And so it came to pass that one of the BBC's meagre attempts at Sci-Fi/Horror television actually got a second series. I wasn't overly impressed with the slow-moving In The Flesh when it made its 3-episode debut last year (strangely, it feels longer... both in the sense that I could have sworn there were more than three episodes, and that I was sure it was more than a year ago that it first turned up... but I neglected to comment on it at the time, so I must be wrong).
There seems to be a British way of doing Sci-Fi/Horror that's quite different from the American way and the European way (at least, if Les Revenants is anything to go by) and very few people ever successfully break that mold (Toby Whithouse/Being Human and Jack Thorne/The Fades being the two who spring to mind).
That said, I seem to recall seeing In The Flesh in a particular light when it first appeared and, having forced myself (and my very forgiving girlfriend) to watch the first episode of the second series last night, I believe my initial impression was wrong. I originally thought that the zombies were a clumsy metaphor for homosexuality, whereas now it seems far more likely that they are a more general clumsy metaphor for 'minorities'. I should, perhaps, have realised that my first assumption was wrong when the revelation that the main character, Kieren Walker (strangely not a reference to the zombies of The Walking Dead) was actually in love with another local boy who (possibly) shared his feelings but felt unable to act on them due to his reputation... I mean, who compounds a clumsy metaphor by adding something that blatant?
Um. Well, this episode opened with a great long lecture about tolerance and acceptance of 'people who are different', only for the lecturer and his young relative to become victims of the zombie equivalent of a pack of suicide bombers on a tram, complete with their prepared speech indicating that a section of the undead population was about to rise up to strike a blow against the infidel. Sorry, I meant 'the living'. Ahem.
The problem with this series is that all of the characters behave very predictably, according to the exigencies of the plot, rather than as if they are real people. Keiren, portrayed as weak and self-loathing, suddenly becomes violent toward a drunk local who has been taunting him and a couple of his acquaintances. The politician who turns up to befriend the (living) locals turns out to have a (not so) hidden agenda and goes sneaking after parish records. The local vicar - a hate preacher, no less - has hidden some of those records and has a heart attack at a critical moment, allowing the politician to make off with his records... they even had her run into the house to call for an ambulance and pause when she saw the book she was looking for, then slowly put the phone back on its cradle and leave the hate preacher to die. There was no reason for this cliché... they could just as easily have had her actually call an ambulance, then make off with the records, and only later reveal the full extent of her dark designs on the community.
Oh, and the preview for next week's suggests that - quelle surprise - Kieren is somehow integral to the plot.
Considering I have zombie dreams fairly often, it probably shouldn't surprise me that I had a zombie dream last night, even though they're not normally precipitated by things I've seen on telly or games I've played beforehand. Even more fun, this one started out with a bit about dodgy goings on at a boarding school and then suddenly metamorphosed into an even weirder version of In The Flesh, in which a mysterious cloaked figure walks around in his own personal swirling dust cloud, a 'rabid' Kieren was chasing a former friend around a set of back gardens while I hid in a (strangely empty) shed, and a group of young children were being led 'to safety', seemingly by following a trail of bubbles.
Monday 5 May 2014
Sunday 4 May 2014
Probably Tempting Fate
Around this time last year, I was suddenly and unexpectedly plagued by ants in my kitchen. It took several months after they were eventually cleared (if not by the ant killer sprayed liberally around by me, then by the professional poison dotted around my kitchen and bathroom) for me to stop checking the corners of the kitchen every morning and evening.
So it will probably come as no surprise that I started checking again back in February... continuing right the way through March and April, and over the last four days.
Thing is, I still don't know where they came from and why they were seething around my kitchen. The occasional moth I could understand - even more so after I realised there were eggs in one of my cupboards after I'd had three or four larva crawling around the ceilings over the course of a few weeks - but ants were a mystery. The exterminator reckoned they only ever set up shop near a source of water, and suggested a leaky pipe somewhere in the flat but I've seen no evidence of anything of the sort (leaky roof being more likely, all things considered, but then why the kitchen, so far from where the leak is affecting my ceilings?).
