Chris Niblock's Blog, page 6

The man who invented the Time Machine

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), along with Jules Verne (1828-1905) is generally regarded as the father of science fiction, though it could be argued that the young Mary Shelley beat them both to it with the publication in 1818 of her novel Frankenstein.

The novel came to be written as the result of a competition between herself, her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, to see who could write the best horror story. Frankenstein nevertheless has at its core some of the basic elements of science fiction: the fanatical scientist who pushes science too far and in doing so, creates a monster he cannot control.

But it was H.G. Wells more than anyone else, who in four of his best known novels established the basic ingredients of the science fiction genre, though he preferred to call them scientific romances.*

Time travel and the dystopian future: The Time Machine (1895).

The megalomaniac scientist who overreaches himself: The Invisible Man (1897).

 Alien Invasions: The War of the Worlds (1898).

Space Travel: The First Men in the Moon (1901).

H.G. Wells wasn't the first writer to feature time travel in a story but he was the first to use the term Time Machine. In a career spanning sixty years, he was a prolific and sometimes prophetic writer of both fiction and non fiction, novels, short stories and articles. But it is for these four novels that he will be most remembered.

All four have been adapted for the cinema but it was another Wells - American actor and director Orson Welles, and his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds which had the greatest impact on an audience. On the 30th October 1938, Halloween night, Welles directed and performed an updated version of the work as a series of simulated news bulletins, which had a section of the audience convinced that America was being invaded by Martians.  Following the broadcast, Welles was castigated for cruelly deceiving his listeners but it made him famous.

*The term science fiction was coined in 1851 but didn't really catch on until the 1930′s when it was popularised by the American editor Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the first science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1926. The Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards, the 'Hugo's' are named after him.

Filed under: science fiction Tagged: Frankenstein, H. G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, Jules Verne, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Orson Welles, Percy Bysshe Shelley, science fiction, The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, time travel, War of the Worlds

Start screaming Kate – Hammer Horror is back!

I was amused to read that Hammer Films is back in business with the news that Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe is to star in 'The Woman in Black' for them. Rather like most of the characters featured in their movies, I'd assumed that the company was long since dead. But it seems they simply became the undead and were just biding their time until a fresh crop of victims came along. In their heyday (1955 to 1959) the films were considered quite scary, but compared to later shockers like' The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and' Nightmare on Elm Street', there was more 'ham' than horror in classics like 'Dracula' and 'The Curse of Frankenstein'. These films made stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and much later , most fondly remembered for her role in 'Virgin Vampires' alongside Kate O'Mara.

As a teenager, singer/songwriter Kate Bush dubbed the screams for Hammer, and featured a song entitled 'Hammer Horror' on her second album 'Lionheart'.

But what I found even more interesting is the news that Hammer have gone into the publishing business with a series of gothic horror novels. Award winning author of 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit', Jeanette Winterson is to pen a novella for them. Imagine the creative possibilities this opens up for the audio book versions of these horror stories. Let's hope they can persuade Kate Bush to provide the screams . . . we haven't heard much from her lately and as a big fan, I'd welcome any new sounds from her even if it is just a blood curdling scream of terror.

Filed under: Movies Tagged: Christopher Lee, Curse of Frankenstein, Daniel Radcliffe, Dracula, Frankenstein, Gothic Horror, Hammer Film Productions, Harry Potter, Ingrid Pitt, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Bush, movies, Peter Cushing, The Woman in Black

In Memoriam

AMY WINEHOUSE

1983 – 2011

Original Painting: Oils on canvas copyright Chris Niblock 2009

Filed under: art/music Tagged: Amy Winehouse, Art, In Memoriam, music, Painting

Serena and Back Dated get a makeover.

It would have been neat to get it right first time, but having lived with it for three months, I've decided that my orignal cover design for Back Dated was a little too subtle. So, I've re-designed it and now feel it accurately reflects the novel's content and storyline.  I think you'll agree Serena's looking a lot better for it. Hope you like it. In fact, I'm hoping you'll like it enough to buy it.

I've made it easy for you: just click on the links below the smaller pic of the book's cover on the right  and it will take you straight to Back Dated's page  on Amazon. For just £1.00 ($1.61 if you're buying from Amazon.com), it's yours.

Don't have a Kindle? No problem, Amazon thoughtfully provide FREE App's which enable you to download my eBook onto an iPad, iPhone and similar devices, or onto your laptop or PC. You can even download the first couple of chapters for Free before buying! So, what have you got to lose?

Still worried you might not like it. Well if you enjoyed TV series like 'Life on Mars' and 'Ashes to Ashes', or books and movies like 'Logan's Run' and 'The Time Travelers Wife', I think you'll enjoy Back Dated.

Filed under: writing fiction/humour Tagged: Amazon Kindle, Ashes to Ashes, Back Dated, Bargain Books, book cover design, E-book, indie writers, iPad, iPhone, Life on Mars, makeover, new fiction, sexy book covers

Featured Painting: 'The girl got the blues'

This recently completed painting is based on a photograph of Taylor Swift, the

 American country pop singer-songwriter, musician and actress.

