spidersilk…
In the Stone Dance I ‘invented’ textiles woven from spidersilk in analogy with that produced, in our own world, from silkworms… My friend Ang has brought to my attention that such textiles actually exist!!!
life drawing
Yesterday I began life drawing classes with my friend Adrian Smith. As you can see (if you follow the link) he is already a most accomplished artist. His reason for going is that “you can always learn more”: my reason might not seem so obvious – I am trying to loosen my method of working.
My method for writing the Stone Dance was VERY intensive. Besides, it is hard, when one grips on to something that tightly, to let go. Now that I’m working on something new, there is an ever present danger that I will slip back into my old (a decade long!) way of thinking. I judged that to assault this frontally was just likely to make my ‘habituation’ dig in… I don’t have separate compartments in my head for writing, drawing, or anything else creative – it forms a fluid oneness… Thus, by loosening up my drawing, I believe I am performing an outflanking manoeuvre on myself… that will free up my writing.
gapminder
Now here is something that blew my mind… First take a look at this then have a play with this.
I have never come across a better justification for the Web (for computers, even) than this… Gapminder is a revelatory instrument (like a telescope, a microscope): it not only presents statistics in a way that anyone can absorb – but puts it somewhere where anyone with access to the Net can use it… I cannot imagine any aspect of recent human history, economics, nationality, ecopolitics etc etc that it will not illuminate.
the digital revolution
This article Jason Pinter (though, previously this was attributed to Jessie Kunhardt) has a point, but he’s not really saying anything that we didn’t know. What he doesn’t address is the ways in which ebooks ‘could’ expand the reading market. Not only in the obvious ways – providing easy access (distributively) to texts, portability, searchability, the ability to attach notes – but also in less-obvious ways such as the ability when reading non-fiction to access pictures, maps, recorded sound, video even. More fundamentally, he doesn’t seem to have considered how much of the problems books may be having might be due to the fact that they are seen as the very ancient form that he lauds. (As do I, but then I, perhaps like you, am a confirmed reader and so value its very antiquity).
The current world of books seems to me to be too much focused on commercial considerations and not enough on the reader and the reader’s reading experience. At a time when diversity and ‘customer’ choice has exploded exponentially in other media, in books there is a narrowing down – the Dan Browns of this world come to mind… At a time when all the old monolithic systems of the various media are collapsing – when the limitation on the means of production, the production costs and the distribution constraints are all diminishing – books seem to be retreating in the opposite direction – stuffing up their traditional production systems with ‘blockbusters’, many of dubious quality. Instead of presenting the reader with untold riches, they present her with a few, grey offerings that her grandmother might well have scorned *grin*
ebooks could unleash a tide of creativity – a renaissance in writing… and the readers might well respond to this renaissance with joy and even relief.
when Jason Pinter says: “More readers — that’s how we save publishing. So get on it.” – what he is talking about – ebooks – could be the very salvation he is urging us to find.
covers
My friend Dean brought these to my attention… and another friend, Remco van Straten, made the mockup shown here as a very rough notion of what a Stone Dance cover might have looked like then. What I feel these covers show is a real love of books as things in themselves.
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (extended dvd version)
I watched the extended editions of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings over the past two weekends. I have come round to agreeing with some of my friends that these films are really quite an amazing achievement. “As good as any opera” is what my partner said. In some places – particularly the first film – there were some extended scenes that were rather dodgy (not to mention the abrupt shift from day to night in Lothlorien). Throughout, I found some of the extended scenes could be a tad ‘soap-operaish’ – and they could slow down the narrative. On the other hand, they made all the various subplots hang together a lot better – Arwen and Aragorn’s love, for example, stuff to do with Eowyn… the extra scene between her and Grima. It made the whole thing more like an HBO series rather than films per se. The interweavings of these subplots – some of which were given far more stress (or invented entirely) than in the books – seemed to me skilfully done. This time round (I’ve only ever seen the films once before and that was in the cinema) I was far more appreciative of how Jackson had found cinematic ways of expressing literary aspects of the books… Gollum’s internal dialogue stood out as being particularly brilliantly realized. I still find the portrayal of the elves and their settlements (Rivendell, Lothlorien) rather weak… too much ‘arts and crafts’, too many candles lit on perfectly sunny days, too many scenes that looked like adverts from some lifestyle catalogue… not to mention the execrable ‘art’ – the concrete statues, the AWFUL murals at Rivendell (contrast these with the fabulous ones in Pella, in Oliver Stone’s Alexander – a film that in so many other places is so weak) – the whole effect for me was to often make Rivendell look like some kind of garden centre. I could also have done without Legolas’ ‘skate-boarding’ exploits.
