Stephen Baxter interview

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.

Q&A Stephen Baxter

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.

 

An Audience with Mr Rankin

I wrote this piece for SFX 134, (I think). By 2005, I had known Robert for several years. I first met him at Euroctocon in Dublin in October, 1997. He and I got on very well and have remained good friends ever since. Rankin is one of life’s singular gentlemen. I have never met anyone quite like him. He is, if anything, even more bizarre than his characters., while the stories he tells in person are all the more astounding for being (mostly) true. I treasure the rare occasions we get to sit down, drink beer and, as he puts it in his Londony way, “talk toot”.

Robert Rankin

Rankin is a teller of tall tales who comes from a long line of tall tale tellers. Few could be taller than his latest book, The Brightonomicon. It takes a cue from New Age movements who saw a zodiac engraved into the earth about Glastonbury and applies the idea to a streetmap of Brighton. Not just any old Zodiac has the author discovered, but one of truly Rankin-esque proportions. Armed with a felt tip Rankin set to, tracing out his new cosmology on B-roads; no Gemini or Taurus here, but the Nazca-like lines of the Hound of the Hangletons and the Woodingdeane Chameleon. There are twelve in all, and each has a story, a case, attached to it which must be solved by old favourite Hugo Rune and his new teenage sidekick, Rizla.

“I wanted a reason for each of them to be there, you also wonder where these names come from – why is Hangletons called Hangletons? We have these dangerous areas, like Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb. So, in the book, Moulsecoomb is inhabited by a pirate captain called Moulsecoomb, who stills comes out and attack the pier from time to time.”

Of course, these dangers of the genteel town, jewel of the south coast and home of the exotic pavilion are imagined…

“Er, no,” interrupts  Rankin, “You don’t want to go to those areas with anything less than a tank.”

And that is his power. Rankin so effortlessly mocks our world that it’s difficult to see which parts are pure fiction and which are not. Indeed, sometimes you suspect he makes none of it up, and is privy to a portal to some alternate reality where backchat is the highest of arts. You get the feeling of reverse dramatic irony – here it is not we the audience who know more, but that his character Hugo Rune knows everything.

Rankin is fascinated by magic, so it is no surprise that Rune owes much to that infamous wizard, Aleister Crowley, whose self-portrait hangs in Rankin’s hall. But, when you look closer, there’s a lot of Rankin in there too. Rune is the master of the scam, a man who pronounces, “I offer the world my genius, all I expect is that it cover my expenses.” Rankin himself is as much raconteur as writer. We could discuss some of his escapades here, would it not bring certain agencies of the crown upon his head. His true, if no less astounding, tales include that of the Blue Peter badge, or the strange case of the cash machines, a story he regaled many an audience with until a kindly policeman took him to one side and asked, gently, that he desist.

“Rune’s not based on me,” counters Rankin. “He is a mix of my father and Crowley. He knew Crowley, actually,” he says. “He met him in the war. My father didn’t fight – using the famed Rankin common sense he thought to himself: ‘I’ll get myself a nice reserved occupation – fireman should do it.’ Which meant standing in the middle of the blitz holding a hosepipe!” he laughs. “Anyway, he met Crowley in a pub in 1943 or ’44. My father didn’t believe in the magic, but he did think Crowley was the greatest poet of the 20^th century. So he cultivated him by buying him lots of drinks. I remember my dad pointing out Crowley on the Sergeant Pepper’s album cover and saying ‘I know him.’ Then he told me he had a couple of first editions signed by the man himself. I was amazed. Of course, my mum, the fundamentalist Christian, had burnt them as Crowley was, after all, the Great Beast. I was gutted.”

Maybe there is more of Rankin Jnr in Rune than he suspects. Or perhaps there have been a long line of Rankins behaving like Runes. He is the fourth Robert Fleming Rankin – a connection to Alexander Fleming now lost to history and, like his father, his life has been full of cameos of unusual people (he went to art college with Freddie Mercury, for example). He’s done many bizarre things, such as convincing the inhabitants of Brentford a Griffin lived there, but he seems as oblivious to how unusual this track is as he is of the genuine reverence with which his fans hold him, fans whose numbers are growing. Rankin was ecstatic to see his previous book, The Witches of Chiswick, advertised in a railway station and, and has begun to force open the American market. Full of tall tales he may be, but you could never accuse him of boastfulness, however, you don’t get posters in Paddington if you’re small fry, old chap.

In true generous style, Rankin has one last thing to say. “That’s the best picture of me that I have ever had taken” he says of his portrait to the left [not included here, sorry folks]. “And I’d like to say thank you to the man who let us use his carousel. Beautiful it was, built in 1888. He even stopped it for us, whereas the pier wanted to charge us £150 to take our shot there. So thank you, and sod the pier.”

The Early History of D&D

I wrote this piece in 2006. It appeared in SFX 146‘s Time Machine. Like most people of my rapidly aging generation, I began my gaming career playing D&D.

