Diary of a Holiday, 2009 (1)

June 9^th: To Paris

Departed St. Pancras at 12:29 – our first journey from the new Eurostar terminal, and very slick it is too. I was even more impressed by the sight of the Dartford Crossing about fifteen minutes after departure; those trains can move. So we reached Paris a couple of hours (and a bit) later, grabbed a coffee at the Gare du Nord, and then made our way to the Hotel Jeanne D'Arc. This turns out to be a bit scruffy round the edges – there seems to be some refurbishment work going on at the moment – but it's certainly come up in the world since we first stayed here, twenty-five years ago. Symptom of its location in the Marais, I guess.

Anyhow, we checked in, and then took a walk, down and over the river, along past Notre Dame and back to the right bank, and then as far as the Louvre before we turned round and headed back to the Marais. Dinner was at Pitchi Poi – yeah, eating East European (herring salad, duck casserole, a weirdly nice poppy seed cake called “Nuit Profonde” that was as dark as its name implies) on one's first night in Paris, but we've been there before and we happen to like it.

June 10^th: In Paris

One advantage of staying in a backstreet hotel (and in a room which looks onto a light well) is that it's quiet, especially for central Paris. So we slept well, thanks, and headed out for breakfast at a branch of Le Pain Quotidien – some streets away, but this is another taste we've developed in this city. (Though you can now get their hazelnut spread in London – well, from their branch in exile in St. Pancras.) Then we decide what to do with the day.

Contemplating the map, we realise that we've never previously got around to seeing the Jardin des Plantes, so we head east along the Left Bank, skirt a Victorian (?) statue of Lamarck with a plinth proclaiming him the discoverer of the principles of evolution (yes, well), and discover a rather nice botanical garden. Definitely a working site (associated with a museum/research institute), not generally overly pretty or cleverly laid out, but well labelled and with a nice rose garden and an even nicer alpine garden. Emerging from there, we see the central mosque of Paris – which turns out to have a restaurant attached, so lunch involves tagines and mint teas. (Look, we did eat French at breakfast.) Emerging from that, we discover that the morning's occasional showers have developed into a full-blown inundation – so we find a metro station and head back to the heart of the city.

After we've spent a little time browsing in the shops that now lurk under the Louvre, we find that the rain has now let up enough to permit a stroll round the Left Bank. That leads to a beer in a brasserie on St. Michel, and by now we've walked enough that heading back to the hotel to put our feet up seems like a good idea.

The rain does then let up a bit, but we don't trust it and we seem strangely to be feeling quite well fed, so we go looking for a creperie for dinner. The first we find is Page 35, which turns out to count as a good choice. Hmm... I still haven't had any French wine, though. (I assume that, when ordering from a Breton menu, cidre is indicated. Well, tomorrow should be different.

June 11^th: To The Pink City

First thought for the day; Does anyone in this country, when in need of an English translation, for a menu or a hotel brochure or whatever, actually think to employ anyone who actually speaks English?

The first part of the train journey took us through a few hundred miles of pleasant enough French countryside, but with few sights to grab the attention apart from one big bridge as we approached Bordeaux. The second part, up the valley of the Garonne, promptly plunged us into a landscape of vines. I think that I'd better get around to that French wine tonight.

We reach Toulouse at 5 pm, and find the Ours Blanc Victor Hugo with only a small struggle with the non-rectilinear local street plan along the way. This is another fairly basic hotel, but comfortable enough – and as we've shifted a few hundred miles south, “fairly basic” now encompasses air conditioning. (This one also runs to free WiFi, in theory. Practice may be another matter; taking my netbook down to the lobby eventually seems to help.) Anyway, we drop some stuff off and head out to look around the town.

Second thought for the day, from Angela: The trouble with these medieval streets is that people have nowhere to put their wheelie bins, really.

But in truth, the place is very picturesque; in a medieval-plan, student-infested sort of way. The “pink city” tag evidently refers to the local fondness for brick as a building material, incidentally. We get to see the basilica and the river, and then decide to take our guide book's word about Chez Fazoul for dinner.

Oh yes – we're in France. So a little backstreet restaurant in a student town naturally does a really unctuous cassoulet and a delicious pear tart.

June 12^th: In Toulouse

Morning: Breakfast at a table outside a cafe on the fine town square, then a stroll that takes us round the Basilica of Saint-Sernin. I've seen big churches, and I've seen Romanesque, but a church this size that's managed to retain its Romanesque purity, without Gothic impositions, really is something fairly new. It feels like a real piece of the early Middle Ages.

And there's a covered food market opposite the hotel. French provincial towns do love their covered food markets. I can see why.

A Bit Later: The interior of the basilica turns out to be as elegant as the exterior, with the odd bit of very old art for interest. We weren't planning to pay to see the collection of medieval reliquaries anyway – we're not great fans of medieval carving and such – but I'd swear that seeing the entrance to the exhibition area stirred the ghosts of of my Protestant ancestors to utter disdain.

On the other hand, we did pay to go into the Musee Saint-Raymond, nearby, which turned out to be better than the guidebook suggested, having not just a good exhibition about pre-Roman Toulouse on the top floor, but a pretty magnificent set of Roman sculptures from a local site on the floor below. I'm surprised this isn't publicised more. Anyway, we then took a walk down to and over the river, and found our way to Les Abattoirs.

Which isn't as bad as it sounds, because the town's old abattoirs have been cleaned up and spruced up to high-vaulted, red-brick magnificence, and converted into a gallery for exhibitions of modern art. I'm not really qualified to comment on what we saw there; some of it affected me, some didn't, but I can't analyse the subject with any credibility (especially as the labels and any explanatory notes were all in French). I will say that, at the time of our visit, they had some very appealing aboriginal art, and some installations that were at the least striking or fun to wander round; also, some installation artists lean rather hard on the use of “disturbing” ambient sounds, which seems to my ignorant judgement like it's turning into a cheap cliché.

Oh, and the gallery has a really nice cafe/restaurant attached. When we were done there, we crossed the town, pausing to take a few pictures, and ended up feeling warm enough that the idea of taking an hour or two in the Musee des Augustins seemed quite appealing. Actually, it was a very good idea; this museum is a converted monastery, and the layout involves some cool cloisters and a peaceful central courtyard with a garden in it.

Oh, the museum exhibits? Well, there were some medieval carvings... And some mostly second-string but not actually bad 19^th century paintings. And a number of Victorian academic sculptures, mostly on mythological themes (i.e. a lot of marble bottoms).

Dinner: Saveurs Bio, which despite what our guidebook says, turns out to be organic but not vegetarian. At least, there was poulet mentioned on the menu, and my main course turned out to include fish. Nice food, leisurely service no doubt related to local custom of one waiter per restaurant.

Expand, Contract (6)

My latest piece of work is now out: Transhuman Space: Personnel Files 2 - The Meme Team. I think that it works.

Oh, and I've had some line editor comments on Dungeon Fantasy: Clerics. That's going to take a little while to move forward to the next stage, though.

Of The Era

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
- Plato, a couple of thousand years early.

Auld Acquaintance

One of the perks to getting a degree from Cambridge is supposed to be the chance to spot future famous people before they get famous. (At least, I assumed that was one of them.) It's worked kind of patchily for me - I think I got Ed Stourton to help out wit a rag week auction, and I have vague memories of a gratuitous stage nude scene from Stephen Fry. But these last few months - first, I discover that someone I knew from the Economics course was working as an adviser for Bear Stearns - and then there's Julie Kirkbride, who I noticed around the place occasionally...

Oh well.

Star Trek (the 2009 movie)

London, 25th May 2009, part 2.

I was never a huge Trek fan, I think. I watched it with the enthusiasm of a young-adolescent proto-geek when it first came up on British television around 1970, to be sure, and then I caught an episode or two when it came round again about 1980 and realised just how clunky it was. I didn't bother very much with The Next Generation, and if I liked Deep Space 9 - which I did - it was partly for having the courage to deconstruct and challenge so much about the Trek that went before. Likewise, I'm not any kind of J.J. Abrams fanboy - I never picked up on Alias, and I was comfortable enough giving up on Lost when it switched from terrestrial to paid satellite channels in the UK, suspecting it of being all flash and no substance.

Which is really just a way of explaining why I took a while to get around to catching this movie, and only really did so in the end to round off a day up in London. With no great commitment to the thing, I could enjoy it well enough as a contemporary Hollywood skiffy action movie, with chase scenes and space battles and ice monsters and stuff exploding. It also got bonus points for finding a cast who, in some cases, inhabited the personas of the original crew unnervingly brilliantly (while giving Uhura a serious job to do, so not all of the Galaxy Quest flashbacks were too painful). I could respect the time travel-based reboot as the smartest solution yet seen for a perennial old-media-property problem. (It raises questions about inconsistent depictions of the nature of time and history in Trek, but who cares? It also solves a basic inconsistency in Kirk's character, in Hollywood-conventional terms; why should the non-rebellious child of a successful career Star Fleet officer turn into a smug jerk with minimal respect for higher authority, albeit also an intuitive tactical wizard, like Kirk? The new Kirk now has Childhood Trauma to explain his jerkiness.) But oh my, the problems that occur to anyone when they stop to think about this movie for a minute afterwards.

