Moviemaking Updates and Other Miscellany

I claim to be an amateur movie-maker at the top of the blog, but hardly ever seem to post anything about that very subject. Well the truth is that for the last while, I haven't been entirely focused on the movie making part of it.  My last big effort in that direction was completion of the fine tuning for The Stone Unturned edit, the entire project of which has been rumbling on for a couple of years now.  The edit is now, as they say, locked.  All that remains is for the sound mix to be completed, at which point I should theoretically be able to drop it straight into Premiere, render it out and we have a complete movie! Theory is all very well in theory. Dropping the sound mix straight in should perhaps be more of a hypothesis than a theory, until tested against the evidence of having something that works.

Rendering for this half-hour production used to take my machine twenty minutes, until I figured that it could use some fancy colour-grading to give it more of the cinematic feel which all amateurs working in video seem to crave.  Movie-looks were provided by a plugin called - unsurprisingly - Movielooks, a freebie obtained when I bought Premiere in the first place.  Rendering it out no longer takes twenty minutes: it takes thirty hours.  Looks great though.  I'm especially pleased, since the free version is no longer available as a promotional item.  And the reason I'm pleased is because I was able to find it cowering in a corner of one of my old hard drives.  And that reason that pleased me is from having to partially rebuild the computer a few months back, when everything started to fail spectacularly. (An obscure interaction between the ATI graphics card and the rest of the system caused drive cacheing to fail. Not sure I believed the explanation, but only became convinced when the card’s fan physically spun itself right off the board.)  I thought I'd lost the plugin entirely and the full - and only version - now available is a tad outside the range of my budget.

The Stone Unturned is tentatively scheduled for free release sometime before mumble mumble mumble. Potentially before the end of the year, but as we’ve learned these things never go to plan. In any case, I reckon it is the best-looking episode of Intrepid we’ve made so far. (Up to speed section: The Stone Unturned is a Star Trek fan film, the latest in the series.  We're approaching it all quite allegedly professionally you know.)

Mainly, however, I’ve been preoccupied with writing or at least attempting to be preoccupied with it. To this end I've now got a complete short script, around 23 pages, which I've passed both to Nick and T'Other'Alf.  Nick likes it well enough to film as-is and Lesley has assured me that "it's not complete pants".  Which is encouraging!  Executable, as it's now titled, has had an odd history.  When I was writing Bit Patterns as a full-length Intrepid script, I was halfway through when Brian Matthews' script for The Stone Unturned made an appearance.  At the time I didn't think I could complete mine quickly enough to start filming in the following months, and so it got bumped to next in line.  Nick was working on a feature length Intrepid script called Conviction of Demons, of which some scenes have since been shot.  I was concerned about what would amount to trying to make two feature films simultaneously, both of which would require extensive outdoor shooting.  In typical Intrepid fashion, both were written in the large.  A huge effort, then.  Multiplied by two.

This was the point at which I started thinking about a full length original film which would be simpler to make.  Something in a single location and with as few characters as possible.  So I started jotting down notes and thinking about a project which had the working title Bottleneck, potentially our first original film.  Then something odd happened.  As I've written in another post, myself and Nick had a conversation, the outcome of which was to rejig Bit Patterns as an original film.  Nice idea, but it involved way more than merely changing names.  As it happened, it needed almost as much effort as writing it in the first place.  Now that it's in the only-tweaking-required stage of scripting, it's obvious that it would need a serious budget and huge effort.  We reckon we could start on a sizzle reel this year - well, next year - but so far it's just in the speculation stage.
(Of course this means that I still owe Nick an Intepid script...)

So now I wanted to think once again about something which could be achieved with less effort, and with the bonus of being less likely to drive me crazy.  So I turned to the idea for Bottleneck and wondered how it would work not as a full-length script, but as a short one.  And that was the genesis of what is now Executable, the final words of which I wrote just recently.  Since it effectively takes place in a single location, is indoors and requires only three actors, we think it could be filmed in a weekend!  Even better, from my perspective, it gives me a chance to make use of the DSLR for shooting, which I bought for the very good business reason that I really, really wanted one.  DSLRs aren't known for their audio quality, however, but since Nick has just ordered a digital audio recorder...

And that’s where I am at the moment. No doubt everything which happens from now on is subject to change.

Alison Rowat and the Licensed Imagination

This post is possibly ever so slightly out of date, being a letter to the Glasgow Herald which I posted on the Intrepid forum three years ago but never quite polished to the extent that I was happy sending it to the herald itself.  Prompting this, and other rejoinders by Intrepid members, was an article by Alison Rowat about the then [Glasgow Science Fiction convention] which some of us considered tantamount to bigotry, had it been said against one of the traditional minority groups.  I've rewritten my rebuttal so that it flows better.  At the time of writing the original, I was very, very angry.  Perhaps it could function as an open letter to other media types – and there are many – who see us poor SF types as an easy and not altogether human target.

---

Dear Sir,
    It's long been a truism that to gauge the accuracy of a newspaper, you should simply read a column about a subject with with you are closely familiar. So it is rather disappointing to be presented with Alison Rowat's article 'You wouldn't believe the warp factor' which contains nary a shred of anything approaching a keen observation, let alone a solid fact.
A little research surely couldn't have gone amiss?

Such as this odd obsession with tin-foil. It's a nice little hook to hang the rest of the article from, so it's a shame that tin-foil hats are synonymous with 1950s paranoia about communist 'mind-control'. Not exactly Star Trek or Star Wars, which are precisely two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction out of some four and a half thousand. Perhaps it's a surprise that there can be such a thing as an Encyclopaedia, but sure enough it turns out that SF is even a literary genre stretching back hundreds of years. Surely the people described in her article couldn't be... atypical?

