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Ragged Claws available on March 16th!

Posted on March 7, 2014 by John Guy Collick

Max and Abby are trapped in the city of Interosseous where the inhabitants navigate through the treacherous streets using the giant faces in the sky.

If humanity is to survive Max must contact the Machine Men who live in the Heart and Mind of the Colossus. But the way onward is a deadly maze peopled with lost creatures transformed by the darkness at the end of time.

As Max tries to trace a safe path through the Body of God he stumbles across a pair of fugitives, and finds himself caught in a web of betrayal and conspiracy that ultimately threatens to destroy the last remnants of mankind.

Ragged Claws is the astonishing sequel to Thumb and the second volume of The Book of the Colossus, a gripping fast-paced science fantasy series.

Ragged Claws Cover Art

Posted on February 28, 2014 by John Guy Collick

The great news is that the manuscript for Ragged Claws is back from my editor, John Jarrold, and ready for the final knocking into shape before release. The book is 99% finished, with just a few minor adjustments and tightening of knots before it gets pushed out to the world. I will announce the release date shortly.

Anyway, to celebrate I thought I’d do two things. First of all I’m knocking the price of the e-book version of Thumb down to around 99 cents/75 pence. This is because Ragged Claws is the sequel (and part two of a four-book series), and people really need to read Thumb first to understand the beginning of the story of Max and Abby and the surreal universe they inhabit. You can buy a copy by clicking on the links in the sidebar.

Secondly I thought I’d reveal the beta version of the cover. Apart from a few minor adjustments this is what it will look like.

As with Thumb, I wanted a cover that referred to to an episode or characters in the book. I also wanted to change the colour scheme, so that the pallet for each volume in the series is different – Red for Thumb, Blue for Ragged Claws etc. I won’t spoil the story or give too much away by explaining who the white figure is, or what she’s doing with those glowing lines. I was still aiming for an overall German Expressionist aesthetic – big bold shapes and a sense of sinister mystery.

This image will be the wrap around for the paperback:

Classrooms of the Future

Posted on February 12, 2014 by John Guy Collick

A young Spock at school on Vulcan. Education as mechanistic data stuffing.

I work in education, advising ministries throughout the world on how to best use technology in the classroom. For most the process is one of constant catch up. Technology changes on a monthly basis, while education systems tend to work on yearly budget cycles. Furthermore if you tinker with something you usually don’t see the effects for years, until the poor little buggers in the classroom who experienced the change work their way through the school system and pop out into society. On the whole I try and point out that education goals should dictate how technology is used, not the other way round, but often grand gesture politics takes over and every pupil is given an iPad (or even worse, forced to buy one) because THAT IS THE FUTURE OF LEARNING, and looks good in the press.

The future of the classroom has been exercising the imagination of writers, artists and film directors since the end of the 19th century. Because most of them don’t really understand that education is primarily to do with human beings telling each other stuff and working out how to solve problems, they focus on the machines. In the World of Tomorrow education will be more efficient because either machines will do it, or machines will help us do it. Here’s a little wander through some of the various visions these largely misguided prophets have put together.

Ok, this isn’t that bad. This drawing from Albert Robida’s 1890 novel La Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique, which purported to show life in Paris in 1955. A young woman uses the téléphonoscope to study maths. It’s essentially online learning. The two striking things to note are a) it’s a woman learning maths – in Robida’s future women are equal, if not generally better at stuff, than the men and b) the method of delivery is totally old fashioned. A guy who looks like an eighteenth century vicar pontificates in front of a blackboard. For those of you who remember late night, flickering, black and white images of sideburns, Grateful Dead beards and kipper ties it’s the Open University all over again.

Our current model of education is based on the industrial approach, geared towards producing an army of literate and numerate workers to go and work in factories, so it’s all about stuffing heads with essential knowledge and basic skills, even though the world has moved on and this kind of learning is no longer fit for purpose. This jokey cartoon from France in the 1900s shows the ideal learning machine of the future. All you do is wire the kids up and pipe information into their brains.

The cyberpunk dream of quick-fix education by jacking into the net.

It’s the same paradigm as in The Matrix (and the whole bogus ‘learn while you are asleep by listening to a tape recorder’ industry of the ’60s and ’70s), where all you have to do is jack yourself into a computer, twitch around for ten minutes and bingo, you know Kung Fu, and Japanese, with 19th century Russian literature thrown in for LOLs.

As a slight digression, this wonderful invention of Hugo Gernsback is called The Isolator and is designed to allow the studious worker to concentrate without distractions from colleagues. Putting aside the fact that it would give any Health and Safety officer the screaming hab-dabs (let’s swap the oxygen cylinder for helium), or that you could make good money renting this out in certain clubs, it has perfect application in the modern classroom. I showed this for a laugh to an audience of education officials and teachers in a certain country and their eyes lit up, which was worrying. I’ve no idea what the thing sticking out the front is, perhaps it’s to accommodate the author’s pipe.

So visions of future classrooms essentially ramp up traditionally dull ways of teaching using computers and robots. Forget the fact that the chalk and talk approach is incredibly inefficient for learning, all we need to do is to swap out the teacher for a screen or an android. This cartoon from a Japanese magazine in the 1960s shows how ‘computers’ will teach in the class, complete with little robot helpers who belt the kids over the head with red bludgeons if they get their sums wrong.

Let’s see how quickly we can induce Terminator-style mayhem.

It’s not surprising that Japan and South Korea, with their love of robots, now seem to be locked into an arms race to see which country can produce the most terrifying robot teacher. The Japanese have gone for the human looking one, though she is about as far down in Uncanny Valley as it’s possible to get, and has the disadvantage of being immobile, which is probably just as well as this monstrous creation looks permanently on the verge of running amok.

