Prometheus

In the tradition of those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't even teach, review, here are a few thoughts on Prometheus.

I think the main point we can take away from both Prometheus and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel is that Ridley Scott's pension pot obviously wasn't performing as well as he would have liked, and needed a bit of topping up. There's nothing really wrong with this film. Scott is a great director, and it shows. The action is fast-paced and the performances are good. You can see and hear what's going on at all times. You never get a stray boom mike bobbing into view or catch a glimpse of the film crew in one of the many reflective surfaces. I'm sure if I'd seen it in 3D — instead of 2D, as god intended — things would have flown out of the screen at me in a very satisfying manner. It was all very competent.

There is a problem with prequels that they can borrow too heavily from the films which came before (after)(this could get confusing) them. In his encyclopaedic analysis of the Star Wars prequels — which as I'm sure you're aware were never made and so do not actually exist — Mr Plinkett points out that Luke and Obi Wan (and Uncle Owen and the bartender at the Mos Eisley cantina) dress the way they do because they live on a hick desert planet. Yet, come the prequels, these desert rags have been adopted as the official uniform of the Jedi. So it is with Prometheus. Maybe David playing basketball has nothing to do with the court scene from Resurrection, but we get the muster scene and the head-mounted cameras from Aliens, the sexually-threatening Android and the flamethrowers. Yet there's one notable absence...

Prometheus also borrows heavily from elsewhere, which is a shame given the strong, unique world which the original films created. As Kim Newman points out, the whole "ancient astronaut" plot has been done to death in SF over the decades since Alien. For my money, 2001 had already presented the definitive version of the story ten years before Alien was released. It also did the boredom of space travel far better. It's sad to see a franchise which originated so many quotable scenes resort to quoting other movies (David's obsession with Lawrence of Arabia). The SF props which make up its background have been drawn from far and wide. The autodoc practically asks you to please state the nature of the medical emergency. (And I'm going to come down on the side of, yes, a caesarian was what she meant to ask for.)

Since Wayland-Yutani-branded crates turn up in Firefly I guess it's only fair that the Prometheus herself should look like Serenity. There is plenty of random shiny gadgetry for the actors to stare at and poke whenever they need to do anything exciting. It makes you wonder exactly how old and backwards the Nostromo was. I wish they'd kitted the ship out with old clackety keyboards and green-screen monitors which clucked as the letters appeared. They could at least have edited out the "Where are you?"s as the character asking stands looking at a 3D map showing with flashing yellow diamonds exactly where everyone was. Also, it was a shame that Chekhov's Iron Man suits didn't get an outing, despite the number of time they were ran past.

(I also wonder about the choice of name "Prometheus" for the ship. (And as a quick aside, Mr Wayland, Prometheus wasn't so much "cast down" by the gods for bringing man fire as "chained to a rock and had his liver torn out on an infinite loop". Subtle difference there.) Something about the metaphor doesn't quite sit right. Personally, I would have kept the Prometheus theme for the aliens and called the ship "Pandora", after the wife the gods fashioned for him. It would be a little more apposite, given what we know about her tendency to open up cans of face-hugging chest-bursting worms.)

The film gets extra points for kicking off the main action on my 118th birthday. (Nice one, Ridders. I do appreciate little touches like that. Cheers.) Unfortunately, about ten minutes in, I'd convinced myself that "Elizabeth Shaw" was the name of Keira Knightley's character in those Pirate movies, and was composing a far more interesting film in my head. One where the feisty heroine swashbuckled her way past Space Jockeys and slime monsters.

Alien was a B-movie horror flick made a thing of beauty by brilliant design and direction. Prometheus... well, I'm not sure what it is, and I'm not sure if it knows, either. It's disappointing in the same way that 3 or Resurrection were when you learnt of the (limited) involvement of William Gibson or Joss Whedon, respectively. It could have been so much more than it was, but it ended up lacking something. And I don't just mean the Alien.

Soon

I GIMPed this up a few weeks back. I get very demotivated very quickly and needed something to keep my enthusiasm up.

This will be a micro-collection. I've already chosen the four stories it will contain (three of which are currently available over on my writing site), and these are with my editor for making readable. Once ready, I'll release it as a Kindle e-book, with a dead tree version (primarily for forcing copied on unwitting friends) to follow soon afterwards.

Of course, if this cover offends any of my Creative friends to the point that they'd like to step in and make me something better...

RIP The Book?

Among the many fascinating events which made up this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival, "RIP The Book?" was one of the most interesting, not least because it intersected in a couple of places with my current interests.

China Miéville spoke first to reassure us that the linear narrative isn't going anywhere, which came as something of a relief. He went on to discuss the ways in which how those narratives are produces may evolve, touching on the idea of music-like remixes. This is something which we at Opuss have been working on for a while now. It will be interesting to see whether China — or his People — will allow his work to be available for treatment in this way.