Of course, says Alison, why would anyone wish to dress up as their favourite character at all? It's not like anyone dresses as characters from soaps, after all, although the remarkable upsurge in little girls named 'Kylie' at the height of Neighbours should give pause for thought as to exactly who is 'sad'.   I'm sure that a few of us have waved a lightsabre, imagined or otherwise, in anger. But so far as I know, no SF fan has ever sent a real cheque for 5000 pounds to help free a fictional character from a fictional prison, as happened with Coronation Street.
    I'll save myself time by blithely assuming that all non-SF fans have a blurred line with reality.

Of course I myself cannot 'fathom the insanity' that makes grown men dress in football tops. After all, on the basis of the last few years, you're seemingly more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a footballer than a terrorist. What kind of aspiration is that?

But I'm not a football fan, I'm an SF fan and as such I'm generally fair game to be mocked in the press and on television.  Somehow I'm now a stereotype, not an individual, but of now part of a group whom you can malign with impunity.

How well do I measure up to this image that you have in your head?  Spandex?  Don't own any.  Social skills?  Got some.  Women? Some close friends.  Relationships?  Had them too.  In one now.  Beer belly?  I'm a man in my mid-thirties, what do you expect I'm going to look like?  Would you like to call me a fat bastard, or is that not politically correct?  I wear glasses too, so I expect you'd like to call me four eyes or speccy or something.  You know, make fun of my appearance in the absence of anything with any thought behind it.

Or don't we do things like that in the 21st Century?  Such niceties don't apply to SF fans it would seem.  I like SF and so I'm some kind of freak and to hell with how it makes me feel when I hear you say that.

How appropriately ironic, then,  that one of the central themes of Star Trek, which you deride, is that in the future we all have respect for one another.  Imagine that.

I did, however, manage to retain my imagination.

Not, admittedly, a valuable commodity in these cynical days, cynicism being a theme often reflected in... oh... modern SF. Just as the subtext of some of those old novels about aliens was about what's it's like for a society to look upon anyone, anything, point and laugh for being something different that we don't understand.
Hmm, now where have I heard that before...

But soft SF is OK apparently – I can imagine Alison campaigning for tolerance zones where one may have an imagination with an appropriate license – but anything more that is implicitly 'hard' and to be discouraged.

Well this is where research comes in handy (you were once columnist of the year weren't you, Alison? Do you remember what “research” is?) since there really is a term called 'hard SF' which deals stories more closely coupled to real, solid, actually existing science and logic. About as far away from dressing up as your favourite character as it's possible to get.
Enjoying a story where you have to think? Preposterous and dangerous!

At this point I do have to apologise for attempting to use a 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' defence of my 'art' without exploring believers in flying saucers, on the grounds that the two groups are not the same.  Is this a surprise to you?
Oh sure there are UFOs in Science Fiction, but only in the same way that Eastenders is a police drama.

Without getting deep about it, I simply like Science Fiction. I'm in a minority, and don't I know it when there are so many pejorative terms for me. To deny that there really are people – people, not just men – with a more than everyday interest would be plain wrong. But to say that all of them are like the colourful minority is equally wrong. I was at a convention just recently and almost an entire half of the attendees were woman. One of them was dressed as Lara Croft and nobody there or in the press, oddly, felt the need to complain about that...

I'll anticipate the defence that the article was humour. Not a gentle humour by any means, not well observed humour, definitely not original and with an obvious lack of contact with, or understanding of, anyone being talked about. Just mean-spirited barbs thrown at crudely sketched caricatures.

Alison, it's obvious that you don't even know who your target is and would it be churlish of me to point out the logical flaw of writing 'they want to stay in their safe little worlds, not connect with others' in an article about SF fans gathering together in the world's largest convention?

Seriously, did you really write that?  I must have just imagined it.

But the final word must surely go to one of my SF loving friends who saw the article, read the part about sad single men and exclaimed: “That's hilarious, I'll have to show my wife.”

Regards,
     Steve Hammond

The Circle is Complete!

A while back I wrote about the veracity of the Hired Guns background story as it appears in Wikipedia. Short version: you can't trust the article. Longer version: I can't add my own history because my recollections are not a proper reference, even though I wrote the damn story in the first place.

So now I'm delighted to see that the HG entry now links to a proper reference, in this case to Gamasutra – to a page discussing the history of computer games. The amusing part about this is the description it gives on the Hired Guns backstory; that the supposed hostages are merely a ruse to draw in some mercenaries for a live field test of their new weapons systems.

Now the only place that this version of the story has ever appeared on the internet is when I wrote it into the Wikipedia article, for reasons discussed in that other post. Which means that Gamasutra is obtaining its information from Wikipedia, which is now obtaining that very same information from Gamasutra!

The circle is, as they say, complete!

And for value-added lols, I now have an insight into the kind of time-travel story where a time-traveller accidentally kills Shakespeare as a young man and is forced to take his place and write all of Shakespeare's works to restore history (because he just happens to have them all memorised). Where, then, does the information come from in the first place?

The answer, of course, is a Wikipedian editor who lives outside of time.

Bit Patterns Redux

Recently I completed the first draft of a screenplay for Intrepid, that old Star Trek fan film for which I've directed a number of episodes.  The story takes place shortly after the events of the pilot episode.  It was quite a journey getting it to the point where it made sense to me, let alone to the stage where it made sense to anyone who read it.  Events in the Intrepid universe overtook some of the plot points and I had to rewrite it, an actor who played a key role wasn't available so that meant another rewrite.  A lot of headscratching and aha moments occurred before the stage where it was actually, genuinely complete.

The night that happened, I had a short list of items I needed to change, points I needed to make and dialogue I had to invent.  One by one I got through them.  Completing the script came as a surprise – adding the last item meant adding some extra lines just to bring that scene to a natural end.  And... oh.... it's done.

