Alasdair Stuart's Blog

Yesterday, my essay on Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross went live. It’s a fascinating, spiky, meaty book and well worth your time. Earlier this month, I interviewed the pair of them about the book, the Singularity and the future. Here’s what they said:

How did the idea for the book come together?

Cory: I was living in SF, and Charlie was living in Edins, and though we’d not met, he and I had corresponded and read one another’s’ work and such. Charlie proposed collaborating, I agreed, and he sent me the first ~500 words of a story he’d got stuck on, called JURY SERVICE. I rewrote that, added ~500 words more, and sent it back. He did the same; and we volleyed until the story was done.

APPEALS COURT, the second novella that went into the novel, went less smoothly. Now that there was some backstory, we each seemed to possess distinctive ideas about where the story should go, and there’s a lot of literal back and fro in the first printing of that story as the protagonist runs back and forth while we tried to wrest control. Thankfully all that was edited out in the rewrite we did for the book.

This was almost certainly exacerbated by my own reluctance to talk about writing — I prefer to write out my story problems. Charlie’s much better about it.

PAROLE BOARD — the final novella, twice as long as the other two combined — went much more smoothly, likely because we had both come along quite some way in our own writing habits. We had a couple meetings — one f2f, one Skype — and sorted it all out and banged it out.

Charles : [[We get asked this so often that it's an FAQ. Here's the canned answer.]]

In stages. At first, Cory and I were chatting in email; one of us raised the idea of writing a story together — it’s quite common for SF authors to do this sort of thing for shits and giggles. So I rummaged in the dumpster of dead projects and coughed up a hairball of around 1000 words’ length; the opening of a story I hadn’t been able to continue writing. Cory broke new ground, adding to it, then bounced it back at me. We played ping-pong with it via email until it ran to 20,000 words, then (to our surprise) sold it to Scifi.com, at that time the highest-paying short fiction market in our field. That story was “Jury Service”, the first quarter of “Rapture of the Nerds”.
A couple of years later we were contacted by Lou Anders, who was then editing the magazine Argosy. He’d read “Jury Service” and wanted to commission us to write a sequel (“Appeals Court”), which he eventually published back-to-back with its predecessor in a limited-edition chapbook.
And then Tom Doherty, CEO of Tor, our publisher, heard about these collaborations. And he told his editors, “buy the Doctorow/Stross novel!” — even though no such novel really existed, and we were both working on other projects.
For a few years we were both busy doing other things; once a year we’d touch base. But then two things happened. First, Locus magazine ran a satirical April Fool’s news piece about us (“Stross and Doctorow hired to write authorized sequel to Atlas Shrugged”), and then it turned out we both had a six month gap in our schedules. So we went back to work and wrote the second, larger, half of what by now had grown into a novel, one 1000 word chunk at a time.
Talk a little about the Singularity. It’s a big idea that’s vital to the book but what does it mean to each of you?

Cory: It’s a literary device. As I wrote in Locus in 2007:

(From Cory Doctorow: The Progressive Apocalypse and other Futurismic Delights)

“Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book, “Stumbling on Happiness”. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who’s eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she’ll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he’ll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present.

We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of “Starship Troopers”, or the bizarre, glassed-over “Progressland” city diorama at the end of the 1964 World’s Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE.

Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last — is the predominant future feeling for many people. It’s easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior.

Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears’ wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they’ll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they’ll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.

Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment  ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world’s storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it.

The very idea of “progress” runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.

Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:

We call it the Singularity.

Vernor Vinge’s Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to “upload” our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker’s next novel would have it) Postsingular.

The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It’s the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity “the rapture of the nerds,” an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.

At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of “Stumbling on Happiness” is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.

The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn’t send out transporter-equipped drones — instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn’t hope to explain them.

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it’s the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.”

Charles: Frankly, I’m tired of the Singularity. I already wrote one substantial book about it (“Accelerando”) between 1998 and 2004. It’s been a hot new topic in hard SF since 1987 or thereabouts. Enough is enough: from my perspective, “Rapture of the Nerds” is both a coda to “Accelerando”, and a cautionary warning, and my final word on the subject (unless something new happens that radically reframes it).

How far off do you think it is?

Cory: It’s not.

Charles: I think the singularity happened between 70,000 and 200,000 years ago, with the development of human culture and language. Or, arguably, between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture. Whether there’s any prospect for an AI singularity is … well, it depends on what you mean by AI; and I suspect the answer is that it makes about as much sense to talk about an AI singularity as it does to talk about the television singularity, or the weaving machine singularity. Individual new technologies don’t cause step-changes in consciousness or render the entire future of humanity unpredictable.
Charlie, I remember interviewing you several years ago and you pointed out the concept of getting lost was something which, with location technology, about to die out. You’re batting a solid wicket here so what do you think is the next societal concept to go?

Charles: Quite possibly privacy. (Facebook are doing their best to abolish it. Note: I am not a fan of Facebook. I think this is the sort of dangerous technology-mediated social change that we really ought to be thinking about regulating, and regulating hard.)

Cory, you’re up. What do you think will be the next societal construct we lose?

Cory: I think we’re approaching a crisis point in the distribution of dividends from automation. As with the Luddite crisis of the industrial revolution, automation is obviating a ton of labour (including highly skilled jobs), and the dividends from those productivity gains are being hoarded by capital — the 1% are getting richer, the rest are relegated to increasing precarity as they compete for scarcer jobs and real wages plummet. This can’t last forever.

What changed in the process?

Cory: That implies that we planned things! We didn’t — the story was an emergent property of our mutual one-upmanship and attempts to amuse one another.

Did anything not make the cut?

Cory: Oh, there are a few bits and pieces that we excised, but nothing substantial.

What’s the moment you’re proudest of in the book?

Cory: I like the knock-knock joke about the Singularity at the beginning of PAROLE BOARD

Are you considering working together again?

Cory: Sure — the major obstacle isn’t desire, its diaries. We’re both pretty busy and finding a time of mutual non-occupation is a major undertaking.

What’s next for both of you?

Cory: Titan will soon publish PIRATE CINEMA, a YA novel that came out in the USA last autumn, to critical/commercial success:

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.

Trent’s too clever for that to happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly he learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke. Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds….

Next from TITAN is HOMELAND, the sequel to my novel LITTLE BROTHER, which just spent 4 weeks on the NYT bestseller list:

In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.

A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

I’m working on a novella called THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON for Neal Stephenson’s Heiroglyphics project with Arizona State University — it’s about hackers who land a 3D printer on the moon and spend a generation remotely printing out a habitat for their descendants to occupy.

I’m also planning a prequel to DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, my first novel, which came out 10 years ago.

Finally, my agent is shopping my recently completed nonfiction book about copyright, called INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE.

—

Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is out now, Titan Books, £7.99. This review/ interview was posted as part of the Rapture of the Nerds Mind-bending Blog Tour. For more details visit: http://titanbooks.com/blog/rapture-nerds-mind-bending-blog-tour/

The Rapture of the Nerds is peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy amongst others). To be in with a chance of winning a SIGNED copy of Rapture of the Nerds tweet the fictions piece of technology that you would most want let loose in the real world @doctorow @cstross @titanbooks #RaptureoftheNerds. The co-authors will vote for their favourite fifteen pieces of tech and each top tweeter will be sentenced to a free copy. The Jury is still out. Good luck.

