I have, on occasion in the past, produced a miscellanies of assorted nonsense here in honour of the festive season. I do like to keep a tradition going, so here we are. This time around, just a randomish concoction of audio-visual amusements.
Audio first.
In the science category, the Astronomy Cast is a relatively new discovery for me, and I commend to you a recent special edition they did concentrating on Strange Stuff in Spaaaaace. Lots of their episodes are fun and informative too, so give them a browse.
In the fiction category, not one but two Christmas stories (this year and last) from Tim Pratt (one of my favourite short fiction writers) and Heather Shaw, courtesy of Podcastle: the 2011 one is The Ghost of Christmas Possible, that from a year ago (probably my favourite) is a bonkers romp entitled The Christmas Mummy.
And in the ‘Writers Talking’ category, here’s a properly substantial interview with Steven Erikson, creator of the properly enormous Malazan series that began with Gardens of the Moon. I found it extremely interesting, for all sorts of reasons which can perhaps best be summed up under the single heading of: ‘here’s a writer of epic fantasy who has thought deeply and seriously about what he’s doing’. It’s an education in how much can be going on in an author’s head, and why their books turn out the way they do. Also, it sounds like I’ve been mentally mispronouncing ‘Malazan’ all this time. Who knew?
Books. Kind of.
The book trailer is finally starting to come of age, I think. Good ones are still extremely rare, but in recent weeks I’ve noticed a few pretty enticing ones showing up here and there. I’ve absolutely no idea whether these things actually make a difference to sales, mind you; someone must think they might, though, or they wouldn’t exist.
Both of at those achieved at least this much: I’m curious about the books. (Although I have to admit, I was already curious about the second one).
Clips, clips, clips
The last issue of SciFiNow I read had a loooong list of funny/interesting geeky clips that have appeared on the internet over the years. I shamelessly (and lazily) harvested their suggestions to bring to you the following, which I offer without further comment. (And apologies for any irritating ads that may precede the start of the stuff that’s potentially funny or interesting).
Okay, suspending the no further comment thing for a moment, this next one’s an amazing thing to find buried in a list of geeky clips: the legendary Fritz Lang, creator of Metropolis, talks about his encounter with the Nazi propaganda machine. Did I say this is amazing?
Because you can never have too many links, right? And they don’t even all have to be about me … though some of them are, of course.
Let’s flag a couple of reviews of The Edinburgh Dead, first.
Neth Space likes it ( ‘a very good historical gothic mystery horror urban supernatural thriller’ !)
So does Civilian Reader ( ‘a superb, slow-burning horror suspense. Very highly recommended.’ !)
Come to that, so do the folks at RT Book reviews, who’ve got it listed as a nominee in the Fantasy category for their annual awards. That’s nice, don’t you think?
And here’s something that tickles me. As regular visitors here may have noticed, I’m a big, big podcast fan, so it’s particularly nice to be able to report my own podcast debut. It has to be said, life is full of small lessons in humility, and one of them for me is hearing my own voice as others do: never fails to chip away at my self-image. I did have a bit of a head cold at the time of recording (fully congealed sinuses, if you must know), but sadly I have a feeling I always sound much like this. Ho hum.
Anyway, of all the places I thought I might end up talking about one of my books, the venue for my first podcast appearance wasn’t one of them, but it was a jolly pleasant experience: the National Review’sBetween the Covers podcast. You do, of course, come away from a quick, unedited interview like that with your brain buzzing with all the things you should have said and didn’t, but I don’t think I said anything that invites legal action or anything, so that counts as some sort of success in my book.
Now, on to some less self-serving content netted out of the great ocean that is the internet.
First, two podcasts of possible interest to those, like me, with a near-limitless appetite for learning more about history:
The Seige of Tenochtitlan got talked about on BBC radio’s In Our Time programme recently – available on BBC iplayer here, or you can probably find a downloadable version in this list. Difficult to think of a more extreme example of clashing cultures in all of human history, really …
And Max Hastings talks at some length about the Second World War on the BBC History magazine podcast – direct link to audio here, or find it in the list here (it’s the 21st October edition). I found it interesting mostly because he concentrates on some of the details that often get overlooked or ignored in discussions about the war (like how many Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed … i.e. a very, very large number).
And now one of the most remarakble demonstrations of fan dedication and craftsmanship I’ve ever encountered. The ultimate Star Wars documentary, in that you get to watch the film while simultaneously getting deluged with background information, annotations, creator interviews etc. etc. Very, very clever and entertaining, and all the more remarkable because the same fan has done the same thing for Empire Strikes Back and Jedi. Here, for your viewing pleasure, then, is Star Wars – all of it! – as you’ve never seen or heard it before.
I mean, seriously: that almost justifies the entire existence of the internet by itself, doesn’t it?
