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Frank Frazetta

Posted on June 14, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Conan the Barbarian

I’m still waiting for Conan. The first Arnold Schwarzenegger film was kind of OK, and had one or two impressive moments. The second was dire and I still can’t bring myself to watch the remake with Jason Momoa (despite the fact that his Khal Drogo is as close to Conan as anyone – though Rory McCann’s Hound comes a close second). The problem is that for me Conan is Frazetta’s Conan, an ugly vicious bugger with a face like Les Dawson’s Cissie Braithwaite. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Momoa are simply too clean and pretty, like cosplay fans oiled up and tanned for the next fantasy con. Conan’s world is, to my mind, the world of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, all cryptic utterances, bleak moors and your own innards falling into your lap – and only Frank Frazetta comes anywhere close to the capturing the visceral darkness of Robert E. Howard’s original tales. Everyone else seems a wee bit feeble in comparison.

This week I downloaded the documentary Frazetta: Painting with Fire (2003) from iTunes. Like many documentaries coming out of the U.S. it leans towards simplistic hagiography, but once you get past the ‘Frank was the most wonderful person in the entire cosmos ever’ comments that bookend each chapter of the film the contents are eye-opening. On the outside Frazetta looked like another example of that peculiarly American phenomenon, the cowboy artist. Ruggedly good-looking with an easy smile, dressed in Levis playing baseball, he resembles Jackson Pollock – an icon of US artistic freedom encouraged by the CIA to counteract Soviet culture (if you think I’m being ridiculous here, the CIA funded the New York Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s as part of their propaganda war against communism).

Conan fighting Frost Giants

One thing the documentary does bring home is the revolutionary nature of his paintings. More than any other fantasy artist, he had the uncanny knack of capturing a perfect instant of pure action and emotion. Some of the remarkable claims to emerge from the documentary are that he didn’t really have a formal art training, which is very hard to believe looking at his figure work, and that he worked at incredible speed entirely from his own imagination. Once the image lodged itself in his head then he would crank it out in eight to fifteen hours.

It’s clear that the dynamic action shots that dominate his paintings come from his apprenticeship working as a ghost artist for comics like Tarzan of the Apes and Li’l Abner, and that his figure work is in the tradition of artists like Burne Hogarth (who produced wonderful textbooks on dynamic anatomy that are invaluable for illustrators and animators alike). The documentary argues that his intuitive grasp of anatomy in a state of extreme exertion also came from his own love of sports, including baseball and karate. What sets Frazetta’s fantasy art apart from the work of, say, Boris Vallejo and Chris Achilleos, is that it very rarely looks posed.

Sacrifice

A painting like Sacrifice, for example, shows his ability to capture an instant with all its drama and emotion. Yet even though the first response of many is that his technique is photographic, it actually isn’t. He is essentially an Impressionist, working at speed (especially in oils) to give his pictures a loose, sometimes even abstract quality, and I think that is where the emotional power comes from. His compositions are often quite narrow (dictated by the aspect ratio of a paperback cover), frequently use a pyramid composition where everything piles up to a dramatic figure in the centre (often top-lit so that the features and lower body dissolve into shadow). Then, very rapidly, the imagery bleeds out into a patchwork of shadows and menacing figures half-glimpsed in the background, which might be real or just phantoms. It’s a very powerful combination that other commercial artists have found hard to match.

Admittedly his paintings of women are less assured than those of the men, his females are usually draped over scenery like large plumped-up cushions. While most of his men are clearly self-portraits (especially John Carter) his women often look like someone’s stuck the head of a twelve-year old girl on top of a stripper. Having said that, they are refreshingly chunky-looking, unlike the anodyne aerobics instructors of later imitators , and occasionally his action shots of heroines matched those of his heroes. Dejah Thoris’s bum in this painting of John Carter fighting the apes of Mars is a stroke of compositional genius.

John Carter, Tars Tarkas, a load of Apes and a bit of Dejah Thoris

Thirty years of post-modern cynicism, and thousands of inferior imitators, have sadly led to both Frazetta and Conan being relegated to the realms of amusing kitsch. As T. S. Eliot famously said, between the conception and the creation falls the shadow. In the documentary John Milius proudly states that the orgy scene in Conan the Barbarian was directly influenced by Frazetta. Cut to half a dozen surfer dudes and babes in faux classical costumes rolling around in a cheap set with totally unmotivated lighting. Chaining a topless girl to a pillar does not a Frazetta image make, and yet Sword and Sorcery is now wedded to images of Arnie running round soft porn sets in furry underpants, and Frazetta’s wonderful paintings suffer by association.