The two great lies we tell ourselves about the future are that it will be here soon and it will be a clean break. The first is a lie because, the Jonathan Coulton song notwithstanding, the future is already here and has been here for a while. Five years ago, I interviewed one of the authors of Rapture of the Nerds and listened to him explain how the concept of getting lost would soon be a thing of the past. At the time I was fascinated, and slightly stunned (a telephone interview with Charles Stross is like an enthusiastic, avuncular fact rollercoaster. You hold on and make frantic notes) as well as a little doubtful. Everyone I know was pretty good at getting lost, we’d all had years of practice.

I’m writing this in front of my phone. Which is also my clock, my mp3 player, my camera, my other Kindle, my comics collection and my weather service. Not quite two years ago I used that phone to send live audio, photos and text from a comics launch event to one of the websites I work for. Not quite a year ago I used that phone, and a particularly cute pseudo-8mm film camera app, to film sizable portions of a weekend at Disneyland. Not quite three weeks ago, I used that phone to help two friends who’d never visited the city before find a car rental place.

And I don’t get lost anymore.

The future is always here, it’s just a matter of it snapping into focus. So that’s the first lie. The second, the one about it being a clean break, goes hand in hand. Innovation is feral, it’s intellectual weather far more than intellectual tidal movement. There’s no such thing as the moment where someone types the period after THE END and we all file neatly into the next phase of human existence. It happens, all around us, all the time. The Osama Bin Laden kill team were inadvertently tweeted about it in real time but, years later, Reddit attempts to identify the second Boston Marathon bomber through crowdsourcing and utterly fails. The future’s always here and the leading edge is never clean, precise and cyberpunk-y. It’s always in ragged motion.

Which brings us to Huw, who isn’t moving at all. The Singularity, the rapture of the nerds, has hit and humanity has sublimed into a colossal, chaotic utopia of digital personalities orbiting the Earth. The Cloud is home to countless people, and countless copies of those people, all at play in the fields of their imaginations. It’s brilliant, wonderful, the most amazing thing in human history and as far as Huw’s concerned it can get stuffed. His parents both joined it, and he, through a combination of anger at them and a fairly ingrained sense of technophobia, stayed behind in Wales to make pots. Huw’s not especially happy but he isn’t unhappy and he is human, and that counts for a lot, at least as far as Huw’s concerned.

Then he gets called for Jury Duty. You see, the Cloud doesn’t really talk to everyone left behind after the rapture, largely because it’s forgotten how. But from time to time it does like to send down little gifts, piece of obscure technology that will either make everyone’s lives infinitely better or amuse the Cloud through the horror they cause.  ‘Jury Service’ means you sit on the board of people who get to decide if the latest surprise from upstairs is dangerous or not. For Huw it also means a long journey across the planet, some increasingly surreal danger, and bicycle theft in ‘Jury Service’, the novella that makes up the opening third of the novel.

This section establishes not just the world but its mercurial, protean nature and the sense of maniacal invention that defines it. In short order we get the newfound horrors of air travel, a biohazard burka, a Djinni-shaped AI and a gloriously, unpleasantly cheerful backpacker called Ade.  Huw is bounced from one incident to the other with almost no chance to get his feet under him and the end result feels a little bit like PG Wodehouse with his foot on the accelerator. Huw’s an Arthur Dent-esque figure, perpetually long suffering and perpetually confused but dogged with it, refusing to be broken even as his thin grip on his life weakens. It’s a smart character decision as, just as you start to worry all the novel will be is Huw being dragged past another really fun set of ideas, he gets his feet under him and starts figuring things out. Huw is completely normal, a resolutely unenhanced human and as a result he’s also slightly extraordinary. Oh and he’s Welsh, which also really helps. His inherent Welshness is vital to the payoff to this first novella too, with Huw becoming the literal mouthpiece for the Cloud, a lump of ‘godvomit’ in his stomach and a genetic whistle in his throat. It’s a wonderful moment that embodies so much of the book’s ideas; pragmatism and humanity mixing with genuine wonder, the ragged edge of the future wrapping around Huw’s throat and singing through him. As I said at the start, the future isn’t clean, the future’s already here and as Huw finds out, the future can reach out and grab you any time it wants to. He starts off as a grumpy Welsh potter and finishes as one of the most important people on Earth with a mission, (sort of superpowers) and a partner with an interestingly mercurial approach to gender.

That idea is key to all three sections of the book; change takes place at every level, all the time and the only healthy approach is to embrace it. Huw’s sexual awakening is tied to Huw’s slightly enforced transhumanism both of which are tied to him leaving the country f or Jury Duty which is in turn tied to the party where he meets his boyfriend/girlfriend Bonnie for the first time. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, just with a lot more screwball comedy and designer genetics.

That constant change is reflected in the tonal shifts between the three novellas too. ‘Jury Duty’ is frantic, light and fun. ‘Appeals Court’ the second novella  is far darker. Huw is dispatched to North Carolina by the Cloud. However, post-ascension America is a nightmare, covered by a hyper-colony of ants that will eat anything they find and slick with petrochemical lakes. The survivors have all got religion to a massive degree and Huw, the ambassador of the Cloud is a godless heathen or a vital commodity depending on who has control of him.

Just as ‘Jury Duty’ is a cheerful sprint through the brave new world, ‘Appeals Court’ is an increasingly frantic battle to escape it. Doctorow and Stross continually unpack the worst excesses of the Christian Right and combine them with the relentless, ragged edge of innovation to create some truly chilling moments. The point where Huw is fed water laced with nano-machines that trigger his pleasure centres and make drinking it a spiritual, tranquilizing experience is one whilst the climax, that sees him used by the Cloud to talk to the ant hyper-colony is the other. It’s a horrifically alien image; the Cloud talking to its insect cousin, the closest thing it has to family on the planet, through a single, terrified Welshman.

In between, it’s clear that if ‘Jury Duty’ was a caper, ‘Appeals Court’ is an unusually nasty action movie. One extreme of the Church wants Huw dead, another wants him to complete his mission for its own political benefit and the tug of war that ensues is one of the most finely balanced, tense sequences of prose I’ve read in a while. Not everyone makes it out alive and the middle third of the book finishes with Huw staggering, for a second time, from the wreckage of a life-changing experience. The future is always now, the future is always constant and Huw is always on the edge of it, whether he wants to be or not. Huw’s a Dent-esque protagonist, perpetually reacting to things happening to him. He exists at the far extreme of the usual ‘protagonist is lens for the audience’ spectrum, so reactive at times that you want to yell at him to get his act together. It’s a difficult element of the novel that the first two novellas sprint past before it can truly register.

‘Parole Board’, the final novella, orbits around this concept. Literally and metaphorically, in fact, as Huw’s mother descends to meatspace, sort-of-kidnaps him and forcibly ascends him to speak at a planning meeting about whether or not everything left on Earth should be shunted over to a simulation whilst their biological bodies are broken down into computronium, the, currently, hypothetical programmable matter that the Cloud uses. Except, of course, that’s not everything that’s going on, because there are the aliens, and Huw’s father who’s working for them and the hundreds of thousands of other Huw’s, one of whom has a very different view of the situation then he does…

‘Parole Board’ is the most ambitious of the novellas and overt science fiction after the caper and action thriller sections that went before it. It’s also, initially, the hardest to like. The initial conceit is such a heavy nod to Douglas Adams that it distracts from the story whilst arriving in the Cloud leads Huw to several long journeys down Exposition Street as well as a needless reappearance by the shrieking Judge Guiliani, a Judge Judy/Rudy Giuliani/Davros mashup introduced in ‘Jury Duty’. Guiliani has an interesting, ambiguous role in ‘Appeals Court’, but her appearance in this third installment comes across as needless symmetry. This is a novel at its strongest when at its most ragged, and her presence smooths over what should be a jagged edge.