The South Korean English Language Robot clearly aims for the cute R2D2/automatic vacuum cleaner approach though that video face reminds me of the mad Cain robot in Robocop 2 just before it went off on one. For me this image sums up everything wrong with technology in the classroom, and what happens when the perceived coolness of the machinery completely overrides the education side of things. Teaching languages is about communication, right? It’s about people talking to people. Racial stereotypes aside (English is spoken by pretty, blue eyed, white, American blondes) how can anyone think that this abomination is a good idea? Those extended wing things worry me too, I think they have missiles in them.

Finally, on a more civilised note, it’s back to Things to Come to offer a paradigm of future education which is not completely tech obsessed or utterly deranged. In a charming scene towards the end of the film a grandfather explains history to his granddaughter with the aid of a giant Interactive Whiteboard (ok, a screen telly). Putting aside the hideously grating voice of the infant, the education paradigm it’s offering is that of Rousseau’s 1762 classic, Emile. In his treatise/novel Rousseau suggested learning was best done by the child exploring the world, and asking intelligent questions of a patient mentor. As the old ways of learning breakdown we may well find ourselves moving back towards this approach which, thankfully, relies on human interaction and not machines.

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack – Tom Gauld

Posted on January 29, 2014 by John Guy Collick

A while back I posted one of Tom Gauld’s cartoons on this blog and wrote a brief piece for my newsletter. His work is so clever, and pushes so many of the right buttons for an Eng-Lit professor turned science fiction writer that I couldn’t help but share some more of his work, taken from his book You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (2013). Normally I hesitate before buying a book of cartoons, after going through them once there’s rarely enough to pull me back, but Gauld’s collection is a happy exception.

Analysing jokes inevitably kills them dead, and besides these cartoons often poke fun at overwrought intellectual interpretations. Talking too much about Gauld’s work risks putting legs on a snake (as Kurosawa once described the process of looking for hidden meanings in his own movies). His ideas are reminiscent of Edward Gorey and the lesser known B. Kliban, both US illustrators known for their surreal humour and, in Gorey’s case, gently nostalgic nods at Victorian and Edwardian narratives transformed into total absurdity. Gauld’s ideas, like those of the Monty Python team and the stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, are filled with the same bizarre non-sequiturs.

Sadly, this one isn’t in the collection.

One recurring theme is pushing together the (supposed) high-brow and popular culture, as in Samuel Beckett’s Adventures of TinTin, or Dickens’ Great Expectations re-imagined as an old Spectrum-style computer game. Science Fiction plays a big part in Gauld’s world, as do the trials of trying to be a novelist.

As a Science Fiction fan navigating his way through the often unbelievably pretentious world of Literary Academia (especially in the early ’80s) I feel like having half a dozen of these tattooed to my chest in reverse so I can laugh at them in the bathroom mirror when I get up. I vividly remember one ultra-cool Guardian reading professor who sneered relentlessly at SF ‘discovering’ Joanna Russ when the Women’s Press published The Female Man, (of course he still refused to accept it was SF at all). I can really, really relate to You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. A must for any writer/critic/SF fan.

Tom Gauld’s book is available on Amazon.com here, and Amazon.co.uk here.

Tom’s own website is here, and his Flickr stream is here.

Schalcken the Painter (1979)

Posted on January 18, 2014 by John Guy Collick

The history of British TV is littered with brilliant one-off series and TV programmes that appeared once or twice and then vanished, seemingly forever. John Hurt as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1979), Nigel Kneale’s horror series Beasts (1976) and the Bavarian film of Carmina Burana that appeared on screens over here in 1975 are three examples. Luckily the ones that weren’t erased to make way for Match of the Day or It’s a Knockout, (a fate that befell the BBC tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing) are now re-appearing on DVD, including Leslie Megahey’s brilliant film of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Schalcken the Painter, released in November last year.

Periodically, and usually at Christmas, the BBC would have a crack at one or two ghost stories, often taken from classic writers like M. R. James, Dickens or Saki. In those days TV dramas were happy to go for the slow burn, coming up with many very creepy and effective tales. Unfortunately most were let down by the anti-climactic eek scene at the end. Writers like James and others, with their hinted-at terrors were hard to render visually and what was toe-curlingly horrible on paper ended up looking a bit feeble on screen. Jonathan Miller’s otherwise brilliant adaptation of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1968) is a case in point. It’s creepy, sinister and atmospheric right up to the point when the ghost appears and the monstrous half animal half humanoid creature running across the sands in the original turns into a chamois leather on a stick. Even though Schalcken the Painter suffers from this to a slight extent, the rest of the movie is incredibly sinister and stunningly beautiful to look at. It haunted me for years after I first watched it in 1979 and so I was delighted to see it re-released by the BFI.

One of the movie’s many tributes to the paintings of Vermeer.

The story is based on a painting by the real life Schalcken, a late 17th century Flemish painter. It shows a woman in a nightdress holding a candle while behind her a man makes to draw a sword against a shadowy assailant. Le Fanu’s story tells of the young painter’s apprenticeship under Gerard Dou, his unrequited love for the man’s niece, and the mysterious stranger who persuades the old man to let him marry the girl in exchange for an unheard of sum of gold, with fairly predictable results for anyone well-read in the genre.

