EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

I was very sad to hear of the death last week of Dan O’Bannon, one of the greats of SF and horror cinema. As the co-writer of Alien, he gave us Ellen Ripley. With Total Recall, he wrote one of the best Philip K. Dick adaptations to make it onto the screen, and certainly the only one where Arnold Shwartzenegger pulls a tracking device the size of a tennis ball out of his nose. With Return Of The Living Dead, he hit the hat trick, with the first appearance of fast moving zombies, giving the genre one of it’s most enduring tropes (BRAAAINS!), as well as writing one of the best lines in horror movies to date.

And of course, he was there at the beginning of John Carpenter’s career, co-writing the script of Dark Star as well as starring as the nutzoid Sgt Pinbeck, whose battle with a rubber ball alien is one of the sheer joys of the movie.

Coilhouse has a fine tribute of clips and previews up for a man that has had a significant impact on the genre and movies I love the best.

This post will be a bit random, I’m afraid, but I can’t really find a way to make anything coherent out of them, so feel free to view it as a bit of a braindump.

1. I like cross-genre stuff best. My favourite John Carpenter movie is Escape From Precinct 13, which is effectively a zombie siege movie hashed up with a blacker-than-black film noir and fairly explicit tips to the hat to the westerns of Howard Hawks. My favourite fantasy writer is KJ Parker, whose novels are exquisitely-researched military procedurals that just happen to be set in a made-up land. To my mind genre fiction of any kind is at it’s best when it takes the standard tropes and furniture and tweaks it.

2. I love zombie films (hi to everyone at Zombie Command who wanders in, BTW) but I reckon the reason I like them the best is because they are effectively dystopian science fiction. They’re end-of-the-world stories writ large. They’re infection-panic, fear of the silent invader/Red Menace noir. Think about it. Zombie films rarely have star casts, mainly because you like that frisson that just about any character in there could be turned. No-one is safe from the de-humanising influences that batter at your doors and windows, waiting patiently to grab at you and infect you if you let your guard down for a second. That’s classic 50s I Married A Communist From Outer Space paranoia.

I’d go further and say that the recent trend for running zombies makes this even more explicit, because a running zombie simply isn’t scary. A horde of running zombies even less so. Then you’re in the arena in which James Cameron’s ALIENS played so effectively. I thought Zac Snyder’s remake of Dawn of The Dead was one of the best SF films of recent years, but I didn’t jump or scream like a girl once. (another reason why TLC hates going to see movies with me. I do so get sucked into the action…)

The best example of this cross-connection between the two genres to my mind is Philip Kaufman’s 1979 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. It’s genuinely creepy, and utterly disorienting as everyone you think you know and trust becomes something … other.

3. Moving back to my earlier post for a second, the brilliant quote from Tamzin Outhwaite came from Dave Langford’s Ansible, the most Hugoed fanzine ever, and a must read for SF fans anywhere. It’s particularly good on the media’s view of SF as a whole, and those that enjoy it in particular (hint: it’s never a particularly flattering view) and skewers the increasingly prelavent claim from actors, writers and directors that the piece of SF that they’ve written/directed/appeared in isn’t SF because… well, try out the random sampler of quotes and see what I mean.

4. One last thing. Fans of the fantastic in general must have been saddened by the news that Robert Holdstock, one of our greatest fantasy – no, scrub that, one of the finest English novelists of the last 40 years, died suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of November. His work, most famously in the extraordinary novel Mythago Wood, dealt with the power of myth and legend, and in the way that our history and the lives of our imagination can frequently intertwine. Here’s the Guardian obit, but really all I can suggest by way of a memorial is to ask you to read Mythago Wood if you haven’t already done so. A whole new world awaits you.

I could, I suppose, pretend that the labours of the last month have been a hard slog, or that getting a 65,000 word novel out has been difficult. I could, but I won’t. PIRATES OF THE MOON has flooded out of me pretty much as quickly as I could type it, and although there’s a long way still to go before I consider it ready for a bigger audience than you, esteemed, Readership, I think in a lot of ways it’s the best thing that I’ve ever written.

