds like a melancholy medieval lament for bagpipes and voice. Then the rhythm section kicks in with a vengeance, and Aranda begins an intricate duet with the stringed instruments... I still don't have the faintest idea what she's singing about, but it still sends shivers down my spine for the next four minutes.

"Els Contrabandistes" hits high gear faster, whereas "Quatre Traginers" stays slow and probably tragic, while "Bolero De Guadassuar" has a lovely double-bass-driven opening... Oh heck, I'm attempting vague descriptions of stuff which I like but can't claim to understand. I like it, okay? It's evoking a culture where I probably wouldn't want to live even if I could speak the language, but if this is what their music sounds like, I'm happy to go visit.

(There seem to be some pretty good clips of the group playing live available on YouTube, incidentally. Worth a look.)

Cheap Domestic Irony

2010-02-13T18:48:00.000Z

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a particular CD online, so I dipped into a price comparison site, then decided to pay very slightly more so as not to give my money to Amazon. Later in the day, I found myself explaining why to Angela, who hadn't seen the relevant news stories. She then pointed out that I'd found myself deliberately shopping at Tesco in defense of the rights of producers and as a protest against multinational capitalist exploitation.

Amazon really have bought themselves a PR problem, haven't they?

Theatre (sort of): Nation

2010-02-13T18:37:00.000Z

National Theatre, London, transmitted to the Arts Cinema, Cambridge, 30/1/2010

The trick of taking operas and plays from major venues and transmitting them live to substantial cinemas via high-definition channels and appropriately competent display technology is a nice one, and this is the latest instance I've caught at the Arts in Cambridge; the National's Christmas show, an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's younger-readers alternate-world story by Mark Ravenhill. It seemed to be using more cameras and camera angles than previous transmissions of this type that I've seen, sometimes showing the projecting-stage performance from close up or even, bizarrely, from above. However, it was still a stage performance, using stage effects (puppets, cast members moving in and out of the spotlight, a model ship on yards of rippling fabric to represent the sea), rather than a movie with fancy CGI. For the first ten minutes or so, I found this a bit disconcerting, even silly, but the human brain can adjust to things; it came to work.

This was, as it proved, a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, even preserving Pratchett's slightly cumbersome outer framework - although the first scene of chapter 1 was moved to late in the play (which I thought was a small mistake). A stage production couldn't convey the apocalyptic sense of the early scenes, of course, and the wildly (excessively?) dramatic flight from the great cave was necessarily lost; come to that, at a few times, the mime depiction of grand actions looked a bit silly. But - so far as I could recall, not having read the book for a year or so - pretty much everything seemed to be in there. The most substantial change was to the nature of Cox, the major villain of the piece, who was transformed from one of Pratchett's quasi-motivelessly malign psychopaths to someone with a personal connection to Daphne, the heroine; I guess that this gave the plot a bit more sharpness and focus, but it did have something of the loathsome Hollywood/kung fu movie habit of making every conflict personal.

Anyhow - on its own terms, the play worked pretty well, playing out Pratchett's intricate dance of ideals and ideologies, complete with lapses into mysticism despite the general humanist-materialist tenor of the argument. I get the impression that people who didn't know the book have been a bit confused by this thing, and to be honest, the book isn't one of Pratchett's best; both book and play may be a bit too schematic, really. It was well cast, though, I thought; Gary Carr and Emily Taaffe made attractive young leads, while Jason Thorpe had a gift of a role as Milton the parrot (no, really). The visual effects and puppet-work were great, too, helping to transport the audience into this strange tale. I wonder if the audience in London had a big advantage in being in the same room as all this stuff, or whether those of us watching the transmission, with all those multiple angles and close-in shots actually did better?

Whatever. An entertaining afternoon, and a good use of promising technology. Hey, if they just doubled the bandwidth, they could do this stuff in 3D...

Recent Reading: Oceanic

2010-02-12T14:30:00.000Z

by Greg Egan

I have a considerable fondness for Greg Egan's work, dating back to fairly soon after he started selling to Interzone, but it sometimes seems that his flavour of hard SF is like rock and roll; it works best in short form. He needs to just punch you in the face and then stop. Sprawling concept albums may have a certain technical interest value, but they're not the point of the exercise.

So when Oceanic appeared, it went on my wish list (despite the fact that it contained a number of stories I'd already read), and duly showed up in my Christmas stocking. It took me a little while to get through it, thanks to various distractions (but then, one can easily forgive oneself that with a short story collection), and yes, it's taken me a while to get around to blogging about it, but anyway...

An obvious thing about Egan's stories is that a lot of them feature a generic Egan narrator/protagonist: intelligent, humanistic, highly ethical, maybe deracinated, arguably a bit chilly, sometimes romantically engaged but not exactly demonstrative about it - as much of a standardised construct as H.P.Lovecraft's similarly intellectual protagonists, but younger and (of course) more optimistic. There are a few of them in this book, but fortunately for its variety, there are some other character types in lead roles too. I've already commented on the first story, "Lost Continent", elsewhere after its earliest appearance, and I'm afraid that it still doesn't quite work for me, but it still shows a hugely admirable sympathy for the underdog (motivated by Egan's own work for good causes), and by taking the much-mauled underdog as its lead character, it avoids the sense of trad-hard-SF competent man nonsense that can become so tiresome after a little while. Likewise, the last story in the collection, "Oceanic", may feature a highly competent scientist as its protagonist-narrator, and may be rather schematic in its extended critique of religion, but at least it gives that scientist a serious and difficult journey by way of a plot. One gets the feeling that, while Egan still has no time for superstition, he is developing a little more sympathy for the emotional and social complications that take people there.