I interviewed Gygax once. Like a lot of Americans involved in fantasy, Gygax was bearded, large and voluble, but possessed a level of interest in others that made his bluffness charming rather than irksome. A very nice man.

Time Machine – Dungeons & Dragons

You enter a rough stone corridor. It looks unsafe, and the wall runs with moisture. Ahead of you is poorly made, if stout, wooden door. Approaching warily, you hear a series of muffled scraping noises and a low growl. What do you do?

If you’re one those who has played Dungeons & Dragons then this kind of statement will be familiar to you. If it isn’t then that’s exactly the kind of dilemma those odd spods with the funny shaped dice used to face, usually weekly, while you were off partying.

Actually, the perception of RPG’s as the domain of the uber-nerd is just one of several misconceptions about the game ­– in reality D&D is no special interest, saddo passtime, but the vanguard of a great gaming revolution that ushered in an age of mass-market wargames, collectible card games and computer gaming – all of which are now multi-million pound industries. Not so nerdy now, eh?

But despite this legacy, D&D the game has had a rocky history. At the height of its popularity, every school had a D&D group (as did many other institutions. “At one time every nuclear submarine had a D&D group,” co-creator David Arneson said in one interview), but then it virtually disappeared off the cultural map. Lawsuits and debt litter its history, and it came to find itself almost destroyed by the industry it created. The story of D&D is almost as hair-raising as an encounter with a Level 19 Gold Dragon in a bad mood.

Dungeons & Dragons was the brainchild of gaming buddies Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax had long been associated with various groups and magazines, including Guidon, a wargames mail-order company. Gygax published various games through Guidon, including 1969’s Chainmail. Written in concert with Jeff Perren, Chainmail allowed players to stage small-scale battles in the Dark Ages. It was not an RPG, but a traditional wargame. However, when Gygax started to add magic and monsters, and Arneson ran a Chainmail game involving a castle sewer (underground adventures are a D&D signature) Dungeons & Dragons slowly began to come to life…

In 1971, Arneson and Gygax completed the first true incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. But they had difficulty finding a distributor – their earlier publishers thought that the game’s referee or “Dungeon Master” would be so busy running the game he would never have any fun, so it wouldn’t work. Gygax, however, had more faith in their creation, and he and set up Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), with childhood gaming chum Don Kaye. In 1974, with funding from Brian Blume, another old-gaming buddy, they launched D&D’s first edition. The 1000 hand-assembled copies sold out in under a year.

The game was a curious grab bag of ideas. Chainmail and its child were heavily influenced by the models that were available to Gygax and his friends. Back then, there were no large firms making fantasy models, so Gygax and co relied on plastic historical figures. Fine for one’s warriors, but for the monsters the gamers turned to cheap Chinese toys – poly-bagged selections of badly executed dinosaurs and weird flights of fancy. This magpie nature had serious repercussions, as the eager proto-roleplayers also included rules for monsters and creatures from the likes of Michael Moorcock, HP Lovecraft and JRR Tolkien’s works. Lawsuits and quiet words inevitably followed, with the result that various beasties, deities and demons were struck from later editions of the game.

Kaye passed away in 1975, leading to the dissolution of TSR. Gygax then set up TSR Hobbies, Inc, to continue the publication of the game. This was initially on his own, but by the mid-seventies Brian Blume and his son Kevin had a two-thirds controlling interest, something that was to eventually lead to Gygax losing control over his creation…

But for the next few years, D&D was to go from strength to strengh. A more complicated version of the game, named Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, was released in 1978. This was a huge hit, and became the model for the many copycat games that were to follow. But it was not without its problems. It was beast of a gaming system, requiring multiple books and a maths degree to play. It also unwisely split D&D into two streams, upping production costs and dividing its audience, a problem that was not to be rectified until years later. Finally, AD&D also precipitated a falling out between Gygax and Arneson in 1979. The two went to court over who owned what of their joint creation. Though the dispute was settled by 1981, it was but the first of many business disputes to hit TSR.

And if arguments over Mammon weren’t bad enough, God soon got in on the act. A series of suicides, murders and a missing persons case were all erroneously blamed on the game, and the powerful Christian far tight roundly condemned it as, well, here’s what Christian Life Ministries had to say about Dungeons & Dragons: “Instead of a game [it] is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship, gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and many more teachings, brought to you in living colour direct from the pit of hell!!!” Hallelujah.

Gygax appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the charges, only to have his answers edited and rearranged, or so he maintains. His complaints to the show after his interview was aired went unanswered.

“There here wasn’t a shred of evidence or veracity in any of those claims,” Gygax said recently. “One of the mothers of the children who had committed suicide said the only reason that her son didn’t kill himself sooner was because he enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons and that this was all just a cock-and-bull story.”