Most or all of these have already been hashed out elsewhere on the Web (see, e.g., Twenty Sided), so I won't add to the geekery by listing everything I happened to think of in detail. Some of them may be covered when some kind of director's cut DVD appears (What's with the hole in the middle of Idaho? How long is the journey from Earth to Vulcan supposed to take?), some probably won't (the whole Planet Plotdevice sequence, with its perfect view of Vulcan and Scotty's long-range transporter and all), some are just so deeply embedded in the Trek pseudo-mythos that no one is going to touch them (How good is interstellar communication, and why doesn't Star Fleet issue direct orders to the Enterprise in moments of interstellar high catastrophe and why doesn't the Enterprise warn Earth about what's coming?), and some will only matter to people who know that pseudo-mythos well (How come any Federation citizens at this date know what Romulans look like?). But, well, really.

I've seen it complained that the original Trek was at least sometimes a drama about ideas, whereas this movie is all explosions and no thought, and I might sympathise with that - except that the ideas in the original series were generally pretty simplistic and clumsily handled, so it didn't hurt me to see them lost in favour of a lot better special effects. I guess I worry a bit more about movies in which people see dozens of their personal friends and billions of other people slaughtered in front of them, and get over it quite so quickly, but in the end, action movies are what they are; the Cosy Catastrophes of the video game generation. (And talking of video game style, what the hell is up with Romulan starship design? Naval architecture inspired by the Mines of Moria, complete with no hand rails?) If this thing generates sequels, I may well go see them, if only to discover what if anything Saint Simon Pegg of the Geeks eventually works out to do with Scotty. But it'd be nice if Abrams eventually decided to do something for people who think after the titles stop rolling. Not that I want the sterile puzzles and fake depth of Lost in Trek, of course, although that might be an interesting train wreck.

Points East

London, 25th May 2009, part 1.

Another day off, another couple of exhibitions...

Morning was Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy. A lot of the prior publicity and posters for this had implied that it was much heavier on the action and mythic adventure than a lot of Japanese prints of the period - less of the elegant views of Mount Fuji, more of the gurning swordsmen battling giant carp - with a strong hint of the manga from a century later about it. And, to be sure, there was a fair bit of that; but there were also some lovely landscapes and a certain amount of rather strange humour. (Octopuses acting like popular entertainers of the period, anyone? Not to mention the phallus-shaped cartoon characters.) Still, Kuniyoshi came across as more cheerfully admitting to being part of the louche Floating World than Hokusai or Hiroshige. Or maybe that was just the way these images were presented. A lot of beauty, though, with a lot of oriental strangeness in it.

Incidentally, gamers might like to note that several of the pictures featured not only (gurning) samurai with swords, but also female figures with naginata. The samurai-class woman with that sort of combat training was evidently part of the imagery back then. I also loved the way that a lot of Kuniyoshi's historical images had to supposedly depict quite early events, because anything less than a few hundred years old was considered too politically sensitive in 19th century Japan - so he just depicted scenes that his audience might guess were really scenes from slightly later dates.

After lunch, it was on to the British Museum, to catch Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran before it ended. This was cunningly located in the upper levels of the old Reading Room space (with the windows blanked out to keep the light levels down), thereby borrowing a great domed space from a different culture to good effect for an exhibition about part of the Islamic world. The show itself was full of lush and gorgeous Persian art, while still conveying something about the history of the reign of Shah 'Abbas I (1587–1629). This, of course, had all too much of period despotism about it, being full of brothers murdering each other and the Shah killing the advisor who'd helped him depose his own father a couple of years earlier. The Elizabethan English adventurer who ended up at as a leading figure 'Abbas's court - and whose portrait crops up early in the exhibition - must have been very willing to live dangerously. Although doing comparably well back home could have been pretty risky, I guess.

The excuse to tie together the politics with the artworks was the idea that 'Abbas was consciously creating a whole new style for his reign - not just showing off dazzling wealth, but making a conscious break with the past. I'll take the experts' word for this, although it would have taken a far vaster exhibition with much more earlier stuff to show the novelty of these things. Incidentally, amidst the (rather faded) silk carpets and gorgeous miniature paintings, there were also whole cabinets of Chinese porcelain (often from a century or so before 'Abbas's reign), showing which off evidently counted as refined conspicuous consumption back then. Although 'Abbas apparently donated a lot of it to a Shiah shrine (which had to build a whole new building around the display niches for his gifts), possibly mostly to make way for all his new bling.

Two sumptuous exhibitions, two reminders of the richness of different artistic traditions. Mind you, lots of reminders of how much the associated cultures went in for sticking sharp things in other people (or themselves - one of them was samurai-era Japan, after all), too, but these days we can sit back and admire the great pictures.

Of The Season

"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality."
- Macaulay

"A 'sound' banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
- Keynes

Expand, Contract (5)

For those who are keeping score; I've just signed contracts for and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Clerics and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Summoners. And I've recently had sight of the (very promising) first-pass PDF of Transhuman Space: Personnel Files 2.

Oh, and I gather that Ars Magica: Tales of Mythic Europe, which has a bit by me, is now in distribution.

Concerning Explication

Living within easy reach of the Fitzwilliam Museum, I try to keep track of the various temporary exhibitions and special displays that often run there - and recently, we realised that we'd not caught the latest batch, so we dropped in on Sunday. They had four such things running; aside from a case with coins from Commodore Matthew Perry's personal collection (noted Victorian public figure had quirkish hobby, shock) and a room full of Chinese jade pieces from the neolithic to the modern era (some of them very nice indeed, but the display didn't seem to have much of a theme beyond demonstrating that jade has been important in Chinese art for a very long time), there were two that told me lots more stuff I didn't know, in somewhat excruciating detail.

The first was entitled "Kachofugetsu: The Natural World in Japanese Prints", and consisted of a collection of, yes, Japanese prints, mostly (but not all) showing themes from nature. Japanese print-making being the art it is, this was a pleasure to visit, and I was shown a few details that I'd never noticed before and found interesting, such as the use of print blocks carved to so as to add physical texture to the image. I was also told a lot of other stuff about things like metaphors and symbolism in the images and all the quotes from Chinese poetry. This is all doubtless necessary information for scholars of the subject, and a really amazingly smart exhibition design might have conveyed some of it in ways that would make it interesting to the general viewer - but I just felt that I was drowning in detail.

The second, two rooms away, was about "Changing Faces: Antony Van Dyck as an Etcher"; it turned out that Van Dyck didn't do very much etching, but yes, when he turned his hand that way, wow but the boy could etch. Mostly he did portraits, mostly of his fellow artists (and the artistic community in the Netherlands at that time was, one can be reminded, packed with significant names); many of these prints wound up in books of, basically, collected picturesof famous folks, a few years after he did them. Often, the creators of said books added background and clothing that Van Dyck himself hadn't included; he and they also added and corrected countless details at various points, as the exhibition labels were happy to explain. I may have come away knowing a little bit more about the craft and history of etching, but mostly, once again, I just felt overwhelmed. It's good to have one's ignorance challenged from time to time, but I couldn't really call these exhibitions overly friendly to the ignorant newcomer.

Still digesting these thoughts, I turned the TV on in the evening to catch part one of The Incredible Human Journey, which rapidly started causing the usual problems I get with TV science programmes these days - a lot of teeth grinding and a strong wish that they'd spend a little less time repeating the trivia and showing the presenter driving a car, and a lot more explaining some details. Dr Alice Roberts was shown trekking laboriously across east Africa and talking to (sometimes worryingly gun-toting) locals, accompanied only by an invisible camera crew, until she finally found the remote site where a past expedition apparently found the oldest known remains of modern humans - but what distinguishes a "modern human" from the various other human ancestors she talked about? What brought that past expedition to that so-terribly-remote location? Damnit, this is a science programme - could we have just a little bit of science? Later, Dr Roberts spent the night on her own out in the bush, protected from the prevalent leopards and hyaenas only by an ad hoc thorn scrub barrier, supposedly in order to empathise with the ancestral humans who'd have experienced the same thing - but we didn't really learn anything about what's known or believed about Stone Age life, with even the nature of the barrier that kept her alive skated over, and while we may have learned something about Dr Roberts's willingness to take risks in order to get five minutes of good film, these scenes with dangerous-sounding wildlife or dangerous-looking locals just drove me to cynical thoughts about BBC management risks assessments and insurance cover, and who aside from the camera crews may have been just off-shot or not far away.

