The Book That Made Me - Paul Melhuish

In the first part of an ongoing series, NSFWG member Paul Meluish discusses "the book that made me"

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The year is 1990. The place; somewhere is Switzerland. The weather; sunny. I’m supposed to be hitch-hiking. I’m sitting on the crash barrier on some rural road and there’s a blind curve to my left. Hardly any cars are coming but I don’t mind because I’m sitting there, rucksack at my feet, reading Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, part of me hoping no cars come for a while, the other part of me knowing I’ve got to get to Lausanne at some point today. When a car does come I can hear the engine before the vehicle rounds the blind curve so I snap the book shut and slip it into my denim jacket pocket, stick out my cardboard sign for Lausanne, smile in that I’m-not-a-serial-killer reassuring grin I’ve perfected for hitching, and the car drives straight by. Good, I think, I can finish the next chapter.

Obviously someone picked me up because I’m writing this in my kitchen and not on that same blind bend where I’ve been stuck for the last 24 years.

For this piece I was going to cite The Lord of the Rings as the book that made me but I chose not to for two reasons.

1. Everybody else has already chosen this book as their special baby.
2. Although LOTR remains one of my favourite books it didn’t inform my writing today. I don’t write fantasy as such. I write horror, Sci-fi or a combination of both with fantasy elements. Weaveworld had a bigger influence on my writing than I’d care to admit.

I’d spent my adolescence in rural Oxfordshire reading James Herbert books, going for solitary walks an bemoaning the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend. I loved all that New English Library horror but for me the writers never went far enough into the fantasy elements. They would mention hell but I wanted to see it, suicide trees and all.

Time passed. I left school with no qualifications, worked as a painter and decorator and quickly decided I didn’t want to work my life away priming skirting boards (they wouldn’t let me near any proper paint anyway) so I made plans to travel. At eighteen I inter-railed around Europe on my own and flipping loved it. At nineteen I left home and decided to hitch-hike through Europe and work in Spain. I ended up working in Switzerland. Well, both countries began with S.

Before I left, I bought 4 books and put them in the side pockets of my rucksack. One book was On the Road by Jack Kerouac (which I thought was crap. Well, I was nineteen) another was Magician by Raymond E. Feist (which I still think is crap but as he outsells me by millions I’m probably the only one to think this) I can’t remember the third one but the forth book I took was Weaveworld.

I began reading it in the youth hostel in Dover, I didn’t read it on the ferry crossing the channel because I got talking to a pretty Cambridge graduate called Emma and we drank halves of lager for the short crossing, but I did read it in Paris, Spain, the South of France and finished it in Switzerland.

The story centres around a guy called Cal Mooney who finds a carpet, Weaveworld, and becomes embroiled in the battle for who should own and use this carpet. The carpet, when unravelled, reveals a magical world which amalgamates with the real world. There is a creature called the Madeleine who rapes men and reproduces with them, a salesman who possesses a jacket that can produce any gift his ‘customers’ desire. The protagonists find Oriel, the angel who guards the gates of Eden and the goodies and baddies travel to the centre of the carpet to find the Fugue, the power centre for the carpet.

Weaveworld is a massive, mind twisting adventure and a real page turner. What made the pages come alive for me was the fact that I was having my own adventure as I reading the book.

I’d hitch-hiked through France and got from Paris to Bordeaux in one lift. I’d hitched from Bordeaux to Barcelona with an American who had come to Europe to escape the law for some unspecified crime. Experiencing something of a crisis in confidence I’d decided to not bother looking for work in Spain and just travel instead so headed back into France. One time I read Weaveworld sitting under a bridge with bullfrogs burping as I’d have to sleep rough that night because I was in the middle of nowhere and I wasn’t going to hitch-hike at night. I travelled with an Irish guy called Colm and we spent the Easter weekend in the Pyrenees. I was reading the book in exceptional scenery. Colm and I looked for work in the South of France but he eventually got me a job working on a farm in Switzerland, lying to the farmer and his family, telling them that I was a student (a lie I had to keep up for my whole four month stay there).

I finished Weaveworld in a Youth Hostel in Switzerland. It was late and I was the only one in the lounge of this funny little wooden cabin. I stayed up until midnight reading. It would be my birthday the next day and I would be 20. Not a bad way to end your teenage years.

I really missed that book when I’d finished. I wanted Cal, the Weaveworld and all the characters to carry on. I also did something I’d never done before. Usually, I was precious about my book collection and would keep books. I left Weaveworld on the book shelf of that youth hostel. It would be nice to think it stayed there or, even better, got picked up by someone else travelling so they could revel in the books magic when travelling.

I read Weaveworld again in 1992 but it didn’t have the same magic. I was working as a kitchen porter then, living a mundane life and knowing the story already took the edge away.

Not only did the book open my mind to literary possibilities but the experience of travelling around Europe changed my perspective forever. I learned that life didn’t have to be humdrum and boring. I learned that you could just set out with just a rough plan and something would come up. The experience improved my problem solving skills and I learned to overcome fears that had once mentally crippled me. This was my rite of passage;  having to survive sleeping rough and having no money, working in a strange country and getting past the language barriers. If I could survive that I could survive most things.

There are other books I’ve read when life was good that I remember with great affection. I read Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon series last year. I was unmarried when I started that book and married when I finished it. Perdido Street Station I remember reading when I was on placement in Slough and things were going well. I also have fond memories or reading Imajica by Barker in 1995 at my first year of university in Northampton but Weaveworld always reminds me of my time thumbing it across Europe.

