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With The Walking Dead back on TV, fans are now watching our scattered heroes as they struggle to regroup in the wake of the Governor’s midseason prison attack. When I visited the show’s set last year (as detailed in SFX 244 – pick up the issue digitally on Newsstand for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch , Zinio , Google Play , Kindle (opens in new tab) or Nook ), I discovered that the town in which Michonne, Carl, and Rick have been foraging is actually just around the corner from the road used for the Governor’s third season home — Woodbury. In reality, the town is Senoia, Georgia, and Woodbury’s main street is a charming, newly refurbished little boulevard lined with eateries and stores, the most prominent of which, for Walking Dead fans, is the Woodbury Shoppe.
The Woodbury Shoppe is a zombie lover’s mecca, chock full of all manner of Dead trinkets and souvenirs, including some unavailable elsewhere. Chief among these is the “Welcome to Woodbury — A Walker Free Community” t-shirt, available in green, grey, or pale blue. Also unique to the shop is my favorite item, a small leather keychain designed to resemble one of the walker ears that everyone’s favorite redneck Daryl Dixon used to wear on his necklace. Buy one, set it in a little box filled with red-paint-dappled cotton, and give it to someone you love!
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Daryl’s popularity is pretty evident from a quick glance around the Woodbury Shoppe, which — alongside the action figures, mugs, messenger bags, and boxer shorts — also offers cardboard standees of the bad boy with a heart of a gold, and earrings in the shape of his trademark crossbow. Of course Michonne’s popularity may be gaining, as one can also purchase a full-size replica of her razor-sharp katana sword for only two hundred and ninety US dollars. Jawless walker pets not included.
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If you pay the Woodbury Shoppe a visit, be sure to note the hallway to your right as you enter: it sports signatures — and, in the case of zombie mastermind Greg Nicotero, a doodle — from the Walking Dead’s cast and crew. And when you’re done shopping, stop by the bar next door — the Southern Ground Social Club – for a down-home style meal and beer served in a genuine mason jar. It’s owned by the same fellow who owns last year’s now demolished prison set. Tell ’em Rick sent ya!
Joseph McCabe
The Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US on Sunday nights and Fox in the UK on Monday nights at 9pm.
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]]>The post GUEST BLOG Alastair Reynolds talks Doctor Who appeared first on Game News.
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Alastair Reynolds is a scientist and science fiction author, famous for, among many others, his Revelation Space series of novels. In 2009 he signed an unprecedented 10-year book deal with Gollancz worth a million pounds. This year he also wrote a Doctor Who novel, Harvest Of Time , and here he talks about his relationship with the show…
Doctor Who is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me and I’d probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one. I also think it played a part in shaping my choice of career. Spock was a scientist, and – at least in the manner in which he was portrayed during my formative years – so was the Doctor. I came to the series in the early nineteen seventies, when Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor seemed to spend half his time peering through microscopes in the UNIT laboratory. In addition to being staunch pacifists, Spock and the Doctor were both skeptical thinkers who would always look for the rational explanation at the heart of any given mystery – even if that “explanation” might involve barely comprehensible alien technologies and motives. There were no other strong scientific role models on television at the time, so I don’t think you can understate the importance of this iconic pair. They influenced not just my choice of work as a space scientist, but my entire outlook on life, the universe and everything. If I couldn’t be Spock or the Doctor, I could at least be a scientist. That didn’t strike me as a bad bargain.
My early memories of Who are clouded by time and confused by repeats and reissues. I have no direct recollection of the first two Doctors and none at all of the first season of the Pertwee era. By the last two seasons of the Third Doctor, I was properly hooked. The Daleks frightened me so much that I did not want to go round to the house of another boy because he had Dalek wallpaper on his bedroom, which struck me was profoundly wrong and troubling. Memorable stories include the two Peladon adventures, all of the Dalek encounters, “Carnival Of Monsters” and “Invasion Of The Dinosaurs”. I can’t think of the latter without remembering a Saturday tea-time of sausages, mash potato and HP sauce.
