Adrian Tchaikovsky's Blog, page 25

Terrible Lizards

Last week, the BBC debuted a somewhat delayed sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, Planet Dinosaur (1), and lo! Thumbs up! (3).

Dinosaurs were always a big thing for me — starting at the age that kids normally start liking dinosaurs and never really going away. There was probably a crisis point somewhere along the way which might have seen the world of the dinosaur-kinden. Don't know if that would have been a harder or an easier sell, to be honest (4).

With this in mind, I took immediately to Walking with Dinosaurs, which had the very simple premise of a nature documentary about dinosaurs, using some extremely good CG against real landscapes(5), and exploring a number of old favourites (Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus etc.) together with some genuinely new stuff, such as the  Antarctic dinosaurs. As well as the dinosaurs themselves, there was an added metatextual element as the serials progressed, as the producers played with different documentary formats, updating from the style I remember from my childhood, with Ken Branagh's disembodied voice narrating, to having Robert Winston sitting in trees with cavemen (the sort of documentary-making I recall Sir David Attenborough pioneering) all the way through to Nigel Marven doing a Steve Irwin-a-like taunting Cretaceous crocodillians (6).

There was a problem with Walking with Dinosaurs, though, that was based in that format. Tim Haines & Co did their best with the science, but palaeontology is a speculative subject, and you just can't be sure. They had to make assumptions, especially in the more speculative sections like Spirits of the Ice Forest, but their best guesses were presented as fact, because they were following the pattern of a documentary on modern-day animals where there just isn't the same element of doubt.

There is a lot of fuss about the dumbing-down of science, and not explaining when there are doubts is one way this can creep in. Saying that we don't know is infinitely preferable to presenting something as flat fact without admitting that it isn't necessarily so (7). So: Planet Dinosaur.

The animation is extremely good, although because I believe it's using CG backgrounds as well as dinosaurs, sometimes it doesn't look quite as real as its predecessor. However, the true joy is that they show their working. In brief, succinct segments supported with graphics, each assertion gets backed up, and you get shown the evidence from which the producers are drawing their conclusions. This simple step in the direction of undumbing science, and engaging audience intelligence, is vastly welcome (8).

If you have the same hangups about science, dinosaurs and the like as I do, you might also want to check out the US series Prehistoric which delves into the fossil history of various American cities, and which also does a good job of showing its working.

(1) OK, there were actually some prompter sequels, Walking with Beasts, Cavemen and Monsters, but this one has dinosaurs in it. And yes, there were also sequels with dinosaurs, like the one-off with the Allosaurus, and the specials that Nigel Marven did, but bear with me. (2)

(2) I liked Beasts, and I really wanted to like Monsters more than I did. However, as I put in at the time here, for some reason they decided to politicise Monsters into some bizarre ideological struggle between vertebrates and invertebrates/arthropods. I mean, OK, that's impinging on my peculiar focus, but also, it's simply not appropriate. Evolution is not a class struggle or an underdog story, it just is, and twisting the story so that the very elements and, it almost seems, God, are against the poor doomed arthropods (such as the spider that is ground zero for a lightning strike, or the Arthropleura that manages to get itself impaled on a stake, like Dracula from a Hammer Horror film) is just not acceptable science.

(3) Which either means that it's a good thing, or that the gladiator gets eaten by dinosaurs.

(4) Insects were a tough sell. My agent, Simon Kavanagh, worked damn hard to get past the basic wall of prejudice most people have concerning anything with more than four legs. When they said that nobody ever wanted to have anything to do with a fantasy based on creepy crawlies, he apparently said, "Spiderman." Strange bedfellows.

(5) As a sign of the technology of the times, the CG tended to run into issues mostly when the dinosaurs and the landscape or physical effects had to interact in any complex way.

(6) Or, to give him his due, doing a Nigel Marven-a-like. Also, the Walking With Dinosaur specials have resulted in my three-year-0ld son now adopting Nigel Marven as his great hero, occupying the same pedestal that I put Attenborough on.

(7) Everyone surely knows one of those guys whose positivity vastly outweighs their competence, and knows just how much damage that kind of mindset can do. Studies on eye-witness testimony have confirmed that the certainty of a witness does not correlate at all with the accuracy of the evidence.

