It makes all the difference in the world...

Last year was a good year for real-world steampunk generally as tall ships resumed delivery of wine and British engineers and enthusiasts built a new steam locomotive from scratch. I got my fill of steampunk last weekend by wandering through the Science Museum: Stevenson's original Rocket, the live demonstrations of Watt's beam engines and other static steam engines, the collection of steam ship engine parts and best of all the various Charles Babbage machines including one of the working Difference Engine reconstructions. The Difference Engine is the mechanical supercomputer of the steampunk world, playing a central role in the William Gibson / Bruce Sterling novel "The Difference Engine" (1990) but, as far as anyone knows Babbage never completed a full scale version of either the Difference Engine or its successor the Analytic Engine - a mechanical computer that may have proved the equal of the punched card systems that appeared much later. Over the past few years reconstructions of the DE have been built in UK and US museums, while impressivly Tim Robinson and Andrew Carol built working engines out of Meccano and Lego respectively.



While mentioning the Science Museum I should also point out they are currently running an excellent Dan Dare exhibition, contrasting the stories and features from the comic with real-life inventions and design trends from the 50s. I have fond (if somewhat vague) memories of the Eagle and would recommend the exhibition.

Enough clacking for tonight...

I have a dream

Some thoughts on The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton. I thought I'd spend a good few weeks on this lengthy book but it's only January 10th and amazingly I've run out of pages. TDV is the first in a new trilogy, set a few thousand years after the Commonwealth Saga.

This book gradually becomes more addictive. It's not original in terms of concepts or settings - human political factions with different attitudes to body or mind upgrades are a common theme in modern-day space opera, and this and the central mystery, the Void reminded me of Reynolds' writing; there are also Culture-like elements. There are plenty of ancient wise or warlike alien races, and a lot of zipping around through hyperspace or wormholes. The space-opera strand is countered by the experiences of a human colony within the Void on a world where people have varying degrees of telekinetic powers, experienced in the galaxy outside through the dreams of the faithful. This is simplistic fantasy and occasionally veers into Discworld-like territory - the hero Edeard has a little of Sam Vimes about him, but I found this strand the most captivating part of the book.

Back in the outside world most of the players (and there are a lot) are searching for something or someone and there's a lot of political machination and plotting. A religious movement founded on the Void dreams plans a massive pilgrimage into the Void but other factions believe this will trigger galactic destruction. There are a few brief bouts of action courtesy of Aaron, the maximally upgraded hitman-without-a-memory, and some bad sci-fi sex courtesy of Araminta the seemingly innocent property developer and her "multiple" partner Mr. Bovey. Different characters seem designed to bring action, comedy, sympathy or other experiences into the novel.

I enjoyed this book and thought it was well-written and structured - particularly given it's length it could easily have lost it's way but didn't. Despite the standardized settings there's a lot of originality in the actual characters and situations. Mostly the characters are convincing as motivated individuals, just occasionally they all start to speak with the same voice. I intend to go back and try the Commonwealth series in the near future and may well continue with this trilogy later.

Happy endings

Is Magnolia (1999) sci-fi? Probably not, it's more of an oddball film. It's long by Western standards, a good three hours or so, mostly taken up with the small-scale dilemmas of a collection of characters. A rare sighting of Tom Cruise in seriously good acting mode is found here. There's another in Interview with the Vampire but I haven't come across any more yet... even rarer, the film does not revolve entirely around him.

This is not the point. This is a difficult film to watch due to it's length and pace but it is my mission in life to get as many people as possible to see it through to the end. Find a way. Let yourself connect with one of the characters. Be sentimental. Or just sit back and enjoy the unearthly beauty of the Aimee Mann soundtrack. Just as the characters are beginning to make progress with their dilemmas, and in some cases to reach out to one another, the film delivers an ending sequence that literally left me slack-jawed and on the edge of my seat for the last twenty minutes. You won't guess it unless someone else has told you. It's the best ending I've seen to any film, delivering a powerful message about the futility of human endeavour in the face of the power of nature or chance.

Just for fun...

here's my version of the Under Construction Trailer, with apologies. You may not get this unless you grew up in the UK...