This was in stark contrast to the first major story (in terms of mere wordcount) I'd written when I was younger and didn't really understand the concept of polishing the work.  Even though there was a huge gap between writing the first half and coming back to write the second half, I'd know since the very first paragraph what the very last line was going to be.  In those days I started at the beginning and wrote linearly until the end.  Writing those last words was an incredible experience and I was bouncing off the wall for days.
So the unexpected completion of Bit Patterns may have been a hint that I wasn't done with it yet.  Oh sure, it was finished but that didn't mean it was done.

So.  A couple of weeks ago myself and Nick had an extended discussion about the future of Intrepid and part of that was the other possible projects that were always there but never seemed to get to item one on the agenda.  We'd always wanted to do an original piece of work once Intrepid was at an end (if indeed it ever was – I once said to him that if Intrepid was a success we'd never be allowed to stop making it.).

I'd been thinking about the timescales, which made me squeak uncontrollably.  The next Intrepid script, Nick's Conviction of Demons, is a monster.  After the readthrough, I estimated that it'd have a running time of at least two and a quarter hours.  And that means a couple of years making it, though that depends on how efficient we can get.  Bit Patterns was almost as large.  So that meant a couple of years plus whatever additional time before we could have something full-sized and original finished.  That's a while to wait, since we've been doing Intrepid since 2003.

So I made a suggestion that I'd been thinking about all the previous week and after much soul-searching, we're going ahead with it.

And that means I'm re-writing Bit Patterns to be an original script.  Not Star Trek.  Original.  And once I've finished  - really finished – I'll be directing a Science Fiction film.  It feels great to be able to type that!  Even if it means that I've just given myself a lot more work for the same total of completed screenplays: 1.

What this means is that I have to do the obvious things such as changing character names.  What's possibly less obvious is that I also have to change the character motivations and backgrounds and relationships.  I have to change the technology.  I have to change the backstory of the whole universe it's set in.  And that's the say nothing of all the additional scenes that will be necessary to do establishing in a way that simply isn't required for Star Trek.

This will be an interesting experience.

Epistemology pt 2: The Story of Hired Guns

I don't think I ever truly liked the name Hired Guns, this being one of DMA Design's Amiga games and one of the key things that I usually get hung up on whenever the subject arises.  The history of the project was somewhat troubled from my own perspective, even though I am still stupidly proud of my contribution and occasionally get misty-eyed over it.  Troubled, because of what happened after I spent over a year writing the background, story and characters.  It was going to be my first published story, really published, really genuinely making me a proper author.  This was going to be great!  I iz a writer!

    I sent the final copy to Psygnosis, who were demanding it at as soon as possible.  They then sat on it for a whole eleven months, before rushing to get the booklet printed by an outside company with only three weeks to go before the release date.  At no point did they offer any comment or criticism during that time.  And then the game was released and the first chance I had to see myself in print was tearing the cellophane wrapping from the complimentary copy I'd been sent, lifting the lid and leafing through the booklet.
    Where all the punctuation was missing.
    All of it.

    Worse than that, if possible were the instructions for actually playing the game.  Scott Johnston, the designer and programmer, had written pages of notes and given them to Psygnosis who were to write the instruction booklet with the purpose of saving time while I fretted away at the background material.  Only they'd taken his notes and pasted them in wholesale, entirely unedited.
    My first published story...

    I tend to get protective of Hired Guns these days, to the extent that I imagine that anything I have to say on the subject of the story is definitive by definition.  And where this impacts on Wikipedia, the results have been interesting.  I never created the Hired Guns entry but I have edited it to incorporate the description of the story, the description of which is simultaneously factually accurate, completely wrong and occupies that strange blurry interface between fact and fiction.  So ask what the Hired Guns story is about and the truth gets slightly odd.

    Let's start from the outside, and work our way in.

    On the packaging, the box which contains the disks and the booklets, it describes the characters as fighting “mutants” and since the outside packaging is the one that's most familiar to anyone – and easiest to research -  that ought to be definitive.  It's there in plain sight after all, and the packaging is not hard to find on the net as a scanned image.  For Wikipedian purposes, it's as easy and uncontroversial a citation as you could wish to find.

    But it's flat out wrong.

    Inside the box however there's the manuals (which I wrote – this is my background story after all) and the creatures described therein, which the main characters encounter, are not mutants.  They are genetically engineered weapons.  It's not just a piffling quibble over semantics either; why this is important is why the characters are there.

    So far it's just a mismatch of info, someone at Psygnosis got it into their heads that it was all about mutants, or perhaps it was even deliberate because “mutants” made for a better soundbite.  I'll likely never know.  But where it now gets interesting is with Wikipedia's description of the story itself.  Within the game itself, the  mission centres around the task of locating four nuclear warheads “backpack nukes” and blowing the crap out of the place to kill all the beasties.  But this is not what Wikipedia says.   There it tells us that the story is about a hostage rescue which proves to be illusory and is only planted to lure the mercenaries to the planet for a live test of illegal bioengineered weapons.  The whole thing is a trap: the planet is a weapons proving ground.
    But none of that appears in the game.

    So how did such an obviously incorrect description get into the Wikipedia entry in the first place?  Where is the source for such an outrageous assertion?  How did something entirely out of left field  come to be parading itself as “fact”?  This one is rather easier to track down, because it was me who put it there.  So does that mean I'm just proving a well-trodden point about the accuracy of Wikipedia and that the story description is plain invention?  An “aha, gotcha” motive made possible by stunt-editing?  Well it gets a bit blurrier here too.  It really is a genuine description, but of Hired Guns' original plot, before it got hacked to shreds.

