F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 42

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

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I’m not actually sure ‘Lathe of Heaven’ counts as science fiction. Yes, there are eventually aliens and spaceships, but it feels more to me like fantasy which at points tips into dark existential horror. Certainly, it’s a unique work. I can’t recall ever reading anything quite like it.

In the future (actually its set in 2002, but really it’s the future) an unobtrusive, nebbish man dreams dreams which have the power to alter the whole of reality. Doctors believing he is merely delusional, send him to a dream doctor, who decides to use his patient’s talents to his own end.

Undoubtedly some of the prose and some of the dialogue is stilted, but I did find myself genuinely gripped by it. It’s not a thriller, but such is the labyrinthine and unpredictable nature of its plot, that there are thrills and surprises here even as its tone stays downbeat and introspective.

Plus it has the great quote – “On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.” Which – full disclosure – I’ll probably try to steal in it my own writing one day.

How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 3)

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Will Self could write a fantastic stream of consciousness novel from inside Donald Trump’s skull. A book that captures the boundless confidence, the rages, the capriciousness, the seeing something on Fox News he doesn’t like it and having it bubble his blood so much that he just has to yell out.

Having said that, I’m not sure I’d ever read this hypothetical Will Self book. Like most of his other work, I’d probably find it both overblown and yet self-absorbed – so in that it would be the perfect meeting of writer and subject.

There’s a view amongst some that Trump is without self-doubt, and frankly a man totally unreflective would be a terrible subject for a novel. But I don’t think that’s actually the case.

If we look at the way he reacted to the suggestion that Obama had more people at his inauguration. That screamed of a man who knows the truth is there, but doesn’t want to face it and so does everything he can not to. That screamed of a man who has voices in his head – rational and sensible voices – telling him things he doesn’t want to hear.

(If we want to see a man without self-reflection, without self-doubt, look no further than Jeremy Corbyn. When asked, after Labour’s historic defeat at Copeland, whether he’d looked in the mirror and asked if the problem was him, I could fully believe him when he said “No”. He seems to me like a man who has set his course and has zero self-doubt that it’s the correct one, no matter how much evidence stacks up to the contrary.)

Actually it seems that Trump’s character is best summed up as ‘childhood bully’. He swaggers and snarls and pushes people around, but deep down he wants people to like him and can’t understand why they don’t. That more than anything else explains why he has a problem with the media. They say nasty things about him and it hurts because he wants them to like him. So, he’s going to try and push them around until they stop saying nasty things about him, as that’s always the bully’s response.

Now a bully is a fantastic character for a book, but normally as an antagonist rather than the protagonist.

Is it possible to write a book people will want to read with a horrible bully like Donald Trump as the protagonist?

If not, and he has to be the antagonist, who is going to be the person who resists him?

Obviously lots of people are resisting him at the moment, but how do we get a character close enough to Trump, to observe him and make him a major character, while still being against him?

Trump’s cabinet doesn’t seem to have a lot of dissenting voices after all.

And those long-term White House staffers who are probably behind the leaks, aren’t really getting close enough to Trump to share the secrets in his soul.

So how do we do this?

Me, Writing, in 2017

[image error]I’ve discovered I can write perfectly well on trains.

This surprised me, as when I was younger I absolutely had to write in silence. Any kind of distraction would break me from my rhythm and send me into a bad, unproductive mood.

Now though I have a baby girl, whom I worship and adore. However, the thing is with having a baby girl, is that if you have a precious ‘no distractions’ rule, she is going to break it.

I’m learning quickly.

At the weekend I was scribbling away while she had fun on her play-mat next to me, occasionally breaking to lend a paternal hand when she rolled herself onto her front and wanted to be back on her back.

My main place of inspiration though is the train. I get to sit down for twenty minutes each morning and I use it to write first drafts of chapters. People are all around me, coughing, shuffling in their seats, talking on their phones – but I’m zoned out and getting the words I want down. There are other places I write – the Pret near my office at lunchtime, for example (and yesterday I managed to write whilst two ladies conducted a job interview right beside me: a personal triumph!) – but the train is my most regular and reliable.

The truly amazing thing is that I’ve been doing this for three weeks and have a rough, early draft of the first third of a whole new book.

