11 Minutes Ago

Hello everyone – Niall introduced me in his post below, but for anyone who doesn’t know me already, I’m Vector production editor and usually found in the Torque Control comments section, and now he’s given me the keys to the blog. You can expect more posts from me on media SF and other fannish topics, while I leave the serious book blogging to Niall. I’ll try not to lower the tone too much.

The seventh annual Sci Fi London film festival took place over the bank holiday weekend. As mentioned previously, it hosts the presentation of the Arthur C Clarke award as part of the opening night, but over the next five days they showed over twenty science fiction films. I think this was the fourth year I’ve attended the festival, and while the films are sometimes hit and miss as to quality, but for every Subject Two or Recon 2022 there’s a Primer to restore your faith in intelligent film-making.

11 Minutes Ago isn’t this year’s Primer, but it’s the obvious comparison to make to this ultra-low-budget time travel romance. Pack is our protagonist, a time-traveller from fifty years in the future, who can only travel back in time for eleven minutes before he has to return to the future. The film consists of eight of these eleven minute jumps, covering two hours of a wedding reception in our time, but two years of Pack’s life. The twist is that we’re following Pack’s visits chronologically for him, but they jump about in almost reverse order between 7 and 9pm on the day of the ~~California Presidential Primary~~ wedding reception.

If Pack can travel through time, why does he keep coming back to the same two hours? We see early on (for Pack and the viewers, that is, at the wedding it’s nearly 9pm) that the answer is Cynthia, a bridesmaid who seems to have fallen for Pack’s charms, and gives an enthusiastic yes to a question he hasn’t even asked yet.

The introduction to the film told us that it was shot in 24 hours. Even without knowing this, it’s clear that the film was made on a shoestring, which they try and turn into a virtue. The angle they take is that the time-travelling Pack is more interesting to the wedding videographers than the actual wedding, and we’re seeing their film, which not only gives Pack someone to explain everything to but means that any dodgy camerawork can be explained away as well. Setting it all during two hours in one location means only one set, but they shoot it well enough and from enough angles that it doesn’t get boring. What doesn’t fare so well is the sound – some lines are inaudible, and the music (which I suspect was being played in the background of the shoot) is overwhelming and almost continuous for the first half of the film.

What works really well are the interweaving plots of the people at the wedding reception, and the way they can set up mysteries for which the answers come from the beginning of the evening – explaining why the groom finishes the evening pissed as a newt when he starts off a tee-totaller, why the bride’s mother is continually making balloon animals, which of Nancy the bridesmaid’s many lovers bought her earrings. Only once do they take it too far, with a card trick from Pack which serves no purpose and feels like padding, even in an 84-minute film.

What doesn’t work as well is the actual science fiction. It seems that the time-travel is just an excuse to do an interesting and unconventional timeline, but while Memento managed to come up with a good rationale for this, 11 Minutes Ago has Pack coming back to our time to collect a sample of clean air so it can be replicated in the future and reverse the crippling lack of libido which is killing the birth rate, an idea which vies with the Doctor setting the poison gas on fire in this week’s Doctor Who for stupidest way to save the Earth.

Assuming you can get past this lack of science in your science fiction, there’s another problem, in that having set up the ending of Pack and Cynthia’s romance at the start of the film, they have to convince me that they would get so far in such a short space of time. Setting Cynthia up as extremely selective in her choice of boyfriends, and someone who is reticent to move too fast, makes their task even more difficult. Pack’s chat-up technique alternates between wannabe profound statements about the nature of time and the fleetingness of their moments together and cheesy lines about her beautiful eyes and soft skin, and if it were me I’d have run a mile after the first half-hour. Further complicating matters is that in a film filled with surprisingly fine actors, Christina Mauro can’t persuade me that Cynthia is a woman so instantly mesmerising that Pack will spend months and years of his life preparing for eleven minute visits to her when she seems like a fairly boring doormat,and that feeds back to make Pack even more of an obsessive stalker than he already is.

Even if the central romance falls short, there’s still enough interest in the supporting characters to make the film worth watching. You’ll need to pay attention, but if it’s not quite the mind-bending experience of Primer you will at least be able to follow it without resorting to diagrams, and the ending, while not unexpected, is neatly done. I don’t know if it has any chance of a release outside the festival circuit, but it’s worth catching if you get the chance.

A Panel I Would Like To Attend

As noted here, from the Wiscon schedule:

How Much Is Too Much?
“Unless we’re reading or writing about a utopia, the societies in our fantasy worlds are going to have problems. In fact, a culture without problems invariably comes off as shallow and unrealistic. Does this mean we need to include things like sexism and racism if we want to tell a believable story? And if so, are we, as authors, guilty of perpetuating whatever-ism in the real world?”
Monday, 8:30-9:45 A.M. (Assembly)
M: Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Rihn, Elissa Malcohn, L. Timmel Duchamp

Alas, no Wiscon for me this year, so I’ll have to rely on panel reports from people keen enough to get up for an 8.30 am Monday panel. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about off and on since the question came up in the discussion of Martin’s review of Red Seas Under Red Skies last year, and thinking about it this week in particular having just finished Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, which takes a diametrically opposite position to Lynch.

In other news, I’ve gotten around to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is to give Liz the ability to post here. Other additions may follow; this was always meant to be a Vector blog rather than just my blog, after all (Liz, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out for most of you, has been production editor for the last year or so).

Things to Come

So. A Clarke judge no longer. More free time. What am I going to do with myself?

