One thing I do try to do, as often as possible, with this blog is document my weird dreams and I've had a couple this week which would be outright disturbing on their own. Together, there's a sense of escalation, despite the fact that the first cast me as the 'victim', while I was the 'villain' in the second.
Since I've left it a few days before getting round to writing about the first, I don't remember much beyond the impression the dream left with me. Essentially, it boiled down to being kidnapped by a trio of eastern Europeans in a what seemed to be a small car. I was with a former colleague - someone I intensely disliked, so I've no idea why they'd have kidnapped the both of us - and, at one point, we seemed to come to a silent agreement to attempt an escape. The driver - someone else I believe I recognised, but don't remember who it was - turned round long enough to impress upon us what a painful mistake it would be as the two sitting in the back of the car with us (may have been a taxi... or some kind of many-seater people mover that simply felt claustrophobic under the circumstances) were rather more alert and dangerous than they might have appeared... and that they would reach their guns before we did.
We resigned ourselves to whatever fate awaited us, and I started thinking that there was lots of stuff in my cellphone that would be of great use to anyone attempting identity theft, and wondered if I'd be able to get it out of my pocket to delete the offending notes before they noticed. It did dimly occur to me that, if I could do that, I might be able to phone or text for help... but I woke up around that point.
Thursday night's dream is somewhat fresher in my memory, though the details are no less confused, to be honest. It seemed to begin with me playing a first-person shooter game, looking about the same quality as GoldenEye on the N64 (which is to say, a bit rubbish by today's standards) and spending quite some time laughing at the game's expense. At some point, though, this low-res, low-poly game blended into reality... or I stopped playing and moved elsewhere in the building I was in - the problem was I couldn't really be sure in the dream, partly because of the extreme nature of what I did next...
...For some reason, my girlfriend's family (including the dog, but it wasn't their actual dog as far as I can remember) had gathered together in a large-ish, glassed-off area in one room. It looked almost like a large shower cabinet as the glass didn't reach the floor or ceiling, so perhaps they were just checking out various parts of a large hotel apartment, and decided to see if they could all fit into the shower..? On a whim, I decided to chuck a grenade in with them.
I have no idea where the grenade game from, other than the game...
The next bit I remember was walking down a road heading back towards the scene of the crime, imagining what state the police and forensics teams would have found the room in - glass and human giblets littering the floor, part of a wall blown out, people in clean suits milling around taking samples of DNA, that kind of thing. I distinctly remember thinking I could get away unpunished... and that either my girlfriend wouldn't mind that I'd killed her family (and dog), or that I could at least get her to keep quiet about it. Weirdly, that's when reality started to trickle into the dream, and I realised there was no way I'd ever get away with it, one way or another, and that my girlfriend would never approve... So I decided to turn myself in to the police just before I woke up.
I wonder if that last part was a reaction to my utter disdain for that plot device most frequently used it detective TV shows, where the killer says "I had no choice but to kill that person" (sometimes almost being presented as a sympathetic character, for example, killing someone to protect a friend/lover)... Because, let's face it, whatever the situation, ending someone's life - whether one's own or someone else's - is not the only choice. Perhaps it's the intention to portray all killers as so divorced from reality that they can't see an alternative but, far too often, these characters are portrayed as everyday people up until they're revealed as the killer.
But what's worse than that, in those same TV shows where the killer committed murder (occasionally several) to 'protect' another person they supposedly care about, that person invariable shows disgust - as opposed to dismay - that this person they've supposedly known for ages would behave that way... and I don't believe for a moment that such a dramatic act could be utterly unprecedented.
Now I'm on this televisual digression, I'll mention that I've just started watching Mr. Robot... and have been very impressed so far, both with the story (even if it is a little derivative) and its presentation. The odd camera angles, the use of focus to represent the main character's state of mind and attention make it very interesting to watch without even paying attention to the story. The protagonist's warped morality and the internal dialogue - directed, amusingly, at an imaginary person who is the viewer - are compelling. I like the way his best friend and his shrink can both tell when his attention has drifted (presented briefly as a flashback or a more honest version of the conversation he's having) and snap him back to reality. The best friend also impressed me by striving to avoid being a damsel in distress, insisting that the protagonist let her succeed or fail on her own abilities, rather than step in to support her in the workplace.
Saturday, 14 November 2015
Sunday, 1 November 2015
The Fiction Dichotomy
It's been quite a while since I wrote anything significant about the books I was reading... that was probably the Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which took up far too many posts due to an excess of enthusiasm for a genre I'd never really tried reading before.