I was a huge fan of Tom Baker but his tenure lasted such a long time that it also saw me falling slowly out of love with the programme. It was being clever when I wanted it to be scary, camp when I wanted it to take itself seriously. Nonetheless, some of the middle adventures of the Baker years had a significant effect on me. “Robots Of Death” is one of my all-time favourites and the wonderful design of the robots was an undeniable influence on my mental image of the character Doctor Trintrignant, from my stories “Diamond Dogs” and “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary”. “Kill the Doctor!” was that week’s playground catchphrase. I think the whole look of that adventure is terrifically well-realised, from the costumes of the human protagonists to the marvellous Art Deco storm-mine machine. OK, it’s a flimsy plastic model but it looked pretty big and impressive on a small television screen in the 1970s.
I’ve also a huge affection for “The Talons Of Weng-Chiang”, but then – who doesn’t? Yes, it’s wrong on all sorts of levels, but the ideas! Probably no coincidence that a human-pig hybrid also shows up in my Revelation Space universe.
I watched Who with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered – others just as infuriating. But I never gave up hope that the series might find its way again. By the time of the Colin Baker/Sylvester McCoy years I was living away from home without a television, so I saw very few of them.
The new iteration of Who is, in many ways, jarringly different from the old, for all the revisted monsters and clever nods to time-honoured continuity. But if the series had stayed on air throughout the ’80s, I suppose it would have necessarily ended up being faster, glossier, more family-friendly, with better production values – much like the new stuff, in other words. Actually I like it a lot, with a few reservations. I think the new Doctors have all been excellent choices, and I’m sure Peter Capaldi will prove an equally fine addition to the role. Matt Smith has been one of my two or three favourite Doctors, period.
But I’m disappointed that the opportunity wasn’t taken to cast a black, asian, and/or female actor in the role. It’s no good saying the Doctor’s a man, and must therefore always remain a man. He’s a time-travelling, body-regenerating alien with two hearts and a respiratory bypass system, for pity’s sake. If a Zygon can become a horse, surely anything is possible? Spock and the Doctor were both men, but imagine if there’d been a strong female scientific role model on television in the 1960s and ’70s? How would that have shaken things up?
I’m not actually that bothered about the “science fiction-ness” of Doctor Who . As Terry Pratchett has noted, the series is constructed on a much less secure conceptual foundation than Star Trek , and its ideas are often too rubbery to critique from a standpoint of scientific plausibility. If we can at least envisage something like the Enterprise, and speculate about how warp drive or transporters might function, the TARDIS constitutes a whole other order of conceptual unlikeliness.
But in that sense, the TARDIS is merely a perfect example of Arthur C Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology will be hard to distinguish from magic. One can apply the same thinking to a great deal of Who paraphernalia. Regenerations? Well, who knows who they work. But it almost certainly isn’t some sort of mystic reincarnation: it’s a physiological process that the Time Lords both invented and control, and which they can revoke when they wish. It may look like magic, but that doesn’t mean it actually is magic. And perhaps “sonic screwdriver” is just the Doctor’s slightly patronising shorthand for a gadget too hopelessly advanced for mere humans to comprehend, much as I might tell a caveman that my smartphone is a “magic talking bone”.
Doctor Who might sometimes resemble a fairytale but the Doctor most certainly doesn’t believe in fairytales himself. The name “Doctor” cuts both ways. He’s a healer, but he’s also a scientist. I hope we never lose sight of that part of his character, because I think it matters rather a lot.
On The Steel Breeze , the latest book by Alastair Reynolds, is available now from Gollancz (£16.99 in hardback).
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]]>The post GUEST BLOG Kate Kelly talks climate change appeared first on Game News.
]]>Kate Kelly is a marine scientist who’s penned her first novel, Red Rock (opens in new tab) , based around climate change… with an extraterrestrial angle. The book is out on Thursday 12 September and here she writes for SFX on the rise of “cli-fi”, climate fiction, as an important genre…
The Rise Of Cli-Fi
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The climate is changing.
This isn’t really news – the climate has always been in a state of flux. The world is by no means static. But in recent years people have been paying more attention to the changing world around us. Climate change has become news, and the subject of fierce debate.
As scientists investigate the impact we are having on our planet it is only natural for writers to start to explore the possible implications in their fiction. Writers look at the world around them and ask – What If? What if the worst predictions come true? Will it be flood or drought or endless winter?
