Falldog

On the recommendation of a friend, I’ve started ‘The Anubis Gates’ by Tim Powers. Lovely stuff so far, with one gorgeous conceit about why magic is so prevalent in myths of the ancient world and yet so rare (and dangerous, if you accept belief in it) in the modern world. Plus, time travel. What’s not to like?

To those of you who stop by and have an interest in writing, I’d like to make two book recommendations on the subject.

First of all, thanks to a mention on Al Robertson’s blog (Al was on the recent Arvon course with me; he’s a man of staggering intellect, noteworthy talent and great height), I’ve picked up Alan Wall’s ‘Writing Fiction’. A tough book, which approaches its subject matter with a serious seriousness and a fierce reverence. There’s lots in it to think about, and a great deal of it I thoroughly disagree with, but the mere act of doing so is quite valuable. Like the aforementioned Arvon course, it’s educational to be confronted with ways of viewing your craft that don’t chime with your own convictions: on the one hand, it forces you to look at things from another angle, and on the other, it validates and strengthens your way of thinking and doing – and writing.

Wall’s book feels, sometimes, like it’s bullying you with its high-minded approach; it’s a form of tough love, but its inclusive, though simultaneously faintly condescending, view of genre fiction is irksome. It’s damning with faint praise, it’s certainly begrudging, and you can’t help but think he misses the point of the few ‘SF’ classics he discusses. (At one point, he says that science is a sadly unexplored theme in mainstream fiction, before admitting that science fiction is all about science… the underlying assumption being, “But you don’t want to go off and read any of that rubbish – read (and write) a proper book instead!”) But, for all that, I’ve certainly found the book useful as a tool for interrogating my approach to my work.

Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘Steering the Craft’, on the other hand, is a joy. It’s three main pluses, in my view, are these: it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by genre fiction (surprise, surprise – it’s by Le Guin, after all), it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by the novel (it has a refreshing approach to the subject of plot: she misses it out, intimating that it’s your novel, you know its shape – and it will find its own shape through the writing anyway), and it’s in love with the freedom and power of the English language. This last point makes up almost the whole of the book, as it looks at ways to use language to build a fiction from the ground up.

It tries to suggest (and I’m putting words in the author’s mouth) that a novel can be as beautiful – in sound, and form, and rhythm – as a poem. Those three things, she suggests, can be found in everything from the shortest sentence to the whole span of the novel viewed ‘from above’. This is absolutely how I am approaching my novel, with a mind to its beauty – not to sound pretentious, of course, I’m no James Joyce, after all. But beauty in writing comes from many sources, from the well-honed phrase to the perfectly proportioned plot. These things have a rhythm, and a pace, and a shape and sound – which is why I hate ‘prosaic’ being used as a dirty word. What’s so ordinary about prose? This is precisely what Le Guin wants you to think about and, more importantly, get over.

If you’ve an interest in getting better as a writer, start here and here.

I’d been warned by those who’ve seen more of Heroes than I have (as of tonight, the series’ debut on British terrestrial TV, that would be more than two episodes) that it doesn’t really kick in until the end of the second episode. They weren’t kidding, though I enjoyed the ride up to the ohmigod cliffhanger they’d talked about. An airy, measured (the Mrs would say slow) pace, really interesting characters, and decent writing (a little hung up on its themes here and there, maybe – but for every character who banged on about their destiny, there was one who was just caught up in the sometimes brutal realities of the life they’re stuck with now).

There have been a heap of comics that pose the question “What would it really be like if someone woke up in the real world with superpowers?”, but it’s refreshing to see a TV show telling this story for the first time. What’s more promising is that the writers haven’t just rested on that alone for the concept: there’s clearly loads more going on, and many more stories to tell besides those of the characters dealing with their new abilities – which would almost certainly have become tedious before very long.

I’m pleased that I’ve enjoyed it as much as my friends who’ve seen it thought I would. I’m just going to have to keep my lug-holes shut now, to make sure nobody spoils any of it for me.

