A Conspiracy of Interactive Facts (oh no another poem!)

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Everything is interactive
My shoes have an app
That plots
The best way to walk to the shops
that remember
What I buy and how best to advertise
A smart-coffee, personalized
with my favourite settings

And every chair in the joint
is my favourite chair
it remembers – what paper I read
And the paper I choose
will use
incredible math
to flatter my shoes
selected by the clever-cotton in my socks
That updates itself
with the latest virus protection software.

Sometimes I wake
from relevant dreams – put together
from viewing habits
and suspect that my shoes have been out
without
me
But where they’ve been
My socks won’t tell,
(though they know)
And who they’ve been speaking too
My phone won’t say
(though it has chosen my breakfast today)
I suspect…
That the bastards are all in it together.

A Reputable Establishment

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Trying to distract myself from impending results and novel fine-tuning…

I wrote a new poem:

A Reputable Establishment

I haven’t been to that bar that they built
on the ground
of the ancient Indian burial mound.

Where everyone pays by card
so the chink of coins doesn’t drown
out the sound
of the trendy experimental Jazz.

Where no one gets drunk and a banker’s on hand
to lend you the price of a beer
handmade
by a monk,
from organic hops
that shops wouldn’t sell in this genuine earthenware jug.

Where up on the stage
in a cage,
behind suited musicians hand-picked for the day,
are authentic louts, their teeth taken out,
leering scandalous obscenities
you can tell your friends about.

Where everyone sits with their legs crossed,
because where the toilets once were
has been redeveloped into an espresso bar
that serves artisan bread
And instead
of graffiti there’s poetry on the walls
written in black ink and block capitals.

Though the sinks are still there, with movement sensors that dispense for free,
water from the dead sea.
They’re next to the man, who washes your hands (for a tip)

It’s where the good people go
to wallow in the glow,
Of an abridged outsider culture.

But I haven’t been there, I wouldn’t get in
past the bouncer from Shaolin
Who checks at the door, to be sure
your degree (2.1 or above) is from a reputable establishment.

Blake Charlton, Halcyon or Storm Petrel ? (Spellwright – Review)

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This week I’ve just finished reading Spellwright by Blake Charlton.

I’ve been looking forwards to this book for a long time.
It’s about a dyslexic wizard, it had glowing endorsements from big names in fantasy, great review in Fortean Times, good review at Fantasy Faction, he quoted Ursula Le Guin in his epigraph.

… I’m willing to concede I set myself up for a bit of a disappointment here.

Charlton’s main character Nicodemus is stuck between prophecies, no one is certain whether he is the foretold Halcyon (the champion of Order) or the dreaded Storm Petrel, a sort of wizardy anti-christ.
I feel like the author was suffering similar confusion about his own abilities and couldn’t decide if he wanted to write a philosophical, speculative, intelligent fantasy, or an off-the-shelf epic fantasy.

The novel, like its protagonist, kept veering between the two extremes, never quite arriving at either.

On the one hand, the world he created was very cool, and the magical system even cooler. The wizards write spells as prose and then cast them from their bodies. The process of spellcasting is akin to writing computer code or poetry, or both. Wizard’s can recognise one another through their unique styles of writing, and can be crippled by dyslexia (cacagraphy in the book).
I loved this. I loved all the word-play that ensued as a result. I loved the idea of magic being as unique as writing-style.
As someone who often thinks of creative writing in terms of wizards and sorcerers, people can imagine why this might appeal to me. There lots of cool parallels not just with prose and code, but also DNA. There was speculation about chaos and entropy as a creative force in language and life (which I wish he had taken further).
This, and fans of the Matrix will like the imagery of the whole world being made out of glowing letters that only wizards can see.

… BUT.

A lot of this cool stuff was under explored. He insisted on throwing out literally every fantasy cliché in the book.
There was:

    1. Order vs Chaos

    2. A battle between deities gently reminiscent of Christian mythology.

    3. A Chosen One

    4. Of Seemingly Humble Origins

    5. … But is actually related to the Imperial family

    6. A dragon

    7. A wise old master

    8. A school for wizards

    9. An evil baddy who may as well have had a monocle and moustache

The list goes on. Seriously.

