'All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour. That behaviour tells you much more than you could ever learn from its political ideas. Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.'Jean Baudrillard, America
Friday 29 July 2011
Drive, He Said
Posted on 08:43 by Unknown
Thursday 28 July 2011
More Soviet SF
Posted on 01:51 by Unknown
To the BFI Southbank last night, to see two more films in the BFI's excellent Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey. The first, Mars (1968), was the last major film made by director Pavel Klushantsev (Road to the Stars) before his contract with Odessa Studios was terminated in 1972, and he was forced into retirement. I was looking forward to seeing Mars because a couple of clips in the documentary that accompanied the screening of Road to the Stars showed a wonderfully gonzo alien scenario complete with cosmonaut dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit. Well, the dog didn't disappoint, but the bulk of the film is a lively but badly dated educational documentary showing that you can prove anything by analogy -- even, in 1968, after Mariner 4 showed Mars to be a battered hostile world lacking any of the romance implied by Percival Lowell's 'canals', the presence of higher forms of Martian life. Klushantsev's depictions of possible variations of life on Mars are marvellous, however, and the brief portrayal of a lifeless Mars is startlingly close to close-up images beamed back by the Viking landers and other American robots.
Toward Meeting A Dream, from 1963, is a more conventional science-fiction film in which aliens from a nearby star are attracted to Earth by the broadcast of a particular piece of music, crashland on Mars, and are rescued by hero cosmonauts. The special effects (re-used by American director Curtis Harrington in his SF potboiler Queen of Blood) depicting both Mars and the alien world and its advanced technology are state-of-the-art, as good as anything in Forbidden Planet, and the Russian space facilities on the Earth and Moon are equipped with all kinds of realistic hardware, but as for the story and characters . . . well, let's just say Soviet SF cinema operated on conventions at a slant to Western expectations. During a conversation afterwards, Kim Newman (who has seen most of the films in the BFI's season) and I identified the following Rules for Successful Soviet SF:
(1) There must be a stirring song, repeated at intervals, and written by one of the characters.
(2) There is no real plot beyond depictions of the selfless heroism of the characters, but a narrator will fill in any holes in the story.
(3) There is no plot because there must be no conflict or violence: problems are solved by application of idealism and logic rather than fists and rayguns. In Toward Meeting A Dream, an American scientist argues that aliens approaching Earth may be hostile and bent on conquering the human race, and is, at the end, very publicly humiliated.
(4) Characters are differentiated by random tags, and there must be no character development (because that would imply that the Soviet heroes possessed flaws which must be corrected). So if you're, say, a chess-playing joker at the beginning of the film, for the rest of the story you'll be carrying a chessboard and, when your comrades refuse to play you because they know you're the best chess-playing cosmonaut in the universe, you'll make a joke about it.
(5) As in American SF of the period, the only female character on the ship operates the switchboard.
(6) If a character dies, it will turn out that the whole story was not only a dream, but it was his dream. And at the very end, some element of it will come true.
(7) Pack all this into a film less than an hour long, either to make room for the main feature, or for a two-hour documentary on pig-iron production in Kazakhstan.
Toward Meeting A Dream, from 1963, is a more conventional science-fiction film in which aliens from a nearby star are attracted to Earth by the broadcast of a particular piece of music, crashland on Mars, and are rescued by hero cosmonauts. The special effects (re-used by American director Curtis Harrington in his SF potboiler Queen of Blood) depicting both Mars and the alien world and its advanced technology are state-of-the-art, as good as anything in Forbidden Planet, and the Russian space facilities on the Earth and Moon are equipped with all kinds of realistic hardware, but as for the story and characters . . . well, let's just say Soviet SF cinema operated on conventions at a slant to Western expectations. During a conversation afterwards, Kim Newman (who has seen most of the films in the BFI's season) and I identified the following Rules for Successful Soviet SF:
(1) There must be a stirring song, repeated at intervals, and written by one of the characters.