To be fair, things got a bit better later in the programme, and I think I learned something about early humans' possible routes out of Africa across the Red Sea and up the southern coast of Arabia. I'll tune in again next week to see what else I can extract from the series. But the first half of the programme surely felt like a horrible warning about what you get if you wish for less detailed, more friendly explication.

At which point, I draw no conclusions, other than that I should give more credit to the creators of really good exhibitions and documentaries. There's a balancing act involved, and getting it right is harder than it looks.

A Camp: Colonia

In which is considered the question: Is Nina Persson selling out?

Well, not really. Anyone whose early work (with the Cardigans) mixed references to Emmerdale Farm with Black Sabbath covers is more or less permanently immunised against any accusation so naffly '70s. But a first couple of listens to A Camp's second album do rather suggest that it's short on the sinister-surreal edge of their first, cover art notwithstanding. A Camp used a lot of conventional-sounding instrumentation and arrangements, to be sure, but placed them behind Persson's dark or chilling or moving singing. This one just doesn't seem to have anything to match the bass-synth thunder of "Such a Bad Comedown", or as hook-laden as "The Bluest Eyes in Texas" - let alone as chilling as the Cardigan's similarly recent "And Then You Kissed Me", as smart as their "You're the Storm", or as potent as "I Need Some Fine Wine, and You, You Need to Be Nicer". And the loose theme of colonialism doesn't really seem to hold it together.

Still, it does have "Stronger Than Jesus" (Don't you know that love is stronger than Jesus?/Don't you know love can kill anyone?/Bring it on, wars and diseases...) and the mutant-'60s-girl-group style of "Here Are Many Wild Animals". I guess that Persson's self-possessed-masochist stance might begin to wear after a few more albums, but I'm still along for the ride.

Coraline

It's not actually officially released in the UK until next week, but the Vue up in Cambridge was showing previews - in 3D, even - so that was our bank holiday fun.

"It" being, of course, the stop-motion animated movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's children's book of a few years back. A rich and colorful little number it is too, a brilliant cinematic-experience fantasy, all gangling limbs and well-judged subtleties of expression. Still, it's a stylised animation - an abstraction and a flamboyant sketch of Gaiman's story, which started more from realism. As a result, some of the characters and plot details become caricatures of their written versions, and some subtleties become reified (notably in the form of Wybie, the completely new character who serves as the cinematic manifestation of some of Coraline's thoughts and problems - a sounding-board and occasional device to assist the changed plot). At times, this broad-brush approach loses some of the book's subtleties; for example, where in the book Coraline's father's cooking merely sounds a bit under-trained and worthy, and Coraline seems to suffer from a child's annoying pickiness about her food, the film father produces goopy animated messes that would put anyone off. And where in the book Coraline's mother seems mostly busy and distracted, her movie version is downright irritable and snappish.

But please, don't think of me as one of those fannish monomaniacs who insists that every movie diversion from a printed source is some kind of sacrilege. (A foolish consistency truly is the hobgoblin of little minds.) On its own terms, as a 3D cartoon, it's a fine thing, well worth the price of admission - a modern-day treatment of the fairytale motifs of "stolen by the fair folk" and "be careful what you wish for". The use of 3D is superb, by the way, complete with semi-transparent surfaces and such; this is clearly already a pretty mature technology. It also interacts well with the model-based animation, which is embellished with more CGI-based techniques in a couple of appropriate places - first in the scene with the ghosts, and secondly where the Other Mother's house begins to disintegrate (very appropriately) like a virtual reality landscape. This makes one or two other moments, where things are animated in physical form, look a little crude; when dirty water comes out of the shower, it descends in the form of plasticine strands. In a Wallace and Gromit claymation epic, this would be charmingly consistent; here, it just looks unexpectedly crude

But like I said, to heck with the hobgoblins of little minds. Good movie.

Wimpole Hall

I guess that the problem for us with Wimpole Hall is that it's just a bit too conveniently close to home, so we keep leaving the idea of visiting the place aside...

No, that's just making excuses. The truth is, we hadn't got there for far too many years because we just hadn't got round to it. Oh well, at least this meant that the place had the charm of near-total unfamiliarity when we took advantage of the nice weather yesterday.

And yeah, it's worth a visit. The rare breeds farm is interesting, even if all the pigs had been taken away from public view for their own protection (sassinfrassin health scares), the gardens are lovely, and the house is quite the period piece. To judge by the potted histories on display, it had a tendency to soak up various owners' fortunes until they had to sell it to some other sucker, but quite a lot of the money seems to have been well spent. And you don't get to see many barns which were designed by Sir John Soane... You also get to see below as well as above stairs, and some oddities like the giant plunge bath (with marble surround made to look like wood). I can't say that the art on the walls amounted to much for me, but it did include one Tissot that I do like a lot.

So, yeah, crackin' day out Grommit...

In the Loop

Yes, I've always liked The Thick of It on TV, and yes, I'm one of the group who thinks that the general idea has survived the transfer to a two-hour expression on the cinema screen. I laughed, a lot. Whether Armando Iannucci and co.'s satirical effectiveness quite survives the use of a lot more recognisable details and incidents from (fairly) recent reality may be slightly more debatable, but I guess that this movie may be one of the more enduring and plausible memorials to the great and inglorious international political manouevres of 2003.

In opening the claustrophobic squabbling of The Thick of It out onto the international stage, Iannucci really needed a complete new cast of characters - aside from Peter Capaldi's feral Malcolm Tucker (and his simply psychotic sidekick Jamie), of course - but he's chosen to cast most of the same actors in new and slightly different roles. This may confuse anyone who paid close attention to the TV original's social dynamics, but what the heck, they're good actors. Mind you, I did wonder how someone as clueless and ineffectual as Tom Hollander's Simon Foster could ever have become a cabinet minister; I know that one of Iannucci's themes is that nobody really knows anything, but Foster barely seems able to tie up his own shoelaces.

The plot also brings into focus the key point about Malcolm; no, not the unremitting obscenity, but his status as some kind of archetype of the power of an unrelenting will. He wins because he cares about nothing except winning. He's smart, but the point is that he applies that intelligence to one purpose; he's also fearless, even if there's a touch of terror-of-the-void driving him on. A few other characters find ways to threaten him quite effectively, but they can't make him lose the plot. Most of the other characters suffer from cowardice; Chris Addison's Toby might almost be a sympathetic character if it wasn't for his childish attempts to deflect any hint of blame for anything - especially things that he's done. They're also often concerned with status or comfort, whereas it's not clear if Malcolm has a life beyond work, and he's exactly where he wants to be.

It's a terrifying idea, really - Malcolm Tucker as a Nietzschean ubermensch with more F-words - and it's maybe a small comfort that news stories of the last few weeks suggest that real spin doctors, while just as nasty as Malcolm, are a bit less competent. Likewise, not only does the thinly-disguised-Iraq plot date the movie in a slightly confusing way, but we can now at least imagine David Rasche's plain-flat-barking-mad neocon Linton Barwick out on his ear and reduced to delivering bizarre rantings to a shrinking audience of idiotic devotees. (It's just a shame it took so long.) I guess it might be interesting to see The Thick of It tackle more current specific events, but Iannucci could say that he did that better with things like The Day Today, and I suspect that when the TV series returns, it'll reset to the introverted world of the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Still, it'll surely be fun to see where Iannucci does go next.

Theatre: A Song at Twilight

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 18/4/2009

Late-period Noel Coward - 1960s, in fact - but definitely Noel Coward. If a lot of it seemed to be an excuse for the two leads to stand around spitting aphorisms at each other, well, they were pretty good aphorisms, and Peter Egan and Belinda Lang spat them pretty well.

And it does have some pretensions to theme. It's hopefully not giving too much away about the plot to note that it's quite explicitly a story from very shortly before the legalization of homosexuality in Britain, which occasionally gives it the air of a period piece. One imagines that, these days, rather more of the audience will be rather more shocked by the not-a-self-portrait-honest! lead character's crappy treatment of the people he supposedly loves or who love him than by any of that stuff - and the audience audibly gasped at one of his casual jibes about the German people, although I'd guess that this was at least somewhat consciously meant as part of the revelation of his real character. To the extent that he may be a self-portrait, it's a fairly brutal one - although having the two women in the play telling him what a genius he is, for all his flaws, from time to time, might be considered dubious.

But never mind the gay stuff - what dates this for me is the revelation that a well-preserved, quite stylish lady of a certain age has no teeth, just a full set of dentures. Yay for medical progress, is what I say.