Still, it's nice to find that, so far, I've not been troubled by ants all over again this year. Let's hope that continues...
So it will probably come as no surprise that I started checking again back in February... continuing right the way through March and April, and over the last four days.
Thing is, I still don't know where they came from and why they were seething around my kitchen. The occasional moth I could understand - even more so after I realised there were eggs in one of my cupboards after I'd had three or four larva crawling around the ceilings over the course of a few weeks - but ants were a mystery. The exterminator reckoned they only ever set up shop near a source of water, and suggested a leaky pipe somewhere in the flat but I've seen no evidence of anything of the sort (leaky roof being more likely, all things considered, but then why the kitchen, so far from where the leak is affecting my ceilings?).
Still, it's nice to find that, so far, I've not been troubled by ants all over again this year. Let's hope that continues...
On Reading
I've never really considered myself a particularly strong reader. As nipper, I learned to read very well, but then couldn't really be bothered. I seem to recall that I borrowed The Hobbit from my Middle School library about half a dozen times, but never actually read a page of it. My family would frequent a mobile library which parked up near our local church. On each visit, I would browse the section that contained the Doctor Who books, pick one or two out, and then never even open them. It's entirely possible I didn't even read the blurb on the back of the books.
Throughout my youth, the only books that ever really made an impact on my were the Fighting Fantasy Adventure Gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and various knockoffs, such as the Indiana Jones Choose Your Own Adventure books (one of which, incidentally, led to a brief but bitter feud between my mother and me) which were comprised of short, numbered paragraphs of text followed by a choice of which paragraph to read next. I didn't even play them properly... When I reached a point where the book instructed me to "Test you luck", for example, I'd invariably presume good fortune was with me, rather than roll the dice. When it asked if I'd picked up a particular piece of equipment, well, of course I had!
But I digress. Even when given books as gifts, I'd put them on a shelf and studiously ignore them. I wasn't really interested, not least because I was far more interested in TransFormers toys and, later, computer games. It was only really in my teens, when studying English Literature at both GCSE and A-level, that I got bitten by the reading bug. While other folks complained bitterly about how dull Jane Eyre was, I actually rather enjoyed it. Later on, I discovered the concept of 'reading for pleasure' with Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, and even started raiding my parents' cabinet of old Sci Fi greats, written by the likes of Asimov and Bradbury, and their Sherlock Holmes omnibus.
During my adult life, I have had many books and authors recommended to me, and all of them have broadened my taste, albeit largely within the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres. Random additions to my bookshelves include things like Natsume Soseki's amazing I Am a Cat (recommended by the tutor in a Japanese language course I did many years ago), 'historical' epics like Outlaws of the Marsh (upon which the old TV series The Water Margin is based) and Three Kingdoms (from which sprung the videogames in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series), as well as collections of classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Three Musketeers. I've even read the odd bit of non-fiction, but that tends to be things like Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow.
There are many books by many authors that I'd never have encountered were it not for a recommendation, and I rarely give up on a book once I've started it. The last time that happened was Robert Lee Hall's Exit Sherlock Holmes... and it wasn't even because it wasn't any good, I just couldn't be bothered to finish it until my sister grudgingly gave me a massive spoiler which turned the story into Sci-Fi rather than a Sherlock Holmes story which barely featured Sherlock Holmes except as the subject of the mystery. Some recommendations have been more enjoyable that others, and some have led to me frantically searching out everything an author has ever written... but I've always read very slowly.
In part, this is because I tended only to read before bedtime, as a means of settling down in the evening. Even with the most riveting read, I'd tend to get through only a couple of pages before feeling the need to put my head down and get some kip.
Other opportunities to read may have presented themselves - long journeys by train or plane when going on holiday, for example - but I never really took advantage of them. Trains tend to send me to sleep and planes tend to be far too noisy for reading.