(2) There is no real plot beyond depictions of the selfless heroism of the characters, but a narrator will fill in any holes in the story.
(3) There is no plot because there must be no conflict or violence: problems are solved by application of idealism and logic rather than fists and rayguns. In Toward Meeting A Dream, an American scientist argues that aliens approaching Earth may be hostile and bent on conquering the human race, and is, at the end, very publicly humiliated.
(4) Characters are differentiated by random tags, and there must be no character development (because that would imply that the Soviet heroes possessed flaws which must be corrected). So if you're, say, a chess-playing joker at the beginning of the film, for the rest of the story you'll be carrying a chessboard and, when your comrades refuse to play you because they know you're the best chess-playing cosmonaut in the universe, you'll make a joke about it.
(5) As in American SF of the period, the only female character on the ship operates the switchboard.
(6) If a character dies, it will turn out that the whole story was not only a dream, but it was his dream. And at the very end, some element of it will come true.
(7) Pack all this into a film less than an hour long, either to make room for the main feature, or for a two-hour documentary on pig-iron production in Kazakhstan.
Wednesday 20 July 2011
Ongoing
Posted on 09:59 by Unknown
Most writers are interested in how other writers write. In their environments; in their habits; in their productivity. Not because they’re neurotics, worried that they’re doing it right, or working hard enough (or not only because they’re neurotics), but because writing is a private process, and a mysterious one, too. In a piece for last Saturday’s The Week In Books feature in the Guardian (which the Guardian doesn’t seem to archive online, any more, so I can’t provide a link), Philip Hensher noted that his friend Alan Hollinghurst ‘is a devotee of Ishiguro’s “crash” method. After a long period of planning and thinking, the author retreats into a cell and writes furiously for up to 12 hours a day.’ Hensher’s method, on the other hand, is slow and steady:
Writing my latest novel, King of the Badgers, I got up at 6:30, five to six days a week, and wrote until 10. I reckon to produce between 400 and 1,500 words a day, and then do a lot of crossing out.There are other methods, of course - Vladimir Nabokov wrote sentences and paragraphs on index cards, and then assembled them into the finished work. But it seems to me that the Crash and Slow and Steady methods are at either end of a spectrum that encompasses most common variants of writing methodology. I’m of the slow and steady school, although I don’t write within a set time but try instead to produce a fixed amount each day. I’m working on a second draft at the moment - rewriting, crossing out, inserting new material - and attempting to make a quota of around 2000 words a day. Yesterday I was writing so slowly that I could have used the blood sweated from my forehead for ink. Today I finished inside two hours. So it goes. I do have a plan before I start the first draft, but it isn't in any way detailed, and I certainly don't spend months thinking about the book before I start. As far as I’m concerned writing is a process of discovery. The trick is to keep moving forward.
Tuesday 19 July 2011
New World
Posted on 07:49 by Unknown
An image of Vesta taken by the Dawn spacecraft two days ago from a distance of 15,000 kilometres, when (as you probably know) it went into orbit around the asteroid. Dawn will slowly spiral inward, and will take many more images at closer range, but this is a great early look at the ravaged worldlet, the second largest body in the asteroid belt (bigger version here). We're looking down at the south pole, which about a billion years ago was hit by a large body. Some debris spalled off by the impact resurfaced Vesta; the rest, about 1% of Vesta's original mass, went into orbit around the sun. HED meteorites are part of this debris, so we already have samples of Vesta's crust. The big whack left behind a big crater. It's about 500 kilometres across, almost as wide as Vesta's mean diameter. The lump in the centre is an uplifted central peak; there are also huge cliffs, and ridges forming chevron-like features. Over at the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawalla has posted a nice analysis, comparing the chevron features inside Vesta's south pole crater with those of Uranus's moon Miranda. Miranda's chevrons were probably formed by diapirs or plumes of upwelling warm ice; if the chevrons sit at the top of the plumes, those ridges may be the edges of uptilted blocks. Since we know that Vesta was once geologically active and almost certainly has an iron core that was once molten (all the HED meteorites are igneous material), it's tempting to speculate that big whack may have triggered some kind of residual geological activity. Could there be ancient volcanoes, on the opposite side?