The film is wonderfully atmospheric, not least because it is one long homage to the paintings of the era. Almost every shot evokes an image from the work of Vermeer, Rembrandt and, of course, both Dou and Schalcken themselves. The interior of Dou’s house is taken straight from such masterpieces as Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and The Art of Painting. The largely static camera work focusses on doorways set in walls at right angles to the lens so that you alternately see figures framed against panelling or at the end of corridors opening on chequer-floored rooms, with people (usually women) standing in the light falling from diamond paned and stained glass windows. Alternately the night scenes, lit by one or more candles, are essays in chiaroscuro. In one brilliant shot, a second long if that, a visitor looks back as he steps into the night and you realise it’s Rembrandt himself from his 1661 self-portrait, complete with white hat.

Schalcken, Gerard Dou and his niece Rose await their guest.

The tale is also rendered more effective by virtue of being almost entirely silent, with very little dialogue apart from the key scenes where Dou, his pupil and niece meet the stranger, and later when the niece briefly returns from her marriage. The rest of the time very little is said, which both adds to the evocation of a series of paintings, and the slow build up of tension. Charles Gray supplies the voice of the narrator, and an interesting commentary on the artist’s masterpieces. I particularly enjoyed Dou’s lessons to his pupils – “The Temptation of St Anthony, St Anthony, Temptation, Devils. You will imagine the devils. Begin,” is his advice after yanking a couple of models around a bit. Incidental music is kept to a minimum, so the sound effects themselves add to the brooding sense of impending horror. A single creak of a floorboard announces the arrival of the visitor, the sinister Vanderhausen.

He might be a bit green, smelly and never blink but check out the gilders.

The film is as much about greed and the treatment of women as disposal possessions as it is about the supernatural. The horror of the tale is equally derived from the casual way in which Dou disposes of his beautiful niece, sending her off to marry a man who is, to say the least, a bit unprepossessing. It’s clear from the scene where he joins the others for dinner that all is not well, not only does Vanderhausen not eat anything, he’s also a decidedly peculiar colour and stares at the niece through the entire repast. Like Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black, you would have thought that Dou and Schalcken would be familiar enough with ghost stories to realise something was amiss, but Dou still cheerfully dispatches the wretched girl in exchange for a manky old chest full of gilders. Schalcken is a waste of space, doing nothing to prevent the marriage, throwing himself into his painting and eventually groping the servant girls or visiting the brothels of Rotterdam for a bit of consolation.

Almost every shot evokes the Flemish school, in this case a memento mori still life.

I won’t spoil it by describing the inevitable denouement. As I said before, these classic tales always ended up a bit wanting in the end, as clumsy special effects or trite endings undercut the build up of atmosphere. Schalcken the Painter manages to carry it off better than most and of all the classic ghost stories I’ve seen over the years this one has perhaps the strongest resonance. It’s perhaps not as laden with symbolism as the accompanying essay by Ben Hervey tries to make out, but it’s as unnerving to watch now as it was in 1979. As a classic ghost story, a tribute to later Flemish painting and a detailed evocation of how these old master’s worked it’s well worth a watch.

The DVD comes in standard and Blu-Ray format and can be bought from Amazon.co.uk here.

Olivetti Lettera 32

Posted on January 12, 2014 by John Guy Collick

Olivetti Lettera 32, designed by Marcello Nizzoli in 1963

A Happy New Year to everyone! This is my one hundredth post and I thought I’d follow tradition by talking about what Santa brought me for Christmas.

When I was eight years old, and a precocious little sod, I filled a couple of reporter’s notebooks from W. H. Smiths with a ‘novel’. My dad was impressed enough to buy me my first typewriter. He later regretted this because it meant that the noise of the office now followed him home as I banged out an endless litany of juvenilia – three novels rejected by Puffin (bastards), a short story read out on Radio Leeds and finally, seven issues of various SF fanzines – ending with 101 Ballooning Adventures That Thrilled the World (don’t ask). What I didn’t realise at the time was that the typewriter was an Olivetti Lettera 32, an Italian thing of beauty designed by Marcello Nizzoli that was later to become a style icon and emblematic of a new generation of roving gonzo journalists and counter-culture writers. It was the kind of machine Michael Herr would balance on his knee when sending reports from Khe Sanh. Leonard Cohen used the earlier version to write ‘Suzanne’ and other light-hearted masterpieces. Cormac McArthy’s Olivetti sold for $254,500 in 2009, and he treated himself to a replacement for $20.

My fingers started getting tired by the end, hence the increased error rate.

My Olivetti eventually gave up the ghost before I went to University. I replaced it with an Olympia (if I remember, Olivetti’s were no longer available in North Yorkshire) before graduating onto an electric typewriter that had a kick like a mule and one of those strange death star rotating balls instead of type bars. In 1984 I bought a BBC Micro 32 and discovered word processing, so my typing days were over.

I was delighted, therefore, to get a genuine Olivetti Lettera 32 for Christmas from my kids, in full working order with a spare ribbon. It came completely out of the blue, I wasn’t expecting it at all. Opening the box resulted in a feeling of instant familiarity, combined with the bizarre sense of stepping back forty years in time to an era when every single manuscript document on the planet was thrashed out on a mechanical typewriter. I’ve been playing around with it over the last couple of weeks and it’s fascinating to drop back into the mind-set of writing with a portable, while getting to grips with having all the advantages of a word processor whipped away. Here’s some of the conclusions I’ve come to:

Original US advert

1. The Olivetti Lettera 32 was a piece of compact engineering genius. As you’d expect with Italian design it combines attention to detail with a really cool vibe. There are loads of little levers and widgets to adjust tab stops, page ends, margins, lock the carriage etc. Bits of the insides look as delicate as a clock. It’s also very light, though the turquoise body is aluminium and feels pretty tough. It would probably stop a couple of stray bullets through the window of the Saigon embassy.