With Science Fiction, I'm on more familiar ground... Or so I thought, until I encountered Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. It starts out all nice and properly Sci-Fi, with a maverick space trader discovering an important artifact of a long-dead alien race, and with some families arriving on a reasonably human-compatible world having been shipped there to turn it into a halfway decent colony, only for things to go tits-up when a weird satanist convict happens upon some weird energy-virus-thing that gives him terrible powers. The writing throughout is compelling, and actually became quite unnerving as the antagonist tortured people to open them up for possession, and the internal electronic systems of various soldiers started to malfunction under this malign influence...
...but all that forced a disconnect from the story, when I found myself wondering "why is there Supernatural Horror in this Sci-Fi story?"
Because this isn't possession by some weird alien energy virus, as it's first thought... it's possession by the eternal souls of long-dead humans, given inexplicable powers. And it gets weirder than that.
I'm currently about three quarters through the second book in what's called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, and one of the primary antagonists by this point is Al Capone, the Prohibition era American gangster, assisted by the futuristic equivalent of Lady Gaga. It's very confusing to have this level of batshit insanity in a Science Fiction story, even one which seems to be trying to explore some measure of theology by focusing on the nature of the afterlife. Bad enough when the souls of real people from real history are described as returning from some kind of purgatory from which they have been enviously observing life for millennia... but now the first major antagonist has discovered the existence of ghosts as well.
Yet, while all this weirdness is making me question why I'm continuing to read such a bizarre mixture of genres, the quality of writing and characterisation is keeping me utterly hooked. I want to know what happens next, even though I genuinely dislike the story.
It also helps that some elements - such as the human augmentations, the 'affinity' links between people and bio-mechanical machines, not least the Voidhawks and Blackhawks - are very interesting and well-implemented, and the 'living spacecraft' idea has intrigued me since Farscape, if not the likes of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who... novels. It's also unusual for a Science Fiction novel to acknowledge how ridiculously difficult it would be for fleets of spacecraft to effect a planetary invasion from another solar system except where the planet is wholly undefended, and that a space battle would tend to last a number of minutes if planned and executed in any sensible way, rather than the way movies tend to do it. There are also several stories going on at once, as one would expect from a novel that spans several galaxies, with the Possessed progressing their grand agenda, as well as a few fighting against it or, at least, progressing their own personal agendas instead, as the living come to terms with the terrible concept of the afterlife as described by the Possessed and struggle to find a way to contain them and, eventually, fight back against them... With one of the alien races hinting that fighting may not be the answer at all.
The thing about reading for oneself, rather than watching a TV show or a movie, is that the experience becomes less vicarious because it's playing out directly in your head rather than in front of your eyes... This series, so far, has been hitting all the right notes, even with the more outlandish characters. Their behaviour is believable, given their circumstances (which is rarely true of television these days, let alone movies!), and the galaxy-spanning implications of all areas and types of conflict involved are quite palpable.
So I guess it's bravo, Mr Hamilton...
With Science Fiction, I'm on more familiar ground... Or so I thought, until I encountered Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. It starts out all nice and properly Sci-Fi, with a maverick space trader discovering an important artifact of a long-dead alien race, and with some families arriving on a reasonably human-compatible world having been shipped there to turn it into a halfway decent colony, only for things to go tits-up when a weird satanist convict happens upon some weird energy-virus-thing that gives him terrible powers. The writing throughout is compelling, and actually became quite unnerving as the antagonist tortured people to open them up for possession, and the internal electronic systems of various soldiers started to malfunction under this malign influence...
...but all that forced a disconnect from the story, when I found myself wondering "why is there Supernatural Horror in this Sci-Fi story?"
Because this isn't possession by some weird alien energy virus, as it's first thought... it's possession by the eternal souls of long-dead humans, given inexplicable powers. And it gets weirder than that.
I'm currently about three quarters through the second book in what's called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, and one of the primary antagonists by this point is Al Capone, the Prohibition era American gangster, assisted by the futuristic equivalent of Lady Gaga. It's very confusing to have this level of batshit insanity in a Science Fiction story, even one which seems to be trying to explore some measure of theology by focusing on the nature of the afterlife. Bad enough when the souls of real people from real history are described as returning from some kind of purgatory from which they have been enviously observing life for millennia... but now the first major antagonist has discovered the existence of ghosts as well.
