Bryan Murphy's Blog, page 3

Me Like Trump

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like the man, but I have found a disquieting similarity between us while reading Bill Bryson’s excellent collection of essays in honour of The Royal Society, the UK’s national scientific body, entitled “Seeing Further”, whose final essays concern climate change. This brought it home to me that both Trump and myself are accidental environmentalists. I have a few unsought credits on my green account. For most of my life, I have not driven a car, though mainly for financial and contrarian reasons. I also spent several years in Third World countries, consuming at Third World levels. I’d dearly have loved to shower regularly during the 3 years I spent in a tropical city, for instance, but there was rarely enough pressure to bring water up to my flat. My biggest contribution to Mother Earth has been in not having children, thereby saving the resources that they and their progeny would have wolfed. This was largely for selfish reasons, not to save the world. Trump, of course, acts on the biggest stage, and what he does makes a phenomenal difference. He doesn’t want to save the world, yet he is doing just that. His disengagement from climate change concerns, and his actions to destroy his own country’s environmental future, have called everyone else’s bluff. Not only are USAmerican States and cities pledging to counter the harm his measures are doing, but the international community is finally getting its act together and signing up for joint action. If Trump continues in this vein, they might even take that action. Let us hope it will not be too little, too late.
Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Revolution Number One

Where does the real revolution take place – on the streets or in our heads?

Portugal, 1973. Ed Scripps has left his homeland to seek his fortune. After a promising start to life abroad, Ed loses his business to a political revolution, his wife to a sexual revolution, and his best friend to a spiritual revolution. As turmoil rages around him, Ed must outwit drug barons and a killer cult if he is to live, never mind win his wife back and save his best friend. Can he survive and thrive as the world around him turns upside down?

Revolution Number One is a fast-paced, engaging novel that lets you experience the world's coolest revolution through the sharp eyes of a not-so-innocent abroad.

You can find it here: myBook.to/zin

Banks and Culture

Review of “Consider Phlebas” by Iain M. Banks, "Culture #1"

Is there something inherently fascistic in Space Opera?
Like in the “Star Wars” film, where a whole world gets annihilated, but what we are supposed to focus on is a lion getting a smile from an aristocrat. In “Consider Phlebas”, I find a similar attitude, even though I believe the author was a noted anti-fascist.
I love sci-fi, especially social sci-fi (which I sometimes write), and the social aspects of the universe Banks portrays here are deeply interesting, but the focus is on the unremitting series of improbable escapes from impending doom.
The fascistic element is that except for the protagonists, individuals are treated as expendable. However, in the end all the characters whose state of mind we were encouraged to consider more important than the lives of their many innocent victims get their come-uppance, and the whole inter-species conflict gets put into perspective.
Nevertheless, I wish I had chosen one of his literary novels instead.

Angola

On the day that Angola belatedly gets a new President, I'd like to point out a couple of good things about the old one, Josė Eduardo dos Santos, who, deservedly, has tended to get a bad press in recent times.
The first comes in the form of an anecdote. At one point while I was working in Angola (1981-84), each Ministry, and the Presidency, had to build a primary school. The Presidency, of course, had to build the outstanding example. When it came to laying the foundation for “his” school, dos Santos and his Ministers assembled on the site with much fanfare and arrays of television cameras. The cameras zoomed in on the President, who loosened his tie, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a spade and set to work digging the foundation. You could see the consternation on the Ministers' faces; fortunately, they all felt obliged to follow suit. A quarter of an hour later, they were still at it, following dos Santos's example of actually doing something to lay a foundation for the country's future. All the more pity, then, that, after seeing off Angola's external enemies, he himself succumbed to the kleptocratic temptation.
The second good thing is that he has actually retired: he has voluntarily given up the office of kleptocrat-in-chief. Another example that deserves a wider following.

The book which I believe best gives the flavour of Angola is "Another Day of Life" by Ryszard Kapuściński. Highly recommended.

At The Existentialist Cafe, by Sarah Bakewell

I'm halfway through this, and have had more of Heidegger than I signed up for, but it has introduced me to Levinas and helped me to understand the puzzling emergence of identity politics on British and North American campuses. It turns out to be standard generation-gap stuff. My generation of baby-boomers rejected Heidegger's naziness and took up Levinas's concern for the Other and the idea of attenuating the boundaries between Self and Other. And we have become the Establishment, against which the new generations can rebel by reasserting a concern for group identity, with a newspun sense of entitlement to special privileges that the non-academic world does not grant to the groups with which they identify. I wonder what they make of Camus these days.

“Bloody Hell!”