2. We’re spoilt in the range of letters and typographical tricks word processors give us. There’s no number 1 for a start, you had to use the letter ‘l’ instead. You would also need to add accents with a biro afterwards (bearing in mind this is an Italian typewriter), and yet it has a bunch of fraction keys. You’re stuck with Courier, and you can underline for emphasis – and that’s it. It means you are closer to the words themselves, undistracted by any visuals, which is why editors and publishers prefer manuscripts to look like they’ve been bashed out on one of these machines.

3. Typing is physically hard work. You have to belt the keys all the way down to get an impression. By the end of the first paragraph my fingers started to hurt and the mistakes increased. How people learned to touch type on these machines I don’t know, they must have had digits like Arnie’s thighs after a few months. After typing for ten minutes I went back to my Mac keyboard and nearly broke the thing, I was belting it so hard.

4. Writing is like carving on marble, or doing a tattoo – there’s no room for error, no cut and paste or spell checking. It feels like you are following a one-way street with no room for manoeuvre. Of course if you did bodge things up you could put a line through it, or overtype (or get out the Tippex), but the whole process forced you to think more carefully about the words you committed to paper. If I remember, the rule of thumb was no more than two mistakes per page, so if you got to the bottom of your A4 sheet and made your third because your fingers ached you had to start all over again. A complete page of error-free typescript from an Olivetti Lettera 32 represents a real piece of hard work and craftsmanship.

My kids inform me that mechanical typewriters, and especially Olivetti Letteras, are style icons with hipsters who sit in parks with them on their knees and no doubt type out homages to The Smiths, or lyrics for their own band Chlorine Shadows Fall Across My Soul’s Daisies. I couldn’t in all honesty return to composing on a typewriter, it’s too constraining and my workflow has changed from the ‘make it up as I go along’ process of that eight-year old me. But it’s a fascinating piece of history to have in the house, and a few minutes belting the keys takes me right back to the feeling of living in the late 60s and early 70s, especially if I put Tubular Bells on the Stereo Record Player.

Jude Law’s Henry V

Posted on December 22, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Yesterday I went to see Jude Law in Henry V at the Noël Coward Theatre in London. We were right up in the gods, sitting on what was to all intents and purposes a shelf glued to the wall among the lights. This was a bit nerve wracking after the collapse of the Apollo Theatre ceiling this week, but we survived. The play itself was superb, a high-speed minimalist interpretation with a cracking performance from Jude Law. One of the advantages of living near London is the chance to see big name actors on stage, whether it’s Patrick Stewart in The Tempest, Kristin Scott Thomas in The Cherry Orchard or, in this case, an older, slightly fatter Gigolo Joe from A.I. chewing up the scenery in one of Shakespeare’s histories. For those who think pretty boy leads from Hollywood are chosen primarily for their looks and charm, Jude Law can definitely act and he turned in a brilliant interpretation.

Henry V is a very odd play. On the outside it looks like a rabble-rousing jingoistic piece with little plot and no real villain. Henry V and his raggedy army of plucky yeomen defeat the arrogant French at Agincourt – that’s it. This image of the play largely stems from the long shadow cast by Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film. During the early days of the war Olivier began a series of radio broadcasts in which he read excerpts from Shakespeare. The idea for a film of Henry V developed from these and the movie began production in 1942. It’s a beautiful piece of cinema, with sets based on medieval miniatures, and a suitably Thespian performance from Olivier. Anything that might detract from the image of an outnumbered ‘band of brothers’ defeating a massively superior and arrogant foe was edited out, while the stirring speeches before Harfleur (‘Once more unto the breach’) and Agincourt (‘We band of brothers’) were given the all-stops-out treatment as glorious set pieces.

Laurence Olivier as Henry V (1944)

In reality the play’s morality and jingoism is far more ambiguous. Once we put aside the inevitable pleasure any stout hearted Englishman feels at seeing the French getting a kicking, the war is entirely a cynical exercise in power-grabbing and propaganda. First Henry IV tells Henry V to go and have a foreign war to distract people from problems at home (Henry IV Part 2). Then, at the start of Henry V, the church concocts a specious claim for the king to bribe him so he doesn’t pass a law against them. Henry V’s invasion of France is therefore nothing more than a speculative land-grab based on a dubious interpretation of ancient inheritance law. The worst thing the French do is be a bit rude by sending King Harry a box of tennis balls and telling him (understandably) to sod off. To be fair they also bribe three nobles to do him in, but that’s an act of desperation after he’s already mustered his army and is preparing to sail for the continent.

Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play (1989) tackled this head on. Instead of the bombastic speechifying of the earlier film’s opening scenes, the decision to go to war becomes a muttered conspiracy in the shadows between the bishops, egged on by Henry’s uncle, played by Brian Blessed. Branagh’s film was made when the Falkland’s War was still fresh in people’s minds – a cynically engineered piece of adventurism that saved Margaret Thatcher’s political career. The battle scenes in Branagh’s Henry V are grim, bloody and soaked in mud, a far cry from the Medieval Day Out of Olivier’s Agincourt.