Self Portrait

Frank Frazetta was an amazing artist by any standards, and despite his own aw-shucks self-deprecation, a surprisingly dedicated and focussed craftsman. After a series of debilitating strokes he taught himself to paint and draw with his left hand, and while he never matched the brilliance of his work in the 60s he managed to produce some pretty impressive watercolours. Perhaps one day someone will have the courage to bring his Conan to life in a serious reboot.

Minecraft Memory Palace

Posted on June 9, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Minecraft is limited only by your imagination

I’ve been a fan of memory systems for years, especially the Memory Palace method of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Known as the ‘System of Locii’ this is based on the principle of using places to remember things. This is how it works – you think of somewhere you know (such as your house) and in your imagination you divide it into specific locations (bathroom, bedroom etc.). When you want to memorise things you create exaggerated images or symbols and, in your imagination, place them in the locations you’ve chosen. When the time comes to recall the information you mentally walk through your chosen place and as you enter each room you will ‘see’ the images of the things you want to remember. To give a really pedestrian example – let’s say you need to buy oranges, chicken and milk. In your imagination you might fill your bath with oranges, have a giant chicken sitting on your bed and a cow being milked on the landing. When you visit the shops you imagine you’re back at home and when you see the images in your mind you remember what you wanted to buy.

Renaissance memory palace in the form of a theatre.

The system is incredibly powerful, and was developed and used for thousands of years. The advent of print meant that people no longer had to commit huge amounts of information to memory and the ‘art’ went underground (it was also associated with Alchemy, and therefore regarded with suspicion by the Church). It became a trade secret among stage magicians and others who continued to tap into its amazing ability to fix information in our heads. Most card counters use a variation of the Memory Palace system to make huge amounts of money in the casinos, before they get found out and their photos circulated on the banned lists. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggests that it taps into fundamental structures of the human mind, our ability to navigate space combined with our imagination, which is why it works so well.

The example of a shopping list I gave above is not particularly interesting, but the Memory Palace can be used to remember incredible amounts of data. At the moment I’m using it to memorise European history on a year by year basis from 0 AD (I’m up to 1500). To give another example, in my imagination I can see a Mafia boss eating an ant pie in Ilkley Station in Yorkshire. This tells me that the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius ascended the throne in 138AD (I’ve introduced a second memory system here which is used for numbers, the Mafia boss represents the number 38). Now, when I get bored with long train journeys, I can ‘walk’ through history in my head.

Minecraft – limitless sandbox for building memory palaces.

Creating a Memory Palace takes time and practice and there are disadvantages to using real places. Typically you will associate a whole range of extraneous information with a location in the actual world. I can’t think of my home without including my family and the cats, and they can get in the way of the things I want to remember. The problem is exacerbated in public spaces. I have to make the mental effort of emptying Ilkley Station of people before I stick my image on the platform. The alternative is to create imaginary locations – palaces and villas of the mind – but these can often be difficult to visualise as accurately as a real place, and so the associated imagery is weaker. These were two things I struggled with until I came across Minecraft.

For anyone who’s been living in a cave for the last few years, Minecraft is a sandbox game that allows you to build anything you like in an infinite world using simple blocks. It’s essentially a virtual version of Lego, though you are limited entirely to cubes. It has two modes – Survival and Creative. In Survival mode you have to mine for materials to make things to defend yourself against randomly spawned monsters. In Creative mode you have access to all the building blocks, and don’t have to struggle against enemies. I’m using Creative Mode to build memory palaces and the results are fantastic. It gets round the problems of random association you get with real places, and gives concrete form to imaginary buildings, making them more ‘real’. Right now I’m using it to learn the periodic table of elements – here’s a quick tour of a section of my Minecraft Memory Palace:

Transitional Metals in the Periodic Table

This is part of the palace devoted to Transitional Metals on the periodic table (hence the big TM on the wall).

This room contains images for four elements. The tree represents Tantalum, it’s the tree from Hades that held the fruit that blew out of reach whenever Tantalus reached up to eat it. The big pink tongue is Tungsten, and the blue box is a box of Rennies indigestion tablets (Rhenium). Through the archway is Osmium.

Osmium

Below is the cave of the Sybil, deep underground where I have built a complex of rooms for the Alkaline Earth Metals. In here is Beryllium.

Minecraft is crude and blocky, and you have to use your imagination to fill in the details. This is actually a good thing because, in the end, the information sits in your brain. That means I can review my knowledge of the periodic table by ‘walking’ through my Memory Palace in Minecraft, or in my head when I have nothing else to do. Each walkthrough reinforces the information, embedding it in my long-term memory. This is only the beginning, Minecraft is such fun to play with I’m adding rooms for all sorts of things I need to remember for work, my writing and my own learning. You could use this system to build entire plots for novels, for example. You can also add information as you come across it. I’m using a memory system for remembering numbers that uses famous people. For example, King Arthur is the number 74. By having him stick Excalibur in the big pink tongue I remember that the Atomic Number of Tungsten is 74.