Between those two, there are ups, downs, and oddities. "Dark Integers" is an oddity in that it's a sequel to one of Egan's best past exercises ("Luminous", to be found in the like-titled collection), but I rather wish it wasn't, because that's what makes it into a down; it isn't actually bad in its sketch of unwanted responsibilities and duelling universes, but in its details, it sucks most of the beauty out of the earlier story. "Luminous" had a computer built of light, and beings of uncanny power and unknowable personality living in the shimmers of a breeze and the twist of a cloud, on Earth but also on the far side of a flaw in mathematics; in "Dark Integers", the technology is less wondrous, and it turns out that those beings are a lot like us, can talk like (and to) us and play politics like us, and the other reality where they live is just a sort of parallel universe with its own planets and suchlike. When the meeting between two worlds ends on a slightly but not overly downbeat note, less seems to have been lost than might have been the case.

"Crystal Nights", which I'd seen before in Interzone, begins with a peculiar dummy, as one of Egan's standard lead figures comes in for a few pages and promptly refuses to play any further part in the story, because it's largely about the ethics of creation, and she's too ethical. It makes a point, I guess, but not too well. (I'm not sure that beginning a story with "More caviar?" to establish someone's levels of wealth is too slick, either.) After that, well, it's a pretty good Egan story, although as so often, Egan is worrying at ethical questions that only (currently) exist in his fictional world. The line about how rival billionaire transhumanists might end up, "throwing grey goo around like monkeys throwing turds", is funny, though, and the story has a certain left-field optimism to it.

"Steve Fever", on the other hand, shows a kind of posthumanist breakthrough gone badly awry, without collapsing into total catastrophe - a sort of Blood Music where the microscopic brains have less smarts but more built-in ethics. The question of where desperation and the survival instinct might lead with a sufficiently advanced science is certainly interesting. "Induction", on the other hand, is in danger of being a bit dull, if only because it features one of Egan's simpler optimistic futures, short of either sensawunda or conflict - having been written for a special issue of the academic journal Foundation, and hence for free, may or may not be a consideration here.

"Singleton" is another one I remember from Interzone, and here we are definitely back with one of those Egan protagonists - someone who can get worked up about existential problems arising from quantum physics. The vague possibility that our hero may actually be mad as a fish doesn't slow the plot down, and the plot eventually expands from near-future plausibility to transhuman wildness, spilling off a character who then, very oddly, shows up again in the next story.

This is "Oracle", which has the look of a tale dreamed up after reading too many biographies of a couple of 20th century figures - with those figures renamed for arcane reasons (and placed in an alternate history). I don't know enough about these people to judge all the details properly, but I'm not sure that Egan quite catches the tone of mid-century English discourse or the manners of the mid-century British intelligence community right. The not-Alan Turing certainly looks a bit too much like another stock Egan hero; maybe I shouldn't have expected Derek Jacobi, but the Turing of Breaking the Code would probably have been more interesting. I feel even less qualified to comment on the not-C.S.Lewis, but he has me somewhat convinced most of the time; however, I really can't see a Lewis-analogue, having sought to engage an opponent in public debate on a crucial matter of moral philosophy, first choosing to make the debated question something rather tangential to his great concern, and second, basing the thrust of his argument on something like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Incidentally, can anyone identify who the "dark-haired young man" who coaches not-Lewis on Godel is meant to be? I assume that one should be able to guess, but I haven't a clue.

"Border Guards", the next story in the book, is yet another Interzone story, featuring an imaginary game that may appeal to physics geeks, set in a universe that's been made more hospitable to humanity than mere quotidian reality. It's interesting in a way, but it's minor key stuff. "Riding the Crocodile", on the other hand, is set in a Utopian future of our galaxy which also features in Egan's most recent novel, and raises questions in a prequel-ish fashion. However, its problem is its unconvincing depiction of a society of immortals. Years, decades, centuries pass while a couple of people sit around in the ultratech equivalent of a tiny cottage, doing some rather limited academic research, with no apparent sign of needing broader cultural inputs or other company, no emotional evolution, like a couple of postgrads locking themselves up for a week to crack a thorny calculus problem. Perhaps they've adjusted themselves or just gradually adapted to this sort of life, but if so, the setting is far more dehumanised than I think Egan wants it to seem. It's a problem that his Utopian futures do suffer from; I fear that the idea of depicting a believable culture of well-rounded immortals in convincing depth would seem to him like a crass distraction from the really cool physics, so we may be stuck with these pale cyphers.

Last off, "Glory" and "Hot Rock" are set in the same future, the galaxy of the "Amalgam", but feature visits to less-developed planets where locals have stuff of interest to Amalgam society. (The first visit is accomplished by a display of technology so egregiously sophisticated and refined that it tips over into silliness.) Both involve discoveries of potentially galactic significance, but both are actually interesting because they feature exercises in the imagination and depiction of alien worlds. Not surprisingly, Egan turns out to be pretty good at this, even if the worlds may seem a bit sparse and schematic. I was sometimes made rather unhappy when his plots dragged my attention back from his aliens. Very old-school skiffy of me, I fear.