In order to give it a 'bluesy' feel I changed the colour palette, substituting  the

 colder shades of blue and purple for the original's much warmer tones.

Original oil on canvas copyright Chris Niblock 2011

Filed under: art/music Tagged: Art, artists, Arts and Entertainment, country pop, female singer-songwriter, girls with guitars, guitar, music, oil painting, popular music, Taylor Swift

Why E.T. shouldn't call home anytime soon.

still from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

Our first contact with intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe may not come in the form of an announcement along the lines of, 'that's one small step for man, one giant leap for all life forms', but a complaint to ofcom. This follows the announcement by astronomers working on the square kilometre array or SKA for short, that when the radio-telescope is completed it will be sensitive enough to detect mobile telephone systems up to 50 light years from earth. The astronomers plan to scan distant stars for artificial radio waves by linking together 3000 separate radio dishes and other antennae to form one vast machine. It's planned to site the array in either the outback of Western Australia or the Karoo of South Africa, which will give a direct line of sight into the heart of The Milky Way.

Setting aside the legality of 'hacking' into an alien's private phone calls, what are we likely to learn from this galactic eavesdropping? Not much, judging by most of the calls one is forced to overhear whilst travelling on a train or a bus here on earth.

That being the case we can look forward to gems like: 'Me? I'm on the 9.10 Pan-Galactic Starcruiser to Andromeda. Yeah, I know, it's a bloody disgrace. I'm going to be late for work again. We've been creeping along at Warp factor 5 for the last 300,000 miles.'

Of course if E.T. turns out to be a mega rich, Pan-galactic superstar, he may well take us to the Galactic equivalent of the European Court of Human Rights, and sue the collective arse off the entire human race for violation of his alien rights!'

Filed under: science/humour Tagged: aliens, Alpha Centauri, E.T., E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Extraterrestrials, Jodrell Bank, light years, Milky Way Galaxy, mobile phones, movies, radio waves, radio-telescopes, South Africa, Steven Spielberg, Western Australia

Dead Sharks and Unmade Beds

'Man Eater' copyright chris niblock 2010

In all the controversy over the availability or lack of it, of tickets for the London Olympics, the cultural festival that runs alongside it, seems to have been largely overlooked by the media. This could be set to change with the announcement that Tracey Emin, of 'My Bed' fame, has recently been named as one of twelve artists who are to design posters for the Olympic and Paralympic games. Miss Emin has a way with words certainly but judging by her artworks at least, has a somewhat limited vocabulary. When it comes to posters four letter words do have one advantage in so far as they are short and to the point, but unless the organisers want to add to the controversy which already surrounds the games, she'll have to come up with some longer words. She also misspelled Picasso on one of them which doesn't bode well.

For many of us, modern art is a bit like marmite– you either love it or you hate it. And the work of Britart artists in particular, has in recent years aroused a great deal of heated debate about the nature of art. Can a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde or a rumpled bed be art? I get out of bed every morning and leave the bed-clothes in a state of disarray: have I just created a piece of art or am I simply being a lazy slob? When I go back later to remake it, I often find myself agonising over the destruction of this masterwork of mine.

French playwright Yasmina Retza wrote a very clever and wonderfully funny play about modern art. Entitled 'Art', its plot is a deceptively simple one: three friends, Serge, Marc, and Yvan, are forced to reassess the nature of their long running friendship when Serge pays a huge sum for an abstract painting which consists of barely visible white lines on a white canvas. Serge and Marc fall out in a big way when Marc describes the painting as a 'piece of sh*t'. Yvan's attempt to reconcile his two friends succeeds only in widening the chasm that has opened up between them. It could be argued that the play is more about the nature of friendship than about art, but it provides plenty to chew over on both subjects.

Perhaps in the end, it comes down to this: it's not what you see when you look at a work of art that makes it art for you, but what you think you see.

Filed under: art/humour Tagged: 2012 London Olympics, Art, Britart, Charles Saatchi, Damien Hirst, modern art, Paralympic Games, Sharks, The nature of friendship, Tracey Emin, Yasmina Reza

The art of being an 'Old Git'.

We were one man down this Tuesday in Housmans; Derek having taken the night train to Turin. No, it's not another euphemism like; 'he's fallen off his perch' or 'he's pushing up the daisies' – he really had gone to Turin. He was on holiday.

Ordering our beers, we enquired if our absent friend had left money behind the bar for his round before departing for Italy. The barman has heard this 'joke' before; every time in fact one of us goes AWOL, and is immune to our pathetic attempts to obtain free beer and food. To his credit, he still managed an indulgent smile, though he was probably wondering why these old gits keep repeating the same old stuff. The answer is of course, that it's the only way we remember anything!