    Limitations of memory in the Amiga meant that not everything we'd intended for the game was able to fit in.   As you can guess, it was the story which had to be substantially changed so that it could be described in less memory, with less demands on custom code and graphics; with appropriate amounts of complaining on my part.  I'd even written a large diary entry on that day that was decided (it was 12th Feb 1993) and it was fittingly enough pouring with rain, moulding itself snugly around my black mood.  Even so, there are still fossilised clues to the original story contained within the games dialogue and within the manual.  Hell, some of the dialogue I'd written was there purely to foreshadow the next four games which I'd been sure were in the bag.

    (In fact, as part of the plot I'd even managed to come up with an invention that wasn't realised in the real world until 2007, but that's for another post.)

    I'd written that in Wikipedia with a mixture of devilment and self-righteousness because, at heart, that's what I believe Hired Guns is really about.  That was the plot, that was the story I cared about.  Indeed in those dark nights alone in my flat at 2am, this wasn't a story I was creating but a true story that I was discovering by being an explorer in some vague space of probability, not a writer.  But here's the description from when the entry was created by a user called Imran in 2002 right up to my first edit in 2004:

“The plot is that your band of mercenaries have been picked from intergalactic 'non persons' and wanted criminals, and have been hired to shut down a mutation producing plant on an artificial planet called Graveyard.”

Intergalactic non-persons?  Mutation producing plant?  Artificial planet???  All that came out of nowhere and is completely wrong.  But where it gets interesting for me is that after my correction, no-one has contested it: it is assumed to be the self-correcting mechanism in action.  Perhaps it's just a minor game out of the many thousands out there and no-one cares, or perhaps piracy was so rampant that very few possess the physical manuals to fact-check with.  Maybe no-one really cares, and if that's the case then what does the truth matter?

    In the end, a fact may be more fluid and nebulous than we'd like. Yet the original story as I described it survived intact for the planning of Hired Guns 2, even to the last-moment addition of an extra planet in the manual.  Whatever the finer points of semantics or philosophy, I consider the original story to be the real one.  After five games (yes, I was optimistic) the background elements of the story arc would have come to the fore with a huge payoff. 
    That resolution, so far, has existed only in my mind.  Not on paper.
    And how on Earth could Wikipedia have a citation to that?

Intrepid Release Day

Release day 2007, that is.

Courtesy of Jo, here's a photo taken on the evening on the release of Heavy Lies the Crown.  The afternoon was a rather fraught one, spent with Nick grappling with rendering a recalcitrant movie that didn't want to be rendered.  A month or so earlier I'd converted all the sequences to Quicktime because my laptop didn't play nice with the MJPEG avis that I'd been using all this time.  Rendering took an hour and we were running short of time to make the midnight deadline, inlcuding uploading for Micheal to place them on the servers.  David's final theme hadn't arrived, so we agreed to use one of the trailer tracks in its place.

The IM was silent.  Ten minutes.  Fifteen minutes.  And just as I was about to hit the button for the final output, David popped up with a message saying that the theme was ready to download.  Hastily placed in the edit and then an hours rendering, then an hours uploading and four and a half years of effort was at at end.

I felt decidedly odd at that point.

What would everyone think?  Would they like it?  Would they hate it?  So Nick went home and I went for a few drinks with Jo, who took the picture.  As far as I know it's the only photo we have from release Day.  The hat and TV were added by the camera phone she used.

I'm still not sure what my expression means!

An Intrepid Update

This is mostly an Intrepid status update.  The Stone Unturned only needs a few pickup shots to be filmed for the shooting to be complete.  In the meantime, I'm now officially doing the editing.  To that end, I've been piecing it together scene by scene and have now got a rough for the first third of it.  It's been going together a lot better than Wheres There's a Sea did, something helped by the fact that there's fewer effects to worry about.  And also probably, possibly, because I'm improving as a director.  (At least that's what I'd like to think!)

To begin with, way back at the start of this moviemaking thing, I'd only be thinking about whatever scene we'd be filming on the day, with all kinds of practical issues to think about such as the noise the fridge was making and how much of the ironing board would be in shot: filming is easier when it's not in a kitchen.

Paradoxically, it also seems to help when there's less coverage to choose from: one bridge scene in Heavy Lies the Crown saw me ending the day with over thirty takes from ten angles.  Now there's fewer (much fewer!) takes but those are chosen better up front.  And by up front I mean five minutes in advance.

I'll have to work on that.

We also rehearse a lot more, which reduces the fluffed lines, though not to the extent that the blooper reel can be consigned to history just yet.

The other Intrepid items marked as 'current' in my brain are the Sisters Audio drama and Bit Patterns, which has been on the go for quite some time.  Sisters hasn't begun production yet, there being a character issue to sort out.  One of them has a lot of backstory and the timeline doesn't quite work out.  In any case I promised at the start that I'd write it and then be hands-off, which so far I'm managing to do with an attendand reduction in stress.

My script for Bit Patterns is weighing in at 56 pages and now I've got to figure out how to wrap up the various threads, in addition to completely replacing one character with another.  Why I'm doing that is the unexpected unavailability of the actor who was playing him.  A character who was right at the heart of the A and the B plot and tying the two halves together.

Well, I guess it's a challenge.

The name Bit Patterns is actually one that I recycled from a novel idea I had back in the nineties, but which never really got further than a couple of pages of notes.  The original title for that was The Moiré Effect, and was to have been a story about an AI researcher who dies in an accident.  The computer system he was working on is then apparently haunted. Genuine AI?  An actual haunting, or is the whole thing some kind of psychological experiment?  This was in the day of PCs maxing out at 100 MHz and were still pretty mysterious to the public at large.  Not sure how I'd approach it today, since any mysterious message coming through the computer is either email spam, Twitter spam, IM spam, miscellaneous spam or a phishing scam.