But let’s end on a less cheery note and dip our toes into the muddy waters of the impending bookpocalypse. It’s mesmerizing, watching the turmoil into which the whole publishing industry is descending bit by bit. Here’s two markers along the way to wherever it is we’re heading that caught my notice recently:
Ewan Morrison asking Are books dead, and can authors survive? The answer to the first bit of that is clearly Not Yet. Print books are clearly going to fade into a niche, but e-books aren’t going to be dying any time soon. The answer to the second bit, I’m not so sure about. The folks who sell really, really big numbers of their books are going to be just fine, of course. The rest of us? Actually: maybe not.
The picture Morrison paints is the worst case scenario, and I can’t really buy into it unreservedly, but … but … there are more than enough folk out there around the internet hailing the digital revolution as the best thing since sliced bread, and I increasingly find myself inclining towards a much darker prognosis, not only for publishers (turmoil hardly covers what they’re looking at) and writers (I strongly suspect if – like me – you’re not a bestseller, things are about to get uncomfortable, to say the least) but also for readers (be careful what you wish for … low prices and an explosion in self-publishing don’t come without consequences).
The weird thing is, there’s so much going on that looks at best inadvisable and at worst potentially disastrous if, like me, you value the work of writers and the survival of a diverse and high quality output of books, and yet … I can’t think of a single thing anyone involved could do, or is likely to, that would change the outcome. Pretty much everyone is coming at this from the point of view of their own individual best interest (personal or corporate), and that’s entirely reasonable and justifiable when looked at at the level of each specific decision, but the overall effect, seen in big picture terms, is … well, alarming just about covers it, I guess.
And, in a development entirely unrelated in any way whatsoever to The Edinburgh Dead, but included here because it’s Friday, and every so often we must have Moving Pictures on a Friday: the late, lugubrious Carl Sagan comes over all eloquent and wise, on the subject of The Earth Seen From Space.
As some of you may have noticed, the Youth (and actually a lot of people who are looking at youth in the rearview mirror) were out on the streets of various English cities recently, causing all sorts of ructions. Not pretty. But then, Youth – or youngish folk, at least – can also do this:
Saw these clips on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, a blog with approximately … oh, I don’t know … 500 quintillion times as many readers as this one, so apologies if you’ve seen them before. Feel free to move along, if so. If not, spare a moment to enjoy these little summaries of the joy of travel (especially the first one, which is just kind of lovely, if you ask me).
Without wanting to sound too ungrateful or smug, I was lucky enough to kind of overdose on travel – especially the kind to rather unusual and far-flung places – by the time the 21st century got underway. These days I’m a rather sedentary sort, deeply attached to my home comforts, with distinctly unitchy feet. But watching those films gave me a little tingle in both soles and soul, and I remembered, for a moment or two at least, just how awesome it is to journey out into the wider world …
I have no inclination whatsoever to do this myself, but I feel a certain envy for those who do. Do they feel as free – free of gravity, free of fear, free of doubt – as they appear? Amazing, and rather beautiful.
So, here comes one of the oldest stalwarts of fantasy literature, roaring in from the horizon for another crack at the big screen.
Now, call me a grump (it has been known), but I think this is a pretty bad trailer. Not because of its impact on my desire to see the film – it looks like DVD fodder for me, but I thought that before the trailer ever saw the light of day – but because of the way it’s put together. The thing looks, to my aged eye, like it was cut and pasted by a toddler with attention deficit disorder. In the main, it’s a succession of bogglingly brief images of people shouting, fighting and bonking, intercut with horses and writhing cgi tentacles; some of the action is so brief, particularly in the second minute or so, it hardly has the time to register on the retina, let alone the brain, before it’s snatched away. The only extended (using the term loosely) scene is of some witch summoning up sandy ghost things to fight our hero, and it doesn’t look too bad, but the rest of the trailer’s a pretty formless stew.
It all screams ‘brainless spectacle with no interest in narrative or character, made for those of limited attention span’, which may or may not be an accurate representation of the movie. As it happens, I quite like a bit of brainless spectacle with no interest in narrative or character now and again, and my attention span is certainly not what it once was, but if you’re going to go that route, you still ought to have some spectacle coherent and spectacular enough to last more than a fraction of a second in the trailer, surely? If you’re going to rely on the wow factor to compensate for the absence of substantial content – which is a fair enough approach to trailers – at least give the images enough breathing space to elicit a wow. As it is, all this elicits in me is ‘oh, look what’s that … wait, it’s gone, what’s this now … no, gone, we’re back to those tentacle-things again … oh, no, it’s the beast with two backs … damn, I’m starting to get a headache …’ Maybe I’m just getting old.
Which may also be the reason for my increasing dissatisfaction with the technological sheen of movies these days. CGI and 3D just don’t really do it for me. Especially 3D, which I increasingly think is the curse of 21st century movies (true, I’ve only seen a couple of movies in 3D in the last few years, and neither of them was Avatar, but I stand by my only lightly informed opinion).