Then, at the beginning of this year, I had a temping placement close to Russell Square station in town. It's far from being the opposite end of the Piccadilly line, but the journey works out as almost exactly an hour on the train, without including any waiting time (of which there now tends to be little as I've got the timing of the journey sorted out). That's a full hour in which I can reliably sit and read and, as long as I've had enough sleep the night before, not fall asleep while doing so.
Which is convenient... Because, for Christmas, I got the first three of the four-volume Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. The First and Second Chronicles must have taken me a couple of years to read because of their size, let alone because of Donaldson's exceptionally dense writing and unforgiving vocabulary. Despite my familiarity with the unconventional conventions of Fantasy Character Naming, it took a while for me to get used to oddities like 'High Lord Kevin Landwaster' and other names which raised an unintended smile. At first glance, bits of the Chronicles seem quite derivative of Tolkein, but Lord Foul the Despiser is a far trickier villain than Sauron, and far more deadly in his scheming. Furthermore, Donaldson himself admitted that he was teaching himself to write while writing, so one can forgive his earliest works for being a bit clumsy.
I started reading The Runes of the Earth as soon as I started working after Christmas and got through it surprisingly quickly, helped (strangely) by the fact that I knew some of what was coming because I'd read a Wikipedia page about the book. Then I read Fatal Revenant. Then I read Against All Things Ending. I'm pretty sure I'd got a good way through that last book by the time my temping job ended. I can't remember exactly how long it took now but, compared to the First and Second Chronicles, I'd blasted through them, averaging about forty pages per day (twenty on the way to work, another twenty on the way home). Needless to say, for me, that's pretty quick.
And once I'd got myself up to date on the events of The Land, I had a pile of books ready to start, some of which I'd bought at this year's PicoCon. There was the option to carry on my Donaldson binge with the Gap series, or try something a bit different. Perhaps I'm a bit late to the game, but I managed to find a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and I'd also made the rather random purchase of Christopher Priest's The Prestige (I quite enjoyed the movie, after all, and books are invariably better than their movie adaptations). I began with the former, since it's so highly regarded, and was initially a little disappointed. I fear that, if it was adapted into a movie today, it would seem very samey. At its heart, it's a Sci-Fi Noir/Heist story - so it would be compared to Inception - with hints of Blade Runner to its dystopian view of the future. Many aspects of the cybernetic enhancement of humans present in Neuromancer have been borrowed by the likes of Ghost in the Shell and, more recently, videogames like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, all too often in life, the source material for great ideas is heavily overshadowed by its derivatives. I'd say Ghost in the Shell, with its tale of an AI seeking asylum via a cybernetic body, owes a massive debt to Neuromancer. It was an enjoyable read, to be sure, and its realistically truncated dialogue was certainly unusual... but it didn't feel all that unique or groundbreaking due to the Noir/Heist basis of the story.
After than, I moved on to The Prestige... which is very different to the movie. A fair chunk of the story is set 'in the present day', though it still bases itself around the long-standing feud between two stage magicians of the late 1800s and early 1900s - Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. For most of the book - written as Borden's notebook and Angier's diary - it's not even clear why it has been republished as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series because there's precious little Sci-Fi to be found until Angier gets sent looking for Nikola Tesla. The narrative is so unreliable - Borden clearly states that his notebook contains only that which he wants to be read, while Angier admits to destroying a good portion of his (early) entries - that, while it generally feels as though you're getting a good idea of what's happening, later pages reveal how little of what has gone before is accurate or truthful: Angiers tells tales of his horrific and life-threatening encounters with Borden which Borden apparently felt were not worthy of even a passing mention. The movie is a very much simplified and condensed version of the book and, during Angier's portion of the narrative, I was constantly wondering how close to the movie the ending would be. Some aspects of it seem a bit silly in comparison, but it was a great read. It seems Priest is considered something of a master of unreliable narrative, so I may well look up some of his other stuff...