Star Wars (in comics)

NSFWG member Mark West, clearly in a nostalgic mood, on one of his earliest sci-fi loves.

One of my earliest encounters with comics (aside from the weekly adventures of Spider Man) was the Marvel comics adaptation of “Star Wars”, which appeared in the 1978 annual (that my folks got me in the summer, to read in the car on the way to Widmouth Bay).  Having watched the original trilogy films over the Christmas period with my son, I decided a re-read (after several years away) would be in order.  Rather than the annual (which is abridged), I went for the Boxtree version, collected from the weekly comics, which was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha.

Clearly sourced from an earlier screenplay (Luke is part of Blue Squadron, for instance and Jabba The Hutt resembles something that stood at the bar in the cantina), this follows the film but also includes scenes that were never shown, such as Luke and his friends at Tosche Station, Luke seeing the battle at the beginning and pretty much all of Biggs’ part.

As a light read (the editing works well, though some of the “meanwhile…” boxes do get monotonous), it’s generally good fun.  The Chaykin artwork is more visceral and immediate (he’s not very good at drawing spaceships) but the Leialoha section, which starts at the encounter with the Tusken Raiders, is more detailed and defined (and, to my eye, better).  The book also has several pages of production art from the film.

Han clearly shot first...

Meeting Jabba

Still one of the best pieces of dialogue interplay in the film and reproduced well on the page

ZZRAKK - though this doesn't explain how Vader could lift the cloak with his lightsaber

With some peculiar dialogue choices - I can’t imagine Han Solo saying “hold on tight kiddies” as the Millennium Falcon blasts away from the Death Star - and some pruning - only the X-Wings make the run on the Death Star - this is faithful enough and conveys the immediacy and action of the film.  Speaking as someone who doesn’t tend to read graphic novels, but loves “Star Wars”, I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend it.


After enjoying reading this, I found the other Boxtree collections on ebay and Amazon, so expect similar reviews of them as the year goes on...

originally published at Mark's blog

The Omega Man and Me, by Paul Melhuish

One January, in a shell garage located by the A45 dual carriageway in Northamptonshire, I stopped to get some petrol, like you do. As I waited in the queue to pay at the counter I saw that they were selling a few DVD’s. Among the popular titles like Die Hard and Toy Story sat the 1971 version of The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston retailing at a whacking £3.99.

Sometimes you watch a film with low expectations, hoping for something cheesy, laughable yet lovable. Sometimes you’re in for a surprise.

I’ve not read Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend but I’ve seen the Will Smith film adaptation. Basically, the majority of the world’s human populace gets infected with a plague that turns people into blood-crazed zombies. Will smith has to fight them off and find a cure at the same time. In our day and age the Man-fights-zombies-then-finds-other-survivors plot is well worn and has been seen a hundred times. In 1971 that particular plot-path was still fresh and new. Night of the Living Dead had only been out for a couple of years and the man-fights-zombies plotline was not embedded in our consciousness as it is today.

So, back to The Omega Man. In my £3.99 DVD Charlton Heston’s character Dr Robert Neville is living in a deserted city, hunting for supplied during the day but barricading himself in his home in a hotel at night, lights blaring out against the infected victims of the plague. The big difference here is that Neville’s enemies aren’t mindless zombies but thinking, conscious, religious and totally mad.

Neville’s nemesis is, if I remember correctly, The Family. A cult of survivors infected with the plague. They present as pale, albino-like and photophobic; The Family can’t stand light so only come out at night. Their leader is Matthias, a fundamentalist who abhors the technology that, he believes, created the plague. Neville, who is unaffected, is the heretic, the ‘Creature of the wheel’ who still embraces technology. (He drives a car and, more inconveniently for the photophobic Matthias and crew, leaves the lights on at night). So Matthias and his band of hooded cultists, Neville, the omega man, is the number one target.

Matthias preaches from a pulpit, wears a hood like some crazed monk and has legions of loyal followers. Which, on balance, is scarier? A mindless zombie or a fundamentalist?

The 1971 version of The Omega Man remains one of my favourite sci-fi/horror films of all time. There are no CGI effects; the stunts are real as are the locations. The city where Neville lives and survives is deserted but not decaying or weed-strewn yet. In the opening shots of deserted streets where litter is blown around and silence reigns, a chilling sense of the post-apocalyptic is evoked. Matthias and his hordes look effectively menacing and insane with their pale faces and black cloaks. They look medieval in their get up which creates a sense of the surreal by placing them in the modern urban environment.

The drama created between Neville and his nemesis could never have been achieved if Matthias had been a mere zombie and the sense of struggle between the two opposing view points just adds to the tension. In one scene one of the main protagonists, a young woman hardened by fighting for survival on the streets of the city, becomes infected with the blood-plague and joins Matthias’s family. You could almost say how this illustrates how seductive the beliefs of the fundamentalist can be to the lost and the frightened. But hey, this is just a movie. I really should stop over analysing this.

In the end, Neville finds a cure for the plague, Matthias tries to stop him from getting the cure to the non-infected survivors and Doctor Neville dies just as he gets the cure to them.

So, to the 2008 version. I don’t want to slag it off, it was an enjoyable film but no where near as enjoyable as the 1971 version. I would like to have been a fly on the wall at some of the scripting meetings for the 2008 I Am Legend. Why did they choose to leave Matthias out of it and give Will Smith a mindless nemesis? Maybe they didn’t want to invoke the image of the fundamentalist in these times where fundamentalism is a more pertinent issue? Maybe they thought they’d play it safe with the well-worn plot of man-versus-zombie. This is a shame because in Matheson’s novel the vampires’s weren’t mindless attackers, they put Robert Neville on trial at the end of the book. Whatever the reason I still prefer the 1971 version.