Everywhere I look more and more books are appearing with a climate change theme to them. Literature is a reflection of the times it is written in and echoes the prominent concerns of its age. Just look at the dominant science news stories – items about climate change crop up on a regular basis – be is observations of the melting ice, or merely a comment on the unseasonable weather. Surrounded by all this it is hardly surprising that climate change themes in fiction are on the increase.
But even before people began to talk about climate change writers had thought about what might happen if the ice caps should melt. In John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes the ice is deliberately melted as part of an attack on mankind. The cause may be different but the outcome is just as devastating. Who would have expected that it would turn out to be our own hand that is melting the ice!
More recently authors have been looking at the ramifications of such changes – even the seemingly small changes around us that might reflect a greater problem beyond the limits of our own experience, as is so wonderfully depicted in Barbara Kingslover’s Flight Behaviour . And take our dependence on fossil fuels – what would happen our supplies were severed? – see Last Light by Alex Scarrow for a frightening vision of the world that could result. It is also the force behind many of the teen dystopias so popular at the moment – Exodus by Julie Bertagna, After The Snow by SD Crockett, and many many more.
Coming from a geological background I am used to looking at the changes affecting our planet across millions of years. Sea levels have risen and fallen before; vast tracts of what was once dry land are now underwater, the ice advances and retreats. Changes that take place over millions of years don’t make very exciting fiction. Speed things up and it starts to get interesting.
This is a guest blog by scientist Kate Kelly , whose book Red Rock is out on Thursday 12 September.
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]]>The post BLOG Elysium: The Art Of The Film REVIEW appeared first on Game News.
]]>This book actually makes things noticeably easier by talking about the process of designing the movie’s worlds and, crucially, one man’s role within that. Syd Mead is one of the greatest designers in modern movie history, a man whose work has been featured in everything from Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Blade Runner and mecha design. Mead’s insight and style has been stamped all over both the fictional future and the actual present. His work is astonishing, and some of the book’s most interesting sections concern his recruitment onto Elysium. Blomkamp’s astonishment that he could now legitimately recruit one of his idols is very sweet and it’s a credit to Mead, now in his ’70s that he not only keeps up with the industry but knew and was impressed by Blomkamp’s work.
His work here, largely on the Stanford Torus-design of Elysium itself is amazing, filled with the clean lines and elegance he’s justifiably known for. There’s some interesting insights into the station’s internal design, too.
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The book really highlights the way the two worlds of the movie collide. Elysium is vast, squeaky clean, beautiful and just a little tacky (after all, just because you’re a billionaire who can afford to live off Earth that doesn’t mean you have taste). In contrast, Earth is a barren favela; a wasteland crammed full of people, tattoos, gang tags and repurposed decades-old cars and weapons. The class war element of the movie is encoded into it on a near cellular level and that’s there on every single page. The book walks you through the design of Max, the robots that run his world, his work place, his exo frame, the horrifying surgery he undergoes and the weapons and vehicles he uses to get to Elysium. Each is dirty, old, battered and the best possible option. If Elysium is heaven, then Earth is clearly hell.
Seeing the two design philosophies and locations collide in the movie is heady enough on the page. It’s like cyberpunk and Kubrickian futurism got blind drunk and did frantic, sweaty things to each other on the set of the latest Mad Max movie. If a tenth of the feverish energy involved in designing the movie is on screen, then we should be in for a very fun experience. As it stands, the book is a beautifully designed look at the fractious world behind the movie and how it was built. Blomkamp, Mead and the other designers have created the most beautiful ugly world I’ve seen in a long time. Hopefully the movie set there will be as much fun as the world clearly was to design.
Alasdair Stuart
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]]>The post PURE GOLDER Theres Nothing Cartoony About Cartoon Scripts Any More appeared first on Game News.
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Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters is an okay film. If you can forgive female characters so thinly characterised the actresses should be able to sue for sexual discrimination, the end-of-level bad guy finale and the shameless Harry Potter ripping-off, it’s a decent enough kids’ fantasy adventure. It’s worth watching for Nathan Fillion’s hilarious cameo as Hermes, if nothing else.
