From Death Ray 09, written and released in 2007 but with the cover date of January 2008 (magazines are silly like that), today I have for you:
A review of the CGI animated film Beowulf.
A review of Beowulf and Grendel, a film starring Gerard Butler released on DVD to cash in on the other Beowulf.
A brief run down of Brian Aldiss’s brilliant book, Non-Stop, which is kind of apposite as this week I’m doing the final pass on my own “colony effort goes horribly wrong” story, Crash.
Ah, Death Ray, how fruitful plundering your corpse is for my blog… This article originally appeared in Death Ray 08, back in 2007, as part of our insanely crammed “Ten Minute Guide…” series. These were among my favourite articles to write; packed full of detail, and no transcribing involved. I’ve put this one up as my review of the Flash Gordon TV series of 2007/2008 is one of the most viewed articles on this site by a long, long way. General searches for “Flash Gordon” take people there, so curiosity about this primal member of the modern SF heroic pantheon still abounds.
The original, and the best. Click the pic for more on the comic.
Golden-haired saviour of Earth, Flash has been protecting us from the art-deco hell of Ming the Merciless’s Planet Mongo for 70 years, often in a pair of tight trunks. In a word: Pulp.
Flash’s adventures are ones of swash-buckling, over the top, Prisoner of Zenda style derring-do in space. The stories are simple stuff, simply told, their enduring popularity down to the sumptuousness of Alex Raymond’s art and the on-screen extravagance it inspired. If scantily clad slave girls, finned rocket ships, weird alien kingdoms and decadently luxuriant palaces are your thing, step this way… (more…)
Criminy, another new year, my 40th to be precise. I’m halfway through my life, or thereabouts. Now that’s something to chew on. Once more the terrifying brevity of human existence troubles my thoughts.
Happy New Year!
I don’t celebrate New Year much. This year (I suppose “last year”) I watched Predators on telly, which was better than expected, then went to bed at 11.30. I’ve always found New Year’s Eve a bit of an anti-climax, unless you can find a good house party. And I always get maudlin about my mortal span (see above). In any case, now my son Benny is four, there’s no going anywhere on days like that. So, onto 2013, it’s a busy one. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in the Guyniverse come the next twelve months (all provisional, naturally).
My first story for Interzone will be published in issue 244. Hurrah!
I’ll be at Black Library Live in Nottingham on 3rd March, then the day after at The Scifi Weekender in Pwllheli. See you there?
I am also going to be at Salute with BL, on 20th April in London. I’ll be at several other events with the Black Library this year, and I’ll be posting details of those nearer the time.
Baneblade, my first published novel for The Black Library, is out on 7th May. Expect a linked story in Hammer and Bolter before the book comes out.
The Crash is out on the 25th. My second original novel for Solaris, it’s about a colony expedition that goes horribly wrong.
Skarsnik is out, my second BL book. This hits the shelves on 19th July. There’ll be a tie-in story about another famous Greenskin warlord in Hammer and Bolter. If you’re seeing a pattern here, that’s because there is one.
My Horus Heresy-era short story will appear in the Mark of Calth anthology, out on 13th. I actually just finished this today, and will tell you the title when I am one hundred per cent sure I won’t get into hot water for it (meaning, I’ll ask my editor).
My third novel for The Black Library/Games Workshop is released 3rd September. Space Marines galore, Genestealers, and a twist.
And that’s about it for the time being. I’ve got several other projects bubbling away, and as I said I will be appearing at other events. As for this blog, I’ve made my one and only New Year resolution to get all my Death Ray work online. And then I’ve a four-year backlog of SFX material; and that’s just the stuff I’ve got permission to publish. FYI, the blog got 25000 views in 2012, nowhere near the likes of John Scalzi’s eight million but not bad, I think. Things I’m hoping for this year? Less rain.
To give myself a quick break before heading off to the great quarry of words, which must be broken free from the bedrock of language by exhausting main effort, I’ve put up a few more reviews on here on the blog, plus an interview. We have:
Masters of Horror A review of part of the anthology TV series (I love anthology horror).
Let The Right One In The Swedish book that became a Swedish film that became an American film. And an interview with its author, John Ajvide Lindqvist.
Fenrir Part two of MD Lachlan’s centuries-spanning werewolf/Norse saga.
Mammoth A silly TV movie from SciFi. So bad that it’s simply bad.