Bit Patterns for Intrepid is an entirely different story.  All that's made it online so far is that it involves two long range probes which vanished in mysterious circumstances and that - again - it proves that the Merchant Service and Starfleet are best when they work together.  I think I've also managed to get in some proper scientific terminology and methodology, something I feel strongly about given that I list astronomy amongst my nerdish passions.  (There was a TV mini-series a few years ago called Supernova which kicked off with some of the most stupid nonsensical "scientific" dialogue I'd ever heard in something intended to be serious.)

Also there's characters and a story.  Important to include that stuff.

Further updates as events warrant!

Naming those Pesky Flying UFO Objects

One of my guilty pleasures is an interest in the whole flying saucer malarkey business. Equally, it's also something which annoys me intensely. The whole subject seems to have gone off the boil (to regurgitate a phrase) in recent years, with only a fairly recent pick-up.

Not much has been happening (and to the hardcore skeptic, never happened in the first place) until the last year or so. I find this Interesting, because of the fascinating history which I think was kicked off for me with a Swap Shop special in 1976. I find this annoying because the bar for explanations seems to have been set so low; i.e. anything slightly odd couldn't possibly be anything other than aliens.

Anything can indeed be pressed into use as a UFO, which itself is an indictment of the terminology used. “UFO” was created in, I believe, 1955 by a USAF Captain, Edward J Ruppelt. The U in UFO means unidentified, not that the sum entirety of the public has any truck with such technicalities. UFO equals aliens. Last year's release of the MOD's Condign Report made a point of describing reports as UAPs - Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon. UFO has become too broad a brush.

So, sitting on a bus one day, which can sometimes be great for thinking off at tangents, I realised that if there were really any solid mysterious craft buzzing around in the air – as opposed to misidentified sightings of the Moon, plastic bags floating in the air and so on, they'd need a different categorisation. Taking a leaf from the book of monster hunters (yeah, yeah, I know) who describe their field as cryptozoology – crypto means hidden after all – a hidden craft would have to be a crypto something.

And this is where the freeform thinking on a bus comes into its own, because I'm rather fond of the old-fashioned names for certain classes of aircraft. An aerodyne is a normal aircraft, a gyrodyne is a particular kind of helicopter and so on.

So I thought an excellent name for nuts and bolts mysterious craft in our skies, both stealth fighters and – hey, alien spaceships why not? - would be Cryptodynes.

Feel free to spread the word. (Yeah, right!)

Hammond's Law

So, at the Iain Banks talk, I was originally going to suggest one of the 'laws' that might be appropriate, but then decided that I was going to keep it to myself; thought I think it rather fits in with the spirit of the Culture. So much so, that I might have subconsciously absorbed something like it from his novels. Anyway, Hammond's First Law – and the associated arrogance which goes along with it – is this: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is an insufficient hoot”.

Sounds like something a Mind would say.

Spooks Series 7: Episode 2

It's a terrible burden actually knowing stuff.  At least that's how the writer of this episode must feel.  There is a certain cuteness, it must be said, when the mainstream media tries to do technology, like a puppy trying to join in a game of football.  It'll make you go 'aw' but what you really care about is the team.

Strained analogy.  Sorry.

The episode had a distributed denial of service attack on the UK, carried out by a submarine tapping an underwater cable.  Which is, er, a single location.  The 'distributed' part of it was obviously merrily sidelined in favour of - gasp! - a big dangerous looking thing!

So of course the defence against this is to launch a 'zero day attack'.

Oh dear.

A zero day attack is making use of an undisclosed computer vulnerability, i.e. zero days have gone by since it was discovered and hence no defence is in place.

I actually laughed out loud when I heard this.  Politics and police procedures are carefully researched for that added authenticity, of course, but as soon as technology is involved, any old shit is made up.  In this case by someone who has heard the phrases but has clearly no idea what they mean.

And just for good measure, the zero day attack is also a virus.  Because as far as TV people are concerned, computer viruses can do anything.  Perhaps it should have been named the MacGuffin virus?

This kind of thing, being a flagship BBC program, should be beneath them; it turned the normally excellent Spooks into a cartoon.

Banks' Law

Back at the Edinburgh book festival, which I claimed I was going to write more about, we saw Iain Banks at one of the big events. Iain, of Culture novels fame – was giving a talk essentially about being Iain Banks, followed by a book signing. The whole thing was something I was intending to blog about immediately afterwards in the pub, as I'd done the day before, but a rather nasty headache overtook me and so the on-the-spot blathering was quietly dropped. Overall, though, I do believe I have added to the Banks' canon.

So here's how I remember it.

We turned up early, to the point of being first in the queue. In no way are either of us a fanboy or fangirl respectively.  Given that it was SF, does that make us fanbeings? In any case, we were first in the door and by happy chance none of the front row seats were reserved, which is how we came to be right in front of him, a mere smattering of feet away.

(I'm really racking my mind to think what was said, the danger of waiting a few months to note things down. As opposed to my memories of the computer games industry, where the notes have waited something like sixteen years.)

Anyway, the important thing happened afterwards at the signing. Lesley had given me Matter and I was dithering about whether I was wanting it signed, meaning that I worried whether I would be too star-struck to form sentences in front of the great man. Lesley contrived to escape from the signing queue, the better vantage point from which to watch everyone smile and nod and say their names and then Iain's autograph would be jotted down.

Most people brought a single novel; Matter was a clear favourite, being newly released. One or two brought a whole pile of books and the guy in front of us had a Kindle. The mystery of how he was going to get an electronic book signed was resolved when he also had a normal book. A Book, book. Someone asked for Iain to write “something inspirational” to which his response was “Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

I think we can all live with that.