Jude Law takes Branagh’s Henry one step further into the realms of Machiavellian power-broking. Branagh’s King mused a bit, felt sad and slightly guilty amid the carnage. Jude Law’s king is a hyperactive psychotic yuppie who prances around the stage verbally and physically bullying friends and enemies alike into compliance. It’s a fantastic performance, restless impatience and brutal energy constantly jostling in his delivery. The physicality of Henry, constantly waving his hands around to emphasise points, plans, or jabbing them like weapons at the people he’s talking to, is wonderfully counterpointed by the largely static performances of the supporting cast. At times he reminded me of Begbie from Trainspotting – matey impatience waiting to snap into thuggery at the drop of a hat. He carried all of the big speeches, injecting them with enough energy to rescue them from over-familiarity, and his wooing of Katharine at the end of the play was, for me, the highlight of the evening – funny and creepy in equal measure.

The production overall was tackled at high speed on a minimal stage – cramming the play into roughly three hours (in Shakespeare’s time this would also have been the case – it’s only from the Victorian era that pompous enunciation of every syllable slowed the plays down). Once in a while some of the performers sounded like they were gabbling, and briefly lost the meaning of the text, but on the whole delivery was clear. Ron Cook’s Pistol avoided the buffoonery many actors attempt when trying to render Elizabethan jokes funny for modern audiences, and instead managed to create a stripped-down version of Simon Beale’s magnificently tragic Falstaff in The Hollow Crown. Noma Dumezweni was equally impressive as both an understated and thoughtful Mistress Quickly and as Alice, the maid who attempts to teach Katherine some English. The only bum note to my mind was the Chorus. Although Ashley Zhangazha’s performance was top notch I question the decision to put him in jeans and a union jack t-shirt and cast him, as far as I could tell, as a fifth former studying the play for his GCSEs.

Henry V is a play that superficially offers limited scope for interpretation and can degenerate into uninspired battle heroics punctuated by bombastic speeches, as witnessed in the sadly disappointing version that ended The Hollow Crown. To give it a new and sinister twist that opens up the darker implications of the play is a real achievement, and Jude Law does a great job.

If you want to find out what really happened at Agincourt and how the over-lusty and arrogant French were trounced by the stout-hearted men of England, read Julie Barker’s brilliant account.

Corporate Samurai

Posted on December 2, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Wolverine decides between a Karaoke night and a Teppan Yaki bar

Decisions, decisions – Karaoke night or a Teppanyaki bar? The red sign trying to spell ‘Wolverine’ reads ‘Noyohishiyoenyuushi’ which sounds like a new brand of underwear.

I downloaded The Wolverine from iTunes a couple of weeks ago. All good fun, even if it did go through the motions a bit, and Hugh Jackman is always watchable in the title role. It was set in Japan, at least the kind of Japan that only exists in Hollywood execs’ heads, and as such felt like a trip back to the early 1990s when I was living in Hokkaido, the northernmost island. At that time relations between Japan and the US weren’t great due to a huge trade imbalance, pumped up by the West as evidence that the Sons of Nippon were set to try and take over the world again, this time financially. Symptomatic of that era’s zietgeist were Karel von Wolferen’s ridiculously alarmist book The Enigma of Japanese Power and the film Rising Sun, based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name and starring Sean Connery. My Japanese friends were getting a bit sniffy about what they saw as the relentless Japanese bashing from the US and we all dutifully trooped off to the cinema to see the movie so they could get miffed bit more and we could attempt to mollify them by pointing out that not all Gaijin thought them avaricious wankers. It was a false alarm. Ten minutes in so-called Japanese expert Sean Connery opened his mouth, supposed ‘perfect Japanese’ came out, and the entire cinema dissolved into tears of laughter. From then on the film was treated as a comedy and Japanese audiences stopped taking US tantrums seriously, especially when shortly afterwards George Bush threw up in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap halfway through trying to persuade him to buy American.

In the Science Fiction world attitudes to Japan came almost exclusively from Cyberpunk and novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In these tales futuristic Asian cartels populated by corporate samurai slugged it out in cyberspace and the streets of future Chiba, a mega sprawl covering all of the eastern coast. Boosted Yakuza, Virtual Geisha and Otaku Hackers rubbed shoulders in the rainy streets of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and those images have stuck, recycled in movies, anime and computer games and egged on by Japanese who quite fancy themselves as Cyber Ninja. The problem is that this Japan bears about as much relationship to reality as Downton Abbey does to modern urban Britain. Having lived for ten years in the country, and worked with Japanese companies and universities for over two decades, I find it particularly hard not to giggle my way through The Wolverine and movies like it, especially when the following cliches are trotted out, yet again:

A typical working day in a Japanese company as the West imagines it.

Japanese Businessmen are all Corporate Samurai

Ieyasu Tokugawa unified Japan in 1600 and exerted his power over the other feudal lords by making them very poor. Over the next three hundred years the samurai class turned into underpaid administrators, clerks and bureaucrats. Think about that for a second – they became civil servants, like the people who send out demands for tax, give you permission to build an extension to your garage or ban hanging baskets in town centres because they might fall on shoppers’ heads. In 1876 samurai were even forbidden to carry swords, which shows you how much power they had in early modern Japan. The idea that Tokyo salarymen carry an unbroken tradition of feudal loyalty from the medieval period is as ridiculous as saying I still hold to the chivalric ideals of my ancestor Sir Reginald De Colwic (c. 1157). Japanese corporate bosses do not, on the whole, keep entire suits of armour in their boardrooms, any more than I have a chain mail vest in my sock drawer, or a two-handed bastard sword in the cupboard. Japanese salarymen are overworked and harassed middle-class blokes with deadlines, car loans and grumpy managers, not über warriors ready to charge around kicking paper screens down in spectacular sword melees. Which brings me on to…

A real Japanese office. Notice the two ninja cunningly disguised as a wastepaper basket and bag.