Doctor Who Easter Special 2009

So someone thinks of a whole load of incidents and scenes and images - not many of them very innovative, some of them seriously old - and then comes up with just enough plot to hold them together. It's a plot dependent on too many coincidences, naturally, but the point is to cram all those bits into an hour, not to tell a decent story, after all. Not actually the worst hour I've ever spent, I suppose, but hardly enough to sustain any mystique.

(Okay, the "guns that work!" line induced a smile. Only a very small one, though. Oh, and I now have to go with Andrew Rilstone's ideas about some characters representing the show's own fans and their foibles, which haven't always convinced me in the past; here, the metaphor just got painful.)

Recent Reading: Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

Having finally got around to reading Charles Stross's first novel, I was engaged enough to get hold of the follow-up/sequel. This turned out to represent a mildly curious sidestep on the part of the author - a slight but definite shift in tone and focus. I think that many people would regard it as an improvement and a case of stylistic maturation, but I didn't really take to it as much.

We're in the same universe as Singularity Sky, about which one or two things are indeed now explicitly clarified - for example, that the humans scooped up and transplanted from Earth by the whimsical not-God-honest Eschaton were moved one year back in time for every lightyear they were moved from home - and indeed, things start in the aftermath of that story. Or rather we would, except that we have to flash back a little. After a brief glimpse of one of the novel's heroines in action - an adolescent girl with a very useful invisible friend who we may remember from the earlier book - we are shown the Iron Sunrise of the title; the destruction of of the inhabited world of New Moscow by the explosion of its sun, accomplished by some sort of very advanced technology. (This destruction is depicted rather well, if perhaps with a bit of unintended glee.) Most sensible people in the setting seem to assume what many readers will think is logical; that this sort of apocalyptic-scale technology is more or less solely the province of the Eschaton, and hence that New Moscow must have angered not-God. We're also told, later in the book, that it involves causality violation, pretty much the one thing that the Eschaton prohibits, although how it's any more a violation of causality than many things which the Eschaton permits isn't clear to me. However, established readers will also know that the Eschaton, while capable of significant and violent destruction when it feels the need, is maybe more of a trickster than a destroyer at heart, and some characters who we like work for it; at the very least, it's not clear what New Moscow would or could have done to inspire such wrath. Stross has set up a puzzle.

Anyway, our attention now turns back to Rachel Mansour, agent of Earth's light-handed government, heroine of Singularity Sky, and sometime kickass righteous super-woman of a type rather common in recent genre fiction. (At least she's less enthusiastic about killing people she doesn't approve of than, say, many of Warren Ellis's creations.) After a brief bit of bureaucratic comedy of the sort that Stross found a better home for in the early "Laundry" stories, Rachel briefly reasserts her heroic status by dealing with an insane nuclear-armed performance artist (yes, really), and then sets off, husband-from-the-earlier-book in tow, to deal with the big plot.

As this may suggest, Iron Sunrise features one of those cross-cutting, multi-protagonist structures that do so often appear in modern genre thrillers. Given their popularity, I assume that many people must like them, but I just find them a bit tiresome. Certainly, they are associated more with thrillers than with mysteries, and this book soon proves more interested in the how and the gosh than the who or the why; the maguffin of the central plot isn't so much the knowledge of who killed New Moscow as it is access to the command codes for some relativistic deterrent weapons which were launched in the wake of new Moscow's destruction, and which will kill a lot more people if not stopped. Someone is killing the diplomats who can issue a recall... But even the identity of that killer isn't as important as sorting out the practical problem, as it seems.

The use of the multi-thread stucture here could be seen as Stross showing off how he's in command of his resources, but I think that he's lost something along the way. All the hard work fitting the thriller plot together certainly loses much of the darkly satirical humour of which Stross is certainly sometimes capable, Rachel's earliest scenes aside.

And while the multiplicity is handled fairly well, there are glitches. For example, we soon meet another of his plot's heroes, a "journalist" of another popular recent-genre-fiction type. Although he seems to embody the setting's manifestation of the London Times, he owes much more to Hunter S. Thompson than William Howard Russell; most of his "reporting" consists of furiously angry op-ed pieces in which the F-word features prominently. However, after this appearance, the character disappears for long stretch, as Stross evidently can't think of much to do with him until he's needed for a couple of specific purposes. Still, he does provide an introduction to the book's leading proximate villains, the ReMastered. These look at first like cartoon Nazis, singing patriotic songs in bars and being blond; they are soon shown to be much more serious Nazis, with a penchant for concentration camps and generally brutal dictatorship; then they are revealed to be something a more original and distinctly creepy, ruthless Nietzschean-Teilhardian posthumanists with a vicious fondness for applied ultratech neurosurgery.

And so the various characters and threads move towards each other and an eventual showdown on a big, lush interstellar liner, with some gunplay and explosions along the way. I'm not convinced by some of these elite secret agents, lethal special forces types, and high-powered journalists, though; many of them seem amazingly ignorant about things that one might expect them to have studied very carefully, and not just so that the reader can be subjected to useful info dumps, while a potentially crucial (and deeply implausible) detail of the assassinations of the diplomats simply goes ignored by everyone except the half-alert reader. Characters who should know better also seem notably sloppy about searching prisoners for concealed weapons. Still, Stross manages some fairly clever twists and turns before the story ends.

Which it does rather abruptly, leaving only one significant extra twist for the epilogue. But several of the mysteries which the book threw up despite itself remain unsolved, and the solutions which it offers for others are sometimes tentative and unconvincing. Even the Eschaton seems uncertain what's going on, even at the end. In short, Stross seems to have left a lot for a very possible sequel or two - but no such book has appeared since this one, in 2004. If he's given up on the setting, fair enough; I don't believe in whipping authors into bored sequel-grinding just to answer anyone's need for neatness. But that doesn't make this book complete. The smart ideas earn it points for effort, but the execution doesn't match the inspiration.

Monsters vs. Aliens 3D

Put me down as slow, but I hadn't actually seen a movie in 3D in the cinema until today. Okay, I admit it, I'm impressed - the technology works, the polarising glasses fit okay over my ordinary correcting pair, and the film-makers used it for some engaging effects. And to give these particular creators credit, they didn't over-use it; after a ball on an elastic string jumped out of the screen early on, just for show, there were few gratuitous attempts to get into the audience's face.

Monsters vs. Aliens, by the way, is fun in its own right. It's not the greatest movie of the decade - it's not even especially high in the CGI animated fantasy comedy field, although that's a tough field to compete in by now - but to me, this stuff is still breathtaking and astonishing on a purely technical level, while allowing a lot of smart, genre-savvy, doubtless rather geeky writers to create scripts of a degree of cleverness which, offered for a standard Hollywood live-action movie, would surely be dumbed down to idiocy by the third draft. There was at least one moment in this one where I was thinking "oh dear, this is the spinoff video game hook", not all the jokes were as clever as they should have been - the obligatory during-the-closing-credits bit was weak - and I guess that all the '50s monster movie references will just confuse the heck out of the kids who get towed along for an Easter holiday treat. But hey, giant robot vs. Japanese movie monster and 50' woman as they demolish the Golden Gate bridge and a cockroach-headed mad scientist with the voice of Hugh Laurie attempts sabotage in support. In 3D. You get your money's worth.

Later Thoughts: It's probably going to be far too easy to offer Freudian or/and feminist readings of this movie, you know. Female lead suffers shattering unexpected experience on her wedding day, and is left staggered and in need of wiping down; suddenly discovers that she has been transformed by this, but far more significantly, others' perceptions of her have been transformed for the worse; when she attempts to fight back against this problem, she is subdued by the male establishment using drugs and brute force, and trapped in a home environment not of her own design; finds herself as the voice of calm rationality to a group of smaller individuals who have even greater problems comprehending their social condition, but who offer her unconditional love...

Willful contentiousness aside, it really does seem to be the case that Susan is transformed by the plot of this movie from a bride to the mother-figure to a group of child-figures (the hungry one, the precociously bright one, the aggressive one, and the big quiet one) while neatly sidestepping any tiresome need for a marital relationship, given that the available husband is actually a jerk. Hmm. The critics kept saying that this was a film for kids, but even the overt heavy 1950s monster movie referencing made this debatable; if you start looking for messages, things get worse.

Expand, Contract (4)

For those who are keeping count - I've now delivered final drafts of all four of the new Transhuman Space: Personnel Files manuscripts on which I've been working.

Other stuff is in hand, but not contracted yet...

Local Eating (2)

With the excuse of my birthday and all, we finally got around to trying Restaurant Alimentum for lunch last Thursday. (It's a bit of a walk from our usual haunts in the centre of town.) This is the Cambridge eatery that's had the admiring comments in the national press recently, and yes, it does generally live up to them.