Which brings me to Harry Potter (NO SPOILERS!). We saw new movie The Order of the Phoenix last week, which I hugely enjoyed. This book is the first I hadn’t even attempted to read, so I came to the film totally fresh. The book before, The Goblet of Fire, I tried to read about a dozen times, but I could never get past the teeth-grindingly dull Quiddich World Cup at the beginning. Now, since seeing the new film and witnessing the release of the final book, I’ve been faced with a difficult decision: read books six and seven before the next film and so get up to speed, or don’t read them, enjoy the films for what they are, but spend the next three plus years trying not to find out what happens to Harry in the end.

I should point out I’m not hugely bothered. The HP stuff is fun, on the whole, but the books are generally turgid: I just can’t get behind either JK’s clunky prose or the evident love of the author for the world she’s created. It’s a rod for her own back, really. I can’t imagine for a minute the HP books became the phenomenon they are because she’s a good writer; their success, I’m sure, is down to a mix of the hugely detailed world of Hogwarts and some inexplicable mass delusion of the part of the reading public. (I honestly believe that there is a similar drive behind both the fervour surrounding Potter and the national meltdown following the death of Princess Di. They are, to me, equally inexplicable in any rational sense, but both tap into some desperate society-wide infantilism: eager dreams of a world in which you can learn to be a wizard, and the terrible mourning over the death of a magical princess. But anyway…)

I get the feeling the wordcounts for the Potter books spiralled out of control not just because her editors were too scared to dare tell JK to write more concisely (or, heaven forbid, just better), but also because JK’s confidence in her own abilities was not so great as to avoid cramming in every little detail of her world, again and again, in every book, just to cover all bases with regards to what people may have liked before.

Anyway, I digress. I think that diatribe makes my decision a bit easier. I shall not bother with the books (I’m knee-deep in du Maurier at the moment, and I’d rather spend my precious reading time with her at the moment), and I’ll just wait for the movies. In the meantime, having the ending spoiled would be irksome, but not the end of the world.

I know about Dumbledore in book six, by the way.

[swipes finger across throat]

I worry about what Doctor Who has done to me. More precisely, I worry for what it’s done to my tastes. And by that I don’t mean that it has given me a tolerance for shoddy TV science fiction (cf Blake’s 7, most obviously, and any number of other bits of rubbish).

This week saw the release on DVD of a story that occupies a rather monolithic position in my childhood memory (and probably that of every fan of a certain age). It was in this story, ‘Logopolis’, that the nine-year-old me saw Doctor Who change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison. “Hang on! I was just getting to like the goggle-eyed shouty man and now this!” But I was young, I rolled with the punches; and, in fact, it’s not the regeneration that makes this story cast such a long shadow in my memory, it’s the story’s eponymous setting.

The planet Logopolis is a world populated by whispering mathematicians, whose murmured calculations hold the universe together. The Logopolitans take numbers, speak the calculations, and make things flesh. “They use word of mouth… [they] mutter, intone.”

When the Doctor finally gets there (about halfway through the story, most of the time prior to this being taken up with the changing of a tyre), we first see it from above: a grey-pink jumbled maze of buildings, the twisting corridors between them making the curved vista look like a brain – the mind of the universe, in fact. And there, crowning the scene, an unlikely seeming radio telescope: hard, jarring Earth technology jutting from this mystical landscape.

At the time, the series’ script editor was a man who had an obsession with the scientific, and who was very keen to get as much ‘hard science’ into Doctor Who as possible. ‘Logopolis’ is one of the finest examples of this, jam-packed as it is with half-realistic technobabble which feels like it’s cribbed from the index of a particularly esoteric physics textbook. All of which makes it all the more surprising that so much of the story is predicated on the idea of pure will made manifest through the power of incantation – a more magical idea you’d be very hard pressed to find.