Not that any of us is in our dotage or anywhere near it, you understand. No, being an 'old git' is more of an attitude than an age thing. We're not angry old men exactly, just rather forthright in our views at times and yes, I admit it, a bit grumpy. This was brought home to me recently, when my daughter pointed out that – horror of horrors – I was sounding more like my father every day. All men have this charge levelled at them eventually, either by their wives or their children: my son lives in mortal fear of the day he finds himself plumping up the sofa cushions like his old man, but I still found it hard to accept. Not that my father was a bad man or anything, quite the opposite in fact, but in old age he could be very forthright in his views and well, how can I put it, just occasionally, I mean hardly ever really, just a wee bit grumpy.

Filed under: life/humour Tagged: AWOL, euphemism, fathers & sons, getting older, grumpy old men, Italy, memory, obsessive behaviour, parents & children, Turin

So, who's got the God Particle?

An article in The Sunday Times the other week suggested that the elusive Higgs Boson, the so called God particle, may have been found 11 years ago. What's going on here? Did an absent-minded professor put it down for a second and then forgot where he'd put it, or did some disgruntled employee steal it?

Scientists have been searching for this particle since the 1960's, when Professor Peter Higgs first proposed its existence. So you can imagine the consternation at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider (a misnomer if ever there was one – it's not just large – it's enormous), when this oversight came to light.

Picture the scene: the head of Cern summons the entire complement of scientists and technicians to a meeting. Stepping up to the podium, he gazes out over the sea of expectant faces.

'I think you all know why I have asked you here today,' he intones sternly. 'I don't want to involve the police in this matter, unless I have to. So, if the Higgs Boson is handed in before the end of the day, we'll say no more about it.'

Not quite how it was, but far weirder things go on in the world of physics. It's full of strange theories, backed up by mathematics that ordinary human beings find totally incomprehensible. We just have to take the physicists' word for it when they say that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42, or whatever it turns out to be.

And the names they give to these things: quarks, gluons, worm holes (essentially short cuts to other parts of the universe), string theory and the rest. It's even been suggested that there could be an infinite number of parallel universes where each of us has a doppelganger living out a different version of our lives.

What if one of these doppelgangers was to stumble into a worm hole and end up in the wrong universe: the same supermarket even as oneself. Bit of a shock coming face to face with an identical twin you never knew existed. Which begs the question: would it even be possible for the two of you to occupy the same cosmic space, or would it be a case of this universe aint big enough for the both of us?

70,000 Words & Counting

Most Tuesday evenings I go to Housmans Bar with my two best mates: Colum and Derek. We sit and sip beer brewed locally in Bishops Castle, flirt with the pretty young barmaid and put the world to rights. We've become such a fixture that the staff have taken to placing a card on our usual table. 'Reserved for the old gits', it reads, and been embarrassed to discover that everyone seems to know which particular old gits they are referring to.

For the past eighteen months the opening topic for discussion has been the novel I've been writing. Before I've even placed my bum on a chair or taken a sip from my beer, the question is asked.

'Have you finished it yet?'

Each week I smile, take a sip of beer and say something like, 'I'm up to 10,000 words and counting.'

I wait patiently while Colum makes a quick calculation. Then he says something like, 'That's only fifteen hundred words more than last week.'

Then Derek chips in with, 'We'll both be dead before we get to read it at this rate.'

And you know, there have been weeks; weeks when I've been struggling to write anything at all, when I've found myself wishing that was true.

One wet Tuesday, they hit me were it really hurt. In answer to the usual question I'd proudly announced that I'd passed the half way mark, and confidently predicted my masterpiece would be completed and on my kindle before my next birthday.

'You've been writing the bloody thing for two years already,' they moaned. 'Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in just two weeks.'

Damn them, I love that book. I wish I'd written it myself. The title alone is enough to make you want to read it. It was an instant classic and one of my favourites. What can I say, I'm a plodder and always have been, but I'm tenacious: whenever I start something, I keep going until I've finished it no matter how long it takes.

'He probably spent some time thinking about it before he started writing it,' I suggested.

Thankfully they didn't challenge me on this or ask me how long I'd spent thinking about my novel. In fact it had a long gestation period. It had begun life as a play for radio which the BBC enthused about but didn't pursue. I shoved it in a drawer for a year or two before getting it out again, and deciding to rework the story into a full length novel. If only I'd known what I was letting myself in for.

Towards the end of March this year, I typed the very last word: number 72,617 to be precise. I'd expected to feel euphoric, and I did for several minutes, but after that I felt bereft. I'd lived with these characters of mine for the best part of two years: controlled their destinies, put words into their mouths. It was like having imaginary friends, and I hadn't had an imaginary friend since I was ten years old. It was a solitary childhood. OK? The consequence of spending the summer holidays reading books and improving my mind, instead of playing footie on the common with the other lads from my neighbourhood. By the time I got to Secondary School, I was a crap footballer but I had a very large vocabulary.

Sitting in Housmans with Derek and Colum a week or so after completing Back Dated, I waited impatiently for them to put the usual question.

'Have you finished it yet?'

'Yes,' I replied with a smug grin. 'So, are you going to buy it?

'Buy it?' they chorused. 'We were expecting complimentary copies!'

Mates eh?

Still, you can always rely on the family. They'll all want to buy a copy . . . won't they?