The decor's generally innocuously moderne (black, white, and red, some occasional vaguely Art Deco touches especially in the loos), and the portion sizes are restrained enough that I managed a three-course lunch without feeling at all stressed; the execution, which is of course the actual point, is good. The starter which both of us chose - thin slices of venison with apple and hazelnut and beetroot - was especially worth trying; I enjoyed my fillet and belly of pork main course, while Angela was very happy with her green leek risotto; then we hit the chocolate and apple mille feuille, which was chocolate-y, apple-y, and featured mille feuille which cut with the edge of a spoon without flaking into crumbs...

Given that the place also does a sensible fixed-price menu, I can see us getting back there sometimes. Especially now the weather is improving so the walk out from the centre won't feel like a risk.

Renaissance Domesticity

Monday turned into another of our two-exhibitions-and-a-good-lunch day trips to London - starting in the morning with a visit to the Queen's Gallery, which I don't think that I'd ever been inside before. It turned out to be quite grand in places, too - mahogany panels and Molton Brown soap in the lavatories (no, not "toilets"), even...

But let's not lower the tone. We were there for the "Bruegel to Rubens" show, Angela having a particular taste for Dutch Renaissance painting, and yeah, it was good - although the Bruegel snowscapes and calm domestic interiors were sometimes in danger of being overwhelmed by the sort of splashy, lush, lurid religious art which frankly does nothing for me. Still, there were some great portraits, including a Van Dyck self-portrait with one of the show's two best stories attached.

(The first such story involved Bruegel's "Massacre of the Innocents", which if one looks is remarkably short of depictions of innocents being massacred. Apparently, it was completed and went to a Spanish nobleman's collection just in time for an outbreak of religious warfare in which the Spanish troops behaved with all the gentleness associated with such wars. Showing soldiers committing mass murder was suddenly considered impolitic, so it was promptly edited. The story about the Van Dyck, on the other hand, involved him selling a different painting to a British aristocrat, not realising that said aristo was going to present it to Charles I. So Van Dyck dumped a thing by his studio assistants on that buyer, and Charles, being a smarter art connoisseur than he was ... anything else, really ... sent it back as inferior quality. And then Van Dyck sent him a better painting; a self-portrait. Ten out of ten for cocky confidence in one's own skills.)

Then, for a bonus, it turned out that the same ticket got us into the place's other exhibition of the moment, a catchall "Treasures from the Royal Collection" show. Of course, the royals having been collecting hard and with some judgement, on and off, for some centuries now, this featured a handfull of Canalettos here, the odd diamond as big as your thumbnail there, a bejewelled ostrich-egg cup, some gorgeous jousting armour... The sort of thing that anyone could turn up in their attic, really. No strong theme, but quite an assortment.

Anyway, lunch was in Wahaca, a chance discovery we happened to pass in Covent Garden and which I'll now thoroughly recommend for freshly-cooked Mexican nibbles (even if their 'Web site is a bit Flash-crazed), and on to the Royal Academy for their current Palladio exhibition.

This must have been fun to set up. Most of it consisted of drawings from all over the place (the RIBA library, the Chatsworth collection, wherever), mostly by the man himself, ranging from rough sketches of Roman remains through to formal final designs for great buildings, sometimes with a variety of details offered on the same sheet. However, there were also a clutch of portraits, many of them by very major artists of the period, of assorted Italian urban worthies who featured significantly in Palladio's career - and most eye-catchingly of all, there were a bunch of detailed wooden models of some of his buildings, borrowed from an architectural study centre named for Palladio in Vicenza.

But I guess it was the drawings that were most important in a crucial way. When somebody has basically defined a culture's architecture for five hundred years (note - I'm sitting in a modern suburban house with a pseudo-pediment worked into the frontage as I type this), it's useful to be reminded that he was a working architect above all, with a vast sense of detail. (Okay, here I'm remembering the TV programme about the man that was on a few months back, which made the same point.) If genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, well, you can see that Palladio qualifies. Not the most glamorous exhibition I've ever been to, but interesting in a kind of fractal way; the closer you look, the more there was to find.

Our Island Story (Naval History Divn.)

Angela had some time off at the end of last week, so we decided to catch up on a bit of tourist stuff in which we'd be intending to engage down Hampshire way. This developed a bit of a theme.

First off was Fort Nelson, which is one of the Palmerston Forts, dating to one of those periods when we (the British) had decided that we didn't trust the French, specifically the 1860s; as we'd also noticed that (a) the Royal Navy was spread a bit thin around our shiny new empire, and (b) naval gunnery was getting a bit long-ranged, these were hastily dug into the countryside around Portsmouth to protect the big Navy base there. They were subsequently abandoned, but Fort Nelson has now been reopened and spruced up a bit to hold the Royal Armouries' artillery collection. Actually, the place has a bit of a feeling of a work in progress; although the (small-ish) gallery of early artillery pieces looks fine (and includes one or two oddities, such as this baroque presentation piece given to the commander of artillery for the Knights of St. John of Malta), much of the fort still looks a bit battered round the edges, and some of the more modern display pieces - including some segments of Saddam Hussein’s "Supergun" (the thing that got its designer, Gerald Bull, assassinated with a rather smaller gun) - are held in a rather plain shed-like building. Still, the tunnels down to the ammunition storage space under the chalk of the hill are very striking, and the place is generally worth a visit for those who might be interested in military engineering.

Descending from the hill and looking back, one is reminded that Portsmouth and the area thereabouts is still very much involved in British military history generally. The modern military research station just along the road from Fort Nelson is another illustration, for a start, and the profile of that big phased array radar tower is not only distinctive - it's somewhat amusing for anyone with a taste for certain popular mini-board games.

It also looms somewhat above Portchester Castle, which means that this photo covers the range of this history. Portchester Castle itself is a pleasingly intact and pretty impressive medieval structure, which apparently served as a launching-point for a lot of English expeditions during the Hundred Years War, a PoW camp during the Napoleonic Wars, and so on - but then you get up onto the roof level, look down, and are reminded that it's actually tucked in one corner of a complete Roman coastal fort, dating back to the 3rd century AD. Apparently, this is the most intact Roman fortress in Northern Europe, having been vandalised remarkably little over the centuries. (For some reason, the locals scavenged stone from the walls by taking a bit at a time from the inside surfaces, rather than engaging in wholesale demolition. I'd guess that it was still seeing some use for defensive purposes much of the time, which must have helped.) It's a well-kept site, too.

And, lastly, we got to Buckler's Hard, a small village along the coast past Southampton (and not far from the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu) which once held the dockyards where some Royal Navy ships were built in Napoleonic times. Actually, it's more of a hamlet, albeit with a decent museum dedicated to its history and a very wide main street. It was supposed to be bigger when it was first planned, by the second Duke of Montagu, but he was planning to use it as a port for sugar from the estates he'd just supposedly acquired in the West Indies, and he was rather ignoring the fact that the area of the estates in question was in French hands at the time. When the privately-sponsored military expedition which was supposed to deal with that inconvenience, umm, didn't work, the plans for "Montagu Town" fell through. Freelance commercial imperialism; gotta love it...

Recent Reading: The Father of Locks

by Andrew Killeen


It's normally poor technique to begin a book review by talking about a different book, but...

There are quite a few historical detective stories around these days, but most of them are lightweight entertainments -- harmless enough, often quite fun, but not very strong on the sense of history. All else aside, the assumptions and necessities of the detective story form tend to dominate. The genre's biggest claim to some kind of intellectual credibility is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, but not many other books really want to be compared to that if they have any sense.

The Father of Locks has some chance of surviving that comparison. It's normally poor technique to begin a book review by talking about a different book, but note: the youthful narrator of Andrew Killeen's début novel enters the story by invading a huge, strange library building in search of a lost manuscript by Aristotle. I think that Killeen knows exactly what he's doing there.

Not that his detective is borrowed from Eco's cerebral (but fictional) Brother William of Baskerville. Abu Nuwas is an historical figure, and more to the point, an occasional guest star in the Arabian Nights. He's also a poet and, in this story, an agent of the legendary vizier Ja'far al-Barmaki. Moreover, he's a wildly decadent drunkard, bisexual lecher, violent troublemaker, and lover of falconry. (Most of this, apparently, is derived from his poetry.) But he has an intellectual's grasp of detail, a poet's understanding of human nature, and a sense of justice; when Ja'far assigns him to investigate rumours that Iblis, the devil (who Abu Nuwas naturally claims to admire) is stalking the streets of Abbasid Baghdad, it's with a sensible expectation of success. Not least because failure in Ja'far's service isn't terribly healthy.

