Mark Chisnell's Blog, page 5

Bye Prince Harry, Hello Captain Wales...

Stumbling across Monday night’s BBC 3 documentary
on Prince Harry in Afghanistan, my first reaction would have been to
surf-onwards to the next channel. Fortunately, the missus had the remote at the
time and she stuck around for a look. I was glad she did, because as a die-hard
republican this made an incredibly strong case for bringing an end to Britain’s
hereditary selection of a head of state.




This was not a great documentary. Richard Bacon
was fawning and shallow, and there were many interesting issues raised and then
passed over. For instance, should royal family members be allowed to serve in
combat zones? On the one hand, training someone to fly/co-pilot a £45M Apache
attack helicopter is expensive, and a pointless waste if you don’t let them do
it for real when the need is there. On the other, their very presence may make
the environment more dangerous to those around them – if identified, Harry
would be the highest value target in the conflict. And should we really be
allowing one of pop culture’s most famous figures to be an ambassador for killing
people, just like it was on a video game?




It was a shame not to see this issue properly
discussed and explored, but the programme remained compelling for all that. It
was clear that Harry is very good at his job – no one gives that much expensive
kit to someone in a war zone if they’re not capable of doing the job. It also seemed
that this ability, and the training and work he’s done to achieve it, has given
him a sense of worth that he otherwise lacks. Being born into the job of head
of state doesn’t mean that the occupant will necessarily value it, or get
self-worth from it – contrast this with how he/she might feel about it if they
were elected or appointed to that role by the citizenry. Who would you rather
have doing the job?




If that wasn’t enough, then after an hour of
watching Harry explain just how much he despised the media, and hated the
almost total lack of privacy in his life, it was hard not to feel sympathetic. This
is a young man whose life has been so distorted by being born
into the royal family that the only place he can find a sense of peace is on
the frontline of a war zone. Think about that. It’s time to stop doing this to
people. It’s cruel and unnecessary. If the Government messed with the lives of
the rest of us like this - forcing roles and responsibilities on them - there
would have been a revolution a long-time ago. No, there was no doubt in my mind
as the credits rolled – it’s time to call time on the royals. Bye, Prince
Harry, Hello Captain Wales...

Holiday Reading - Review Round-up...

The holidays are behind us, and I hope you all got as much reading done as I did... In fact, I got rather more done than I expected. For various reasons that are too complicated to go into here, I ended up in a hotel room in Houston on my own for a week. 




What? You say it's not too complicated? 




Well, ok... my lovely new wife had such bad morning sickness that she couldn't come on what was supposed to be a combined business trip and holiday. The holiday was hers and the business trip mine - so while she could and did cancel and claim on the insurance, I couldn't. I had to go - and the result was that we spent our first married New Year thousands of miles apart. So I did a lot of reading and writing, even finishing the final draft of my latest novel Powder Burn - but more on that in the future, this post is about my holiday reading...




Only the Innocent by Rachel Abbott




Rachel Abbott’s Only the Innocent was one of
the big independently-published hits of 2012, and I was intrigued to finally read
it. The cover and blurb promise an edgy thriller, and there’s no doubt that all
those elements are there – sex, abuse, murder. Nevertheless, the book still has
a lot in common with a ‘cozy’ mystery, as the detective work revolves around
the drawing room of an old manor house - but no, it wasn’t Colonel Mustard with
the knife in the kitchen, the end was much darker than that.




Only the Innocent leaves you with a central
moral dilemma – something I’m fond of in my own writing - and this lifts it
above the run-of-the mill mystery or thriller. Punish the guilty, or protect
the innocent? I can’t tell you which the book goes for without dropping some
massive spoilers, so you’ll have to read this one, and I can strongly recommend
a four star ride.




I held back a star because the central
protagonist’s necessarily meek and frightened character became a little
wearying. There’s one fabulous moment where Abbott shows the reader what Laura
was like before her marriage – unfortunately, it just made me want to read
about that Laura, rather than the one we see in the book. But that aside, it’s
a well structured, well-written mystery and well worth your time and money.