D&D was demonised. At the height of the hysteria, the TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982) came out. This told the story of one youth (played by a very young Tom Hanks) driven mad by gaming. The game in the film may have been called Mazes and Monsters, but everyone knew what they were really talking about. The controversy rumbled on for years, leading TSR to excise references to many of the more dread powers of hell from the second edition of the game, published in 1989.

Despite all this, nothing seemed to dent TSR’s armour, and it began to explore other opportunities for D&D, with Gygax heading off to Hollywood to tout the property. It was a hard slog. Mineral-water quaffing entertainment execs were not easily won over by the mid-western hobbyist. But he persevered, and in 1983 the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons was broadcast on CBS. The Dragonlance novels followed in 1984. These too, were a massive success and transformed TSR into a major player in the booming fantasy publishing market.

However, back at base trouble was brewing. TSR had accrued debts in excess of $15 million, and Gygax discovered his partners had tried to put the firm up for sale. He forced one partner, Kevin Blume, from office, but the problems didn’t stop there. Another court battle ensued as Gygax struggled to retain control, but the law found against him, and he sold his controlling interest in 1985.

After Gygax’s departure, a number of proprietory worlds were developed, and licenses acquired – Marvel Superheroes, Conan and Indiana Jones amongst them; and new gaming avenues, such as card-based play, explored.

But the company’s fortunes could not last. As the decade began to wind down, dozens of games jostled for custom in a crowded market. Worse, RPGs were getting more and more complicated, fewer kids were getting involved, and the average age of gamers increased. With no new blood coming in, revenues dropped, and many companies went under or sold off their RPG properties.

TSR survived, albeit with a smaller, increasingly niche audience, soldiering on through the 90s, until, stuck deep in debt, it was bought out by Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WoC was in turn purchased by Hasbro, who consolidated it with other gaming properties to create a gaming division operating under the Wizards tradename.

This marked something of a new start for D&D. A new edition – version 3 – of the rules was created in 2000. This scrapped the division between AD&D and D&D, creating one game. It dispensed with many the different dice the game used, settling upon the 20-sided variety. Gygax, who has undergone a change in thinking over the years, maintains the system is too complicated and damages group co-operation by focussing too much on power-play. Nevertheless, it has proven to be popular, and Wizards have wisely decided to make the system free for all games publishers to use, breaking down walls in the RPG community and generating fat loads of advertising for D&D.

Now, though the game will never be as big as it once was, Wizards estimate that around three million people a month play the game in the US alone. It appears the adventure of D&D will run for some time to come…

A D12 of D&D

Roll your twelve-sided dice to generate a random Wandering D&D Fact!

1. The game was penned under the uninspiring title of “The Fantasy Game”.
2. Gary’s surname (his parents were German) is pronounced “Guy-gax”, not “Guy-jax”, as many a poorly informed wannabe wizard would have it.
3. The name “Dungeons & Dragons” was, according to popular legend, suggested by Gygax’s wife.
4. Gary Gygax also created GenCon, now the world’s largest gaming convention, and launched Dragon magazine.
5. Fantasy movie  Krull (1983) went under the name Dungeons & Dragons for part of its developmental cycle, despite having nothing to do with the game.
6. Though Gygax originally started to put fantasy elements into Chainmail, it was D&D co-creator David Arneson who first restricted players to one model each in his games, establishing the link between player and character.
7. The game has a magic system where the wizard must memorise spells. Once he has spoken them and set them off, he forgets them. This was directly inspired by the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance.
8. Although the term “Hobbit” was removed from the game to stop infringing on JRR Tolkien’s rights, the term “Halfling” remains.
9. D&D had no setting when originally launched, instead it provided gamers with hundreds of monsters, demons and beasts with which one could create one’s own world. Many of these were drawn from mythology. Tiamat, the multi-headed dragon in the cartoon and game, for example, is a Babylonian deity which represented the salt ocean, symbolic of chaos.
10. D&D has sold more than 20 million copies, and generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
11. Many potential RPGers now play online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games. The biggest, World of Warcraft, has six million gamers. A D&D MMPORG was launched last year.
12. Gygax is not a big fan of Tolkien, finding his books dull. The works of Jack Vance, Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber have had far more influence on the game.

D&D on the screen

Not so well done, cavalier

 D&D has had many brushes with the silver and small screens. Not all of them positive. There of course was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show, which ran for three years and 27 episodes, but we had to wait until 2000 for a real Dungeons & Dragons movie, and then wished we hadn’t. A diabolical mess that featured a bored looking Jeremy Irons (paying for renovations of his Irish castle), that forgettable dude who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois and Clark, Thora Birch, Richard O’Brien and hod-loads of crap CGI, it was closer to the game but further from quality than the cartoon. This is a crying shame, as it was director Courtney Solomon’s life-long ambition to make a D&D movie. He acquired the rights to make the film in 1990 aged just 19 and spent 10 years putting together the money. All for nothing, because it really is awful.