But then it was my turn and in a sudden fit of inspiration I asked for his full Culture name! In the Culture, you see, your full name also includes your planet and star system of birth. Emboldened, I managed to mumble out the question that I'd been too chicken to ask in the talk itself. Given that Arthur C Clarke has a law and Asimov has his laws of robotics, does Iain Banks have his own law?

I was amazed that he only needed a second or two to think this over and come up with a clear answer on the spot, though as he said, laughing, it was still a first draft.

“Any worldview, indistinguishable from solipsism, is wrong.”

I left happy. The remainder of the evening involved the train back and watching a massive glow in the sky from what was apparently a fire at a chemical plant. But that's another story.

Intrepid: Sisters

Last night I put the final polish to the audio script for Sisters, something which I'd been meaning to do for the last week. Originally this was a short story of mine which I'd thought of as being akin to Intrepid fanfic, written while Heavy Lies the Crown was yet to be released and not really 'official'. So it was nice to see elements from it being incorporated into the proper background. That made it the real thing for me.

Micheal Hudson thought it would make a good audio drama and made an attempt to convert it, before realising that it might not be that straightforward. Almost the entire thing was either some visual imagery or else internal character thoughts; not something lending itself to audio very easily.

So I've been rewriting it, in some places quite substantially, to fit the new form. A narrator has been added for some of the exposition, while the remainder has been changed into dialogue divided between the characters. In some cases, new characters. It was an interesting experiment and now that it's in Micheal's hands I've promised to be hands-off while he gets it made.

That last part might be tricky - I can't help wanting to do everything!

Edinburgh Book Festival

The Edinburgh book festival is now in full flow and I've just been along with Lesley to see Richard Dawkins (famous scientist) give a talk. All was going pretty much as expected, arrive early, see huge queue, guy with new iPhone (non-famous member of public) behind us, start going into the tent where the talk was being held. We found a seat and sat down. No problem, until this proved to be the very wrong seat indeed when Lesley spotted Iain Banks (famous author) having walked in as part of the audience.

The wrong seat, of course, was any seat that was not immediately adjacent to Iain Banks (famous Scottish author). Lesley happens to like Iain Banks (famous and clever Scottish author) a lot. So that was why the minutes leading up to Dawkin's talk consisted of observations of the form "Iain's taking his coat off", "Iain's looking around" and "Iain's looking at me!!!" (Disclaimer: Lesley is normally very *non-starstruck* and independent.)

The talk proved to be an interview chaired by Paula Kirby (famous, er, non-famous? I really have no idea) who started off by telling us that we'd be going into some less-travelled questioning. Most of the questioning stemmed from Richard's views on aliens, which itself came from an earlier debate in which he'd been consistently misrepresented. Even though it was outside his normal area of expertise, he spoke lucidly and at one point I wondered what must have been going through Iain Banks mind (famous clever Scottish Science Fiction author) as Richard explained that any real aliens would be vastly different in form to the old humanoid shape. Most science fiction writers don't have their aliens as being anything other than humanoid.

I wonder if Richard has read The Algebraist... but then Iain is most definitely not most science fiction writers. (Iain's giving his own talk on Wednesday, I'll have to ask him his thoughts - if I'm brave enough.) Dawkins is not most science fiction writers either; he revealed that his own story about aliens on the moon didn't follow the usual SF convention of having them speak English - the spoke French. But then he was seven at the time.

Most of the rest of the talk continued in on this theme, with a discussion of the Earth as a likely place for life and of multiverses. It was an unexpected avenue, and something which I am more familiar with than I would have been with biology. Of course it was all discussed with reference to scientific explanation versus "God did it", the result being entirely fascinating, even mentioning Fermi's Paradox. At that point I couldn't help thinking how amazing a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Baxter (another famous science fiction author) might have been.

Myself and Lesley were half expecting Iain to ask a question during the subsequent Q&A, but he remained silent. I thought that the questions from the audience were rather more interesting (and of course wider ranging) that Paula's questions, which really just stuck to the same theme.

So I'm blogging this from a pub a few streets down from the book festival and there's a lot of events still to go this week, including one about blogging.

Doritos in Space

(I wrote a first draft of this a while back and then promptly forgot about it. I was reminded of it by a BBC news item of something similar. I'll get to that in a later entry.)


The notion of using space for advertising isn't a new one. The Last Action Hero was briefly featured on the side of a NASA rocket launch, Pepsi was launched to Mir and Pizza Hut was on A Proton launch vehicle, amongst others. But with the latest ad effort, one has lurched into the entirely sinister.

Soon after NASA broadcast a Beatles song deep into space with a radio telescope, an advert for Doritos was broadcast in the same way. As far as any potential inhabitants of 47 Ursa Majoris are concerned, the first contact with humanity will be spam. Not content to merely pollute our own airwaves, we're exporting our pollution as far as we can possibly throw it across the universe. How noble.

Spamming would be grounds for an invasion all by itself, by any presumed civilisation. But then that is not the larger point that is being made. The very basic fact is that we have been making ourselves visible for some time now, but now we are doing it deliberately. As has been pointed out elsewhere on the net, were exposing ourselves to a something whose capabilities and intentions are unknown.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. Even if the chances of the broadcast actually being picked up are vanishingly small, the potential consequences are immense. For example an event, such as a large asteroid hitting us, is unlikely but the result is catastrophic. Our Doritos advert has an even smaller chance of any consequences, but those consequences could be vastly greater.

We're conditioned by fiction to think of aliens as spanning the whole range of possible psychologies. Klingons are warriors who hold honour above all else, for a well-known example. But almost the entirety of alien depictions are variations of humans in one way or another. A truly alien psychology may act in ways we could barely comprehend. List all the SF battles between humans and aliens and the two sides are essentially pretty well matched. Any real encounter would have no such luxury.