Having said this I’ve not seen the 1964 version of Mathesons novel, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price. I might like that even better but I don’t think they’ll be selling it at any Shell garages anytime soon.  


this article originally appeared on Paul's blog (at this link) 

The Perils of Plotting a Time Travel Novel, an article by Tim C. Taylor

One of the great fantasies in fiction is to travel into the past to experience what it might have been like to live in historical worlds that we see only in history books, or to travel the other direction into the future. In most cases, authors and scriptwriters present these fantasies by simply setting the entire story in this other time: hence historical dramas and futuristic science fiction. But there’s another way to present this fantasy, and that is to have your characters travel into the past or the future, usually starting their journey from a setting in today’s world.

Welcome to the time travel novel!

In 2012 I published a series of time travel novels called The Reality War. In this post, I’ll share some of my experiences because plotting a time travel novel isn’t always as simple as it looks.

A brief history of time travel
Most commonly the writer sets up most or all of these time-traveling characters to come from the present day so that we, the reader, identify with them. As the characters marvel at the wonders these other times present, and struggle to prosper in worlds they don’t fully understand, we marvel and struggle with them. We’re right in there, exploring these times as if we too are time travelers.

Writers have used this approach to time travel for most of the past few centuries. TV shows such as  Quantum Leap, books such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, and films such as  Back to the Future (1985-90) largely fit this description, though some of these stories, such as Twain’s, are designed to satirize contemporary society, and by the time Quantum Leap and Back to the Future were shown, there’s an increasing interest in the mechanisms and the reasons for time travel, something that has often been to the fore with the longest-running time travel saga of them all: Doctor Who (first shown in 1963, the day after President Kennedy was shot, as I guess we all now know in 2013).

More recently, while many time travel stories remain content to transport the characters to an adventure in another time, others are increasingly interested in the consequences of time travel, such as the beautifully circular nature of Schwarzenegger film The Terminator (1984), and the complicated romance of The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger.

So when I started writing a time travel novel a few years ago, I first had to make some decisions about what kind of book I wanted to write.

Scientific Romance or technobabble?

First off, I read some novels featuring time travel. It’s quite a fun kind of research. Plenty of people would point to The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells as the first modern time travel novel. Wells described his ‘scientific romances’ (as he called them) as changing just one thing about the modern world and seeing what would happen as a consequence. In his case, that change is the time machine built by the Victorian gentleman inventor. The future worlds the inventor travels to extrapolate Wells’ thinking about the class divide in the wake of the industrial revolution (Wells has the workers and the wealthy evolve into separate species), and contemporary scientific thinking about the entropic universe (in his story, the Earth of the far future is dying). While Wells makes a lot of effort to invent credible futures, he makes no attempt to explain the physics of time travel or its possible consequences. We see shiny brass control panels and levers; that’s enough for Wells.

I also listened to an audio version of Kindred (1976) by Octavia Butler. Here the author takes a black woman living in 1976 California and transports her to a life of slavery in Maryland of the early 1800s. Rather than present a straight historical novel, Butler uses time travel as a literary device to transport a modern woman into the past in order to make the realities of slavery more immediate to the modern reader; we’re also transported with the main character, and we also find the transition shocking.

But in Kindred, there is no attempt to cast a veil of explanation over the way in which the character time travels. There’s no moment of Star Trek technobabble, where (at its worst) it suddenly occurs to the chief engineer that if we reverse the phase of the forward shield modulators, we conveniently have the capability to time travel. Butler’s time travel is a literary contrivance in order to set up an otherwise impossible scenario that she wants to write a story about. We know it’s contrived. Butler knows that we know it’s contrived, but none of that matters. She makes such a brief reference to the traveling that we quickly accept the story conceit, and get on with enjoying what Butler wants to show us.

Then there were other books I read that I’m too embarrassed to mention here. Ones that start with the worst technobabble from Star Trek, add some half-remembered terms from school such as hypotenuse and coefficient, and present that as impressive science. No, I wasn’t going to take that approach with my novel. (BTW: I love Star Trek; a consequence of the Trek universe having such a vast fictional output is that inevitably are some dark corners of plotting naughtiness.)

I thought Kindred’s if-I-mention-it-quickly-no-one-will-notice approach to time travel worked for that book, but was too vague for the science fiction I like to read. So to start with, I decided that HG Wells would be my pilot through time, and that’s not a bad thing.

How to make your reader’s brain melt
Time travel can get really complicated.

I’m not talking about the mechanics of how it’s done, I’m talking about the storytelling. In most conventional novels, each scene takes place a little further along in time than the previous one. If there’s a big gap, the author will probably start a new part and add something like ‘Ten Years Later...’ so you know there’s a big jump in time. The reader is so familiar with this sequencing of scenes that he or she won’t even stop to notice what the author’s doing.

But with time travel, what is the correct sequence of scenes? Well, of course, there isn’t one. When the characters can move backward and forward in time, it’s up to the author to choose whatever sequence best fits the story they want to tell.

Sometimes the author wants to write about the dislocating effect of time travel. Well, that’s easy enough: just jumble your scenes into a random order; that should do the trick. Problem is, most readers will give up if you do that; I know I would.