So - not prime Egan, then. But even sub-prime Egan is more Egan than anything else. Still, perhaps he needs to take a break from the benign, enervated, post-human futures that aren't going to convince any of the unconverted, and allow himself a bit more of the moral passion that features in "Lost Continent", the ambiguity of "Steve Fever", or the world-building of "Hot Rock". Egan has the more-than-potential to be one of the greats, but he may need to hold back on the (atheist) preaching and actually allow himself to be a little bit more of a science fiction storyteller.

Expand, Contract (21)

2010-02-05T18:39:00.002Z

One is anything to do with me only in the sense that I'm now the line editor for the line of which it's the foundation-stone, and the other was a very small editing exercise for me (any long-past work inside aside) and is being given away free, but anyway:

Transhuman Space Classic is now available from e23.

So is a snazzy PDF version of part of the hopefully-only-semi-forgotten Teralogos News (for the Transhuman Space line, I should say). Yes, the rest of it will follow in due course.

(Oh, and my comp copies of Le Jeu de Role du Disque-Monde arrived a little while back, I forgot to mention. So I can now waste time trying to work out if it says what I can't remember if I wrote ten years ago. My French is almost up to that.)

Expand, Contract (20)

2010-01-21T16:36:00.002Z

Pyramid 3/15 is now out, and it not only does it have an article of mine ("Transhuman Action"), it's entirely dedicated to the Transhuman Space setting.

On which subject, I'm happy to be able to report that some further TS material - not necessarily new, but not unwelcome - should be up on e23 in the near future.

An Inability to Understand My Own Work

2010-01-14T17:53:00.001Z

I've had enough odds and sods published over the years that I may be a bit blase about new books with my name on these days - but I still get a small an irrational thrill on those rare occasions when I get translated into a foreign language. So the comp copies of Mundodisco: El Juego de Rol which reached my hands today induced a certain glow, despite the fact that I can't read them.

Expand, Contract (19) (and an apology of sorts)

2010-01-14T17:19:00.001Z

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 9: Summoners is now out. And while this is, yes, a Dungeon Fantasy supplement, I'd like to think that its treatment of summoning magic, stats for spirits, and so forth might just make it moderately interesting to GURPS fantasy gamers in general.

Meanwhile, I've also recently had sight of much of the next issue of Pyramid, because this'll be the Transhuman Space issue. If I say it looks very promising, it's not just because it includes an article by me.

(And, on a completely unrelated matter, if anyone wonders - no I haven't been able to summons the enthusiasm to review the last couple of D[octor]r Who[?] episodes, although it might yet happen. But honestly - a ridiculously over-qualified array of thesps grab all those bit-parts and cameos so they can expand their CVs and look cool to their grandchildren without actually having to do very much, characters sprout super-powers for no particularly good reason other than plot, and we get subjected to the most protracted and hyper-active death scene in the history of time and space... Is anybody inspired?)

Hamlet

2009-12-31T19:24:00.000Z

It's a kind of twisted and unfortunate compliment to media SF that the BBC breaks a decade or two's avoidance of Shakespeare in order to make a filmed version of an RSC production of Hamlet that happens to feature the Doctor as the prince and Captain Picard doubling Claudius and the ghost. But let's not be grudging; it was three hours of good, punchy, classic drama. David Tennant did actually bring some of the tics that he's been using to make people like his Doctor to his starring role; all that nervous, eccentric intelligence, the worry in those staring eyes, the bursts of energy and introspection - it was a perfectly respectable Hamlet while also being the David Tennant that the Who-fans will have wanted to see. Patrick Stewart, meanwhile, simply applied the intelligence and gravitas and charisma that he can wheel out for any role you care to pay him for to both purposes; why the director wanted him in both roles was unclear to me - I assume it was simply that if you've got one of the best mature actors of his generation available for this play, you might as well make maximum use of your resources. The ghost isn't much of a character, of course, but Stewart had some fun with Claudius's increasing but never quite adequate attempts at murderous deviousness.

(Hmm. Maybe... If the ghost is partially - though not completely - a projection of Hamlet's neuroses, and given that Hamlet doesn't seem to have seen much of his father for some years or to have had much in common with him, perhaps the face and voice he perceives could indeed be drawn from the available alpha male on whom he's projecting his Oedipal anger? Oh, heck, maybe maybe maybe - but that's making excuses, not adding anything to the play.)

Anyway, it would be wrong to imply that this was purely a two-star vehicle. The RSC cast was as good as you could expect, including Oliver Ford Davies as a Polonius so annoying that most of the audience will have wanted to stab him in the arras by "to thine own self be true" (though he actually took a bullet through a mirror in this incarnation); Edward Bennett struck me as a bit too Wodehousean as Laertes, but perhaps that was the point, while Mariah Gale worked to convey the underlying fragility in an Ophelia who initially seemed quite smart and sensible, before rather rapidly flipping under stress, and Penny Downie was a hard-drinking satin-dressed mature jazz siren of a Gertrude.

"Wodehousean", by the way, wasn't a big problem given that this was a more-or-less modern dress production, looking kind of 1930s formal in the early scenes where smart suits, ties, and court decorations were everywhere, before the more modern leather jackets and such began to intrude. (Hamlet carrying a medieval sword to threaten his friends with in early scenes just looked clunky, though; the large flick knife that he didn't quite use on the praying Claudius was more in keeping.) The production design was fabulous - all polished black marble, huge mirrors, and chandeliers; Elsinore had clearly acquired a great interior designer from somewhere, even if the battlements were still cold and drafty places for trench-coated sentries to pace in the vaguely defined wee small hours. The minor obsession with surveillance cameras initially looked more trendy than apposite (and not very '30s), but it became clear that Hamlet was partly being driven to distraction by the sense that he was perpetually under observation, which was why he grabbed a gun to shoot out that mirror and hence Polonius, so I'll give it a pass.

