The snow is falling

Writing is often referred to as a solitary activity. Even though you may choose to undertake it in company, by  its very nature unless you're writing collaboratively you're obliged to spend a lot of time inside your own head. That's not conducive to social intercourse.

If anything, as a self-published author, it's even worse. No agent to engage with, no editor, no publisher, no cover designer, no... well... you get the idea. And while you're engaged in all that editing, proof reading, polishing, formatting (for Kindle, etc), and spending time wondering what meta-writing to put out there on Facebook and Twitter to promote your work, and what NOT to put out there so as to avoid totally pissing off your mates by blathering on about it the whole time, there's not an awful lot of time left for yer actual writing.

And then one day you find, as Pink Floyd famously did, ten years have got behind you. Only it's not quite ten years since I finished War of Nutrition. It's "only" four. Or one-and-a-half if you count the rewrite (which you should, because that's the one that eventually got published).

So, ever conscious of the passage of time, I've been trying to decide what to write next. And then, having chosen what I thought was the strongest contender from the list of two or three dozen ideas ("log lines") I've assembled over the years, I've been trying to get my head around exactly how I can turn it into a novel-length story.

After several months (intermittent!) work, I'd fleshed out quite a rich world - two worlds actually, since the story moves from one to the other - in which the action could take place, together with a fairly strong (I thought) cast of characters. Trouble was, at this stage, I didn't know what they were all going to do. I mean, I had the germ of a story idea, but beyond that I started to get a bit bogged down in exactly what all these people in this marvellous new world were going to do that was interesting enough to make you all keep reading.

Breaking out of the inside of my head for a while to talk this over with Blythe during one of our journeys back from Yorkshire, she introduced me to Snowflake. I'll just take a sip of tea while you get over your surprise that I'd never heard of it. Sorry, but no, I hadn't. But it sounded like just the ticket to get me over my hump. When I was writing WoN I worked to a template that was ideally suited to a thriller, but this new work is a science fiction/fantasy fusion, and that old template didn't fit. The Snowflake method is open-ended enough to suit pretty much any genre, so I thought I might give it a go.

Today I finished Step 3. OK, much of the work for the first three steps I'd already done while prepping the world and the characters, but that aside working within the framework has already even at this early stage thrown up some great new ideas and directions, and vastly strengthened my view of the characters, who they are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do by the end of the story. It's fair to say that so far, Snowflake is working out pretty well.

The unkindest cut

News of US TV's autumn schedule reached these shores yesterday, bringing with it the now inevitable stories of the "canning" of two series we've been following.

Heroes had its share of problems over four series, but the most recent outing seemed to us to be back on track, having solved the issues with way too many characters and yawnorama powers, and introduced a credible villain with an interesting goal to rival Sylar. We'd started to enjoy it again just in time to see it disappear forever.

FlashForward, on the other hand, has never been anything but intriguing. It didn't have a duff series, or a doldrums period, it has a wealth of subplot, well-drawn characters, and good writing. But it too failed to fire the US public's imagination in sufficient numbers for the network to consider keeping it going.

So these two highlights of our viewing hours join the swelling ranks of good sci-fi that has ended before its time. Firefly, The 4400, Farscape, Stargate: Atlantis, Invasion, Surface. A swift Google is all that's needed to find other similar stories, and forums stuffed with legions of fans bemoaning their loss and asking why. Those last two on my list are another example of series that were paired in our house - we watched them in parallel and we saw them die in parallel, killed off in the same season a few years back. We never even had chance to get into Firefly on broadcast media before it was killed off, discovering it on DVD long after the dust had settled on one of the most inventive,original and widely-missed series ever.

So how long can US TV remain broken like this? Time after time creating and then pissing off multiple fan-bases that stretch all across the world? Would it really be so hard to solve a problem that arises solely from the intersection between the short-termism of the producers and commissioning editors, and the relatively recent attempt by writers to introduce multi-series story arcs (Lost the most obvious example) without being able to fill them with TV compelling enough to command audience figures that will satisfy the networks? At the very least let's have some degree of completion at the end of each series (to hedge our bets against the "rest of the story" never being made) or a commitment to always allow a one-off "special" to be made to tie up any loose ends.

It may be too much to ask that US TV networks wake up to the notion that it may not even be possible to sustain audience figures when there are so many other avenues of entertainment open. Even the most popular UK TV shows have seen audiences dwindle in recent years. If our TV was produced along US lines we'd have seen the end of many of our longest-running shows long before now.