To be honest, this isn't the greatest detective story plot I've ever seen; there's a big espionage/diplomatic plot, with one major element that modern readers are likely to identify long before most of the characters, and a big, dark red herring to spin things out. The solution mostly comes from a series of conveniently overheard conversations, providing Abu Nuwas with a string of clues that he pulls together in an extended flash of inspiration. The book's title is misleading, too; it's a translation of "Abu Nuwas", and "locks" here means "locks of hair"; the poet was apparently noted for his hairstyle. On the other hand, his sidekick and Watson, Ismail al-Rawiya, is actually a dab hand with lockpicks (I'm not actually sure about the lock and lockpicking technology seen in this story -- I get a sense of anachronism -- but I couldn't swear to this), cheerfully occupying the Thief of Baghdad stereotype as well as seeking a life as a storyteller, despite coming from Cornwall.

There are also places where Killeen's research pokes through in rough lumps, especially early on, when he is still setting the scene; while Ismail is evidently bright and observant, I'm not sure that he could have the sort of perspective that would allow him to say of a group of people "veterans of the revolution ... they now formed the military class of the regime". Likewise, some of the historical-figure guest appearances are gratuitous (although others are nicely subversive, especially the faintly idiotic Harun al-Rashid). But no matter; the thing that sells this book lies elsewhere, in Killeen's cheerful use of the 1001 Nights pattern. Much of the novel consists of stories told by various characters to explain the background to the plot, or just to explain themselves or to fill the time. At the point when the Frankish ambassador launches into "The Tale of the Horn of Hruodland", I realised that Killeen was showing off, but with some justification. By the end, Abu Nuwas is offering the rather cliched suggestion that telling our stories anew every day "is how we know we are still alive" -- but yes, his characters live through their storytelling.

(Well, most of them. Some die, despite their stories. This is, I should note, a fairly bloody and brutally unsentimental crime story in places. Also, Abu Nuwas lives the decadent poet life pretty determinedly. Caveat emptor.)

Like The Name of the Rose, this novel ends with mysteries solved and secrets revealed to the investigators, but not much justice done; history isn't really a nice place to visit, and if Harun's Baghdad is enjoying a golden age of poetry and prosperity, it's because it's fairly safely under the thumb of an authoritarian regime which uses violence and religious orthodoxy to keep control. Moreover, Harun's rule follows a period of brutal civil war, and another such period will follow his death; the reason that the 1001 Nights so often invokes it as a time of glory is that things were so often so much worse. But Ismail al-Rawiya is an engaging guide, and Abu Nuwas has at least a little of the charisma which he assumes is his right as a decadent poet. Many historical detective stories end up as parts of series, and The Father of Locks ends with that option open; while The Name of the Rose was always the better for standing alone, I wouldn't mind seeing Killeen return to old Baghdad.

Expand, Contract (3)

For those attempting to keep track of my work - latest news of many of the e23 projects I've got in hand or completed is that they're waiting in the queue for review and (especially, as it seems) production time and effort at Steve Jackson Games. More on some of these (fairly) soon, I hope.

Theatre: God of Carnage

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 28/2/2009.

Yes, it's been rather a theatrical month round here. God of Carnage is by French playwright Yasmina Reza, who was also responsible for Art, which I saw a few years ago. The story goes that Reza proclaimed herself bemused when Art (in translation) won a Best Comedy award, as she thought that she was writing a tragedy; well, if God of Carnage wasn't originally intended as a comedy, then the translator, Christopher Hampton, must have added a lot of jokes in the course of his work (which is possible, I guess). But it also wants to be a bit more than "just" a comedy.

Mind you, this production sells on more than Reza's name, with a cast including the ever-wonderful Richard E. Grant, plus Roger Allam (not a name I recognised, but his face is familiar from lots of British TV, and he's good), Serena Evans, and Lia Williams. The plot is more setting-specific than that of Art - this is very overtly a story of the Parisian bourgeoisie, with lots of specific details - and tries rather hard to expose bourgeois failings. Two couples meet to discuss the fact that one of their young sons has beaten up the other, in an atmosphere of strained civility, and things naturally go downhill quickly from there. This collapse is predictable, and not just because it's necessary for the play to exist; one of the men rapidly demonstrates an appalling mobile 'phone addiction, while the other mentions an incident involving a hamster without realising how badly it shows him up... These aren't really civilised people.

Mind you, I'm not sure what sort of people they are. The mobile 'phone junkie is a lawyer who is dealing with a problematic corporate case, but he also seems to have some kind of background in international criminal law; one of the women is a mild-mannered liberal housewife who has somehow written a publishable book about Darfur. I had a slight sense that they had whatever features the plot demanded.

Which plot does dearly want to be taken seriously. This isn't just four people getting into screaming comedic rows, you understand; it's a picture of the flaws and dishonesty that fail to disguise the weakness and savagery of humanity. We're supposed to take the play's title seriously, you see; God is a god of carnage. Oh dear; I'm not actually sure that a four-hand, one-act bourgeois comedy can really support the weight of all this, and throwing in references to real, unspeakable tragedies like Darfur to add weight could just look dangerously crass. But perhaps I'm being too Anglo-Saxon about this. And it is rather a good bourgeois comedy.

Recent Reading: Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

Yes, I've only just got around to Charles Stross's first novel, from 2004; terribly disorganised of me. Anyway, I'm doing some catching up.

For those who are further behind than me, a little scene-setting. Some time in the 21st century, humanity's computer systems apparently bootstrapped themselves into a state of nigh-godhood called the Eschaton. Being a near-god, the Eschaton is evidently ineffable and barking mad, but friendly to authors looking for plots; it promptly scattered most of humanity onto habitable worlds across thousands of lightyears, and also across thousands of years of time. Faster-than-light travel is thus shown to be possible, and therefore so is causality violation, but the Eschaton, apparently understandably worried that someone might use time travel to prevent its own emergence, declares an absolute ban on the sort of dangerous misbehaviour that it's just shown to be highly feasible, and drops large rocks on people who don't follow its rules.

(Characters in this book keep saying that the Eschaton isn't really a god, but blimey, it acts like one, doesn't it?)

Anyway, a couple of centuries later (in their frame of reference), we meet the New Republic, one of the ad hoc human colonies created by this event. It was founded by a bunch of future-shocked Central European technophobes who go in for place names like New Austria and New Prague, but whose style is pretty solidly Czarist Russian - all else aside, they perform a pretty fair re-enactment of bits of the Russo-Japanese War in the course of this novel, and we get a brief appearance by a Colonel von Ungern-Sternberg, which is of course a bad sign. Despite their rampant technophobia, the New Republic has somehow vaguely sustainable imperial ambitions, and a small handful of conquered or colonised worlds. In the prologue, one of these is invaded by the Festival, a peripatetic civilisation-thing which evidently originated in a human culture which the Eschaton dumped thousands of lightyears from Earth and thousands of years into the past, and which travels between the stars in small packages of computer technology, reconstructing itself as a wacky ultra-tech parody of the Edinburgh Festival whenever it arrives in a new solar system. The Festival starts granting wishes for the inhabitants of the colony world, scattering ultra-technological gifts around in exchange for new information (stories will do); the New Republic, objecting to having its colony occupied and forcibly kicked up by a millenium or so's worth of technological progress, launches a counter-invasion fleet, and the novel's plot is underway.

Except that Stross despises the New Republic too thoroughly to allow any of its citizens to serve as story protagonists on the fleet, so a couple of people from Earth attach themselves to it for various purposes - one engineer from an arms cartel which sold the New Republic some spaceship technology, and one diplomat/military observer. Both have hidden agendas, the engineer's being more arcane (for a very experienced agent, the diplomat/observer doesn't do much of a job of secrecy; she appears to be using her own, well-known name much of the time, even when she needn't); they also rapidly become a couple. Actually, they represent Stross's default protagonist-couple-type, as seen in Halting State and some of the "Laundry" stories, among other places - a geeky but technically competent man, and a tough, self-assured, sexy woman who can handle any butt-kicking that's required. Frankly, it looks like fan service, if not wish fulfillment, and hearts being in the right places doesn't excuse it.

But anyway... It should be said that there's a decent comedy somewhere inside this book, looking to get out; just for a start, the New Republic is a pretty good parody of the quintessential political reactionary mind-set. The trouble is, the book would like to say a bit moe than that, but it isn't sure how. The New Republic is a portrait of a bad society, crippled by its reactionary impulses, but once we've seen the secret police in action, the poverty in the streets and military stupidity - and once our protagonists have been repelled and appalled by the place for a paragraph or two - there's really nowhere more for that strand to go, and the joke has turned slightly sour. So we follow the military expedition as not a huge amount happens, except that some obnoxious products of the system plot not very effectually against the heroes and worry about the technological superiority of the enemy they're supposed to fight - albeit not enough, as it predictably turns out.