The ideas on display here are complex and fascinating, especially the commoditization of processing time and emotional nuance through an infinite panel of app slide bars, but the sheer pace, and density, of the exposition is brutal. One of the sub-plots, concerning a second Instance of Huw that’s been hacked by the opposing side, is particularly bad for this, grinding to a juddering halt as a friendly AI does Economy-Fu to defeat her and explains everything they’re doing in a page long monologue. The sheer amount of invention here is staggering but this is the point where you start to get worn out by the relentless pace of things. Not to mention sick of Huw’s whining. A couple of out of place jokes about organized religion don’t help matters, especially as they obfuscate the central metaphor that transcendence/ascension is a physical extrusion of the ‘religion virus’, just one with very real (or, perhaps more appropriately, very virtual) benefits and consequences.

The first half of ‘Parole Board’, laden down with these two sub-plots, is the hardest section of the novel to get through and it’s the same for Huw. His pathological refusal to learn anything puts him in real trouble and is eroded, ultimately, not just by his mother and boyfriend/girlfriend pointing out how much is depending on him but also by a near-spiritual experience watching TV programs uniquely tuned to his brain for a huge, for him, span of time. It’s only here that we see Huw’s actually on the classic hero’s journey, going out (or in this case up) to the wilderness, finding himself there and gaining knowledge from that fact. He finally learns, he finally changes and accepts that change and in doing so, he finally stops whining, rolls his sleeves up and starts making the most important pots in human history.

The closing sequence is wonderful, managing somehow to be epic, funny and genuinely sweet all at once. Huw and an alien Instance with his father’s face and memories are tasked to decide whether humanity will be destroyed by the Galactic Council or allowed to live by running an insanely detailed simulation of human culture that they will build for a set period of time. Once they’re done, their work will be assessed and the decision made or, to put it another way,  Huw gets to make his peace with his dad over the largest train set in the universe. This is the moment where the entire novel could have fallen apart and instead, it’s the moment where it soars. Huw knows the thing he’s talking to isn’t his father in a real sense, but it doesn’t matter. He’s in the Cloud, where time is currency and ideas are language and the conversation he has with his father is revelatory for both of them in a quiet, gentle, uniquely Welsh way. Huw finds not only forgiveness for his parents but a new found respect for the brave new world, and a chance to do something with his life instead of having it done to him. He saves himself from his past and, in doing so, saves everyone else’s future. The last tapered end of the ragged edge of change washes over him and, instead of being swept away by it, he finds something within sight of happiness. Which, of course, leads to one last action sequence and Ayn Rand reincarnated and running around the Valleys, but this is the future, it’s already here and that edge is ragged all the way down.

Rapture of the Nerds is a spiky, frantic sprint through the minds of two of the best writers of their generation. It pulls precisely no punches, gives precisely no damns about that and makes you choose between being carried along with it or watching it pass you by. It’s hard work, but change always is and, much as it hurts, change is always worth it. The ragged edge of the future is here. Grab it.

The amazing alternate covers are from the blog post about the design process you can find here.
—

Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is out now, Titan Books, £7.99. This review/ interview was posted as part of the Rapture of the Nerds Mind-bending Blog Tour. For more details visit: http://titanbooks.com/blog/rapture-nerds-mind-bending-blog-tour/

The Rapture of the Nerds is peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy amongst others). To be in with a chance of winning a SIGNED copy of Rapture of the Nerds tweet the fictions piece of technology that you would most want let loose in the real world @doctorow @cstross @titanbooks #RaptureoftheNerds. The co-authors will vote for their favourite fifteen pieces of tech and each top tweeter will be sentenced to a free copy. The Jury is still out. Good luck.

Clark Kent is one of my patron saints. The quarterback-sized reporter with the calm manner and the dogged refusal to back down from a story is an ideal I find very attractive, arguably far more than the whole blue suit/cape/superpowers thing. Clark’s a working journalist, a journeyman reporter. He’s Cary Grant in a good hat with a press pass, a calm, solid guy who can’t not write and can’t stop once a story presents itself. As ideals go, that’s a pretty good one to aspire to for me.

And there’s Lois.

There’s always Lois.

The Rosalind Russell of the DC universe, a reporter whose cheerful disregard for politeness, official whitewashes or the word ‘no’ frequently gets her into as much trouble as it does success. She’s relentless, a force of nature who absolutely will not back down, stares every single fight right in the eye and delights in not only being the best reporter in the city, but good naturedly messing with her farmboy partner. Lois is an original, an American classic, one of the greatest comic characters of all time. Of course, so is Clark but just like Ginger Rogers, Lois has been around for as long as he has and does what he does, just frequently in heels, backwards and with no superpowers. Which means she just has more of an excuse to mess with him.

Those two reporters; the good-natured, polite farm boy and the spitfire city girl are one of the most endearing pairings in modern fiction. They’re also one of the most consistently well cast; look at Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the Donner-era Superman movies, Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman  (Note the title there too) and Tom Welling and Erica Durance, who didn’t so much attack the role as beat it senseless and make it her own, in Smallville. There’s a reason these two have been around for 75 years, they’re easy to admire, to aspire to, easy to love.

That’s been helped immensely, on the big screen, by the music associated with them. The Donner-era Superman theme is one of the finest pieces of movie scoring ever produced. It’s iconic and majestic in a way which manages not to be pompous. The slow opening refrain is a statement of intent and the constant, driving line beneath it, the light twin of Williams’ own Jaws theme, start to raise your pulse almost before you know it’s there. There’s real excitement to this piece of music, a sense of something amazing about to happen and when it does explode, spreading out into that wonderful, expansive brass line it becomes one of the most unabashedly heroic pieces of cinema music of the last few decades.
What makes it great though, is the tempo. There’s something almost boyish about the speed the piece cracks along at, Clark’s country boy innocence and open good nature translated into music that revels in its patterns and shape. Played right, it’s a piece that seems genuinely excited to be heard and there are two spots in there where you can almost hear it rally, take a breath and speed up again. Bravery and hard work, tenacity and compassion all wrapped around that central, bustling refrain.

And at the heart of it is Lois.

Because there’s always Lois.

The theme for their relationship only shows up once but it’s almost dead centre in the piece of music, keeping pace with the other refrain but still an individual, still marking its own time, working its own angles on the story.

Williams is one of a small, elite body of composers whose work has scored the largest, and some of the best loved, movies of the last few decades. His Superman theme is undoubtedly amongst his best work but that also makes it unassailable to the point that Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns opted to simply reprise Williams’ theme rather than have a new theme composed. Whilst this was absolutely in keeping with Singer’s movie, itself an extended love letter to the Donner-era, it ultimately helped mute an already uncertain film. Superman Returns has a lot to recommend it, not the least of which is Brandon Routh in the lead role and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor but it struggles to find a voice of its own and, for me, remains an interesting failure.
So, with all the hopes for a new DC movie franchise resting on Man of Steel, the new Zack Snyder-direted picture, the question of how to score the film rose up once again. Snyder opted, sensibly, for Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is arguably the Williams of this generation, a man whose iconic, and at times daring, work has scored everything from Crimson Tide through to, appropriately, the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman trilogy. Zimmer’s work is as iconic, as extraordinary, as Williams’ and earlier this week we got our first run at it.

