Category Archives: ArtSF

I’ve never had someone change my stories in a way that I disagree with.

My work has been edited – of course it has. Editors have suggested many many changes to my work. They’ve clarified sentences that were hard to understand, they’ve cut boring passages and moved other passages around to make them more interesting.

No one has ever forced me to write something I don’t believe in.

So I’ve been wondering what I would think if an editor asked me to change the description of a character from fat to enormous. They might feel that the story was implying that to be fat was to be greedy. As I don’t believe that to be the case I’d probably want to change the word to avoid misunderstanding.

I mention this because of the recent news about Roald Dahl’s books being rewritten.

When I first read the above article I was against the idea of rewriting books, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if I’m really upset about the feeling that it’s my childhood that’s being rewritten. When I take the time to consider, many of the changes listed in the article seem quite reasonable. Language and attitudes change over time.

Rewrite is an emotive word. Is it a rewrite if the sense of the text isn’t changing, or is it just a judicious edit?

By way of illustration, I’ll quote my daughter. I bought her a collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories for Christmas. This is what she said:

“Dad this book you’ve bought me has so many iterations of the N word, and the climax involves him getting into black face.”

Should that text be edited to change the N word, should the climax be rewritten? Or should it be left as it is? I have my own opinion on this, but that’s for another post.

Something like don’t forget the pasta, and I found myself just looking at the words.

I was thinking about all these things that we write, all these words that we scribble with a pen or tap out on a keyboard or thumb onto a phone and then think nothing else of them. And yet those words were important enough to write at the time, and the fact of writing them lends them a certain permanence.

I type up so many words – emails confirming my attendance at a meeting or messages thanking a friend – and those words are backed up and the backups backed up to three generations and then those words reside on servers probably never to be seen again. All those words that were important enough to put down at the time and are then forgotten.

Words like this blog post. I like to think it’s interesting enough to read now, I’m under no illusions that people will be looking at in 100 years time.

I’ve been looking at ChatGPT – the AI writer. It’s very impressive, but there’s no intent behind the words, no history or provenance or web of interactions that led to its words being written in the first place.

For that reason alone what ChatGPT writes will always be less interesting than something written by a human.

My advice to would be writers: start blogging.

Why? Because blogging once a week helps instill the discipline necessary to becoming a writer. It forces you to actually publish your work rather endlessly revising it. If you’re lucky somebody might even read what you’ve written: treat that as a bonus.

I’ve given this advice many times: it’s rarely acted upon.

Even by myself.

My writing juddered to a halt around 2018. Family circumstances slowed me down, then Covid finished me off. Spending up to fourteen hours a day at a computer in my day job as teacher meant I had no wish to sit down afterwards and write. The ideas kept coming thick and fast, I’d just lost the urge to knit them together.

And then last year I finally followed my own advice. The discipline of posting here once a week has been enough for me to start writing properly again. I’m now 60K into a novel (that’s probably about a third of the way, see here for why) and I’m working on short stories again.

Thank you to all those who’ve given feedback here. Your encouragement has kept me blogging which has got me writing again.

I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s biography. (sponsored link). There’s a passage in there on the effect that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had on him. It was a passage I recognised. I first encountered Hitchhikers in the 1981 BBC TV version ^[1] [2] and I thought it the cleverest and funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

Like all wannabe writers I wanted to do the fantasy version, but I could never get the ideas to fly. When I picked up the first Discworld book I realised that this was it, the book we had all been trying to write. Terry, of course, did it far better than I could. 

My children never appreciated Hitchhikers anywhere near as much as the Discworld, but that’s probably to be expected.

As Douglas Adam’s himself said about inventions…

1 . Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I’m sure something similar applies to books and music. 

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Footnotes

1. When I was at university we all claimed to have heard the original series broadcast on Radio 4 in 1978. I suspect it wasn’t just me lying when we made this claim. I’d have been 11 or 12 when the program was first broadcast and probably too young to understand the humour. And of course I didn’t listen to Radio 4 in those days. 
2. As this post is about Terry Pratchett it seemed appropriate to include footnotes.

I took a parcel to be returned to Amazon to the shop around the corner and I realised I’d predicted this in Recursion. It might not seem that big a deal, but when I wrote my first novel a communication shop seemed a pretty good extrapolation of the world at the time. Back then if you wanted to return a parcel you had to go to the post office.

