Politics Is What Humans Do

A little light reading for you: Martin Lewis’ interview of Richard Morgan, from Vector 253:

So your time in Turkey and Spain was helpful to you as a writer?

Yes, very. It’s a powerful shock to the system to go and live in a place where millions of people exist day-to-day on a set of cultural assumptions markedly different from your own. As with seeing the feminist (or more simply the female) perspective on things, you are forced out of your accustomed world-view, forced to consider its validity as against any other. The result is ultimately very empowering – you come away with a far better sense of what is of real value in your own culture, and of what could really do with being changed. Plus (if you can beat your own nasty knee-jerk prejudices) you get an overwhelming sense of common humanity, a (one would think fairly obvious) understanding that at basic levels people are similar wherever you go – but you get that understanding at an emotional rather than an intellectual level. And then of course, there’s the wealth an experience like that brings to your life in terms of getting to know different food, different music, different languages, different kinds of humour … and all of those will feed into your fiction, and make it correspondingly richer, more human and more textured.

Save Heroes

Here:

We need to write a detailed critique of the plot, character, race and gender elements of Heroes. We need to have one place where the producers and writers of Heroes can come and find what fandom has to say on these issues.

That’s the purpose of this website. We don’t need to Save Heroes from cancellation or network misuse, we need to Save Heroes from itself. Because it’s not a lost cause. It’s still capable of being the amazing show it was in season one. No, it’s capable of being even better.

[…]

Timeline

Week of November 19 – 25
Putting together the first draft – accepting comments/links/contributions from all fans

November 26 – 28
Creating the first draft, soliciting input from contributors.

December 3rd
Final draft ready.

Beowulf

A quick post about this, mainly because Abigail said the other day that Beowulf “looks like the unholy love child of The Polar Express and 300” and, having seen it, I think this is a trifle unfair. Beowulf is better than The Polar Express because its characters almost never look like creepy soulless automata — the motion-capture definitely has an easier time of it with closeups, older characters and characters in motion than it does with distance shots, young characters, or as Roz Kaveney notes, moments of repose, but there are still long stretches when you forget about the technology and are absorbed into the story.

And Beowulf is better than 300 because, well, just about every film ever made is better than 300, but specifically because it has characters for the motion capture to distract you from, not to mention action sequences that aren’t pure tedium and a healthy sense of its own ridiculousness. With the exception of the truly bizarre cheeseboard of accents (it’s very nearly worth the price of admission to hear Ray Winstone’s cockney hard-man delivery of “I am Beowulf, and I’m here to kill yer monstah!”), the film is not a comedy by any stretch of the imagination. It is a film about manly men doing manly things — this Beowulf is basically the Jack Bauer of the early middle ages — but it’s still a film that knows full well when it’s being OTT and winks at the viewer just enough to make it all fun. When Our Hero is swallowed by a sea monster and then bursts its single, giant eyeball from inside its skull, for instance, the moment is almsot immediately undercut by the people listening to Beowulf relate his tale. ([Sceptic] “How many was it you killed, again? Twenty?” [Beowulf, frostily] “Nine.” [Beowulf’s comrade, sotto voce] “Last time it was three.”)

The point is also made more than once that Beowulf is not entirely sane; and there are other, occasional serious moments that lift the whole, such as the confrontation in which a diminished, worn King Beowulf basically dares a captured Frisian invader to kill him. The Frisian wavers, of course, and Beowulf, dismissively, tells his men to “given him a coin and let him go. Now he has a story to tell.” It’s such moments that remind you that this story is actually about things that matter; about power and heroism and reputation and the slow passing of an age. None of which gets in the way of the greatest reason why I’m quite happy having spent time and money watching Beowulf: the stupendously realised dragon in the final act, and the even more stupendously realised action sequence featuring said dragon. I have been waiting a long time to see a convincing dragon on the big screen, and had thought I was going to have to wait until they got around to making The Hobbit, but Beowulf scratched the itch good and proper. What can I say? Sometimes I’m shallow.

Quotes

Sam Thompson in the LRB, reviewing The Steep Approach to Garbadale earlier this year:

When Fielding tells him that ‘history is finished . . . Capitalist democracy has won and the rest is mopping up,’ Alban replies: ‘Bullshit. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads SF comes out with this crap about the end of history.’ Much of Banks’s own science fiction features an anarchist paradise called The Culture, a galaxy-spanning, ‘post-scarcity’ civilisation in which everyone harmoniously does just as they like, thanks to transcendentally high technology, infinite productive capacity and the benign supervision of prodigiously powerful artificial intelligences. It reads as the utopian solution to the wrongs that enrage Alban, an alternative set of rules by which humans might play. No wonder science fiction readers are right-thinking people – they have seen the answers. But the problem, back at the beginning of the 21st century, is that there is no obvious way of getting there from here. The other side of SF utopianism is something close to despair, with Alban denouncing the shortcomings of the present: ‘Stupidity and viciousness were rewarded, illegality not just tolerated but encouraged, lying profoundly worked, and torture was justified – even lauded. Meanwhile the whole world was warming up, getting ready to drown … Everybody should know better. Nobody did.’

Brian Aldiss, writing in the Guardian, today:

For a while after the second world war, a spirit of optimism prevailed in SF magazines. It was a time of great projects, when rockets reached Mars, or we held what wars were available on Pluto, or we even dreamed of fleets of ships reaching far into the galaxy. […] But then the future went the other way – a duller, yet more dangerous way. The cold war began to blow instead. The lights went out in Cybernetics City.

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination. Our new and creepy scenario is already in the hands of the scientists, if not MGM.