Jet by Russell Blake




Russell Blake is a force-of-nature, I don’t
know where he’s holed up, but wherever it is there can’t be a lot of
distractions. I think he’s now published 18 books in as many months. The latest
includes the Jet series, and he launched the first four of these in the back
half of 2012. These are thrillers in the Lee Child / Jack Reacher mould, only
more so. They’re short, sharp and straight-forward – don’t expect much
sophistication in the plotting; there’s lots of action, very little sitting
around and pondering, and about as much navel-gazing as you’d get from Daniel
Craig as 007, i.e. an occasional grim look in the mirror.




And while it’s nuts and bolts stuff, Tab A
always fits squarely and neatly into Hole A, and it all comes together like the
solid piece of craftsmanship that it is, and the writing occasionally elevates
to several notches higher. I wouldn’t call it art, but there’s some excellent descriptive
stuff in here. I don’t know that I’ll be rushing back to Jet 2 in the
short-term, but I’ll get there next time I’m looking for an easy, super-entertaining
read.




 The Penal Colony by Richard Herley




This is a book I noticed flying high in the
Kindle store and with almost 400 reviews averaging close to 5 stars, I thought
it was worth a closer look – I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great read, the tale
of an innocent man dispatched to a brutal jail for the rest of his life –
Shawshank Redemption territory.




In my view, it’s a match for that movie. It has
all the action required of the genre, but pushes home a few hard points about leadership,
the nature of punishment, violence and man’s essential self. It’s not necessary
to agree with what Herley seems to have to say about these things – it’s more
than enough that he gets you thinking about it.




This really was my kind of book, and in a sense
it brought together the thought-provoking element of Only the Innocent, with
the faster, cleaner, pacier writing style of Jet - and produced a book as good
as either one on their own terms, and better than both judged on my own
personal scale.




Richard Herley seems to be one of those writers
that publishing forgot, and more power to the eBook revolution in bringing his
work back to the surface and into the light it so richly deserves. I will be
reading more.

Kill Your Darlings

It’s an old saying in writing circles, kill your darlings. The instruction is
not to commit filicide – thank goodness, because there are writers out there
who would seem prepared to do anything
for a bestseller – no, it means cut out the best bits of your writing. 




Whenever
you think your prose has hit the most wondrous heights – delete it. The reason
that’s usually given for this is that if you love those words so much, then you have lost
a sense of objectivity and that’s dangerous. If all that fabulous language
isn’t moving the story along efficiently, then it’s got to go whether you love
it or not. It can’t just sit there looking pretty. Unless you're Zadie Smith.




The phrase is usually ascribed to William Faulkner and an earlier version - murder your
darlings - originated from a lecture at Cambridge University given by Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch. ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of
exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before
sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’




I recently had cause to murder a real darling
in the final rewrite of my new novel Powder Burn. Originally it contained
several viewpoint characters, but in this last go-around I’d decided to strip
it back to just two. One of the consequences was that my favourite scene in the
entire book had to go, because it was written from one of the deleted points of
view – oh, the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth...




Anyway, I couldn’t let it die completely, and here
it is... but reading it again a couple of weeks after the act, I’m glad I did it. It was written for the book’s original audience of snowboarders and
mountain folk. I’m hoping that the final version of Powder Burn will reach a
wider audience, and this scene might have driven them away.




The set-up is that a character called Vegas has
climbed a mountain in the Himalayas to attempt to be the first person to ride a
snowboard back down it. By the time he’s got close to the top and into position
for the descent he’s not in good shape, exhausted and with the stirrings of
altitude sickness. Will he climb back down, or ride to his destiny? And what
will that destiny be?




He knew what he was
there to do after the months of planning and preparation. He must climb and
ride. And nothing, not even the bowel snake of fear, was going to stop him.
This was his last chance, and every cell of his body knew it. He moved over to
the edge and started looking for a place to get down into the chute as he
ascended those last few yards. He dragged himself upwards until the cornice on
top of the main ridge began to tower over him. He couldn’t go any further, and
there was no easy step down, at least none that he could see. But it was only a
couple of yards and so without really thinking about it he jumped. He landed
flat on his back, and sank into the snow.