Shortly after I watched that cameo, a thought came to mind (which is never a good thing when you’re watching a film – you should be lost in it, not dissecting it). The Fillion scene felt like something out of a Pixar film. That in turn got me thinking about how much better the scripts are in Pixar’s CG films – and indeed Dreamworks and Blue Sky animated films – than in any other current live action children’s film. Or indeed most current blockbusters.
It’s not much of a generalisation to say that animated films these days boast some of the slickest, sharpest, most inventive scripts to come out of Hollywood. In the genre of family entertainment they are streets ahead of fare like the Narnia films, the Percy Jackson franchise or Journey To The Centre Of The Mysterious Island or whatever it was.
Every Scene Counts
Whereas with How To Train Your Dragon , Monsters University or Despicable Me each scene is a mini masterpiece in itself, overflowing with witty little touches, shrewd character choices and well-crafted gags. These films can gear-change from fun to poignancy with a micro-engineered precision that leaves your heart in your stomach, only to make your spirits soar a cut later.
They’re not particularly deeper than their live counterparts. Toy Story 3 ’s teary tale of a boy growing out of childish things contains no greater insight than Sea Of Monsters ’ subtext about teenage outsiders feeling like monsters. But Toy Story ’s approach was fresh, and original; in Percy Jackson it feels like something we’ve seen in a zillion kids’ fantasy shows from Australia.
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As I said earlier, the best of the animated films even outshine Oscar-winning dramas at times. Want daring and different and emotional? Look no further than the opening of Up . Lucky old Academy, having created a ghetto category for Best Animated Feature a few years beforehand so they could give Pixar the consolation prize and award Best Picture to the begging-on-bended-knees-for-an-Oscar The Hurt Locker instead.
Of course, not all current animated films are genius. Many fall far, far short of that. But if you could quantify quality of script somehow (which, of course, is a pointless exercise, so just accept the spurious Golder Standard for the sake of argument) and averaged all animated films against all live action films, I reckon animated films would win by a country mile.
Collaboration Game
Why are animated films blessed with better quality scripts in general? Maybe it’s a “designed by committee” approach that US telly loves so much. The old saying would have you believe that “a camel is a horse designed by committee” (in other words, perfect for the task, but not exactly pretty). On the other hand, US scriptwriting by committee often creates thoroughbreds.
Certainly when you watch behind-the-scenes features on Pixar Blu-rays you get the feeling that everybody on every level is involved; that the script is a mere blueprint and that actors, animators, artists, editors… everybody is allowed input, and the best ideas remain. A lovely little character moment can evolve from something like an animator deciding that this character should have that kind of walk, which then inspires the director to try something in this scene he hadn’t previously thought of…
Maybe the key difference is that things can be changed on computer right up until final compositing with animation, whereas live-action directors are stuck with the live-action footage they shot months before (bar a few reshoots). Animation directors can keep on fiddling to the end, basically.
In other art forms, collaboration can lead to dilution. In Hollywood filmmaking, the opposite seems true – the more the merrier. Except if you’re called Woody Allen. Who’s pretty much a European filmmaker now.
But animation and the auteur theory? Doesn’t seem to mix, does it?
Dave Golder
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Remember that scene when they blew up the White House in Independence Day ? Remember seeing the Statue Of Liberty’s head roll down the street in Cloverfield? They were huge iconic moments. Moments that set up their respective film’s threats; events which set the stakes as high as possible. Sure we’d seen landmarks destroyed in sci-fi films before but these two incidents managed to make it look so real. And as the films progressed there was a sense of loss, a sense of scale.
Since then, the destruction of famous landmarks and cities from across the world has become more commonplace in sci-fi and disaster movies. We’ve seen New York and other American cities destroyed numerous times, Liberty has been knocked over time and time again, we’ve seen London, Paris and Rome suffer similar fates. And it’s all getting a bit boring. Sometimes it furthers the story as it should, but lately there seems to be so much destruction for destruction’s sake…
In films like 2012 or Knowing we expect destruction on a ridiculous scale. That sort of thing is written into the DNA of sci-fi disaster films. But for most sci-fi films I don’t think it’s a prerequisite. In recent years the third acts of some sci-fi films have been overflowing with scenes of mass destruction. Since CGI came along there seems to be no end to the amount of destroyed buildings and ruined cities smeared across our big screens. And not only are we treated to these orgies of destruction but sometimes they seem to be happening with less and less consequence for their film’s characters and even less viewer investment; they seem to be a means to an end and we become immune to it.