Screw you, distractions! You don’t have sway over me anymore!

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

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Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ is both entertaining and somewhat insubstantial. A book I enjoyed, whilst not really connecting with.

It starts by examining those cases of people who have been grandly shamed on twitter, those who have made a stupid joke, or a professional mistake and been pilloried on a global almost unfathomable scale. Obviously shamings aren’t a new thing, so Ronson goes back to public shamings in the old days, with the stocks and so on, then moves ahead to modern shamings away from twitter (Max Mosely) and starts to ask various questions – why do some people feel shame when others don’t? How do you avoid feeling shame? (Would that even be a good thing to do?) Once you have been shamed how do you come back from that? But these questions are somewhat unanswerable and the book feels like it’s chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.

However, it felt to me like Ronson seemed a bit disingenuous in his mission statement. He says he’s examining shame as a concept, but what he’s really writing about is twitter.

Jon Ronson loves twitter. I’m not on it and it kind of passes me by. A mob mentality is needed for there to be a public shaming, and to me the mob has always been the mob. (As ‘The Simpsons’ put it “There’s no justice like angry mob justice.”) And for all the good that twitter can offer, it is just another place where the mob can gather.

Ronson suggests that he joined Twitter with an evangelical hope that it would herald a better world. So whereas he can be hurt that the wonderful people on Twitter are doing these things, I – from the outside – think that’s just the mob and this is another place for them to meet. These public shamings aren’t nice and with this modern technology they can be much bigger than ever before, but I’m not as surprised as Ronson that they’re actually happening.

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Mondasian Cybermen

I love Doctor Who, although for reasons I’ll go into in a blog post in a few weeks, I am somewhat trepidatious about the upcoming series. Having said that, I almost jumped with excitement this morning to find out that it will see the return of the Mondasian Cybermen.

For other classic Doctor Who fans let me say that again – The Mondasian Cybermen.

For everyone else let me explain:

The Mondasian Cybermen were the very first version of the Cybermen. They had cloth faces and weird high-pitched voices, which should have been goofy, but actually made them creepy as hell. Rather than the angry robots Cybermen would seem to become, they were kind of a twisted Frankenstein monster version of humanity, with their organs and limbs replaced to such an extent that they no longer counted as men. And they came from a planet called Mondas, which was a weird upside down version of Earth that they’d apparently been driving around the Universe for millennia – although I’d be quite happy if that last detail was omitted this time around.

The Cybermen haven’t really worked on Doctor Who for a long while (even in Dark Water/Death in Heaven, they felt more like support to Missy. And that’s before we get to The Cyber Brig.) A big part of that is Doctor Who’s writers seem to have forgotten that their roots lay in a kind of Cronenbergian body horror, that they weren’t always just stompy metal men. This unexpected return of the original conception makes me hopeful that we’re finally – FINALLY! – going to get that great, modern Cyberman story we all want and need.

How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 2)

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The problem with Trump being an unhinged, scary man with a huge list of grudges and perceived slights AND the ability to launch nuclear weapons, is how do you make that scary in a horror narrative?

Obviously, the reality of it is absolutely petrifying. The kind of thing that would keep you up all night if you let it. I have a baby daughter and I really, really don’t want her growing up an apocalyptic wasteland.

But If we’re trying to tell a horror story where Donald Trump is a major character, our problem  with going down the nuclear route, is that the real horrible shit is going to happen to everyone else.

The image of him waddling defiantly over to the nuclear button, mangling a prayer to some deity he doesn’t believe in before pressing LAUNCH is one to chill the blood, but a great narrative it does not make. After all he will be in a bunker far below ground, with his aides, some champagne and a load of nubile young women, all participants in a ten females to one male breeding programme.

Everybody else will suffer, the rest of the world will bear the horror. And when it comes to a nuclear winter, it doesn’t really matter who pushes the button.

In ‘The Dead Zone’ movie, there’s a great and memorably frightening scene where Greg Stillson launches the payload (in the book it’s a lot more abstract), but that’s one scene with a supporting character. It’s difficult to tell the story when the major protagonist is the one bringing on the apocalypse, as he won’t have to face the consequences in the same way we will.