All this said, Jackson really has pulled off some kind of miracle. He has not only filmed the unfilmable, but done so in a cinematic way that is true to the books while not being slavishly so – in my opinion, in various places, even managing to improve on Tolkien’s narrative.
University of Edinburgh Freshercon
It was only when I arrived outside the venue for this event that it occurred to me that I should have announced it here, on my blog. Not entirely sure why I didn’t. Apologies if you might have wanted to be there but weren’t.
This talk was specifically for freshers (students coming to university for the first time) with a view of encouraging them to join the university’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Society. It was well attended. I read some stuff from the various Stone Dance books and talked a little about who I was and how I had got into writing.
I talked about Tolkien and Moorcock: how the former inspired me by his method and approach; how the latter reinforced my own desires to escape from the tyranny exercised by ‘feudal Europe’ over fantasy. I talked about how dated Tolkien’s ‘black hat/ white hat’ characterisations can be – that though this polarized view of reality might perhaps be natural to people living through the two World Wars and who were still deeply influenced by Christian dualism, but that today I felt it necessary to take a more subtle, nuanced position. I touched on Dune, Ursula le Guin, Ray Bradbury and Gene Wolf. Then I moved to discussing the renaissance that seems to be occurring in speculative fiction generally.
Finally I launched into backing up a claim that speculative fiction could be seen to at the centre of our culture – and rightly so… My basic argument went like this. It seems to me that sci-fi explores possible evolutions of our cultural envelope in a cognitive projection from where we are now, on into the future… Fantasy on the other hand explores the inner world of our psyche. I talked here a bit about Jung’s archetypes and his notion of the collective unconsciousness – the deployment of which makes a story about everyone, and no one in particular. I pointed out that, in some ways, these two categories are pointless as there is much fantasy that appears to be sci-fi (Star Wars being an example) and sci-fi that may appear to be fantasy (the Stone Dance being an example…), that what really mattered was that the reader lay at the heart of these categories… perhaps even squeezed between their boundary as a fluid mix of her/his internal and external worlds… her/his present between the future and the familial past… I then railed a little at the ‘speculative’ ghetto… and pointed out the rather interesting fact that the only area in which fantasy/sci-fi is not a second class citizen is in children’s books: Harry Potter, Pullman, for example… is this not, perhaps, suggestive?: that in a world that is changing faster all the time, those who remain childlike longer – curious, learning, adapting – will cope the best… Thus it seemed to me that it is speculative fiction that best addresses the issues of the ‘now’ and can provide insight, guidance and, even, consolation.
Jarhead
Watched Jarhead last night. It begins with the usual ‘grunt’ camaraderie and training obligatory in all depictions of the US military. but then continues into deployment in Kuwait during the First Gulf War where bleached out days and nights lit by burning oil fields seem like a computer game. I suspect this is deliberate. What is shows brilliantly – and quite possibly accurately – is how America has managed to extend the experience and envelope of the consumer society to the very front line of the battlefield. At no point do you feel that any of these ‘citizen’ soldiers even touch the reality of where they are or who they’re fighting. even when they walk amidst the carnage of the flight to Bagdad with its carbonized corpses of children in school buses.