At least in 2012’s The Avengers they made an effort to get some pathos and consequence into the events during the battle of New York. Sure they had giant space worms levelling whole buildings but they did show the heroes trying to rescue some people, and there was a nod to trying to limit the damage. Except Hulk, he just smashed. And speaking of the Hulk, the death and destruction rained down in the character’s last solo outing is reduced to a “last time I was in New York I kind of broke… Harlem.” joke in the ensemble film. God knows how many dead, how many millions worth of damage and it’s a throw away joke line. Do they even want us to care about the stakes?
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The next big film on the way is Pacific Rim and that looks like it’ll make the destruction depicted in the films mentioned above pale into insignificance. But will we care?
I get that big summer blockbusters and events films sometimes need to be, well, big. And I love a gigantic battle as much as the next person. Honestly, I love big explodey fun. I just wonder where it’s heading? Would we not be better off with events that actually engage the audience? I’m not saying every film needs to end with only a small, personal one-on-one fight, even though we usually get that right after the mass destruction anyway. I just think that big isn’t necessarily always better. And if the stakes of destruction are getting higher and higher, then where will it end? Just how big can the battles get? And will we care? Are we even supposed to care anymore?
Steven Ellis
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]]>The post BLOG Doctor Who In Six Lines Of Java appeared first on Game News.
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Whilst we’re in Doctor Who limbo, waiting to find out who the next Doctor will be, how long the new season is, what John Hurt’s role is and the other members of the never ending Legion Of Questions, it’s easy to get bored. Admittedly things can’t get much worse than the “Paris Jackson is the new Doctor” story excreted last week, but they can get much more boring than they already are. Thankfully, the team at UsVsTh3m has put together an episode plot generator that, in six lines of Java, throws out some unnervingly plausible sounding episodes.
And it’s a wonderful time sink. Also, I’d like to personally throw my support behind the “David Bowie as the White Guardian” campaign now, following a particular great random plot it generated for me a few days ago.
Regardless of your thoughts on whether the Thin White Duke should be the Thin White Gallifreyan, it’s a fun toy and was how I found UsVsTh3m . There’s some great stuff on the site, much of it cheerfully sweary in an NSFW kind of way, and I talked to founder Martin Belam about it, and what their plans are.
Tell us a little about the site.
“ UsVsTh3m is our crack at being funny on the internet. Editorially it is lead by Rob Manuel, who founded B3ta , and the premise is that each day we make stuff we hope is funny; the rest of the internet makes some funny stuff; we publish both, and at tea-time send out an email announcing who has “won” that day according to our secret formula.”
What led to the decision to set it up?
“Trinity Mirror is funding it. It has a digital strategy that involves setting up some new sites and trying to reach new audiences, and it is also trying to be more experimental with its digital publishing. We had a workshop with a few people from the business and some of the editorial team, settled on the premise, and got it up and live within five weeks.”
You’ve got some wonderful geek humour up there, especially the magnificent Icefail. Is that something you’re deliberately skewing towards or is it naturally evolving?
“In the long term, we’d aim to have a more mainstream audience, but in the short-term it seems wise to play to our strengths, which is being a bit geeky and poking fun at the media. I think our style will naturally evolve: the day we launched to the public was the first time that some of the writing team had ever met each other, let alone worked together.”
The Doctor Who plot generator is a thing of awful beauty, and terrifyingly convincing. What’s your favorite episode it’s generated so far?
“Someone posted a picture on Twitter of what could have been a pretty convincing plot-line for the 50th special. It actually started life as an attempt to generate fake spoilers for November, but then we just started adding sillier and sillier ideas into it. I feel a bit mean having delivered a bit of a slap to the current state of the show like that: there’s a long tradition of fans giving the team running it a hard time because it doesn’t fit with some mythical idea of how Doctor Who ‘ought’ to be. I love the cameos generated by the JavaScript though: it is essentially a wish list of who I’d like to see next year – Tom Baker as the voice of a villain, or David Bowie.”