The Time Traveler’s Wife pushes this about as far as I think an author could go and still retain a readership. The sequence of scenes is difficult to follow, but that’s okay because that book’s more about the psychology of troubled relationships, with the time traveling more of a metaphor for how people in relationships often don’t seem quite in phase with each other. I wanted my book to be essentially action-adventure (though a thematic connection with The Pilgrim’s Progress soon became very important — but that’s another post). So I knew I had to make my plot easier to follow than The Time Traveler’s Wife.

That’s much easier said than done. I kept a book of scrawled notes and diagrams about how my fictional world(s) worked. I needed to be clear how everything fitted together because that way I could concentrate on the parts of the story that mattered most and were most exciting. Sounds strange, perhaps, but I find the deeper my understanding of the background to a story, the more confident I am at knowing what to focus on, and what I can safely leave out.

Even so, there were two redrafts where I looked at my notes, and then scratched thick red lines through sections of the plot that were overcomplicating the story and so had to go.

But I wanted a story where time travel wasn’t only an excuse to have an adventure; it was at the heart of event, it caused them.

So I couldn’t ignore perhaps the most powerful — and dangerous — idea in plotting time travel novels: CAUSALITY.

Causality causes confusion
At the kind of simplified level that you and I might understand, causality is actually a pretty obvious concept. It’s a fancy way of saying that cause leads to effect.

Take this example: you hold a glass vase of flowers out of the fifth-floor window. You let go... what happens?

Well, it’s not a trick question. You let go — nothing resists gravity accelerating the vase toward the ground — vase hits ground — vase shatters. It’s so obvious it seems a pointless waste of time describing the sequence of cause leads to effect. Cause happens first (drop the vase) followed by the effect (vase breaks).
Not so with time travel.

Take the first Terminator film: John Connor leads the human resistance in the future — so a cyborg assassin goes back in time to kill John’s mother, Sarah Connor — so John sends his friend, Kyle, back in time to protect his mother — which leads to Kyle getting Sarah pregnant with John — so Sarah goes into hiding and prepares to train up John to be an effective leader and fighter — which brings us back to John Connor leads the human resistance in the future — a cyborg assassin goes back in time... and so on.

In this example, causality breaks down. In other words, it is no longer true that effect always happens after cause. Humanity needs John Connor to lead the resistance (cause) which leads to Sarah preparing him for that role (effect). But the rise of the machines hasn’t happened yet. The effect is occurring before the cause.

If that feels complicated, it’s because it is complicated. In the world we live in, cause always appears to lead to effect; time only flows in one direction and our brains can’t really cope with anything else. In The Terminator, the script cleverly implies a closed loop. If you follow events in the right sequence, as I listed them above, then it appears that effect follows cause and everything appears simpler than it really is. And yet the sequence is impossible; it’s a paradox, but maybe it’s just what the universe has decided to settle with. It might be impossible, but it’s the most stable version of history.

That’s a neat trick, so I make use of closed loops and the idea of reality settling into the most stable and least confusing version of history.

But I wanted something in my novels to shatter all this neatness, to be the spanner in the works that kicks off the Reality War I write about. And for that I need a little more from PARADOX.

Professor Paradox is/ was/ will be my grandfather

Let’s go back to The Terminator. If Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin succeeded in killing John Connor’s mother in the past, then John would never be born — which would mean the cyborg would not be sent back in time — which means...

This is sometimes called the Grandfather Paradox. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you would never have been born... in which case you couldn’t have killed your grandfather... in which case you can travel back in time and kill him...

Argghhh!

Plotting with time paradoxes is like cooking with the hottest chili peppers: a supremely memorable ingredient, but use sparingly or you’ll blow your readers’ heads off.


But if we can time travel...
One more time travel plotting idea to consider... If time travel is possible, what’s so special about the times when your story is set? Take the Victorian gentleman inventor of HG Wells. If he invented time travel in the 1890s, why don’t other people invent time travel in his future, or make use of the technology first developed in the 1890s and has been in continual use since then? And what about the people in their future? And in the future of their future too? What is so special about the 1890s that this is the only point that time travel is invented? To his credit, Wells raises this point in his novel. I think he’s right to do so, which is why you need to keep watching the shadows in my novel because in The Reality War there are other people hiding there.

Conclusion: Plotting for time travel 
In conclusion, plotting a full-on time travel is not for the fainthearted There are many pitfalls and a lot of  work, and it’s rather like wearing fresh underwear, as I explain in this post. And when you sit back and release your novel into the world, I have no doubt that some readers will vigorously attack it because they will be convinced that’s not how time travel really works.

No worries. I look forward to such discussions, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing time travel, it’s that it is addictive.

Dead & Buried, a review by Mark West

Directed by Gary Sherman
Starring James Farentino, Robert Englund, Melody Anderson

As a horror fan, I’ve loved the genre for a long time and my first contact with the film side of it was when BBC2 showed the 1930s Universal movies in the early evening.  Then, growing up in the 80s with the advent of home video and the subsequent Video Recordings Act, my friends & I had a shopping list of “banned” films with garish titles and gaudy cover art which we’d never heard of before.  The 80s were a glorious time for horror (and, occasionally, a real trough) and although I could mention Videodrome (David Cronenberg’s ideas, James Woods and Debbie Harry and Rick Baker’s fantastic make-up effects) and An American Werewolf In London (for John Landis, Jenny Agutter and, once again, the superb Rick Baker), I thought I'd instead write about a film that not many people seem to know.  And I think they should.