Yet, while all this weirdness is making me question why I'm continuing to read such a bizarre mixture of genres, the quality of writing and characterisation is keeping me utterly hooked. I want to know what happens next, even though I genuinely dislike the story.
It also helps that some elements - such as the human augmentations, the 'affinity' links between people and bio-mechanical machines, not least the Voidhawks and Blackhawks - are very interesting and well-implemented, and the 'living spacecraft' idea has intrigued me since Farscape, if not the likes of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who... novels. It's also unusual for a Science Fiction novel to acknowledge how ridiculously difficult it would be for fleets of spacecraft to effect a planetary invasion from another solar system except where the planet is wholly undefended, and that a space battle would tend to last a number of minutes if planned and executed in any sensible way, rather than the way movies tend to do it. There are also several stories going on at once, as one would expect from a novel that spans several galaxies, with the Possessed progressing their grand agenda, as well as a few fighting against it or, at least, progressing their own personal agendas instead, as the living come to terms with the terrible concept of the afterlife as described by the Possessed and struggle to find a way to contain them and, eventually, fight back against them... With one of the alien races hinting that fighting may not be the answer at all.
The thing about reading for oneself, rather than watching a TV show or a movie, is that the experience becomes less vicarious because it's playing out directly in your head rather than in front of your eyes... This series, so far, has been hitting all the right notes, even with the more outlandish characters. Their behaviour is believable, given their circumstances (which is rarely true of television these days, let alone movies!), and the galaxy-spanning implications of all areas and types of conflict involved are quite palpable.
So I guess it's bravo, Mr Hamilton...
Wednesday, 21 October 2015
Coincidental Anniversary is Coincidental
Well, good grief... It's been over three months since I last posted anything on here - clearly my life has become ever so hectic, or something - but I could hardly miss out on posting something today, as it's this blog's ninth birthday!
It's also, by sheerest coincidence, Back to the Future Day - the 'future' date that 'Doc' Emmett Brown brought young Marty McFly to in an effort to prevent a disaster involving his son in a film released in 1989 (or 1985, as it happened right at the end of the first film, technically). Cue all kinds of internet wackiness, and police forces all over the world tweeting warnings about travelling at 88mph, or hoverboard usage, or something to do with DeLorean cars...
...Even our histrionic Prime Minister got in on the act, with a feeble attempt at a joke about his counterpart in the Opposition going back to 1985 where his policies supposedly originate. Nice one, Dave: try to engage with 'geek culture' and show what a twat you are.
But I digress.
Honestly, lots has been happening over the last few months. So much, I can't possibly hope to mention most of it here because I'd like to get this done and go to bed, thank you very much. It is somewhat regretful that I haven't at least documented some of my telly viewings because, since my girlfriend moved in last year, we've had Netflix and Amazon Prime keeping us amused whenever regular television lets us down. Which is most nights.
After becoming addicted to Bridezillas while visiting her best friend in LA last year, my girlfriend and I have been... if not actually pleased or happy, then at least gratified to see it turn up in ITVbe's schedule recently, and one of my colleagues introduced me the the festival of schadenfreude that is Channel 4's First Dates. Then there's the recent return of Doctor Who, of course. Meanwhile, on Netflix, we regularly watch Fringe, amongst other things, and the likes of Castle and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Amazon.
I've even been somewhat successful in getting my girlfriend to give a damn about TransFormers through Beast Wars and TransFormers Prime on DVD, and her interest was piqued by Weird Al Yankovic's voicework on TransFormers Animated.
Speaking of the inimitable Mr Yankovic, we attended his recent concert at the Hammersmith Apollo (I make no apologies for using its old name, since Hammersmith station has two signs directing people to the Apollo, both of which feature different names, neither of them the current one!) followed within a week by the Barenaked Ladies performance at the club inside the O2 dome.
But before all of that, we had a week(ish) in Chicago, where we did lots of cool stuff, saw lots of cool things, ate lots of amazing food (well, not so much me, as I had food poisoning for the first half of the holiday) and generally had a grand old time on our first 'flying solo' holiday together - staying in a hotel rather than with friends or family, and finding our own way everywhere via public transport. Which was fantastic, I must say - very similar to London, with their Ventra cards and halfway decent buses and trains. Since my first 'proper' international holiday about 20 years ago, I've visited quite a few bits of the States - places like New York, Washington, New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles (a couple of times) and Florida - but nowhere so far has felt quite as familiar and comfortable as Chicago. I've described New York in the past as being "like London on a bad day, populated by 9 million of the world's most impatient people", but Chicago was more like London on a good day, and populated by some surprisingly friendly and open people. Not least, the day we arrived, having got confused over how to get to the hotel (the bus we thought we were taking only runs during the week, and we arrived on Saturday), a lady on the bus we ended up on, who interrupted her phone call just to ask if we knew where we were going, where we'd need to get off, etc. and then offered advice on some of the sights to see.
