Autumnal Musings

Perhaps it’s genetic; the evenings begin to cool, life begins to slow and we crowd round the fire to hear the storyteller conjure up new worlds from the flames, exciting our imaginations and reminding us of who we are. Perhaps I’m just odd; but whatever it is, autumn is here and as the cool evening breezes blow round me in the dying golden light I feel a stirring in my mind. Dreams awaken and I’m suddenly impelled to do the things I should’ve been doing all summer – writing, rewriting and actually submitting works to potential publications!

It’s early yet and my first attempt met with an unexpected setback. I thought I’d typed a story up but it turns out I hadn’t; so task one is to do so. That’s The Truth of Dragons, the first piece I completed as a married man and there are a few places I’m thinking of sending it to; watch this space. The second, ongoing, attempt met with a bit more luck. The Tale of Five-Fingered Jack (working title) which I started on New Year’s Day finally has a structure and is over half written. No idea what to do with that when it’s finished though. The idea was it would be a one-man show and told to a theatre audience, whether that’s a practical idea or not I don’t know but I know it can be done.

In fact, I think most first-person narratives can be mounted as live performances, and many have. I’ll never forget seeing John Astin reciting Poe’s Tell-tale Heart on an episode of Good News Week; I was putty in his hands. The trick is the language and the gift of the teller; which goes back to my idea that it’s genetic – we love stories, they’re our oldest tradition.

While I’m here, on a totally different topic, I’ve been troubled by certain comparisons being made in the media. The Hunger Games (no I haven’t seen it or read the book) is a new film franchise; obviously comparisons will be made, they always are – it’s sort of like this, or it’s this movie crossed with that other one. Fair enough, it seems to be how we decide if something will interest us, or is a shorthand way of getting a grasp on that. But The Hunger Games is being compared to two other franchises which bear no relation to it whatsoever, Twilight and Harry Potter – why? As far as I can tell to get people to read the article and to stir up hype that doesn’t exist. The three series may have started out as books for younger readers and may all belong to the all-encompassing speculative fiction genre, but they are vastly different properties that gain nothing in the comparison. Let’s just forget all that and judge each one on its own merits. And please, please let’s wait till we’ve seen them before we make that judgement; beating on something because it seems the cool thing to do, is not cool.

Back to the autumn, dreams shared are worth more than lost fancies. Fire your imaginations!

The New Dystopia

I just read Craters, a short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and it's left me feeling very thoughtful. It's a near-future SF piece about a journalist going into a refugee camp in an age where everyone has microchips inside them for identification and the war on terror is in disturbing place. I'll try not to give any spoilers - to read it yourself go here http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/craters/

While I'm not sure Rusch was deliberately writing a dystopia it certainly is one. I should probably explain what I mean by dystopia, it's not that common a term ironically enough. The best explanation is an example, the archetypal dystopia is George Orwell's 1984. Essentially they're opposite of utopias; where society has turned to some other thing, a controlled status quo. The core dystopias include Huxley's Brave New World, Vonnegut's Player Piano and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. These all show an imperfect world where free thought and action is restricted or forbidden by some means or another – and most people are happy about it, or think they are.

Rusch hasn't done what those stories do; Craters is not demonstrating the society or showing how the dystopia works. This is the frightening thing, the story is simply set in a world where the state has means of control; security is paramount over liberty and everyone lives according to these paradigms. In other words, it takes elements of today's world and extends them, quite logically and very plausibly.

I don't mean to suggest the world Rusch sets her story in has the drastic levels of control Orwell established. Rather it has simple things, things we already have and elevates them. James Cameron did the same thing in Dark Angel; even V for Vendetta treads some sort of middle ground between the two. We may not be going in the direction of nameless autocracies as some older dystopias suggested; but these near-future stories are as dystopian in spirit as ever even if they don't mean to be.

I'm not sure how well I'm explaining any of this – the ideas are still flying about in my head – but I guess what I'm getting at is that SF has shifted from drastic visions of potential realities to subtler extensions of current issues. And if that's the case we really need to think about how the world around us is going and if there's anything we can do about.