Overall, then, three hours of David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and a lot of other top professionals doing their stuff to fine effect, shiny and crisp; the Beeb can have my license money for this, and will in any case doubtless make plenty on the DVD sales, and I don't think that the Who or Trek fans will have been disappointed.

Blog Admin

2009-12-21T19:46:00.000Z

As may be obvious, I've been tinkering with the blog format - including allowing non-Google-subscribers to post (although there should be some kind of Capcha protection thing to keep the worst of the deranged autobot spammer slime out). This is all a bit experimental; I'll see how things go, and if necessary, tweak further.

ding-dong farely merily for xmas

2009-12-21T07:49:00.003Z

For those who'd like such a thing... My online Christmas card is now available at http://www.philm.demon.co.uk/Christmas/. And seasonal felicitations to all my readers.

Life, Concluded

2009-12-15T10:07:00.003Z

Life was good, of course. The BBC natural history camera work was predictably dazzling; to be sure, I could sit there for hours, letting the images wash over me and listening to David Attenborough's authoritative-enthusiastic voice saying what was going on.

Still - previous BBC superb-pictures-and-Attenborough series had some kind of structure and theme. Yeah, I'm old-fashioned enough to think that a BBC/Open University natural history programme probably ought to have some kind of educational content. This one, I can only assume, was another part of the grand project of getting people to buy into HD television. Well, tough, guys - you made it too damn pretty in standard format to make me yearn for better.

And the sense of it all being a big, classy sales pitch was strengthened by the persistent notes of anthropomorphism and sentimentality. Last night's concluding piece on primates proved especially susceptible; although we were told that the low-status Japanese monkeys who didn't get to sit in the nice thermal pools were possibly going to freeze to death in consequence, that skimmed past on the way to a lot of shots of cuddly chimpanzees. Nary a sight of dominance fights, infanticide, or use of handy small monkeys as blunt instruments in combat was there. I thought that Attenborough was quite prone to pointing out the dark side of our nearest cousins' home life, with all that hints at.

Still, if we're going to be sold to, I want to be sold to with fabulous camerawork, bizarre insights into the sex lives of ring-tailed lemurs, and cute little big-eyed tarsiers suddenly flashing scary pointy teeth.

Expand, Contract (18)

2009-12-11T18:02:00.003Z

Well, I've just turned in an outline for a 50 page GURPS (non-Transhuman Space) book, and received the very first draft for someone else's Transhuman Space book that I'll doubtless be editing in due course. And I'm about to get back to working on a Pyramid article that I've promised to get done soon. So I guess my writing work is rolling along.

Enigmas and Cabinets of Curiosities

2009-12-10T09:52:00.003Z

Angela took last week off work, and we made a few day trips to places like the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Bletchley Park, and the fancy new galleries at the Ashmolean Museum. I don't currently feel inspired to ramble on all this, but I have put a few photos up on Flickr:

The Whipple Museum
Bletchley Park
The Ashmolean

Status Anxiety

2009-11-24T16:40:00.001Z

Hmm. I seem to have acquired last-minute guest status at Dragonmeet next Saturday...

Recent Reading: Unseen Academicals

2009-11-20T16:58:00.007Z

by Terry Pratchett

I was significantly distracted from this book a couple of times during the reading of it, from which you may reasonably infer that it isn't apex Pratchett, in my opinion. I finished it, and sometimes I laughed, but this is an author who's set himself stratospheric standards in my eyes. It's a book about football on the Disc, which didn't help to begin with; I'm not a fan, but the real problem may be, I suspect, that nor is Pratchett, much. I really don't have much of a sense for the core imagery of this topic, but I remember enough from my childish phase of petty enthusiasm and the general experience of growing up in the UK to feel that Unseen Academicals just doesn't catch things quite right. Where Moving Pictures nailed Hollywood perfectly and hilariously, and Soul Music showed us that there is a mythology of rock and roll of which we were barely aware to exploit, this book has a bit of a tin ear.

For example, the story climaxes - naturally - with a football match, but this is cut short, going to a sudden death option for vaguely plausible but not overwhelming reasons. I can see why a writer would do this - drawing a full ninety minutes of back and forth could easily get very boring - but a real footie fan wouldn't have ducked the challenge. (Interestingly, another of our current brilliant genre-loving humorists, Aaron Williams, similarly truncated a soccer match in PS238 #38 - for, I suspect, very similar reasons.) Even within the match, the climactic moments are described in the voice of a journalist who hasn't invented sports writing yet, giving things a deadening distance; compare the breathtaking Tower of Art/giant blonde scene in Moving Pictures.

The point of the book, in terms of the great accumulating Discworld epic, is another step in the Disc in general and Ankh-Morpork in particular's accelerated evolution from medievalism to modernity, manipulated by an increasingly philosophical Patrician but triggered by a vague outburst of divine intervention. Football is the nominal theme here, and it turns out that Ankh-Morpork has a game of that name, but it's still a distinctly medieval street brawl; various protagonists find themselves obliged to transform it into a game of rules and green fields. There's a brilliant natural player to be encouraged, and his born-to-WAG true love to wander through glowing passively, but Pratchett's lack of deep engagement is shown by the number of other sub-plots. In the depths of the increasingly comic-Gormenghastian Unseen University, we find Trevor Likely, the natural player who avoids playing but who has the gift of the gab (and it's to the book's credit that it never actually uses the hugely appropriate pun that his name demands), but also more importantly, Mr Nutt, one of Pratchett's annoyingly omnicompetent plot-moving heroes, who turns out to have more or less literally wandered in from a completely different fantasy universe. Meanwhile, above stairs, the Archchancellor is suffering annoyance caused by the (initially absent) Dean, who has defected to another university. There is also some stuff with a brilliant cook and with the arts of dwarf fashion, into which Miss Born-to-WAG wanders...