Better than that, though, is when I thought people lying in bed sending text messages in the middle of the night. This is was in my story Restoring the Balance, Too, first published in Interzone. Texting was a new thing, and it occurred to me that people feeling lonely in the night might speak to their friends in this manner.

Lots of other people had the same idea, of course, but it was original to me at the time and I got really quite excited by the possibilities.

All of this sounds pretty mundane, I’m sure.

And all of this is pretty irrelevant. SF isn’t there to predict the future, but to extrapolate the present, and getting it right doesn’t make a good story. Still, there’s a quiet sense of satisfaction on getting it right slightly ahead of every one else.

The third time I predicted the future was when I wrote about the robots on Penrose, but you’ll have to wait a couple of hundred years to see that one come true.

I  remember being pushed aside by one of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s goons as I walked through Harrods in the 1990s. They were clearing a path for their boss; I was heading to meet my wife who worked there at the time. She told me stories of Al-Fayed’s behaviour that I won’t repeat here.

I see a lot of people are saying that the Crown isn’t an accurate portrayal of events. I never thought it was. Nor do I care, the Royal Family have the money and power to get their point of view across. 

Accurate or not, the Crown S5 E3 has some of the best writing I’ve seen on TV in a long time. 

This episode showed a racist, social climbing bully and an entitled princess find something in common. I don’t know if the story is true. I don’t care, to be honest. As far as this post goes I’m only concerned with the fact that two very different people were shown by the end of the episode to form a connection, to like each other.  

I started my writing career with romantic short stories. It’s there that I learned it’s not enough to say two people love each other, you have to show it. This episode showed humanity in unlikeable character, (the Crown has done this before: it’s the only show that ever made me feel sorry for Thatcher), it laid down enough emotional connectors for the final scene between Al-Fayed and Princess Diana to be completely believable. 

Don’t be distracted by the veracity, the costumes, even by the superb acting: this was a masterclass in writing. 

Richard Feynman coined the term Cargo Cult Science: something that copies the form of science whilst ignoring the underlying rigour. 

Watching some old episodes recently I realised that Alan Partridge is a Cargo Cult TV presenter.

He understands the chat show form perfectly. He knows that, to be a presenter, you need to dress in a certain way, you need to ask questions and to listen, to tell jokes and to be serious. 

He embodies the form, so much so that he repeatedly manages to get himself onto TV.

But he doesn’t understand the underlying mechanism. His jokes come at the wrong time or are inappropriate, he’s full of bathos. All of this is what makes him such a great comic character.

Rings of Power is a Cargo Cult television show. It has the form of a fantasy, the elves and dwarves and orcs, it has battles and  rivalries and fellowships and the best scenery of any TV show I’ve seen. It has everything that Middle Earth should have.

Apart from any sense of connection. People fall out because the plot arc demands it. Dwarves and Elves distrust each other because that’s what dwarves and elves do. People ride to battle and then ride back home again. Nobody likes the orcs. 

Tolkien built distrust out of little things. A steward who would be king. A father who favoured one son over the other.

These things take up as much space on the page as the battles do, they’re what make you believe in one side over the other. A list of kings isn’t enough to give a story a sense of history. An epic battle needs to have people at the heart of it, and they need to have real emotions, not just a cut and paste back story.

I really wanted to like Rings of Power. Sadly, this is what happens when you throw too much money at something.

It’s not the big things that make something an epic, it’s the little things.

I was teaching object-oriented programming the other day (don’t worry this isn’t a post about computers… ) when I came to the part where I say that instantiating an object is like Harry Potter casting a spell (computer part over) and I realised by the blank looks given that the wizarding world is no longer a big deal amongst students.

I’ve seen this many times over my teaching career: a cultural reference point passing.

I remember when Monty Python lost their appeal to sixth formers. Back in the 90s, a student danced before me with two plastic fish in his hands, much to the delight of the class. Come the noughties and students learning the Python programming language didn’t care it was named after a flying circus.