So, the question of my reading now becomes a matter of whether my choices of early reading material were at fault, whether I need a situation where reading is the only viable form of occupying my mind, whether I've improved over the years since I first started reading for pleasure, or whether the wiring of my brain is such that I'm better able to concentrate for longer periods of reading.
And, chances are, it's a combination of all of them...
...Though having two hours of reading time either side of my working day is certainly a big help in getting through a book quickly. It took maybe a couple of months to get through three volumes of Donaldson's latest Covenant books, but Neuromancer and The Prestige took about a week each...
...And since I finished The Prestige, I took under a week to read the first in Donaldson's Gap series... Chances are, I'll have finished the whole series before The Last Dark comes out in paperback.
Throughout my youth, the only books that ever really made an impact on my were the Fighting Fantasy Adventure Gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and various knockoffs, such as the Indiana Jones Choose Your Own Adventure books (one of which, incidentally, led to a brief but bitter feud between my mother and me) which were comprised of short, numbered paragraphs of text followed by a choice of which paragraph to read next. I didn't even play them properly... When I reached a point where the book instructed me to "Test you luck", for example, I'd invariably presume good fortune was with me, rather than roll the dice. When it asked if I'd picked up a particular piece of equipment, well, of course I had!
But I digress. Even when given books as gifts, I'd put them on a shelf and studiously ignore them. I wasn't really interested, not least because I was far more interested in TransFormers toys and, later, computer games. It was only really in my teens, when studying English Literature at both GCSE and A-level, that I got bitten by the reading bug. While other folks complained bitterly about how dull Jane Eyre was, I actually rather enjoyed it. Later on, I discovered the concept of 'reading for pleasure' with Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, and even started raiding my parents' cabinet of old Sci Fi greats, written by the likes of Asimov and Bradbury, and their Sherlock Holmes omnibus.
During my adult life, I have had many books and authors recommended to me, and all of them have broadened my taste, albeit largely within the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres. Random additions to my bookshelves include things like Natsume Soseki's amazing I Am a Cat (recommended by the tutor in a Japanese language course I did many years ago), 'historical' epics like Outlaws of the Marsh (upon which the old TV series The Water Margin is based) and Three Kingdoms (from which sprung the videogames in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series), as well as collections of classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Three Musketeers. I've even read the odd bit of non-fiction, but that tends to be things like Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow.
There are many books by many authors that I'd never have encountered were it not for a recommendation, and I rarely give up on a book once I've started it. The last time that happened was Robert Lee Hall's Exit Sherlock Holmes... and it wasn't even because it wasn't any good, I just couldn't be bothered to finish it until my sister grudgingly gave me a massive spoiler which turned the story into Sci-Fi rather than a Sherlock Holmes story which barely featured Sherlock Holmes except as the subject of the mystery. Some recommendations have been more enjoyable that others, and some have led to me frantically searching out everything an author has ever written... but I've always read very slowly.
In part, this is because I tended only to read before bedtime, as a means of settling down in the evening. Even with the most riveting read, I'd tend to get through only a couple of pages before feeling the need to put my head down and get some kip.
Other opportunities to read may have presented themselves - long journeys by train or plane when going on holiday, for example - but I never really took advantage of them. Trains tend to send me to sleep and planes tend to be far too noisy for reading.
Then, at the beginning of this year, I had a temping placement close to Russell Square station in town. It's far from being the opposite end of the Piccadilly line, but the journey works out as almost exactly an hour on the train, without including any waiting time (of which there now tends to be little as I've got the timing of the journey sorted out). That's a full hour in which I can reliably sit and read and, as long as I've had enough sleep the night before, not fall asleep while doing so.
