Max J Friedländer

I came across Friedländer in Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong (which comes thoroughly recommended).

Max J. Friedländer , 1867-1958, was a German art historian who, according to Frayn, warned against the “vanity of attempting to describe pictures in detail”.  Friedländer recommends “the strictest economy of words”, limiting oneself to “aphoristic remarks, put together unsystematically”.  The advice struck a chord with me on reading the book, and, as I discovered on subsequently searching the web, it seems to have struck a chord with others.

The advice reminds me of the eyeball kick, mentioned by the the Turkey City Lexicon,  amongst other guides:

That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.”

It wasn’t always thus.  Chesterton opened one of his Father Brown stories  to excellent effect with paragraphs of atmospheric description of  dark and sinister pine forests, but this is old fashioned writing in the days of big budget movies, especially for those of us working in the SF field.  You’re never going to get the reader to imagine the same spectacle as they can be seen on the big screen, but you can arrest them with the small details (It’s years since I read Schindler’s List, but the image that to always comes to my mind from that book is not the barbed wire or the soldiers, but the little girl in the red coat).

Personally, I don’t like passages describing scenery, I like to keep such things to a minimum, but maybe that’s a matter of taste.

Or maybe not.  You’d be surprised how much description a reader fills in for themselves.  Think of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.  About the only description Austen gives is that he is tall.  The rest is left to the reader’s imagination.

KISS

“No, father, you never did care about anything except your precious job.”

This is a line from Blood and Iron, spoken by a young woman to her father, and overheard by a nearby robot.  Given the circumstances in which the words were spoken, I originally used an expletive in place of precious.  But then I realised that as the words were being translated by computer as the young woman spoke them, and robots don’t use human expletives which tend be organically based, the sentence would probably read

“No, father, you never did care about anything except your rusting job.”

This is logical, but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to the reader at first glance as it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a young woman could say.  I could have put in an explanation (a common writers’ mistake, in my opinion), but that would have slowed down the action, and worse, taken the reader away from the scene and reminded them they were reading a book.

I love a complicated plot, I love hard SF, but when it comes to the writing I always like to Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Anyway, Blood and Iron is finished and should be with Macmillan now.

Hymns Ancient and Modern

Watching Belshazzar’s Feast last Saturday evening in Bradford (they were the support band at the Bellowhead concert) I was struck by what an easily overlooked resource the hymn book is.

The pair played an old Welsh Hymn by the name of Ebenezer ( or Ton-Y-Botel), quoting the hymn number.  I checked  when I got home in the very tatty old book that I own and had a go myself.  It sounded great- even more so, I thought, when played in 3/4.

Now my preferred definition for Folk Music is something like this one I just found on the web :

the traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of people in a community

and of course, hymns were an example of just that in the past for large parts of the community .

Of course, tunes travel both ways.  A quick scan through the hymn book showed many folk tunes appropriated by the church: Londonderry Air, Scarlet Ribbons even Scarborough Fair.  A quick scan through my records and CDs threw up such gems as John Renbourn’s excellent version of Monk’s Gate (which I remember singing as a child to the words “He who would valiant be”) and Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Travellin’ on For Jesus, and an awful lot of Christmas Carols (I found at least five versions of While Shepherds Watched, including the local one which is sung to the tune of Jackson).

Anyway, I’ve been playing through the hymns, some of them sound very nice (at least, the ones written before 1950 do).  Definitely something to look at in order to increase your repertoire.  (Have you learnt the Valeta yet?)

By the way, I enjoyed Belshazzar’s Feast.  Accordion and Fiddle:  a classic combination.  I’m not so sure about the slide whistle though…

Micro Men

Have you seen Micro Men yet?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

If, like me, you learned to program by typing out lines of BASIC on a Sinclair ZXx, an Acorn Micro or Commodore machine, then you’ll love this story of the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they battle for supremacy in the early ’80’s micro market.  If you are too young to remember those days (for example you may be one of my Computing class who is reading this rather than getting on with your homework, you know who you are, and it’s due in by Thursday) then watch it anyway and marvel at how primitive those early machines were.

What struck me whilst watching was how much of a dead end the first home computers were.  Although many machines were sold, nearly all of them were used for playing games.  Only a few people put the micros to their intended use and learned to program on them (Incidentally, I remember paying £10 for a book on Assembly Language, and another £30 for an Assembler on a ROM cartridge.  Nowadays, if you want to learn to program you can download a fully functioning IDE and access hundreds of excellent tutorials for free).

One question we never really asked back then was why did people need to learn to program anyway? The subject is no longer taught in schools, except as a specialism.  Ten years ago most people wanted a computer so they could learn how to use the internet or to word process.  Today even that isn’t really the case, and pupils are now  taught Flash animation or how to set up websites instead.

A few of us may owe a debt to those early machines, but what the world was really waiting for was the PC equivalent.  The trouble was that such a thing was too expensive, or at least more than people were willing to pay in those days.  It was down to Alan Sugar to produce the AMSTRAD word processor, the first reasonably priced machine that bore some resemblance to today’s computers.

Anyway, watch the program.  It’s funny and poignant, full of the sense of missed opportunities.  I can’t help thinking the world would be a much geekier place if Sinclair and Curry had worked together instead of fighting (and geekness, of course, is a good thing).

