Spectacle In Search Of A Story

Down into London town (where developers seems intent on narrowing every pavement to half its normal size, leading to Bladerunner-style pedestrian jams) to see a preview of Hellboy II The Golden Army. Which, as long as you accept it for what it is, is a decent enough couple of hours entertainment. What it is, of course, is a comic book film with great art design, some decent acting, and an exiguous find-the-coupons plot. Or rather, plot coupon: namely the third portion of a crown that, when reassembled, enables the wearer to command an army of indestructible soldiers created on the order of an Elf king in the long ago, and which an Elf prince now wants to control so that he can get his revenge on the perfidious human race who’ve destroyed his forests. Or something along those lines. The supernatural equivalent of the FBI - the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense - gets wind of the prince’s plot when an auction house is overrun by ravenous tooth fairies when it puts one of the parts of the crown under the hammer, and Hellboy steps in to clean up the mess.


Ron Perlman is once again perfectly fine as an ordinary working schmoe who just happens to be the red-skinned spawn of the Devil with an indestructible stone fist, and is ably supported by pyrokinetic girlfriend (Selma Blair), newtboy with a brain the size of a planet (Doug Jones, replacing David Hyde-Pierce) and their hapless boss (the great Jeffrey Tambor, twitchily anxious to do right by his superiors). There's also Teutonic smoke-in-a-suit new guy Johann Krauss, basically a couple of actors taking turns in a steampunk diving suit, voiced by Seth McFarlane. Director Guillermo del Torro and his design team create a couple of zoos’ worth of weird creatures, notably in a densely populated Goblin Market. There’s also a very fine sequence right at the beginning that uses puppets to set up the plot, framed as a bedtime story read to a young Hellboy by John Hurt, briefly returning as his kindly mentor.

So far, so good. But between the noisy and nicely choreographed action sequences there’s not much story, and the narration proceeds by a series of awkward jerks. Since there’s only one plot coupon to be scooped up by the prince, the second act is padded out with a couple of romance sub-plots that don’t quite dovetail with the rest of the movie, there are an awful lot of plot holes and seen-it-coming-in-the-first-reel twists, the usual ordinary people don’t understand superheroes schtick, and the dreaded golden army don’t really get to show its stuff. But it does the business, there are touches of fin de siecle sadness that play nicely against Hellboy’s truculent, wisecracking noir hero, and it’s crammed with del Torro’s trademark weirdness. Now here’s a director who’d be a perfect fit to direct a film version of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. Now there's a story.

Tomorrow: The Dark Knight.

True Names

I'm now pretty sure that the title of the ongoing project, which is kinda sorta a sequel to The Quiet War, is The Gardens of the Sun. Of course, my publishers may well disagree, for all kinds of appropriate reasons, but as far as I'm concerned that's its true name, just as the true name of Cowboy Angels is Look For America. Like most writers, I feel that names have secret powers.

Night of the Lepus

More animal bioterror. I wonder if the crazed rabbit was in contact with the kamikaze ducks...

Rabbit contaminated water supply
Pitsford reservoir
Water supplies were declared safe on 4 July

A rabbit has been named as the cause of a sickness bug which was found in water supplies in Northamptonshire.

Customers in 100,000 homes were told by Anglian Water to boil tap water for up to 10 days after the Cryptosporidium outbreak on 25 June.

The firm said a rabbit gaining access to the treatment process led to the bug at Pitsford Treatment works.

The Happening World

Foul play or kamikaze attempt to create world's lamest metaphor?

Okay, I admit it: I've gone slightly stir crazy, stuck in front of a screen attempting to hack my way into the second draft of the ongoing and generally behaving like one of its characters, holed up in a refuge in a hostile environment. But I think I have the first part nailed, and the sun appears to be shining outside . . .

Yes, But What Are They Saying About Us?

From Science Daily:

When it comes to cellular communication networks, a primitive single-celled microbe that answers to the name of Monosiga brevicollis has a leg up on animals composed of billions of cells. It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered...