And so it goes on. Trevor must deal with his nemesis, one of Pratchett's petty-nasty sociopaths but not a very clever one, two familiar members of the Watch get a half-page each, a couple of old friends from Uberwald wander past in person or passing description, and eventually the book shudders to a halt. There are interesting hints that this book is Pratchett's reflection on the 1980s and their aftermath, as football is transformed from a faintly violent working-class preoccupation to something more acceptable to the bourgeois wizards, and the mess left by a failed Evil Empire must be cleaned up - but my overwhelming sense at the end was of loose ends untied and plot threads forgotten.

Ah, forgotten... The elephant in the room here is Terry Pratchett's famous health issues. Are they affecting his writing, we have to wonder. Well, he can still create crackling dialogue, eye-grabbing metaphors, sympathetic and unsympathetic characters, and some good jokes. But the loose plotting and uncertain handling of theme may be symptoms of a memory that's not what it was. Or perhaps this book just represents an off year. We'll just have to wait and see.

Doctor Who no particular date special, November 2009

2009-11-16T19:42:00.008Z

Well, it was better than the last one. It had a fairly substantial plot, and an opportunity for some acting (from both the lead and the guest stars), and some decent special effects and some references for the old fans to catch. It even attempted some semi-serious hard SF details in its depiction of the near future, with a Mars station that looked like it might work, built at a date when such a thing might well happen. (The chance of keeping NooHoo's future history anywhere near KlassiKoo's skimpy near-future timeline is of course zero, thanks to the passage of time, and the Time War can be safely assumed to have sent waves of borrowed DC Comics cosmic korflu over history.) The attempts at robust logic didn't last long, mind you; we couldn't really expect any sensible depiction of Martian gravity (not on this budget, kid), but when we were told that there were serious mass constraints on what could be shipped to Mars, it was just plain annoying for the station to have big echoing voids and walls that were allegedly made of six feet of steel. (Err, what? I mean, Mars has radiation issues, but six feet of steel?) Nor did the character logic hold up; we had a first human colony on Mars, which suddenly and inexplicably found another (seemingly) human being on its doorstep, and within minutes horrible catastrophic things started happening, and yet after a token comment, nobody tried to blame or interrogate the impossible stranger...

But that was kind of the point. The Radio Times asked rhetorically if this was the scariest Who ever, but it was really just the most Doctor-Who-scary Who that the writers and director could manage - a very, very stock-classical Who plot, in basic, skimpy form. Station in deep space, the Doctor arrives, bad sh*t goes down (thanks to a monster whose nature remained under-explored, but which manifests as a variant on the modern shambling-zombie stereotype, yawn), the Doctor assists the humans as they're picked off one by one; all this was only padded out to an hour by the Doctor's recognition that he couldn't help this time, because this doomed station represented one of those graven-in-stone historic events, and his struggle with what this might really mean to him, particularly in the still-unshaped context of 21st-century NooHoo mythology.

From the start, NooHoo has spent (too) much time attempting ironic deconstructions of 20th-century KlassiKoo tropes; this episode attempted to escalate that deconstruction into actual classical tragic form, with a flawed hero escalating rapidly to Hubris and a flash of blue light as the Nemesis that strikes down his spirit. But what this really meant was just a script that gave David Tenant an excuse to engage in a lot of acting and some wild shifts of supposed motive, and a setup for the two-episode Christmas Special.

Ah yes, the teasers at the end. NooHoo has previously displayed a superhero-comic-style willingness to drag fan-favourite characters back despite having closed them out with loud assertions that they were gone, gone, sealed off by the laws of the multiverse and gone forever, really. Nobody took that claim seriously with regard to the Master, of course; he's just too coolly complete an antagonist for our hero, and there was a hint or two even at the time. But Donna (and her irritating grandpa)? Oh, come on guys; however skimpy the plot logic of her write-out, can't you stand by the integrity of your own closed-loop tragedy, for once? It's not like you had the unbearable pressure of the teen romance fanwank demand that brought back bloody Rose.

Oh, and at the end of the episode, we had a glimpse of an Ood - yes, the wettest alien race in the history of NooHoo or KlassiKoo (wetter by far than this episode's monsters, ho ho). Jeebus. That, after an episode which had mentioned perhaps the most interesting Who-aliens ever, aliens who haven't reappeared in NooHoo. Couldn't we have, say, a Who-New-Space-Opera exploration of the history of Mars, please? A fudge to explain what a high-tech culture was doing there a mere 10,000 years ago and how the same race came to be part of that multi-species commonwealth in the future, plus a CGI treatment of the freeze guns and cryonic technology?

No, of course we can't. Not this year. That would require a bit of cool-headed seriousness. But next year, the show gets a producer who has shown some capacity for seriousness and a real sense of style (even if it also gets an infant Doctor). So I guess I'm hanging in there, for now.