Laters!
As part of my ongoing quest to put much of my archived work online, and to make up for not posting much this past week, today for you I have:
Hunter’s Run (book) – Great SF adventure collaboration between George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham.
Dark Alchemy (book) – Magic anthology about wizards by fantasy’s brightest and best.
300 (film) – Zac Snyder’s take on Frank Miller’s take on the Battle of Thermopylae
Perfect Creature (film) – Interesting if confused New Zealand steampunk, alt-reality, vampire movie (I did say it was confused).
Blade: House of Cthon (TV) – The pilot of the TV show of the movie of the comic.
Time Trap: Quatermass (TV) – All-round information on that other great British SF character, Bernard Quatermass, who was like a more grown-up Doctor Who.
If you haven’t already, check out the other reviews I have here, there are quite a lot of them now, and still only a fraction of what’s to come.
I reviewed this awful mess twice, firstly when it began, secondly when it was canned. The first review is from Death Ray 06, and I wasn’t keen. The one at the bottom is from Death Ray 13. By then it had really hit home what a pack of shite it was. Bollocks.
ONE STAR
Directors: Pat Williams, Paul Shapiro, Mick MacKay, T. J. Scott
Writers: Peter Hume, Melody Fox, James Thorpe, Gillian Horvath, Sheryl J. Anderson
Starring: Eric Johnson, Gina Holden, Karen Cliche, Jody Racicot, John Ralston, Jonathan Walker
Review #1
Calamitous reinvention of Alex Raymond’s classic space hero.
There’s a peril to being an intellectual property that survives the march of time; the terrible peril of collective ownership. This is especially pronounced if the property is but of middling power, doubly so if there is no keen-willed corporation to codify in iron what that property actually is. Sherlock Holmes for example, has enough muscle as a modern archetype to survive most indignities unscathed, while the legal department of Disney ensures no one screws with Mickey Mouse.
But those lesser entertainments of yesteryear with neither mythical status or corporate mascot-hood? They become the sport of hacks.
Poor old Flash is one such, all he has on his side is a sort of fuzzy, warm public remembrance. Resultantly he’s been reinvented so many times even he’s not sure who he is – 1930s comic book hero, 1980s camp movie icon or 1990s hoverboarding teen?
Now the Sci-Fi channel have got their claws into him, and the results are not pretty, fearlessly managing to bypass both the visual opulence and exuberant pulp energy that typify the best outings of the titular hero.
Let’s allow a little apologia for Sci-Fi. They invest a fair bit in original drama. But fantasy TV is among the most expensive of all, and they’ve only go so much money – This is the stunted twin to the same channel’s Battlestar Galactica. Flash Gordon bears the full brunt of this financial shortfall like a stoic taking a beating.
There’s no majesty in Flash, no Lionmen, no Sharkmen – just plain old, men. There are no glorious sets, no over-the-top costumes, no be-ribbed pistols. Instead endless conversations in rainy Vancouver, a henchman on casters and a Mongo that looks like an abandoned factory adorned with some cheap curtains.
There’s no energy to it. Flash travels to Mongo via a portal, allowing trips back and forth to Earth. This is nice for him, as it means he can attend a wedding in episode two, but bad for us, as we lose the vital drama, and, what one might legitimately say is the whole damn point of Flash Gordon, of his TE Lawrence style freedom-fighting while stranded on an alien world.
A really quite dreadful script, full of filler material, clumsy exposition and awful cliche (“This one’s for you dad”), calls for lots of the running around in the Canadian woods that modern low-budget SF seems to require by law (Though rarely do they start, as this show does, with their hero actually jogging through the woods). The cast, comprised entirely of cast-off co-stars, aren’t bad, especially Flash (Eric Johnson) and Dale (Gina Holden), but it’d take a bunch of thesps with a lot more chops than “not bad” to make this dross sparkle. They seem bored, bored, bored, with Ming (John Ralston) behaving like a depressed banker trapped in a loveless marriage, while Karen Cliche as Baylin bases her performance mostly on scowling.
As exotic as a drizzly McDonalds car park, as limp as a burger bun discarded in the same, this one’s so bad it’s simply just bad. On the basis of these first few episodes, avoid.
