I picked this little meme up from S F Signal today:

Q: What book are you currently reading? Is it good so far?

I’m currently reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

It’s a book in three parts (at least the version I’m reading is a three volume box set) and I’m currently approaching the end of book 2. It’s quite an achievement in world building, with Clarke setting up an entire history (with extensive footnotes) for an England where magic once existed in plain sight and is going through a process of revival. The book is set in this alternate England during the Napoleonic wars, the first part of the 19th century. It’s written in a style that fits the era, almost Dickensian in places, using old spellings such as shew for show, sopha for sofa, chuse for choose and so on to add authenticity to the narrative.

I have to admit that in places the book is very long-winded, with some parts going on for far too long. Even some of the footnotes that are used to flesh out the history are several pages long! But on the whole it’s extremely enjoyable so far and something slightly different. Well worth a look. There’s an official website here.

I won’t hit up anyone by name with the meme, but there’s my effort. Consider yourself tagged if you read this far.

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I was annoyed enough last week when I was talking about Will Smith planning a sequel to his godawful film version of I Am Legend. Now I hear, from slashfilm.com via Dogmatic, that talk of a sequel to Blade Runner is floating around.

Let me start by stating, as I’ve said here before, that I think of Blade Runner as the best film ever made. It’s really hard for me to name a top ten list of movies, but whatever films have moved me over the years, I still think that Blade Runner is the best of them all.

Rick Deckard - Blade Runner

It’s based on the book by Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.

The book is excellent - some of Philip K Dick’s best writing in my opinion. But the film is very different. There are a lot of similarities, with characters and situations taken directly from Dick’s pages, but the movie does very different things with them. Director Ridley Scott took a great book and used the bones of it to make a really great film. This is often better than a direct adaptation. Often, direct adaptations fall well short of the high bench mark set by the books. When a film-maker uses a book purely as insiration to make a film in a similar vein, the results are often better. This is definitely the case with Blade Runner.

The book already has sequels. Author K W Jeter, with the approval of Dick’s estate, wrote Blade Runner 2 - The Edge of Human, which was really not very good. I tried to read it, but couldn’t get more than halfway through. Jeter has since written two more Blade Runner sequels, Replicant Night and Eye and Talon. I don’t know if they’re any good and I can’t be bothered to find out. If I couldn’t get through the first sequel, I doubt the others will hold my attention any better.

Regardless, Philip K Dick’s book stands tall as a great piece of science fiction. It doesn’t need sequels and Jeter’s attempts are best ignored. Blade Runner, the movie, is also fantastic and absolutely does not need any sequels. When you have stories that are as well made, as well written and realised, as these things are, then trying to make sequels just devalues them. It’s a cynical attempt to cash in. If you read the slashfilm.com article (linked above), you’ll see that the sequel appears to be a long way from ever being made. Let me just add my voice to the multitude here in saying that I never want to see it made. Blade Runner is a unique diamond that can’t be copied or improved upon, and certainly should never be cashed in on.

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This comes under the banner of the truly ironic. I read in the Sydney Morning Herald today that more than 140 people have been trampled to death in a stampede in Jodhpur in western India. The people were Hindus on a pilgrimage to the 15th-century Chamunda Devi temple. There was a long, narrow passage that became a death trap when the people were gripped by some kind of panic.

Now, you’d think that this would be the ideal opportunity for a bit of divine intervention, no? Or, if a god or gods were being honoured by the pilgrimage of thousands of faithful, you would think that said gods wouldn’t let something like this happen in the first place. Shouldn’t the people be gripped by a holy calm rather than a panic?

A senior state government official, Kiran Soni Gupta, said, “We have lost over 140 lives due to suffocation. This was a chance accident.”

And indeed it was, in one of those moments that are actually not that uncommon. This particular deadly stampede was the fourth in India this year. The annual Haj to Mecca has a body count that Arnie and Sly Stallone could never hope to top in their most brutal movies combined:

From wikipedia:

# On July 2, 1990, a stampede inside a pedestrian tunnel (Al-Ma’aisim tunnel) leading out from Mecca towards Mina and the Plains of Arafat led to the deaths of 1,426 pilgrims.
# On May 23, 1994, a stampede killed at least 270 pilgrims at the stoning of the Devil ritual.
# On April 9, 1998, at least 118 pilgrims were trampled to death and 180 injured in an incident on Jamarat Bridge.
# On March 5, 2001, 35 pilgrims were trampled to death in a stampede during the stoning of the Devil ritual.
# On February 11, 2003, the stoning of the Devil ritual claimed 14 pilgrims’ lives.
# On February 1, 2004, 251 pilgrims were killed and another 244 injured in a stampede during the stoning ritual in Mina.

Of course, hundreds, even thousands of deaths at a specifically religious event are considered a terrible accident; pure chance. One grilled cheese sandwich with the hazy image of a Messiah on it is a Divine Miracle. Let’s all look up Pareidolia for our homework.

