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Europa Report (2013)

Posted on April 8, 2014 by John Guy Collick

Spoiler Alert

News from Space last week confirmed the existence of an ocean underneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Furthermore it seems that this immense body of water is in contact with the moon’s rocky core, allowing minerals to leach into the sea. Chemicals, water and tidal heating caused by Saturn’s gravity point to the tantalising possibility of life. The only way to find out, of course, is to drill through the ice and have a look, a plan that’s been on the cards for Jupiter’s moon Europa for many years, and which forms the background to the found-footage SF movie Europa Report.

For a while it seemed that the completely ridiculous Apollo 18, with its moon rock spiders, had pretty well put the nail in the coffin of the found-footage SF genre and the horror versions were tying themselves in increasing knots. I know modern dads sometimes hide behind the video camera to avoid engaging with their families but if I’m rescuing my daughter from a coven of witches I want one hand to hold the kid, and one hand to hold the tyre iron, not a bloody handy cam, but hey ho. Anyway just when we all thought grainy video footage had had its day as a plot device, Europa Report breathes fresh life into the conceit, combining hard realism with a pretty engaging story.

The Mission Crew – slightly more competent than the BBC’s band of muppets.

The release schedule of Europa Report was frustratingly odd. It came out on the US iTunes in 2013 as a download but wasn’t available here until this Spring, probably to coincide with the release of Gravity on DVD so it could ride on the coattails of that movie. Apart from obvious similarities to 2001, Sunshine and Gravity in its hard science approach to near-space exploration the closest ancestor is the BBC TV series Space Odyssey: A Voyage to the Planets, produced by the BBC in 2004 as a quasi-documentary tour of the universe taking in Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, a fictional comet and Pluto. It was an oddly unsatisfying two-part series that didn’t really work as science or drama, and underscored a lot of the problems facing film makers trying to create realistic space journeys that have enough drama and interest to sustain a couple of hours.

The sheer terrifying loneliness of space.

The basic problem is that in between taking off and landing space flight is deadly dull and the writers are left with very little to work on. The choices are

a) Things Go Wrong – which can be pretty exciting and spectacular in the case of Gravity or Apollo 13 where things go really wrong. For the BBC documentary and Europa Report things can’t go too wrong, because then you’ve lost the mission. So things go a bit wrong and people gather anxiously around readouts muttering things like ‘I’m seeing a voltage spike on the KU-BAND Circuit Breakers on Panel R15’, which means bugger-all to anyone. The only alternative to this is Crewman Spectacularly Cocks Up

b) Crewman Spectacularly Cocks Up – and boy did they cock up in the BBC documentary. Whoever put this lot in charge of a multi-trillion dollar spaceship needs a quiet talking to. Nearly everything went wrong and a lot of it was down to human error – i.e. dithering around in lethal radiation zones, getting too close to the asteroid so the ship nearly got atomised, staying too long on Venus/Mars/the Comet etc etc. Inevitably this triggers the Crewman Dies scenario, followed by the Guilty Crewman Mopes Around. This can trigger Crewman Goes Barmy but then you are into the realm of Apollo 18 as real astronauts just sit on bunks and sulk instead of chasing the others round the ship with a hammer or a knife and fork like Big Jim in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

Landing on Europa

So in Europa Report we get Crewman Spectacularly Cocks Up when Sharlto Copley gets Hydrazine all over his suit while performing a routine EVA and so has to be left to die in space, followed by Guilty Crewman Mopes Around when Michael Nyqvist’s character goes all Scandinavian and broody because he thinks it was his fault. We almost get Crewman Goes Barmy because he sees things moving around outside when they land on Europa and everyone else exchanges glances and twiddles their fingers next to their temples. Of course anyone with a fraction of a brain would be going ‘Bloody hell, where?’ but this is Seriously Real Space Stuff so instead they gather round readouts going ‘Maybe it’s a voltage spike on the KU-BAND Circuit Breakers on Panel R15’. From then on the film is just one string of disasters after another, people falling through the ice, engines going wrong, the ship falling back onto the ice, everyone else falling through the ice again until we get the final OMG scene at the very end, which to be honest was expected all along but is still impressive despite that.

Stepping onto the surface.