Which is why I’m saddened to learn that according to some people, it will never get anywhere. Because it is utter, unashamed old school science fiction. It’s set on another planet. There are aliens. There are spaceships. There are robots. One of the main reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to write a story that harkened back to the stuff I loved as a kid, and still do now. It’s a very deliberate homage to authors like Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton and most importantly, a forgotten favourite, Brian Earnshaw and his Dragonfall 5 novels. These books were a massive influence on me when I was a kid, and Earnshaw’s idea of a space-faring family running a decrepit spacecraft came instantly to mind when I started hashing out the plot for Pirates.

But apparently no-one reads these kinds of books anymore. I had a Twitter and Livejournal chat yesterday with Adrian Faulkner, who is a thoughtful and perceptive writer of dark fantasy. He put me in the direction of a piece by Mark Charan Newton, who said just that. It’s here, and worth reading in full. And to an extent, I agree with him. Although good ole-fashioned space opera is booming on the big screen, fewer people are reading it. Or at the very least, not admitting to it.

And herein lies the problem. Proper wide-screen unrepentant space opera has a bit of an image problem. It’s viewed by the vast majority of the population as infantile, as a bit silly. It’s OK to watch Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica and enjoy it, but the idea of picking up a Midshipman’s Hope or Honor Harrington, or even perhaps a copy of Joe Haldeman or John Scalzi’s work seems to be beyond the pale. I’m not entirely convinced by this argument, especially when you look at the robust health of the fantasy market, and the Harry Potter fans and Twilight Moms who will happily read books that are badged and racked as Young Adult. I’ll admit, I have deliberately pitched PIRATES at this very market. Partially as an attempt to break into a burgeoning market, but also as an attempt to try to write something without any sex or swearing in it. That was a challenge, I can tell you.

I would say, though, that the idea that literary SF is dying out is just plain wrong. One particular, tiny facet of it may by in decline, but on the whole we are living in a time when SF novels have never been in such a strong and accepted position. Let us, for example, consider Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon, whose latest novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate reality story that won the Hugo and the Nebula this year. Let us consider the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a bleak dystopian vision of a ruined earth. Margaret Atwood has been hilariously tying herself in conceptual knots for years by claiming that her stories of the future featuring clones and bio-engineering are not SF.

Going back to Mark Charon Newton’s piece, we can see that he too agrees that while what he calls “the core genre” is not doing so well, the tropes, imagery and themes of classic SF are alive and well and in the mainstream. He calls it appropriation. I call it assimilation. Let’s face it. We live in the 21st century. We live in a world where space travel is humdrum, where the planet is ringed with satellites. Where we can access more data than we could properly absorb in a lifetime on the bus, while listening to music and telling our mates what we’re up to all at the same time. A lot of what we’re living now was SF thirty years ago. So does this mean the genre is dead? No, of course not. SF has always been more a mirror to the world now than a vision of the future. At the moment, escapism is in, which is why fantasy is doing so well. And there’s another factor to consider.

Horror and fantasy fiction are both enjoying a resurgence off the back of the Young Adult market. Big, broad stroke movies and simple tales of magic and paranormal romance (shudder) have opened the market up in ways that could not have been imagined five years ago. It’s not going to take much for an SF story with the same broad appeal to have midnight openings at bookstores across the planet. My money is on Scott Westerfeld doing the business with the next book in his Uglies universe. And it’s telling that Stephenie Meyer’s latest book The Host is a story of good ole-fashioned alien Body-Snatching. That’s a sure way of getting the tweens and their moms off sparkly vampires and onto something with a little more (ahem) bite.

I’ll just sum up with a quote from Tamzin Outhwaite, star of the BBC show Paradox. This is a programme about an elite police squad that attempts in a Minority Report stylee, to solve crimes before they happen. She said:

Initially I thought it was a sci-fi project … Then I read the script and realised it wasn’t. It’s about police officers trying to work out whether there is a worm hole between two time zones.’