There was a sequel in 2005. Don’t ever see it if you have even one iota of self-respect.

Buck Rogers in the 20th Century

This post represents the continuation of my never-ending quest to get as much of my old journalism online as I can. Unfortunately, that means nothing before 2004, as I was denied permission for that, but there is still so much to come yet! This feature was originally published in SFX 140, in that magazine’s regular “Time Machine” slot, in 2005.

Time Machine: Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers – all white teeth, innuendo-laden badinage, fey robots and tight jumpsuits. That’s what the name means to most of us, remembering as we do the low-brow, high-camp 1980s series from the vast stables of Glen A Larson, whence many a wonky nag and almost thoroughbred SF TV show came trotting onto our screens. The show followed Larson’s “fire and forget” approach to producing, appearing with much fanfare and running for a mere one and a half seasons before sinking into a quagmire of high mediocrity, becoming a something that today seems laughably bad. But Buck Rogers was once much more than this, entrancing several generations of Americans in magazines, comic books, radio and screen, and the sad whimper that his last hurrah endured does a great disservice to his legend.

Anthony Rogers first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. Penned by Philip Francis Nowlan, the tale was entitled “Armageddon – 2149″. It was a clever piece of science fiction that had the forces of the future waging war on one another with a variety of military inventions that have since become commonplace – infrared ray guns for night fighting, jet planes, bazookas, paralysis rays and more, though Buck’s flight-endowing jumping belt is still sadly unavailable. The famed Hugo Gernsback, at the time editor of Amazing Stories, firmly stated of the tale: “We have rarely printed a story in this magazine that for scientific interest as well as suspense could hold its own with this particular story. We prophesy that this story will become more valuable as the years go by. It certainly holds a number of interesting prophecies, many of which, no doubt, will come true.”

Buster Crabbe plays it straight.

His prophesy was a good one. Soon after the story’s publication, newspaper mogul John Flint Dille commissioned Nowlan to create a comic strip featuring the adventures of the hero. Entitled Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, the strip began its run on January 7th 1929. It was to be a phenomenal success, running in over 400 newspapers simultaneously at the height of its success.

Many of the Buck staples are present in the original stories. Buck Rogers, an ex-WWI American fighter pilot, is a surveyor in Pennsylvania who gets trapped in a cave-in and is put into suspended animation by a strange radioactive gas. When he awakes 500 years in the future, the heroic Buck becomes a pilot once more, a secret agent and head of the Rocket Rangers. He lives in a futuristic city of “metalloglass” full of marvellous devices. His enemy is Killer Kane, an evil Mongol who is trying to dominate the world, and his ally Ardala. Buck’s cohorts are the genius Dr Huer, Wilma and her younger brother, Buddy.

By 1932, when the spin-off radio serial was launched, Buck memorabilia crammed the bedrooms of American boys. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to listen to the adventures of the space hero four times a week, whose gadgets and gizmos were simulated on the airwaves by the clever use of power tools (his psychic disintegration ray was an electric razor, for example). Buck Rogers was, in all ways, a household name.

In 1939 Buster Crabbe, who had played Buck’s imitator Flash Gordon, donned the robe of the time-displaced adventurer for a cinema serial. This Buck’s origin stepped up the science fiction wow-factor – he­ is flying a dirigible with his colleague Buddy (changed from his earlier role as Wilma’s brother) when they go down over the Artic. The ship is carrying an experimental gas, Nirvano (a shameless piece of McGuffin pinched by ITV’s poor 1999 drama The Last Train). The pair are instructed to inhale the gas in order to preserve their lives. Of course, when they wake up, they’re not in early 20^th century Kansas any more, so to speak. This serial – of the kind that ran before the main feature in the days before televison – had Buck and Buddy revived in 2440. Killer Kane is again the villain, this time at the head of a band of super-gangsters which rule the Earth. Buck joins the freedom fighters, and, in a complicated plot, seeks aid from the planet Saturn. The 12-parter was recycled endlessly, being cut together for a 1953 film release, Planet Outlaws and edited again for television in 1953 in the shape of Destination Saturn. It even ran in the ’70s and ’80s on British TV. Though virtually indistinguishable from the Flash Gordon serial, it was far more polished than other SF offerings of the time, and had a kind of muscular vitality the ’80s version lacked. The wiry Buster Crabbe, an athelete, was a world away from the toothy avuncularity of Gerard.

The TV show that followed in 1950 was, by all accounts, a disappointment, though it is difficult to gauge as there are reputedly no copies of this long-forgotten piece of TV history. It was only the second ever TV SF show after all (the first being Captain Video and His Video Rangers), and the signature elements of Buck Roger’s universe, the constant action and clever gadgets, were severely hampered by the static, live nature of television.