Monday 11 July 2011
Road to the Stars
Posted on 09:26 by Unknown
Last Friday, the day of the launch of the last space shuttle, and the end until who knows when of the United State’s capability to send human beings into space, I went the British Film Intitute to watch a marvellous old Russian film about space travel, Pavel Klushantsev’s Road to the Stars -- shown with a documentary, The Star Dreamer, that provided useful historical context and a nice overview of Klushantsev’s career.
Klushantsev began to make Road to the Stars in 1954. He’d started his career in a Leningrad studio making documentaries, and The Road to the Stars begins in straight-forward documentary style, with a dramatised biography of the father of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and a sequence on early experiments in rocketry that establishes the basic physics of spaceflight. Then, without changing style (or the portentious narrator), the film jumps into the future. Ingenious special effects, with meticulously detailed models and sets, and realistic depictions of cosmonauts manoeuvring in free fall (amongst other tricks, Klushantsev shot actors hung on wires from below, and used a revolving set), are deployed to show the launch of the first three cosmonauts into space, the construction and operation of a space station in low Earth orbit, mapping the Moon’s surface by a robotic surveyor, and the first manned flight to the Moon. Some of the scenes allegedly influenced Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Just before Road to the Stars was finished, in 1957, Sputnik 1 went into orbit. The Russian authorities insisted that Klushantsev insert material about Earth’s first artificial moon, and gave his film a wide release. Space was the next big thing; the Soviet red star was in the ascendent; Road to the Stars was, as far as the authorities were concerned, a prime piece of propaganda. More than a million people saw it in Russia; it was screened in twenty- two other countries. Segments shown by Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news allegedly galvanised the American participants in the space race. Road to the Stars seemed like a blueprint for the Soviet conquest of space: space travel as an inevitable step in the evolution of Russia’s socialistic scientific utopia, proceeding by logical steps to the Moon, with journeys to other planets soon to follow.
It’s a future we didn’t get, of course. America won the race to the Moon; Nixon cancelled a programme to build rockets that would send astronauts to Mars; after the last Apollo mission, no human being has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Klushantsev went on to make a full-length feature film about the first expedition to Venus, Planet of the Storms, that showcased more marvellous special effects, but ran into trouble when a commissar objected to the tears of a female cosmonaut (‘No Soviet cosmonaut would cry’). His film was given a restricted release; the script for the next, about a race to the Moon involving Russian, American and German spacecraft that ended in peace and harmony, was rejected. He made further documentary-style films about space travel (scenes from one about Mars, with giant animated flowers and a dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit, look wonderful) but retired a disappointed man, more or less forgotten until American special-effects artist Robert Skotak tracked him down, just before his death in 1999.
Unsurprisingly, some of scenes in the film seem quaint (nothing dates like the future), but it’s infused with warmth and charm, and its cheery optimism about the benefits of space exploration and colonisation outshines the occasional passages of naked propaganda. At the end of Road to the Stars, two cosmonauts descend a spacecraft’s ladder to the Moon’s surface. There’s a close-up of the first tentative step, and the bootprint it leaves.
But there’s no solemnity; no tick-box of tasks to be performed. The cosmonauts dance out across the surface, and when they see the Earth floating above the Moon’s mountains, they embrace each other with glee, overwhelmed with amazement and happiness at being on the Moon. It’s a wonderfully touching moment, reminding us that although robot spacecraft have and still are sending back amazing pictures and reams of data, the old-fashioned notion of human exploration, while perhaps foolishly and unrealistically romantic, still stirs emotions no robot can reach.
(You can watch the whole film, without subtitles, here.)