(8) Planet Dinosaur is also dealing with relatively "new" palaeontology. However, this just goes to show how quickly knowledge trickles down. Because of my aforementioned son I get to see a lot of kinds dinosaur stuff, and the Spinosaurus fishing (9) shown in Planet Dinosaur can also be seen in Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train (10), whilst the opposing Carcharodontosaurus turns up in the bewildering Dinosaur King anime (11).

(9) The fact that Spinosaurus was predominantly a fish-eater, and probably scavenger (rather than something that would go kick a T-rex just because it had an inferiority complex about the previous films) does put an additional boot into the groin of Jurassic Park III, a film that dearly needs it.

(10) In an episode called "The Old Spinosaurus and the Sea" which suggests that somebody in that writing team didn't necessarily expect to be writing for a cartoon about dinosaurs on a train at his/her time of life.

(11) This series is a prime example of the sort of crazy ingenuity that goes on in kids anime. From a standing start of "what if it were like Pokemon only, instead of dayglo My-Little-Pony-spawn monsters, they got dinosaurs to fight each other" it springs full speed into a phenomenally convoluted plot including time-travelling robots and alien pirates. Also, whilst the backgrounds and human characters are rendered with a characteristically simple Pokemon-style, the dinosaurs themselves are presented as far more detailed CG constructs, this demonstrating the very secure grasp the animators have of what kids actually care about.

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The World of the Insect Kinden

Herewith the lands of the Insect-kinden, as so far revealed. Click on each map to view in full detail.

The Lowlands, showing the Three City Alliance

The East-Empire and the Exalsee

The South and West-Empire and the Dominion of Khanaphes

The Spiderlands

And last, for now, the Commonweal, as a sneak preview from Heirs of the Blade.

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Carta Mundi, and a little extra news

Firstly, I am very happy to present a complete (to date) set of maps for the world of the Insect-kinden here — and when I say complete, I include a map of the Commonweal, as a sneak preview from Heirs of the Blade.

For the news, very briefly:

Rebis, one of my all-time favourite publishers, have picked up the rights to the Polish translation of Heirs of the Blade.

And the Barnes and Noble "First in Fantasy" article on Empire in Black and Gold can be found here and very nice it is too.

And I've just written my first stab at the back cover blurb for The Air War despite the fact that nobody at Tor has actually read it, so I could have written anything, you hear me? Anything! It could be complete cobblers, and they'll never know! Muahahahaha. Etcetera. Anyway, I'm told that's for flogging the series around the Frankfurt Book Fair, so crossed fingers for some more translation news soon.

And last, Fantasycon, at the end of this month. I will be:

8pm Friday — signing books along with a large number of other authors.

10am Saturday — Panel — Trends in Fantasy Fiction, Russell Room (1)

2pm Saturday — Reading slot, Room 134 Royal Albion Hotel. Not sure what I'll read, and (assuming I have an actual audience) will probably give people the choice of a short story or a section from the Air War or, conceivably, both if time allows.

(1) I assume it's in a location called the Russell Room. Alternatively, Russell Room will be chairing the panel.

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And some late news: Barnes & Noble pick of the month

Yes, yes, own trumpet, but even so this is rather nice. Barnes and Noble have set out their picks for September, each of which will get a going over on their site over the next few days. 9th September is Empire in Black and Gold. Some impressive company I'm keeping, too: Martin, Erikson, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Rothfuss and more, and I'm especially pleased to see Jon Courtenay Grimwood's The Fallen Blade there, as I read that earlier in the year and it is extremely good.

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News roundup: Fantasycon, New cover art and cheap kindling.

Latest news from the world of the insect-kinden:

Firstly, I will be at Fantasycon 2011 this year (1) and I've been asked to sit on a panel on Trends in Fantasy Fiction, 10am Saturday. I will hopefully be essaying a reading too, as the five people who came to the last one at Alt Fiction seemed to enjoy it (2). Reading, if it goes ahead, will either be the section of The Air War or a new short story.