The TV show finished in 1951, and Buck went into a slow decline. Nowlan had long left the comic strip behind, and it lost much of its power. Though it ran until 1967, it was confined to but a few newspapers. “Buck Rogers”, once a commonplace synonym for all that was futuristic in the speech of Americans, became a derogatory phrase applied with the same level of disdain as someone might have said “Doctor Who monster” ten years ago.

There was no Buck for 12 years, until maverick producer Glen A Larson got his hands on the property, launching a new

What science fiction needs is more comedy robots.

Buck onto an unsuspecting public in 1979. Many of the main elements of the story remained wholly intact, but the concept was retooled for the age of disco. “The original space man! The ultimate trip! Buck Rogers swings back to earth and lays it on the 25th Century!” screamed the jive-talking tagline. But disco was not the only innovation since Buck had last entertained the masses – feminism had come along in the meantime and grabbed the world by the proverbials. In response to this, Deering was promoted to Colonel, (though the character was always in need of rescuing and actress Erin Grey had to a) Dye her hair blonde and b) prance about in a shiny catsuit – feminism was yet to be fully integrated into the popular consciousness) and had an arch relationship with Buck with more than a hint of “mother knows best” to it. Ardala too was given preminence over Killler Kane, who was reduced from emperor of the world to henchman. She was now a sexually bored yet ultimately dangerous Princess, daughter of King Draco, evil overlord of one of Earth’s antagonistic ex-colonies. Again, empowered as actress Pamela Hensly was, Ardala was required to prance around in a whole range of adolescent-bothering outfits. Not that this upset Gerard, who had the pair of these lovely, self-determining chicks fighting over him in the show.

“All those beautiful women were one of the reasons I had such a good time doing it! It was in my contract ‘scantily women only’. We were kind of kinky, a little ahead of our time,” He told SFX in a 1999 interview.

Originally intended as a pilot for a TV show, Buck Rogers went on general theatrical release in the US where it tapped into the public’s fondness for the character, grossing vast amounts of cash.

“The figures are burned into my mind,” Gerard told us, figures tripping off his tongue as he recounted his glory hour. “It took 35 million in one month, before being removed from screens because it had been pre-sold to cable. It was one of Top 5 grossing pictures in 1979. In the opening weekend alone it took 12 million dollars, and this was three dollars a ticket at the time.”

(These big figures, predictably, prompted the third re-release of the old Universal Buster Crabbe serial).

Feminism's advent had a minimal impact on the new Buck Rogers. The last Wilma might have been a capable colonel, but men were encouraged to look at her tightly clad backside.

Unsubtle flirting aside, this Buck was a different man. Though he was known to floor the odd Tigerman with a well-aimed punch, he was also a caring, sharing gentleman. The series writer’s bible said of him “As a character Buck Rogers outwardly presents a flip, sardonic, devil-may-care guy, and an adventurous spirit. Beneath this facade is a serious and caring man who is alone. For all of the marvels of the 25th century, Buck Rogers is cut off from everyone he loved or cared about.”

And what marvels! Actually, no. The keyword with Buck Rogers’ 80s incarnation is ‘fun’, and that in the lightest sense. Behind the recycled, unused Battlestar Galactica concepts (another Larson show) and Ralph McQuarrie spaceships, the stories suffered from the curse of syndication – the need for the series to be shown in any order at all cut out any character development or story progression, with many narrative inconsistencies between episodes. The future looked like a bad nightclub furnished by early Ikea, so soulless and plastic that when Buck paints faces on his furniture many viewers must have empathised. But the show illustrated one important social shift – the idea of relentless social progress through science had taken a beating, and it was often Buck’s knowledge of the old ways that got him out of scrapes. This aside, the show relied heavily on comedy, particularly from Twiki, Buck’s mentally deficient midget robot sidekick, and this did not make for the gut-wrenching tale of one man lost across the centuries. Even when the film tried to capture this aspect of Buck’s character, when he sneaks out of New Chicago to his ex-girlfriend’s grave, it slips into pathos.

Worse was to come. Glen A Larson had become little more than a name in the credits once the film had aired, and, as much of a magpie as he was when it came to other’s ideas (Gerard affectionately called him a “bandit”)  the TV series lacked his screwball creative energy, and Gerard allegedly argued with the chief writers on the project. Then came the second series…

Where the first series was goofy but fun, the second was risible. Buck joins the crew of the Searcher, a spaceship commissioned to search out “the lost tribes of man”. The first series’ bible made much of Earth’s relationships with her former colonies, though these were never satisfactorily explored, but this level of plagiarism from Battlestar Galactica, was too much. The second season retrod old western and Star Trek plots. Mel Blanc, the cartoon genius who had voiced Twiki in the first series, was replaced by Bob Elyea for much of the second series, to fans’ mystification and outrage, and the little bot’s limelight was stolen by Krichton, an awful robot who owed much of its ancestry to a standard lamp. Buck wasn’t the only anachronistic throwback on board either, a bemused Wilfred Hyde White was wheeled onto the show to stammer and dither his way through awful lines, in a cardigan! Not very sci-fi. Gerard rages against this new direction.