“Dead & Buried” was written by the then white-hot duo of Ron Shusett and Dan O’Bannon (who co-wrote Alien), the film was directed by Gary Sherman (of Deathline fame – “Mind the gap!”) and starred James Farentino (big at the time with Blue Thunder), Melody Anderson (from Flash Gordon) and Robert Englund (soon to be Freddy Kruger).  It was included in the original cull of “Video Nasties” (which, once you watch it, it clearly never should have been) and remains a very dark and often grim film and is really quite gruesome at times.

It takes place in Potter’s Buff, a seaside town in Maine and opens with a photographer taking pictures on a beach.  A blonde approaches him, models for him and then he’s brutally attacked, but doesn’t die.  The local police chief (James Farentino) who has passed up promotion to the city to stay in his home-town, is disturbed by the brutality of the crime in this close community.  When a drunk fisherman is also slain – then the photographer is finally killed – he realises that something sinister is happening.

To say more would ruin the plot, since surprise is a key element and some of the set-pieces are put together so well it’d be a shame to spoil them – though it’s safe to say that the film is never actually what you think it’s going to be.

Sherman does a great job, keeping things moving at a good pace and the whole film has a really cold tone (you only see red when it’s the blood of the victims, apart from the blonde at the beginnings shirt) that compliments the story perfectly.  The cast do a good job, the music is well used, it’s exceptionally atmospheric and it all works together to pull you in, until you’re not quite sure what it is you’re watching.

Of course, a horror film from the early 80s often stands-or-falls on the strength of its effects and here Stan Winston excels himself, using sleight of hand, photo-realistic make-ups and puppets (for one piece of ocular mayhem that made me groan when I saw it in the mid-80s and still makes me feel unwell now) and there’s a sequence set in the funeral home that is almost beautiful in its precision and care.

There are downsides, of course – the film is 30 years old and some of its ideas have since been mined by poorer productions – but these are far outweighed by the positives.

So if you’re in the mood for a creepy, intelligent, well-made horror film that isn’t afraid to show gore but doesn’t glory in it, then you could do a lot worse than watch this.  If only “they still made ‘em” like this today.

The SF Genome, by Rod Rees

A couple of years ago I attended a SF conference where the keynote talk was given by a very successful writer (who shall remain nameless). This pompous individual opined that ‘classic’ SF wasn’t worth reading because the science underpinning it was ‘flawed’. I challenged him, suggesting that as all SF writers stood on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before it was the originality of their ideas we should be celebrating rather than disparaging them on the basis of their antiquated science. It was an argument that cut little ice with the speaker.

Thinking about this I got to wondering, if the SF genome could be disentangled, which books provided the ideas that underpin the stories being written today. In other words which SF books were truly original, which novels were, well, novel. 

This is my list and I’ve been pushed to think of any book post-1990 which has added to this SF genome, something that might, or might not, speak volumes for the state of SF today.

1.       Le Morte d’Arthur (Sir Thomas Mallory, 1485)

Every ‘quest’ story since has referenced, in some way, Book VI, ‘The Noble Tale of the Sangreal’, which describes how Lancelot, Percival, Bors and Galahad searched for the Holy Grail.

2.       Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley, 1818)

The book that kick-started modern SF and provided the template for every ‘mad professor’, ‘science mustn’t interfere with Nature’ and ‘man creates monster’ story ever since.

3.       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)

The first fantasy and the first to use anthropomorphic creatures/objects.

4.       20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne, 1870)

‘What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?’ Captain Nemo: the prototype madman (tho’ is he mad?) who wants to change the world.

5.       The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886)

Good vs evil, the duality of the human condition, transmogrification: it’s all here.

6.       Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)

The quintessential vampire story that spawned the whole blood-sucking genre. (Nelli insists that it should have been Gogol’s ‘Vy’ cited here but given the popularity of ‘Dracula’ it gets my vote)

7.       War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1898)

Every ‘alien invasion’ tale ever since owes a debt of gratitude to this book.

8.       Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

The novella which spawned a multitude of ‘time travel’ stories.

9.       Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912)

Tarzan was, perhaps, the world’s first ‘superman’ in literature and a man to whom all who come after are indebted.

10.   The Lost World (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912)

Where would ‘Jurassic Park’ be without it?

11.   We (Yebgeny Zamyatin, 1921)

Dystopia; check. State surveillance; check. Dangers of totalitarianism; check. Little man kicking against the pricks; check. Feisty, insightful female protagonist; check.  ‘We’ predated ‘1984’ by twenty-eight years.

12.   Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932)

Just pipping Wells’s ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (which I prefer) is this seminal vision of a future London of 2540 AD. It sets the tone for all stories that come after that deal with extrapolation of the present in the future, eugenics, psychological manipulation, and recreational drug use.

13.   I, Robot (Isaac Asimov, 1950)

The Three Laws of Robotics have been referenced in practically every tale of androids since. These stories also provided the seed corn for the tales that came after concerning the problems of artificial intelligence and ‘out-of-control’ computers.

14.   The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov, 1951)

With these three books the ‘space opera’ came of age. The Foundation trilogy was the original universe spanning, multi-world encompassing, tale of political machinations (and, it did, of course, introduced the world to the intriguing theory of psychohistory).

15.   I am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954)

The harbinger of all the zombie stories crowding our bookshelves.

16.   The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick, 1962)

The genesis of the alt-history genre.

17.   To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Philip Jose Farmer, 1971)

The book that melded ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ characters within the same story.

18.   The Difference Engine (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, 1990)

The progenitor of the ‘steampunk’ genre.