Given the steepness of the slope he had jumped onto, it now occurred to
him that he was lucky that he hadn’t hit a hard crust. Otherwise, he might well
have started the first descent of Powder Burn on his ass. He lay there for a
long while, the sun giving the illusory impression of warmth, while he
struggled again for breath. It would have been easy to fall asleep. Just to slip
away, rest his weary body. But eventually, he remembered that he was there for a
reason and he sat up. He wrestled to get the pack off his back, but the snowboard
was strapped to it and the tail had dug deep into the snow. He couldn’t work
out why he couldn’t drag the pack round in front of him. He floundered, digging
a deep hole until finally he got his arms out of the straps and rolled clear.

He stared at it for a while, anger subsiding. Then he fiddled with the
strap buckle that was holding the board onto the pack, but it wouldn’t set at
the angle for quick release. He pulled a mitten off and tried again, then
fumbled until he found a way of pushing the strap back through the buckle an
inch at a time. After what seemed like an eternity of effort the board was
loose. He set the edge into the snow so the board sat perpendicular to the
slope and kicked his feet into the bindings. The hard plastic straps were
easier to deal with, and he got them ratcheted up tight with relative ease. He
was ready. What about the headcam on his helmet? There was a switch. He wasn’t
taking his mittens off again. He reached up and fumbled, fingers thick through
the cloth and cold. It felt like he got it. Whatever.

He stared down the chute. The walls seemed to be getting closer together,
moving in on him like some giant car crusher. His breath rasped in the neoprene
face mask. The backpack - he turned and found it lying behind him. The ice axes
were still strapped to the outside. He’d forgotten those as well. The quick
release buckles chose to work. He stuffed the axes handle-first into the snow
and struggled into the backpack straps, then looped the axe leashes around his
wrists. He adjusted the goggles, pushed at the face mask. Then there really was
nothing else to do. He had to go.

He stood up, and immediately the board started to slide sideways down
the mountain under the extra weight. He was pushing a gathering wall of snow in
front of him and already gaining speed, reeling at how steeply the slope fell
away beneath him. It crossed his mind that he could just cruise down like this.
Then he remembered Lens and the camera, and a switch clicked in his brain. He
had never stepped back, never bottled a drop or a jump or a run. He flicked his
hips and his board pointed straight down the slope.

The acceleration was a familiar sensation, and the trained responses
kicked in from thousands of hours of riding. But never before had he dealt with
this much gravity, at this altitude. The adrenaline rush flushed through him
with the avalanche of raw sensation, of clumsy response. Of nerves and muscles
doing whatever they could to keep him upright and pointing down the hill.
Somewhere, there was a voice saying - put in a turn and slow it down, this is
the limit of control. But the chute walls were a fuzzy black blur and with the
tunnel narrowing and quickening and flashing past on either side with
terrifying closeness, the fear of blowing the turn and hitting the wall rose
like bile and drowned even that shred of conscious decision making. It was all he
could do to control and respond to the board, the snow. The froth of fear and
reaction pushed the voice of experience under for the last time.

Then he fired out of the bottom of the chute and the run didn’t look so
threatening. It was wider and the wall on the left hand side had disappeared.
It didn’t matter that riding over the cliff was just as fatal an error as
slamming into the rock – he felt the psychological pressure of making the first
turn ease. He gently put some pressure onto his toes to push into a turn away
from the wall. He was on perfect snow and the board – yabbering and hammering
at his legs - responded. Now it flashed through him. He realised what was
beyond the edge ahead. He didn’t panic. He just pushed a little too hard
instead of rolling into another turn. Even then, it was far from disastrous.
The board was hitting the snow with too much angle and too much speed. But it
could have just bitten deeper into soft snow, slamming into a huge,
thigh-jellying power slide that if controlled, would, if nothing else, have
finally slowed him down.

But some confluence of snow type, temperature, humidity, wind, and
geography ensured that his board dug only so far into the snow before it hit a
layer of ice. The edge started to skid along the top of this harder surface, while the snow above it let go of its frail grip - just as it would in an
avalanche. For all the resistance it provided at this critical moment, it might
as well have been on roller bearings. He felt nothing more than the sudden rush
of acceleration and a moment later, along with a couple of hundred pounds of
snow, he flew off the edge of the mountain and out into space. He was falling,
spinning in a whirl of powder, unable at first to comprehend what had happened.
But he had a long way to go. Time to realise that he was all done. That there
was nothing left to hope for, save a miracle landing. And perhaps more
realistically - that it wouldn’t hurt. There was a feeble blip of anger at his
error, then resignation. No screaming, no histrionics, becalmed in utter
helplessness, then nothing.