Flash Gordon was invented in 1934 by cartoonist Alex Raymond as a rival to Buck Rogers. The original Flash flew to Mongo on a rocket ship after being kidnapped, along with Dale Arden, by Dr. Hans Zarkoff. The three were stuck on Mongo for many years, but they eventually overthrew evil Emperor Ming and returning to Earth to join the World Space Council. The theatre of their adventuring then expanded to take in more of the cosmos.
Review #2
A sorry mess of wasted opportunities, thrown over for a handful of rubbish jokes.
When Flash Gordon fell burning from the phosphor heaven of the TV screen, it became just another pile of bones on the plains of cancellation. It’ll be soon forgotten, unmourned, despite the huge fan-fuelled furore that greeted its inauguration. Yep, Flash got flamed so much on the net that he was practically barbecued in the first few minutes of his reappearance. The newspapers stamped on the ashes shortly afterward.
There is much to loathe about this series, but there were also glimmerings of potential, glimmerings that will now stay forever unrealised. There are three things at fault for this. Yes, three. Here they are in descending order of seriousness.
The first, and major, cause of Flash‘s demise were the rifts, the spangly holes in the universe that allowed Flash and his chums to go to Mongo. Not a bad idea, really, gets round the whole old-fashioned rocketship, and ties in with certain physics. A great way to travel, but they were allowed to come back. Again, and then again. They cut down on this, but by then the damage was done. I’ve said it before: Flash Gordon is about a group of people who are marooned on an exotic alien world, and fight against the tyranny they find there. This is not a show about that, it is a show where our leads can nip back for misjudged comedy weddings.
Which leads us on to number two, comedy. Sass is the slow death of SF. Witless one-liners make Flash a bouffant manchild, reduce Zarkoff to a bumbling clown, and turn Dale into a blathering encumbrance, Only the Mongo men have any testicles to speak of. It’s frat party SF, with fatherly Ming scolding the Earthlings for being wankers. If only they had listened. In SF land, nobody ever grows up nowadays. It’s like Mongo was gatecrashed by escapees from the happy bus. We’re not saying we want a return to the old serials, with overdone hams barking at each other like seals recorded on wax cylinders, but why does all SF have to be, ahem, “funny”?
Number three, exoticism. Here the show at least tried. I watched seven episodes of Flash Gordon in quick succession, and began to think that if all the Earth sequences were edited out, it might have been only half bad. The Mongo scenes, though low budget and rife with cliche, were the strongest bit of the show. Whaddya know, it’s also the heart of the Flash Gordon concept. If they nailed this, they’d have won. Imagine if Flash behaved like a hero, outraged by injustice, if a genius Zarkoff had matched wits with the excellent Rankol (one of the show’s few highlights). The duel of Barrin and Flash – we should have had more of that. But no, thought the showrunners, let’s nip back to Canada for more familial bonding and hollow quipping.
So now we won’t have any more of anything. Serves them right.
A review of the DVD release of Danny Boyle’s film Sunshine, from Death Ray 05, published in 2007. My opinion of the film has mellowed since I reviewed it initially, and I think were I to regrade it, I’d give it four stars. But the science is still silly, even though they had ubiquitous astronomy hipster Brian Cox on science consultancy duties.
FILM: THREE AND A HALF STARS EXTRAS: THREE STARS
2007 • 108 mins • 15
Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: Alex Garland
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh
A multi-national crew race to almost certain death in an effort to re-ignite the dying sun and save mankind in this UK SF effort.
It’s a clever choice from the team behind 28 Days Later to make a film that has global cooling at its heart when we’re all running around worrying about the exact opposite, and this is one of the conceits that make Sunshine a bit brighter than your average SF blockbuster. It’s a shame then that it never quite dazzles. The good bits are as shiny as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bad bits a nasty cross between the dark side of Solaris and Event Horizon.
For a start, a lot of the film’s science is nonsensical. For example, how can a man be vaporised by sunlight millions of miles out from the star, yet a bomb made only of metal survive unscathed in a plummet through the sun’s (very, very hot) corona? The sun is also far too small throughout (in reality it’s so big that more than 98% of all matter in the Solar System is to be found within it). There are also too many incidents of unprofessionalism on the parts of the crew for the film to convince. In real life, astronauts check and triple check everything. You’d think this would be even more the case on a last-ditch mission to save mankind, but not aboard the Icarus II. And while it is conceivable that even the best of the best spacemen might go a bit nuts when under so much pressure, the Pinbacker subplot is exceedingly silly.