What’s next for the site?
“We’ve got enough money to run it for a couple of months as an experiment, and if it goes well I hope we’ll add more staff and start to publish more than 9-5, 5 days a week. We are also going to be running some comedy events alongside it, as a way of helping us come up with new content.”
• UsVsTh3m is off to a great start, hitting multiple different styles of comedy and subject matter with the same maniacal glee. Visit for the Doctor Who plot generator, stay for the jokes. It’s worth it.
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]]>The post BLOG The Power Of A Poster appeared first on Game News.
]]>I know I’ve moaned about the advertising juggernaut that accompanies the release of any blockbuster film before. I’ve lamented the passing of a more subtle style of advertising.
And today I realised that I miss the movie posters of my childhood.
For most of my childhood, like many kids, I had posters on my bedroom walls. My three of favourite posters were the Star Wars “Circus” poster, a Raiders Of The Lost Ark poster and an ET The Extraterrestrial poster.
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The artist who drew the three posters will be very well known to readers of a certain age: if hot his name, that at the very least his art will be very familiar. He is Drew Struzan, and his work probably graced the childhood walls of a fair number of people reading this article. You may, like me, still have his art on your walls. You definitely have his work in your DVD or Blu-ray shelves.
Other fads came and went. Other posters came and went, but those three posters were always there on my bedroom wall and were always the first to go back up on the wall after the occasional redecorating my mum inflicted upon the room. These days I still have movie poster art by the same artist on my wall. But now they’re in a much artier, adult looking postcards-on-a-black-background format in my living room and they’re the ’97 Star Wars Special Edition movie posters and the three posters for the prequels.
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Drew – has there even been a more apt name? – Struzan has been responsible for the poster art of so many of the films from our childhood; he created iconic artwork for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Back To The Future, ET, The Goonies and many, many more. He became the go-to guy for Lucas, Spielberg and many other film makers. It was rare for an action/sci-fi film in the late ’70s and ’80s for poster art work not to be drawn by him.
Struzan started out doing album covers for the likes of The Beach Boys, Earth, Wind & Fire and even Black Sabbath back when LPs were still popular; he also dabbled in film posters but the work was mainly for B-movies. His breakthrough piece was the aforementioned Star Wars “Circus” poster for the 1978 re-release of the film. He’d only ended up working on it as a favour to another artist – Charles White – who wasn’t a fan of portraiture. That single poster began Struzan’s association with film posters in the public eye and the artist has been in demand ever since.
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Over the years Drew has painted images of some of the most famous film stars out there and his depictions of them are always fantastic; from Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in Star Wars to right through to Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter he manages to catch each actor perfectly.
After completing artwork for the advertising campaign for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull ( blimey, was there room on the poster for artwork after a title like that? – ed ) Struzan announced his retirement in September of 2008, although he didn’t actually stop working; he just works less these days. He recently did a The Walking Dead teaser poster for AMC and he still does alternate artwork for many films.
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In 2010 Struzan was the subject of “Drew: The Man Behind The Poster”, a documentary about the man and his work, which featured interviews with filmmakers and actors including Harrison Ford, George Lucas, Michael J Fox, Frank Darabont, Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg among others. There’s also a book celebrating the man’s work out there too. Whether you know the work of Drew Struzan or not; whether this is a trip down memory lane, a new discovery or an artist you want to find out more about, both are well worth a look if you get the chance. Alternatively you can take a look at his website here . You won’t regret it.
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I think in all honesty I’d swap most of the modern movie posters and countdown posters for one decent piece of art by Drew Struzan for each film released. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s a desire to return to a more innocent childhood age, or maybe I just think less is more. In this age of Photoshopped movie posters and uninspiring promotional images a piece of film poster artwork by Struzan from 20 years ago can still take your breath away. The man is such a genius; he can take everything you need to know about a film and put it all in one single, beautiful, and elegant piece of art. I think Drew Struzan’s poster art represents a golden age in cinema, an age which I sorely miss.
So are you a fan of Struzan’s work? Do you have a favourite poster?