Folk against Fascism

Now, I realise that I am stretching the brief of this blog a little by including a picture of a melodeon (we deal with robots and accordions here, after all) but it’s for a good cause…

Why Folk against Fascism?  Well, if you haven’t heard, this is not so much a call for Morris Dancers to take up arms, but rather the reaction of a group of musicians who are understandably annoyed that the BNP are trying to hitch their wagon to traditional English music.  Crofty describes all this rather well on his blog.  The FAF site is here (and includes an interesting take on the issue by Jon Boden)

Personally, I’m pleased if anyone wants to come along and listen to the music and help keep the tradition alive. What’s annoying is appropriating someone else’s work for your own political ends.  What’s irritating is when you don’t appear to have studied that work in the first place.

Anyway, I’m going to see Show of Hands tomorrow night in Chester.  They’re quite folky, if anyone is interested.

Reading Aloud

Listening to David-Rees Thomas’s excellent reading of my story, “The Waters of Meribah” the other day, I was struck by just how awkward some of the sentences were.  This is not the fault of David’s reading, I should explain, but my writing.

No false modesty: I can give two reasons for this.  Firstly, and I’ve heard many other writers say this, when you read any piece of your own work once it’s published on publication, its always the case that every mistake and piece of bad writing becomes glaringly obvious in a way that it never did when you were still redrafting.

But secondly, and this is the main point here, back when I wrote  ”Waters” I hadn’t yet learned the trick of reading my stories aloud when redrafting.  I don’t always do this now, if I’m honest, mainly due to pressure of time, but it’s a good trick to learn.  Reading aloud makes you more aware of the rhythms in the dialogue.  It exposes wordy sentences and unnatural expressions, and it makes you realise just how awkward some of your sentences are prose is.

Most importantly though, you experience the story via another input stream and this gives the brain a different perspective on the work.  (Similarly, some writers re key in the entire final draft of a story in order to send it through the brain in a different way).

By way of experiment, I just went through the above text reading it aloud.  I’ve marked my deletions using strikethrough.

See?  It works.

Blood and Iron

Follow this link to my website to see Jon Sullivan’s amazing cover for Blood and Iron, published April 2010.

Redrafting

Julie, a friend of mine, came up with a perfect description of the process.

She said that when you first write a story it’s like a baby:  perfect and precious in your eyes.

After a few redrafts it grows into a young child: you see that  it has its faults, but you love it anyway.

But as  you keep rereading and improving, a story becomes a teenager, lurking in its bedroom and complaining that you don’t understand it anymore. Catch it on a bad day and all you can see is its faults- everything about it irritates you.   If you’re honest with yourself, you realise that you’ve both been in each others company too long: you’ve both changed.

By that time you’re looking forward to the day when your story can go out into the world and start earning a living.  That’s when you can both see the best in one another again.

Blood and Iron

The sequel to Twisted Metal will be titled Blood and Iron.

For most of the time of writing it was known as Untitled Robot Book, and that’s the name that appears on the contract, but the title itself caused me more problems than any other story I’ve written.  Odd really, bearing in mind I’ve had the novel plotted since before I started Twisted Metal, and the characters virtually wrote the story themselves.

But I just couldn’t figure out what the title was going to be… until my agent advised me just to read through the MS.  ”You’ll find it there in the text,” he said, and he was right.  Right in the middle of Chapter 10, in a meeting between humans and robots, there was the phrase Blood and Iron.

This time, unlike with Twisted Metal, I looked up the phrase on Google.   Coincidentally, Bismark used the phrase (or almost used it: he said “iron and blood”) in a speech confusingly known as the “Blood and Iron” speech.  Further checking showed there was no “Blood and Iron” video game.

None of that mattered, really.  Blood and Iron felt right. I knew that was the title.

I’ve seen the Jon Sullivan’s black and white rough for the cover, by the way.  It looks amazing.  The plan is to have the background in blood red, the foreground character in iron grey.

I’m currently thinking about starting book 3.  To me, it will be “The Book of Robots” but that’s not a very commercial title.  I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Dollhouse

Thank you to Afront for recommending this rather excellent series way back when I stopped watching Heroes:  http://tonyballantyne.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/no-more-heroes-anymore/

I don’t know if they’re making a second series, I can’t bothered to Google and find out at the moment (research is not what this blog is about, nor is being at the forefront of things).

But what a series!  It started out a little like Joe 90 (remember that?) with the dolls of the series being implanted with different personalities to tackle that week’s mission, but it gradually became something much stranger.

Too many people mourn the passing of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.  Watching programs like this, makes me think we are just entering it, because this was Science Fiction on television like nothing I’ve seen before.  Rather than just sticking to the same basic concept for each episode as just about every series has done in the past, Joss Wheedon and the crew extrapolated their basic premise in true Science Fiction fashion to an ending that I for one did not see coming.

The cast also deserve a mention, by the way:  the same actors protrayed markedly different characters each week.  This can’t be easy. (Though a lot of the female cast looked the same to me: thin with long dark hair.  I kept getting Echo and Dr Sawyer mixed up)

Sometimes we can be a little negative. I’m fed up of hearing that print is dying out, that the short story is dead and that the younger generation aren’t interested in Science Fiction.  I say that Science Fiction is changing and there is something rather ironic about Science Fiction fans not recognising this.  Things like Dollhouse are an illustration of this and hopefully the shape of things to come.

Buy the DVDs for the first series, and look forward to watching the next one (ok, I looked…)