...With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear? "We don't have a clue!" says Manning, "but this discovery is the first step in finding out."

'More elaborate and diverse than any multicellular organism' including us, I guess. Hmm, maybe Greg Bear's idea that prokaryotes are the secret rulers of Earth (in Vitals) isn't so far-out after all...

Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

‘. . . there are moments when a soul released from its cave of flesh will speed towards a mortal mind as it lies entranced in sleep, will curl across its surface, frothing, like waves across a beach, touching its tenderest parts and causing dreams to rise from its depths, like the bubbles of burrowing clams. And we awake, knowing we have been touched by something beautiful,whose beauty we shall never understand, knowing only that we have been witnesses to its inexpressible passing. We call her name, if we can remember it, and ask her to remain a moment longer, only a moment. But already she is gone.’

The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch 1940 - 2008

There are tributes from people who knew him here, here, and here. Go read his books, and his stories. Read The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song. Read the stories collected in Getting Into Death and Fundamental Disch. He was a damn fine writer. He was one of the writers who meant a lot to me when I was a lonely teenage sci-fi geek in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Update: Daily Kos has posted a fine memorial essay.

Evolution Strikes Back

A little while back, I mentioned Carl Zimmer's marvelous book, Microcosm, which uses research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli to illuminate every aspect of the new biology. One chapter was given over to discussion of the work of the team led by Dr Richard Lenski. One of Lenski's papers, showing evolution of a new trait by E. coli (the ability to grow on citrate) in laboratory conditions, attracted the attention of Richard Schlafly, the right-wing Christian activist who runs Conservapedia. Schlafly demanded Lenski's data, resulting in the following illuminating exchange, documented on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site, in which a closed mind meets a surgical strike.

(Link via Roz Kaveny and John Crowley.)

(By the way, it's instructive to follow the open-minded scientists link on Conservapedia's page about Lenski. Hmm. I thought those guys didn't like to be called Creationists any more, preferring the less contentious 'supporters of intelligent design'.)

Spaced

Out today, issue 217 of Interzone, which includes my story 'Little Lost Robot' (aka the big space robot story) as well as stories by Karen Fishler, Paul Tremblay, MK Hobson, Suzanne Palmer and Jason Sandford.

I was going to write something about WALL-E, which I saw last Sunday, but a bit of Googling will reveal a myriad indepth reviews. So I’ll just say that the first forty minutes is one of the best bits of SF cinema I’ve ever seen. The candy-coloured satire of the second half is less successful (and contains a gaping plot hole) but the odd-couple romance between the infinitely curious and engaging WALL-E and the advanced probe EVE carries the day, with a definitive Tinkerbell moment that had the small children in the audience gripped. Increasingly, SFX-rich movies seem pointlessly noisy and frenetic*; WALL-E shows how the same tools can be used in a rich and painterly fashion.

*mind you, the first five minutes of the new Batman movie look great.

Current reading: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

And Junot Diaz has an excellent take on the sandbox game where I’m spending rather too much time shooting cops, mafia hoods and flying rats.

Relocation, Relocation

Stick a dome over this proposed design for a sustainable hotel in Shanghai and imagine it in a crater on Dione or Iapetus...

Shake And Bake

First wet chemistry results from the Phoenix Lander shows that Martian soil is highly alkaline, and definitely interacted with liquid water at some point. The water isn't a surprise, but the alkalinity is - a lot of people thought that Martian soil would be highly acidic and, without being extensively modified, inimicable to plant life. Instead, according to the lead chemist, in one of those quotes that the media loves, you might be able to grow asparagus in it. Yeah, but think of the shipping cost and the carbon footprint.

(Lunar soil, by the way, is suitable for marigolds.)

Lost In Space

Some saint has posted the BBC4 adaptation of Ballard's 'The Enormous Room' on YouTube. Catch it while you can!

(Link via Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits.)

With A Small Flourish Of Trumpets...