Treasure Hunt - SHOW ME YOUR NOOK!

In eBook-world the focus is so often on the Kindle, Amazon’s baby and the device that brought eReading to the world. It’s far from alone though, with a rapidly increasing number of choices available even in the UK (my home). There’s now the Kobo, the Apple tablets and – finally - the Nook. 




In celebration (it’s Christmas after all), I’ve got together with a few other authors and, until December 31st, we've got a fun offer so you can win some free ePub books – the format that will load into the Nook (or the Kobo or Apple readers). So...




Show me a picture of you with your NOOK! 

(Keep it clean, people) 



Just post the picture on my Facebook page - and leave a message so I can get back in touch! 



I might not be around much over the holidays (hey, authors need a break too), but I promise once we’re all back to work (probably around 7th January) I’ll be in touch with a coupon code for you to download a shiny new copy of my thriller The Defector from the Smashwords store.




It’s not just me though – head to any of the following authors hang-outs, because they are also playing Show Me Your NOOK!  They will have similar instructions to mine, although the way you get the ebook may vary.  




Fantasy, Humour, Mystery, Nonfiction, Romance, Science Fiction -- who knows what they're offering?  




Here are other authors playing Show Me Your NOOK!




Cat Kimbriel -- Fires of Nuala -- Science Fiction

Jeffrey A. Carver  --- Eternity's End --- Science Fiction

Phyllis Irene Radford -- Guardian of the Balance -- Fantasy 

Brenda Hiatt -- Lord Dearborn's Destiny -- Regency Romance

Phoebe Matthews -- Demonspell -- Contemporary Fantasy

Lorraine Bartlett -- Murder On The Mind -- Mystery

Ruth Harris -- Modern Women -- Chick Lit  

Doranna Durgin -- Barrenlands -- Fantasy

Jennifer Stevenson -- King of Hearts -- Romantic Comedy

Vonda N. McIntyre -- Starfarers, Book One of the Starfarers Quartet -- Science Fiction

Lise McClendon -- All Your Pretty Dreams -- New Adult Fiction -- 




Go get ‘em folks – just... Show us your NOOK!




And have a fabulous holidays -- see you back here in 2013!!




Obligatory disclaimer: All copyrights to the free books are retained by the authors. You may share this post in its entirety.  All pictures must be posted by 11:59 PM, December 31, 2012, CST.  If anyone posts any of these EPUBs to a torrent site, the portal closes and we won't have any more games.  This is a gift to you, not an invitation to set the book free forever.  If you post a picture that would be considered in bad taste, it will be deleted and you won't get a coupon code.  Thank you for keeping things fun!

Zero Day by David Baldacci

I’ve not read any David Baldacci books before, and I only started with this one because it sat at the top  of the UK charts with a bunch of good reviews and a 20p price tag – but I’m glad I picked it out, and I’m giving it four stars. It would be three and a half, but that isn’t possible.



Zero Day is the first in what I’m sure will be a series starring Jack Rea... sorry, not Jack Reacher, John Puller. Spot what Baldacci did there? Many other reviewers have drawn the comparison between Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Baldacci’s Puller, and while there are only seven basic plots in story-telling and some overlap is inevitable, I’d still have to say that Baldacci’s Reacher is unnecessarily close to Child’s Puller. If you see what I mean.



The story begins with John Puller being assigned to investigate the murder of an entire family. Puller is Army CID, and he’s given the job because the father was in Defence Intelligence. The investigation unwinds slowly, and the book really gets going at about three quarters of the way through when we learn the reason for the murder. It was done to cover up multiple wrong-doings, and part of that is a very nasty terrorist attack that Puller must prevent once he’s figured out who the bad guys are.



The book’s writing style is a curious mix of spare with a tendency to being long-winded. The set pieces are economically described – a little bit too economical for my liking, it’s a bit slow in the slow parts, and never really fires up in the action.