Listen to the transition there, how it shifts from that mournful piano line to split into two; the constant, low, thudding heartbeat of the percussion and the slow but constant rise of the strings. It’s much, much more cautious than the Williams but it’s traveling in the same direction, constantly rising, constantly moving up and becoming more complex. It breaks out and becomes more expansive as we see Clark’s hero’s journey continue and then…
It blossoms.
Listen to how the foundation constantly folds in and around itself and the percussion just puts their foot on the floor and doesn’t stop. What grabs me by the lapels in there though is the almost atonal strings moving up and down through everything else accompanied by that huge, massive brass line. The alien, the impossible, the thing which makes him extraordinary out in the open and impossible to miss and when it drops away…

There’s Lois.

There’s always Lois and, as always, she’s chasing a story, right at the heart of the refrain, once again. And, of course, messing with Clark once again. The trailer closes and even as it fades, we get that constant, pounding percussion line. Bravery and hard work, tenacity and compassion, the sense of something immense and important and wonderful just over the horizon. It’s an extraordinary piece of music just like its predecessor, and a very fitting piece to take two of western comics’ most enduring characters into their 76th year and a new film. So, to both the Daily Planet’s best reporters, Lois and Clark, all I can say is this;
Happy birthday, guys.
Now back to work, we’re on deadline.

Images taken from JLA Classified: New Maps of Hell, written by Warren Ellis with art by Butch Guice which is available here.

Click here for The John Williams Web Pages, an archive of information about his work.

Click here for Hans Zimmer’s webpage.

So it turns out I’m good at chicken. I have chicken skills. There is great chicken power within me. I know chicken fu. That sensation you’re feeling is called the chickening. There’s a war going on out there old friend, and it’s not about who controls the information, it’s about who controls the chick-

You get the point.

I mention this because I’ve made two chicken dishes this week, one an awe inspiring poke in the eye to the fast food industry which left me atop a mound of the deliciousness I’d made screaming ‘GAZE UPON MY NORTHERN FRIED CHICKEN, YE MIGHTY, AND DISPAIR!’ and the other is Chicken Kiev.

Chicken Kiev. That’s major grown up food if you grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

And ate lots of chicken.

And think Kiev sounds a little exotic and cool.

Seriously, this was one of my favourite foods when I was a kid, and chicken Kiev carefully sliced open and exposed to the air with sweetcorn, peas and chips is still one of those meals that instinctively makes me happy. And I dissected it every time, seriously. I think watching Quincy, M.E. at an early age had an effect. Aside from thinking the show was called Quincy, ME, and was about a really confident pathologist of course.

No seriously it looked like that.

See?

Told you.

Anyway, Victor! The suspects!

So what have we got there, other than Marguerite’s lovely, slightly cracked and soon to be replaced mug? Well, there’s:

-Philadelphia soft cheese.

-Left over roast potatoes rolled in herbs.

-Leftover sautéed mushrooms.

-A whole bunch of chicken.

Oh and some breadcrumbs, and an egg, but they were stuck in traffic.

So the thing I love about Chicken Kiev is it feels a little like a meaty Kinda egg. Horrifying as that image is (Thanks Mum! Chocolate, botulism AND a surprise!) it’s sort of fitting.  You get chicken, breadcrumbs and garlic butter.

Except I don’t know how to make garlic butter.

And I’m reasonably certain rubbing a stick of butter with a garlic clove would

A)Take a while

And

B)Require Barry White. In abundance.

So instead, and also because the recipe recommends it, the cream cheese will serve as filling. Now, given that I live with a pro/am Californian spice fiend I had plenty of opportunity to make it more interesting or perhaps…

To…SPICE things up…

(PUTS SHADES ON)

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

So I put half a teaspoon of garlic powder, a quarter teaspoon of Cayenne and a quarter teaspoon of onion powder in a bowl and mixed it all together with the cheese and moved on to beating up some chicken.

Seriously, that’s what you do! It’s like the Jack Bauer peppers just with blunt force trauma! I was honestly a little weirded out because, literally, in order to get the chicken flat enough to hold its delicious, cheesy interior, you have to put it in a bag and pound on it like you’re Robert DeNiro in one of those movies where he puts stuff in bags and pounds on them. It’s an unsettling process and given Asda’s touching commitment to frozen Chicken breasts of all shapes and sizes, meant things ended up looking like this;

So with the chicken hammered flat(er, that big guy could take a beating. Not a ‘Will get a title shot at the end of a touching movie about self-belief and guys, or in this case, chickens, punching each other’ way but more in the ‘if you owed this chicken breast money, you’d pay it, quickly’ way), you then daub the delicious cheesy goop over the top and…

Do some origami.

But first you beat an egg (Easier than the chicken, yet somehow thematically appropriate…) and put it in a bowl, then add the breadcrumbs to some flour (Which wasn’t stuck in traffic. Flour, like brown rice, is just an asshole.). Then, fold your chicken.

I know.

Pinch the four corners together so it looks like a really horrifying Christmas bauble (‘Oh hey is there chocolate in the-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’) and then roll it in the egg, followed by the flower and breadcrumbs. This process will be messy I promise, but you’ll end up with this:

Just in focus and slightly less lens flarey.

Then once you have those, put it in the oven for twenty minutes at 200 degrees Celsius or so.

I was fully expecting this not to work. The whole fleshy origami element of it was a bit unsettling and I was prepared to find, when I opened the oven, that both of them had unfurled and I was looking at slightly breaded chicken breasts with a lump of cheesy lava in the middle. Instead, what I got was this:

Obviously not the table, cutlery and netbook playing the Steve Lamacq show on BBC 6, that would be both weird and require a huge oven. No, the stuff on the plate. Which looks like Chicken Kiev, tastes like Chicken Kiev, is shaped like Chicken Kiev and in every other way that matters is in fact Chicken Kiev.

It looked really good. And some of the stuff I make usually doesn’t. And that’s really cool. Plus the hideous mob beating I was required to hand the chicken tenderised it making it taste both different and better. Plus plus, it was a weight watchers meal which mean the chicken was 296 calories and the rest was COUGHIdon’tknowbutnotmuchCOUGH! Win!

What I learned:

-That pounding chicken is a term which sounds filthy even though it isn’t.

-That tenderizing is an actual thing that works.

-That breadcrumbs, whilst seemingly a lazy thing to buy, are actually very effective and much more fun than the never ending process of bread grating I had previously attempted.

-That chicken breasts are the edible equivalent of journeyman boxers. They won’t beat you, but they’ll make you work for the victory.

-That I’m much better at chicken than I previously thought.

Steampunk is producing some really interesting things at the moment. Not only do we have one of the legitimate creators of the genre, James P Blaylock, working again but there’s Cherie Priest, Guy Adams, the incomparable Professor Elemental of course and now, Resurrection Engines. An anthology of fifteen stories edited by Scott Harrison, it takes the usual tropes of steampunk and rivets them to classics of literature.

It’s an interesting, brave idea and it kicks off in fine style with The Soul-Eaters of Raveloe by Alison Littlewood. Based on Silas Marner, by George Eliot, it takes the basic concept of an old weaver caring for a child and turns it on its head. Here, Silas is mechanical, as is Eppie and whilst he makes beautiful, elaborate creatures, none of them last.  The final pages are tragic, as the collision between meat and metal, love and greed rends Silas’s one moment of joy apart. The true horror is twofold, coming from Littlewood’s red-toothed imagery and the subversion of the original story. It’s a very smart, very nasty piece that gets the book started at a gallop.