Book Review: Fatal Revenant

Way back in October 2008 I reported finding the first two books of Stephen Donaldson's Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I read book 1 on our Lakes week last October and since then I've been waiting for a chance to pick up book 2. This week has provided that chance and I've been devouring Fatal Revenant's 856 pages since Sunday morning.

I don't want to give too much away, but I will say I found this every bit as riveting as the first book. It's true that you have to be prepared to do battle with Donaldson's style when he's writing about the Land. The constant repetition of his heroes' fear, anguish, trepidation, suffering, loss and uncertainty which was such a signature feature of the first two trilogies is here once again, in spades, and it can get very wearing.

But overwhelmingly, this is a monumental success. Not only does Donaldson pick up the threads of every story, race and being that has gone before, and weave them into a narrative that fits as comfortably as an old cardigan, but he then skilfully embroiders that cardigan with a host of new characters, races and situations that are so cleverly explained and so thoroughly well thought-out that you can't tell the embroidery was never part of the original cardigan.

Moreover Donaldson's skill as a story teller, already epic at the time he wrote the first Chronicles, has achieved a hitherto undreamt of level of mastery. The complexity of this tale, as Linden Avery confronts a host of opponents some of whom endure bitter rivalries of their own and hence can occasionally appear to be her allies, others who are virtually their own hero and foe simultaneously, and continues to journey with a rare admixture of characters each of whom has a mystery to solve or at least one hidden aspect, is breathtaking. One of the most satisfying and rewarding reads I can remember for many years.

Movie Review: Avatar

I've tried to stay away from the hype surrounding this movie. In years gone by I would have been so excited by the concept I'd have barely been able to sit still through the adverts and trailer reels. With age, and with many experiences of excitement and expectation being dashed on the rocks of reality, I stilled myself. Hoping for the best and fearing for the worst. Having treated ourselves to the PS3 Avatar game and watched Nat playing it for a few minutes, the worst I expected was nearly three hours of video-game footage a la Transformers.

I needn't have worried.

Before the detail, here are the headlines. Avatar is outstanding. A team of creative giants at the peak of their craft, led by a man with a monumental vision, have created a world of beauty and wonder. What else is film-making about? If you haven't seen it, I would urge you to. If you're thinking of waiting for the BD/DVD release, I would politely suggest you go to a theatre to see it in its breathtaking 3D glory. Avatar will not only take you to another world for 162 minutes, it'll make you wish you could stay there.

"Pandora is a moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri A" says the Avatar wiki page, and you've grabbed me right there, from the off. Since the very first time I saw an "artist's impression" of the surface of a world with more than one moon in the sky I've been hooked on those images. Having a gas giant on the horizon just makes it that much more impressive. But this is just one of the jaw-dropping visuals with which you're assaulted in the opening minutes, and there's even better to come later on. Here is a world similar to those previously locked in the imaginations of the likes of Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews. Only it's real.

Undoubtedly using every cycle of processing power on the world's fastest graphics-rendering computers, and every nuance of programming subtlety developed over years to faithfully reproduce real-world physics and biology, Pandora looks real.

I've been impressed with CGI before - from Lord of the Rings to various Terminators - but there's always been something, some little thing, that jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief. That mental hiccup where you think oh yeah, it's just a drawing. Not here. In Avatar, CGI finally comes of age.

And at that point, the only limit is your imagination. From the gently floating seeds of Eywa through the bioluminescent forest pathways to the mighty Leonopteryx (Toruk), Pandora is the world you've only been able to read about up 'til now. Whether it's Hothouse or Hyperion, Halvmork or Helliconia, they've been more real in your head. Now they can be real in front of your eyes.

As good as any visuals are, they can always be lifted with the addition of a good sound track and here again Avatar does not disappoint. From the simplest forest sounds through the Na'vi native music to the soaring and uplifting strains that accompany the Ikran flights, Avatar is as much a joy to listen to as it is to watch. This must surely be the best work of James Horner's career.

Although Avatar pushes the envelope in so many technical ways, and achieves such heights of success with all of them, still it would be a hollow shell without a story to fill it and here, you may read, some critics have fallen short of rapture in their reviews, calling the plot predictable at best. Actually it had the opposite effect on me. The presence of the stereotypical characters - the grizzled military leader out for blood; the impatient businessman with his eyes so fixed on the money he doesn't see the real prize; the suspicious warrior leader; the beautiful native girl who steals the hero's heart; and on; and on - for me merely added a comfort factor. Knowing where the story was headed almost allowed me to relax and enjoy it MORE. There were still enough surprises to keep it interesting, even if the visual delights as each new part of the planet was revealed hadn't.