In Stranger in a Strange Land, the Martians debate the artistic necessity of destroying Earth. Extraordinary. Yet in real human culture we have behaviours which are far stranger. Draw a cartoon with a particular subject matter and a sizeable section of humanity will call for your execution. And it hardly need be pointed out that after only a hundred years of technological progress we can destroy ourselves quite thoroughly. What can another civilisation do with a thousand years head start? Or ten thousand?

To reiterate; we are making ourselves known to possible aliens who may react in ways which cannot be known in advance. Whose intentions perhaps can't be known even in principle. Truly, we have no idea what we might be messing with.

They may think an interstellar Doritos advert to be funny. They may think it is the sign of an appallingly immature civilisation. Or they may merely see that a new technological culture has arisen – and move to eliminate it before it can become a threat. Or - and how humiliating this would be - we join the greater galactic community but are forever after treated as a joke, a third rate culture, because our first detectable broadcast was not about art or science or any of the things we supposedly hold to be important, but about crisps.

We can't know. And given the limitations of the speed of light, we won't know, though future generations may. Carl Sagan once asked who speaks for Earth. Well now we know the answer: a marketing executive.

Arthur C Clarke

A couple of weeks ago at a party, in the midst of a conversation about the divide between sports and science, I said "Every true geek can remember where he was when Isaac Asimov died." One of the guests thought he was still alive, but further questioning proved that he was actually thinking of Arthur C Clarke. Asimov had been gone since 1992 and despite my proclamation, I don't actually remember where I was when I heard the news; I only remember a vague impression of writing down how I felt. Last night, of course, was different.

Unfortunately, I actually did get to know where I was and what I was doing when I found out Clarke had died. Even though we had all acknowledged that he was pretty old, it never occurred to me that he wouldn't go on forever. I was online on the Intrepid forum, arguing about the correct length of phaser beams in Star Trek, and then suddenly there was a new thread started with breaking news...

In my last post I wrote that Islands in the Sky was one of the first Clarke books that I had read, but it wasn't the one that made the most impression. Even for a techie like myself, who loved the sheer plausible, accurate detail in his short stories, it was the imagery that sold it. No other writer could convey such a sense of awe. And for all that his style was functional, and his love of technology perhaps offputting to those who couldn't appreciate the inherent cleverness of the stories, there was just enough sprinkling of poetry to require carefully putting the book down for a few minutes to savour it.

One image that has stayed with me for years is from The Songs of Distant Earth, when the colony ship ignites its drive system on the opposite side of the world and the whole of the horizon lights up. The colonists are departing, and because this is proper science fiction with the emphasis on science, of relativistic time dilation, we have a full, deep, understanding of what it means; there is no possibility of return. None.

Two groups of people who can never again meet.

And its this fusion of enormous concepts with a very human dimension which shows Clarke at his finest. I have some of his books on my bookcase right now.

I think I should do some reading.

What is Science Fiction Anymore?

Nobody seems to know anymore. A recent poll conducted by the BBC drew much comment on our own forums, because of the twenty or so favourite SF shows (as voted for by the public), it seemed to us that just a little over half of them were actually SF. Admittedly, there seemed to be a sliding scale of 'SF-ness' with the usual suspects of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica flying the SF colours, then shows with a strong flavouring of SF and then... hold on a second. A sliding scale of SF-ness? If the poll was to be believed, the public – astoundingly - considers Twin Peaks to be Science Fiction!

But is that really so astounding? Up until now, the bane of SF fans was the tendency to lump anything vaguely genre-looking in the same immature-shaped hole labelled 'not literature' or at least 'not worthy'. Librarians and book chains mix Magician and 2001 with a completely straight face. Nowhere does there appear to be a section that isn't headed up by the words “Sci Fi and Fantasy”.

However, the poll has solidified something that I've been gradually becoming aware of. In the magazine SFX, there has been an increasing amount of horror coverage, which to be fair reflects the amount of horror movies newly released and 'SFX' is somewhat of a catch-all for genre fiction anyway. But now there's a rival magazine out there and it had hit the ground running with an equivalently large proportion of the pages devoted to horror. Sci Fi and Fantasy seems to have become Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror. In some cases without the Fantasy.

Looking for a movie to watch on Virgin Media's on-demand feature, I was presented with a list of categories and it was this that nailed it for me. One of the categories was “Horror and Sci-Fi”. This was interesting all by itself, since within that category I counted thirty eight movies of which an entire four were Sci Fi. Sort of. So few purebred SF titles appeared, that before I'd got halfway through the listing, I was convinced I'd have to include Gremlins which was surely more appropriate as Fantasy. Discounting that, I had three SF titles and one of those was Frankenstein, which we elitists SF types tend to add to the canon because it adds respectability. But if I discount Gremlins, then how can I add Frankenstein which anyone will tell you is (very obviously) a Horror?

The reasoning goes that the Frankenstein novel is often called one of the first examples of true Science Fiction because the power that drives Frankenstein's creature is explicitly derived from science, not magic, in the form of electricity; then new and mysterious but in principle explicable. Primarily, though, any example in cinematic form is going to be labelled a Horror, even if a classic one.

So that left me with two titles from the thirty eight vying to represent our maligned genre. From here it got even more muddled, since the next one in my shortlist was Lord of the Flies. This was even more of a stretch than Frankenstein had been, but as I recalled it from reading it in school, the island setting involved a nuclear war having taken place offstage. (I confess that I haven't been able to support that statement, but it is genuinely how I remember it.) Lord of the Flies is a very literary source novel, much favoured of English teachers and so describing it in genre terms could be taken as a crafted insult. SF's rich heritage is rarely recognised and it is this 'worthiness' distinction that leads to quality SF being lauded as long as the SF part is dismissed.