This is Not a Review

2009-11-16T19:22:00.004Z

I haven't really followed R.E.M.'s development closely enough to essay a review of Live at the Olympia. They're not a band about which it feels permissible to attempt even a glib, smart-arse bunch of throwaway comments unless one has trawled studiously through the subtleties of the I.R.S. years and all that; heck, even they seem to avoid talking much about Automatic for the People, which a naive casual fan like me can regard as one of the great albums of the last fifty years or so.

I can say that this collection has some songs I recognise, and some I don't, and of the former, there are some wonderful performances, and some which aren't quite as punchy or enthralling as I've heard elsewhere. And I'll note that R.E.M. are clearly a great live band, who it'd be cool to catch in the flesh some day. But that's elementary stuff.

No, the reason I'm posting is simply a thought inspired by the DVD which came with the deluxe set which I picked up. Specifically; how can a band so alert to the history of rock and roll, and so paranoically diligent about avoiding cliche, include so many scenes where they wander around corridors backstage prior to going on. I mean, have they really not seen Spinal Tap?

Expand, Contract (17)

2009-10-29T16:11:00.003Z

Ah, yes. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics is now available.

'Nuff said?

Expand, Contract (16)

2009-10-23T08:44:00.003+01:00

Now, what lately? Oh yeah, the final draft of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Summoners went in, and I reviewed the rough PDFs of a small Transhuman Space freebie that should appear in a little while. And I gather that someone else's Transhuman Space project of the moment is almost contracted for.

So I'm taking a short breather and dealing with some personal business before diving into a Pyramid article I've promised to write and deciding which projects are now at the top of my stack.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2009-10-19T07:59:00.007+01:00

This is a movie about a man with the ability to give people access to the inside of his own imagination (or perhaps more their own imaginations - on this, as on other matters, it's a bit vague). That's slightly ironic, as the best reason to go see it is the chance to spend a couple of hours on the inside of Terry Gilliam's visual imagination.

It's a Gilliam film which reminds one of other Gilliam films, especially Time Bandits but also The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and others - his most visually fantastical efforts, perhaps. However, it's a bit skimpier on actual content even than those, let alone than some of his more serious creations. There's a plot and structure of sorts on offer, involving the power of story (actually questioned quite harshly here, unlike in many fantasy films in our current Gaimanian era, which makes a change) and a deal or two with a rather half-hearted devil, but I was left feeling that any time Gilliam felt that he might sacrifice some clarity in favour of another fancy CGI-assisted set-piece, he took the deal gladly.

The cast is very good, but they've been given a bunch of non-characters to play, with damn all in the way of consistency, a tendency to disappear when no longer needed, and back stories that are at best left largely to our imaginations - and in some cases, notably Verne Troyer's, any hint of an explanation has presumably ended up on the digital cutting-room floor (unless we get a hint at the end that Troyer is some kind of cut-rate guardian angel, which feels like a stretch). Christopher Plummer sticks to doing world-weary like the old trouper he is, while Lily Cole looks amazing, static or in motion (and can act, too), but she and Heath Ledger (and the latter's stand-ins where required) are, well, stuck with the script.

But, but, but... Terry Gilliam. Visual design. CGI aside, the margins and fringes of London have never looked more shabbily gothic (what would film-makers do without Battersea Power Station?), and the way that a faded carnival show can so easily and swiftly expand into a visual wonderland stands as a symbol of, well, something. Time spent here isn't wasted, at all. But it's strange experience to find yourself missing the satirical bite of Time Bandits or a Monty Python sketch.

Life

2009-10-17T11:07:00.003+01:00

Don't talk to me about life...

So the latest BBC natural history series is now up and running. Is it what we might expect? Rich-gravelly-paternal David Attenborough voic-eover: check. (Shame he's no longer up to getting out with the camera crews and sitting next to the animals, but that's, well, life.) Blimey-how-did-they-get-that-shot dazzling camerawork in incredibly difficult environments: check. Various weird, cute, or terrifying animals in action: check. (Inflatable eye-stalks? Whuh?) Some of those animals dying and getting eaten: check. (Time was when Spitting Image had a running joke about wildebeest seemingly existing solely to get eaten by lions on the beeb, but these days, technology spreads the pain around, and we get young penguins dying for our edification and a leopard seal's diet. Underwater.) Ten-minute show-your-working making-of snippet tagged on the end: check.

Going by the first installment, what it doesn't have is much of a theme, beyond This Is Life; it apparently no longer needs one. (Well, yes, inflatable eye-stalks - but why, really?) Frankly, its main functions are to justify the license fee and to sell HD televisions. Still, reports suggest that later installments settle into some kind of structure. And watching the darned thing (while Uncle Dave's commentary washes over), it can be hard to complain.

Up

2009-10-12T22:56:00.010+01:00

As the leading exponents of a new media technology, Pixar make it their business to impress. Toy Story was a strong beginning; Monsters, Inc. demonstrated that they could show every hair on a furry creature; Ratatouille not only showed every hair on a rat, but showed every hair on a wet rat that had been struck by lightning; Wall-E featured grand vistas...

Up shows a photorealistic waterfall plunging off a Lost World plateau, a pack of semi-realistic dogs, and worn-out tennis balls covered in slime - all in immaculate 3D, if you go to the right screen. The humans are still more like plastic puppets, but I'd guess that Pixar won't try to change that until they can get to the far side of the uncanny valley in one titanic leap. Still, things are now getting to the stage that the cartoonish action sequences are looking markedly less plausible than anything else on the screen; increasingly realistic beings obeying unrealistic physics could become a problem. Though audiences used to modern action movies may not have too much trouble with this.