There was some interesting musing on the subject of what form exactly a "book" would take, with the floor passing to Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital, and a tech gnome from a company called Liquid something, whose name I didn't catch. This was the first time I'd been to any literary events, but I've attended lots of tech gatherings and there is something very striking in the differences between the approaches taken by speakers from the two worlds. Literary speakers seem to talk with an authority and directness which is missing in their tech counterparts, who seem to favour vague, hand-waving statements and almost-motivational promises. Unfortunately this was evident from these two panel members, as they asked us to imagine a future where children's imaginations were fired not by boring old books but by future wonders which incorporated interactive storytelling and what we used to call Multi Media. When the gnome declared that he "wasn't really interested in the words", China's arched eyebrow was a thing of evil beauty. (It also didn't help that, as another audience member observed on the way out, "he wasn't bloody using the microphone properly".)

(This kind of attitude is nothing new. I've witnessed it firsthand myself, when working on a poetry app at a former employer. Faced with some of the greatest, most powerful writing in the English language, Creatives and managers started flailing around for animated gewgaws to make the content "interesting".)

Some of the properties of these future books — such as the ability to look up the definition of words while reading — are already available in current e-readers. Others — such as interactivity, with stories taking different paths depending on user choice — are describing things which have existed for a long time and aren't actually books. Many of the examples were directed at children's books, where there has always been this kind of innovation (think pop-up books and fuzzy felt).

Between China and the tech people came Mark Billingham, who seems like a really nice bloke with a bee in his bonnet about self publishing, particularly in its digital form. This is something which I'm slowly creeping towards (sometime this year, definitely...) so was particularly interested in. Taking a deep breath to quell the initial wave of annoyance his comments provoked, I found myself agreeing with many of his points. Digital self publishing is easy, and as a result there are a great many books released which were written in weeks, with a cover knocked-up by the author's neighbour. Mark also has a problem with the low price these are sold at, and how they are clogging up the best seller lists (and presumably keeping his Professional books down). This raises two issues which weren't really touched on.

Firstly there's the question of who should be allowed to publish. China made a comment about Jeffry Archer, to make the point that the standards of professional publishing aren't necessarily that high. (I think the swath of celebrity "auto"-biographies may have been a better example of this.) If I had a chance, I would have liked to ask Mark who he thought the gatekeepers to being published should be. There are many stories of classic novels being rescued at the last minute from publishers' rejection piles. Is it right that a small number of individuals working for (in the majority of cases) primarily commercially-driven publishing companies should decide what makes it into print? (And here I'll admit that I'm going down the self-publishing route because I don't have the confidence that my writing would be accepted by a publisher. I've tried in the past and been rejected after months or years of waiting for a response. Now I'm going to take a chance and go directly to the readers and let them decide whether what I've written is any good.)

Secondly is the simple matter of taking pride in your work. There is no excuse for releasing work full of copy errors with a badly-designed cover. At the "How Soon is Now?" event, one of the pop-up panelists — whose name I think was Alex something but he was a late addition and isn't in the programme and I didn't quite catch it at the time and oh god am I going senile already? — described how he wasn't allowed a copy editor for the indie project he was working on, on the grounds that someone's wife had found a spelling mistake in one of the Harry Potter books. Anyone who doesn't put in the minimum effort of hiring professionals to fill in the gaps in their skills deserves a thousand one-star reviews. Hiring an editor isn't expensive (in the great scheme of things, especially compared to the amount of your own time you've put into writing) and should be the least you do. (Here I'm following the wonderful advice of David Gaughran in his book Let's Get Digital — if you're considering self publishing you really should read it.) To do otherwise is to devalue your own work, and to give naysayers like Mark extra ammunition.

(Mark also appeared to be showing the signs of advanced Stockholm syndrome when it came to his views on the agency pricing model, but I won't go into that. I think I need to refresh my understanding of the issue, because it seems strange for his views to be at such great odds with how I perceive the economics of the situation.)

In all, the "RIP The Book?" session provided tremendous food for thought and reflected the high quality of the Festival as a whole. I can't wait for next year. (And if the organisers are planning another similar event and are looking for a panelist with experience in both self publishing and the brave new tech world of words...)

Assemblers

This week I saw The Marvellous Avengers or Assembly of the Avengers or Go! Go! Team Avengebots or whatever it's called. As I quipped on the Twitters, it is now officially my all-time no.2 favourite Joss Whedon film. Serenity remains unassailably in the no.1 spot, of course. Apart from having the funnier script and the less-identikit blockbuster set piece what-the-hell-is-going-on? battle sequence, I was simply more invested in the characters. (Although I still totally want to be Tony Stark when I grow up.) And Serenity never had the impact on popular Olde English usage that The New New Avengers is likely to (cut to a playground where school kids are calling each other mewling quims). Hat-tip to Joss for Coulson's almost forth wall breaking final words. But I do wish he'd stop sticking pointy things through the chests of everyone's least-offensive favourite characters.