Still, Sunshine manages to be both atmospheric and exciting. The interplay between light and darkness in the film is beautiful, evoking a sense of wonder that is brilliantly enhanced by the haunting score. The set pieces are masterfully executed, and the finale has you inching forward on the sofa, daft though it is.
Sunshine has design and mood down perfectly, but it is nowhere near as clever as it wants to be. Perhaps that’s asking a lot, but it does set itself up as a thinking man’s film. If you want light-drenched awe, watch The Fountain instead.
Extras: The release DVD has numerous goodies, including a director’s commentary, Brian Cox commentary, an alternative ending, deleted scenes, web production diaries and a short film. But none were included on our review copy, and this may not be the final list.
Though it is never stated in the film, in Sunshine the sun is dying not of old age (it’s due to run out of fuel in about five billion years) but because it has been infected with an exotic particle that is disrupting its normal behaviour.
This is an interview with the author Gregory Maguire who wrote the novel Wicked, which was turned into a wildly successful musical of the same name. From Death Ray 05, published in 2007.
Gregory Maguire is an American writer with a passionate interest in children’s literature, being co-founder of a charity dedicated to furthering reading among the young.
He is primarily known for penning revisionist fantasies, often based upon well-known fairy tales. However, his most famous works take their inspiration from a more recent source. Maguire has taken L Frank Baum’s famed series of novels, borrowed his world and put his own stamp firmly upon it, often adding his own characters into crucial points of the stories, or looking at Baum’s own characters from alternative points of view. The first book, Wicked, centres on Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and portrays her as a passionate rebel rather than as a hook-nosed harridan with a nasty allergy to water. It has been adapted into a musical that has enjoyed great success both Stateside and in London town.
Guy Haley: You are very passionate about literature for children. Why do you think that is important that children read?
Gregory Maguire: I heard a report this week that said at the age of 10, only 43% of American kids read for pleasure. At the age of 15, that has dropped to 19%. When I hear statistics like these, I fear for the loss of certain skills that imaginative reading enhances; apprehension of subtlety, ambiguity, tolerance for differences, willingness to suspend judgment until the last page (or even beyond). I think reading for children, even more than reading for adults, is central to the survival of a literate citizenry. That is why I still write for children, even though my income is much richer and stronger when I publish for adults.
GM: Tell us a bit about your organisation, the CLNE.
GH:I helped found an educational charity called “Children’s Literature New England” 21 years ago. For two decades we met (four times in the UK) and considered topics of literary interest as they are dealt with in books for children: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”; “Swords and ploughshares”; and “The Fairytale belongs to the poor.” Writers and artists such as Philip Pullman, Quentin Blake, Maurice Sendak, Ursula K Le Guin, Philippa Pearce, Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Lively, Peter Dickinson, Susan Cooper, Russell Hoban, John Rowe Townsend, Alan Garner, and many others collaborated with us to consider these literary themes as expressed in books for the young. This is built on the notion that children’s literature is no less an art form than novels for older readers.
GH: Why do you choose to use the “toolbox of the fantastical” to tell your tales? Do you think that fantasy is more effective at bringing messages to children (and adults) than stories with a contemporary setting?
GM: I am afraid that as a Luddite, someone who doesn’t have an iPod, a cellphone, a play station, or a digital camera, I cannot convincingly portray our increasingly technological contemporary world with any verisimilitude. So writing stories that take place in the past or in a fantastical setting makes me much more comfortable.
That said, I also think that the kind of relaxation that once must go through in order to tolerate a “magic” story might just make one more tolerant of larger themes, too, and I care deeply about the themes of my stories – more than about the plots, characters, settings, or the mechanics of magic.
GH: Some of your greatest successes have been with stories set in Oz. Why have you chosen to use L Frank Baum’s world?
GM: Oz – unlike Middle-earth or Wonderland – is an imperfectly realized magic land. I admire much of what L Frank Baum did, but it is what he failed to do, or did less well, that allows me license to parachute into his magic kingdom and see if I can make any more sense of its history or politics than he did. Basically, I took a land of fabulous incongruity and I tried to superimpose an orderly civilisation upon it, with its own history, religions, cultural conflicts, etc – to be an anthropologist of Oz.
GH: Do you ever feel awkward, playing in the sandbox of such a renowned man?
GM: He is conveniently dead, so I am seldom embarrassed at dinner parties.