Which is convenient... Because, for Christmas, I got the first three of the four-volume Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. The First and Second Chronicles must have taken me a couple of years to read because of their size, let alone because of Donaldson's exceptionally dense writing and unforgiving vocabulary. Despite my familiarity with the unconventional conventions of Fantasy Character Naming, it took a while for me to get used to oddities like 'High Lord Kevin Landwaster' and other names which raised an unintended smile. At first glance, bits of the Chronicles seem quite derivative of Tolkein, but Lord Foul the Despiser is a far trickier villain than Sauron, and far more deadly in his scheming. Furthermore, Donaldson himself admitted that he was teaching himself to write while writing, so one can forgive his earliest works for being a bit clumsy.
I started reading The Runes of the Earth as soon as I started working after Christmas and got through it surprisingly quickly, helped (strangely) by the fact that I knew some of what was coming because I'd read a Wikipedia page about the book. Then I read Fatal Revenant. Then I read Against All Things Ending. I'm pretty sure I'd got a good way through that last book by the time my temping job ended. I can't remember exactly how long it took now but, compared to the First and Second Chronicles, I'd blasted through them, averaging about forty pages per day (twenty on the way to work, another twenty on the way home). Needless to say, for me, that's pretty quick.
And once I'd got myself up to date on the events of The Land, I had a pile of books ready to start, some of which I'd bought at this year's PicoCon. There was the option to carry on my Donaldson binge with the Gap series, or try something a bit different. Perhaps I'm a bit late to the game, but I managed to find a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and I'd also made the rather random purchase of Christopher Priest's The Prestige (I quite enjoyed the movie, after all, and books are invariably better than their movie adaptations). I began with the former, since it's so highly regarded, and was initially a little disappointed. I fear that, if it was adapted into a movie today, it would seem very samey. At its heart, it's a Sci-Fi Noir/Heist story - so it would be compared to Inception - with hints of Blade Runner to its dystopian view of the future. Many aspects of the cybernetic enhancement of humans present in Neuromancer have been borrowed by the likes of Ghost in the Shell and, more recently, videogames like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, all too often in life, the source material for great ideas is heavily overshadowed by its derivatives. I'd say Ghost in the Shell, with its tale of an AI seeking asylum via a cybernetic body, owes a massive debt to Neuromancer. It was an enjoyable read, to be sure, and its realistically truncated dialogue was certainly unusual... but it didn't feel all that unique or groundbreaking due to the Noir/Heist basis of the story.
After than, I moved on to The Prestige... which is very different to the movie. A fair chunk of the story is set 'in the present day', though it still bases itself around the long-standing feud between two stage magicians of the late 1800s and early 1900s - Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. For most of the book - written as Borden's notebook and Angier's diary - it's not even clear why it has been republished as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series because there's precious little Sci-Fi to be found until Angier gets sent looking for Nikola Tesla. The narrative is so unreliable - Borden clearly states that his notebook contains only that which he wants to be read, while Angier admits to destroying a good portion of his (early) entries - that, while it generally feels as though you're getting a good idea of what's happening, later pages reveal how little of what has gone before is accurate or truthful: Angiers tells tales of his horrific and life-threatening encounters with Borden which Borden apparently felt were not worthy of even a passing mention. The movie is a very much simplified and condensed version of the book and, during Angier's portion of the narrative, I was constantly wondering how close to the movie the ending would be. Some aspects of it seem a bit silly in comparison, but it was a great read. It seems Priest is considered something of a master of unreliable narrative, so I may well look up some of his other stuff...
So, the question of my reading now becomes a matter of whether my choices of early reading material were at fault, whether I need a situation where reading is the only viable form of occupying my mind, whether I've improved over the years since I first started reading for pleasure, or whether the wiring of my brain is such that I'm better able to concentrate for longer periods of reading.
And, chances are, it's a combination of all of them...
...Though having two hours of reading time either side of my working day is certainly a big help in getting through a book quickly. It took maybe a couple of months to get through three volumes of Donaldson's latest Covenant books, but Neuromancer and The Prestige took about a week each...
...And since I finished The Prestige, I took under a week to read the first in Donaldson's Gap series... Chances are, I'll have finished the whole series before The Last Dark comes out in paperback.
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