Margaret Atwood / China Miéville
I went to the launch of Margaret Atwood’s new book Year of the Flood primarily because my partner was singing at it. It was held at a church in the centre of Edinburgh and was very well attended – so well that I had to queue for returns – and only got in because a kind American woman gave me her ticket.
What followed was a rather uninspiring affair. Atwood read passages from her book, the choir sang the ‘hymns’ she had invented for it and some other volunteers acted out parts – again, from the book. What struck me was that the whole thing sounded like an episode of Survivors – to be fair, I want to make it clear that I’m saying all these things without actually having read the book though, on the basis of what I experienced in that hour, I’m not likely to.
I have read two of Atwood’s books – Alias Grace – that I can remember nothing about – and The Handmaid’s Tale that I thought was brilliant… So I’m not saying the woman can’t write… but what get’s my goat are the claims that she persistently makes about her more recent writing ie. that “it’s not science fiction”… I listened to her being interviewed by Mark Lawson on Front Row where she said – several times – that the reason this new book of hers was not science fiction was because science fiction had things like “talking squid” in it. With that term, I feel she betrays herself. To dismiss all of science fiction as being the kind of writing that might have a talking squid in it (not that I have anything against squid, talking or otherwise!) is either profoundly ignorant, or disingenuous. Of course I understand why she struggles so hard to distance herself from the genre – more often than not, writing in the genre leads to work being ignored both by critics and reviewers and thus by many readers who might well enjoy it. (The success of Atwood’s ‘speculative fiction’ would seem to suggest this might be true.) Of course it is because my own work has suffered this fate that this issue makes me angry. So, I understand that Atwood is behaving like this to protect her own interests, but what I don’t feel is acceptable is that she should do so by dissing science fiction and those who work in that genre… Being dramatic for a moment: history is littered with examples of the persecuted joining the ranks of the persecutors so as to save themselves.
Ursula Le Guin, a writer of the first rank whose many brilliant books are dismissed because they are classified as science fiction, puts this better and with more grace in her recent review in the Guardian. Perhaps it would be wise for me to defer to her (qualified) praise for The Year of the Flood though I wonder if it wouldn’t sink without a trace were it sold as science fiction, if only for the reason that the post apocalypse novel is already a venerable tradition and has been done brilliantly by many authors – however surprising such a concept might be to Atwood’s ‘literary’ readers.
Imagine then my relief when I went off to listen to China Miéville being interviewed (by Stuart Kelly). Here was someone who is happy to tell anyone who wants to listen about his fascination with creatures with tentacles. He is also someone who writes fresh and literate books on the cutting edge of genre fiction. In fact, his books have had the tendency to cut through the edges of the various genres that attempt to contain them. His latest book The City and The City punches its way out of fantasy/science fiction into another genre, crime. Miéville read passages from various books – including one of startling invention from a work in progress. All of it was far more engaging, both linguistically and in its ideas, than anything I had heard from Atwood. Kelly wondered out loud when Miéville might win the Booker Prize – but we all know this is unlikely because such awards are not for genre writers.
human uniqueness…
I was just reading a review of Wild Justice that included the sentence: “Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of ascribing morality to animals because it seems to threaten the uniqueness of humans”…
Nothing could more succinctly demonstrate how neurotic a species we are. How amazingly insecure are we, the Rulers of the Earth, the ‘paragon of animals’? It used to be that we relied on an absolute division between us and ‘them’ – a distinction insisted on by our holy books – for are we not, after all, made in the image of God…? When Darwin punctured this conceit we regrouped behind other barricades – our language, our culture, our tool using, our ‘reasoning’ – as researchers have brought down each of these in turn, we have scurried to a new defence… All of them seem to me to be something akin to: but do whales sit in rocking chairs smoking pipes and reading magazines? Thus we move the goal posts to make sure we always win!
Isn’t it about time that we grew up – that we started finding confidence in what we are within ourselves, and accept that we are one animal among many…? The sooner we do that, the sooner we will stop behaving like spoilt children…