GH: You also use fairytale a lot, especially in revisionist fantasies for adults. This seems quite popular in film and literature at the moment. Why do you think that is?
GM: As we become something of a post-literate society – or perhaps I should say that as our shared literacy becomes more audiovisual and less textual – the fairy tales, like the parables, remain conveniently portable and functional vessels of story that, because we get them young – and frequently – may in fact be the final shared narrative that most people in the west can agree that they share in common.
GH: How do you feel about the success of the musical Wicked? Are musicals as valid an art form as literature in your mind?
GM: I love the musical Wicked and am buying tickets today to see it for the 26th time. It is a different art form than the novel and as such made some changes to the plot, which do not bother me. The basic theme of the story is the same as in the novel I wrote – which is that we should beware demonising our enemies, or seeing the world in absolute moral tones of black and white.
GH: You say that you enjoy English novels. Why is that?
GM: I believe the English write more delicious prose, by and large. I also grew up in a time when English writers for children were very easy to find in the libraries in the US I loved CS Lewis at the age of 10, also the books about Mary Poppins, Paddington Bear, and Tom’s Midnight Garden.
There are exceptions. Among my favorite US writers living and working today are Jess Walters, Ron Hansen, and Daniel Handler.
GH:Who are your major influences?
GM: As to the Wicked cycle, I would say TH White’s The Once and Future King, Grahame Greene as to a spooky tone and sinister atmosphere, and perhaps Ursula Le Guin as to someone who took and takes fantasy writing with utmost seriousness.
Gregory Maguire is married to painter Andy Newman.
This interview with Brian Froud comes from 2007, when it was published in Death Ray 06.
This particular piece appeared in our “New Gods” profile slot. Unfortunately, the 2009 release date he gives at the end of the article for The Power of the Dark Crystal has come and gone, but I live in hope we’ll see it some day. You can read my review of the original The Dark Crystal here.
I interviewed a number of artists for Death Ray, and will be posting the articles here in due course. Hopefully, should I get permission from the artists, accompanied by some of their glorious illustrations.
Froud was a really nice chap to talk to (my rule of thumb is that artists and writers are great to speak with, actors less so), and yes, he really does see fairies…
A quarter of a century ago, Muppet Master Jim Henson tracked down Brian Froud to provide art direction on The Dark Crystal. We talk to the master of faerie painting about this film, his artworks and his encounters with the other…
Brian Froud paints fairies. His pictures, influenced by the pre-Raphaelite movement, Arthur Rackham and Swedish artist John Bauer, are a mass of detail, of otherworldly faces peeking into the human world.
“I left college as a jobbing illustrator,” he says, “and did all sorts of things for about five years – magazines, book covers, and I got fed up with it. I used to have battles with art directors, until I discovered that any project that I art directed myself I would win awards for. As soon as I created my own things it just worked.”
Froud had always yearned to live in the countryside, so he upped sticks and headed to Devon. The folkloric book Faeries, produced in conjunction with artist Alan Lee (who lives in the same village) came out in 1977. He’s not looked back since.
“When I moved to the country, my response to nature was to paint fantastical creatures, fairies and trolls. It just haunts me, I’m fascinated. I can’t help it. I’ve a book coming out in America called Brian Froud’s World of Faerie. It’s thirty years of my work. It’s a journey through time – my earliest stuff up to the very latest. But it’s also a journey deeper into fairyland, as my art has become more about the spiritual aspects of fairies.”
This journey has taken to Froud to the edge of Faerie itself… The artist says he now sees the little folk. His good-natured tone becomes a little more self-conscious.
“It was just after finishing Good Fairies, Bad Fairies, I was on tour signing and I spontaneously started to see fairies.”
And these positive experiences generally?
“Erm, yes,” he says tentatively. A chuckle breaks his reticence. “Until the white van arrives!” He explains, “As an artist there are various techniques you use to get across an idea, but it has to contain an element of truth. And it’s fascinating to me that when I’m doodling in sketchbooks, I’m looking at these faces, getting them so I can say. ‘Yep, there’s something true there,’ rather than something I’ve made up.”
Ah, so he communicates with the fairies through his art…
“No, no. I am seeing them. Everyone says they want to see a fairy, and they want to see it with their eyes, you know, but you see it with an inner eye. They are psychic experiences. It doesn’t happen all the time, and I can’t make it happen, and it’s always a bit surprising… It’s hard – I paint fairies that feel right, but to paint fairies that look right is difficult. The experience involves so many other things.”