The classic book on Memory Palaces is Francis Yates’ The Art of Memory. The best contemporary guide I’ve come across on how to build such a palace is Dominic O’Brien’s How to Pass Exams. Minecraft can be downloaded from here.

The Castle of Otranto

Posted on June 6, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Villain confronted by a bit of giant ghost.

There’s one school of thought, kicked off by Brian Aldiss in his book A Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973), that says that Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know it started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her novel came at the end of the original Gothic movement in literature, and carried with it a whole bunch of themes and ideas from that genre that still permeate SF. Nowadays the Gothic is used to describe just about anything wearing black lace under a full moon feeling a bit undernourished and hormonal. Between 1765 and the mid 1830s Gothic had a very precise meaning – it referred to the early horror novels (and, on occasion, poems) that flooded the market and were obsessively consumed by the kind of young middle-class ladies that Jane Austen described in her own books (most notably Northanger Abbey). The tome that started it all off was The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole.

The Castle of Otranto had the same effect on the reading public as Fifty Shades of Grey (OK, without the sex). It was overblown, preposterous, badly written and yet it captured the public imagination and spawned an entire movement. To give you an idea of the subtle Hemingway-esque prose here’s the scene when the Princess Hippolita faints after her son is squashed under an enormous helmet that has just fallen from the sky -

The domestics, without observing the singularity of this direction, were guided by their affection to their mistress, to consider it as peculiarly addressed to her situation, and flew to her assistance. They conveyed her to her chamber more dead than alive, and indifferent to all the strange circumstances she heard, except the death of her son.

It doesn’t exactly flow off the page, although readers were more accustomed to this kind of purple prose in the mid-eighteenth century.

Frontispiece to the first edition, claiming the book was a translation of an ancient manuscript.

Walpole set out to imitate Shakespeare, specifically Hamlet, and to create a new type of novel based on the Jacobean tragedy. Prior to this most literature looked to the Greek and Roman classics for inspiration, emphasising order and decorum. Unfortunately you can only imitate Homer and Virgil so many times and readers were getting bored. The Castle of Otranto was a complete breath of fresh air, and set the model for years to come. The key features of the Gothic as contained in Walpole’s book were as follows:

1) The story was set in a quasi-medieval past dotted with castles and ruins. This was unusual in itself, but the book also claimed to be an original medieval manuscript of an Italian author ‘Onuphrio Muralto’ who Walpole had ‘discovered’. This was partly because the real author didn’t want to be associated with the novel if it bombed. It also set the trend for many Gothic writers to produce ‘authentic’ manuscripts from the past. James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1760) is the most notorious example of this. For years people genuinely thought they were written by ancient Scottish bards. After Otranto the past was no longer filled with polite Romans and Greeks, now it was a romantic wilderness of ruins, wild passions and sexy barbarians.

The giant helmet.

2) The book had a ghost, in fact it had a whopping huge ghost in armour that stalked about the castle, dropping things on people. You don’t see the whole spectre until the end of the book, prior to that it’s just fleeting glimpses of a hand, a helmet etc. This increased the feeling of unease because it suggested there was some vast Lovecraftian awfulness lurking beyond the darkness, and we petty humans could only ever see fragments. Fragmentation is a huge theme in the Gothic novel and echoes the feeling people had that the old order was collapsing (as it did spectacularly in France in 1787).

3) Helpless heroine and cruel but sexy tyrant. Scratch the surface of any Gothic novel and underneath you find eighteenth century domesticity exaggerated to horrific proportions. At the end of the day most of these tales are about a young girl who is in love with Dopey Hero A and lusted after by Sneering, Sardonic (but dangerously attractive) Villain B, who kidnaps her and carries her off to his castle. Even better if Obstinate Father C is forcing her to marry Villain B against her will. Young Claribel would be reading this while glancing suspiciously across the parlour at her own father who had just brought that nice Parson Simpkins round for tea – and he keeps smiling at her across the cruet set.

4) A vision of the natural world as a place of untamed and terrifying beauty. Restoration society loved ordered gardens in neat rows, modelled on the Italian style. Romantic gardeners dropped fake ruins in their gardens, built secret grottoes and paid ‘hermits’ to live in them and jump out at visitors. Heroines would often pause mid-escape (or in some cases, mid-ravishment) to look up at the storms playing across the Alps and exclaim ‘What a sublime prospect affords itself to the ocular organ!’ (trans. ‘Wow, look at that!’). The word awful is often used to describe scenery – literally meaning that it fills the mind with awe.