Was Monty Python really that good? Part of the problem is that the comedy they introduced has become mainstream. But there’s something else: people usually refer back to things they enjoyed in their childhood and just because you like something doesn’t make it good. Or to put it another way, when people talk about having good taste what they usually mean is that they have tastes in common with their audience.

Does it matter if a TV program or book is objectively good?

If you enjoy it then that’s enough. Why spoil the pleasure by analysing the life out of it?

But if you want to improve as an artist then be prepared to critically evaluate what you find. I’m looking at you, Doctor Who

The trouble with writing anything set in a consistent universe is the weight of what has gone on before.

I’m experiencing this with my Recursion universe. There are so many things established in previous stories that could be used in the next. Explaining them to new readers becomes a drag on the action. This is why the real world is often easier to write than the SF world: there’s no need to explain what a microwave oven is, the protagonist can just go ahead and use one.

Which is not to excuse the final episode of the thirteenth Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor.

You might have enjoyed it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a pleasure in watching all the ends of series coming together. I really enjoyed seeing the old companions, particularly spotting Ian Chesterton at the end.

But don’t pretend that was a well written episode. It was atrocious.

Not because it was a mosaic made up of fragments stolen from other stories (if I know anything about spaceship repair it’s that you take a pipe out of one socket and plug it into another socket).

It was bad writing because it was a mess. It definitely wasn’t SF. Good SF is taking an idea and extrapolating. Exploring how that idea will touch peoples lives, the big and the small things. Examining that idea from all sides and bringing forth something new, something perhaps quite unexpected but when you look at it you say, yes, that’s right.

What was the idea behind this story?

Well first it had the Doctor, who uses her time machine to help people. It also had the Daleks. The Cybermen came along for the ride, invading a space train to kidnap a powerful child. The Master was there too. He was stealing paintings. And kidnapping seismologists, which he then shrank for some reason. There were two planets fighting each other at one point. I think this was after Moriarty got himself arrested and put in Hannibal Lecter’s prison so he could then escape and trap the Doctor in a Dalek suit so she could be converted into the Master or possibly another Cyberman, just like the head of UNIT.

There was also an exploding volcano with Daleks flying out of it. I think this was in 1916, but it might have been the present day. I do know the stolen paintings turned up in the present day with beards drawn on them, because the Master was Rasputin.

If you’ve not seen the episode you might think I’m making this up. I’m not.

The point is, just one of those ideas should be enough for an exciting story. If the Daleks aren’t enough for a writer then it’s a real failure of their imagination. Don’t excuse what you saw, you’re doing the program a disservice if you do. It can and should be better than this.

Apparently some people used to be upset by the fact that Doctor Who was a woman. I can only assume the writer was one of them. This was Jodie Whittaker being put on a glass cliff and pushed.

This was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen the Rings of Power.

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Edit: I’ve just got my daughter to confirm that this was all in the show and I didn’t just dream it. She also pointed out that the all powerful child was actually sentient energy in the form of a laser squid.

Part of my day job is preparing students for Oxbridge applications.
Once they have researched their courses and written their personal statements I arrange practice interviews.

One of the questions I always ask is “Why have you chosen this subject? Why do you want to study English or History or Computer Science?”

The answer is nearly always the same: that theirs is the most important subject, it’s the only one reflected in all the different disciplines, and it’s the only subject that can explain everything. They all believe it to be true, I can see it in their faces.

And the thing is, they’re all sort of correct. This is the subject that they love, this is how they see the world, they look at everything through the lens of Maths or Politics: that’s how they understand the world.

Many adults are the same. They think that their job or their interests touch all of life (I’ve heard both writers and teachers say the same thing, and I suppose I believe it myself.)

It’s the same with stories. Stories inevitably describe the world through one point of view: that of the author.

In the golden age of SF, science was seen as the cause or solution to all problems.

In the 60s and and 70s they wrote about society and the environment.

I’ve written about robots and AIs, I’ve described the world in terms of information.

I think it interesting that in the 40s and 50s Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch enemy was an evil scientist. Later on, he became an evil businessman.

It isn’t an original thought to state that points of view tend to reflect the current times. This isn’t a problem. You can always read a range of books from different authors.

I’m going to end this post on a rare political note: I write this as the pound is crashing. I can’t help thinking our current problems are down to people who see the world solely in terms of money. They really need to read a more diverse range of books.