Secondly, cheap kindling!  In that there is an Amazon offer for the Kindle version of Empire in Black and Gold that can be found here. Ideal present for someone who hasn't read it, might like it, and has a Kindle thingie.

Finally, and most momentously…

NEW COVER ART

Although mentioning the above in the header probably killed that as a surprise reveal, the earlier Shadows of the Apt volumes are getting something of a remodel. The new editions will be trade paperback format (to fit with the the upcoming release of Heirs of the Blade and feature completely new art by Alan Brooks. So far designs for Empire and Dragonfly are in the pipeline:

The new editions should be out around March 2012.

And finally finally finally, and just so I've not been blowing my own trumpet for the whole post, I have just finished reading Dan Abnett's recent novel Embedded, and good lord it is good. Go get yourself a copy if you haven't already.

(1) because being at Fantasycon 2011 any other year would be stupid.

(2) In all fairness that was about how many the room sat.

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Conan 2, Hyperborean boogaloo

… anyway …

Hmm, Ok, so I wasn't unqualifiedly in love with the movie, but Bob "Movie Bob" Chipman, whose opinions I normally chime with, says here: "Nobody really seems to give a damn about Conan the Barbarian" which would be a terrible thing to be true. It would be the death of a lot of potential fantasy films in potentia that might be quite the hit — I was especially thinking about the John Carter of Mars adaptation that keeps getting talked about on and off, but that seems to had a burst of speed and got as far as a trailer that has some nice-looking scenes, and so cross fingers for that. (1)

What surprises me about the Conan business is that the current fantasy literature is about as far on the H-axis of the Howard-Tolkien scale (2) as it has been for decades — there is a lot of gritty, swords-and-sorcery stuff out there, riffing strongly on writers like Howard and Lieber, and it is extremely good — Abercrombie and Scott Lynch are instant examples — and even the modern grand epics of fantasy, like Erikson and Martin (3) focus a lot more on that kind of personal-scale drama whilst telling world-scale stories. The film world just doesn't seem to be in the same place, though, and that's a shame.

Oh, and going off on a complete tangent, but congratulations to Scott Lynch, whose The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of the first 10 Gollancz classics, out in the old-style yellow covers that gave me a weird kid-in-library flashback when I went into Waterstones on Friday. Lynch is rubbing shoulders with writers like Herbert and Wolfe, and well deserved, because it is a beautiful and elegant book.

(1) And yes, I too lose count of the number of good trailers that have showcased bad movies.

(2) which I just invented and which has no objective meaning or reality.

(3) I had intended some sort of self-serving footnote inserting myself into that august company, but I don't honestly have the chutzpah.

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Prepare for Hyper(borean)speed

In which I continue watching films as a pretext for making awful puns in the title. And yes, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers for the new Conan film.

I have been heard to say that before Peter Jackson made Fellowship (1) there wasn't a fantasy film out there that you could cite as a good film without then going on to say "but…". This is just a personal opinion, and don't get me wrong, I dearly love a lot of those films, but… I mean, I like Krull, which for heaven's sake boasts Robbie Coltrane, Liam Neeson and Alun Armstrong (2) and has, in the Slayers, some of the best film bad guys around (3), but it really suffers from coming out just after everyone and their dog decided that SF was the way to go. I like the original Conan, which for me does realize a very Howard-esque (4) world, but it has its moments of extreme high-camp corniness. I also really like Hawke the Slayer, but it is ludicrously awful.

So, I did enjoy the new Conan, but…

Possibly the real "but" here is either that I'm getting old, or that Peter Jackson has spoiled me, but anyway.

Yes, I did enjoy it. Jason Mormoa made a good Conan, and the character wasn't too nicened-up, if that's even an allowable hyphenation, which is always a danger these days. There were some stunning visuals, and if there were cliches, then it's hard to complain given that Howard and his fellow writers of the 30's basically invented a lot of them, up to and including the beloved cowardly thief stereotype. The simple plot is still almost too complex for the requirements of the sub-genre, and a lot of the visuals, especially the wide shots of the ruins, cities and the like, are very arresting. Notable moments include:

- "I am such a pimping villain that I shall travel the world in a ship carried by elephants, and have a sword with not one but two blades!" I mean yes, for the latter, we see what that was about, but when you first see it, it's a weird flashback to the metalworking lunacy that went into The Sword and the Sorcerer.