It does the old soul good to hear technobabble like that, it really does…

…and it looks like my hopes for continuing the story of the Armstrongs on the Moon will have to wait. At least for a while.

I have a day or so left to go on the first draft of PIRATES OF THE MOON, following which I will be jumping back into the dieselpunk world of Sohu, to complete the dark urban fantasy that I call THE PRISONER OF SOHO.

I’d like to give you a flavour of what you’ve voted for, so here’s a short extract. Our hero, Inigo Jones, has just been shoved through a portal that leads to … well, this.

He frowned up at the sky. It was an unhealthy turd-yellow, and black at the edges. It had been bleak and grey when he disappeared underneath Soho, but this looked more like sunset to Inigo. He checked the Nixon. That concurred with his internal clock.

12:23. No more that a couple of hours had passed since he had first met Litany, but there was a distinct chill in the air that slipped through his damp suit like a razor.

Something was not right at all. Further, there was something odd about the air. It smelt wrong somehow, even through the stink of garbage. It had a softness and a spiced fragrance to it that was utterly unlike the pissbeerrot stink that he found familiar. And there was music. A pulse. A beat that he knew. A skipping, skittering vibration that tangled up in his spine.

A shudder zapped up his spine. He suddenly felt very alone.

With his hand on his knife, he stepped out of Kraiey Court, and into another world.

Boulevard Francescu Bacon was wide, filthy and crammed with people. Porn shops, bars and strip joints lined both sides of the thoroughfare, while stalls selling clothing, knock-offs and hot snacks spilled off the pavements into the road. Traffic was a growl away from a snarl-up. Pedestrians and cyclists weaved through whatever gaps they could find.

There were no vehicles Inigo recognised. The street looked like three different car collector rallys all competing for the same exhibition space. There was nothing even remotely modern. Two-stroke powered Trabants thakkered their way through tiny gaps in the gridlock, while Morris Oxfords engaged in automotive combat with high-sided Bedford vans and the occasional tricked-out Wolseley. He could see nothing that dated any later than 1965. Adding to the carnage, sharp-dressed geezers on scooters buzzed through the throng, mounting the pavement if it made things easier. They scattered pedestrians as they went, screaming insults and jeering at the tops of their voices.

The noise was huge, filling Inigo’s head to straining point. Blatting horns provided a 4/4 kick overlaid with the shrill yelps of street vendors and the throb of over-revved engines. The battering thud of music blared from every open door, a wild mix that Inigo struggled to find familiar elements. Algerian rai was mixed in with Kodo drums, the sweet majesty of qawwali backed with the sonorous drone of Nepalese throat-singing, and somewhere at the back of it all, sweetening the mix, the same pulse, the same intoxicant throb of a backbeat, twisted through the mix like silver wire, the lost chord that tied everything together.

He swayed, dizzied by the noise, assaulted by the stench of petrol, hot fat and frying meat, a tang of decay that made his tongue arch. It was a Ridley Scott remix of “Absolute Beginners”. It was 50s Soho mashed together with 22nd century Algiers, coated in chilli paste and microwaved until it fizzed.

The buildings looked sort of familiar. To his left a narrow cylinder-ended construction reminded me of the Sun And 13 Cantons pub in Beak Street. Unlike the Sun, this building had been festooned in rickety neon signage, bilious pink worms of light that proclaimed … something … in a language that looked like a bastard mix of Pashtun and Cyrillic. Every building sported the same encrustation. Some had two-storey mediatronic screens flaring out commercials at blipvert speed. None of them touted a brand name Inigo recognised.

He stumbled backwards, eyes puppy-wide. He’d walked into some bizarre Arab-Stalinist version of Times Square, and it was squeezing his head out of shape.

You likee?

It’s December, for those of you who might not have noticed. The start of the Christmas month. Time to open the first door on the advent calendar. If you’re anything like my nephew Conor, it’s also time to open the second, third, fourth and fifth. Well, there is chocolate to be had.