My anti-CGI inclination is a bit more surprising to me. As I said, I like spectacle, and I certainly like the way the advances in special effects have freed up cinema to do sf and fantasy on a grand scale, but there remains – with a few honourable exceptions – a weightless, inconsequential quality to even quite sophisticated CGI that somehow distances me from the images on the screen. For all the technologists’ talents, they still can’t quite replicate the texture and presence of reality inside their magic boxes, and I find myself noticing it more and more. There have been a few rare occasions in the cinema when I’ve totally, 100% forgotten that I’m looking at wholly digitally-created images – now and again with Gollum in LotR, for example – but generally, even when the CGI is done quite brilliantly, there’s always some tiny, near-dormant niggling part of my brain that is distantly aware that what I’m seeing isn’t real, and that can sometimes be just enough to dilute the immersive effect of the movie.
All this technological genius applied to films has produced a medium that looks, to my jaundiced eye, more than a little decadent. Awash with money and capabilities that have induced a kind of wanton frenzy, admitting of no restraint, that creates weightless, rather debased, wonders on a gargantuan scale.
Enough moaning, though. It’s more pleasing to reflect on the source material for all this: Howard’s original Conan stories. I re-read a few of them not so long ago, in the decidedly not weightless, very much real, collected edition that’s one of my favourite book-as-objects I possess.
I’m by no means an uncritical fan of this stuff. Some of the stories feel a little over-extended, their length not quite justified by the content, and some of the racial and sexual assumptions don’t exactly jibe with modern sensibilities. But still, I find a good deal to enjoy. There’s an energy and conviction to the stories that’s very engaging, and on the whole they’ve aged remarkably well, considering how the world and the genre have changed since they were written. I suspect the discerning fan of fantasy might well find their time better spent going back to source and reading or re-reading Howard’s original tales rather than sitting in a dark cinema being beaten over the head with 3D CGI. But that’s just me, grump that I am.
An interview with Neil Williamson, a Scottish writer of speculative fiction, who has a short story in contention for one of the annual British Science Fiction Association awards. I thought I’d pass it on for various reasons, including (a) there’s some discussion of the Scottish sf/fantasy scene, which is not a particular corner of the genre diaspora that gets talked about all that often (except in Scotland, I suppose), (b) the interviewer is Jeff Vandermeer, who is the sort of chap who’s well worth following around the internet, if you’re not already doing so, in a nice non-stalkery way, obviously, and (c) I get mentioned in the interview. Which is nice. But not important, of course.
First saw this on the indispensible SF Signal, by the way.
Thought I’d resurrect an old tradition around here – not that something that’s only happened once before, long ago, really qualifies as a tradition – and provide a randomish smorgasbord of odds and ends to mark the festive season. So, without further ado:
For Movie Fans (and Superhero Fans), the trailer for one of the latest in the apparently endless sequence of movies based on comic books. Thor, which I confidently predict will be the highest grossing superhero-fantasy-Norse mythology mash-up of 2011:
Considerably more promising than I thought it might be when I first heard it was in the pipeline, but I’m saying that from a position of low, low expectations. Vastly more promising, in my humble yet obviously expert opinion, than the other big budget superhero trailer doing the rounds at the moment: Green Lantern. Still, trailers are only trailers; who knows how the final products will measure up.
For Book Fans, and in a somewhat self-serving spirit entirely out of tune with the season, my author copies of the Subterranean Press Speculative Horizons anthology edited by Patrick St-Denis turned up the other day, and things of compact but considerable beauty they are too.
The limited edition signed copies are very pleasing, with a whole page of signatures bound into the book. Enough to make a chap giddy, to be keeping such august authorial company:
For Podcast Fans, I offer a couple of the more unusual items from the long list of stuff I’m subscribed to, in case there’s someone out there who shares my peculiar combination of interests.
The Norman Centuries. An excellent, straightforward narrative history of the Normans. For fans of medieval history, this is rich pickings. Most folk – round here anyway – know the Normans as the conquerors of England, but less generally known is their habit of conquering all sorts of other folks, wherever they went: the French, the Italians, the Byzantines, the Sicilian Muslims. Just about everyone they came across, really.
The Ink Panthers Show. Exactly the kind of thing, in many ways, podcasting was invented for. Two guys, with occasional semi-random guests, talk to each other about … well, about almost anything they feel like talking about, really. They’re both comics creators, so that comes up now and again, but a lot of it is just about what’s going on in their lives and families. I find them pretty personable, articulate and funny. Once – if – you get on their wavelength, it’s a pleasant listen. It’s mostly quite family-friendly, but sometimes strays into slightly more adult or non-PC areas, so consider yourself so advised.
For Fans of Ye Olde Classical Music … well, this (in case any overseas visitors don’t know, by the way, the chap introducing things is Matt Lucas, one of the current movers and shakers of British comedy):
You can only wonder what the neighbours thought …
And, come to think of it, I’m going to repost the musical clip from that long ago first iteration of the Christmas Miscellany, just because I still think, as I did then, that it’s one of the nicer sounds on the web and sounds to me suitably restful, reflective and contented for the holiday season. How’s that for keeping a tradition going?
And For Everyone Else: well, just my best wishes for the festive season, however you choose to spend it, or celebrate it, or ignore it. I’ll be back and blogging once the inevitable gluttony-induced lethargy and inertia wear off. Happy Christmas!
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