This is not gritty realism, this is a CSI-style procedural detective story, with thriller action in the end game – also very much like a Jack Reacher book. So if you’re one of those people for whom Child’s one-a-year output is not enough, then this is right up your street.



Despite my reservations about the comparisons, I enjoyed this one and thought it was just about worth the four stars. It stretched my suspension of disbelief too much to stand any chance of getting the fifth star, and while I was always engaged with the story, it never came close to rising up and sweeping me away.



It was a perfectly good nuts and bolts thriller with, for the most part, tab b very effectively fitted into slot b. If you’re looking for paroxysms of excitement or enlightenment, this isn’t where you’ll find it, but it’s a more than pleasant diversion for a winter evening.

A Tale of Two Sales

Christmas has been rushing up like the light at the end of
the tunnel (or more like an on-coming train) for a while now, so this was
always going to be a short blog. The festive season focuses the mind of anyone in the book
trade like nothing else.







It used to be that Christmas shopping was the key sales period
for the whole year. It’s still really important for printed books as they make
such great presents. And the village that I live in recently had ‘late-night’
shopping for a couple of evenings to cater to the present-shopping brigade. The
local gallery, Sea Sky Art stocks my books, so they asked me to come in and do
a ‘signing’.




This really is old school book selling – making a sale by hand,
of an individual, signed 'spy thriller' to the person you have just spent five or ten
minutes talking to about books, life and the universe. It’s a wonderful
experience, and I had a great night. My wife, Tina is a photographer and she
came with me to take some pics – there were carol singers, minced pies and
mulled wine. It really felt like Christmas had started.






But these days, the peak book-selling period extends a month
or three into the New Year. And that’s because so many eReaders and tablets are
given as presents. All those new owners look to Amazon, Nook, Kobo and Apple to
load up with something to read right after they unwrap their new toy on
Christmas Day – and either that or Boxing Day is usually the top sales day for eBooks.




It was with this in mind that I have spent every spare minute
over the last couple of months sprucing up my book pages on Amazon and the
other websites. New book descriptions, jazzed up formatting, a new cover here, a change of category there... whatever seemed like it might help. I’ve also made The Wrecking Crew, one of my ‘Janac’s
Games’ action thrillers available as a free download, the idea being that a good position
in the ‘Free’ charts will help people find the others, and so boost sales
overall.




I got a big helping hand on that front when the book was featured
on the fabulous Ereader News Today on Monday, 11th December. The Wrecking Crew shot up the charts into the Amazon
Top 100, and reached #1 on the US Spy Thriller Chart. This could not be more
different from hand-selling printed books – in the time it takes to sell one paperback,
tens, or even hundreds of eBooks can be downloaded. And I have no idea who
those ereaders are, unless they pop back in a week, month or a year and write a
review. It’s a very different experience of selling books, but no less
thrilling when you see your pride and joy hit the top of a chart.






I don’t know where it’ll be when you’re reading this – hopefully
it’ll stay high enough to boost the visibility of all my books right through
into the New Year. So if it’s after the great unwrapping, go have a peak at the
Spy Thriller Charts in the US, or in the UK, and see how I’m doing... 




In the meantime,
I hope you’re not in the middle of a last-minute shopping frenzy, have your
turkey wrapped, your presents decorated and your tree ordered. Or... is that...
oh, never mind. Happy Christmas and Merry New Year.

The Expats by Chris Pavone

I don't normally review books on the blog, they are usually too short and just get posted at Amazon and Goodreads. But I've thought a little more about Chris Pavone's The Expats, which has been riding high at the top of the thriller charts for weeks now, but I think it's because of the 20p price tag, rather than the writing...



I just don't quite know where to start with The Expats. A great idea, let down a bit by some over-done writing and inconsistent characterisation - but the really dodgy part is the way it's been structured.



There is a relatively straight-forward and entertaining story here about an ex-CIA agent and a major white collar crime, but you wouldn't know it to read the book. The timeline is all over the place, with little or no indication of when many of the scenes are set until very late into them. This is just plain frustrating. It might work if you read it all in one go on a beach, but I didn't. I read a little each evening and I very quickly got tired of trying to keep track, and gave up and went with the flow... skipping a lot just to get to the end to find the resolution.