So even though it’s real world scary, the threat of nuclear annihilation is going to have to hang there in the background of any tale we eventually write. Unless something brilliant occurs to me, it can’t be a major part.

As such we look elsewhere.

And the thought occurs that maybe the key to writing a horror story where Trump is the protagonist lies in his seemed warped, paranoid and self-aggrandising psychology….

You Must Remember This – Carole Landis

If you’re a fan of old Hollywood movies but have never heard the podcast, You Must Remember This, then you should really, really check it out. Karina Longworth takes us through forgotten stories of the Hollywood star system with a sympathetic eye and a commendable reluctance to take the salacious details – which normally make the front page headline – at face value.

This week she covered the life and untimely death of Carole Landis. Now I love old Hollywood films, both watching them and reading about them, and I’d never fucking heard of Carole Landis. It’s true to say that she was never a big name, but she was reasonably well known in her day, playing second-fiddle to Bette Grable a couple of times and was Raquel Welch’s role in the original ‘One Million Years BC’. She also had a high profile affair with rising star Rex Harrison, before her suicide at the age of 29.

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Carole Landis, used to be famous

I’m not really going to do her story full justice here, but if you’re interested in hearing more, please do check out the podcast.

What struck me though was that not only is Carole Landis pretty much forgotten today, she seems to have been largely forgotten by the time she died. And that set me wondering, in these days when the internet remembers anything, is it possible for an actor or actress whose names make it above the title, to disappear from view.

Two words: Alison Lohman.

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Alison Lohman, used to be famous

A decade ago Alison Lohman seemed to be sitting pretty. She’d been in ‘Where the Truth Lies’ which is the kind of indie film which launches young actresses; there she was, above the credits, with Nicholas Cage and Sam Rockwell in ‘Matchstick Men’; and was soon to make Sam Raimi’s ‘Drag me to Hell’, the kind of horror movie which gets a big roll out. She was in short on top of a promising career, a big star in the making.

Then nothing.

Literally zilch.

IMDB tells me that she started working again last year, but there has been a long seven year gap. I could speculate as to the reasons why. (Starting a family? Sabbatical? Stared into the abyss of movie stardom and decided she didn’t want it?) The fact remains that she disappeared from view.

I’m not suggesting that her life is as tumultuous as Carole Landis’s was, and I’m sure any podcast that eventually covers her career will be a more sedate affair. But even in this saturated media ago of ours, a young actress can effectively disappear, and nobody will really notice that she’s gone.

The Barbarous Coast by Ross Macdonald

I’ve written reviews on Goodreads for years. There are literally hundreds of them now. If you’re interested (or incredibly bored) you can check out my Goodreads page here. But from now on, I’ll be posting reviews here and there, so no one will miss out.

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This comparatively early Archer novel feels almost carefree and easy-going compared to what was to follow. Given that the last Archer novel I read was ‘The Wycherly Woman’, a book I found more than somewhat dispiriting in its depiction of damaged people doing damaging things to each other, this was something of a relief. Yes, it’s an undoubtedly an Archer novel, as psychology and family intrigues play big roles here, but although there’s murder and blackmail, it knows it’s a detective story (and actually more than once references the way people behave in detective stories, in a lovely post-modernist touch) rather than a play by Chekov.

It helps that Archer here falls right into my particular sweet spot: detective stories/thrillers about old Hollywood. I’m not sure that there’s another Archer this focused on the movie business (if there is, I don’t recall reading it), but we have here studio heads, screenwriters, would be Latin lotharios of the silver screen and scheming starlets. There’s even a chase on a studio lot.

Archer is hired by the owner of an elite club to first protect him from a jealous husband, then to find the jealous husband’s missing wife. Those who’ve already read MacDonald will know the drill – there’s mistaken identity, crimes from the past being awoken in the present, and some gorgeous prose layered on top of twists and turns and murder after murder.

(The above isn’t the edition I read by the way, but I do love that cover).

How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 1)

There’s no actual need, as Stephen King did it already with Greg Stillson in ‘The Dead Zone’.

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Obviously, that’s a glib answer (and if you’ve read ‘The Dead Zone’, a terrifying one), but I have been pondering this. More to follow…