Author Archives: Ben

Prometheus

Posted on by

So, Prometheus. Well worth the evening out. Well acted and beautifully produced. Noomi Rapace has a great future: a Swedish Sigourney Weaver for the present day, who one day will get an international role that doesn’t require wearing skin-tight suits. The ship Prometheus itself is a thing of beauty, to be added to the canon of all-time great starships. It doesn’t do much more than provide a vehicle and a habitable environment for the humans to have their adventure, but it still dominates its screen time like an extra character. The effects are astonishingly good: by which I mean CGI, where it happens, is made to look like superlatively good model work. I can think of no higher praise.

I was also very pleased to see the movie in 2D. 3D would have been entirely superfluous. Some shots would have looked impressive but added nothing to the story and would certainly not be worth the extra expense.

Yes, there were things wrong with it but not enough to negate the experience of having gone. Even so, the criticism will take a disproportionate amount of this blog up. Don’t take it personally.

Movies dealing with matters of faith really should get a consultant in who actually has some, rather than someone who has just been told about it. Credit to the writers, they at least are aware that people with faith don’t just chuck the faith in when faced with Science and Reason and apparent contradictions. What they don’t quite get is why this is so. Thus the plot keeps stumbling over Z-level theological conundra of mind-numbing inconsequentiality, which is as irritating as a driver inexplicably dropping into third gear from time to time when he could just cruise in fourth all the way.

Many reviews I’ve seen devote time to the plot holes. I actually think these were script holes, which I’ll come to. Mostly these alleged plot holes revolve around the apparent illogic of the Engineers’ actions. This didn’t bother me for a number of reasons.

1. All we have to judge their actions against is Noomi’s drawn-from-thin-air assertion that they are our progenitors and have invited us. She might be wrong. In fact, I think she was. The engineers that we saw could sculpt a monument the size of Australia, giving a star map that could only be read from space, or at least leave a signature in a glacier somewhere. Rock scribblings of a consistent star map that are separated by thousands of miles and centuries are impressive, sure, but they do not constitute an invitation. (Oh yes, and deduct a further 10 points from the script writers for equating “galactic configuration”, whatever one of those is, with what we lesser beings prefer to call “a solar system”.)

2. Okay, assume it was invitation. Whatever the Engineers set up was done thousands of years ago. LV-233 might have been a paradise planet back then. Meanwhile factions rise and fall, policies change. Demanding consistency on that timescale would require a monolithic Star Trek-type civilisation where everyone thinks and acts in exactly the same way, for millennia. This is known technically as “bad science fiction (example of)”.

3. All we are seeing is a tiny slice of the Engineers’ world. You couldn’t extrapolate 21st century global politics by excavating the Great Pyramid.

4. Maybe the invitation was misunderstood? I’m put in mind of a short story I read years ago, “Dark benediction” by Walter M. Miller, which dates from 1951 and must be one of the earliest zombie apocalypse tales. In this case the apocalypse is wrought by a meteorite that was cut open by scientists, revealing a kind of parasitic goo which starts to infect people. What they didn’t notice was that the meteorite contained many layers. It was in fact intended as a gift. The donors assumed Earth scientists would think as they did and cut the thing open layer by layer, releasing ever increasing levels of technology, each one helping them to understand the next, so that by the time they reached the core they would know exactly what they were handling.

Anyway. Noomi herself excuses any illogicality in the story by noticing it and resolving to resolve it. So there.

The more geeky reviews wonder why, as this is a prequel to Alien, the crew of Nostromo didn’t pick up traces of the earlier expedition or the Engineers’ artefacts? My answer is twofold. Geeky: Nostromo landed in the middle of a storm with visibility reduced to tens of metres, and all sensor data was being handled by Ash the Evil Android and the ship’s computer, which had been programmed to consider the crew expendable. Less geekily: Alien was made over 30 years ago and Ridley Scott had no idea he would one day be revisiting the story.

So that’s the plot holes. Now the script holes …

The actors were good, and could all convince me as being specialists in one area who were out of their depths in another: again, like the Nostromo crew. They get a heck of a lot more sympathy than the frankly incompetent marines of Aliens who deserved everything they got. Most of the time the characters act as they do because that is what normal people would do and they have no idea they’re in the prequel to Alien.

But then their characters are made to do silly things. The biologist doesn’t notice alien life forms literally manifesting beneath his feet. They establish that air is breathable, but don’t check what else might be in it before breathing it. Sanshelmets, they open a door which might have unbreathable air behind it. Even the archaeologist acts surprised that their entry seems to have disturbed the equilibrium of somewhere that has lain undisturbed for millennia.