This, and Charlton is nuts for exposition, and seems to subscribe to the Tell Don’t Show school of thought. Every other page a character will get distracted into giving or receiving an extensive lecture about the background of the world. Or Sometimes it comes to them in a dream. Or sometimes the

    10. Bad guy explains everything whilst gloating.

Now I appreciate a lot of my annoyance at exposition is my own prejudice. Excess detail drives me nuts, but I felt this novel did take it to an extreme. The series is meant to be a trilogy, but he could have easily made it one book if he’d just left out all the unnecessary exposition (and it would be better because of it!).
On of the book’s strengths was its location. The Starhaven academy seemed eery, distant, alienated, weird. Built on top of the semi-explored ruins of a city built by an extinct species. It reminded me of Gormenghast or the space-station in Gateway in a lot of ways.
I didn’t need to know the history of the world this place was set in. The more I knew, the less interesting the setting was.
A fantasy author should spend a long time inventing monsters, creating histories, drawing maps… they just shouldn’t inflict too much of that on their reader.

The ending was also profoundly unsatisfying. Not in a “oooh I must purchase the sequel” way. In a “He really could have wound this up satisfactorily in one novel” kinda way.

The novel has been praised for all its strong points, and it should be. But it definitely isn’t the best the genre has to offer.

I wanted more, more of what Charlton is really good at, less of the rest.
I just don’t care that much about ambiguous chosen ones and painstakingly constructed worlds. I’ve already seen Star Wars.

So a god walks in with a gun…

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When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

– Raymond Chandler

I’ve this week set myself the task of writing 2000 words a day, in the hope of making some real headway into the new novel.

I’m blogging right now because I’m 300 words off my target and I’m looking for any excuse to procrastinate.
Chandler’s Law says I should just have someone walk in with a gun and be done with it, but that isn’t always an option for fantasy writers.
Not to mention that I’ve set my story in the gospels.
I already checked, and NONE of the gospel writers got out of difficult plot situations by having a man walk in with a gun.
Well, Luke did but that was expunged by the Church.

Oh well, onwards and upwards

"I picked the wrong day to quit smoking..."

Use-Names

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At present I’m powering through the Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin

Earthsea Quartet - Ursula Le Guin

A lot of my friends were shocked that I hadn’t yet read any of these books… I’ve consumed every letter of Sci Fi by Le Guin that I could lay my hands on. I’ve even read her translation of the Tao Te Ching (Which, by the by, is brilliant). Somehow I’ve just never gotten around to it. But it’s been living on my shelf for nearly a year and I’ve been feeling a lot of ‘hardboiled fiction burnout’ so I decided that it was time.

They’re fantastic books, especially if like me you enjoy Tolkien, but the underlying conservatism and Christian allegory kinda makes you uncomfortable. I think the themes running through the Earthsea books are a lot less nostalgic, a lot more mature, a lot more beautiful than Tolkien or CS Lewis (whose books it is invariably compared to).

The second book even has a young girl performing a human sacrifice… Le Guin wasn’t nearly so patronising to her young readers as some.

But what really tickled me was the idea of True Names that she put in the novels. Magic in the Earthsea world is practiced by knowing the True Names of things. People keep their real names secret, sharing them only with their most trusted friends. As a result, most people have a day-to-day Use-Name.
This reminded me of the internet (I mean, come on, Use-Names, User Names??) where people are equally guarded of their real identities. Where a person can wreak untold havoc if they only know someone’s Real identity. I have internet acquaintances I’ve known for years whose real names I still don’t know.

I wonder often how much this sort of thing is coincidence. The internet, it was built by geeks. It is, was, has been, for many a form of escapism just as Fantasy worlds have been (personally I hate the idea that fantasy is escapism, but bear with me).
The internet has its own language, its own rhetoric, all of which make it sound like a world to explore, a strange realm where the very matter of reality can be altered and controlled by those in the Know…

Is the internet’s long association with Anonymity in fact because the internet is really a part of Fantasyland?

10 commandments

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I’ve had to read a lot of the gospels researching my current novel… Christianity’s big contribution to Life is often said to be the whole love thing… Actually a LOT of religions beat Jesus to the mark on that one… Their real achievement was the 10 commandments. They looked at the 613 mitzvot and said “bugger that”.

And they were right. People shouldn’t have more laws than they do fingers

The end is Nigh

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Just put the final touches on Major Project for hand-in tomorrow.
End of the MA. Exciting, but no one was in, so I told the dog.
He gave me one of those looks that says:

“What are your strange human learnings to me? Today I rolled in the grass and barked at the flying metal sky-cat. As far as I’m concerned, for the last year you’ve been going out for extra walks twice a week and *not taking me*. Come, I’ll show you where we keep the biscuits.”

Not dead, Just Studying

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Just a quick hello to assure people the large quantities of 0 output this month are NOT because I’m dead.

I’m working on the Major Project for my MA… Which I’m pleased to discover seems to fit many definitions of the Quest Fantasy… not my creative submission (that’s a comic detective fantasy… sort of ), but the act of doing a major project itself.

You go off searching for obscure artifacts, guided by your supervisor, there’s a climatic battle… Total Quest Fantasy.

