SF – Tony Ballantyne

Newton Aycliffe: The Town of the Future!

There’s an article in the Guardian about my home town, Newton Aycliffe. The shopping centre is owned by a billionaire businessman. Over half the units are empty, the ones remaining are mainly owned by the big chains. Local shops are left to die.

This wasn’t really news to those of us who came from Aycliffe. When I was growing up it was often said that the rents for shops in the town were higher than those in Oxford Street, London.

I wrote about Newton Aycliffe in Midway. The ownership of the town centre wasn’t the only example of a monopoly. You can read in that book how television aerials weren’t we allowed on roofs and so we had to rent televisions from the same company. That company owned a huge TV mast at one end of the town, it funnelled BBC and ITV to homes via cable. The picture quality was poor, but if this was your first television, how were you to know that?

This was the 1970s. There was no internet, many people didn’t have cars. Our closest big towns were Darlington and Newcastle. All we knew of the world came from newspapers, television and the radio. And books of course. My mother was the town librarian. All we knew was what was all around us, and so that seemed the natural order of things.

Looking back on my childhood it seems like I grew up in one of those towns you get in SF movies. At first, a seemingly idyllic place, but things aren’t what they seem. There are dark forces at work, hidden in the background. Walk by an open door and you get the occasional glimpse of something strange lurking in a room. You see mysterious trucks rolling along the railway at night, there are lights in the sky…

Newton Aycliffe was supposed to be the town of the future. Quite an appropriate place for an SF writer to grow up in, I suppose. When I was a child I imagined aliens and evil supervillains everywhere. But as you’ll see from the article the truth is both far more mundane and ultimately depressing.

As is so often the case, something built with the best intentions ends up being exploited by those whose only motivation is profit.

‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 | Communities | The Guardian

Inspiration Thursday!

I just spent a week in Marrakesh, hence this post.

The picture shows the Jemaa El-Fnaa Square in the centre of the Medina. You can see the Koutoubia or Kutubiyya Mosque in the background. There are far better photographs of the mosque online – I just looked back over my camera roll and this was the best I had. But hey, you don’t look at this blog for the pictures.

According to Wikipedia, construction on the mosque begin sometime in the 12th Century. The name Koutobia derives from the Arabic word meaning booksellers, as this was main activity of the vendors in the square at the base of the mosque. The three golden spheres at the top of the minaret represent Islam, Christianity and Judaism and are intended to show that all religions are welcome in the city.

While in Marrakesh I happened to pass the mausoleum of Sidi Abou Fariz Abdelaziz Tebbaa. According to the notes written outside, he ranked high among his contemporaries in science, knowledge and honesty. I was impressed that this was how they measured his worth.

I’ve been thinking for a while about doing a series of posts on an “Inspiration Thursday” theme. I don’t know if this could be the first.

Write a story set in a world where people are respected for their knowledge and their honesty. Where books are valued and different religions are tolerated.

Granted, such a world seems pretty far fetched at the moment, but apparently it was not always the case. We are talking SF and Fantasy after all.

It’s beginning to look a lot like…

… Bad Christmas Movies

My family love bad Christmas movies.

I don’t mean bad Christmas movies like Love Actually where they have the time and budget to allow the cast to do their thing and then to edit the thing properly at the end. (Many things irritate me about this film, but I love the scene where Rowan Atkinson takes forever to wrap a Christmas present.)

Nor am I talking about bad bad Christmas movies where cast and crew are are just going through the motions.

No, I’m talking about good bad Christmas movies. The sort of movie which has all the ingredients, they just don’t have time and budget to put them together properly. The sort of film where the script talks about the evil Bolton Brothers who run an evil business, but the budget only runs to one of them showing up on screen.

What I love about these films is that they understand what the audience wants and they try to deliver it.

There’s a female lead who hasn’t had a relationship for some time.

She has a best friend who tells her to put herself out there and so she heads off to a small town (possibly her home town, possibly a town in New England or Scotland, occasionally a village near a castle in a small Kingdom in Europe)

The clock starts ticking, counting down to Christmas day.

The lead meets a Prince, a Lord or a Duke in disguise. If none are available she’ll settle for a handsome carpenter who is good with kids.