“Our new producer John Mantley had no idea, one of his ideas was to replace Mel. A complete rip off of Star Trek was another. We ditched all those classic characters – Ardala, Killer Kane, the Tigermen. I was saying ‘Look, I’d really like Buck to stay on Earth. Why would he want to leave? He’s been gone for 500 years. The man needs to look around for a while, not go flying off again. John Mantley did not know what he was doing. He did the last part of Gunsmoke. To hear him tell it he reigned during the headier days of Gunsmoke, but he simply presided over the demise of that and the demise of Buck Rogers. He actually bragged about the fact he ripped off one of his Gunsmoke scripts for the Hawk episode. He actually bragged about it, he thought it was really funny that he cast Barbara Luna in both roles – she was the Indian princess and she was Hawk’s wife. The thing is, to actually laugh about it, to have so little respect for the audience, as to say, fuck ‘em”

The audience got the message, and deserted the show in droves. It was canned. Buck disappeared from the popular awareness, only an RPG, published in the late eighties, keeping his memory alive.

But his tale is perennial one, that of a man out of place, in a new world that presents many opportunities as much as it makes him yearn for that which he has lost. With TV SF reaching new levels of sophistication, perhaps it is time for some enterprising producer to take up the torch of Buck Rogers, and carry it once more to light the darkness of the future for us all.

Buck Facts

• Buck has been played by Matt Crowley, Curtis Arnall, Carl Frank and John Larkin (radio series); Buster Crabbe (cinema serial); Kem Dibbs and Robert Pasteme (’50s TV show) and Gil Gerard (’80s TV show)
•  Buck is a nickname, the character’s real is Anthony Rogers
•  Buck has been put into suspended animation by radioactive gas in a cave, experimental gas in an airship, and by being frozen in deep space when his probe is lost
• In the ’80s version, Buck’s Deep Space Probe, Ranger 3, was modelled on the space shuttle. The series introductory narrative explains it was launched in 1987. In reality, there were no shuttle launches in that year because of the prior year’s Challenger disaster
• Gil Gerard worked with Glen A Larson once before. Larson’s band, “The Four Preps”, played at Gerard’s college. Gerard’s band supported them
•  Gerard was originally going to be a teacher before deciding to take up acting
•  Buster Crabbe appeared in the 80s episode “Planet of the Slave Girls”.
•  The first Buck story, Armageddon-2143, appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories as the first part of EE Doc’ Smith’s “The Skylark of Space”.
•  Though they are often seen as contemporaries, Buck Rogers came before, and inspired, Flash Gordon
•  At his peak, Buck commanded the loyalty of thousands of fans. The Radio serial had several giveaways with it. The first of which, a map of the planets, had 125,000 requests. A later offering of a space helmet could only be gained by sending in seals from Cocomalt cans, the show’s sponsor, even so 140,000 of these pieces of tin were sent in, and this was during the Great Depression.

Find out everything there is to know about Buck Rogers at the excellent www.buck-rogers.com

An interview about Reality 36

Reality 36 is now out in North America, so here’s an interview with me about it done by Jessica Strider, who works at The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. Reality 36 is on display there, along with a shorter version of the below text. You can also read it on her blog.

What’s Reality 36 about?

This is a tough question to ask an author, in a way it’s really for the reader to decide this. Also, in what way ‘About’? This could mean the story, or my intention for its themes, or, as it’s SF, the world. Books are a collaboration between writer and author, and as reviews of Reality 36 have shown me, they all see different things, and judge it on different criteria. So, I’ll answer all three.

Reality 36 is the first in what I hope will be a series of detective/action/SF novels set just over one hundred years from now. The main characters are Richards, a Class 5 free-roaming artificial intelligence, and Otto Klein, a German cyborg ex-commando who served in the EU army. They run a security consultancy agency, which means they cover cases from missing persons to small-scale wars.

In this particular story, Richards and Klein are sort of bullied by the AI head of the European Police into investigating the death of Zhang Qifang, the world’s foremost AI rights activist, who appears to have been murdered more than once. As they draw closer to solving this unusual homicide, they discover a plot that puts both the Grid (VR cyberland internet thingy) and the Real (er, the real world) in danger…

Theme wise, it’s kind of about the Singularity. Some people have called this a Singularity book, which is close, but not entirely right, in a way I think of it as an Anti-Singularity book.

I don’t really believe in the Singularity as such, technology may accelerate to dizzying levels of change, but people will remain people. What Richards and Klein are living through might well be referred to as The Singularity by historians in their future, but like our own constantly changing today, to them it’s just everyday life, as all centuries and all times and all cultures are to those that exist within them, no matter how rapid or slow change is within those times. But I can say Reality 36 touches on what it means to be alive, with one of my heroes a machine that thinks it’s a man, the other a man who was made into a machine, the technology of their day throws this question into stark relief.