Alan Baker, up next, changes the tone with A Journey to the Centre of the Moon. This sequel to, you guessed, it Journey to the Centre of the Earth is less urgent than the Littlewood and plays, very deliberately with self-deprecating humour and parody. However, the central concept is both fascinating and a little unsettling, leaving the story on a note which Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger would have quite approved of.

Juliet E.Mckenna’s She-Who-Thinks-For-Herself, an alternate take on H.Rider Haggard’s She, is faced with a daunting task. The original story embraces the social views of the time, crammed to the nines with noble savages and Ayesha, an immortal white queen who bewitches all around her and at the same time has almost no agency of her own. It’s aged very badly as a result and Mckenna pulls off a remarkable piece of narrative Aikido to make her story work. It takes place before, during and after Haggard’s and combines   far more clear eyed approach to the Amahagger, the tribe presented in the original, with a very different, far more empowered female role model. The end result is a story which is clearly fond of the original and manages to honour it whilst rehabilitating the more dated elements and talking about a possible different start to the early stages of the women’s rights. Oh and it’s, being McKenna, often very funny too.

The Great Steam Time Machine based on the work of HG Wells and written by Brian Herbert and Bruce Taylor is next and has one of the best set ups I’ve read in quite a while. Percival Lowell and Hugh Gernsback walk into a room, and it’s not the room they expected…Simultaneously a joyous celebration of the adventurer-thinkers of early science fiction and a hymn to the wonders of exploration, it’s a hopeful, charming piece that will leave you smiling.

Philip Palmer has been quietly building a reputation for a while now as being one of the smartest authors working in genre fiction. That’s borne out by Silver Selene, his riff on the Wilkie Collins classic thriller The Woman in White. An apparently open and shut murder case, which involves one of the ambassadors from the intelligent race who live on the Moon, becomes ever more complicated as Palmer presents the testimony of various people involved with the case. The end is a real narrative flourish and this is one of the most ambiguous, and enjoyable, stories in the book.

Roland Moore’s Fangoria, based on Jack London’s White Fang is another standout. Combining a terrifyingly plausible reason for biomechanically enhanced wolves with a desperate and often unsuccessful fight for survival, it’s a bloody-knuckled counterpoint to the more genteel stories that come before it.  Cutting between a funeral, and Gorton and Yamada, the two men struggling to transport the body it’s a piece which delights in throwing bad luck after bad luck at its characters, leading to a conclusion which is equal parts heroic and tragic and is another real standout.

The God of All Machines by Scott Harrison himself is up next and it’s remarkable. Harrison mixes elements of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde with alien invasion and high-tech weapons development to create a story about the things people do in war-time and the price everyone pays. This is one of the cleverest takes on Jekyll and Hyde I’ve ever seen and whilst it’s a complete, and very satisfying, story, there’s real meat on the bones of this world. I hope Harrison has more in the works here.

The Crime of the Ancient Mariner by Adam Roberts is next and there are, of course, no prizes for guessing what it’s based on. However, as is typical of Roberts, there’s remarkable linguistic elegance here which never seems obtuse or precious. Burnet is a time traveller, and not by choice. He’s been picked up by the Mariner and dropped back near his own time not long after. There are only two problems with this; firstly the Alba, the mysterious automatons that sail the ocean of time want to know how he was returned and, secondly, he’s from 1798, so when a female time traveller from further upstream turns up to try and explain what’s going on, he gets very confused. Roberts has a flair for wordplay and gentle humour and both are on display here. Where he really shines though is in the ability to explain complex ideas in a way which doesn’t seem patronising and also doesn’t seem like exposition. Burnet is a true innocent abroad and as a result the information he finds is less about exposition and more about survival. And survival, on the roiling seas of time Roberts describes, is clearly a commodity in demand. Constantly surprising, very clever and filled with haunting imagery, this is another real standout.

There Leviathan by Jonathan Green riffs on Moby Dick and does the one thing you all but have to do to make it work as a steampunk story. Reimagined as an aerial leviathan, bioengineered to survive in Earth’s ruined atmosphere, the white whale is a monstrous presence in the story and Green uses both it, and the freedom offered by flight rather than sail to create a tautly paced action story with some really well done, innovative set pieces. There’s a smart conceit involving the chapter numbers which only adds to the atmosphere and this is both a fun change of pace from the Roberts story and a taut thriller in its own right.

The Island of Peter Pandora by Kim Lakin-Smith combines Peter Pan with HG Wells’ The Isand of Doctor Moreau in a way which seems counter-intuitive for half a page. After that it’s both natural and increasingly disturbing as we explore a very different side of Peter Pan. A prodigy and son of Wendy and James, a pair of talented scientists, Peter refuses rescue when they die and vows to build his own friends. Some, the Lost Boys, are metal. Others are not…

Lakin-Smith constantly switches between the feral joy and amoral cruelty of an unbound child to create one of the most fascinating monsters you’ll meet this year. Peter’s hideous and the cruelties he enacts on his poor doomed robots and the creatures led by Hookie are as awful as they are compelling. This is a story that leaves a real mark. It’s also an example of just how impressive the stories here are, as it simultaneously completely subverts and remains absolutely faithful to the original work.

The Ghost of Christmas Sideways by Simon Bucher-Jones is, of course, a riff on A Christmas Carol. However, much like Adam Roberts uses The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to explore a form of temporal physics, Bucher-Jones explores alternate universes. Scrooge is shown the worlds around his own, and the single choice he made that both doomed and saved his own world. Bucher-Jones plays with one of the most traditional steampunk images to huge effect and this is a deceptively simple story that lingers long after the Ghost at its centre has faded.

Talented Witches by Paul Magrs is extraordinary. There’s really no other way to describe it. A semi-stream of conscious sprint through the history of the Bronte sisters, Haworth where they lived in Yorkshire and the Magrs family itself, it bounces and twirls around normal time and narrative structure in a way which will certainly frustrate some readers. Others will see echoes of the Brontes, Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire and James Joyce. Obtuse, beautiful, heart-breaking and one of the most profoundly bizarre short stories I’ve ever read.

Fairest of them All by Cavan Scott takes Snow White as its inspiration and, like Roberts, turns the established story completely around. Here, Sir Henry Prince is a classic Victorian villain, a man whose decadent wants lead to obsession, violence and horror. Like Mckenna, Scott plays with the concerns of the time, class in this case, to huge effect. Few stories in the collection have the visceral impact of this one and the consequences of Prince’s actions.

Tidewrack Medusa by Rachel Pollack takes Treasure Island as its basis. Wrapped in amazing, intricate language that’s still completely accessible to new readers, it’s a romance much like the Scott piece. However, unlike the Scott piece this one takes in witches of the sea, creatures both more and less than human and the magic inherent in mothers, daughters and hat-making. Eccentric, endearing and horrifying when it needs to be, Pollack’s story is playful and sweet without ever losing its edge.

Finally, Jim Mortimore’s  Robin Hood and The Eater of Worlds brings the book into land with still another remarkable story. Combining the legend of Robin Hood with elements of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos gives the story it’s foundation but where Mortimore excels is in how he weaves the elements of those two stories together with some truly horrific extra ideas. The Knights, semi-sentient suits of armour people are grafted to are a truly horrifying concept and they’re just a small part of a story which walks the line between steampunk and flat out horror. This is still Robin Hood, still a heroic outlaw fighting impossible odds and winning. The only difference here is what he wins and who he may end up winning it for.  Equal parts horrific, thrilling and desperately sad, it ends the book on a real high note.