For some reason there will be a baking competition.

On Christmas Eve, it will start to snow.

And then she will realise she has met her man.

I have no problem with films that follow a structure. The first stories I placed were romances, sold to UK women’s magazines.

I learned a lot by writing them: if two people are going to fall in love in a romance, you have to make them attractive both to the reader and each other. Beginner writers, when confronted by something difficult (and getting your characters right is difficult) have a habit of dodging this by changing the structure.

Changing the structure can be fantastic, but not in this case.

I saw a film called Hot Frosty recently.

In it, a lonely woman builds a snowman who comes to life. He’s a good looking guy, totally ripped with great abs. The other women are jealous of this Hot Frosty.

And all I could think was, why don’t they build their own snowman? What if they did, and the town was suddenly filled with hot snowmen? What would the regular men do?

But this wasn’t a bad SF film. It was a bad Christmas movie. People watching this film (and I include myself in this) didn’t want internal logic. If they did they wouldn’t be watching a film where a snowman came to life.

If you’re looking for some ideas on what to write over the coming weeks, then I would recommend the following: write a straight love story. Or given the time of year, write a Christmas love story. Learn the structure and follow it. It’s excellent practice.

The Arctic-Alpine Pea Mussel

I heard the Arctic-Alpine pea mussel mentioned on Radio 4 earlier this week when they were discussing the three thousand species in Wales that now exist in five places or fewer. I don’t want to diminish the struggles of the pea mussel but I couldn’t help but think it might not be so endangered if it weren’t quite so picky about its choice of ecosystem.

Or maybe not. Thinking about it, I suppose there are lots of cold streams in high up places. The name tells you something about the creature.

Rather like the glutinous snail, which I heard mentioned on the same program. At first, I thought I’d misheard this one so I looked it up. It wasn’t mentioned in the accompanying article, but after a little more googling I found an article about the snail here.

Reading about creatures like these doesn’t make me wonder why writers bother to invent aliens and fantasy creatures. There are very good reasons for this which I’ve talked about elsewhere, and I’m sure I’ll talk about in the future.

But it does make me wonder yet again why writers make up names.

If a group of glutinous snails have just slithered down the ramp of their flying saucer and demanded to be taken to our leader, why would they confidently announce that they were the K’Kzzlia?

They’re snails. They don’t have tongues and teeth. They wouldn’t have the ability to make K and Z sounds. They do, however, have the ability to build a machine that can translate their language into English (assuming they’ve landed in an English speaking country). So why doesn’t that machine just introduce them as the Glutinous Snail People of Betelgeuse 5?

I hate made up names. They’re overused by beginner writers to lend an air of exoticism to their world building. They end up just confusing people. Worse, they muffle the drama.

I quickly become bored reading stories where Oolma rides a Vlurp through the gates of Mlzra in search of the stolen Glevar of the Throom. Wouldn’t it be far more exciting to say that Emma rides a horse through the gates of the dungeon in search of the stolen daughter of the King? Call your smeerp a rabbit and have done with it.

The thing about most exotic names is that they aren’t actually very exotic. I thought that Suidobashi in Tokyo sounded enchantingly strange when I stayed there. It turns out that Suidobashi just means aqueduct bridge.

And as every expectant parent poring over lists of baby names knows, everyday names can have some rather exotic meanings.

For example, Tony means “priceless one” or “highly praiseworthy”.

That seems about right to me.

How we used to write: part two

The image attached to this post is of the notebook I used to plan Twisted Metal. You can see the map of Shull I made to keep track of where everything was, as well as some of my reminders from when I was editing the first draft. Sticking out of the book are notes I printed out from the internet about mineral composition and some old newspaper articles.

I’ve included some other images below. One of them contains the original sketch of a teardrop ship that features in The Recursion Series and the Fair Exchange series.

I don’t use handwritten notebooks any more, everything is collected electronically and stored on Obsidian. It’s a lot more convenient, it allows me to place links between different parts of my worlds. Having everything stored in the cloud means I can browse my ideas on my phone, I put links directly to sources rather and I can work on prose and copy and paste it straight into the MS when its ready.

