THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
Dir. Robert Wise Perf. Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. Twentieth Century Fox 1951 Film
Dir. Scott Derrickson Perf. Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly. Twentieth Century Fox 2008 Film
Out of everything they might’ve given us, the aliens from The Day the Earth Stood Still decide to bestow the revelation that we’ve put ourselves on the way to destruction.
We know that!
THE ZEN GUN
Barrington J. Bayley (DAW Books, 1983, ISBN 9780879978518)
When I flew into Los Angeles in 2002, the airport strip-searched me. I look about as menacing as a pug dog, but as I walked through the x-ray machine, a woman pointed to me and they pulled me off to the side.
Behind a translucent curtain marked, ‘privacy screen’, they had me strip down to my underpants. A man in latex gloves felt me up. Meanwhile, another man pulled the innersoles out of my shoes and probed around inside them with a plastic wand. Continue reading
DUNE
Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 9780450011849)
Hilary shared an apartment, and thus rent, bills and housekeeping, with Sophie. Like Hilary and me, Sophie supported herself through a mixture of Austudy and various atrocious part-time jobs. After a brief stint working for a telephone sex line, she found her niche as a telephone psychic.
An ineradicable optimism endeared Sophie to you as a friend, but it made her an appalling housemate. It amounted to the faith that when you found yourself without the time or money to do something, you could do it anyway. Continue reading
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about characters and characterisation recently. It’s something that I’ve always felt has been something of a weak point in my own writing and it’s something that I’ve been focusing on trying to improve. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is how characters are defined not just by their own personal foibles, quirks, traits, preferences and personality, but by their relationships with other people in the story and their relationship with social groups, institutions, social rules, laws and traditions. I think that in genre fiction especially, the background of societal setting is often disregarded and this leaves the characters and the world feeling somehow ‘thin’ and ‘tepid’. To start off I started putting together a list of ‘social settings’ to help me think this through. Continue reading
Lester Dent was an American pulp fiction writer who was known for his tightly plotted works. His best known character was probably Doc Savage.
Dent worked to a very strict formula for writing pulp stories. The formula is quoted below (via Dirty 30s). What I think would be a fascinating exercise would be to play around with this… gender swapping the main character would be interesting… or putting the raw plot structure into an unexpected setting perhaps?
I very much like how the formula works with Menace and Suspense. I think of them as plot drivers along with other elements like Mystery, Excitement and Triumph.
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
Thompson, Francis (Branden Pub Co; 2011, ISBN 9780828314404)
Mr. Gangjeon operates Lairds Pharmacy on Centre Road in Clayton. Three doors up, a rival pharmacy ply their trade at number 1310.
Mr. Gangjeon’s rival participates in a methadone maintenance program. Mr. Gangjeon does not. On methadone day, his rival often closes early without giving warning. By this simple expedient, they bring a terrible weapon to bear against him. Continue reading
COEN MOMENT
From my backyard in the middle of the night, I can see the cars on North Road whipping past gum trees while five other backyards sleep in silence. In one of them, my neighbour Chen has two identical woollen yellow sweaters drying on his clothesline. Chen has spaced them out so they fill the space, leaving a gap to either side the same width as the space between them. They have crisp black V-necks and no creases or sun bleaching, floating there in a sliver of lamplight in the middle of the night.
This was originally spotted by Orbit publicist Ellen Wright (original tweet here) and then picked up by tor.com. The US patent office has done some recent revision on who and who cannot apply for copyright. The revision was triggered by the controversy in 2011 over a monkey selfie. Continue reading
I recently read a short exegesis on the topic of US and UK fantasy fiction betraying features of the underlying character of the countries that the authors themselves probably never intended to betray. In both cases the actual setting is unimportant – fantasy is often set in a sort of pseudo-historical European, or at least classical / Asia Minor world. What’s important is the underlying themes of the fantasy. Continue reading
MAD MAX 2
Dir. George Miller Perf. Mel Gibson and Bruce Spence. Kennedy Miller Entertainment 1981 Film
Tim reminds you of The Humungus from Mad Max 2. Of a barbarian born in the last days who hurtles through life in a dune buggy wearing a mixture of bondage gear and sports padding. Of a man who has hooked a public address system up to his dune buggy so he can proclaim himself to the people of the refinery. Continue reading
REMAINS TO BE SEEN: TRACING JOE HILL’S ASHES IN NEW ZEALAND
Davidson, Jared (Rebel, 2011. ISBN 9780473189273)
In a bum one sees the mystery of how he got there. Seasick Steve ran away from home. Joe Hill fell into the Great Depression. Ours came from a tatterdemalion public library on Cooke Street, where he’d spent the morning chroming petrol from a lemonade bottle. Whomever they’d sent to pick him up hadn’t arrived, so we offered him a lift home in Colin‘s Subaru.
The bum lived in a shelter on a street he pronounced, “flighnay!” Continue reading
One of my little background hobbies has been the compiling of a book on fairies for some years now. It’s a dictionary, perhaps a bit like K.M. Brigg’s dictionary but more etymological and I’m much more inclined to put in scarecrow and lubber and slovenly names like Bugahag and Slubber-de-Gullion and Trolly-Mog that are possibly lost fairy names preserved as insults or slang. At any rate, while hunting for information on Asrai I discovered an anonymous page of folklore over at mondrem.net. Continue reading