To be fair, although the film, like every Lovecraft story ever written, rides well-worn tracks to the final reveal it is still an impressive and eminently watchable movie, and before Gravity came along a delightfully refreshing break from overblown action SF spectaculars like Oblivion and Pacific Rim. The cast, on the whole, act well even if their roles are a bit obvious. Sharlto Copley reprises his goofily enthusiastic Wikus from District 9, Michael Nyqvist does Gloomy Swede and Christian Camargo looks and sounds like Mr Spock as the science officer. The real star of the show is, for me, Anamaria Marinca as the pilot Rosa. The way she switches between I’m Going To Die terror and sheer, wondrous curiosity in the final few moments is very moving, flattened somewhat by Embeth Daviditz’s wholly unecessary ‘Well that really shook up our understanding of the universe, didn’t it?’ speech in which she seems to be trying to channel Margaret Thatcher’s accent.

In terms of cinematography and pacing, the film is spot on. Although ultra realistic space flight tends to consist of scrapyard vessels motionless against a black background, the special effects and imagery work beautifully to give a real sense of a journey travelling far beyond the limits of what’s decent. While the film might now be completely overshadowed by Gravity, it’s an unfair comparison as it has its own intelligent and considered pace that rewards careful watching.

Ragged Claws out now!

Posted on March 14, 2014 by John Guy Collick

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Ragged Claws

by John Guy Collick

Giveaway ends March 31, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Ragged Claws, second volume in The Book of the Colossus, is available on Amazon as an eBook and a paperback, and on Smashwords. Apple, Kobo and Barnes and Noble will follow shortly.

To order from Amazon.com click here.

To order from Amazon.co.uk click here.

To order from Smashwords click here.

To order from Createspace click here.

Ragged Claws, like its predecessor Thumb, is set at the very end of the universe, when all the stars and planets have dissolved into quantum ash. The last remnants of humanity live on an immense, flat singularity created for them by the alien race known as the Black Roses. Covered in the remnants of ground-up worlds this wilderness has become a workbench on which mankind is building a god. The titan, half a million-miles long from head to toe, will come to life and carry humanity to a new universe. Because there is nothing left at the end of time the materials to build the colossus are plundered from the past via wormholes punched through the singularity. These swiftly-fading portals also provide the last people with the clothes, food and artifacts they need to survive and so the realms of Ragged Claws are a patchwork of tatterdemalion kingdoms in which diesel-powered flyers fight battles inside the caverns of God’s body with guns and missiles, and men and machines are fused together into monstrous hybrids using science so rarefied it has become arcane magic.

The Great Task has taken a million years and is reaching completion, but over the long aeons most people have forgotten its purpose and turned on each other, building empires and kingdoms that plot, go to war, conquer, rise and fall. Max Ocel and Abby Fabrice are making their way through the shadowed interstices of the titan’s body in search of the Machine Men. Max carries him with a terrible secret that will condemn all of mankind to destruction and he finds himself in a race against time, pursued by enemies human and inhuman, and betrayed by those closest to him.

If you want to find out more about the universe of The Book of the Colossus, and the first book in the series, Thumb, check out this interview on Underground Book Reviews.

For those of you who have not read Thumb, the eBook version is now available at the discounted price of 77p/$1.28.

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.

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.

Visualising Ragged Claws in 3D

Posted on November 3, 2013 by John Guy Collick

The first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month. It’s hard not to keep re-reading and tinkering, but I know from experience that if you’re not careful you end up reading what’s in your head, not what’s in the manuscript itself. So to keep myself occupied I’m spending the next few weeks creating the artwork and for that I’ll be using the 3D animation software Houdini 13, which was released last week. Normally a full licence for this would cost anywhere up to $9,000. That’s if you are one of the big studios who uses it for movies like Thor: The Dark World or Gravity. For people like me there’s the ‘starving artist’ edition which is a mere $99, which is incredible really because it’s no different to the full version. The only difference is if you use this on your Hollywood blockbuster, SideFX’s lawyers will pull your toenails out.

Many many years ago (1974) BBC 2 did a series called ‘The Do-it Yourself Film Animation Show‘ which showed people how to make their own cartoons, with the help of famous animators like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, and Bob Godfrey who was responsible for the hysterical he’s-eaten-too-many-jelly-tots cartoon Roobarb. In those days the technology stretched to cut out bits of paper, felt pen and biro (which gave Roobarb it’s unmistakeable psychedelic vibe) and for the really ambitious, acrylic paint on acetate (Disney). I built myself a rostrum with bits of wood and paint cans, bought a second hand ex-Wermacht (probably) Standard 8 cine camera and made a few films. It was great and I fell in love with animation.