Oddest of all was when time seemed to stand still, or flow backwards, or something, onboard Prometheus. Violence occurs between characters, the ship’s procedures for preventing alien infiltration are blown to hell, and a woman is found wandering the corridors in her undies and covered in blood. No one even gives her a “‘Zup?” – they just carry on with the plot, including the people she has just beaten up who might at least cast her a dark glance.

Meanwhile, for no reason other than an additional 5 seconds of tension, an expensive item of medical equipment that has previously been firmly established to be the sole property and for the sole use of a female character is revealed to be configured for male bodies only.

Other things.

Why get a relatively young actor to play an older man when it entails swaddling him in layers of Star Trek latex? Why not save on at least a couple of layers by getting an older actor?

Why are axes standard issue in lifepods (apparently)?

And Ridley Scott’s sense of plausible timescales still irritates. It irritated me in Blade Runner, when I was expected to believe that a mere 40 years hence – 7 years hence, from where I’m now sitting – flying cars would be the norm and a character could plausibly bang on about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Now I’m expected to believe we’ll have viable interstellar travel, albeit requiring two years in hibernation, by the 2090s.

Quibbles, quibbles. It’s fun. Enjoy it.

And now some links.

Prometheus: an archaeological perspective (sort of) skewers it far more enjoyably than I can. Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About offers an alarmingly well thought out alternative reason for why everything went wrong, which is almost certainly not what Ridley Scott had in mind but makes perfect plot sense.

Res publica

Posted on by

I read several articles over the weekend in various outlets in which former trendy lefty reporter columnist types admitted how their youthful republicanism was gradually turning into something suspiciously pro-monarchy, and all because of the current incumbent of the British throne. I will admit possibly to being one of them.

Tonight, Madness will perform ‘Our House’ on top of Buckingham Palace, all very post-Blair, post-Cool Britannia and democratic, and I’m delighted. But it still can’t beat the sight of a rain-drenched chorus from the London Philharmonic singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ and the national anthem in the middle of the Thames, while an old lady of 86 stands, as she has stood for four hours, in the pouring rain, because she knows she owes it to the many who have come to pay their respects to her.

I am equally pleased that a short distance away, near City Hall, the ‘biggest republican protest in living memory’ was under way and getting all the TV time it deserved under the circumstances, which is to say, none. Even John Barrowman on the belfry barge, putting the camp into campanology, got more time than they did.

From Republic’s own web site: ‘Earlier this month Republic published a new pamphlet – 60 Inglorious Years – which argues that the Queen’s reign has been characterised by “personal enrichment, feeble leadership and an obstinate refusal to allow real scrutiny of her role”.’

Oh Get Over Yourself You Big Tart.

Don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely no doubt that in principle, in cold, rational theory, on paper, a republic is the most just and appropriate form of government for our time. In my own trendy student days (I had a few) I remember the republican cause frequently being put down by “two words: President Thatcher”, which was a fatuous argument that convinced absolutely no one who actually knew anything about politics. A republic does not have to have the same presidential system as the United States. In the event of this country ever becoming a republic at all, it will almost certainly be a parliamentary republic, with two Houses of Parliament and a Prime Minister recognisably similar to what we already have (though both Houses will be elected; possibly a subject of another post) and the President simply taking on the Queen’s current figurehead executive role. President Thatcher would be as important as President Whoever who is currently in charge of Germany.

(Anyway, Thatcher would never consent to such a role. She was too much of a snob, the figurehead of the arriviste Margo Leadbetter class who need, indeed, require a monarchy above them to emphasise their own branch of the tree.)

But the republic, if/when it comes, should be the grandest achievement of our history, the final emergence from the dark ages into the age of the post-Enlightenment. It should not be characterised by the petulant whine of a five year old complaining that it’s not fair.

And there is one other thing a republic needs. Giants. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Mary Robinson, even Jed Bartlet – in fact, it needs a steady succession of them as presidential terms expire and new holders take up the position. What could be a grander, prouder title to bear than President of the Republic? A republic could even get by quite comfortably with the present generation of political pygmies in all the legislative roles, as they currently are, so long as the executive was a step above.

I see no giants.

Short of an actual revolution – never going to happen – I see one way the republic could happen, and it would be a good way, and who knows, it might even give us the right sort of presidential material. The monarchy needs to attack itself from within. Charles waits until his mother has decently passed on, then announces that he will be the last monarch of Great Britain, and that he is now going to set the movement towards a republic in motion. The power of the monarchy is gradually phased out in favour of a president, possibly taking decades to do it, and a thousand years of generally glorious history comes peacefully and inevitably to an end.