A Japanese Sword is the Mystical Soul of its Owner, forged by Master Craftsmen.

The first problem with Japanese swords is that they are long, very sharp and you need quite a bit of space to wield one. Unlike Western fencing, which largely consists of short jabbing movements with a pointed blade, Japanese swordplay involves waving the thing around with two hands and leaping all over the place while yelling the name of the part of the body you’re about to stick it in. Urban Japan is very cramped, and in many homes you can touch both walls by standing in the middle of the room with your arms stretched out. Unless you are in a dojo or a big field you are likely to end up with the weapon stuck in the ceiling, walls or floor, or half a dozen people who got in the way. Japanese swords are nice, if you are into that kind of thing, but not the major core of Japanese culture films like Kill Bill and The Wolverine would have us believe. The Tokyo Sword Museum is the size of a big garage, but once you’ve looked at your twentieth bit of curved metal with a wavy pattern on it gets a bit dull, and I only ever saw the occasionally bored looking school party when I visited. The Yakuza sometimes break out swords because they are more frightening than a gun, but even they admit that they are a bugger to use in the cramped corridors of a rival gang’s den (in fact Yakuza offices are designed with very narrow passageways precisely to make it hard for topless tattooed Ken Takakura wannabees to get beyond the lift without being shot). Japanese swords can safely be filed under the ‘more romantic nonsense for gullible foreigners’ sign.

Rira Fukushima prepares to take out the light fittings, TV, air-con and family parrot in her 2 metre square apartment.

Rira Fukushima prepares to take out the light fittings, TV, air-con and family parrot in her 2 metre square Tokyo apartment.

Get out the Ninja

If the films are anything to go by if you have a problem with a rival dynasty or another corporation has undercut you all you need to do is Dial-a-Ninja and hundreds of black clad shadow warriors will pour over the rooftops hurling interesting home made bombs around like a violent version of Cirque Du Soleil. I never once came across anything to do with ninja in my twenty years dealing with Japan (Aha, you say, that’s because they melt into the shadows like the cunningly invisible assassins they are). The historical problem with ninja is that they were only good for one mission, at the end of which they killed themselves to protect the identity of their employer. The most famous ninja hid in a toilet all day so he could stab a lord up the bum, hardly exciting and romantic. It was never a particularly glamorous calling, despite the cool gear, and recruitment was always a problem. Yet Gaijin love ninja for some reason, and Japan is happy to feed this strange obsession.

Hugh Jackman closely avoids getting a sword up the bum.

All Japanese are Martial Arts Experts.

I studied Aikido at the world centre for Aikido in Tokyo for a year and every class consisted of 50% French (don’t ask me why), 20% other foreigners (including that bastard Miguel from Barcelona who nearly twisted my arm off) and one or two Japanese blokes. Martial arts are hard and you have to train for years, hence of little interest to disaffected, idle Japanese youth of today. Furthermore, in one of the most peaceful societies in the world there’s not a lot of call for close combat skills. The biggest hobby for my Japanese friends seems to be playing musical instruments and they are brilliant with the flute, violin etc. Martial arts are popular with Gaijin who want to be more Japanese than the Japanese. To the average Japanese twenty-something, martial arts have all the appeal of Morris Dancing over here. Admittedly the sight of a weirdly sexy Japanese model in stripy stockings and a black miniskirt whaling the crap out of ninja (who else?) makes for good viewing but now we really are in the fairy-tale realm of Sailor Moon.

Japan is ultra hi-tech society where the future is now!

OK – the Japanese love gadgets and are massive smartphone users, but that’s about it. Go into any Japanese office and you’ll be hit by the mountains of paper forms surrounding the computers. PC use came to the country later than in the West, simply because it was only from the late 1980s that computers were powerful enough to handle the thousands of Chinese characters needed for basic word processing. The vast majority of school classrooms use chalk and blackboard, and are heated by kerosene stoves. People sign the countless documents that cross their path with the same wooden seals used since medieval times. The most impressive sight is when you take money out of a bank or visit a post office. The teller works out the sum on a calculator, and then uses a wooden abacus to double check the machine got it right. Futuristic hi-tech exists in isolated pockets, and usually at the level of personal use, but as a whole Japan is a surprisingly lo-tech country.

One of the funniest comedies ever to hit Japan – Sean Connery in Rising Sun

and finally … Yakuza

Yakuza are brainless thugs. They like to think of themselves as champions of the commoners vs. corrupt politicians and much was made of the fact they were first on the street handing out food in the wake of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. In reality they rely on extortion, prostitution and peddling Class B drugs. They operate out of Estate Agents, have their own business cards and publish magazines containing poems about what a hard life they have. The police tolerate them because organised villainy is preferable to anarchy, but the rest of Japan is increasingly less accommodating and the Yakuza are on the retreat as local residents associations go on the attack, and they fall apart from their own in-feuding. Yes, the Yakuza’s biggest enemy is the middle-aged Japanese woman, so fearsome they even have a comic series dedicated to them. Yakuza rarely go international because, like most Japanese, they struggle with foreign languages and find themselves up against criminals from far less comfortable and accommodating societies like Russia and China who happily have them for breakfast. Finally re. Yakuza with fingers missing. They cut their finger ends off when they make a mistake, so the gangsters with lopped digits are the ones who are, quite frankly, a bit useless.

Revisiting Battle Royale

Posted on November 22, 2013 by John Guy Collick

In last week’s post Jane Dougherty raised the interesting question as to whether modern Young Adult fantasy sanitises the world for its readers, serving them the illusory comfort of simplistic ideas of good and evil over which teens can triumph, as opposed to the more complex banal institutional horrors that characterise the 20th and 21st centuries. She mentioned The Hunger Games as one example of an illusory and reassuringly anodyne view of the world concealed under superficial grittiness, and that got me thinking of the Japanese movie Battle Royale (2000).