Scriptwise, some of the early exposition wanders close to the border with the Realms of Woodenness, but all things considered the backstory of how Pandora was found, why humans need masks to survive, why the Na'vi are revolting and what the military forces are really after, is all sorted out in pretty short order, arming the viewer with the necessary information and leaving him or her free to lap up the alien landscape as it unfolds.

Avatar as a whole, and the world of Pandora and the Na'vi in particular, have stayed with me in a way I cannot remember a film ever having done since I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of 12. I saw it yesterday and I'd be delighted to go back and watch it again today. I don't think that has ever happened. Simply outstanding in every way. I read one critic's claim that it is the best film of the last thirty years. I couldn't disagree.

July Wednesdays. Number 5: Book Club

With me "officially" in the chair - because it was my selection this month - rather than my normal "unofficial" chairing (i.e. supporting the official chairperson when they can't remember the running order).

Last time I chose the book - by some strange coincidence exactly two years ago in July 2007 - only 7 people turned up at the meeting to discuss it, so I guess on that basis you could say I did well to garner a turnout of 12. When compared to recent numbers though, it looked a bit sad. We've been having 20-25 people attending for months now. If I felt like being kind to myself I'd say something about it being holiday season, or the good weather keeping them away, but if I'm being honest I know there'll be a lot of the group who decided right off they wouldn't read the book this month because they hear the words "science fiction" and the shutters come down.

I can hardly blame them. There have been at least two months this year when I haven't read the book either, and another couple of occasions where I've either not finished it, or wished I hadn't. It seems that the idea of joining a book club to read books you wouldn't normally read is good in principle but too easy to avoid in practice.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction. A few people enjoyed it. Kind of. Only one absolutely hated it (and didn't get past page 70). I wanted to point out that I'd made my eyes bleed reading through HIS selection, so maybe he owed me similar respect, but I didn't have the heart. This is supposed to be fun, after all. And having not really enjoyed the read myself this time around, I'd have been on shaky ground arguing with him really.

So that's the end of the July Wednesdays. A month of almost unheard of mid-week sociability and activity. I'm exhausted. I think I better have a lie down.

Movie Review: Star Trek

First off, I should say that I think J.J. Abrams has a blimmin' cheek calling his film "Star Trek" as if it is the first one ever. OK, he - or more accurately writers Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman - pulls off a clever trick that means, in some respects, it could be considered to be the first one ever, but that's not the point. Neither do I agree with those who argue the franchise needed "rebooting" - whatever that means. OK Star Trek 10 (Nemesis) was a turkey, but there have been turkeys before. It made its money back. It needn't have ended there, even if none of the cast were up for another, and starting the story again at the beginning doesn't necessarily qualify as a reboot. A retelling, maybe, but even so I think it would have been more respectful to have a marginally longer title.

But I seem to have started off on a negative note which belies the enjoyment I derived from this movie, and its many good points. That aforementioned trick IS clever. It allows Abrams unprecedented freedom from canon, which for a 40+ year franchise is no bad thing. Having to bear in mind every little nuance that went before, from five TV series and ten movies, even if those events are all in the future and all you have to do is avoid doing anything which precludes them from happening, must be like wearing a creative straitjacket for the writers. Even with this freedom, the writers do a remarkable job of staying within the known Star Trek universe, and maintaining the characters as essentially the same people we grew to love all those years ago in TOS. And on top of that, they layer on credible new slants, excitement by the bucketload, and some memorable chunks of dialogue that will stay with me for many years (e.g Captain Pike to Kirk: "Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better."). The only thing they don't do, and for which the film suffers to some degree, is come up with a basic story that is anything near interesting. For once though, that lack does not wreck the film, which is saved by the humour, the action, the effects and the cast.

Yes, apart from a small handful of misses, the cast are uniformly good, and some are outstanding. Special mention has to go to Karl Urban as Doctor "Bones" McCoy, who for much of the movie acted as though he was channelling DeForest Kelly, so accurate was his mimicry of Bones' famous verbal ticks and body language. "My GOD man!", "Dammit Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a physicist," and "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" tripped off his tongue as if he'd been saying them all his life, which of course Bones would have been. Nice touches with the origination of his nickname, and his early befriending of Kirk too. The other stand-out for me, and much has already been written about this so I won't dwell on it, was Zachary Quinto as Spock. Uncanny facial resemblance coupled with excellent writing, a more complete backstory than we've ever had before, and a compelling insight into his early life as a total genius made his probably the most powerful character in the entire movie.