World-wise, I’ve tried to construct what I call a “whole cloth world”. A lot of SF uses ONE BIG IDEA that changes everything, and then examines those changes, and that idea, in-depth. This isn’t how the world works, it’s how parables work, and though somesuch SF is amazingly profound and I love it, I personally didn’t want to write parable SF. I’ve looked at economics, technology and possible political change (all inspired by history and contemporary developments) to, I hope, depict a believable future. I also don’t really believe in “collapse” or “apocalypse” (also both labels that have been applied to the book). Lots of bad stuff has happened in the future, but you know, life goes on.

As a parallel — to people from the 19th century, our world would be awe-inspiring and terrifying, much of what we think and do in the free west would appal them, as would the consequences of what they did to make our world the world it is. But we’re still here, we’re still diverse, we’re still making love and war. The same logic applies to the future depicted in Reality 36. No togas. No one big idea. No nonsense.

Of course, it’s also a kick-ass, action-packed adventure novel with loads of fights, drama and excitement! All that stuff above, that’s background, and it stays in the background. Reality 36 is a lot of fun, I hasten to add!

Has being a magazine editor helped you with regards to getting your own work published? (In terms of editing your manuscript or understanding more of the inner workings of publishing.)

Kind of, but not in the way you mean. (Background info – I’ve been a journalist since 1997, and worked on SFX, Death Ray, and White Dwarf as well as others).

Magazine and book publishing are very, very different beasts. Like, say, the difference between running a butcher’s shop and an upmarket shoe boutique, I mean, both are shops… My manuscripts are (I have been told) cleaner in terms of errors and the like, probably due to my editorial training. Having said that, I do have a good deal of insight into how book publishing works, among other things, because over the years in the course of my job as an SF journalist I’ve met and interviewed many great publishers, authors and agents, some of whom I’m lucky enough to call friends, and many of whom have given me great advice and encouragement at crucial times. Without them, I doubt the book would have been published.

Likewise, writing so many words every day for 14 years taught me some very important technical lessons that I’ve been able to bring into my fiction.

You’ve interviewed several high-profile authors for your job.  Which author – living or dead – would you like to interview for fun and why?

Actually, I’ve interviewed dozens of writers, including some of the biggest names in the field, and that also taught me a lot. (Specifically, that there is no one way to write. I went into SF journalism to learn this secret. There is no one answer, kids, NO ANSWER! AIEEE! It’s like Lovecraft out there). But anyone? Ooh, HG Wells, because he was a great visionary, but also a priapic love machine (he was an early proponent of free love, and a terrible adulterer)! I’ve never really been able to square the two sides of him in my head… Or maybe Lovecraft, because I’d like to introduce him to some nice black friends of mine, get him a cup of tea, and ask him to calm down a bit.

You’ve posted a number of book reviews on your website.  Do you find reviewing books makes you more critical when writing your own? 

Again, because of my job  I’ve actually written hundreds of reviews; there are only a few examples up on my blog, although I am trying to write more. In a way, reviewing made me less critical of my own work — not because I think it’s awesome and I am the best writer in the whole wide world EVER — but because for a very long time I was too critical of my own work, and that sent me to the pub rather than to the typewriter. And I’m not talking about the standard aspiring writer rant of:  “They published this? I could do better in my sleep!” What really helped me is in reading so many hundreds of genre books, and then being forced to critically appraise them, it made me aware of what works and doesn’t in a novel, and how to form one to a specific end and market, and then to apply that to my own writing, although I stress this is all within the small cone of my own preferences.

Reviews are, after all, only opinion. But reading and writing reviews, or rather the thought behind the reviews, definitely helped sharpen my own storytelling skills up. They made me better at writing what I like, if that makes sense.

What made you want to be a writer?

I love stories. I like to be my own boss. On top of that it’s a lot safer than being a stand-up comic, which I wanted to do for years, but never had the nerve. If you’re a rubbish comedian, people throw things at you and boo. If you’re a bad writer, you can read awful reviews at home and weep in private, so cowardice might be one reason. I wanted to engage with people, I always have. It’s an approval thing. I’m a mess. You should see me repeatedly googling for reviews. It’s sad. Help me.

In the books you’ve written, who is you favourite character and why? 

Tough choice. I don’t really have a favourite. Richards and Klein both, maybe.

If you could, would you change places with any of your characters?

No. Their world is in an even worse mess than ours! But like all authors, my creations are reflections of me. I’m a bit up and down. Richards is cheeky and attention seeking, Klein morose and introspective. Both are determined. Zip them together and you get a version of myself. Ahem, I should make clear that I am neither a 170 kilo military cyborg nor an advanced artificial intelligence. And I’m not German. Well, not much.