There’s already been plenty of debate about whether The Hunger Games is a copy of the Japanese movie, (and novel by Koushun Takami) and I don’t want to get sucked into that argument here. What is interesting about the first film is not so much the blood and gore, but its fascinating portrayal of the social and cultural issues that Japan faced after its economic bubble burst in the 1990s, and the impact the economic crisis had on the relationship between the young and the old. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, in an unspecified near future Japan, classes of high school kids are kidnapped and forced to fight each other on a zoned island. Each child is given a back pack with survival rations and a random weapon, which could anything from a submachine gun to a frying pan. They also wear exploding collars to prevent them straying into forbidden zones or trying to escape the island. They fight it out amongst themselves, overseen by Takeshi Kitano‘s tragically world weary teacher.

Winner of the previous game of Battle Royale

The film caused ructions when it first came out, and questions were raised in the Japanese parliament about the levels of violence in the movie. By Japanese film standards it’s no worse than, say, the Lone Wolf and Child series, but the fact that it was high school kids seeing each other off with machine guns, crossbows and sickles touched a nerve for reasons that went beyond the copious amounts of ketchup sprayed around the sets. A number of high profile cases of kids killing each other in real life pointed to a deep malaise in society’s treatment of youngsters, and the pressures it subjected them to. Battle Royale seemed to be rubbing politicians’ faces into an issue they didn’t want to face.

Japan possesses a very rigid hierarchical society which stood it in pretty good stead until the 1990s. The life path for a kid was mapped out to the nth degree – reasonably pleasant elementary education, sheer hell at high school (and at cram schools in the evening) swotting for university entrance exams, four years holiday at university itself, then a job for life in a giant corporate. Stifling conformity and obeisance to one’s superiors was worth it for the security and overwhelming sense of belonging to what can feel, at times, like a family of 120 million relatives. But then it all fell apart. Bad loans based on ludicrously inflated property prices came home to roost in the 1990s and the delicate framework of deals, complicity and back-scratching erected by the government, business and Yakuza (Japanese mafia) came tumbling down on top of the heads of the ordinary citizens.

Middle aged corporate workers started losing their jobs, the economy drifted into nearly two decades of stagflation and many young people began to realise the dream they’d been sold (study and get into a good university to secure your future) was a mendacious nightmare they couldn’t escape from. In the film the hero’s father loses his job and commits suicide, leaving his body draped in toilet roll covered in the word ganbaru (used all the time in Japan, it means ‘try hard’, ‘good luck’ and ‘please put up with it’). Another symptom of youngsters collapsing under societal pressure was the rise of the Hikikomori (literally ‘hiding away’), young men who locked themselves in their rooms for years, refusing to engage with society at all, while long-suffering mum pushed their meals under the door. Reports of children murdering their parents, and each other, in extreme violent rages suggested that the combination of intense social pressure to conform but with no guaranteed reward was creating a highly toxic situation.

The message on the board reads ‘Today we’re all skipping class’

Battle Royale shows a society in denial hysterically clinging onto the very institutions that cause the problems in the first place, by shifting the blame onto its main victims – the kids. The most interesting parts of the film are the scenes that play out the dynamics of a typical Japanese school room to a grotesque degree. The ‘lesson’ at the start of the game, when the kids are forced to watch a childishly patronising video describing what’s going to happen to them, is spot-on in its recreation of the relationship between fractious kids and a teacher on autopilot. Having spent twenty years working in and with the Japanese education system I can vouch for the authenticity of the scene (apart from the knife-throwing and exploding necks).

Hilarious send up of NHK TV for kids as hysterically cute ‘older sister’ explains how to kill your schoolmates.

Takeshi Kitano specialises in playing middle-aged men trapped in the system with stunning poignancy, whether it’s a detective plagued with bad luck in Hana-bi, or a petty gangster turned child minder in Kikujiro. In Battle Royale half the time he’s either consigning kids to their deaths, reading out the butcher’s bill in the matter-of-fact tones of a teacher making an announcement about wet playtime, or handing out umbrellas to stop them getting rained on, sharing ice lollies in a bizarre dream sequence or fielding abusive phone calls from his own daughter. At one point the heroine comments that in her dream he always seems sad and lonely. At the end of the film he exercises by himself to a tape in an overgrown playground – a perfect image of the passing of traditional, secure, corporate Japan.

Not the best translation of the original Japanese

Behind the spraying blood and high-octane ultra violence Battle Royale is a highly intelligent movie that perfectly captures the sense of unease at a society facing an economic and social crisis that the establishment (largely consisting of old men) refuses to confront, deflecting blame, instead, onto the young, or women or indeed, anyone and everyone else. In the end all are victims, the kids, the parents, Takeshi Kitano’s ultimately lost and desolate teacher, and the drone-like military who go into hilarious and spectacular meltdown when the students briefly manage to hack into the system.

Lack of context, and poor subtitle translation meant that Battle Royale ended up on the shelf marked ‘ultra violent and weird Asian shit’, next to Ichi the Killer and the Korean movie Old Boy (another brilliant satire), waiting to be picked up by ‘edgy’ dilettantes like Quentin Tarantino who were happy to reproduce the stylish mayhem while discarding any message as irrelevant next to the need to be cool. In the wake of The Hunger Games it’s worth watching again as a mordant commentary on an establishment increasingly baffled by the refusal of the young to do what it’s told and ganbaru.

Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by John Guy Collick

This week’s post is a guest article by Jane Dougherty, the author of the wonderfully grim fantasy novel The Dark Citadel. First in a series, it tells of a future religious/fascist dystopian society sheltering beneath an immense dome, around which prowl demons and creatures of legend. It’s refreshingly sinister and pulls no punches in its depiction of oppressive brutality. It also raises questions about the categorisation and censorship of books for young readers. In the old days no-one told teenagers what they should and shouldn’t read, now we have a whole industry devoted to producing ‘suitable’ fiction for those transitioning from childhood stories to ‘grownup’ writing. Is this just another example of our modern obsession with ‘appropriatness’ and control freakery? Read Jane’s excellent post and see what you think.

Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?

Since my first book, The Dark Citadel, was released at the beginning of October it has received several reviews pointing out the dark, violent aspects of the story, and its unsuitability for children. All fair comments—it is dark, and I never wrote it for children. But why write dark in the first place? What is its appeal?

After my youngest child was born I was kept more or less housebound in the winter with a rare condition, one of the symptoms of which is severe chilblains. Sounds funny but it wasn’t. The older children would bring armfuls of fantasy books back from the library and, not being able to choose any of my own, I read theirs. One series left a mark—Orcs, a particularly grim story by Stan Nicholls, with relentless violence set in an unspeakably awful world. It left a mark exactly because of the unremitting awfulness of it. What was an eleven year old doing reading this kind of stuff? Simple—our local library put all fantasy in the children’s section.

A few years later when I set to work on my first novel to please teenage children with epic fantasy indigestion, I had already decided that I wasn’t interested in talking animals, fascinating princes and forlorn or swashbuckling princesses. I was going for gritty fantastic realism, if that makes sense, not with monsters and endless battle scenes, but with true evil. There is so much more satisfaction to be got out of a really evil character than a good one.

Good versus Evil Cecil B. DeMille style

So, my story was going to be dark. But what kind of darkness? There’s the Dark Lord type of darkness, the bloke who exists just to be evil and who must be fought with lots of bloodshed by massed coalitions of assorted un-evil peoples. This darkness smacks of cop out to me being simple sword-swinging with no moral consequences. If your enemy looks like something out of a freak show and comes at you in unfairly large numbers, there isn’t much to discuss.

I was much more interested in the Hannah Arendt notion of evil: its banality. In The Dark Citadel, the bumptious little Protector and the oppressive rules and strictures of the Elders’ theocracy are closer to Eichmann and the Taliban than to Sauron and his army of Orcs. Their evil is more chilling than the king of the demons who is after all only running true to type. Abaddon only exists and draws his strength from the real evil that the nasty regime has brewed without any prompting from him at all.

The Green Woman series is dark; unpleasant things happen, the world is ugly, and while some individuals make a stand against the ugliness, the majority are either tacit supporters or fully paid-up party members. As I see it, that’s pretty much how life is everywhere when your society is powerful and brutal. Do I think this kind of darkness makes suitable reading for young adults? Yes, I do. Without wishing to sound preachy, I believe that facing moral dilemmas and making the right decisions for the right reasons is part of becoming an adult, and writers who take that responsibility away from their young protagonists have created not heroes but selfish, immature human beings.

Evil as committee

A case in point is The Hunger Games. For all I can appreciate the skill of the writing and the interesting storyline, I dislike the way the author is careful to avoid situations where Katniss has to take moral decisions. She kills children dammit, but the reader is expected to believe they deserved it, or else it was self-defence or a sort of accident. Katniss is deprived of the possibility of being heroic, and we know that for her credibility’s sake it’s just as well, because she wouldn’t have risen to the occasion.

Dark and nasty, but there is light at the end of the tunnel

The world of The Green Woman is not unadulterated darkness, and I haven’t done away with heroes, but they are the kind of heroes I admire: the partisans, the underdogs, the people who take risks to save others. None of them is handy with a sword, and there isn’t a single fledgling prince among them either.

If I had tried to pitch The Dark Citadel at an adult market, the elements of violence and evil would not have posed a problem. But the main protagonists are teenagers; therefore, according to the great god of marketing, this is a young adult novel. And when you’re talking about young adults you can forget the adult bit. We are talking here essentially about old children, and children are not supposed to be able to handle unpleasantness, even though they see far worse in visual images every time they turn on the TV.

This idea that the transition from Dora to Kafka will not take place naturally, and that without proper guidance, disastrous psychological damage may result, has opened the way for publishers to go to town on book categories. There was a time not so long ago when there were books for children and books for everyone who could understand or imagine what it means to be an adult. Children decided for themselves when they could handle something a little more edgy than Pooh sticks. Which did not mean that they immediately leapt for the Marquis de Sade. Kids read what they enjoy and understand.

Is there a limit to the kind of dark young adults should be expected to deal with? The answer, in my opinion is that if it’s good enough for adults, it’s good enough for young adults. I’m not a defender of gratuitous violence, violence used simply to titillate, but it has its place in a story about a brutal totalitarian regime. In fact, Providence without violence would not be credible. No more credible than an evil regime without opponents.

I didn’t write a totally dark story. True, it gets worse before it gets better, but there is hope in a better world, not just a return to the old one. Wherever there is evil there will always be resistance, otherwise humanity may as well just turn off the lights, put the key under the door and stumble off into oblivion.

Jane Dougherty

You can buy The Dark Citadel from Amazon.com here and from Amazon.co.uk here I can also highly recommend Jane’s blog where she talks about writing, poetry and her life in France.