****

Eighteen books which, in some way, can be described as ‘original’ or ‘seminal’. I’m surprised there are so many. Of course, this is a very personal list and hence subject to challenge: for instance, Nelli was aghast that I’d omitted Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Any suggestions gratefully received.

Some Advice for Budding Writers, by Ian Watson

From Ian Watson, chairman of the Northampton SF Writers Group

When I used (past tense) to visit places to give workshops for just an hour or two, here is some of the advice I would give....

Write about a violent incident (robbery, fight, quarrel, accident, or whatever) from the point of view of a blind person – because we often ignore the senses other than vision.
Smell, touch, sound, etc.   The other senses are important to add flavour, though we don't want to go over the top.

To practice compression and leave out irrelevancies, write a story that is exactly 100 words long (excluding the title).

“16 year old John, an only child whose father had just died, was knocked down by a bus.  An ambulance rushed John to hospital, where he needed an immediate operation.  As John was wheeled unconscious into the operating theatre, the surgeon looked down at John’s face and exclaimed, `Good heavens, it’s my son!’”   How could this be?  Write similar stories that reveal latent gender expectations.

The author knows what she means but the reader only has the words on the page.  What is vague to the reader?  What is confusing?  What is ambiguous?  If you reread your own story after a few weeks and feel the slightest momentary hesitation somewhere, something is wrong there.

English words can often mean more than one thing.  This can cause unintended ambiguity, which the writer doesn't notice because she knows what she means.  “The woodpecker is a boring bird,” said so-and-so.

"She flew in from London..." —in an SF story anything can be literally true.  This can cause temporary misunderstanding of the text.

Get events in the right order.  People often write down an event than add on something additional they think of.  “He tiptoed into the room after taking off his shoes.”  The reader's mind has to jump back.  This is irritating after a while.

Choose 3 words from a dictionary by opening at random and sticking your finger on the page, and write a story logically but subtly linking the 3 words.

Be specific, to give a feeling of reality.  “He walked through the park.  Flowers were blooming.”  What sort of flowers?  What colour?
However, one specific item implies a whole context.  If the flowers are daffodils, the story must take place in Spring.  (And therefore you do not need to state that is Spring.)
At the same time you don’t want to cram a story with irrelevant details.  Ideally everything mentioned should help the story along, as setting or atmosphere or part of the plot.

Can the viewpoint character actually hear and see what is being described?  Just because the author knows does not mean that the character is aware of something.
A writer sits still and describes action.  Sometimes the action is physically impossible.
Act out in your mind instead of just writing words.  I have read total rubbish by published authors who not only don't know how to change a tyre (fair enough) but seem never to have been in a real car on a real road in the country they themselves live in.  A story must be thought, and felt, not just written.

If you have a viewpoint character, don't suddenly veer to a different point of view for a while, or include a different character's point of view however briefly within the narrative.

Unless you are writing in the first person, keep your own personal likes and dislikes out of a story.  The reader won’t necessarily like and dislike the same things as the writer.  Though we are interested in the likes and dislikes of the characters.

Vary the structure of your sentences.  Instead of: “I walked down the High Street.  I went into the chemist’s…”  try: “The High Street was busy.  I went into the chemist’s…”   Do not start successive sentences with the same word or phrase, unless for special emphasis, or you will be monotonous.

Prefer active to passive constructions.  Instead of “The field had been flooded by rain” – “Rain had flooded the field.”  This has more immediacy.  

Never misuse "careen" to mean "career" as in "he careered along the corridor".  To "careen" is to turn a boat on its side to scrape off barnacles, for instance.

Never misuse "actinic" to mean a lurid, eldritch, achingly blinding light.  It only refers to the action of sunlight upon something, which is usually very minor.

If you don't know for sure exactly what a word means, even though it seems suitable, look it up.

Long sentences, with many parentheses and multiple synonyms for nuance (such as "it was boring, tedious, and mind-numbing") are the norm in most Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian etc) and seem more sophisticated to the reader of those languages.  In English these are waffle and lack focus.  English has a bigger vocabulary than, say, French, and can usually provide a single perfect mot juste.

Wage war on the word "it" which is almost meaningless.  Prefer a noun where possible.  Count your "it"s and get rid of as many as possible.

Likewise wage war on "There is/are/was/were" as a starter for sentences.  "There was a blazing fire in the hearth" is lazy and abstract compared with "A fire blazed in the hearth".

"with" is often a meaningless connective.  "A man with red hair came in, with a red scarf around his neck" " should be "A red-haired man came in, a red scarf around his neck".  Purge unnecessary words.

Have fun!

That was the Year that Was (a round-up by co-Chairman Ian Whates)

So we bid a fond farewell to 2013, a successful year for the NSFWG and its members in many regards.

Now resident in Spain, chairman-in-exile Ian Watson made a welcome return to the pages of Asimov’s in July when his story “Blair’s War” appeared there, to be followed by his poem “Catalogue Note by the Artist” in the December issue.  Ian also saw stories published in French and Romanian and had an original piece feature in Daily Science Fiction, while his classic “The Very Slow Time Machine” was reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Stories. His greatest achievement of 2013, however, was undoubtedly to marry the lovely Cristina (clearly a brave woman).

Nor is Ian the only member of the group to have tied the knot.  In May, members Donna Bond and Neil K Bond were married in a wonderfully relaxed steam-punk themed event at a Northampton hotel.  A month later, Donna, who continues to edit books on a freelance basis for several publishing houses, took over as chair of the British Science Fiction Association from yours truly (clearly another brave soul)  She also had a story featured in Daughters of Icarus, an anthology of new feminist SF and fantasy from Pink Narcissus Press.