Resurrection Engines is the perfect on ramp for anyone looking to try cyberpunk but unsure where to start. The stories here are all familiar and not only honour but build on the classics on which they’re based to create some very new, and yet not unfamiliar. A unique take on a sub-genre criticised for becoming staid, Resurrection Engines is a huge, and hugely impressive piece of work.

Resurrection Engines is out now priced £7.99.

Information weather fronts move pretty fast these days. They’re easy to spot, and a lot of the time you can watch Twitter as they begin, build, crest and subside. The latest front to wash over genre fiction hit last night. Hugh Howey, self-published millionaire author of Wool, published a blog post on his site about an encounter with a bullying, arrogant female fan at WorldCon. It’s since been taken down, but whilst information weather fronts move fast, they never quite fade. It’s out there if you want to find it, as is a wide range of commentary on it.

Howey goes the whole hog too, not so much hitting the ‘sexist language’ button as mashing it until the housing breaks. Unsurprisingly, he got taken out for a ride. Slightly more surprisingly, Howey’s apologized, twice now, and stated the post was intended as parody.
Parody or not, the apology has been greeted with the full gambit of responses ranging from ‘you shouldn’t have done that’ to ‘you didn’t do enough.’ Howey has owned the possible interpretations of his language and that takes courage. Failing hurts. Being called on that failure hurts more and taking ownership of that failure is agonizing. It speaks well to him that the apology is there, regardless of whether or not any individual reader feels it’s appropriate, merited, or sufficient. Personally, I’m cautiously hopeful that the whole experience will end up being instructive for him, because, like it or not, genre fiction needs Hugh Howey. Or at least the idea of him.

Publishing is changing. I know, that’s one of those sentences like ‘the sky is falling’ that’s always true and never quite true. In the decade I’ve been following the industry, I’ve seen major new publishers appear, countless new authors arrive and the explosion of podcasting, digital publishing, e-readers and now, self-publishing. Publishing doesn’t need a Council of Nicaea, it’s been having one for years. And it hasn’t finished.
As a result, there’s never been a better, or worse time, to be an author. If you can get noticed, if you can make a mark, then you’re doing fine. If you can change the rules around you, like Scott Sigler did years ago with the EarthCore podcast, like Howey did with Wool and, whether you like it or not, like EL James did with 50 Shades of Grey, then you have the chance to not only make things better for you but make things better for everybody. That’s both a blessing and a curse.

Every author, freelance or not, is hammered flat by the constant cycling demands of creation, promotion, repeat. Every author I know would metaphorically kill to have the level of success Hugh Howey reached. That he’s done so is an incredible testament to both his ability and his luck, and it places him on a pedestal that I don’t think even he’s quite aware of.
Howey is the first self-published author through the Millionaire’s Door, one of that tiny breed who have the opportunity to draw their own maps. He’s a poster child, a trajectory to aspire to at least as much as an author to admire the works of. Whether he likes it or not, he’s become a figurehead. He carries with him the reputation of an entire classification of authors, all scrambling and clawing for recognition from an industry that’s either ambivalent or flat out hostile to their method.

So when he publishes a post called ‘The Bitch at WorldCon’, it doesn’t just make him look sexist. It makes him look like an idiot. An idiot who has apologized, but should have been aware of the implied responsibilities of his past successes. And worse, an idiot who handed a silver bullet to everyone wanting to denigrate self-published authors as being brash, unprofessional cavaliers.

That’s not the Hugh Howey genre fiction needs. Genre fiction needs an author who recognizes he was the first one through the door and acts appropriately. It needs him to appreciate the role luck played in his success, and it needs him to not just revel in that justifiable victory but hold himself to a higher standard. Hugh Howey represents every self published author right now, whether they want him to or not. And self-publishing needs all the bolstering to its image it can get. Genre fiction is a fiercely conservative beat when it comes to acknowledging new talent and news ways of writing. The day a self-published author wins one of the major awards is going to make the Howey controversy look like the tempest in a tea cup many people already feel it to be.

Are you ready?

There you go. That was easy wasn’t it? I’ve been news dark for five days, since Thatcher died because I knew the country collectively, and the media specifically, would drop 50 spontaneous IQ points. It’s not being a perfect blackout, I was subjected to enough of Nick Clegg’s dribblingly incoherent tribute to know he still has as little clue of what his party is for as he did three years ago and heard enough second hand reports of Glenda Jackson’s one woman honesty attack to be impressed. But aside from that, I’ve kept quiet, kept out of it, for two simple reasons; firstly because death is death, and to speak ill of it is disrespectful. Secondly because, despite Thatcher’s policies blighting my childhood (And they did, make no mistake. A lot of people were very happy with the Thatcher government. A remarkably small amount of those people were nurses, teachers or miners.) it was my childhood. I’m not there anymore, so to react with anything other than acknowledgment that death is bad and I’m glad Thatcher’s not in power anymore just seemed crass for me.

Which isn’t to say I don’t support the protest buying of ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead’, because I do. Everyone I’ve read, over the last five days, has agreed on one single thing, a neutral buoyancy phrase that covers a multitude of metaphorical and literal sins; Thatcher was divisive. Ergo, people were and are divided about Thatcherite policies. Therefore they have different opinions. Therefore people who want to buy a song in protest at that period in British history should, and are, being allowed to.

But then, when that song charts at number 4 as I write this, and the BBC make it clear it won’t be played in the official chart countdown but rather a clip will run in a news bulletin, that’s where you get problems. Because that’s not even censorship, it’s cowardice. That’s the producers of a station which, at this stage, is openly pointed at tweens and commuters and basically nobody else, deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong. That the 20,000 plus people who’ve bought the track have opinions which don’t deserve to be heard and respected through four minutes of ironic, gentle, typically British protest.

I joked earlier today that Thatcher’s last act of chaos would be the fact the Iron Man 3 premiere has been postponed. It isn’t, it’s this. In fact it’s almost impossible not to view this as the final victory, the tenants of Thatcherism so tightly woven into British society that it dictates policy even now. Whether or not it’s insensitive to the Thatcher family isn’t in question, I’m sure it is, but the moment this decision was made, the BBC continued down the increasingly terrifying editorial route it’s been lumbering along for several years now.This was Lord Hall’s first moment to shine as the new chairman, the first real test of his courage. It’s failed him, and by extension, everyone who bought that song. The BBC should report the news, not make it. If Lord Hall had an ounce of the fortitude and courage Thatcher is being lauded for possessing, he’d know that.

Source:The Independent

There are two phrases which tend to get a Pavlovian reaction from horror fans. The first is ‘torture porn’, and the second is ‘found footage’.

I actually just heard a couple of you shiver.

Here’s the thing though, both of them have their place. Horror, like any genre is when it comes down to it, a language with a lot of dialects. You don’t have to speak all of them fluently but being able to order coffee in all of them is probably a good idea. The issue, certainly over the last ten years or so, has been that a couple of the dialects have drowned out all the rest. Torture porn has been the default setting for cinematic horror for a long time and like most sub genres it’s led to some fascinating, challenging, smart movies. The longevity of the Saw series for example, to say nothing of its increasingly intricate chronology and history, is pretty impressive and a good half of that franchise is flat out great. Likewise, although as I write this I haven’t seen it, people whose opinions I trust tell me the Evil Dead remake’s pretty damn good and also, definitively, sits in this sub-genre.