Steven Ellis
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]]>Today we welcome writer Guy Adams to the site. He’s already an established author but he’s begun a new series for Solaris, called The Heaven’s Gate Chronicles, which are described as “Weird Westerns”. The first novel is The Good, The Bad And The Infernal and we invited Adams to write for us on this subject: “Why does steampunk provide such an interesting sandpit for an author to play in?”
Photo below © Peter Coleborn
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I feel like Richard E Grant as Withnail, who once went on holiday by mistake. Not for me the damp, terrible splendour of a Welsh holiday cottage, poachers and predatory uncles rather the thick smog and coal stacks of a genre that is new to me.
I’ve written a steampunk novel by mistake.
This is not an unusual position for me, I’m a great believer in running at a book with mad abandon, who can be surprised if it becomes something I didn’t altogether expect? It certainly could be worse, I could be here talking about my new Goat Porn trilogy and that would be awkward for all of us.
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The Good, The Bad And The Infernal , the first in a trilogy published by Solaris Books, started off life as a western. Arguably it ended its life as one too, the toes of its leather boots pointing up into wide Arizona skies, but it gathered other trappings along the way.
The only difficulty I have with the situation is that in press interviews for the book I keep being asked about the steampunk genre. This is natural enough, I’ve just written a novel featuring land locomotives and Native American tribes gene-spliced with steam engines. I can’t deny this spade is a spade when the long handle is jutting up for all to see. Still, being one of those silly authors who thinks about things too deeply, I now feel like something of a cheat discussing a genre I’ve only recently dipped a toe into. It is not a genre in which I am well read. Asking my expert opinion on it is rather like asking Nicholas Sparks to discuss military sci-fi.
That said, if there’s one thing authors do with gusto it’s make stuff up and feign authority. So, when I was asked to write this guest blog answering the question “Why does steampunk provide such an interesting sandpit for an author to play in?” I did what I always do, say yes and worry about the details later. Which is now. Sigh…
I can certainly say why it was interesting for me. I am not a writer well-versed in restraint. While The Good, The Bad And The Infernal does its very best to be historically accurate up to a point, I am not a writer that enjoys letting reality hold him back. This is why the last few years have seen me write novels about infinite houses where you can go sailing in the bathroom; nightclubs run by the living dead; espionage departments dealing with supernatural terrorism and, well, a western that centres on a doorway to the afterlife. If you’re going to make things up, say I, then you might as well be hanged for a dragon as an iguana.
I’m a great believer in cooking stews of novels. I like a lot of different flavours. The dry, sand-blasted, chilli-infused tang of the western; the hot, salty copper of horror; the bourbon and tobacco of pulp crime; the banana-split and anchovy of comedy. They’re all worth chopping up and throwing into a book whenever the recipe allows.
A flavour I use time and again is Victoriana. I’ve served my time with Sherlock Holmes (having written two original novels plus a Persian slipper full of non-fiction), and The World House featured an explorer from the late nineteenth century as one of its central characters. That world of port wine, dark cobbles and antimacassars is very dear to me. Victoriana is my garlic, I throw that bugger in whenever the stew will allow.
Historical fiction, though, as I believe Shakespeare once said, can be a bit of an arse. It brings with it a whole new portmanteau of rules and pitfalls. Simply: you have to get your facts right. We get away with mistakes all the time of course, because most readers don’t know the minutiae of history any better than we do (I’m reminded of a scene in Anthony Horowitz’s excellent Holmes novel The House Of Silk where the detective lights his cigarette off a gasogene, a clever trick given that it’s actually a type of soda siphon). Still, we all try to avoid such things. In steampunk this is less of an issue, all the flavour of the Victorian era but with a built-in liberty when it comes to historical, or scientific fact. That’s the thing with alternate universes, you can do what you like with them, Simon Schama won’t have a leg to stand on if he decides to pick a fight. For any type of fantasist that’s incredibly appealing.
(I will just note that, at least so far, The Good, The Bad And The Infernal is set in our world rather than any alternate universe, because I’m not only a bad planner but I’m also stupid).
But steampunk is also all about the aesthetic. I can’t think of many literary genres that come with a dress code.