What was the first novel (published or unpublished) that you wrote and how long did it take to write it?

A book called Tales of Infinite Adam, it was basically the plot of that Jet Li film The One, but with poor comedy and lots of whining (all my early characters were drunken, self-doubting, Northern whiners, I had to write three books to get that out of my system). That took me about six years to get two-thirds of the way through, and then The One came out and spoilt it. I was there first Li, y’hear!? (Er, best not say that too loudly, he might kick my head in).

When and where do you write?

I am a new writer and a father, and thus poor. I work in a gap between my tiny house’s stair banisters and my bedroom wall on the landing. Seriously, this is God’s honest truth. I do a lot of my thinking in the shower, in that weird semi-dream state running up to a nap, and when walking my Malamute, Magnus.

What’s the best/worst thing about writing?

The life — wandering o’er hill and dale with my dog, and spending loads of time with my son (I work part-time, and look after our three-year old half the week). The opportunities for drinking… The worst is the pay. Note to self: Get more famous.

Oh, sorry, you mean writing writing? Thinking up a story is great fun, like telling a campfire tale in your head, making it work, dreaming up cool bits of dialogue — all great, and I do that a lot, and have great fun writing it up. Among others I have ideas for six more R&K novels, so please buy this one so they’ll get commissioned, folks, as I’d like to write them.

Actually getting a book down is a horrible, painful, difficult slog which is about as much fun as mining coal; except you’re a coal miner who doubts his mining ability with every painful swing of the pick. Rewriting is lots of fun again. I liken it to sculpture, only you’ve got create your own block of marble (the raw copy) before you can chisel out your statue (the redrafting). Imagine squeezing marble out of your behind… It’s metamorphic, you know, a lot of geological effort goes into making it. (Shudder).

I’m getting carried away here. It’s a great job. I love it. At least I better, it’s taken me 20 years to get here. I’m in a pickle if it’s not what I want, aren’t I?

What is something you didn’t know about the publishing industry before you had your first book published?

There’s not much I didn’t know, really, as I’d had so much contact with it beforehand. Sounds immodest, but I think I had a grasp of the basics. (NB, I know NOTHING about the actualities of making and distributing and accounting a book, just the point up to where it is sent to the printers).

Do you have any advice for hopeful authors?

Write. Don’t just talk about it. Let people read it. Listen to them. Let professionals read it. Listen to them REALLY carefully. Don’t think you are brilliant when people tell you your work is rubbish repeatedly (it probably is) don’t think it’s awful when people tell you it’s great repeatedly (it most certainly is, and no, that doesn’t include what you mum, gran, or the dog says). My biggest problem with would-be writers (and I mean from before I got published) is massive, misplaced self-confidence. And never, ever, self-publish, unless you’re putting out some worthy academic tome, then it’s a useful. Those people fleece hopeful folks of cash.

And then, when you’ve taken all that on board, write some more. The actually writing part is key here. Do it lots until it is good enough.

Any tips against writers block?

Just sit down and write. I always find having too many books on the go and several deadlines helps plenty to clear blockages. I’m not sure writer’s block really exists, anyway. When I get it, it’s a mix of pathetic anxiety and bone idleness, and I kick myself hard for it. If I get tired of one book or job, there’s always another task to be done, and then I go back to whatever I’m “blocked” on  (I still do magazine contracts, which helps break it up).

How do you discipline yourself to write?

See above.

How many rejection letters did you get for your first novel or story?

Um, well, dunno really. In total I’ve had like seven or eight, but for many different things. I was lucky to be mentored by a publisher for a while who saw some promise in me, and I listened to her very, very carefully (see above), and she was harsh! My eventual writings weren’t to her taste, but she helped a lot. I had one book nearly published which failed near the end of the process, that was tough, and that was done face to face, but most of the rejections I’ve had were positive, ie “You can write, this is awful/ not bad/ not quite good enough (as my career progressed), but you can write, so write something else.” In fact, nearly all of them have been the much coveted “personal rejection”. Eventually, someone said yes, then several someones said yes.

I have a lot of ideas, and the process of publication is so long —the book I referred to above, the one that nearly got there, took nigh on four years from initial interest to final, crushing refusal — that by the time people get back to me I’m on to something else rather than hanging around in a tizz waiting for approval or emotional demolition. I always reuse my ideas anyway, nothing goes to waste. Now I’ve five books coming out over the next two years, so I must be doing something right. I hope. I really like this job. Please buy my book.

A Brace of Columns

I’ve been reviewing Self Made Hero’s graphic novel The Lovecraft Anthology today for SFX. It made me think I should put these two pieces up on Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft from Death Ray‘s ‘Deep Thought’ opinion section. I’ve one on William Hope Hodgson too, but I’ll have to type that out as I lack the digital file, so that can wait. Enjoy! (Or not, I got quite a few people angry with my Lovecraft piece…)