- someone ahead of me in the cinema getting up and moving to a seat at the back during the opening scenes, presumably due to over-exposure to the awesomeness that is Ron Perlman (5)

- The Blarney Stone Award for world's most rapidly spoken piece of exposition by a doomed priest.

-  "Curse you! No matter how many of my own men I feed to this giant octopus, you just won't die!"

- The old "it's not for defence, it's just for identifying the villains" school of armoursmithing — which is presumably why Conan rides around in nothing but a loincloth and a snazzy sleeve. I'm trying to think of the last film I saw where armour actually assists the wearer in any way. May be Excalibur, and that's only if you're not actually facing the titular magic chainsaw.

And the fights.

This is not actually a Conan critique, and Conan does not do this any more than similar films, but Conan is the current skeet for shooting, and so I will give my old man grumble about it. I did a few years training in the real and ancient art of stage fighting. It's a beautiful, complex and difficult business but it is an awesome thing to be seen when it's performed and filmed to show it off. The Hector/Achilles fight in Troy is awesome. The lightsabre fights in most of the Star Wars films are likewise very good (the ones that don't lean too heavily on FX and leaping around). There is a mountain of martial arts films out there where choreography, with or without wires, is basically the meat of the film. Western films, however, seem to be devolving their fight scenes into two distinct directions - novelty fights where the unusual conditions dictate an enormous set piece (fighting inside the rolling wheel in whatever Pirates film that actually happened in is a good example), so that the actual swordfighting or whatever gets completely lost in the frequently mind-boggling premise, and quick-cut fights, as seen in Conan, where the camera flicks from move to move, so that the actual flow of the fight is lost, and sometimes even the visual logic seems to leap about from moment to moment without continuity — some of the cuts in Conan were so quick I couldn't keep up with them. The Conan –v– multiple enemies fights are almost reduced to a series of kill shots, so that the heroes spend more time over dispatching the bad guys than actually fighting them sword to sword.

This is a shame, especially in an actual honest-to-goodness sword and sorcery film. I really, really wanted to kick back and see some serious, smoothly choreographed swordfighting, and though the film delivered on a number of other levels, that was the thing I came out of the cinema still wanting.

Anyway, personal rant over. I will go back to my dentures and my heart pills and stop telling you kids to get off my lawn.

(1) Or, as they filmed them all together, Fellowshiptowerking. Which looks like some weird German compound noun.

(2) for the same reason so much of the Star Wars cast is British — it was a good financial time to make films in the UK and even award-winning stage actors need to eat.

(3) So you're this big armoured guy, and you've got a spear, only one end shoots off like a blaster bolt and then you use it as a sword, and you've got — you've what? — some kind of escape squid that breaks out of your head and escapes by burrowing away? And you… no wait, what is the deal with the squid, exactly?

(4) Robert E., not The Duck.

(5) I'm quite serious, I love Ron Perlman, and even though he's done some films that, taken on their merits, were kinda shaky, he's been damn good in all of them.

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Movieing Mountains

Yuk. Puns. Ah well.

Anyway, cutting the day job down to four days a week has meant that this thing called the cinema (1) has re-entered my life. Experiment has taught that I can actually go into Leeds, get a big ol' slab of writing down in the coffee shop of my choice, and also take in a movie. As anyone else with a three year-old son will vouch, evenings at the movies suddenly become a logistical nightmare, so this is an unexpected freedom. And my wife hates me for it, cos she doesn't get to go. All have to make sacrifices etc. etc.

It's a bit like having been a hermit for a couple of years. WTF all the superhero movies, for example? When did that happen. OK, I lie, I was kind of aware that, given that Dark Knight sort of exploded the film industry with awesomeness (3) the superhero handwagon was back on the tracks again (4). Superhero movies arcs tend to follow this weird curve of good, good, bad, horrible, straight to video (5), but at the moment we seem to be building on the good. It helps that X-Men: First Class turned out to be vastly better than it had any right to be, and I say that as an X-men fan. Unlike the scattering of films I've seen over the last few years where logic, writing and plot all cave in to grotesquely extended FX/action set pieces, it was a beautifully balanced film, one of the best I've seen for a long time.