So, basically, it's a case of having way too much to write about, and not enough time to write it in.
Weirdly, though, I have decided to start another blog on another subject... It shouldn't require much input from me as it's on a very specific subject. At least, that's what I'm telling myself...
In other news, work has been pretty crazy in all kinds of ways I probably shouldn't write about (yet). It's just getting to the almost slack period in the monthly cycle before it all goes nuts for Christmas and the New Year... but it should all be OK. And who knows what the New Year will bring? I have a few ideas, at least...
I'll try to get back to this blog before then. Honest.
It's also, by sheerest coincidence, Back to the Future Day - the 'future' date that 'Doc' Emmett Brown brought young Marty McFly to in an effort to prevent a disaster involving his son in a film released in 1989 (or 1985, as it happened right at the end of the first film, technically). Cue all kinds of internet wackiness, and police forces all over the world tweeting warnings about travelling at 88mph, or hoverboard usage, or something to do with DeLorean cars...
...Even our histrionic Prime Minister got in on the act, with a feeble attempt at a joke about his counterpart in the Opposition going back to 1985 where his policies supposedly originate. Nice one, Dave: try to engage with 'geek culture' and show what a twat you are.
But I digress.
Honestly, lots has been happening over the last few months. So much, I can't possibly hope to mention most of it here because I'd like to get this done and go to bed, thank you very much. It is somewhat regretful that I haven't at least documented some of my telly viewings because, since my girlfriend moved in last year, we've had Netflix and Amazon Prime keeping us amused whenever regular television lets us down. Which is most nights.
After becoming addicted to Bridezillas while visiting her best friend in LA last year, my girlfriend and I have been... if not actually pleased or happy, then at least gratified to see it turn up in ITVbe's schedule recently, and one of my colleagues introduced me the the festival of schadenfreude that is Channel 4's First Dates. Then there's the recent return of Doctor Who, of course. Meanwhile, on Netflix, we regularly watch Fringe, amongst other things, and the likes of Castle and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Amazon.
I've even been somewhat successful in getting my girlfriend to give a damn about TransFormers through Beast Wars and TransFormers Prime on DVD, and her interest was piqued by Weird Al Yankovic's voicework on TransFormers Animated.
Speaking of the inimitable Mr Yankovic, we attended his recent concert at the Hammersmith Apollo (I make no apologies for using its old name, since Hammersmith station has two signs directing people to the Apollo, both of which feature different names, neither of them the current one!) followed within a week by the Barenaked Ladies performance at the club inside the O2 dome.
But before all of that, we had a week(ish) in Chicago, where we did lots of cool stuff, saw lots of cool things, ate lots of amazing food (well, not so much me, as I had food poisoning for the first half of the holiday) and generally had a grand old time on our first 'flying solo' holiday together - staying in a hotel rather than with friends or family, and finding our own way everywhere via public transport. Which was fantastic, I must say - very similar to London, with their Ventra cards and halfway decent buses and trains. Since my first 'proper' international holiday about 20 years ago, I've visited quite a few bits of the States - places like New York, Washington, New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles (a couple of times) and Florida - but nowhere so far has felt quite as familiar and comfortable as Chicago. I've described New York in the past as being "like London on a bad day, populated by 9 million of the world's most impatient people", but Chicago was more like London on a good day, and populated by some surprisingly friendly and open people. Not least, the day we arrived, having got confused over how to get to the hotel (the bus we thought we were taking only runs during the week, and we arrived on Saturday), a lady on the bus we ended up on, who interrupted her phone call just to ask if we knew where we were going, where we'd need to get off, etc. and then offered advice on some of the sights to see.
So, basically, it's a case of having way too much to write about, and not enough time to write it in.
Weirdly, though, I have decided to start another blog on another subject... It shouldn't require much input from me as it's on a very specific subject. At least, that's what I'm telling myself...
In other news, work has been pretty crazy in all kinds of ways I probably shouldn't write about (yet). It's just getting to the almost slack period in the monthly cycle before it all goes nuts for Christmas and the New Year... but it should all be OK. And who knows what the New Year will bring? I have a few ideas, at least...
I'll try to get back to this blog before then. Honest.
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