But that still leaves the question of the uses to which this synthetic realism is being put, which is becoming quite strange. Some critics have suggested that the protagonist of Up is a highly unlikely cartoon hero - a squat, grumpy geriatric. Actually, I suspect that "a cranky old man" would have seemed a perfectly reasonably lead character for, say, some of the classic Warner cartoons; it's only Pixar's connections with Disney that make it seem quite so strange, and heck, even Disney were noted for salting their emotional mix with the odd touch of sadness. But no, I don't think that any of the Golden Age Hollywood cartoon studios would have turned one of their movies into a wrenching meditation on aging, mortality, and the loss of dreams. (Not even if the tone shifted into something a little bit more conventional after half an hour or so.) But Up pushes its luck with the conventional cartoon audience fully that far; having the juvenile second lead turn out to come from a broken home, and then having the lead's lifelong hero prove to have been transformed by bitterness into a small-time Bond villain, end up looking like downright conventional touches. Another twist is to have the movie's talking animals - the dog pack - logically explained, and then to get a lot of good comedy from their pretty authentic canine psychology. (Mind you, after we've seen a whole furnished house wafted from North to South America under a cluster of party balloons, having anyone express surprise at a talking dog seems a bit of a cheek.)

Anyway, oh, yes, I nearly forgot - this is a good comedy, showing Pixar's customary eye for multiple details, with nary a clanking pop culture reference. The dogs get to provide most of the jokes, while also providing much of the practical menace; the leads are too busy being tragic. And Pixar do have some sympathy for the feelings of their younger audience members; on at least two occasions, some of the dogs should plunge to their dooms, but are granted soft landings instead. It's not a brutal film - just an oddly thoughtful one.

But where the heck are Pixar going to go next? Is the anglepoise lamp going to play King Lear?

Expand, Contract (15)

2009-10-10T10:22:00.002+01:00

We've closed off the playtesting and I've started work on the final revisions for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Summoners. And we're moving along with a proposal for a very nice-looking Transhuman Space PDF supplement that isn't by me.

Not big news, I know, but I thought that people might like to know that I'm not asleep.

Recent Reading: The Dragons of Babel

2009-10-02T13:12:00.010+01:00

by Michael Swanwick

This one took me a while to finish. There were some external reasons for that, but I guess it may have been a bit of a bad sign.

I really rather enjoyed Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, so I was slightly bemused to discover that its sequel didn't seem to be getting UK publication, at least at the time when I looked. Possibly, I should have treated this as a bad sign. However, the Internet offers many solutions to problems, and I picked up an imported US hardback easily enough.

I seem to be hinting that this was a mistake. Well, perhaps it was - but not a catastrophic one. Swanwick can write, and he can also imagine, and his twisted modern vision of fairyland remains impressive. It's just not anything like as impressive this time around.

The Dragons of Babel reuses the picaresque structuring that worked so well in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, opening this time in a rural village in the fairy world. However, the villagers - a diverse bunch, including young Will, who is to be our hero - are painfully aware that there's a war on, and war-dragons duel in the skies above. One of them is damaged, crashes, drags itself into the village, takes over, and selects Will as its mouthpiece, revealing to him subsequently that his survival in that role proves that he must have mortal blood...

At which point, the past reader of The Iron Dragon's Daughter is wincing at the repetitiveness of it all. But Swanwick sidesteps that accusation fairly smoothly, as Will turns monster-slayer and disposes of the dragon within a few pages. A ghost of its personality actually remains in the back of his mind for the rest of the book, but frankly never does very much; we're getting more than a repeated story. We're just not getting as good a story.

Will is exiled from his village for the acts which his entanglement with the dragon induced, and Swanwick begins his clever shifting of stylistic gears, moving from timeless bucolic idyll/hero-tale to 18th century war-zone travelogue to refugee camp story, all the while enriching things with his modernised fairytale tropes. Then the prisoners, Will included, are transported to Babel, capital of fairyland's dominant political power, New York with extreme magical colour saturation and the dials turned up to eleven, and the book settles into what proves to be its favoured mode; pulp-style, street-level urban adventure. Will finds himself apprenticed to the sort of con artist who the pulps lionised and Hollywood came to love, and learns his way around the city, from the depths of its literal (or hallucinatory) underground to the spires from which it is governed. (Meanwhile, people keep telling him their stories, gently padding the text.) The multiplicity of fairy types dwelling here reflects the uneasy urban melting-pot of the pre-WWII USA, with the semi-incorporeal "haints" in particular suffering the casual prejudice (and displaying the flashes of communal strength and tricksy ingenuity) that elsewhere would be associated with black skins. Unfortunately, Swanwick also feels obliged to drop in a lot of detail that links this setting to our own urban reality, notably throwing in a lot of real-world brand names and trademarks - something I don't remember seeing in the earlier book - and the effect for me is merely jarring, a modernisation too far.

Will makes the mistake of falling in love with a woman beyond his reach, his mentor's big con turns out to have complications on its complications, and a dangerous and uncanny hunter wanders in and out of the plot for no reason that I could easily see (but perhaps I failed to analyse the text closely enough - honestly, I couldn't be bothered to try). Eventually the story reaches a resolution of a reasonable sort, adequately bittersweet and with a few flourishes. If I'd never read The Iron Dragon's Daughter, I'd probably have been more impressed - but this story lacks that one's dark visualisation of growing up as a voyage through story, the climax just isn't as hallucinatory or apocalyptic, and there's no real linkage back to mortality from the otherworld this time, despite the hero's mortal blood. It's just a clever exercise in the use of classic fairytale motifs in a modernistic world - rather too many of them, rather too knowing - when we know that Swanwick is capable of much more.