But even so, there is something special about a handwritten notebook. The book records the passage of time in a way that is more interesting than simple date stamps. The different inks, the stains, the coffee rings, the crumbs caught in the pages, the dog ears. The fact that you started at the beginning and worked through to the end (sort of…)

I still like notebooks now, but I’ve weaned myself off them. I have an artist friend: her notebooks are wonderful to look at. But she draws beautiful illustrations and has wonderful handwriting. Looking back now, I can barely read my own notes.

Why Loving Unfashionable Art Can Lead to Success

I rather like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work.

On the rare occasions I mention this most people feel the need to tell me they don’t like his music. There are two possible subtexts to their comments, either they’re telling me that I’m wrong in liking his stuff, or they’re telling me that they have better taste than I do.

Anyway, I recently read and enjoyed Unmasked, his autobiography. It gave me something to think about.

Near the beginning of the book, Lloyd Webber describes how he was always uncool. He liked musicals when they were out of fashion and, in particular, he liked Rogers and Hammerstein when the critics were slating their work. (I love Richard Rogers’ music even now). As a child, Lloyd Webber’s other interests were Victorian Art and Medieval architecture, both also desperately uncool at the time. At one point he describes the moment he first heard the Beatles and he realises that his street cred had just gone into negative.

Even so, he still loved musicals. You’ve got to really love something to keep pushing yourself on whilst everyone else is turning their nose up at what you’re doing. If you’re just doing something because you think it’s cool you’re never going to be more than half-hearted about it at best.

That thought led me to wonder if people who like unfashionable stuff are more likely to succeed. Not because what they like is unfashionable, but rather because the fact that it’s unfashionable doesn’t bother them.

I love SF and have done as far back as I remember. My mother was a fan, and she introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as Star Trek and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I can’t say my friends ever laughed at me about it when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation back then. I was an SF fan long before I was a writer.

But I think I realised while reading his book that I’ve never loved SF as much as Lloyd Webber loves musicals.

He always loved musicals, he always wanted to write musicals and so he set out to do just that. True, he had the family and connections to help him succeed, but he was single minded in that pursuit.

Good for him.

P.S. The image attached to this post came from Pexels free photos. I searched for cool and stylish and that’s what came up. I don’t want the model thinking I’m calling them uncool. Far from it. That’s their thing. Let them do it.

And through the wire…

A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.

I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.

Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…

I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.

It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.

I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.

The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.

Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.

When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.

Have I mentioned going for a walk recently?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

It’s a good idea in one sense. I read a lot of opening chapters by beginner writers (and to be fair, some very experienced ones) that are nothing more than pages and pages of world building. This is particularly true in Fantasy and SF where the world they are describing is unknown to the reader.

World building is great fun if you’re a writer, it’s deadly dull to the reader. There is no conflict, no action, no story in other words.

So yes, why not start with a fight? It gives you a chance to show off your writing chops, examining the emotions, building the tension, having the bad guys seem to be on the point of victory than the hero turns it around at the last minute and wins through…

Except it usually doesn’t work. To care about a fight, you’ve got to care for the people taking part, and if this is the start of the novel and you’ve only just met them, then you’re not emotionally invested in them yet. You don’t really care who wins.

It’s not so bad in a historical novel when you may have an inkling that you’re on the side of, for example, the Allies and not the Nazis, but what chance have you got in a Fantasy novel where the Alfari are fighting the Volana? (And why have you used those words for their names?)

Even worse, what if the bad guys aren’t bad guys at all, but animals? I’ve read a surprising number of stories which begin with the hero successfully fighting off an attack by wolves (or smeerps). I’m not sure that killing a lot of wolves establishes a character’s hero credentials. Wolves aren’t evil, they’re just doing their job. And all the hero has done is save their own skin. All I’ve learned from such a scene is that the hero is good with a sword. I’m reserving judgement on whether I have any sympathy with them.

If you’re dead set on having a fight at the opening, make sure you establish whose side we’re on. You could give clues of course. The opening of the original Star Wars film does this well. It uses visual clues to establish who the bad guys are: the really big bully spaceship chasing the little one, one side wearing masks and killing without mercy. Then there is the use of trigger words like Empire. Empires in these sorts of stories are nearly always evil. This works, but it’s difficult, and it goes to demonstrate the following point:

It’s really hard to start a novel. Your aim is to establish who is who, what they want and what’s stopping them. A fight may seem attractive, but it’s not the easy option.