The Castle of Otranto sparked off a flood of imitators, spawned a massively successful commercial genre, and almost single-handedly paved the way for the Horror and Science Fiction novel. The Gothic novel reached maturity with the writings of Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is held by many to be the best of the genre. Towards the end there was a move away from Castles and Ghosts towards more introspective studies of human madness (Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg being two good examples). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the tag end of the movement, and lacks many of the standard tropes, but still retains the unsettling ideas of fragmentation, uncontrollable nature and melodramatic themes taken from Jacobean drama and Milton’s universe.

Aeon Flux – the animated series

Posted on May 31, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Aeon Flux

I stumbled across Cyberpunk when living in Tokyo. This had both its advantages and disadvantages. Half the time it felt like I was living in a true William Gibson world, especially when walking through Shinjuku at night or hanging out in some grungy bar where cyber geeks rubbed shoulders with the Yakuza. Unfortunately it only took a trip down the admin office or the local bank to burst the whole romantic bubble. Corporate samurai only exist in westerner’s heads. In reality you end up sitting opposite hassled Mr Yamamoto who doesn’t know one end of a PC keyboard from another, fills out endless forms in laborious handwriting and then ‘signs’ it with his personal wooden ink stamp. Ordinary day-to-day Japan is disappointingly lo-tech.

Anyway it was here that I stumbled across Aeon Flux. As the title says, this wasn’t the abysmal 2005 film starring Charlize Theron, but the original uber-cool animation series produced by Peter Chung. In the 90s MTV showcased a number of experimental cartoons combining deeply bizarre concepts with weird visuals and generally incomprehensible storylines. The Head (man wakes up with swollen head containing a wise-cracking alien called Roy), The Maxx (homeless man is super rabbit in alternate universe, I think, actually I need to watch it again) and Aeon Flux being three examples.

Aeon Flux is set in a dystopian future centred around two nations, Monica and Bregna. The stories largely consist of cat and mouse games between the leader of Bregna, Trevor Goodchild, and the sexy leather-clad (and heavily into S&M) agent Aeon Flux – the two of them clearly have an ongoing love/hate relationship.

The first thing that hit me about the original series was the visual style. All the characters are drawn using a frenetic, angular line that on occasion makes them looked deformed or anorexic. Aeon in particular, despite being the supposed sexy dominatrix, has hip bones you could cut cheese with, and skin like a plastic bag. Faces are often drawn with anatomical detail bordering on the clinically unpleasant (especially mouths). This completely threw me until I realised that Peter Chung based his character art on the Austrian artist Egon Schiele (a huge favourite of mine).

The second thing that was odd, especially in the short mini-episodes, was that Aeon died in most stories, usually through some inane trick of fate such as accidentally hanging herself or stepping on a nail and falling to her death. Occasionally her end was deserved, but more often than not there seemed to be no relationship between the plot and her demise.

Aeon’s nemesis – Trevor Goodchild

Indeed, it rapidly becomes clear that Aeon is a nasty piece of work. She is brutal, vindictive and often seems quite stupid. Trevor Goodchild concocts endless schemes, some of which do seem to have a noble aim (for example, in The Purge he creates artificial consciences to make people good). Aeon seeks to deliberately destroy each one, driven by nothing more than an anarchic impulse to cross Trevor, while blowing things up and shooting people. In the end you sympathise with Goodchild. Despite the fact that Aeon exudes sex and has a voice like melted chocolate, you just want him to execute the malevolent bugger and have done with it.

Aeon on the rampage

Finally the stories frequently elide into the completely surreal. To give an example, in the episode Utopia or Deuteranopia? Trevor Goodchild has kidnapped the previous ruler of Bregna, Clavius, and created a boudoir inside the man’s body (stay with me here) where he plans to have sex with Aeon Flux. At one point he gets lost and ends up at the end of a red-velvet lined corridor (again, inside Clavius) looking out across a wooded landscape. You really don’t want to be watching this late at night. Peter Chung would frequently take standard action scenarios (Aeon storming a fortress and killing lots of people) beyond the point of absurdity (she kills so many Monican guards that the entire complex ends up waist deep in blood). The plots frequently implode on themselves, becoming incomprehensible, but the whole series exudes such style and intelligence that you don’t really care.

