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.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
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.
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.)
(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.)
Sunday, April 12, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, April 10, 2009
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...
Other stuff is in hand, but not contracted yet...
Sunday, April 05, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
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...
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...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, March 06, 2009
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.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 09, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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