In William Gibson's The Peripheral, a policewoman in the future London confirms her British identity for American readers by exclaiming “Bloody Hell!” Sadly, on a recent return to these shores I noticed the disappearance of the word “Bloody” from the contemporary British vocabulary. Cultural subservience to Hollywood and HBO now sends us straight to the F-word. Even in Grimsby, it seems, we want to gab like gangstas.
What's sad about that? Well, a couple of things. First, the purpose of swearing was to shock. But if you use a taboo word as though it were nothing unusual, it eventually loses its power to shock. It will retain little more than its ability to signify that you belong to a particular group: people who (imitate people who) would like to shock if only they could think of a ruder word than the F-word has become. Second, dear old “bloody” was useful in that it had just a little power to shock, because it was rude but less rude than other taboo words: you could break the taboo without breaking the vocabulary bank, leaving yourself options if you wanted to shock more later on. Now, I guess if you say “bloody”, it marks you as a fuddy-duddy. Maybe that's the real reason I want it back. Bloody hell fire!

Fry, baby, fry!

When you come “home” after years spent far away, you have to steel yourself for some reverse culture shock. Last time, there was less than I expected (though the rampant ageism in England was a surprise) but this time I got zapped in a place I didn't expect: language. Blimey, they don't half talk funny in England these days! Particularly the young, though more so on television than in the streets of Kent. Well, it's only natural that language should evolve, but the area of greatest innovation seems to have switched from vocabulary to sound. One phenomenon I've noticed is a restriction of the vocal chords, especially at the end of an utterance. It's something I've tried and failed to imitate, but thanks to Ian McEwan, I now understand what it's about. In his new, intriguing short novel, “Nutshell”, he mentions it and gives it a name: “vocal fry”, which means you can Google it. It turns out to have originated in the USA and to be prevalent among young women. Unlike young people's slang, which is intended to keep us oldies out, “vocal fry” aims to impress other youngsters, apparently by giving the speaker an air of sophistication. It is also a technique used by singers. One thing I've noticed in various languages is that people often constrict their vocal chords when they want to sound posh. This all begs the question of whether people fry their vocals deliberately or unconsciously. It also turns out that a lot of people dislike the sound. However, the reaction of my better half, a native speaker of Chinese, to one disdainful You Tube video, was that she preferred the sound of vocal fry to to the high-pitched whine of the young lady denouncing it. Personally, I'm just happy to have got a handle on it, and to know that it's not just my hearing aid playing up.

Who are we?

A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.

Fine Fruit On The Nettle Tree

I'm very pleased to host this stage of The Nettle Tree's blog tour. You can find the book here: http://shop.claytonbye

The editors have asked me to comment on one of the stories that I found particularly striking. The Nettle Tree is an anthology that re-defines a genre – the Western – and does so largely by grafting elements of fantasy and science fiction on to it. Perhaps because I am a writer and fan of science fiction, I was most intrigued by John Rosenman's story, “State of the Art”, which, set in the future, looks at facets of our present and our past with humour and deep philosophical concern. Rosenman uses the tropes of the Western to subvert themselves, as technology from the future intrudes and overturns the apple-cart. He leads us to question what we expect from a Western, and why, and also to ponder whether “artificial intelligence” is a contradiction in terms. He achieves this with a splendidly light touch, and gives us the pleasure of seeing the new-style baddies get their old-style come-uppance.

Here are the book's details:
Title: The Nettle Tree
Publisher: Chase Enterprises Publishing
Editors: Kenneth Weene and Clayton Bye
ISBN (print): 978-1- 927915-10- 3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1- 927915-11- 0
Format: Trade paperback and e-book
Pages: 166
Genre: Speculative Western
Price: $17.95 (print) $3.95 (e-book)
The book and pdf e-book can be purchased at: http://shop.claytonbye
It is also available on Amazon in print form and on Smashwords for all e-book formats.

The music of the future

When you write science fiction, you tend to extrapolate current trends to picture the future. If you write social science fiction, you will look keenly at cultural trends. Last night, the BBC (which is watchable because they are prevented by statute from bombarding you into submission with commercials every few minutes) provided a neat juxtaposition of one aspect of culture, popular music, 50 years ago and today. What struck me most was the change in the clothing of the musicians. The men in “Sounds of the Sixties” were seen as alpha males at the time, but they'd only dress so flamboyantly these days if they were striving for recognition as gay icons. And almost every part of their body was clothed. On next was the Reading Festival, where the headliners were all stripped to the waist. So how about 2066? Will the disrobing have continued, perhaps to the point of musicians of all sexes appearing starkers except for high-tech tattoos, the shyer ones preserving their modesty with hologram pixelation? Or will a reaction have set in, with performers only appearing as holograms, perhaps not even of themselves but of depersonalised avatars?