Klushantsev began to make Road to the Stars in 1954. He’d started his career in a Leningrad studio making documentaries, and The Road to the Stars begins in straight-forward documentary style, with a dramatised biography of the father of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and a sequence on early experiments in rocketry that establishes the basic physics of spaceflight. Then, without changing style (or the portentious narrator), the film jumps into the future. Ingenious special effects, with meticulously detailed models and sets, and realistic depictions of cosmonauts manoeuvring in free fall (amongst other tricks, Klushantsev shot actors hung on wires from below, and used a revolving set), are deployed to show the launch of the first three cosmonauts into space, the construction and operation of a space station in low Earth orbit, mapping the Moon’s surface by a robotic surveyor, and the first manned flight to the Moon. Some of the scenes allegedly influenced Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Just before Road to the Stars was finished, in 1957, Sputnik 1 went into orbit. The Russian authorities insisted that Klushantsev insert material about Earth’s first artificial moon, and gave his film a wide release. Space was the next big thing; the Soviet red star was in the ascendent; Road to the Stars was, as far as the authorities were concerned, a prime piece of propaganda. More than a million people saw it in Russia; it was screened in twenty- two other countries. Segments shown by Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news allegedly galvanised the American participants in the space race. Road to the Stars seemed like a blueprint for the Soviet conquest of space: space travel as an inevitable step in the evolution of Russia’s socialistic scientific utopia, proceeding by logical steps to the Moon, with journeys to other planets soon to follow.
It’s a future we didn’t get, of course. America won the race to the Moon; Nixon cancelled a programme to build rockets that would send astronauts to Mars; after the last Apollo mission, no human being has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Klushantsev went on to make a full-length feature film about the first expedition to Venus, Planet of the Storms, that showcased more marvellous special effects, but ran into trouble when a commissar objected to the tears of a female cosmonaut (‘No Soviet cosmonaut would cry’). His film was given a restricted release; the script for the next, about a race to the Moon involving Russian, American and German spacecraft that ended in peace and harmony, was rejected. He made further documentary-style films about space travel (scenes from one about Mars, with giant animated flowers and a dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit, look wonderful) but retired a disappointed man, more or less forgotten until American special-effects artist Robert Skotak tracked him down, just before his death in 1999.
Unsurprisingly, some of scenes in the film seem quaint (nothing dates like the future), but it’s infused with warmth and charm, and its cheery optimism about the benefits of space exploration and colonisation outshines the occasional passages of naked propaganda. At the end of Road to the Stars, two cosmonauts descend a spacecraft’s ladder to the Moon’s surface. There’s a close-up of the first tentative step, and the bootprint it leaves.
But there’s no solemnity; no tick-box of tasks to be performed. The cosmonauts dance out across the surface, and when they see the Earth floating above the Moon’s mountains, they embrace each other with glee, overwhelmed with amazement and happiness at being on the Moon. It’s a wonderfully touching moment, reminding us that although robot spacecraft have and still are sending back amazing pictures and reams of data, the old-fashioned notion of human exploration, while perhaps foolishly and unrealistically romantic, still stirs emotions no robot can reach.
(You can watch the whole film, without subtitles, here.)
Friday 8 July 2011
Free Entry to British Library Event
Posted on 03:26 by Unknown
I'm appearing on a panel at the British Library Tuesday 12th July, talking with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt and Kim Newman (and a virtual Margaret Atwood) about our favourite items in the Out of the World exhibition.
I have not one but two free entries up for grabs. If you want to come along, email me at PJCMcAuley at gmail dot com and I'll add your name to the list on the door. First to email wins!
EDIT: They're gone!
I have not one but two free entries up for grabs. If you want to come along, email me at PJCMcAuley at gmail dot com and I'll add your name to the list on the door. First to email wins!
EDIT: They're gone!
Tuesday 5 July 2011
The Secret of My Success
Posted on 00:14 by Unknown
Harold Pinter on his plays, 1963 (pinched from Dangerous Minds):
I’m not a theorist. I’m not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that’s all. That’s the sum of it.