The other problem is that the book lacks big tense scenes of the kind that a good thriller needs - think Jack Reacher going into battle at the end of a Lee Child book. Chris Pavone seems unable to hit these heights, and I can't help thinking that he's tried to hide this deficiency with the convoluted narrative.



If you do read it, when you get to the end think back through the major events and you'll see that there's a potentially great thriller here, but written in a single timeline from multiple viewpoints - loads of tension could have been extracted by letting the reader know more than the characters, with a lot of excitement to be had watching these people car crash into disaster.



Or not. And boy don't get me started on that ending, what a let-down... but I won't spoil it for you, just in case I haven't put you off!

Plotting After Powder Burn – Part 3

In a blog called Plotting After Powder Burn - Part 1 I talked about the search for a plot for my fifth novel, which would be the
second in a series starring American wannabe-journo, Sam Blackett. I’d always
had a particular story in mind for this second book, but I was worried that it had
similarities to the 'Janac's Games' stories, and I felt I should make a break
from those boat-and-action dominated tales.




I
finished Part 2 concerned that the second book should be more urban, and more of an investigation
than an action thriller. I went off to find out what Lee Child did with Jack Reacher
in books one and two, as this series is the model for the Sam Blackett stories.
Well, it took a while - and there's been a few blogs floated under the bridge
on other topics since then - but I'm finally back to thinking about plotting
after Powder Burn.




I can
report that Lee Child started the Jack Reacher series with Killing Floor,
written in the first person about a counterfeiting fraud set in a small town in
Georgia, and mixing action with investigation. He followed that up with Die
Trying, which switched to the third person but maintained the mix of action and
investigation.




Powder
Burn is mostly action with the mystery-element relegated to a relatively minor
role - and so I think I definitely need to introduce more of an investigative
storyline to the Sam Blackett series in the second book. I've also thought a
lot about the milieu for this story and I now feel even more strongly that I
should try and find an urban setting for the book, to help me break out of the
ghetto of 'sailing author' that I fear I'm in danger of drowning in...




So far
so good - now any decent investigation needs a murder, preferably linked to a
serious criminal conspiracy. I've been casting around for just such a conspiracy
and I think I've found it. There's always been a huge market in counterfeit
aircraft parts; they look and feel like the real thing, but are often made much
more cheaply from sub-standard materials with low-cost manufacturing techniques.
Consequently, they don't have anything like the same life span as the real
deal.




This
fact might worry you if you fly a lot, but while the safety hazards of this
fake parts trade has been well known for a while, there now appears to be a national
security risk too - the trade has spread to military aircraft.
This is the sort of criminal conspiracy a good thriller needs - a gang plotting
to make a fortune from selling fake parts to the USAF for the F-22 Raptor, the
planet's most expensive fighter?




Or,
maybe it's drone parts - these things are much more controversial (anyone been
watching Homeland?) and that might really ramp the story up. It also plays
into a theme I've been thinking about for a while: Western military supremacy
relies on cheap and effective offensive dominance. It used to be gunboats, and
machine guns against spears. These tools provided such a massive military
advantage that they enabled the use of force at a minimal cost of lives - vitally
important to politicians in a democracy.




The
drone strike is the modern version of this, allowing the US to use swift and
brutal violence at zero (direct risk) of US casualties. So what if the fake
parts conspiracy threatened the drones, and this politically vital means of
applying American power in the hot spots of the world? I can feel my story juices
already starting to flow...




At the
very least this is a good starting point - the next step is to work out how Sam
Blackett might stumble into this conspiracy... but perhaps I should end the
'Plotting After Powder Burn' blogs right here, before I spoil the final book
for you - or until this story idea crashes and burns in development hell...

The Vividness of a Moral Dilemma

Moral dilemmas strike many poses - the two men battling for
the heart and soul of America in last night's US Presidential debate both face
a constant moral dilemma, although you don't hear them talk about it much: take
the lobbyists funding and pay the piper down the track, or lose the election
and let the other (bad) guy in.




This is probably the single greatest moral issue facing
American politics, but we're much more likely to hear about the strength or
otherwise of some Senator's morals, and his ability to keep his pants on with a
pretty intern. There are many causes of this colour blindness, not least the
power of the lobbyists money and the public thirst for scandal; but some recent research
puts the latter in an interesting light.