Wherever his art springs from, his appreciation of nature, his own imagination or through a communion with the world of Faerie, Froud’s pictures do have a glamour about them, and carry a lot of emotion for his fans.
“This could be self-delusion,” he says “but my sense of the ‘rightness’ of the pictures comes across from the response I get from people. It’s often about family, their mothers have given their books to them, and they’re going to give their books to their children, or that the books have helped them through terrible experiences, even abuse. The books have given them a safe world to flee into. I’m very humbled and proud that they’ve had such an effect on people.”
Froud’s also known as a conceptual designer on Hensons’ fantasy classics The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Storyteller, and for him these experiences remain a high point of his career. Jim Henson saw a picture of Froud’s on a book cover, and thought the artist would be perfect to help him bring to life an idea for a world he’d had. Froud jumped at the chance, and not only because he is a huge fan of the Muppets.
“I’d always wondered what it would be like if my art moved. I figured that traditional animation would not work, because my art doesn’t have depth to it, and so I’d actually thought, well maybe puppets is the way to add that depth.”
Ironically, after hiding himself away in the country, he was to spend much of the next five years in New York and London. But it had many benefits, not least that he met his wife Wendy, a puppeteer, at Hensons.
“Being in the Muppet workshop was like being in heaven. Colours, glue and fur and stuff! Jim and Frank [Oz] would come in and talk about the world, about the sort of creatures that might populate it.”
Froud oversaw every aspect of the design, drawing and sculpting on The Dark Crystal. Initially beginning with a small team, as the crew grew to 360 people, the lone artist had to learn to collaborate, the most satisfying part of the experience.
“It took five years of my life in the end. And I think that’s what makes The Dark Crystal unusual, we did literally build the whole world from the ground upwards. A whole world that had history, it had a religion, it had different animals. Jim was financing it himself until really quite late in the day. That gives it its freedom of expression. Nowadays everything is driven by accountants, I don’t think you’d ever get that freedom again. We made this film for ourselves, it caused confusion when people saw it – they wanted to know who it was for. But we though we didn’t really know, I think it affects everybody.”
This lack of a clear target audience and the release of ET meant that The Dark Crystal was a modest financial success. Froud and Henson’s next foray into fantasy, Labyrinth (1986), bombed. But both have gathered a large cult following, and Froud expresses amazement at the diversity of different editions he signs at events. Over the years a sequel to The Dark Crystal has been mooted, but it’s only recently that Froud was approached to design creatures for a second film in the series. He was initially less than taken with the idea.
“My first thought was ‘Why’? I’m always up for going on forwards, not going backwards. If we’re going to go back to this world, there’s got to be a reason. Talking to David Odell, who scripted the first, we came up with a reason. When we left this world it was paradise. Now we’re returning, something’s gone wrong; why? For me that’s the intriguing nub of the story. At the moment that’s in the script, but who knows what will happen! Anyway, I’ve done some designs for various creatures, Gelflings and things like that.”
Currently the film is going under the name of The Power of the Dark Crystal. Hensons literature reveals that a much older Jen and Kira, the heroes of the original, are rulers of the Castle of the Crystal. A fiery girl named Thurma from the centre of the planet (early development of The Dark Crystal featured underground civilisations, according to Froud) requests a shard of the crystal to revitalise the inner sun. The Gelflings refuse, so Thurma steals one, leading to the re-emergence of both Mystics and Skeksis.
“They’re still getting the final funding in place,” says Froud. “I spoke to Cheryl Henson at Comic-Con the other week. And she’s confident we’re talking about a 2009 release.”
Stephen Baxter wrote a very nice review for SFX magazine of my latest book, Champion of Mars, so I thought I’d put up this interview I did with him for Death Ray 07 in late 2007. The interview was conducted to publicise his book, H-Bomb Girl, and was published before the death Arthur C Clarke, who Baxter talks about below.
The Scouse author’s latest book takes him tumbling back in time to 1960′s Liverpool and the palm-sweating height of the Cuban missile crisis. Only it’s just that little bit different. Yep, the bone fide scientist (he has three degrees) and scribe of fantastical far futures is exploring his other favourite subject, alternate histories, once more.