Empty

Some mornings you wake up to find yourself lying at the bottom of a deep dark pit and you have to claw your way up towards the weak grey light before you can begin another empty day. It isn't like feeling sad, although that's in there somewhere. It can hit you in a crowd on a bright sunny day. Being alone is a symptom. There's a hollowness at the centre of your being, a vacum which sucks the energy from your limbs and the thoughts from your mind. A cold aching void, a yearning nothingness. That's when the voices start, telling you that you're nothing, cataloguing all your failings, the things you've never done, the things you'll never do, the tests that you've failed and can never hope to pass. Telling you that all those people who want nothing to do with you have the right idea. When it strikes all you can do is curl up into a tight little ball and wait for it to get bored and move on. Which it does. Eventually.

Amsterdam

I was in Amsterdam last week. I went to see the Manic Street Preachers play the Paradiso (an amazing gig in a beautiful, intimate venue), but thought I might as well make a weekend of it, especially in light of the whole Appsterdam thing. So here's another one of those bullet point lists I do.

• The Dutch are tall buggers. You really don't want to be stood at the back of a crowd of them.
• They are also all — as far as I can tell — as nice as hell. While the Japanese were universally polite, the Dutch are genuinely friendly.
• They also all appear to speak perfect English. Which is so kind of them that I won't even make a joke about their silly accents.
• The prevalence of cannabis can't be understated. Coffeeshops (note the important distinction between these and cafes) are everywhere, and pot smoke wafts through the streets like smooth jazz.
• The best time to see the red light district is probably on a drizzly grey morning, where you can experience the full effect of its tawdriness. The famous windows are generally just common or garden glazed doors packed closely together, for some reason making me think of vending machines.
• I'd describe the city as some kind of hookers and weed theme park, but that would be to ignore how incredibly beautiful it is. Parts of it are tacky in a British seaside kind of way, but the rest is simply adorable.
• The museums were great. Those that were open. Stuff closing for renovation is an effect I seem to have on anywhere I visit.
• I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason that "xxx" is emblazoned everywhere, including on the city's coat of arms. I should really get round to Wikipediaing it.

"Anniversary"

Read it here. There are spoilers below.

I dashed this off in a day for the Big Think SF short story competition on the theme of "future food". It didn't get anywhere, and if you read it you'll see why: it's a confused mess. It has far too much exposition and at the same time doesn't manage to get across clearly what it's trying to explain. It's a failure in world building. I was trying to build up the revulsion / horror of the main theme — that people routinely eat their own flesh, which is produced by the same machines and processes which create the tailored artificial organs which keep them alive and extend their lifespans — and then cap that with the introduction and breaking of a final taboo — the eating of other people's flesh (in this case as a gesture of commitment / devotion).

I may come back to this one day, just because I don't think the idea itself is too bad, and I'd like another shot at doing it right. I also kinda like the term "Geneva Chicken". That may be the future version's title.

"Tokyo Song"

Read it here.

Did I mention I went to Tokyo?

I'm not good at travelling. I've hardly been anywhere — opportunity and money never managed to coincide until just recently — and I've never really got the hang of holidays. Telling myself that I'd use these trips as research is my way of justifying the time and expense to myself.

I had the idea of writing something about Great Alex (the band who have been appearing as fragments — an oblique mention here, a sly reference there — in some of my writing for a while now) touring Tokyo even before I got on the plane and shared economy with a genuine touring group. Seeing them convinced me I was right. I do like it when fate gives me a clear sign like that. I also wanted to try out the voice of Matt, their drummer, in preparation for a longer story which I have planned (and which one day I may get to). Meanwhile, this gives me a chance to explore some of the themes which that will cover, while reusing my observations of the otherness of Japan — the surprisingly slight differences — pretty much all of which have been recorded elsewhere here in my travel notes. It also let me begin to flesh out the band's back catalogue of songs (or at least their titles), which is a part of the world building which I really enjoy.

Doing further research for this also gave me an excuse to trawl YouTube for 80s pop. The Graham Parker reference was added after I posted the first version of the story, after Brett Easton Ellis mentioned the song "Discovering Japan" in a tweet.

Mistake

I'll admit that I made a mistake leaving my last job. Not because of the pay — although I had got used to having a regular income and, yes, finding contract work seems to be far more of a chore than I had expected — but because of the people. I miss working with other people in general, and with the good friends I'd made there in particular. And while I try to keep in touch, it's proving hard — as hard as I've always found it to keep in touch with people, to stop them drifting away out of my life. And the thing is that I knew this would happen. It was the reason I always gave for not wanting to go contracting, no matter how good the money. I should have stuck with the job, no matter how soul-destroying the frustration became.

Hosting

Working on the principal that life is far too short to waste time administering a dedicated server, I've begun moving the couple of web sites I still run — Bounded by Infinity and Just About Managing — over to SquareSpace. While I'll lose a lot of the flexibility of the VPS I currently use, I won't have to worry about keeping the software stack up to date. I'll also get a few extras — like analytics, which I've never got round to setting up — into the bargin. It should even work out a little bit cheaper. Selling SimCap through the Mac App Store has meant that I no longer need to run my own system to dole out licence keys, which had been my mine reason for sticking with self-hosting. And if I ever find myself needing to do anything webapp-ish there's always Google App Engine.