But, as all things do, torture porn’s day in the sun, presumably bleeding profusely and screaming from the salt in its wounds, came to an end. What replaced it was found footage and, once again, a single franchise led the charge up through commercial and critical acclaim to ‘Oh GOD YOU AGAIN?!’. The Paranormal Activity movies have a lot of interesting common narrative ground with the Saw ones, both franchises using the previous movies as building blocks and both franchises increasingly unafraid to take frankly demented chances as the series continued. The one major difference being that whilst there was always the EWWWW factor to Saw, the Paranormal Activity movies have tied themselves in ever greater knots to find new and interesting things to do with basically locked off camera equipment.

And that’s the problem a lot of people have with found footage movies I’ve…found. There’s a sense of them being static, of watching a series of scenes that are happening at us whilst we’re watching instead of being drawn in. Think about the opening of Scream. You’re in the house when the phone rings, standing behind Casey Becker as she realizes, far too late, just how much trouble she’s in. You’re victim and voyeur, in danger and yet completely safe which is what makes that scene, and the very different callback to it at the start of the second movie, so great.

Now think about that shot through the security cameras in the house. You get the tension of seeing what Casey doesn’t, certainly, but the immediacy’s gone. In the right hands this can work brilliantly, and anyone who hasn’t seen Stephen Volk’s brilliant Ghostwatch, a TV drama that horrifically traumatised an entire generation of future horror writers and journalists really, really should. As Patient Zero’s for a sub-genre go, I don’t think there’s better.

But there’s plenty of worse, or at least, stuff enough people believe is worse to begin criticising the sub-genre as a whole rather than specific movies. I don’t think that’s fair, especially as the last two years have seen three really interesting found footage movies. Apollo 18 is a pitch-perfect crazy haired UFO Whistleblower documentary and the stuff about alternate lunar landing programs in there warms the sub cockle area of my conspiracy theorist heart. End of Watch is a very smart deconstruction not only of the cop as action hero but of any kind of romance to the idea of being a police officer and The Bay takes the idea of found footage horror and bolts it onto the very broadcast culture that allows me to do this, to become something much more interesting.

The Bay is told in flashback by Donna Thompson, played by Kether Donohue. Donna’s being interviewed over Skype about her experiences in Claridge, a town on Chesapeake Bay in 2009 and the movie cuts between Donna on the skype call, looking, if not drawn then certainly less than happy, and Donna as a cub journalist covering Claridge’s 4^th of July celebrations. This is, of course, the perfect time for something awful to happen and it does. The Blue Crab eating contestants all become violently ill and a woman dunked in a tank for charity walks down main street, sobbing hysterically as her skin is covered in blisters.

This is the moment the film really takes off and we follow Donna as she initially covers the story and leads us to other footage that shows what she didn’t. The genius of the movie is in not just telling it’s story in flashback but having a journalist do it. Donna, as we see her in the present, has clearly been working on the case for years and the footage she’s assembled does two really smart things. Firstly, it provides the movie with an excuse to shift footage and secondly it gives her agency. We’re not looking at a character unable to see what we can, we’re looking at a movie designed to feel like the lead character’s built it. This isn’t a locked off camera, it’s a narrative and that raises the bar in every single way.

It also means you get context, as we cut between footage of an eco-activist breaking into the local chicken farms to find evidence of chemicals being illegally used and dumped, police officers reacting to an escalating number of emergency calls, an increasingly frantic Doctor trying to get the CDC to help him diagnose his patients, a couple sailing into town completely unaware of what’s happening and two local police officers taking progressively more disturbing calls. The movie cuts between them, with the older Donna’s interview as a framing device and in doing so it gives you a real sense of the scale of the disaster.

It also helps Levinson nest some nice call back visual gags into the plot. One thread, involving two marine biologists studying fish death in the bay is particularly nasty, as we know the pair are already dead, their bodies having been discovered earlier in another piece of footage. What really makes this section shine though is the growing tension between them due to how they appear on camera.  Similarly, the two police officers anchor much of the movie and the eventual reveal on what’s happened to them is chilling. There’s a second visual gag here too, with the shot from the police car’s on board camera being used to great effect towards the movie’s end.

From the doomed biologists to the equally doomed cops, these are normal, flawed people who make mistakes, are often unlikeable but are always working. No one has the complete picture here, aside from Donna, and that turns the format again, the powerlessness of normal found footage movies sitting with the characters far more than it does the viewer. Everyone knows a little, no one knows enough and only Donna, with years of distance and a journalistic eye can see what’s really going on.

There is a downside to this, and it’s the same down side that almost all found footage movies suffer from. The style is by definition so naturalistic that it’s all but impossible for the cast to stand out. After all, if they are, they’re doing something wrong. That’s true here, which is a real shame as the performances are uniformly strong. Kether Donohue anchors the movie and convincingly plays different versions of the same woman whilst Stephen Kunken as Doctor Jack Abrams does fine work as a man frantically trying to hold the line against a medical incident he can’t even begin to understand.  Finally Frank Deal does great work as Mayor Stockman, managing to simultaneously evoke the feckless mayors of all good small town horror movies and give the man some interesting depth. The cast as a whole are uniformly very strong but it’s those three that stand out, despite the challenges inherent in this kind of material.

Those challenges are the very factors that have made found footage movies a whipping boy but here, just as they are in End of Watch and to a lesser extent Apollo 18, they’re worked with and turned into strengths. The Bay isn’t just an off the peg found footage monster movie it’s a genuine attempt to do something new with the tools of the sub-genre and it works really well. Levinson’s eye for detail means the story itself feels more grounded than any movie about artificially enhanced isopods eating people from the inside out should be, and the script, co-written by Levinson and Michael Wallach never lets you forget the human cost of the events. From the clearly traumatised Heather to the chilling shot of Stephanie (Played by Cabin in the Woods’ Kristen Connolley) walking out of town carrying her baby, this is a film that concentrates on the human cost of impossible events. That’s what makes The Bay fun and interesting, something which, ironically, has always lain at the technical heart of found footage movies; focus. If that’s a lesson The Bay’s successors can learn, then this is a sub-genre that, unlike the town of Claridge, will be saved.

(Originally recorded for Podcastle Episode 254: Sundae by Matt Wallace, read by Dave Robison. The ebook of Sundae is available here. You should buy it.)

There’s a unique strand of heroism which hits me right in the chest, and it’s wrapped up in this idea of the good death, of making your peace with what’s happened to you and deciding that just because you are where you are doesn’t mean you have to lay down and die. This is the moment of absolute peace Matthew Broderick talks about in The Graduate when he talks about the freedom inherent in being completely screwed. It’s the way George Kirk smiles when he hears his son for the first and last time. It’s the good death, tapping you on your shoulder and telling you it’s time to go.

And you spitting on the ground and saying ‘Not yet.’ And bringing your hands back up.

Because there’s always work to do. There’s always something to defend and heroes like Sundae are the ones who have to do it.

An awful lot of abject bullshit is spewed about writing. Write what you feel. Write what you know. Work this way. Obsessively check GoodReads this way. Always work for a set amount of money. Always take any money you can get.  Sit here, write that way, use this sentence, read this book.

It’s all, all of it, without exception, crap.

Well, kind of. But we’ll get to that.

Write. Just write. It’s in the damn word. Sit down and start writing. Plan if you want to, rearrange your desk if you want to, make a playlist if you must but when it comes down to it it’s always, always you and the white page. At the end of the day if the page is blank, it’s won.

Don’t let the page win.