X-Men is, of course, not currently within Marvel's own home-grown project, and this is another thing: the level of ambition of the film industry, at its best, seems to be hitting enormous new heights. Years ago, now, Peter Jackson and New Line filmed pretty much a day's worth of solid Lord of the Rings, and did good, but now, not only do we have a 10-year, 8 film epic with Harry Potter, which — love the films or not — is an undeniable technical cinematic achievement, but we also have Marvel Comics' own home grown continuity, in which four separate heroes of five films are living in the same world, meeting the same linking characters and maguffins, and about to come together in a grand meet-up film next year. Again — whether or not you liked any of the individual films (and there are surely stronger and weaker components to the mix), as a writer the sheer vision to bring that breadth of continuity to the big screen is awe-inspiring. It helps that Captain America, which looked as though it should be the most problematic of the various titles to pull off without getting that tooth-rotting over-patriotism that the character seems to invite, turned out to be a very good film in its own right. Now I need to go catch up on Hulk and Thor, which I missed.

I've also — and for Heaven's sake what have I been doing which my life (6) — finally managed to watch Tron Legacy, which I also really enjoyed — and it was a visually and musically beautiful film as well as a good one. The enduring impression after finishing it, however, is, "so that's why my damn PC is so slow. All the ****ing programs are watching gladiatorial fights when I want to check my emails…"

(1) Or, as my home village in Lincolnshire had it, "the kinema" (2)

(2) In the Woods, no less. And if that isn't a missed opportunity for Stephen King I don't know what is.

(3) and yes, I haven't seen it yet but, like Sixth Sense, by now I've essentially seen it vicariously.

(4) or the road. I have only the loosest idea what a bandwagon is.

(5) Or, in some cases, just bad, horrible.

(6) except 2 jobs, a family and a WoW raid group

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I, Beholder

I've been meaning to pen a thing about online RPGs, to go with my long-ago posts on paper and live ones. There's a ton of this sort of stuff about, of course — Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate. However, first off:

Eye of the Beholder

Possibly nobody else even remembers this. It was a TSR Forgotten Realms thing way ahead of Baldur's Gate, and it was completely mad on a number of levels, and yet enormous fun — and generally the fun and the madness tended to stem from the same elements. I give you some examples:

1. Your 6–8-man party of random adventurers was set up like a first person(s) shooter, and whilst having Duke Nukem or whoever potter about with a POV camera stuck between his eyes is one thing, this starts to break down when you're basically the shared POV of six people, and there's no head bob for movement, leading myself and my co-player to the irresistible conclusion that our valient heroes had descended into the dungeon on a golf buggy.

2. Although a 1-player game, we found that it actually worked better with 2 — one to control the trolley, usually by reversing at top speed away from the irate monsters, and the other to cast spells, shoot arrows, and throw random items from the inventory. Melee combat basically never happened, but everything in your pack could be flung at monsters for actual damage as your half-dozen characters frantically backpeddled down the corridors, and this was, in fact, what most of the early encounters degenerated into — especially the level with all the spiders, which was one level before you could deal with their poison (sneaky).

3. The monsters, in grand old D&D fashion, could not work the doors. In fact, when dealing with Mind-flayers, as an example of a monster type quite capable of killing off some or all of your party, we ended up adopting the following procedure:

a: open the door, unload all series spells and attacks at the perplexed Mind Flayer.

b: close the door before the Mind Flayer can do anything.

c: rest up for eight hours for the spellcasters to regain their spells.

d: repeat until successful. Fights can be expected to last up to 2 weeks.

4. Given the severely limited flat graphics (like the old pre-Quake FPS's) and general early and rough feel of the game, there were some extremely clever touches that I've never seen since, such as:

a. You had to watch the repeating wall panels carefully because the secret doors were activated by little buttons that relied on the player(s) being able to spot them/

b. The game also took advantage of the repetitive environment by having traps that turned the party around, which was almost impossible to notice.

c. The occasional pile of bones you found could later be resurrected into an additional character for your party.