And of course, the end of NaNoWriMo for another year. I finished on a bit of a high this year, getting sixty thousand words of a first draft out by ten pm yesterday at which point my brain and hands gave up and insisted I drink wine and watch the end of Face/Off.

But this is a great start. Notice the stress there. Most people doing Nano hammer away crazily for a month, then put what they’ve done away and don’t build on it. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. And it’s a waste. I reckon I have five grand left before I can stick “The End” on Pirates Of The Moon. Or in this case, “The Armstrongs, Arty and Quiddity will return…” in the best tradition of all the Bond movies.

Because the characters are growing and changing as I write them, and a continuation of the story is gathering at the back of my head even as I shape the end of the first place. I do believe I may have an honest to goodness trilogy on my hands.

However, first things first. Pirates gets done, and then I will honour the results of my poll and finish off another draft. At the moment my dieselpunk epic The Prisoner Of Soho is in the lead. I’ll keep the poll open until Saturday morning (at some point during Saturday Kitchen while Masterchef is on, probly) so get yer votes in if you want a say in what I do next!

It’s been a great November but time, and the writing, goes on.

Oh, and just so you don’t think it’s all wine and roses and happy creativity here, let’s finish with this year’s NanoSnark, from the brilliant Ariana Osbourne, which I love to bits because it absolutely PROVES MY POINT.

The caption says it all, really. Yesterday at about 3pm I finally hit the 50,000 word mark on Pirates Of The Moon, a moment that I marked by doing a little happy dance (certain members of the Readership will know exactly what form that dance takes. The rest of you will just have to imagine it) and then going out to buy cat food.

2009 is my fourth Nanowrimo and the one I have completed in the quickest time. I put this down to a couple of factors. Firstly, I had the idea early enough that I could properly plot it out. Although things were left loose enough so that the story still had room to take surprising twists and turns (one of the real joys of Nano is when the story or a character does something that you genuinely didn’t expect) the main story beats were set up so that I would never be stuck.

Secondly, the Nano community itself, more specifically the Oxfordshire forum to which I contribute, has been on fire this year, and encouraging each other to greater and higher excesses of word count. Several of the Oxfordshire nanos are at well over 150,000 words and still going strong. In that atmosphere you cannot help but thrive.

So. From here I have work to do. There’s Pirates to finish (I may have reached 50 grand, but Nano continues, no slacking) and then December, where I will carry the momentum into finishing one of my earlier, unfinished stories. Not sure which one yet. I know, how about a poll?

With two first drafts under my belt, I can then start polishing Pirates, and from there set up a rolling sequence whereby I can be working on either first draft or editing of SOMETHING. All of which requires writing to be done every day. Which was, after all, kind of the point to starting Nano in the first place.

And what will I be doing with all this writing?

Well, that’s an announcement for 2010. Let’s just say I’m looking at how TLC is using her e-reader with a great deal of interest…

…of the month, that is. Not the wordcount, which I’m pleased to report is… well, see for yourself. At the time of writing I am at the low thirty thousand mark.

Not the story either, which is looking to finish at the same kind of word count as Satan’s Schoolgirls. In other words, about 60,000 words, which is short but perfectly formed for a novel. Think the early novels of Elmore Leonard, or a lot of the classic pulp noirs. Or indeed the early novels of Robert Heinlein, which are the primary influence on “Pirates Of The Moon.” In the same way that I believe that 90 minutes is the perfect length for a film, I think 60 grand is the ideal word count for a quick cheap, fun book. The kind of story that Nanowrimo has always engendered in me.

So then, so far, so good. As usual, the story is moving and deepening in directions that I hadn’t considered when I was starting. The characters are taking over, doing and saying things that were never part of the plan. The villains have motives that I hadn’t considered. The heroes, especially my main character, the 14 year old space pilot Aurora Anderson, are more heroic and more human than I could have hoped.

I hope you’re having fun reading the first draft of the story. Because I’m having an absolute bloody BLAST writing it.