Alien, from the episode ‘End Sinister’

Sadly the live action film Aeon Flux (2005), starring Charlize Theron, eclipsed the original series with what can only be (politely) described as a steaming heap of crap. Type in Aeon Flux into Google and you’re bombarded with photos of Theron in black spandex interspersed with one or two pieces of artwork from the cartoons. I don’t want to dignify the movie by dwelling on it here, Peter Chung’s response to the premiere was that the film made him “feel helpless, humiliated, and sad”.

Fortunately the complete series is available on DVD, and can be ordered from Amazon. If you like anything to do with animation, Cyberpunk (or even Egon Schiele) I highly recommend it.

White Tiger (2012)

Posted on May 23, 2013 by John Guy Collick

White Tiger: Directed by Karen Shakhnazarov. With Aleksey Vertkov, Vitaliy Kishchenko

Spoiler Alert – if you haven’t seen the film and plan on doing so, watch it first then read this.

This is a very odd Russian symbolist fantasy set during the Second World War, and based very loosely on Moby Dick. After a battle on the Eastern Front a tank driver is found with 90% burns over his body, but miraculously he heals completely. He tells of a white German Tiger tank that appears out of nowhere, is seemingly invincible, and disappears just as mysteriously. Other people have heard of the myth, including captured German officers who are clearly just as fearful of the strange war machine, though they claim it is the ‘triumph of German genius’. The Russians build their own super tank and assemble a crew, including the driver who’s been given the name Naidyonov (‘found’). He now claims that tanks talk to him, warning of the approach of the ghostly enemy. It’s also clear that there now exists a weird symbiotic relationship between the two, which allows him to sense when it is lurking out in the dark forests of the Eastern Front. The new prototype trundles off in pursuit of its quarry, ready for the final showdown, at which point the needle on the Existential Enigmaticometer goes off the scale.

Tank driver Naidyonov watching out for his nemesis

On the surface White Tiger seems to be a straight forward fantasy/horror war film. There’ve been a few in the past, usually on the lines of Nazi Occult experiments Awaken Age-old Evil, The Keep (1984) and the more recent Outpost (2008) being two examples. As a genre it hasn’t really gained much traction. After Saving Private Ryan (1998) news-reel style realism of the real brutalities of war make the addition of fantasy or horror a bit of trite, pointless exercise. It’s clear from the mixed reception White Tiger has received that most people find it confusing. It looks like a standard war film – an accurate portrayal of tank warfare from the Russian side filmed in washed out muddy tones and pulling no punches in its depiction of the merciless slog of combat – but it’s clearly not. Neither is it a horror film – ghostly Nazi tank powered by ancient evil hunted down by Soviet hero blessed with Wolverine powers of regeneration. Halfway in and you realise you’re watching a far subtler symbolist study of obsession and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of the remorseless march of brutal history.

The White Tiger itself

The film it’s closest to in my mind is Tarkovsky’s utterly brilliant (and infinitely better than the George Clooney version) Solaris (1972), in which a group of scientists orbit a vast sentient planet-sized ocean. It’s clearly trying to communicate, but is fundamentally incomprehensible. There’s a Russian phrase, ‘kitchen intellectuals’, which refers to the feeling of powerlessness felt by the intelligentsia during the Soviet era. They understand the world around them, and they want to engage with it and play a meaningful role, but in the society of the time they are useless. So they gather in the kitchen at parties and talk about life, the universe and everything. In Solaris the scientists are kitchen intellectuals hovering above this massive, powerful force they have no control over. In White Tiger, the ghostly German tank is a similar unstoppable power. Even after the Germans have surrendered Naidyonov still stands at the edge of the forest waiting for the White Tiger, “He’s waiting, he is, he’ll wait twenty years, fifty, maybe a hundred.” All the characters in the film, Soviet, German, soldiers and generals hover around the edges of this incomprehensible mystery – looking generally confused. The film ends with a bizarre scene in which Hitler himself gives a grotesquely self-serving speech of justification before a man sitting in shadow (the devil perhaps?), finishing by claiming that war is the natural human state (‘weren’t me, Officer, it was the Human Condition what done it’). It’s the vision of history with which Tolstoy ended War and Peace – things happen, populations rise and fall, wars come and go, and no-one has a clue why, or how to change it.