So things may remain quiet until I’ve thrown the One Ring into the fires of Mt Doom.

In the meanwhile, I shall share this adage from Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ that has become something of a guiding motto for me these last few months:

As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

(p.42)

Answer

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Whilst ambling through C-Space I came across this Sci Fi story, which I read for the first time in a secondary school English class.

It’s called ‘Answer’ and remains a favourite.
And I’m pretty sure it is out of copyright, so I thought I’d post it here.

——-
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

(Fredric Brown, “Answer”)

Reassessing the Role of the Jedi in the Old Republic. (Part I)

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Sure they’re kitschy and badly written, but I’ve always loved the Star Wars films. Who doesn’t like to see a super-powered order of space knights fighting the forces of darkness?

Recent considerations have, however, given me cause to reconsider the role of the Jedi in the Star Wars films. Whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to call them evil par se, I have started to develop major qualms about the version of events portrayed to us in the films.

Let’s start with the open credits.

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

This intro text often goes without any serious scrutiny, we assume that we are being addressed as viewers in the manner of a fairy tale. But does close analysis bear out this view?
I believe that the intro credits raise two questions:
Who is the narrator?
Who is being addressed?
You might say that the narrator is George Lucas, he is addressing his viewers. But the credits are not the same as other credits, for example those give us technical details about production. These credits are not “meta”, but an internal part of the film.
Now also consider this, the Star Wars universe is populated by humans. But we know that humans evolved on the planet earth. This means that the credits cannot be addressing us as 20th / 21st century human beings.
If the events of Star Wars were supposed to be set within our own universe, there could be no humans in the story. If the refrain “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” were being addressed to us directly as viewers, it would make no sense.
When we see the opening credits we are seeing a film-within-a-film, the credits are clearly intended for an implied viewer within an alternate fictional universe.
Now to return to the question of the narrator…
It would be fair to say that the Star Wars films fixate upon the Jedi Knights. Despite the historical events of galactic scale that are unfolding, despite the impossibility of such events hinging upon the actions of a handful of individuals, there is rarely a scene that doesn’t involve the Jedi.
Even in the original trilogy, where the Jedi have been all but destroyed, Jedi, or potential-Jedi enjoy a hugely disproportionate amount of screen time.
I believe that the subtext we are supposed to infer from all of this is that Star Wars is to be viewed as a film made by the Jedi for an undisclosed audience in some distant future. It is a history of political events, explaining things from their point of view.

This discovery radically alters how we are able to view Star Wars. If the Jedi are the narrators, and the events (by their own admission) took place in the distant past, to what extent can we trust their version of events?
We know that history tends to be written by the winners.

Once we cross examine the events of the film in this light, we start to uncover several unnerving inconsistencies in the Jedi tale. We can unravel the prejudices of the order by looking at what (and who) is marginalised in the films.
We discover a harrowing tale of religious persecution, political corruption and a power-struggle between two equally self-interested factions.

Political and religious propaganda?

We discover that the fable of Star Wars is, in fact, far more nuanced than we ever suspected.

Let us consider now another key question in the Star Wars universe. Where are all the other religions?

In the entire six films the only non-jedi religious sentiment we see expressed is by the Sith and peripherally by the Gungans (Who, we note, are portrayed as having been largely unknown to the Jedi until the events of the film).

Does it not strike anyone as odd that in a universe where actual miracles are possible, there seem to be no religious sects whatsoever in mainstream society?
Not only this, but most people do not seem to belong to the Jedi faith either, even though they demonstrate incredible powers.

This calls for some close analysis. Could it be possible that the Jedi do not in fact have supernatural powers? That this is embellishment of the tale?
It certainly seems probable, if the Jedi had real powers, everyone would believe in the force, yet force-skepticism seems prevalent in the Star Wars world.
Could the tale of Star Wars be something similar to our own religious epics, the Old Testament, the Gita, and so on. It is making claims about the supernatural, but these are not historically verified details.

We then still have to ask, where are all the non-jedi faiths? Why are the only non-jedi religions either unknown to the Jedi, or their arch nemesis?

The unavoidable conclusion is that the reason there are no other religions is probably because the Jedi have killed them all.

Their reaction to the discovery of the Sith is to immediately plot their destruction (even though the Sith philosophy does not seem especially different to our real world Church of Satan, Nietzsche or the Objectivist movement… Unpleasant perhaps, but not worthy of being hunted to death.)

Given how the Jedi behave towards religious rivals, and the marginalisation of other faiths in society, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Old Republic was probably a theocracy, where the Jedi faith had risen to total religious hegemony, and ruthlessly persecuted their rivals.