PS Publishing has just posted the table of contents for issue #15 of Postscripts magazine:

. . .the biggest issue yet of PS Publishing's award-winning short fiction magazine. Not only that, the entire issue will focus on the science fiction genre, with a positively stellar list of contributing authors and work . . .

The usual 'I'm not worthy' disclaimers apply, of course.

Evolution Now

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, public reading of short papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at a meeting of the Linnean Society launched the idea of evolution by natural selection on the world.

If you want a primer on how far biology has come since then, you can do no better than read Carl Zimmer’s elegant, lucid and vividly written Microcosm, which uses a century of research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli, found in the lower intestine of every human being, to illuminate our understanding of metabolic control, horizontal and vertical gene transference, evolution, the social life of bacteria, the origin of life, arguments against creationism, the ethical and practical problems faced by genetic engineering and synthetic biology, panspermia, and much more. One of the best and most thought-provoking science books I’ve read for a long time.

Following a discussion about the similarities between the evolution and organisation of metabolic networks of E. coli and the growth of man-made networks like the Internet, Zimmer concludes:

At the Dover intelligent design trial, creationists revealed a fondness for analogies to technology. If something in E. coli or some other organism looks like a machine, then it must have been designed intelligently. Yet the term intelligent design is ultimately an unjustified pat on the back. The fact that E. coli and a man-made network show some striking similarities does not mean that E. coli was produced by intelligent design. It actually means that human design is a lot less intelligent than we like to think. Instead of some grand, forward-thinking vision, we create some of our greatest inventions through slow, myopic tinkering.

Slow, myopic tinkering: hmmm, more or less exactly the way I work.

Proof Positive

On Friday, I received a copy of the bound proofs of The Quiet War, well on its way towards becoming an actual book. Here it is, sitting on top of the printed MSS of the first draft of the ongoing. As for that, I've read the draft and made notes on structural changes that need to be made to make the narrative coherent - moving chapters around, deleting material that doesn't move the story forward and noting where there are gaps and inconsistencies that need to be fixed. Next, I'll be working through the text line by line. Some people can do all their drafting directly on screen; I need to make marks on paper, to create a physical history of first and second thoughts which I then transfer to a new draft. Perhaps it's a hangover from my first stories and novels, which were composed on a typewriter. The fact that you had to retype a page if you had second thoughts really concentrated the mind, back then.

But before I get into all that, I'll have to deal with page proofs of The Quiet War, correcting goofs that made it through the various drafts and the editing and copy-editing process, combing out typos and making other last-chance fixes before it goes back to the printers for production in time for publication in October. As in farming, every stage of book production has its season...

Natural Art

Particles + gravity + time = beauty

Commercial Break, Encore

Recently received: the French edition of The Secret of Life, transformed, by the alchemy of translation, into Une Invasion Martienne. You can read an online interview about the book, conducted by Eric Holstein, here.

Elsewhere, you can watch Tom Waits’s press conference about his tour, or listen to the world’s oldest known recordings of computer music, made in 1951. No, it isn’t ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...’ But it's pretty close.

Commercial Update

I've just been told by my hero editor that Gollancz has decided to reprint the Future Classics edition of Fairyland, and hang the expenses. I'm mightily pleased, needless to say.

Elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair memorialises what's being lost around the London Olympic site.

Commercial Break

Cowboy Angels has just been published in paperback, retaining the lovely and evocative cover of the trade paperback/hardback. The publishing group (Hachette Livre UK) that owns the imprint that publishes my stuff (Gollancz) is currently in dispute with amazon.co.uk because the latter want to keep an even higher percentage of the retail price. I’m on the side of my publisher on this one: all publishers have already shaved their margins to the bone, major retailers like Amazon already get more than 50% of the retail price, and cutting the percentage the publishers make on the sale of each book even further would ultimately cut the diversity of titles they could publish. Amazon has been removing sales buttons from some Hachette titles and ‘delinking’ some titles from features like ‘Perfect Partner’ but so far Cowboy Angels hasn’t been affected by these strong-arm tactics. Like many authors I use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com by default to point you to where you can buy my stuff online, but there are plenty of other places, such as the Guardian shop (the Guardian just gave the paperback a nice capsule review).