It seems that people are more likely to make an emotional rather
than a rational response to a moral dilemma, if that dilemma brings a
particularly vivid image to mind. If the moral dilemma has the consequences of
a bloody death, then the brain will react emotionally - that's just wrong !




Take away the vivid picture, and the brain is more likely to
react rationally, and use a cost-benefit analysis to decide the dilemma. NPR's
Shankar Vedantam gives the detail of Joshua Greene and Elinor Amit's research,
recently published in the journal Psychological Science.




I think we can see how the mental image of the Senator with
his pants down is rather more vivid than the dry consequences of lobbyists
funding politicians. Or is it? Reframe the lobbying and funding issue around
its consequences - big tobacco and dying of lung cancer - and it's possible
that a lot more heat could be put into this issue.




It's a lesson that debating politicians can learn - tell a
story with a vivid mental picture and you'll get the gut response. If that's
not what you want, then tell a dry story about numbers and outcomes, and you'll
get the cost-benefit response - unfortunately, dry stories are much more likely
to get ignored than blood and thunder dilemmas.




Is this what drives politics to the emotionally-charged culture
wars, and allows the real issues to be pushed to one side?




I don't know, I'm not a politician, I'm a thriller writer who specialises in
stories with a moral dilemma and a twist - but I do know that from now on they
will always bring to mind a vivid image.

The Game of Climate Change

This is the fourth in a series of blogs on how Games Theory
can be seen in action in the real world. I've already looked at the banking
crisis (It's Only Taken Three Years...),
the housing market (Games Theory and the Estate Agent) and even the application of Games Theory ideas to the Olympic road race.




Before I start I'd better give you the low-down with links
for Games Theory, which drives the plot of my first novel, The Defector,
and in particular a thing called the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you haven't come
across it before then I will point you at my own description in the foreword
to The Defector,
a suspense thriller in which it features as the central plot device. Or you can
check out a much more technical take in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry.




If there's a big topic for Games Theory then it's climate
change, in which all the notions of cooperation and defection are crystallised.
Let's start by agreeing to agree on some premises, since I don't intend this to
be a discussion of the science. First off, climate change is happening;
secondly, its impact could be mitigated by human intervention, specifically
spewing less CO2 into the atmosphere.  




We can apply the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) to our responses to the finger-wagging advice from pressure groups to
minimise CO2 emissions. For instance, paying more for solar generated energy
rather than burning cheap coal costs the individual money, so formulating this as a PD:




If I cooperate in the fight against climate change by
minimising CO2 emissions, then I am individually poorer, but I improve (albeit
microscopically) the survival chances of the rest of the human race, and so the
group should have a better outcome than if we all defect.




If I defect and opt out of the battle against climate change,
then I gain relative to all those people cooperating. By burning cheap coal
while other people pay more to switch to solar, then I have more money to
protect myself from many of the bad outcomes associated with climate change. I
can afford a house on a hill, and sky-high food prices.




The individual's age has a big impact on the way this
dilemma formulates, since most people over 40 (ie. those in charge) will be
dead before the really bad outcomes hit the planet. They have a realistic hope
that enough money will protect them. But for a 15 year old that isn't an
option, they're going to be around when the real shit hits the fan, and all the
money in the world won't help. And so the young tend to be more in favour of
climate change activism than the old.




Things are changing though, and the time will come when it's clear that even
the multi-million dollar pensions of middle-aged oil company executives and
ex-Prime Ministers won't save them from the hordes of
starving refugees roaming the land, armed to the teeth. But by that time, if the
scientists are right then it will be way too late to do anything anyway. And
evolution's experiment with opposable thumbs and big brains will come to a sad,
grisly and untimely end.




In an ideal world I'd have some solution for you, some
mechanism for reshaping these choices so that cooperation made sense for the
people in charge before it was too late. But it isn't going happen with Games
Theory mechanics - science and technology are the only hope. The cost of
cooperation needs to drop under the cost of defection. In other words, cheaper
solar panels and biofuels. It's back to the scientists, but as they came up
with a coal-driven steam-engine rather than a biofuel in the first place, they really
should be responsible for getting us out of this mess.