But it’s this juxtaposition that makes me so fond of Logopolis, I think, and what has made its imagery endure so thoroughly in my memory. That first, overhead shot of Logopolis is burnt into my mind’s eye as strongly as any other childhood memory; its strangeness, the discomfort of its science/magic clash, immediately captivating the young me – and captivating me still.

And it’s this clash of the magical and the scientific that has gone on to colour my tastes in fiction. It’s not simply a question of ‘liking science fiction’ or ‘liking fantasy’. While I’m partial to fiction of that type, I’m still remarkably fussy about it. For a piece of fiction to really tickle my fancy, there has to be some sort of clash: the magic realism of the novels of Paul Magrs (who later turned out to be a Doctor Who fan, and turned his considerable talents to writing for the range of novels based on the series – and later still, I snared him for a Doctor Who short story collection I edited, which is still one of the highlights of my career) is just one manifestation of the conjunction of real and unreal that I like so much.

It’s there in all my Officially Favourite Things: Buffy, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, even the jolt of the Cylons’ mysticism in Battlestar Galactica, along with the many other odds and sods I hold dear to my heart, including, of course, Doctor Who.

It’s precisely the clash of mystical and science-fictional that turned me on to Liz William’s ‘Darkland’ – which, you may remember back on day one of this blog, was the book that set me on the path I’m on now. Today, I picked up another of her books, about a police detective who solves problems to do with demons and ghosts and… er… I realise this sounds familiar, given recent reading matter, but it has a different spin – and even so, it’s another prime example of the real-meets-unreal bait that gets my mental carp a-bitin’. Er.

So, I suppose this entry is a sort of marker. Stuck here with this last big freelance stint in this office, the dream of spending all my time writing and creating – playing in my own created worlds, just like those made by others which I enjoy so much – seems further away than I would like. But I know I’ll be there soon, and with each passing day, I get more excited about the prospect.

For you, I hope this post was at the very least worth your time. For me, it’s a little heads-up to say, “You know, it’s OK. You’re still on the right path. Stick with it.”

On Saturday, we had a couple of friends round for dinner and, instead of wine, we bought in a small festival’s worth of bottled beer of one unusual sort of another. A triumph! I would recommend it for an unusual twist to any dinner party.

Delights included: the cloudy, nutty Trappist beer from Orval Abbey; the lightly sweet Organic Honeydew from Fullers; a beer (which I didn’t try, so can’t report on) made with the same yeast used to make champagne; Greene King’s Beer to Dine For* (which everyone should have with a meal at least once in their life – it goes especially well with pork and lamb, I have found); a raspberry beer (a bottle of which I hid from the over-keen guests, as I like raspberry beer and, frankly, was being selfish – sorry, guests!); and, as an after-dinner treat, a glass of Meantime’s coffee beer, which is like Guinness, pudding and espresso all in one.
There are still one or two untried varieties left in the fridge, so there’s more excitement to come. Lucky old me.

In other news: I mentioned the fact I’d recently discovered the Harry Dresden magical-crime novels, you may remember. Funny how things come about. Last week, I saw an advert in a US magazine for the Sci-Fi Channel’s TV series of the books – and now, today, I discover that the same series is due to hit our shores, on Sky One, in just a couple of weeks. Am now unduly excited, having enjoyed the first book tremendously.

Being based in Chicago gives any crime fiction a particular echo anyway, and ‘Storm Front’ plays on this hard-boiled heritage while adding ladles full of oddball magic, fairies, talking skulls and summoned demons. The mystery is tightly plotted and, if the ‘gruff, scruffy, singleton private dick working with the hard-nosed, hard-done-by female cop’ is clichéd, at least the fantastical trappings help it take a large step away from the predictable. I hope, and mostly believe, that the author, Jim Butcher, had his tongue at least tickling the inside of his cheek during the writing, but even so the story is full-blooded, scary and real where it needs to be, and soft and silly where such lightness is welcome. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I would imagine, but a nice, light, different read.

* Ooh! Get the Wikipedia write-up on the beer in question: “the currently popular golden lager style”. A note of snobbishness, with an aftertaste of mint?