In a slightly similar vein, I was greatly entertained today by Michael Fridman’s post at A Nadder!, where he equates books of the Bible with their very modern counterparts. Why are some mythologies still causing deaths by the thousand while others are considered nothing more than fairy stories? After all, a religion is nothing more than a myth that some people still believe to be the truth.

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The final episode of VFoS is up on the Serial Novella page now.

It all started back on February 24th and now it’s over - thirty four (almost) weekly episodes. Today sees a bumper double episode as I’ve posted the short Epilogue and Episode 34 together. What will I post on Mondays now? I’ll have to start writing more blog posts to keep you all interested.

I do hope to write more stuff to serialise here on The Word in the future, but right now I’m working very hard on getting my second novel out. The sequel to RealmShift, it should be available sometime during October if all goes well. I know I’ve promised it on a number of occasions, but this independent publishing game is harder to control than I originally thought! But I’m getting on top of everything now, so keep an eye on the blog here for news over the next few weeks.

Also, don’t be shy to drop comments on this post and let me know what you thought of A ‘Verse Full of Scum, or anything else you’ve read here for that matter. Or you can always send me an email, the address is in the yellow box at the top of the page.

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Apparently Will Smith and others are dreaming up a prequel to the awful movie version of I Am Legend.

The 1954 book by Richard Matheson is one of my all-time favourites. It’s a great mix of horror and sci-fi in the old school style and it’s a truly great story. The reason for the title of I Am Legend is inspired. Will Smith’s movie version crapped all over that.

The movie wasn’t that bad to begin with, a reasonably updated version of Matheson’s book, but the last third of the film or so became a horrible steaming pile of American god-loving bollocks, completely desecrating the original point of the story. And the CG vampires were bloody terrible. As you can tell, I wasn’t very impressed with it.

And now Smith wants to make a prequel? Even after the flashbacks in the first film that told us the story of what happened? Even if we know that basically everyone will die and vamp out and Dr Richard Neville (Smith) will be left alone in the world, supposedly. Even though we know that the story ends atrociously because Smith et al couldn’t bring themselves to stick to Matheson’s story and make a truly great film?

Way to go, Will - you’re about to make one of the worst movie adaptations ever even worse.

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You may remember back in mid-August I was writing about my concerns with the new Watchmen movie that Zack Snyder is hatching in Hollywood.

As I mentioned in that post, Watchmen author Alan Moore has distanced himself from all his projects that have been adapted to film and often talks of his absolute hatred of all things Hollywood. Well, it seems that nothing’s changed. Talking to the L A Times, Moore has said, “I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying” and “It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination.” Hard words, but I can’t help agreeing with him for the most part.

Talking about the Watchmen movie, he also says, “Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it’s been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come.”

Not even pretending to mince his words. He never does. It’s one of the things that makes him the genius writer that he is.

It’s a great article that talks about things other than the movie. It discusses his new DVD, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which is billed as “A psychadelic journey through one of the world’s most powerful minds”, and he talks about magic, comics and the 750,000 word novel that he’s working on. Yep, 750,000 words. That’s bloody massive.

You can read the whole article here and I heartily recommend that you do.

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I know I was pretty slack about this last time. Harper Collins, way back in the mists of earlier this year (or was it last year? I can’t be bothered to check) released Gaiman’s novel American Gods for free online for a limited time. I happened to mention it here when it had about a week to go. Better than nothing, but no help to the slow readers among you.

Well, this time I’m on the case like a rash on a mangy dog. Gaiman has just announced on his Live Journal that his novel Neverwhere is now available to read for free. This time you can read it online like before or download it. It’s a time bomb download and will only last thirty days before it self-destructs, but, as Gaiman says, free is free. In fact, what he said was:

For those people who grumbled about reading American Gods online, here’s Neverwhere. You can read it online, and it’s also downloadable. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you don’t get to keep it forever. It’s yours for thirty days from download, and then the pdf file returns to its electrons. But if you’ve ever wondered about Neverwhere or wanted to read it for free, now is your chance. And free is free…

You can get the free book here. Bear in mind that when I tried it, the Read Online link worked, but the Download link needs fixing. Apparently they’re on the case. According to Gaiman’s people:

If, when you try to download it, it gives you an “ebx.edt” file then you may either (A) save the file as “neverwear.txt”, open it, find the “bookfileurl” line, paste that URL into your browser, and save that file as “Neverwear.pdf” OR (B) wait for HarperCollins to fix the problem.

I must say, I found the typo in that above quote quite amusing. Gaiman, not happy with being the most popular author on the planet, has started his own clothing line, perhaps? Enjoy.

EDIT - Check the comments for a very kind correction from Mr Gaiman’s Web Goblin (and also to see that I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am.) I’ve corrected the link above too, so that should work for everyone now.

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A friend of mine (and quality writer) has put together an anthology of short fiction called Speculative Realms. It’s a collection of short stories from authors all over the world, all following the theme: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The stories were all chosen through a fairly rigourous selection procedure, so this book should contain some pretty good new fiction. And I’m not involved, so it’s not shameless self-promotion going on here either. (They didn’t accept my submission!)