Joined-Up Government

Quantum of Solace: The older Bond films scraped across the edge of the sci-fi zone due to their love of improbable gadgetry and occasional low-Earth-orbit derring do. However gadgetry and other plot elements have been toned down in the re-imagining. In Casino Royale this worked well - the car with the built in automated defibrillator was pretty cool. However the main innovation in Quantum is also it's least plausible feature - it's hard to accept that a UK government body could ever commission a fully functional multipurpose cross-agency database, or indeed any computer system. The following scenario is a little more likely:

Scene: MI6 headquarters. There’s an impressive glass-projection computer screen, but it’s showing a DOS error message and the display is rotated 90 degrees. M is on the phone.

Bond: (via mobile): “Can you get me anything on Dominic Green?”

M: “Hang on a second, 007 - just checking the social services database now… Sorry, it’s not accepting my password again. Ah. There are 7,000 Dominic Greens - anything more specific?”

Bond: “He’s plotting to overthrow several governments.”

M: “Unemployed then. Right - think this must be him - sending picture now.”

Bond: “…Sorry, can’t view it on this phone you’ve issued me with - can you send it as a jpeg?”

M: “No.”

Bond: “Oh well. Anything else on the social services database?”

M: “Sorry 007, that part of the database was in a CD-Rom we sent over to the Treasury by courier.”

Bond: “The one that turned up on ebay two weeks later?”

M: (sighs) “Who’d have thought dr_no_mwahaha1 would have bid so high?”

Bond: “How about the NHS record system?”

M: “System’s still down. The contractor’s gone bust again and we can’t get through to the helpdesk.”

Bond: “Criminal Record Bureau?”

M: “Fill in the form and send it in - they’ll get back to you in about three months.”
Female Virgin Mobile voice: “You have 30 seconds and 15 texts remaining.”

Bond: “I need answers. Now.”

M: “OK - I’ve got his online tax returns but that’s about all. Shall I put it on an unencrypted flash drive and leave it on the Circle Line for you to pick up as usual?”

Bond: (hangs up)

Perdido Street Station (spoilers)

I don't confuse sci-fi with fantasy. I do read fantasy as well (and other genres too) however can easily get bored with standardized tales of wizards and elves. I wonder if Tolkien in the long run has done more damage than good to the genre - on the one hand there's so much to enjoy in his own books; on the other hand there are all the other books "inspired" by the Tolkiverse.

To my mind fantasy should be about fantasy: you fantasise. A fantasy writer should be free to allow anything into his or her novel from his or her mind. While a certain amount of internal consistency might still be helpful, it's not about keeping things plausible or nearly plausible, or sticking to the rules (like, say, hard sci-fi).

This is why I'm bringing up Perdido Street Station - it's brimful of highly original beings and events. The setting combines magic and steampunk; the world includes all manner of creatures and hybrids - to give you some flavour, the heroes, a journalist (with a beetle instead of a head), a freelance scientist and a criminal fixer are trying to defeat a giant dream-stealing moth, that should give you a start. The setting - the city of New Crobuzon - combines the absolute worst excesses of every major city on Earth. Mieville has a wonderful prose style that describes settings in three-dimensional, 32-bit colour and HD resolution; and he's never happier than when finding new and fresh ways to describe just how mucky the current setting is. And there's not an orc to be seen anywhere.

New Beginnings

Happy New Year!

Just started two sci-fi epics. The first is Peter F. Hamilton's novel-brick "The Dreaming Void." I am new to PFH, having been somewhat intimidated by the proportions of the books in the past. So far so good. The novel introduces an Antarctica-like multi-species scientific community, set up to study the anomaly at the centre of the Galaxy which, it turns out is not a natural black hole but an artificial barrier thought to hide an ancient alien race - not unlike the Shrouders of Revelation Space. The story encapsulates a history-rich, Machiavellian human society finding its place within a larger and older galactic community, a religion based around dreams thought to emanate from within the anomaly, and within the dreams a fantasy sub-plot set in a medieval society where villagers have telekinetic abilities.

The second epic is Nick Delios' "Conspiracies," a member of the more or less failed interactive movie genre, translated from the original Greek and picked up in a computer games store at a fairly decisive discount. First plays suggest production values that could have been higher, with corny dialogue and melodramatics plus dodgy bluescreen (not that I'm in any position to talk.) The game plays out in two modes so far - full motion video (real actors, virtual settings) with branching dialogue, and point-and-click puzzles in 3D virtual environments.

I'll post an update on both epics when I've finished them or at least progressed further.