Chris Pine has received much praise for his rendition of Kirk, and although it took me a while to warm to him in the role, and I wouldn't go so high and wide with the praise as some, he certainly did manage to bring something new to the role and make it more than a Shatner clone. The only one that didn't really work for me was Simon Pegg as Scotty. Comic relief is great, but I don't remember Scotty being *quite* so much of a loon, and I don't think it sat well. He can certainly say "I'm giving her all she's got, captain," well enough though.

On screen the film looks every penny of the $150m it cost (and which it virtually made back in the first two weekends at the box office, in the US alone). This will definitely be one to buy on Blu-ray. I don't have any time for those who ask why the technology looks so much more advance than it did in TOS. The answer is simple, and has a lot to do with why the final TV series - Enterprise - failed for me. Making a modern show with technology that looks faux-clunky doesn't work. We loved TOS with its clunky hardware because we knew it was the best they could do at the time. Now film makers can do better, so why wouldn't they?

All-in-all then, another Star Trek movie to love, without a doubt one for the collection, and now that it's proved a huge box office hit I'll be amazed if they don't make another. All I would ask is: please, please next time, give us a good story. Remember Wrath of Khan and make it so.

Watchmen

So much has been written about this - both the book and the film already, even though it's only been out a week - that I almost hesitate to go into print with my own view. Is there anything new I can say? Does that even matter?

I read the book over Christmas, at Blythe's suggestion, and wasn't overly impressed. Even though I devoured comic books as a teen, the graphic novel has never interested me. The story was good, and the art work uniformly excellent but nothing more than I'd come to expect from that kind of work. I didn't see much to rave over.

I'd read so many reviews of the film, with such widely varying reactions, that the only conclusion worth coming to was that I should approach the film with no expectations at all. Good or bad. And it was in that frame of mind that I took my seat along with both daughters in the middle of the first row of "premier seating" for today's first showing of Watchmen at the Manchester IMAX.

It's no exaggeration to say that, from the very first frame, I was blown away. I have never seen a film with such incredible... texture. I don't know how else to describe it. The cinematography was an order of magnitude better than anything I have ever seen. The images leapt out of the screen, fabulous close-ups with a wealth of detail, wonderful composition and imagery (the raindrops on the polished coffin lid is an image that keeps coming back to me, but there were dozens of others - gnarled faces with each hoary whisker almost deliberately positioned; rain-drenched streets; faultless costumes) and stunning iconography.

If you've seen 300 or Sin City or any of the other graphic novels that have been brought to the screen before this, you'll be familiar with the usual kind of "comic" images that a director plays with. What made Watchmen so incredible, so compelling, was that these images were uniformly made of real people. No silhouettes, no extreme contrast, no apparent visual trickery of any kind. It was the comic, made flesh. Made real. Incredible. And the sound stage? Awesome. A great sound track, crisp foley work, none of the muddy dialogue that plagues so many modern movies. Sharp from beginning to end, and - unlike some reviewers - for me none of the music grated.

So much for the technical aspects. What of the story? As I've said, I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy of the novel, and I think this helped. Much of what irritated me about the book had been pared away. This was the central story of Watchmen. That is complex and detailed enough, without any of the frippery. Nor did I come to the theatre expecting a run-of-the-mill, all-action "superhero" flick. Many commenters have said Watchmen is "boring" or "slow." Come on - they have 30 years of backstory to get through, as well as a whole bag of complex interpersonal emotions to pack in to what never felt like two-and-a-half hours. All I can say is, it held my interest from start to finish. I never felt any itchiness at the pace (like I *definitely* did halfway through The Dark Knight, where I actually fell asleep at one point it was soooo sloooow). There was always something to hold my interest, be it action, dialogue, imagery, music, whatever.

The set pieces - fight scenes; Mars; Ozymandias' palace; the bombs - were note-perfect, and several of the scenes gave an understated but poignant reminder that this was an alternate reality, and set in 1985. So the irony of having a huge hole blown in the middle of New York, while in the background you can still see the Twin Towers, was very powerful. Being a graphic novel, some of the violence is *very* graphic. I know both my daughters had to turn away at some point, but that comes back to what I said about it being a comic made real. Snyder didn't flinch from representing faithfully what was on the page, even though when it's being enacted by real people the impact is increased a thousandfold. It makes for a totally visceral cinema experience and puts Watchmen very firmly in my top ten movies of all time.

Just don't ask me what has to drop out to make room for it.

Rain stops work

After yesterday's DIY success, today's scheduled task was decidedly more mundane: applying woodstain to the patio doors to complete the ambient patio-and-conservatory look of burnished mahogany.