Meanwhile, the invaded colony world is going through a technological singularity - an explosion of wishes come true and strange and sometimes nightmarish things happening. But because the population suffers from their New Republic upbringing, they fail to handle this at all well; not one single inhabitant of the world thinks to ask for information rather than material goods, not even the relatively clued-in revolutionaries who've been dumped there as exiles in best Russian style. The trouble is, I'm not at all sure that Stross has a very clear idea of what's happening here either. So we get a string of scenes, some of them funny or macabre, and occasional conversations, but no great sign of changes that can't be folded away in an instant.

Then the New Republic's fleet shows up, and gets casually defeated, but some people make it down to the planet, and then the book shambles to an end of sorts in a flurry of speeches and very minor revelations, leaving a clutch of unresolved plot strands and unexplained stuff. It isn't a disaster, or even a disappointment; it just fails to gel.

I think I'll look at the sequel (Iron Sunrise) sometime, though, if only to see if Stross refines his technique a bit in that. Too much like this would lead me to give up, but one book might lead on to better things later - and the later Stross books I've read do also have their moments.

Theatre: Where There's a Will

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 21/2/2009.

One could ask what one of our leading theatrical knights - a former director of the RSC and the National Theatre, pushing 80 - is doing touring the provinces with an early pocket-sized Feydeau farce. The answer, though, is quite likely "having fun", or maybe "very well, thanks". (Okay, it also turns out that his wife, Nicki Frei, was responsible for this new translation.) His program notes suggest that Peter Hall sees this play as a formal theatrical exercise... But that sounds too po-faced for what is actually an effective comedy executed in an attractive production. Very attractive, actually; the scene is the reception room of a Parisian town house, decorated in light Art Nouveau style, and the cast look dead stylish in Edwardian costume. It's great to look at. I thought that the cast were good, too, quick and straight-faced; for a while I thought that Sara Stewart was channeling Felicity Kendal, but actually I think itwas just a similar intonation (and the sort of part she was playing).

The farce is up to Feydeau's usual standards - more talky rather than slapstick by some standards, but with a certain amount of climbing in and falling out of windows. The plot also leans on some very theatrical, possibly distinctly period use of hypnotism, although this isn't over-used. It naturally also features the sort of total amiable sexual amorality that gave France such a reputation for naughtiness among straight-laced Anglo-Saxons of the time.

Anyway, I enjoyed it.

Recent Reading: Gun, With Occasional Music

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I finally pulled it down while in search of reading matter the other day, remembering or being reminded as I did so that it was Lethem's first novel, and that he seems to have acquired a lot of semi-mainstream literary credibility in the years since it came out.

The blurb and interior review quotes lead me to expect a mixture of hard-boiled detective story and dystopian SF, which I got, but the book is perhaps even more significantly an example of School Of Philip K. Dick. Dick's influence on a certain sort of highbrow American genre SF writer is huge, and Lethem here has exactly that Dickian tone of faintly surreal, sun-bleached futurism, and a very large dose of the Dickian (literary) interest in mind-altering drugs. The blurb also lead me to expect something funny, which I didn't get; the Dickian quasi-surrealism, and especially the talking animals which loom large in the plot, might have a certain Pythonesque quality, but any laughs are lost in the noir-meets-dystopia looming darkness of the setting.

The detective story elements, by the way, reminded me of the movie Brick; they treat numerous tropes of the classic Hammett/Chandler movies as a kind of modern Commedia Dell'Arte framework, to be reused on the assumption that the audience will recognise them. Though I have to say that I enjoyed Brick more. Nor is the mystery plot especially strong; eventually, the hero solves his case, but mostly by coming up with a story which arguably fits the facts marginally better than anything else available, and which is more satisfying to the lead characters' sense of the world.

I should also note that the SF elements of this novel are, in true Dickian style, subservient to the other aspects; the dystopia is low-key and mostly a matter of a world slipping down to noirish moral corruption, and the furniture is very consciously retro. Even in 1994, when this book appeared, the complete absence of mobile phones and the limited use of computers - all accessed through monochrome terminals rather than PCs - must have looked a little odd. But futurism isn't the point here. Anyway, it's a smart book, but not one I can love.

Recent Reading: Hexwood

by Diana Wynne Jones

I'm not on an Arthuriana kick at the moment, honestly. This book didn't even admit to being Arthuriana until half way through.

Unlike a lot of people I know, I've only read bits and pieces of Diana Wynne Jones's work. For the benefit of those who've read even less of her than that, I should note that she's classified as a children's author - one of many who was doing rather good magical fantasy for kids years before J.K.Rowling first hit the coffee shops - but that she has a significant adult readership. I've quite liked most of her stuff that I have read, but I've never felt the urge to be systematic about it. However, Hexwood finally came to my hand the other day.

It turned out to be a bit of an oddity, to put it mildly. It's structured as a conventional children's fantasy in some ways, with a child protagonist observing strange goings-on in her vicinity and entering the nearby woods to discover more, but it's presumably intended for slightly older readers; aside from the very discreet references to sexuality, the structure very soon turns rather weird. The wood which our heroine observes, and the power which turns out to be playing a godgame with everyone involved, generate a wildly achronological plotline, with the people who our heroine meets appearing at different points in what seems to be a process of childhood, youth, and education when she visits at different times over a period of a couple of days. If I'd tried reading this when I was young, I think that I'd have found the repetition and lack of strong chronology very off-putting.

Anyway - things eventually expand, and turn more linear again. From past reading, I get the impression that Jones has a weakness for throwing in numerous new characters whenever she thinks that a plot needs some jazzing up, and here, we get a shift to a realm of galactic commercial politics, complete with a batch of sleazy corporate/palace villains who flail around trying to work out what to do about the problem that's developing on Earth. There are also lumps of backstory, much of it solid but some of it sadly underdeveloped, and the growing mass of Arthurian imagery, which for a while looks like it might, say, be an incidental by-product of the imaginative influence of a minor character, but turns out to be fairly crucial. (Although actually, the Arthurian imagery of many of the plot incidents is pretty much unconnected to the Arthurian elements in the backstory.) Then our plucky child heroine, who'd seemed likeable enough if underdeveloped as a character, turns out to have been just an aspect of an adult heroine who wanders in from a bunch of minor offstage jokes. (Having the heroine turn out to be a princess is all very well, but, well, honestly...) Then we get some dragons, with little apparent justification except that the book's godgame-playing grail seems to be capable of almost anything and is doing whatever will drive the plot in order to educate the lead characters, in a way that I'd only expect from the plotting of far less respectable children's authors.

I dunno. Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe a lot. But Hexwood seems like a lot of under-digested ideas, cobbled together and rushed out. Fortunately, I do know that Diana Wynne Jones is capable of better.

Theatre: Life & Beth

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 7/2/2009.

One of the many odd gaps in my theatrical education involves Alan Ayckbourn. I've seen a few things of his on the TV from time to time, I believe, but I'm not sure I'd caught any on stage until we got to Absurd Person Singular at the Arts last November. But, yesterday, we followed that up with Life & Beth.

Actually, I suspect that this is relatively minor Ayckbourn. It's not terribly long (under two hours with the interval), it's got a fairly small cast, and it doesn't seem to be readable as much of a big political allegory. It's also pretty well impossible to discuss without giving away bits and pieces of the plot, so please be warned if you're going to catch this...

Actually, though, one doesn't need to know a lot about the plot to find, say, the big theatrical coup at the end of the first act not very surprising. The thing is generally a bit slight, to be honest; the overt jokes are few and far between, and only the central character is allowed any development; one of the others comes on completely mute, for rather weak reasons, and just stays that way. As all of the (living) characters are living lives of apparently-very-Ayckbournian quiet desperation, this makes the thing seriously bleak, if you let your attention shift from Beth herself. She ends up a bit better off, but by a not-very-startling route.

(Beth, by the way, was played by Liza Goddard, who ended up looking much more aged and careworn than she evidently does in reality. Marks for lack of actorly vanity there.)

The only things I was left wondering about were (a) how the central couple were so widely assumed to have a perfect marriage, when one of them was such a blatant, classical jerk, and (b) quite where Gordon actually went post mortem (assuming that he wasn't just a figment), as I think that there were some slightly dark hints.

All of which probably sounds much more negative than it should. The fact is that Ayckbourn can write, and create characters, and I'll be aiming to fill that gap in my education further in future, when the opportunity arises.

Recent Reading: To the Chapel Perilous

by Naomi Mitchison

I picked this up a while ago... I'm not sure where or how now, actually, possibly even as a freebie, but doubtless at a roleplaying game event; it was republished by Green Knight Publishing, who mostly existed to publish Greg Stafford's Pendragon RPG, but who also reprinted a whole slew of modern treatments of the Arthurian myths.