It has happened before, and quite recently, in Spain. In that case it was the transition from dictatorship to constitutional monarchy, rather than constitutional monarchy to republic, but the same processes could apply. The king personally supervised the transition and grew immensely in stature as a result.

Maybe it will never happen. In fact, probably not. So this is my challenge to Republic: stop whining and give us the giants. Give us someone else of the same stature as that 86-year-old lady in the rain and then maybe you’ll get your wish.

Where I’m at

Posted on by

Once upon a time there was a young man with the twin ambitions, not incompatible, of making it big in publishing and becoming a successful writer. How did he do?

Well, the publishing happened, for a good few years. It didn’t take him long to discover that the bits he enjoyed most were editorial work and hands-on production. The bits that are actually more necessary, from a business model point of view – acquisitions, marketing, royalties, accounts in general, strategy – tended to leave him cold. His ambition to grease his way up any of those particular poles was therefore limited from the start, which led to a career of middling editorial sort of work – books, journals, more books, more journals, more books and oh, a magazine –culminating in the creation and liquidation of his own company. After that he rather felt he had had his fun in publishing and looked around for something with a compatible skillset requirement. Thus he found himself working in communications for a large computer network, which via a stroke-of-the-pen-change to marketing lasted for seven years – the longest this once aspiring publisher had held down any job. Redundancy struck – for the first time in a nearly quarter of a century career, which face it, isn’t bad – and cast him out into the world as an aspiring freelance technical writer, with the understanding that his former employers would be providing about a quarter of his work. No one told that to the marketing drone who replaced him and he was chronically underused, so more by chance than anything else he found himself employed fulltime once more as technical author for a firm that manufactures scientific instruments. His job title is now Communications Executive and to his huge surprise he has ended up in charge of advertisements, amongst other stuff, despite never having bought anything based on an advertisement in his life.

No, it isn’t where he saw himself 25 years ago. But it pays the bills and it leaves time for the other.

Stop sniggering, I do of course mean the writing. What happened there?

Well, it all went swimmingly at first. The writing was very specifically science fiction – okay, and fantasy if pushed, but sf most of all. That was 90% of his reading so it was going to be his writing too. Stories were sprayed at Interzone and other outlets – but mostly Interzone – until a few stuck. An agent was acquired, novels were written and even sold. Four in total. And then?

Well, that company that I, I mean he … I … he … oh, okay, I (you’d guessed, hadn’t you?) founded. It published science fiction. What else was this life-long sf fan going to publish? And it broke the subject. I’ve never been able to work out why. Maybe I looked too closely at what goes on behind the scenes – I saw the wooden supports that hold up the sets and suddenly could no longer suspend the disbelief. I can still read it but the drive to write it had just gone.

There again it’s possible I had just told all the stories that were bubbling inside me. I wrote a few more pieces, using up the last of the ideas bubbling away in the background, and they continue to bubble on slushpiles on either side of the Atlantic. If a publisher shows interest then I have no doubt my own interest will rekindle. But life is too short for writing on spec, and unless they do get taken up then there won’t be any more like them written for the foreseeable.

And I was introduced to Other Stuff. For a while I became Sebastian Rook, writing the first three of the Vampire Plagues series – Mayan vampires in Victorian London, for readers aged <=12. That was fun, and I could use my genre experience (though I say it myself) to deliver that little extra to the plots. The plot for book 1 came ready made; I made some suggestions that were retrofitted into the series background; I was consulted heavily on the plot for book 2; and for book 3 we all sat down in a room together and hacked the plot out from scratch.

That led – same editor, different publisher – into ghostwriting for a Real Life TV Celebrity, not genre at all. At least, not my usual genre. But genre of a sort, and nicely paying too. Rather like a series of H-bomb tests causing something ancient and terrible beneath the Pacific to stir, this caught the attention of my agent, who had not had a lot to do with my career in the intervening years but whose attention I badly needed to catch.

At his suggestion we are now working on a series of historical adventures, and fingers are crossed as to its success. I have come to the conclusion that every historical writer should be an sf writer first. No one knows they are living in the past. As a rule, everyone lives in the most present and up to date world they have ever known, even if it has standards and mores that are utterly alien to cultures that actually come later. For them this is normality and it must be presented as such, with all the important differences signalled to the reader via some means other than an “As you know, Bob” speech every couple of pages. A 32-gun frigate may seem quaint to us but it’s as exciting as a starship to a young man from the late eighteenth century.

And so that is where I am. By a series of utterly logical steps I am a publisher and science fiction writer who is not currently working in publishing or writing science fiction, and has a lurking suspicion that this is How It Is Meant to Be. At least for now. And really quite happy about it.

Keep watching.