Expand, Contract (14)

2009-09-24T16:21:00.004+01:00

And now - GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque is in the shops. Well, the virtual shop.

(Edit: Did I mention that it's a setting where you can play a talking cat?)

Theatre: The Hypochondriac

2009-09-21T10:13:00.006+01:00

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 18/9/2009

There is a certain category of old-fashioned stage comedy that is basically King Lear repeated as farce - the foolish old patriarch has to Learn Better before his (generally) loving daughter can claim the romantic independence she has so richly earned, while the villains who've exploited his folly have to be exposed (comically) and thus defeated. Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire is one of these; it's also a satire on the medical profession, from an era when seeing a doctor was probably a risky enough act, even if you were genuinely ill, that such attacks could be fully justified.

This production uses a new translation, by the always likeable Roger McGough, commissioned in the wake of a previous successful Molière translation from his hand. It makes the play into a franglais farce, albeit largely in fractured comic poetry well up to his general standards; still, given the amount of toilet humour (which apparently initially put McGough off attempting this particular play, so I doubt that he's added much) and the need of which he's spoken to work around (or sometimes, in practice, update) all the song-and-dance interludes that were standard in the period, I don't think that he could seriously be accused of lowering the tone much. Anyway, the thing raised a lot of honest laughter from the audience, which ain't bad for a 336-year-old comedy in anything like its original state. My knowledge of Molière is kind of patchy, but I guess his rep may well be well earned.

The production, incidentally, makes good use of a classic and classical single-location set and a highly competent cast. The acting and direction focus on the farcical aspect - I imagine that a different approach could make Argan, the old hypochondriac, into a more pathetic figure - but I don't think that anyone in this audience was complaining.

Expand, Contract (13)

2009-09-17T20:03:00.003+01:00

Ah, the pleasure of loads relieved. While GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Summoners is now revised, has been accepted by the line editor, and has passed into a closed playtest, GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque (as it will be known) has been edited and laid out, and seems to be well on track to publication in the near future.

Now, what comes next...

District 9

2009-09-14T18:23:00.010+01:00

First, this being a fairly major film at a commercial-chain cinema, there are the trailers for various upcoming SF-ish blockbusters. These always make me feel old and cranky these days, and I assume that anyone with flicker-sensitive epilepsy just no longer goes to the cinema. Even the moderately interesting-looking Surrogates gets flattened down to the level of the rest. After a while, they all run together - explosion, dark corridor, explosion, flickering light giving glimpse of threat, explosion... oh, grow up.

(SF fans are forever whingeing about ignorant mainstream writers who deny that their stories venturing into the topics of time travel or genetic engineering are science fiction. But remember; this is what "science fiction" means these days.)

But after a while, we did get District 9. This has a few explosions and even some flickering lights, especially in the later sections which - as every critic and blogger has noted - shift into conventional action movie shoot-out mode - but the aesthetic is mostly a bit more sophisticated than all that. It's also amazing squalid. For years, SF film-makers have been working on the principle that, if they make their imagined futures a bit shabby and scruffy, they'll look more plausible, but here, things tip right over the edge. District 9, the South African slum where a giant spaceship's load of mostly idiotic aliens has been deposited, is basically an inhabited rubbish dump. The segments taking place in human society gleam by comparison, although they're mostly set in chaotic offices, scruffy burger bars, and fading domestic housing; anyway, they're heavily punctuated with gross incidents drawing on the traditions of body-horror movies.

This shabbiness is part of the film's half-hearted attempt at a verite style; early on, and at times later, it pretends to be a documentary about events in the recent past of its alternative history, including footage originally filmed for a documentary about the company responsible for relocating those aliens from their slum to a camp up country. But that conceit simply doesn't hold; to tell its story, the movie keeps switching to scenes which no one could have filmed, and which don't have the quality of "dramatic reconstruction". It's also been described as a modern treatment of the classic B-movie form, presumably because of some of its themes - alien incursion on Earth, horrific transformation suffered by the protagonist - but this doesn't hold either; actually, the film owes more overall to the modern popcorn-movie form, with its run-and-shoot thriller scenes, extensive use of special effects, extremely rubbery and arbitrary "science", significant convenient plot holes, and use of a totally amoral and high-tech-weapon-obsessed corporation as its primary villain.

But it's definitely a highly eccentric sort of modern SF thriller, pushing itself forward as an indictment of man's inhumanity to prawn while not letting anybody off the hook - almost all of the humans present, of all races and nationalities, are bastards of one stripe or another, and most of the aliens are violent morons. There have been some discomforted debates about the extent to which the movie's refusal to grant any group unambiguous heroic status is really Swiftian satiric savagery, and how much it's just unrestrained prejudice; well, I dunno, but all I can say is that if any Nigerians are really concerned about their nation's image, they can leave this film alone for now and start by doing something about all those scam e-mails oozing out of Lagos. And anyone paying attention at the end will note that one fairly major character who proves something of a hero (and who seems to be facing punishment for it) is in fact black.

Yeah, District 9 is an oddity, probably completely unique, schlepping in devices, themes, and techniques from all over genre movie-making and reality in order to raise questions - and then running away in the ensuing chaos, leaving its surviving victims with a face full of something worrying, unidentified, and just possibly transformative. Not my favourite film of the year, personally, but possibly the most interesting thing we'll see in a twelvemonth.