5. Finally, though, after fighting your way through about 20 levels of slimy, dank dungeons, you reached the Beholder's lair. Which was immaculately done up with white and purple wallpaper, and had dinky little dado rails with plaster eye motifs, leading to the inescapable conclusion that "Changing Rooms" had just finished with the place. This is a monster with a bunch of eyestalks and no hands, and so the logic can lead to either the beholder somehow hiring a team of interior decorators who fought their way through all the same psychotic monsters in order to pimp out its crib, or alternatively the beholder itself doing all the plastering by way of masterful telekinesis. The beholder also had an enormous spike trap in its living room, which served the sole purpose of killing the beholder when you knocked the wretched creature back into it, making this the most hamfisted example of Chekov's Gun I've ever come across.

But it was fun, and it was the first online RPG I'd ever played that didn't come entirely in text asking me which compass point I wanted to take through a poorly described forest. And Baldur's Gate would be for a few years, so it was all we had.

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A funny thing happened…

In which I am the victim of racist abuse.

I over-dramatise, certainly. It wasn't aimed at me specifically. The jackbooted ghost of Moseley didn't kick in my door at midnight. However, hearing the phrase "They should all f*ck off where they came from" used to close some oratory on the scurrilous nature of those Eastern European immigrants coming over here and taking all the jobs (1) (it had started off as a go at the homeless, but turned out to be surprisingly well-travelled for a diatribe) seemed to go beyond the usual cut and thrust of social banter. On enquiring whether the speaker including myself and my family, I was reassured "everyone." Possibly the gentleman in question wanted the islands left untenanted, as some manner of nature reserve.

I'm ashamed to admit that I failed to have the proper writerly response, which would be to immediately think, "Aha, that gives me an idea for a book!" (2)

The speaker was very young, very ill-informed, of no authority and in no possible position to actually enforce the opinions that he was parroting. I have no sense that he is BNP candidate material. If there had been some strong ideology there to engage with, some deep-held conviction, then it would almost have been easier, a villain to cross swords with. In this case it was just someone who has read too much of certain inflammatory tabloids vocalising his general discontent with his lot in life, by way of a convenient, media-provided scapegoat, and hearing the same sentiments echoed back to him by his peers in the pub, enforcing and reinforcing each other. Similar discussions with him in the past, that stayed on the appropriate side of the pale, have demonstrated this general unfamiliarity with actual facts, and there was always a sense of, 'oh, he's just saying it to be controversial.' But I guess you can overdo the controversial sometimes.(4)

So he's not the man who would be standing on the podium at Nuremburg, but with the right hand on his elbow one can certainly see his face in the crowd. He's not an ageing holdover from the 50's who hasn't been able to adjust to the '76 Act, after all. This is tomorrow's man (5)  and he and his peers down the pub, just getting into their second decade, have grown up on a celebrity culture telling them that they can have everything for nothing, and are now standing in a world where all the booms went bust. Obviously, none of his woes can be his fault, and so who to blame, he wonders? Who is it that has brought him to his unsatisfactory pass?

At the moment, that sort of talk sells the odd newspaper, but as a writer of speculative fiction, it's open to me to cast a few doom and gloom Bacigalupi-esque possibilities, and today's little incident has rather opened a window onto a potential future where straitened circumstances, thinning resources and the hand of recession might have us turning the calendars back after all. Right wing rhetoric loves a bit of national hardship, after all, to really get the hate going.

No doubt, if they come to deport me and mine in a few bleak decades' time, for the crime of having a name whose awkward assortment of letters lacks a good English pedigree, the nostalgic rush of seeing a familiar face in the crowd will make being taken away that much easier on me.

(1)  Esprit d'escalier suggested I point out that the jobs my immigrant ancestors took were mostly keeping his ancestors safe from the Nazis, but you always think of these things too late.

(2)  Although I did get round to blogging about it so maybe there's hope for me yet (3).

(3)  And I'm not saying there won't be a book.

(4)  I used to get some stick for my name at school. Back then, though, the cold war was still on, and I was accused of being a commie. That seems oddly hilarious now, especially as I don't think any of us had any idea what a commie actually was. Oh the innocent days of youth…

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