Well, first up, Thursday sees the “science fiction as a literary genre” symposium organised by Gresham College, at which I hope to see a fair few of the people reading this. After that comes the BSFA/SFF joint AGM event, on Saturday 7th June, and then at the end of June there’s the SFF Masterclass in SF criticism. So, no Wiscon (or Readercon) for me this year, but I won’t be short of things to do.

In blogging terms, once I’ve caught up on various other (mosty Vector-related) tasks I’d been letting slide a bit, I’m hoping to get a slightly more regular schedule going — say, links on a Monday, a review on a Friday (or possibly vice versa). The Baroque Cycle Reading Group continues (next installment due Friday 16th!), and by the end of the month I hope to be joining Karen in blogging about some of the Masterclass reading. There’ll probably also be more discussions, after the fashion of the Matter roundtable, at some point.

And speaking of reading, here’s my current TBR-imminent:

From top to bottom:

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos — an impulse buy from a second-hand book stall a while ago. Given that Stand on Zanzibar is on the Masterclass reading list this seems like an appropriate time to try Dos Passos.
Speculative Japan, edited by Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis — a review copy for Strange Horizons, which I have very selfishly been sitting on because I want to read it. Now I have time.
Hopeful Monsters by Hiromi Goto — one of the stories in this is on the Masterclass reading list; I’ve been meaning to try Goto for a while, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read the rest of the book as well.
Intuition by Allegra Goodman — Abigail raved about this a while ago, and Nic bought it for me for Christmas. And it does sound right up my street.
Dreamers of the Day by Maria Doria Russell — if the pile was sorted by the order in which I intend to read it, rather than by size, this one would be at the top.
The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block — the latest sf/f-ish book from Faber, this one dealing with, as you’d expect, memory; and it’s already had a glowing review from the New York Times.
Flood by Stephen Baxter — the big science fiction novel in this month’s reading; I’ll be reviewing it for IROSF.
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson — as noted above.

Plus, almost certainly, the mundane Interzone, when I get my hands on a copy. All of which, hopefully, should keep me out of trouble. What are you reading at the moment?

Mundane Frenzy

Public service announcement: apparently Geoff Ryman will be talking about mundane sf on Front Row, on Radio 4, at 7.30 this evening.

The occasion (I assume) being the imminent publication of the “Mundane sf” issue of Interzone, as discussed over on the BSFA forum. It’s out next Thursday, in fact, and in the meantime here’s the fiction contents:

“How to Make Paper Airplanes” by Lavie Tidhar
“Endra” – from Memory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
“The Hour is Getting Late” by Billie Aul
“Remote Control” by R.R. Angell
“The Invisibles” by Élisabeth Vonarburg
“Into the Night” by Anil Menon
“Talk is Cheap” by Geoff Ryman

If that’s not enough, here’s a Guardian blog piece by Damien G Walter:

The battleground for this SF smackdown would be the pages of one of the world’s most influential short fiction magazines. Where literary fiction has long since abandoned the short form in favor of the fertile intellectual territory of Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, SF has continued to value short fiction as the arena where the genre innovates and evolves. Enter Interzone, Britain’s longest-running SF magazine, at a time when British writers have come to dominate the field. Never one to shy away from a good dust-up, but smart enough not to step in front of a locomotive full of enraged SF fans, the editors of Interzone handed control to a team of guest editors representing the heartland of Mundanista territory, and the call went forth for stories that represented the Mundane manifesto.

No prizes for spotting the most ironic statement in this paragraph.

EDIT: You know, it’s almost like some mastermind is coordinating this. Here’s the first review of IZ216, which is generally positive, although it offers almost no insight into how well the issue functions as a showcase for mundane sf.

AFTER FRONT ROW: Well, that was brief, but good to hear nonetheless. Here’s the Listen Again link.

The Winner

And the winner of the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award is …

Black Man by Richard Morgan

Congratulations to Richard Morgan; and of course, it’s an excellent book, which you should all go and read right now. Or, if you prefer, you could look at my photos from the award party and ceremony, over here. Paul Billinger has some here, including a good one of the judges.

I haven’t seen many reactions around yet, but Abigail Nussbaum is pleased. Jeff VanderMeer also thinks it’s a good choice, and has a short piece up at the Amazon blog. Instant Fanzine considers it “the least slapfightlicious choice.”

UPDATE: Paul Raven’s happy (but it’s the only one of the shortlist), Joe Gordon is chuffed, and Jonathan and James report they enjoyed attending the ceremony, and the Guardian implies that Richard Morgan is a genetically-modified assassin. (They also — mistakenly — give the impression that Paul Billinger was a voting judge; in fact the Chair’s role, which Paul carried out very well, is to moderate the discussion.)

Over on the Guardian blog, Sam Jordison reports on a night in the new world of SF. Two things strike me about this report: first, it’s great to hear that the passion involved in the decision was visible to an observer; second, I really regret not knowing that he was there, because I’d have liked to thank him for his continuing series of Guardian blog posts on past Hugo Award winners. I very much hope he gets a chance to post about his reaction to Black Man.

Elsewhere, Joe Abercombie is pleased the award went to an unashamedly sf novel, Philip Palmer enjoyed himself, and the post-presentation Gollancz meal seems to have gone well. (As for the tiny trousers mentioned in both posts, I can only assume that Adam Roberts has been supplying Lilliputian assistants to his fellow writers, and is now running a premium clothing-replacement business.)

Sci-Fi London have footage from the ceremony here, while the text of Paul Billinger’s speech can be found here. And io9’s take: “Shockingly, Science Fiction Book Wins SF Book Award”.