Cities on the Edge - After-Note

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

Also...

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

Rango

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

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

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

"Okay."

I mean, the @$*#?

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

Expand, Contract (28)

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

Concert: British Sea Power

The Junction, Cambridge, 20th February 2011.

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

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

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

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

English, Evolving and Evolved

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

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

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

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

Dr Who 2010(a)

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

Case in point...

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words; Bah, humbug.

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

Expand, Contract (27)

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

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

Spanish Photos

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

The Orange and the Red

Spain, October 31st-November 5th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Reading: PS238: When Worlds Go Splat!

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

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

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

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

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

Miniature, Epic

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

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

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

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

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

Gone Postal

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

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


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

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

Miniature Architecture

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

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

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

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

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

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

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

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

Stockholm Photos

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

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

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

Recent Reading: Alexandria

by Lindsey Davis

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

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

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

Recent Reading: Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theatre: Twelfth Night

Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, 28/8/2010

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

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

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

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

Expand, Contract (26)

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

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

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

Toy Story 3

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

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

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