So, if you like thoughtful cinema and prefer to watch Russian films wearing a black turtle-neck with your chin on your fist then I hugely recommend White Tiger – it’ll certainly give you plenty to talk about in the kitchen at parties. If you just want a knockabout war film, or a bit of Occult Nazi Horror then I’d look elsewhere.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

Posted on May 14, 2013 by John Guy Collick

I’ve just finished reading the collection of essays Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. The book is designed to counter the increasing number of what it politely refers to as ‘anti-Stratfordians’ – those who believe that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the plays attributed to him. A couple of years ago James Shapiro wrote Contested Will, a history of the Shakespeare deniers from Delia Bacon and her hunch that the real author was Francis Bacon (there’s a surprise), through the appositely named John Looney to people like Derek Jacobi, who really should know better. This new book is a more academic refutation of the varied conspiracy theories out there, linked to explanations of how a dramatist like Shakespeare would have actually crafted his plays, and explanations as to why the Shakespeare deniers exist. The tone of the book is that of a group of baffled professors peering out of the literature faculty window at a bunch of nutters jumping up and down waving banners and shouting in the car park. While the essays are short, they are carefully rigorous and at times a little bit laboured. My experience is that conspiracy theorists tend not to respond to the subtle investigation of evidence as their own beliefs paint over reality in broad lurid colours. Having said that this collection does a very comprehensive job of exposing the fallacies behind their ideas. The key points are summarised below, please feel free to print off and keep in your back pocket in case you meet a wild-eyed Baconite or Oxfordian at a party:

1) Shakespeare-deniers believe in the Romantic notion that an author can only write about what he or she knows (their theories date from the mid-Victorian era, no-one before that questioned the authorship of the plays). Shakespeare’s plays talk about kings and queens, and foreign lands. Therefore only someone posh and widely travelled could have written the plays. This is bollocks. As far as I know Kim Stanley Robinson has never been to Mars and George R. R. Martin has never visited Westeros, yet they have managed to do a perfectly good job of describing both. Assume that writers can only describe what they themselves have experienced and in one fell swoop you have wiped out Science Fiction and Fantasy.

2) There is hardly any evidence of Shakespeare’s life. Huge gaps exist in the timeline. Well, you can say this about all his contemporaries. We know more about Shakespeare than Christopher Marlowe or John Fletcher, and no-one doubts the authorship of their plays. In this period in history people didn’t write down the day to day ephemera of people’s lives, they didn’t think it important. It’s only with the rise of journalism and the novel at the end of the 17th century that people’s lives become serious objects of interest. Having said that Stanley Wells painstakingly lists all the references to ‘Will Shakspear Wot Wrote Thyse Playes’ and there are loads.

3) Shakespeare-deniers misunderstand the way in which plays were written in this period. They subscribe to the Romantic notion of a single author in a garret penning Great Works and then handing them over to the actors (as in Shakespeare in Love or that steaming heap of dung Anonymous). This, again, is nonsense. Plays were written collaboratively by teams, often including the actors themselves. Shakespeare worked with others on many plays, and we can see the hand of Christopher Marlowe and John Fletcher in plays like Timon of Athens and Macbeth, to take two examples. The best analogy is of a team of script writers working on a film or TV series. Shakespeare, Marlowe and an actor (for example, Will Kemp) would get together down the tavern and thrash out a scene, testing lines of verse, entrances and exits, working out blocking with coins on the tavern table. They might say to Shakespeare ‘I need a stonking good speech for my entrance in Act III but make it short because I’ll be knackered after the duel’ and Will would sit in a corner and come up with something, but the idea that Shakespeare sat in a room on his own or under a tree penning Great Art is a Victorian fantasy.

Anonymous (2011) – utter nonsense from start to finish

4) Conspiracy theorists love a conspiracy, and each one tries to out-do the others with their own pet theories. Hence there are now about 80 contenders for the ‘real author’ of the plays, including Queen Elizabeth herself. The law of diminishing returns kicks in here, because every new addition to the cast list undermines the case for all the others. It reminds me of the wonderful comment by a Beefeater Tour Guide at the Tower of London – ‘If you think you are Anne Boleyn reincarnated you are certifiably insane, I meet four of you every year and you can’t all be right.’

An Elizabethan play sketched by Johannes de Witt in 1596. One theory suggests this is a scene from Hamlet with Richard Burbage as the Prince. If that is the case then the Ghost of Hamlet's father (figure on the right) was played by Shakespeare himself.

An Elizabethan play sketched by Johannes de Witt in 1596. One theory suggests this is Hamlet with Richard Burbage as the Prince. If that is the case then the Ghost of Hamlet’s father (figure on the right) was played by Shakespeare himself.

The last point throws an interesting light on conspiracy theorists in general. I’ve met enough Shakespeare-deniers and Moon-hoax advocates to spot a constant note of underlying smug triumphalism – along the lines of ‘I know the real truth, unlike you deluded saps’. Latching onto a wild-eyed theory that flies into the face of established knowledge has the dual effect of making you feel smarter than the unenlightened and somehow a rebel. The rise of the internet has given amateur ‘scholars’ a free platform for all sorts of theories without the inconvenience of careful peer review. Conspiracy theories are also sexier and more mysterious than reality. We have yet to see a decent film of Shakespeare’s life with the same apparent high-mindedness and production values of Anonymous.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is a great collection of essays, and a small calm voice of reason amid the shouty nonsense. I doubt most Shakespeare-deniers will read it though. In the end I always think that the best response to conspiracy theorists is that of Buzz Aldrin when challenged by Moon-Hoax advocate Bart Sibrel.