Guy Haley: Unlike a lot of authors, who tend to write in one world or on one theme, you often change subject matter between hard SF and alternative history. Why is this?
Stephen Baxter: I think that’s true, and it doesn’t always do me the best of favours. Changing your strategy isn’t very good for your publishers. It goes back to right at the beginning of my career, my first couple of novels were hard SF, and I think that that’s my basic brand, but my third novel was Anti-Ice, which was an alternate history, of the kind that H-Bomb Girl is. I think it’s better to have a wider range of inetrests and I like to keep myself fresh by finding new ways of telling stories, and new avenues to explore.
GH: Do you get bored then, with one creation?
SB: I wouldn’t say bored, each book is the best book I’ve got in me at the time if, but I have to rip myself out of one particular thing after a while, when I’ve mined the seam, and move onto something entirely different. In fact I’ve been prolific the last few years, a couple of books a year, and that’s partly by alternating – I have a hard SF series on the go and then young adult like H-Bomb Girl or the Mammoth books.
GH: You’re working very hard. The third Time’s Tapestry book has just come out, and now this. That’s a lot of writing.
SB: I’ve always had a work ethic. I didn’t give up my day job until after The Timeships was published. I was working full-time up to that point, I was commuting to London as well, so I was working in the evenings and the weekends. I’ve always tried to keep to the habit of using time well.
GH: What attracts you to alternate history?
SB: I’ve always been interested in history for as long as I have been interested in science, and then alternate history is the different possibilities and the contingency of everything. I mean, you look back in your own life and see how things could have been different if you’d made a different choice – like meeting your wife for the first time, if you’d stayed at home that day things would have been entirely different. The present is as contingent as the future.
And the notion of the past as well is very interesting. I mean, trying to write my way into Liverpool of 1962, it’s like an alien planet, everything’s different. I think the mobile phone especially is a huge disjunction between the present and the past, I expect 1985 was a lot more like 1962 than now, just because the phones and other communication technologies have changed everything about the way we live.
One of my impulses behind H-Bomb Girl is that in each age we have an apocalypse, the moment it’s the green apocalypse isn’t it, where we’ll be fighting over the last scraps of water in 100 years’ time, but when I was growing up it was the Cold War. We weren’t going to grow old because the computers were going to unleash a nuclear holocaust that was going to just end everything. Absolutely terrifying. And I think looking back to the previous generation, for them it was the Second World War. The pre-war generation were terrified of the coming war. Well, it was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Each generation has a horror show ahead. So I thought it might be interesting to write for a modern generation of teenagers about the fears of a previous generation of teenagers. I wouldn’t want to diminish the challenges of climate change, but I suspect we’re going to muddle through somehow.
GH: Will you be working with Arthur C Clarke again?
SB: Yes, in fact we’ve been working on another new book, the Time Odyssey Series. It’s called First Born and it’s going to be out next year from Gollancz.
GH: How do these collaborations work?
SB: They generally start with a four or five-page outline from Clarke, but they’re really open-ended, you’ll have what becomes the kind of first chapter and plot threads, but generally without a resolution, so then we bounce that backwards and forwards by email until we’ve got an outline that we agree with and then off we go.
He was ninety this year. I’ll be happy if I’m as mentally active as he is when I’m that age.
GH: You are from Liverpool. What was it like going back in time?
SB: Well, I wasn’t even five when the Cuban Missile Crisis kicked off, so in a way it was looking back to a time just before I can remember really. So it was interesting. It’s not autobiographical but it’s like that. It’s looking at a place I know well bu through different eyes and describing it from an outsider’s point of view.
The great thing that I turned up in research from my point of view was that the Beatles played in my old school! In 1961, in one of their many sort of cavern era mini-gigs. It was a Christian brothers school and they got thrown out apparently. All the teddy boys rioted. I didn’t see my school in the same way after that, I’d stood on the same stage where the Beatles played. That era’s become a bit mummified in a way, sentimentalised, but it was like a punk explosion really, all radical, very unpopular with the grown-ups.
GH: Everyone always blames the kids! Teddy boys, Mods, Punks, now hoodies…
SB: I think it’s just jealousy, everyone wants to be young again. Youth is wasted on the young, they say. But again we muddle through. It’s as if we think we’re the last sane generation and they’re all mad and dissolute behind us. But they’re not, people mature and grow up.