A couple of Vipers I built using the 3D package Lightwave.

I saw Tron in 1982 and like every other geek on the planet my jaw hit the floor with a loud clang. Even though the actual animation in the film is under 20 minutes, the potential it had for creating entirely believable fantasy and science fiction worlds captured my imagination. Over the next thirty years I tinkered on and off with different 3D computer packages, creating landscapes in Bryce 3D with its ground-breaking terrain generators, and learning how to build Battlestar Galactica Vipers in Lightwave which, for a short while, was the program of choice for budding 3D animators. The special effects in Babylon 5 and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica were both done in Lightwave.

There are essentially three levels of 3D software for those interested in having a go. At the bottom end Daz3D and Poser are used by many to populate Uncanny Valley with thousands of unfeasibly-breasted fantasy mannequins. These programs operate a bit like an Action Man or Barbie set – get a standard human figure, pull it about a bit to turn it into a character, dress it up and plonk it in a pre-designed landscape. Bingo, Thongar the Barbarian rescues Princess Mammaria from a giant Steampunk Robot. You can actually get very good results if you put in the time and effort, though it’s pretty easy to spot artwork from this end of the spectrum because of the doll-like sameness of a lot of the images (and the slightly, er, adolescent subject matter).

Houdini demo reel

There’s not as much available mid-level any more, although the wonderful free program Blender is still around. This is because 3D animation has now reached such a level of sophistication that in order to achieve the quality expected by most production houses you have to go for one of the high end professional packages. In the past these cost an arm and a leg. A lot of companies realised that this was counterproductive if they wanted to make sure that each new generation of artists were adequately skilled in their software. So they started making student editions available, which is great news for the rest of us who baulk at stumping up $9000 a licence. The professional 3D animation world is dominated by Autodesk’s Maya, and Houdini, which is odd because you will very rarely hear about the latter in 3D forums, despite being used on just about every major movie. Opening credits to Skyfall? Big splashy whale in Life of Pi? All done in Houdini. The problem is that the software uses a completely different paradigm to all the other packages, which makes it both incredibly powerful but also a bit of a challenge to learn. Once the penny drops, though, it’s fantastic to work with.

At the moment I’m working on the back cover for the book. Without giving too much away I wanted to show some strange vehicles making their way over a weird blocky landscape in an empty universe. As I mentioned before, the overall aesthetic I wanted to aim for was somewhere between the art of the German Expressionists, and the very early SF covers of the 1930s, especially those of Frank R. Paul and Wesso. I didn’t want to make it look like a super realistic vision of the future – partly because I see too much of that in movies, and partly because it takes huge teams of software engineers months to make it look good.

Test render of the strange Expressionist caravan.

So here is the strange vehicle. It had to look sinister, and slightly distorted, like a child’s toy that’s gone a bit grotesquely mad. Without going into too much technical detail, Houdini uses a procedural system that allows you to work at any stage of a model build so you can revisit earlier parts and make fundamental changes without impacting on the details you add later. In this case I decided to fatten up the wheels and angle them a bit more, to make them look reminiscent of a bug’s legs.

An early test render for the mysterious vehicles.

The next thing I wanted to create was the landscape. It’s the skin of a man-made mannequin five hundred thousand miles long, built from debris and scrap brought from the distant past. Up close it’s a wilderness of blocks, shapes and lights flung together. I’ve built a routine in Houdini that allows me to randomly generate huge swathes of this landscape. Here’s an initial render of the landscape to allow me to check the geometry of the scene.

Test render of the surface of the titan’s skin. High above the atmosphere.

At this point it’s worth stating the number 1 Golden Rule of 3D.

THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN A 3D IMAGE IS THE LIGHT

It’s also the bit that’s often ignored. After spending months building, rigging and texturing a model a lot of artists just bung in a couple of lights and end up with the kind of unmotivated and flat illumination that plagues many 3D images. Obviously with the scene set in the eternal night at the end of the universe I’ve got to get the balance right between showing a landscape plunged into darkness, lit here and there with a few guttering lamps or mystic light sources, and making sure enough of the scene is visible and recognisable. Here’s a draft of the final image, with the vehicles added to the landscape.

The whole thing needs a lot more work, but as a first pass I’m quite happy with the results.