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.

On the plus side, we’ve known about the impending shutdown for a while, and its provided the impetus for some long-discussed and hopefully thoroughly positive changes to brianruckley.com. So we (we is me and my invaluable Orbit web guru, by the way) will, with any luck, be bringing you a nice new website very soon. Thank you and good night.

Not a lot, is the answer, but as always where the internet’s concerned, a couple of interesting snippets. Especially the last one, though I’m not sure ‘interesting’ is really quite the right word for it.

Lovecraftian graffiti

A photo of some ridiculously big starfish

Clearing a giant fatberg from the London sewers. Yeuuch.

And now I’m off to do something slightly less futile than googling phrases culled from horror fiction masterworks.

The income for the author would be much higher, of course, if all those library loans had been book purchases instead. You can hope some of those borrowers might become buyers in the future, or that they’ll tell their buying friends about this great book they’ve just read, but at the end of the day helping writers sell books is not why libraries exist. Shocking, I know, but it’s true apparently. Their purposes are rather nobler, and having a well-used library system is an inherently good thing for a country and a society. So I’ll just take my PLR payment as a sign that I’ve become a tiny little cog in the wheels of A Good Thing and be grateful that people are reading the book anywhere and anyhow.

The PLR people have also put out a booklet in which ‘writers comment on the PLR scheme, its future priorities and the broader context of authors’ rights.’ Sounds dull as ditchwater, right? Well, probably. You can judge for yourself if you like, since this is the pdf of the booklet, but in case you’re not so inspired, here’s a few things that caught my eye:

There are 37,000 authors (I think they might be including some illustrators, translators etc. in that figure too, but I’m not sure) registered for the PLR scheme, with around 1,400 new ones joining each year. Wow. That seems … quite a lot.

The number of visits to libraries each year is increasing, but the number of book loans and the number of books bought by libraries are both decreasing. People are obviously finding things to do in libraries that don’t involve actually borrowing printed books. Does suggest a slight disconnect developing, though, since as far as I’m aware the number of new titles published each year has been going up, so if the libraries are buying less of them, does that mean the proportion of titles that are available through libraries (in printed form, at least) is declining?

No surprise to anyone, I imagine, but writing is a top heavy business. Some recent research says the top 10% of authors now accrue 50% of all income earned by writing. The bottom 50% get just 10% of the riches. That’ll be the ‘death of the midlist’ everyone keeps talking about, I guess, but if anything those figures seem less extreme than I would have expected them to be. Still, in recent years the figures for wealth distribution in the UK as a whole have shown a very similar pattern, to within a couple of percentage points. Maybe under the British version of capitalism, the top 10% of every category just naturally get 50% of everything. Law of Nature or something.

According to the same research, the average income from writing for UK authors is declining and is now down to £4,000 p.a. Treasure that day job. Really. Maybe even get another one, just to be on the safe side.

Also available is the PLR’s annual newsletter, which is even less interesting to a non-writer on the whole (although if you’ve got masochistic tendencies, or just like to know how things work, here’s the pdf of that, too). But it does have some more of those facts and figures I so enjoy:

Approximate total number of book loans from UK libraries per year: 323 million (down from 330 million the previous year).

About 83% of resgistered authors received less than £100 as their PLR payment this year. See what I mean about it not paying for many holidays? This includes 35% who received nothing at all. You don’t get paid anything if your earnings are under £1, I think, plus there’s probably some registered authors with no books in-print.

Just over 4% have a PLR income in excess of £1,000 this year. That includes 242 lucky souls (less than 1%), who qualify for the maximum allowable payment of £6,600. In order to get that, your books have to be borrowed a very impressive 110,000+ times. I did actually go onto the PLR website to see how many sf/f/h authors are on their lists of most borrowed writers, but to be honest there’re hardly any and you could guess who they are with a moment’s thought: JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, that kind of thing.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered Winterbirth was borrowed rather a lot less than 110,000 times. Still, it’s always good to have something to aim for.

A nice little (very little) story from The Daily Cabal (where all the stories are very little).

A good little podcast about the Inuit, that beneath an easy-to-listen-to exterior is about a big and complicated subject: the ways language, environment and culture interact and merge. It’s that worldbuilding stuff sf/f writers and readers go on about, only in the real world. From Nature Stories.

A stunning gallery of underwater sculptures, discovered via the palace of cool that is Notcot, which was in turn discovered via the livejournal of Ian McDonald, who wrote the wholly excellent River of Gods.

And not strictly internet-related (except that it was rented via the net) but watched The Host recently, and enjoyed it. Korean sf-horror that doesn’t take itself too seriously, despite being quite dark and nasty in places, and is, in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle, unlike anything Hollywood would come up with given the same basic material to work with. Plus it has a monster that swallows people whole and vomits them back up. Nice.

2. DARPA is the ‘way out there’ research body for the US military, busily pushing the boundaries of the plausible and practical in search of cutting edge military technology. Their website sometimes has some interesting little nuggets of info, but this one fell into the category of ‘read it twice to make sure you got the right end of the stick’: DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-hybrids, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphosis.

3. Tintin Movie! Cool.

4. My main conclusions from watching the film below, showing the evacuation of one of those new superjumbo thingies Airbus is building: (a) an ability to put the fear of God into your passengers is evidently part of the job description for the stewardesses, and (b) if you’re old, infirm or disabled, I don’t much fancy your chances …

The exact location is ‘The Celtic Lodge’ in Brodie’s Close just off Edinburgh’s High Street. Starts 7.30pm, should all be comfortably done and dusted by 9.30. Apparently, tickets will be for sale on the door on the night, and I’m told that ticket-holders are entitled to a 50% discount on one of Edinburgh’s famous/infamous ghost tours. Bargain! How can you resist?

We’ll be reading stuff, of course, but there might well be a certain amount of mingling, Q&Aing, perhaps even signing going on too … Being new to this kind of thing, I’m still not absolutely sure what to read. At the moment I’m inclining towards reading a little from Winterbirth and then something from Book 2. Since it’s meant to be a ‘dark’ event, it’s safe to assume that whatever extracts I end up choosing, they’ll involve some form of violence, bloodshed and/or general gruesomeness.

Further info available by calling 0131 225 9044 or e-mailing info(at)blackhart(dot)uk(dot)com