Over at Locus, Graham Sleight reviews all eight titles of Gollancz’s ‘Future Classics’ series, including Fairyland. That particular edition has gone out of print and because the lovely, prizewinning covers are very expensive to produce, none of the titles in the series will be reprinted. Which nicely but unfortunately illustrates my point about publishers’ margins . . . Although Fairyland is no longer available at Amazon, some bookshops still have a few copies, and I hope to have some good news about a new edition soon.

Rock And Roll

I’m old enough to remember when the physics of 2-D chunks of space junk colliding and splitting into smaller fragments in the primeval video game Asteroids seemed genuinely cutting edge. Now, it seems that something like that may be occurring in Saturn’s F-Ring, whose rapid changes may be created by colliding chunks of rock. Yet again, you just can’t make it up.

Talking of old video games, I highly recommend Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong, a classic new kid/old gunslinger contest involving Donkey Kong and the Screen of Death.

It Isn't Easy Being Green

Down through the early morning heat into the centre of London to see a preview of The Incredible Hulk. More of a correction to rather than a sequel of Ang Lee’s outing with the angry green giant, the second of Marvel Studio’s productions isn’t actively bad, but it’s a disappointing follow-up to the flawed but feisty Iron Man. Still, it starts out well. The creation myth that occupied much of Ang Lee’s movie is recapitulated under the opening credits, efficiently showing how a laboratory accident cursed nuclear physicist Bruce Banner with a monstrous alter ego, the Hulk. The story opens with Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, hiding out from General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, who considers him property of the US Army, attempting to learn how to control the anger and stress levels that cause him to transform into the Hulk if they rise to high, and making a connection with the mysterious Mr Blue, who promises a cure. After evading an attempt to snatch him, Banner ends up back in America, on the run with former sweetheart Dr Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), heading to New York and a rendezvous with Mr Blue, who turns out to be cell biologist Professor Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake). Meanwhile, an experienced soldier (Tim Roth) detailed to capture Bruce Banner is first treated with Super Soldier serum, and when that doesn’t satisfy his thirst for power forces Professor Sterns to give him the full Hulk treatment . . .

Like its protagonist, the movie is divided into two, and the preliminary hide-and-seek between the US Army and Bruce Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro is a lot more exciting and engaging than the blockbuster CGI fest of the second half. A bigger problem is that the human characters aren’t much more appealing than the CGI creatures. Throughout, Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner much as he played ‘John Smith’ at the beginning of Fight Club: mousily quiet and severely repressed. It’s a good take on Banner’s predicament and works well in the opening sequence, but doesn’t develop into anything interesting and lacks Fight Club’s knowing irony. Partly, this is because the nature of the beast means that the lead actor always disappears when the action starts, but in between CGI rampages Banner remains an enigma, and although he’s a scientist, he shows little interest in what it means or feels like to become the Hulk; although Betsy Ross’s new flame is psychiatrist Leonard (who in the comic books was briefly Banner’s psychiatrist, before a dose of Hulk serum transformed him into Doc Samson), the movie misses the chance of a meaningful conversation between him and Banner.

Some nice moments hint at the bones of a better film underlying the blockbuster flab: Banner and Betsy Ross start to make love but can’t follow through because Banner’s arousal might trigger the Hulk; a brief, punchy scene ends with Betsy Ross letting rip at a crazy New York taxi driver, something Banner can’t allow himself to do; a Beauty and the Beast idyll between Betsy Ross and the Hulk references both Frankenstein and King Kong. But these are few and far between, and although there are enough nods to the myth to satisfy fans, and director Louis Leterrier (who scored a hit with The Transporter) gives the action scenes a gritty and visceral feel, especially in a chase through the alleys and rooftops of the favelas, the plot, like one of the episodes of the '70s TV series, doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Instead, a couple of moments that have nothing to do with the movie’s story, including a brief walk-on by another Marvel character, aim us towards the next in the series. Let’s hope it’s a lot meatier than this.