Thumb available in paperback!

Posted on May 10, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Thumb is now available in paperback from Amazon, priced $9.99 in the US, £7.99 in the UK and €11.17 in Europe. I confess to being biased but I’m really happy with the quality – the book looks and feels nicer than a lot of standard trade paperbacks. Anyway, the links to buy the book are below. If you do buy it and enjoy it, please spread the word to others you think may be interested, and also let me know what you thought.

Buy the paperback edition from Amazon.com

Buy the paperback edition from Amazon.co.uk

It should gradually come on line in the other European Amazon sites, the French Amazon says that stock is currently ruptured – I failed my ‘O’ level French with an unclassified mark (in the words of Nanny Slagg, I was ‘lowest of the low’), but I’m hoping this is French for not available and doesn’t refer to the poor guy who’s had to cart boxes of my books around.

You can also see some bookmarks in the photo at the top of the post. I had these printed off to hand out to people as I thought they would be more useful than just flyers or posters. If you would like to help me promote Thumb and you know of Science Fiction fans in need of bookmarks please let me know and I will send you some.

The Singing Ringing Tree

Posted on April 30, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Creepy bear and terrifying goldfish

For a certain generation in the UK, The Singing Ringing Tree, an East German take on a Grimm-style fairy tale is indelibly carved on our psyches, giving us all the screaming habdabs for years. Many of us still wake up crying in the middle of the night over fading visions of large plastic goldfish, grizzly bear ones-ies and false lemon-coloured beards.

The Golden Age of Children’s TV in the UK stretched from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s and was dominated by BBC1. Between 4.20pm and 6pm every weekday they showed programmes for kids. As part of their schedules they included serials from abroad,. Anyone who was a child in the 1960s will instantly recognise the theme tune to the French version of Robinson Crusoe, or The Flashing Blade. The Singing Ringing Tree was unusual in that it came from behind the Iron Curtain. How it made its way onto British TVs during the Cold War is a mystery, perhaps it was a KGB plot designed to paralyse the nation with terror like Sadako’s video in Ringu.

Haughty Princess and stunningly thick Prince

The plot is pretty straightforward. A haughty princess tells a handsome prince that she’ll marry him if he brings her the famous Singing Ringing Tree. The suitor finds the tree in a fairy kingdom in the mountains, presided over by a dwarf who tells him that if the tree refuses to ring by sunset then the prince will be his, oh and by the way the tree will only ring if the princess loves the prince. The prince, whose boundless faith in human goodness is only outdone by his utter stupidity, takes the tree to his beloved. The tree doesn’t oblige and the prince ends up in thrall to the dwarf. He also turns into a bear. Understandably miffed at the way things have turned out the bear captures the princess and takes her back to the kingdom in the mountains. I won’t give the rest of the plot of the way for those who summon up the courage to watch it, this site covers it in far more detail than I feel comfortable with.

What makes the film especially creepy is the hysterical artificiality of the production. It was shot entirely in the studio using technicolor cranked up several notches. The costumes, sets and make-up have no pretensions to any kind of realism (I know it’s a fairly tale but other kids programs from the same era did have a stab at suspending belief). The prince’s bear suit is rubbish – you can see his fingers poking out of the end of the fake paws and the giant plastic goldfish with rolling eyes is precisely that. The overall impression is of a bunch of creepy playroom toys come to life, and therein lies (I think) the reason for The Singing Ringing Tree‘s enduring terror.

Creepy bear and infinitely more attractive Princess

Years ago I wrote an article on the Grotesque in Dickens, Kafka and Mervyn Peake. The Grotesque is a sub genre of fantasy which is characterised by absurdity, sudden frightening shifts of perspective, a sense of helplessness and an inability to distinguish between inanimate objects and living things. It’s a type of art which whips away all normal frames of reference, and is typically associated with the viewpoint of children, or an arrested childhood consciousness (both Dickens and Kafka suffered from this as a result of their dysfunctional relationship with their fathers). Essentially Grotesque art is a dream plonked into reality, and this description fits The Singing Ringing Tree perfectly. Everything looks fake, odd and saturated in disorienting colour. Take the goldfish, it’s obviously a big phoney cellophane fish with rolling eyes, which makes it far more frightening than a realistic 3D CG fish, because it shouldn’t be moving around of its own volition. Combined with some neat cinematic tricks (reverse photography, time lapse and double-exposure cellophane fire) obviously influenced by La Belle et la Bête, the overall impression is disturbing to say the least. You half expect everyone to rip off their masks and reveal Lovecraftian horrors at any moment. In the original TV viewing the BBC recorded a narrator telling the story over the top of the original, so you can hear the actors saying stuff in some outlandish foreign tongue, probably incantations to summon Nyarlathotep.