I’ve had two full-length plays produced in London. The first ran a week, and the second ran a year. Of course, there are differences between the two plays. In The Birthday Party I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In The Caretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead. So that instead of, say, “Look, dash, who, dash, I, dash, dash, dash,” the text would read, “Look, dot, dot, dot, who, dot, dot, dot, I, dot, dot, dot, dot.” So it’s possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes, and that’s why The Caretaker had a longer run than The Birthday Party. The fact that in neither case could you hear the dots and dashes in performance is beside the point. You can’t fool the critics for long. They can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither.
Monday 4 July 2011
Where I'm At...
Posted on 12:08 by Unknown
...rather than 'where I've been', because I've been right here, behind the curtain, spending most of my time dealing with the editing stage of In the Mouth of The Whale. Right now, I have the whole thing in my head and can spin it around like a CAD/CAM model and examine its threads and connections, its components and framework from any angle. That won't last, but it has allowed me to know which changes were highly local, and which struck echoes and required secondary changes in various parts of the text. But now it's done, and the amended MS has been sent back, and I think that, if nothing else, I've pinned down the first word: When.
Meanwhile, I'm rereading a couple of novels for a panel at the British Library on July 12th, in which I'll be discussing favourites from the rather good Out of This World exhibition, along with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt, Kim Newman, and the virtual Margaret Atwood.
Oh, and I've finished and sold a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. It should be in the January 2012 issue.
Meanwhile, below the cut in the last post, Boogeyman259 asks, 'Could you please send me your origional notes about remote sensing from Cowboy Angels.' Afraid I can't, Boogeyman, since I didn't make extensive notes about something mentioned only in passing. And anyway, gee, I hardly know you, and you don't give me any clue about why you want to know this stuff, or why you can't find it out for yourself. But you did say 'please' (I'm not being sarcastic; too many people demanding something or other don't), so I'm happy to tell you that the CIA were certainly into remote viewing once they realised what their Soviet counterparts were up to, in the psychic line. There are passages about it, and the rather eccentric cast of characters involved in it, in Jeffrey T. Richelson's The Wizards of Langley, and there's at least one whole book about it, too: Jim Schnabel's Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. I bet there's all kinds of stuff about this on the WWW, too, but I'm not going to look it up. It's probably at least as reliable as your average novelist: we do tend to make things up for a living, or at least bend and twist stubborn facts to more convenient shapes. In this case, though, I didn't have to make it up; in fact, the truth is (more than usual) a lot weirder than fiction.
Meanwhile, I'm rereading a couple of novels for a panel at the British Library on July 12th, in which I'll be discussing favourites from the rather good Out of This World exhibition, along with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt, Kim Newman, and the virtual Margaret Atwood.
Oh, and I've finished and sold a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. It should be in the January 2012 issue.
Meanwhile, below the cut in the last post, Boogeyman259 asks, 'Could you please send me your origional notes about remote sensing from Cowboy Angels.' Afraid I can't, Boogeyman, since I didn't make extensive notes about something mentioned only in passing. And anyway, gee, I hardly know you, and you don't give me any clue about why you want to know this stuff, or why you can't find it out for yourself. But you did say 'please' (I'm not being sarcastic; too many people demanding something or other don't), so I'm happy to tell you that the CIA were certainly into remote viewing once they realised what their Soviet counterparts were up to, in the psychic line. There are passages about it, and the rather eccentric cast of characters involved in it, in Jeffrey T. Richelson's The Wizards of Langley, and there's at least one whole book about it, too: Jim Schnabel's Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. I bet there's all kinds of stuff about this on the WWW, too, but I'm not going to look it up. It's probably at least as reliable as your average novelist: we do tend to make things up for a living, or at least bend and twist stubborn facts to more convenient shapes. In this case, though, I didn't have to make it up; in fact, the truth is (more than usual) a lot weirder than fiction.
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