Your creativity, your sense of self, your confidence are all, odds are, battered and crumpled and sewn back together. I’ll let you into a secret, mine are. I work constantly and about half of what I do I’m paid for on a very very good day. I recently finally had an invoice cleared for work I did five years ago and had been too insecure and self-deprecating to bother chasing. I didn’t push, I didn’t strive, I didn’t show up for the fight.

Until I did. And I won.

Stand your ground.

Matt Wallace threw his life in the back of a truck two years ago and went to LA. He’s got scripts being shopped around, he’s picking up more and more work and he never, not ONCE, has stopped moving forwards.  Matt has fought and kicked and gouged for every single break he’s got and to my mind he’s got, maybe 10% of what he should. He doesn’t complain about that, because that isn’t the work and when you do this it’s always, always about the work.  And protecting yourself enough to do it.

As I write this I’m waiting to hear back about a job. It’s a massively important one to me because it’s a job in publishing. It’s one I’m experienced enough to do, it’s with people I know and like and everyone I’ve talked to tells me I’m a strong candidate.

It doesn’t mean shit. Because all it will take is three or four other people with better qualifications and I won’t even get an interview and I got to tell you that’s going to be hard to swallow. Because I’ve made my career one week at a time for a long time and I’m only just getting to the point where things are starting to move. I’m not sure what’s going to happen if I don’t make it to interview, I don’t know how long it’ll take for me to bounce back.

But I know I will.

I’ll have another scar, another wound that’ll heal differently but I’ll get back up and I’ll go looking for the next one because that’s what writers do and any writer who doesn’t have a little streak of Sundae, of the hero to them, ANY writer who doesn’t defend their ideas and their successes to the death and beyond isn’t deserving of the title.

Plan if you want to, rearrange your desk if you have to, make a playlist if you must but when it comes down to it it’s always, always you and the white page. And your version of Sundae, holding off the doubt.  Make sure they’re fully armed and then, WRITE. And don’t ever stop. Except to buy Matt’s book.

The Dead Space series, and its hero Isaac Clarke, live and die on how good, how solid the technology of the world is. So much of the original game’s plot is wrapped up in engineering tasks, fixing equipment or retrieving material to try and get you and your rapidly dwindling band of survivors off the Ishimura that it becomes the spine of the game and that idea, the combination of a skeletal design motif combined with the sort of grubby-booted work environments that Sam Bell wouldn’t look out of place in, gives the series a foundation that it’s built on for three consecutive games now. Whilst Dead Space 3 switches the setting and expands what you can do that battered, weather worn functionality still lies at the heart of the series.

The Art of Dead Space, written by Martin Robinson, explores the designs that the series is built on, and, refreshingly, doesn’t just focus on Dead Space 3. There’s a lot of material on the newest game, certainly, but it’s all necessary. One of Dead Space 3’s strongest points is its sense of place and the three primary environments; the flotilla of dead ships, Tau Volantis and the city are all explored in expansive detail. The city is a particular standout, as it is in the game, and there are some neat insights from the designers. Alex Muscat, for example, talks about how the city has a circular motif to not only show this was where the aliens came together to build the great machine that powers the final act of the game, but also as a subtle visual cue to the sort of puzzles the player will face there. The city’s an immensely atmospheric place to walk around and it was one of the spots in the game where I genuinely felt uneasy. It’s a pleasure to see the design strategy for it walked through here.

This level of detail is present for every aspect of the games, with the Sprawl from Dead Space 2 getting some much deserved attention. Again there’s interesting design insight here, especially about how they worked on building the space station in a believable way, with utility passageways leading out onto the public face of the Sprawl. It’s all grounded, sensible, pragmatic design that feels lived in and real.  The designers talk about how they got this feel, by systematically building environments that actually related to one another rather than just a collection of set-pieces. It’s why the Ishimura from the first game remains one of the most impressive settings as the ship was designed in a way that meant each section connected exactly as it does in the game. It’s a weird thing to be impressed by, but it pays off to the extent that, in the opening levels of Dead Space 3 you’re relieved to see the Terra Nova in orbit because it looks so much like the Ishimura. No place like home, but it’ll do when you’re trapped in orbit over a dead world that isn’t quite dead enough…

And speaking of not quite dead enough,  the Necromorphs are, for many people, the real stars of the games and they’re given room to shine and shriek and…glisten unpleasantly here. The Necromorph chapter really goes to town and Brett Marling, the chief designer on the nastiest looking creatures in recent years, comes across as an admirably laconic, deadpan guy. You get the full tour here, from the traditional sword-armed, shrieking and ripped corpses of the first game up to the alien Necromorphs of the third.  The odd thing is, after a while, there’s an odd beauty to the Necromorphs. It’s a terrifying, multi-fanged beauty that wants to kill you and build with the pieces of you but it’s there and it’s a pleasure to see the series’ iconic villains given such a spotlight here.  It’s also nicely contrasted with the character designs for the doomed SCAF expeditionary force from the third game, a collection of burly, heavy coated military men whose form is still visible in the monster they turn into. There’s a very definite hint of The Thing to Dead Space 3’s design choices and, from the characters to the battered vehicles of the SCAF, it’s very much in evidence. This is a game about what happens just before, and right after, you stop being human and Carpenter’s classic is referenced in an affectionate, and reverential way.  After all, if you’re doing science fiction body horror on an ice world not doing ambulatory severed heads would just be disappointing.

The level of detail in the book is consistently really impressive and that’s never more apparent than in the logos and stickers scattered through it. Everything from the ubiquitous but never quite explained Peng to Red Dwarf ale is on display and it’s these little touches that really bring the world to life, just in time for the Necromorphs to rip it apart. This isn’t a shiny, clinical future, it’s one that’s still wearing the boots it had on when its shift started several days ago and that sense of a lived-in universe really shines through in the little details like the consumer goods you see advertised on the Sprawl or the tattered public information poster on how to use a Suit kiosk without dying.

It’s also the guiding principle behind the Dead Space games’ approach to weapons. The third game builds on the customization options of the previous two and allows you to craft weapons yourself. There’s some nice concept art of the bolted together guns you can build on display here. What’s particularly interesting though, is reading the designers talking about how difficult it was to work out how each weapon could both standalone and work well as part of a larger gun, to say nothing of making sure it fitted into the game without disrupting Isaac or any other graphic on screen.

But my favourite section is the tools. So much attention was lavished on Isaac’s equipment and suit, because, with the original game’s decision to scrap the HUD, the suit told you everything you needed to know. Again you’re walked through the various stages of the design, and it’s interesting to see how, just as the Necromorphs were originally influenced by aquatic life, Isaac’s suit was influenced by old fashioned diving gear. It gives the character weight and presence at the same time as subtly keying the audience in on just how dangerous the situation he’s in is. Isaac is no slouch, but he’s not the traditional action hero by any means and the Suits are most often designed for harsh environments rather than combat. They’re not really armour, Isaac isn’t really a soldier but in the absence of anyone else, he’s all we’ve got. Well, him and his tools. . Fittingly, for a game about an engineer, each decision made is logical, careful and backed up by everything that went before. This is bootstrapped science fiction that’s been attacked by full scale body horror and the collisions of those two concepts make for some really fun games for us, and a never ending stream of nightmare fuel for Isaac.

The Art of Dead Space is beautiful, even the pages dealing with the Necromorphs. Every aspect of the world is explored here, with real insights from the designers and it’s nice to be able to wander through at leisure instead of running or creeping like you tend to do in the games. Crammed with beautiful art, this is a great companion to the series. It won’t make you whole, but anyone who’s played the games knows that’s the last thing you want…