Steampunk is full of flavour… the burning of coke, the texture of velvet, the hiss and punch of hydraulic systems. It’s not only a literary genre it’s a shared sensibility that any of us can imagine. And for those of us who secretly dreamed of being Victorian gentlemen but never had the piercings or foreign policies to quite pull it off, steampunk allows us a chance to dabble. To enjoy the trappings but play the most important writing game of all: ‘what if?’
“Why does steampunk provide such an interesting sandpit for an author to play in?” Because the sandpit is deep and filled with treasure. You can dig for years and still find something new.
But don’t ask me, I don’t even work here full time. Though, having enjoyed the experience I wouldn’t be surprised if I applied for a few more shifts.
Thanks Guy! You can get the book from Amazon.co.uk (opens in new tab) or Amazon.com (opens in new tab) and there’s an extract ready to read now on the Solaris editors’ blog. Find out more about Guy Adams at his website or on the Solaris website .
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]]>My weekly fix of spaceships and war has gone the way of the dodo too; Star Wars: The Clones Wars left our screens just last month after five seasons and 108 episodes. The shows makers say there might be more, but in what format they haven’t said. I’m really going to miss that show.
Over on this side of the pond we said goodbye to both BBC 1’s Merlin (five series and 65 episodes) and BBC 3’s Being Human (also five series with 37 episodes in total) in recent months. Both those shows were already airing before we found out that they were ending which made the final episodes that little bit more precious. I’m really going to miss Being Human ; Merlin not so much, but there are plenty of you out there who will. ( Don’t forget that E4 has announced the fifth season of Misfits will be its last, also – ed. )
After reading this back I’m starting to wonder if Community ’s Abed wasn’t far wrong with his “Six season and a movie” line; just drop the movie and one of the seasons and that covers the shows I mention above. I also think I just found the title for this blog…
I know we lose TV shows all the time, for whatever reasons: finance or a lack of viewers; studios having a change of direction; sometimes creators wanting to move on. The five shows listed above can each cite one or more of those reasons. But its always sad to see them go. I realise that TV is business and that low ratings or rising costs can end a show and I accept that. I just don’t understand how better shows are leaving our screens and mediocre shows seem to go on and on. This isn’t a new thing, I’m sure we can all think of shows we loved which have been cancelled while other shows seemed to just go on and on for years and we never understood why.
Over the years I’m sure we’ve all had shows that we didn’t want to end; I know I have a long list of them. From Farscape to Angel , there’s plenty of shows which I think ended before their time. I’m sure anyone reading this can name at least one show which they’d love to see back on our screens. (Yes; the one that just popped into your head as you were reading.)
I hear a lot of people talking about Fringe or Being Human ; saying that at least they went out on a high before they got old and tired. Cancelled before they “jumped the shark” – or are we saying “nuked the fridge” these days? – is another thing I hear. And while I suppose I understand the sentiment, I have to disagree. The above shows I mentioned above were nowhere near their sell-by dates creatively. All five were providing gripping and exciting storylines right up to the end. Being Human has successfully replaced its entire original cast and was still firing with all guns which is quite a feat. The Clone Wars was consistently brilliant and showed no signs of fatigue or a drop in quality. If anything it was getting better.
I know that there are plenty of new shows on the telly. My Sky+ box is full of stuff. New shows like Revolution ; returning favourites like Game Of Thrones or Doctor Who ; there are shows which will be coming back for another season at some point like Falling Skies and Continuum; and there are a few new shows the horizon like Defiance to look forward too. But I have to say I’m just not as excited about any of these shows as I was about some of the ones we’ve lost. The shows I’m watching now just aren’t gripping me as much as the shows we’ve lost did. I’m just not overly passionate about any of them; I enjoy some of them sure, but none of them are my favourite hour of the week, none of them are “must-watch live” TV for me. I just wish I could make some the shows that I mentioned at the top of this blog come back. If I had to pick just one show to bring back it’d be Fringe ; I think I could stand to lose almost all the shows I’m currently watching in exchange for another full season of the adventures of Walter, Peter and Liv.
So, my question to you is which TV shows do you miss the most and if you could bring any show back from the dead which one would it be?
Steven Ellis
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