Worthy, as long as we ignore those troublesome SF elements. Battlestar Galactica was noted by the public as being Science Fiction. Indeed with fleets of spacecraft, space battles, searches for a missing planet and artificial lifeforms that mimic humans, how could anyone mistake it for anything else? Because Battlestar Galactica is really high quality, therefore some commentators have declared that it's not really Science Fiction at all, an opinion shared by some members of the cast! The night before Sky One vanished from Virgin cable boxes, the announcer introduced it with “Forget Sci Fi, this is real drama”. Jeanette Winterson recently wrote a novel containing spacecraft fleeing a dying Earth complete with sentient robots and a post-apocalyptic city.. Jeanette Winterson also hates Science Fiction. She said so in an interview with New Scientist.

Really, I shouldn't have had too many hopes for the movie category which now had a shortlist contained a single item. One film left which was reputedly SF and that was Village of the Damned, based on a novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which actually is truly, authentically Science Fiction. Well, mostly. Primarily it was a still a horror, just like Frankenstein. So the number of possible movie choices I had in that category numbered exactly nothing. I found this slightly bewildering, since the complete A-Z section had Armageddon which I thought (dreadful, brain-dead mess though it may be) would have been an obvious choice as SF. Only, it was Action Adventure. Then there was Deja Vu which has as solid an SF premise as you could ever hope to find, looking back into the past through a wormhole. It was a Sci Fi Thriller, but clearly a thriller with a veneer of SF. Thriller first, anything else second.

So why does no-one seem to know what Science Fiction is anymore?

Did they ever?

I suspect that SF has become less a genre in its own right, than a kind of flavouring for other genres, since SF as a standalone type of story is notoriously hard to quantify. Damon Knight defines it thusly: “science fiction is what we point to when we say it”, whilst Norman Spinrad tells us: “science fiction is anything published as science fiction”. Frederik Pohl is quite explicit: “Science Fiction is what science fiction fans mean when they point to something and say 'That's Science Fiction'”. Can I be correct, then, if I assert the opposite? What if I point to something and say “That isn't science fiction”? Part of the dilemma, I think, is that traditionally distinct Sci Fi elements such as robots, ray guns, rockets and computers are now so much part of mainstream drama, indeed part of real life, that we fail to recognise them as such anymore.

I'm thinking of TV shows like Alias, Spooks and other hi-tech spy thrillers whose plots can revolve around some gimmick or gadget that would have deserved a short story all to itself in the 50s and been hailed as visionary. How often does nanotechnology crop up in these shows? It has reached the status of a tired cliché, if somewhat more advanced in fiction than we've seen in the labs so far. I first encountered the concept of nanotech in an old issue of the role playing magazine White Dwarf, where it described microscopic robots injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged cells. It was dated 1973. Reading New Scientist, such uses now seem merely a matter of waiting until they're ready. Does nanotech even count as SF anymore?

What about computer viruses? Even more than nanotech, they have become solidly embedded in the mainstream. Indeed, computer viruses in drama have become nothing more than a lazy plot device, whose implications are never worked out. Why would I even consider it to be a SF device? It depends where you happen to be in time. The concept of a computer virus was reputedly invented by John Brunner in his 70s novel Shockway Rider, which was an astonishingly prophetic vision of the future. Yet as I was writing this, a computer security firm has stated that there are so many real viruses out in the wild that they've stopped counting them. When did they stop? At a quarter of a million. Yesterday's futuristic SF element has become something that, if you're reading this, you are not unlikely to be sitting within a few feet of one.

The future is become out of date more quickly than ever! The US Army has a working pain ray, we've had rockets for decades and a robot probably built your car. William Gibson – father of Cyberpunk – has even given up trying to predict the future because it's become so difficult. So how can we say what is genuinely Science Fiction when those classically SF trappings are used merely as window-dressing on big-budget-billed-as-SF movies and those trappings are becoming indistinguishable from the world you see outside the window? What does it mean that a writer can create a short story where the big revelatory point is that – shock! - satellite TV can be used to broadcast violence and porn and is an excellent propaganda tool because of it? That's the box I've had in the corner of my living room for a decade. Yet Arthur C Clarke's short story I Remember Babylon was published in 1960. Can we still call it SF? Did it become mainstream by some literary equivalent of radioactive decay?

I didn't know what my conclusion would be when I started to write this. But my take is that anything with overt SF trappings, flavouring, colouring or a veneer of those old-fashioned futures which may or may not take place, has become somewhat muddled with the real world. Technology proceeds at great speed, the understanding in the street is that science and technology between them are capable of anything at all. Even if it's something unlikely, it probably just means (they reckon) that it hasn't escaped from a super-secret government laboratory yet. So it's just another plot device to dump seamlessly into the middle of a TV drama.

And true SF? Or what, with a hint of smugness, I will claim to be the genuine, hard-core stuff that really makes you think? True SF would take that gimmick, that gadget and really work out the consequences of it. In the novel, The Trigger, a device is invented which can throw up a field in which explosives can no longer explode. If that was Alias, then it would either be stolen or destroyed by the end of the episode. The world moves on and so what. The novel, in contrast, explores what such a capability would do to society and it ain't pretty, despite what you might first assume.

My contention, then, is that a properly SF work of fiction doesn't leave the world the way it found it. The world is, effectively, not our world although it starts off the same. And in the true spirit to the quotes earlier, there is plenty of Science Fiction which bears no resemblance to what I just said! In the end, I forgot about trying to watch a movie and instead watched a topical comedy news quiz, Mock the Week.

They were joking about cities rising up on giant robot legs.

Mainstream indeed.