How we used to write: Part one

Who remembers this?

(The featured image for this post is an old Interzone rejection letter.)

I’ve been clearing out my study following my retirement from teaching. Amongst my files I found all my old unsuccessful submissions from the late 80s and early 90s to magazines like Interzone, FEAR and BBR.

I lost count of how many submissions I made. At least 40, probably more like 50.

Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays most submissions are electronic. Back then the finished manuscript had to be printed off (my first MSS were printed out at work as I didn’t have a printer) and placed in an envelop containing a stamped address envelope (or an international reply coupon if I was sending it abroad) for the reply. I used to mark my manuscripts as disposable, meaning I didn’t want them returned. I would print a new copy each time so that editors didn’t know they were third or fourth in line for a submission. I’m sure they would have guessed. Who doesn’t send to the highest paying markets first?

After the MS was posted, there was the wait for the reply. Weeks writing a story, weeks waiting for a reply, opening the envelope and then the bitter knife in the guts feeling of disappointment when the story was rejected.

For a couple of years all I got were standard rejections. I couldn’t understand why my stories weren’t selling. Reading over those old MSS the reason is obvious. The stories weren’t very good. There were some good ideas there, if I say so myself, but the actual story itself was lacking if not non existent. I couldn’t see that at the time, but that’s what I had to learn, and it’s something that I only learned by practicing. By writing and submitting, writing and submitting.

After a while I stopped getting standard rejections, I started to receive nearlys and almosts, and comments on how to make the stories better. (It’s worth noting that Interzone in those days nearly always provided constructive feedback). That was progress, but it was still bitterly disappointing. The longer the wait, the more likely it seemed the story had finally been chosen, but then the gate would squeak, I’d hear the snap of the letter box and I’d run down to see the envelope and open it and… all that hope crushed in a few seconds.

Things are very different nowadays. There have been occasions when I’ve submitted something online and received a rejection (or acceptance) sometimes the very next day. Rejection still hurts. There seems to be something very unequal about the investment in time and the suddenness of the “No, thank you.”.

But that’s the nature of the profession. Rejection, like it says in the letter, means the story isn’t suitable for the publication’s needs.

That’s it. The story isn’t suitable. I’m very grateful to the people over the years who’ve told me exactly why my story wasn’t suitable. I’d like to thank them here.

I listened!

Jack Wedderburn and the Manatees

It’s been over ten years since I wrote Dream London. Someone asked me about this scene last weekend, the one where Jack Wedderburn gets raped by the manatees. They wanted to know what was going in my mind. A fair question.

The answer is I was making a point. I’ll come to it shortly.

I’ve been watching old James Bond films while I’ve been doing the ironing. There’s a common structure to these films. James Bond will usually sleep with two women. He’ll hook up with the first about a third of the way through the film, and then around half way through he’ll come back to his hotel room to find her dead in his bed.

The second woman will be the “real” Bond girl, the big name female star. Bond have to pursue her, will probably save her from the exploding secret headquarters, and will usually end up making out with her just before the end credits.

There are two sorts of people in these films: heroes and victims. In a Bond film the first woman is an ordinary person and therefore a victim. The second woman is a hero, and therefore Bond always saves her before she is too badly mistreated.

You get the same sort of thing in the Marvel universe. Marvel heroes never suffer the consequences of their actions in the way ordinary people do. Even when heroes die, they die a heroic death. They’re never humiliated or suffer indignities in the way ordinary people do, merely to provide motivation to the heroes.

That’s why Jack Wedderburn was raped by the manatees in Dream London. I don’t like heroes, and I didn’t want Jack to make it through the story unscathed. Besides, Jack Wedderburn was an unpleasant character, one who fooled everyone by using his good looks and charm.

Many people were upset by what happened to Jack Wedderburn, they say I shouldn’t have written the scene.

Two points

1) I didn’t actually write the scene: only the lead up and aftermath is shown.
2) So called heroes don’t get special treatment in my books

One last thing. Jack Wedderburn lied about what happened to him by the manatees, and everyone believed him. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you’re good looking.