Mark West has enjoyed one of his most successful years to date as a writer.  In addition to editing an anthology, The Anatomy of Death, for Hersham Horror Books and co-editing "ill at ease 2" for Pen Man Press, Mark saw his short novel Conjure reissued by Greyhart Press and had no fewer than seven short stories appear in various anthologies, including “Jack In Irons” in The Bestiarum Vocabulum: 2 (Western Legends Publishing), “The Bureau Of Lost Children” in Ill at Ease 2 (PenMan Press), and “It Was A Dark And Stormy Night (tale for Emma)” in The Book Of Horrors (Spectral Press). In addition, Mark’s story “Fog on the Old Coast Road”, which appeared in 2012’s Hauntings (NewCon Press), gained honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Years Best Horror.

Another member to gain honourable mention from Ellen Datlow was Emma Coleman, with “Home”, her debut appearance in print, which featured in NewCon Press’ 2012 anthology Dark Currents.  The story was also longlisted for a Bram Stoker Award.  Emma has recently sold a story to PS Publishing for a future edition of Post Scripts, expected in 2014.

Demi-Monde: Fall, the fourth and final volume of Rod Rees’ ambitious and original series, appeared from Jo Fletcher books in August. Various instalments of the Demi-Monde series were also published in Germany, Turkey, Croatia and France. Not content with that, Rod followed the Demi-Monde up with the feisty dystopian short novel Invent-10n (Alchemy Press) in December.

Nigel Edwards’ debut novel, Badger’s Waddle, an anarchic and surreal take on life in a warped English village, appeared from Greyhart Press in May, while his parable-esque tale “The Last Star” closed the NewCon Press anthology Looking Landwards in October.

Andy West’s debut collection Engines of Life, published in July by Greyhart Press, includes a story that won the University of Central Lancaster’s SF prize.  For much of the year, Andy has focussed on the climate change debate, producing several controversial blog posts on the subject.

Paul Melhuish’s story “Time Television” featured in Twelve (Horrified Press), an anthology of Gothic time travel stories, and he is currently working on his next novel.

Tim Taylor’s Greyhart Press continues to go from strength to strength, with ten new titles appearing in 2013, including three via new YA imprint The Repository of Imagination.  The year’s highlight for Greyhart was hitting the #1 bestseller spot on the Amazon.com alternate history and time travel romance charts in June, while the second edition of Tim’s own guide to laying out books for Createspace became his first ever paperback to pass a thousand sales. When Tim added up all the editions of all books he had laid out for paperback or eBook during 2013, the total came to 227. No wonder he felt busy! Notable ventures included working with Peewee Hunt to bring out his tales of life aboard the Ark Royal in the 1950s, and completing the reissue of Jeff Noon’s back catalogue as eBooks.

I’m sure there’s another member of the group who is involved in publishing… Oh yes, that would be me, Ian Whates. In 2013 NewCon Press enjoyed our most prolific year to date, publishing a total of nine new titles, including debut collections from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Stan Nicholls, and Mercurio D. Rivera, and a first SF collection from Steve Rasnic Tem. Highlights included Chris Beckett’s The Peacock Cloak occupying #1 bestseller spot in Amazon UK’s science fiction short stories for both kindle and books, producing the Looking Landwards anthology to commemorate 75 years of the Institution of Agricultural Engineers, and compiling Legends: Stories in Honour of David Gemmell.  The signed hardback of the latter (150 copies) sold out almost immediately, and the title continues to feature high in the kindle sales charts.  Personal highlights included the publication of my second short story collection Growing Pains (PS Publishing) in March, having my novella “The Smallest of Things” appear across four consecutive issues of Aethernet (April to July), and seeing seven new short stories feature in various venues, including “Eros for Anabelle” in a January edition of the science journal Nature, “Default Reactions” in The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic in October, and “Without a Hitch” in the anthology End of the Road (Solaris) in December.

Nor have the other members of NSFWG been idle.  After five years immersed in academic study, Heather Bradshaw has emerged with a doctorate and has begun to write her own brand of cutting edge SF once more, Steve Longworth continues to craft his unique style of short stories while wrestling with the demands of working as a GP in modern day Britain (a task often more surreal than anything he might write as ‘fiction’), and Susan Sinclair continues to develop the themes and narratives of various ongoing novel projects.

So, that was 2013.  Watch out 2014: the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group has you firmly in its sights!

Ian Whates
Co-Chairman NSFWG
January 1st 2014

Happy Christmas

...from all of us at the Northampton Speculative Fiction Writers Group to the readers of this blog.

Happy Christmas and our best wishes for the New Year.

The blog - with its articles, news and various lists - will be back in January, starting with a round-up of the year from co-chairman Ian Whates, followed by some writing advice from NSFWG chairman Ian Watson.

See you in 2014!

Creature From The Black Lagoon, a review by Mark West

Following on from Ian Watson's article about "Moon" and "Sunshine" a few weeks ago, here is an article/review from NSFWG member Mark West on the classic 1954 Universal horror film.

As a child of the 70s and 80s, I grew up without ready access to the films that I read about in magazines or books and so a lot of my exposure to early horror was if I was allowed to stay up late on a Saturday night to watch one. Then, during one summer – I think it would be been 1980 or 1981 – a lot of classic B&W chillers were shown on BBC2, after tea. Finally, I got to see Lon Chaney as The Phantom, rather than just reading about him and scaring myself silly over the pictures; finally I got to witness Boris Karloff’s superb performance as Frankenstein’s monster and finally, I got to see the creature that, for me, is the highpoint of Universal horror icons.