Tyrion Lannister’s dad

High spots include,

1) The scene where the princess behaves like a brat in fairy land, punctuated by mocking laughter from the dwarf who, at one point, sits in a bunch of cotton wool clouds.

2) The fact that the princess with green hair and an upturned nose is infinitely prettier than the heavily made up plastic blonde that signifies her beautiful self.

3) The deeply weird bit where the dwarf sticks his head through a cliff face, which then re-assembles itself over his face in reverse motion.

4) The idiot prince who despite taking four days to find the fairy kingdom, blithely accepts that he must give the tree to the princess and get it to sing by sunset on the same day that he found it.

5) The musical bridge with the prince’s horse turned into stone.

The Singing Ringing Tree is available on DVD, fully restored to all its glory and with an interview with the actress who played the Princess.

The British comedy series The Fast Show did a wonderful spoof - Ton Swingingen Ringingen Bingingen Plingingen Tingingen Plinkingen Plonkingen Boingingen Triee

Thumb – Out Now!

Posted on April 24, 2013 by John Guy Collick

The universe is empty. The stars are dead. The worlds are no more.

The last humans struggle to create a god to save them from the utter end. In the shadow of this colossus Max Ocel rescues a beautiful stranger from the clutches of an insane giant, and sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to wipe out mankind itself.

Invincible battleships bear down on the ancient city of Metacarpi. Assassins stalk the stone tower of his childhood. Alien creatures gather in the darkness. Max faces the realisation that he must sacrifice everything he holds dear to save humanity.

Thumb – the first volume in The Book of the Colossus, a gripping fast-paced science fantasy series of incredible imagination.

Thumb is now available from Amazon as an ebook for the Kindle. You can download it from the following Amazon sites:

A paperback version will follow shortly. As with all Kindle ebooks you can download a sample to read before you decide to buy. If you do buy Thumb and enjoy it please tell your friends.

And so, in the words of the 18 year old girl who wrote the first Science Fiction book two hundred years ago;

I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper…

Countdown to Thumb

Posted on April 16, 2013 by John Guy Collick

A flat singularity carried the unfinished body of God through an empty universe. The colossus lay on his back, a being so vast he might easily have put his arms around a world, if any still existed. His left hand rested palm upwards. In the shadow of the Thumb a brass and wooden flying machine sped southwards. Max Ocel sat in the forward cabin of the Bricolage. If he glanced through the porthole to his right he could see the Knuckle, thousands of miles away, like a wall cutting the sky in half.

With Thumb on the verge of release I thought I’d write a short post on some of the ideas behind the book, and where the inspiration came from. In true Gothic style, the novel started with a dream I had about 20 years ago. I saw a bald-headed man in blue robes standing in a desert in front of a giant hand. The image started a train of thought – the hand belonged to a colossus that the last people were frantically building to save them from some disaster. But they’d been building it for so long they’d forgotten the original purpose, and instead they’d splintered into factions at war with each other; Head against Hand, Heart against Mind etc.

Each time I revisited the idea the colossus got larger, until in the end he was half a million miles from head to toe, (that’s about ten times the circumference of the Earth). Of course no human planet would be big enough to support such a mannequin, so in Thumb, long after all the last worlds and stars have vanished, this new god lies on a flat singularity while all around him the last remnants of mankind beaver away creating him. The hero, Max Ocel, comes from the town of Metacarpi, in the shadow of the left thumb. It’s an unimportant backwater, but for some reason it’s become the centre of a struggle between empires both human and inhuman. The cause stems from a dark secret in Max’s past, which ultimately leads to a revelation that will determine the fate of mankind.

I wrote the first version of Thumb eight years ago, then abandoned it for a while as I concentrated on screenplays and articles. Thumb Version One was closer to Kafka, more absurdist in its premise and the universe it described. Thumb Version Two still has echoes of that first strange realm at the end of time, but now it’s a science fantasy adventure – Indiana Jones meets Kafka – and the first in a series of four volumes. It’ll be out very soon, and then it’s straight into writing the next book; Ragged Claws.

On and on I sped into futurity...