There’s going to be an online book launch running a full 24 hours on September 1st and there’s a promotional video on YouTube that you can have a look at to learn more about the book. If it strikes you as interesting then give it a go and help to support independent publishing and emerging writers.

The official website of the book is here where you can learn a bit about it and get a taste of all the stories contained.

EDIT - I’ll try embedding the video here, as I’ve never done that before. Let’s see:

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This is something that has me seriously concerned. Alan Moore’s awesome graphic novel Watchmen is still one of the most influential graphic novels ever written. It set the stage for what can be achieved by the collaboration of great writers and artists. It proved that comic books didn’t have to be Wham! Holy catsuits, Batman! and Archie. It’s the only graphic novel to ever be included in a Time list of 100 best English-language novels (2005). The powers that be there have since changed the rules so that a graphic novel can’t be selected again. Elistist bastards.

Anyway, it’s a bloody good book basically. Now they’re making it into a movie. This is a project that has tried to get off the ground numerous times, but keeps falling over. Alan Moore has distanced himself from the project, as he does with all movies made of his work. However, it’s now up and running.

Directed by Zack Snyder (of Dawn of the Dead and 300 fame) it’s finally crossed the line and is scheduled for a 2009 release. The scope of the story is massive and I really think it will struggle as a movie. I wonder how much will be chopped and how much the story will suffer from the transition to celluloid. However, as the eternal cycnical optimist that I am, I’ll expect it to be terrible while harbouring some deep seated hope that it’ll rock.

For those of you interested, here are a bunch of posters for the movie from the latest Comic-Con, showing the main players. The look of the whole thing is certainly pretty faithful to the book.

Here’s the homepage to the official Warner Bros site with loads of info.

And on the subject of comic books being made into movies, here’s some more on the recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight. In this article, John Scalzi discusses whether or not The Dark Knight really is an Oscar worthy film. It would certainly do wonders for the whole spec fic genre if the film did pull in one or two small golden humanoids. Fingers crossed.

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Well, according to How To Split An Atom anyway. (Thanks to S F Signal for pointing this one out.)

Why should I read these books? I suppose it’s out of some kind of sense of belonging. A need to fit in. While I would vehemently deny ever doing anything because I wanted to fit in, there must be some sub-conscious residue of it somewhere deep inside me. To be honest, at a conscious level I would deliberately avoid fitting in as a matter of principle. It was this attitude that saw me in tattered clothes and Hard Rock hairsprayed mohicans in the eighties and early nineties. Ah, those were the days, back when I had hair.

However, follicle nostalgia notwithstanding, whenever I see a list like this (100 greatest movies, 50 best tv shows and so on) I can’t help but have a look and see how many of them I’ve seen, read, enjoyed, whatever. It’s as if there’s some kind of validation in my agreeing with some completely arbitrary list written by some completely anonymous internetian that is probably no more relevant or influential than I am. I would like to say that said author is almost certainly less relevant than me, but here I am talking about one, so I should be wary of my glass walls when throwing these stones.

So when I saw this list I immediately had a read with the thought uppermost in my mind being, “I wonder how many of this guy’s top 32 I’ve read?” It can go a few different ways, this thought process. If I read his list and think he’s a completely tasteless dweeb with absolutely no respect for the real quality stuff then I can feel superior to him if I’ve read very few of his top books. If I really agree with his tastes I can feel validated if I’ve read a good percentage of them. Or depressed if I’ve hardly read any. So what happened with this list? Well, let’s start by reproducing the list:

Foundation - Isaac Asimov
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Animal Farm - George Orwell
War Of The Worlds - H.G. Wells
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Minority Report - Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Accelerando - Charles Stross
I Robot - Isaac Asimov
Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The Giver - Lois Lowry
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - Jules Verne
Ringworld - Larry Niven
More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
Spook Country - William Gibson
Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Dune - Frank Herbert
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
1984 - George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Timeline - Michael Crichton

Now, that’s a pretty solid list on the whole. The author, Steve Spalding’s, reasoning for the list is not in any order of preference, it seems, but “books that have pushed the boundaries of the genre, inspired generations of thinkers and in some cases have even predicted key aspects of societies [sic] development.”

I would have to agree with a large number of them. But there do seem to be some authors that are glaringly obvious by their omission. After all, if there are multiple entries by some authors (often deservedly so), surely Steve could have slipped some other authors in there instead. Or made it a top 50. Why 32 anyway? Why am I even asking? After all, I mentioned early on how arbitrary these things are. One author I would have absolutely included, for example, is Iain M Banks. No list of quality sci-fi is complete without him. I won’t bother mentioning further, as, being such an arbitrary subject, why are my views any more valid than Mr Spalding’s?

But, as he has taken the time to put together a list, does it validate me? I like his taste, I agree with a lot of the content, so I would hope to have read a good number of his suggestions if my credentials as a lover of sci-fi and fantasy are to remain intact in my fragile psyche. The answer? Sixteen out of thirty two. Exactly fifty per cent. That’s not a bad strike rate. And seeing as I don’t completely agree with him, not a bad indication of how our tastes overlap. But as I don’t really give a shit about these things it doesn’t matter anyway.

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