I suppose, picking this up and reading descriptions, that I was vaguely expecting a new look at the Arthurian stories, filtered through the anachronistic lens of modern journalism - a sort of smarter Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, perhaps, or a more lit'ry Idylls of the Queen (the latter being Phyllis Ann Karr's unjustly forgotten stab at an Arthurian detective story). Actually, though, I think it's more a book about modern (well, mid-20th century) journalism, viewed through the lens of the Arthurian stories. I gather that Merlin (the editor of one of the newspapers in the story) is actually based on somebody Mitchison knew at the Guardian, and the news staff scenes have a certain period-specific tang of authenticity to them, clashing weirdly with the high-mythic feel of some of the grail quest action, especially early on in the plot.

Mind you, it's quite an abstruse sort of view of the nature of journalism - Mitchison was a literary novelist much more than she was a journalist - verging in places on a meditation on the nature of Truth and the processes by which one story/myth comes to dominate in the world of ideas, although others survive. It's also light on jokes, although there are some; I suspect it'd be funnier if you knew that journalistic milieu and period. And it does tend to tell rather than show, but I guess that's appropriate for a book about journalism, and one which perhaps assumes that readers know their Arthuriana fairly well.

All round, a bit of a period oddity, but not without interest, and I suspect it's really quite appealing to the real Arthuriana geeks.

Local Eating (1)

Somehow, we'd never previously managed to get round to eating at the Cabinet at Reed until today. Which was kind of silly. The one time we'd tried, the place was fully occupied. This was not so today, which presumably says something about either cold days in winter or cold economic conditions. (Although the place changed hands fairly recently, I believe; dunno if that's relevant.) We seemed to see precisely one member of staff while we were there - a chatty barman/waiter - but that was all that was needed front of house.

Anyway, this is yet another of those rather good pub-restaurants we seem to have dotted around the area in careless profusion, and the food was very much in that style; I definitely enjoyed my pea and gorgonzola risotto with artichokes, though by the end of the meal there was a definite sense of a place which didn't stint the fats. Anyway, recommended, and we ought to get back there slightly more often.

Expand, Contract (2)

By way of a follow-up to the previous post, I should say that the first draft of the 10,000 words of fiction was completed and uploaded by the contracted date - a little while ago now, actually. No feedback yet on that.

Which left me free to tackle the editing job - specifically, Cities on the Edge, by the esteemed Anders Sandberg. And despite a slight delay in my receiving the actual contract, that was delivered by the agreed delivery date (i.e. yesterday). So, assuming that we can keep this moving forward, the restarted Transhuman Space line should acquire a nifty book on cities in 2100, complete with Stockholm as a developed example. And now I'm waiting to see how some of my own, slightly less substantial efforts progress.

Hmm. Somewhere on my personal to-do list is a set of notes on Stuff I'd Like To See Proposed For Transhuman Space. Maybe I ought to put that together this week.

Oh, and GURPS Thaumatology can now be said to have paid out its advance. Which is nice.

Expand, Contract (1)

Anyone with a bizarre urge to follow my career might presumably like to know that I've recently signed a contract to provide 10,000 words of fiction for a new hard SF RPG on a fairly tight timescale, while working on a significant editing job for another RPG line (contract still awaited, strictly speaking, but I've started the work anyway). And I've got two other writing projects (or five, depending how you count them) in varying stages of completeness and contractedness, which may descend on me as more work at any time in the fairly near future.

All of which is good, I guess. But those who merely have to talk to me from time to time may recognise a tendency to distraction, pensiveness, and heaping curses on displacement activities.

Hmm. I put Google Ads on here, and it decides that people reading this blog will be interested in student self-storage and a church in Norwich. What does it know about me that I don't?

(Of course, from now on it'll know that I've mentioned these things here. Oops.)

Recent Reading: Game Night

by Jonny Nexus

Game Night came out a year or so ago, and I've just got around to reading it. (So, as the saying goes, sue ... someone.) I'll assume that most people reading this already own a copy, or can forgive mild spoilers. It turns out to be, I guess, a B-minus or thereabouts.

The central conceit is pretty well known by now; the book tells a roleplaying campaign plot in the form of a piece of actual fiction, while swapping back and forth between that and the players responsible for these events. The extra twist in this case is that the players in this case are literally gods of the game world - but, being plausible polytheistic gods, they're still as idiotic and egomaniacal as any other RPG players, and indeed behave just like, well, roleplayers.

(Both the "players and PCs in parallel stories" and the "gods as roleplayers" ideas have been used before, of course, but I think that this novel is the first thing to make both central to a plot simultaneously.)

To get the obvious out of the way first - yes, this book is indeed sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, at least to a gamer reader. As anyone who's seen his various columns and online zines will know, Jonny Nexus can perfectly nail that ranty, exasperated, more-affectionate-than-is-deserved tone one gets from gamers trading tales of disastrous sessions, bad decisions, and poor rules design. If anyone ever took Cyborg Commando seriously, they'll surely see why they're in a minority after seeing Jonny's both-barrels treatment of the game and how badly he and his group played it. There's a lot of that in this book, and I giggled quite a lot. Non-gamers will probably stare in numbed incomprehension, although there's a bit of universal human failure involved - but anyway, it's not meant for them.

But this is one joke and one conceit, and they can't really support a whole novel, even a fairly short one. Nor does the conceit really hold together; these gods aren't in any way godlike - they're just roleplayers with funny furniture in their games room. The Dead Gentlemen managed the dual-narrative joke a bit better, twice, but they didn't load themselves down with the gods thing, and they only had to keep things going for the duration of a film; similar comment might apply to DM of the Rings and the sadly truncated Chainmail Bikini. I was still giggling late in the book, but then, the raw slapstick value of a the determined meathead munchkin-minimaxer is frustratingly eternal.

The meathead in this case is "the Warrior", playing "Draag", a single-minded anti-paladin, and I guess that one of the reasons why I couldn't find Game Night as funny as some of its fans clearly do is that I long since managed to get away from the sort of group where a bunch of "good" characters and their players will put up with his sort of crap indefinitely. But the Warrior and his playing piece, being table-hogs, dominate the book as they dominate the session (despite honourable attempts at subversion by the Jester and his stereotyped thief character). The joke still works, but it's a joke about mercifully distant memories for me, and there are no other strong jokes to hand to vary the flavour. I just ended up empathising with the GM'ing AllFather; sure, he's an insufficiently experienced railroader, but at least he's trying to do something, and he's putting in the work for the usual negligible thanks from his players.

Which may be why I found the rather truncated ending of the novel distinctly depressing as well as anticlimactic. It's clearly meant to show the AllFather recovering his spirit and even achieving a kind of GM heroism - I had a bad feeling that the author might even be aiming for some kind of significance - and I'm actually all in favour of the principle that real heroism sometimes means that you have to just walk away, but this makes for a sad commentary on roleplaying. It also leaves a bunch of loose plot threads, because that's what the AllFather has to do. And what does it say for a universe that the pantheon eventually has to fall apart like a bad roleplaying group?

Icons and Relics

The last day of the year, and back to London for some more exhibition-catching-up.

(And passing posters which reminded me that I'll almost certainly miss the V&A show about post-war design completely. Darn. But... Is that a topic I can overly regret missing?)

Anyway - morning was Darwin at the Natural History Museum. Yep, good stuff - starting with "one of the most important samples in the history of science" (not that I can tell the difference between two slightly dissimilar dead mockingbirds, but Darwin could, which is why he's probably the greatest naturalist in history - everything else ultimately came from that). There wasn't a lot here that any acceptably well-read person wouldn't already know, by the definition of "acceptably", but there was a lot to see nonetheless. The fully furnished study from Down House was a nice touch, though there wasn't a lot else to give a feel for the man's life, apart from a lot of letters. Just one warning; low light levels (no doubt for good reasons), and a lot of casing structural bars throwing shadows over the labels.

Byzantium at the Royal Academy was better presented from that point of view, despite having much stuff that requires at least as much gentle care. That's the big thing about this show; it's kind of necessary to visit, because it includes a variety of things that you'd otherwise have to travel several thousand miles across three or more continents (and a war zone or two) to see, sometimes in obscure museums, sometimes to ancient monasteries tucked away up biblical mountains. I gather much of this material may never travel again, and I think one room held about 10% of the world's supply of Byzantine micromosaics. Very once-in-a-lifetime.

So... Right. For a thousand years, there was a rich pocket civilisation in the eastern Mediterranean which drew on classical influences and in turn demonstrably influenced the Renaissance. But, honestly, it still feels as alien to me as medieval Japan or India - maybe more so. The exhibition does its best to show that not all icons are they same, that the classical influence was important, that some Byzantine art was secular; but in the end, there's only some much exquisitely carved ivory and lustrous gold leaf that a person surely needs.

Still, a good end to the year. (And the Royal Academy cafe does a mean cream scone, too.)