Assuming it was 1981, I was twelve when I first saw “Creature From The Black Lagoon” and I loved it. I bought the DVD, years later and watching it again is like revisiting a much-loved old friend.

Opening with a prologue that details the formation of earth (but, really, is just an excuse to have loads of things hurtling at the camera to fully utilise the 3D experience), this moves to the present day where a geology expedition in the Amazon uncovers a fossilised hand from the Devonian (I don’t know either) period. The expedition leader, Dr Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) takes it to his friend, Dr David Reed (Richard Carlson), an ichthyologist and the formers girlfriend Kay Lawrence (Julia Adams). Their financial backer, Dr Mark Williams (Richard Denning), decides to fund an expedition so they sail up the Amazon in an old steamer called Rita, captained by Lucas (Nestor Paiva).

Arriving at Maia’s camp, they discover his workers dead (we, the viewer, get to see the attack, where the Gill-Man is threatened and so fights back) and decide to stay on to look for more fossils. Reed suggests that some rock formations could have been washed downriver and Lucas tells them of the “Black Lagoon”, a paradise from which no-one has returned, where the tributary they are on ends. They set off, unaware that the Gill-Man is watching them, as it’s spotted Kay and likes what he’s seen.

Once at the Lagoon, Reed and Williams go scuba-diving and pick up some samples and then, whilst they’re examining them, Kay goes for a swim and the Gill-Man stalks her, touching her feet with an almost gentle reverence. It then gets caught in the ships net but escapes, accidentally leaving behind a claw to reveal its existence.

After killing two of Lucas’ crew members, the Gill-Man is captured and locked in a cage on the Rita. It escapes and Reed decides that they should return to civilisation but the Gill-Man has other ideas and blocks the lagoon entrance with logs. As the crew attempt to move them, Williams is killed by the creature, who then abducts Kay to take back to his cave. Reed, Lucas and Maia follow, rescuing her and shooting the creature. He is last seen sinking slowly into the depths, presumed dead.

This is a terrifically entertaining film and I really enjoyed it. Ably directed by Jack Arnold (who made, amongst many others, “It Came From Outer Space”, “Revenge Of The Creature”, “Tarantula”, “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and “Monster On The Campus”, before moving into TV directing), this keeps up a good pace from the off, with only a couple of slower moments which mainly seem to do with the 3D experience. The writing, by Harry Essex and Arthur Ross, keeps the scientific mumbo-jumbo to a minimum, though I could have done without the “Devonian period” and whilst it’s a fairly standard plot, the character interplay is sharp and bouncy. The production design is terrific, with the main set being Rita in the lagoon and whilst we never see the whole area, you get the sense of the claustrophobia, which ramps up the suspense when the Gill-Man is on the prowl.

The acting is, on the whole, pretty good with Nestor Paiva making the most of his character’s cheerful brashness to hold the screen whenever he’s on, whilst Richard Denning seems to relish his characters nastiness. Julia Adams, the beauty to the Gill-Man’s beast, is more than just decoration, holding her own even when – at times – she’s reduced to simply being the person who screams to alert the others. As for the Gill-Man himself, the two stuntmen who played him – Ben Chapman on land, in a darker suit and Ricou Browning underwater, in a lighter suit – aren’t credited in the film, which is a shame.

The underwater sequences, directed by James C Haven, are beautifully photographed, with the murky depths illuminated by shafts of sunlight that look spectacular. Arnold spends a good chunk of the running time underwater, highlighting the differences in the worlds though some of the swim-pasts, though they probably looked great, feel like padding in 2D.

Of course, a monster movie lives or dies by the quality of its “star” and this doesn’t disappoint. Apparently stemming from a story the producer William Alland was told, about a mythical race of half-man/half-fish creatures in the Amazon, this introduces the Gill-Man early and doesn’t suffer for it. He even gets his own theme – some jangling horns – and the first ‘shock’ reveal of him, underwater, is still quite unnerving today.

A big element of that is the fantastic suit, though it wasn’t without its disadvantages, visibility being one of them. Chapman apparently bashed Julia Adams’ head as he carried her into the cave and Browning had to hold his breath for long periods of time, so that all the air had left the suit before he could move. Designed by Millicent Patrick, though Bud Westmore took the credit, the creature’s facial features were based on a frog, hence the bulging jowls as it breathes. With scales and fins and hands like a wicket keepers gloves, the suit looks superb – on land or in water – and still holds up well when viewed now (as it should, costing $12,000 back then).

This was originally shown in 3D (the director also made “House Of Wax” the previous year, another 3D film), as was the craze at the time but I’ve never seen it in that format and some of the ‘special dimensional effects’ get a bit wearing when watched in 2D. But as a quibble, it’s very minor.

The film was successful enough that two sequels followed – “Revenge Of The Creature” (1955) and “The Creature Walks Among Us” (1956).

“Creature From The Black Lagoon” is a classic, giving the genre at least two highly iconographic images – the Gill-Man himself and the wonderful underwater swimming session with the lovely Julia Adams, sparkling in her white one-piece. What makes the character stronger is that, in the end, he’s a sympathetic creature – he’s only trying to protect himself and his environment from the deadly encroachment of men.

This is a cracking film and very highly recommended.

This review was first published at the Monster Awareness Month website in February 2011