The Lords of the Cumulonimbus had other ideas though, and as I stepped out onto the patio in my painting duds with stirrer in hand, a few drops fell splashily onto my ever-baldening pate. I stepped back inside sharpish. Never let it be said that I'm a determined and weather-defying wielder of a well-loaded brush. No, the slightest excuse is enough for me, and even though the rain passed over in a few minutes the sun that followed it was sufficiently strong for me to declare the task void for the day.

I busied myself instead with a few more chapters of Rebecca - the book club book for June - and followed this up with chopping the chicken and veg for Nikki as she prepared a chilli chicken dinner for the four of us. And then, as it was Father's Day today, I indulged myself with the director's cut of Blade Runner, which neither of the girls had seen before as far as I could tell.

This has long been at the top of my list of favourite films, but for some reason I watched it today with a more critical eye than usual. The story is set in 2019 and the closer we come to that date, the more far-fetched the image of "futuristic Los Angeles" becomes. I've written before on the dangers of predicting the future. I guess when Blade Runner was made (1982), 2019 sounded sufficiently far into the future to be credible. Now it's not much more than ten years away, flying street cars and genetic designers creating snakes and owls (not to mention humans) from scratch seems laughable. We're only just on the verge of creating the very first lifeform from man-made DNA, but it'll be a bacterium of some sort, not an owl. And off-world colonies? We were closer to that in the 1970s than we are now. Note to self: if I ever write any hard science fiction, make sure it's set at least a hundred years in the future. At least I'll be dead by the time it's proven wrong.

The old film still manages to move me at the end though, with Rutger Hauer's impeccably-delivered line: "I've ... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like ... tears ... in the rain. Time to die." It's worth watching just for that.

I've seen the future

Our weekly tech bulletin this week included this entry from an IBM think-tank style gathering. A handful of industry luminaries thinking Deep Thoughts about how life will look in 2050.

As some of the commenters on that entry have already observed, this is all a pile of tosh. It's not even yet 50 years since the last instalments of Tomorrow's World were predicting various social trends only twenty years out, and getting it wildly wrong. Mind you, they were never very good at it. Many of their articles were so far behind the curve we used to call the programme Yesterday's World.

But my point is, predicting this kind of thing is impossible, simply because the things we'll be using then haven't been invented yet. It's all very well extrapolating from technology trends, but all that tells you is what you'll be able to do with stuff we already know about. Yes, processor speeds will be incredible and storage capacities unthinkably vast. Someone once calculated that you could store your entire life's memories in high-definition video, with audio and notes, in about 26 terabytes. For those of you not familiar with the term, a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Single terabyte discs for home computers are already available. By 2050 it's virtually certain that kind of capacity - 26TB I mean - will be available in a hand-held camcorder.

But being ABLE to do something with something is not the same as actually DOING it. Or wanting to. And predicting the future from a point before a life-changing invention just ends up being totally wrong. Look at the transistor, and the (now "humble") PC. And then go and watch a movie like Soylent Green, which is supposedly set in the future and which has its hero searching for information in piles of... what did they used to call it?... paper, all stacked up in a... you know... library. No Internet or desktop computers in sight.

This - this very blog you're reading and others like it - that keeps us in touch with people we have never/will never meet - is a phenomenon on the up. Web 2.0. Content created by real people for real people. Something that was not conceived of much more than 5 years ago. And something that may be almost dead 5 years from now. Bloggers may by then have realised that the effort of recording their insignificant lives is not worth the investment, or maybe the next sliced bread will have arrived fresh and hot from the bakery to take their interest, attention, and spare time.

Nanotechnology; biocomputing; genome manipulation; graphite sheets: these are all exciting new areas of research and many of them could be extrapolated with some degree of certainty. But it still won't give you the right answer. This time next year we could be hearing about something totally new - and there's still 40+ years to go until 2050. Think back 40 years - 1968 - and remember how you were spending your time and what the "hot new topic" was. The world would only need half a dozen computers (said the IBM think tank!!), the PC was yet to be invented, networking was in its infancy. Extrapolation was dangerous even then - we were about to land on the moon and the talk was of Mars being the next stop. Who predicted investment in space technology and exploration would be ratcheted back and we would be stuck on Earth for the next 40 years?

Those predictions by that small group of very clever people may look learned and erudite now, but when viewed from the perspective of the real 2050 they will look every bit as naff and silly as those offered by the people from Tomorrow's World.

Heroes - Volume 2

Oh Boy. Spent most of today watching the second series of Heroes. This show just gets better and better. I know Tim Kring is on record admitting that it got off to a slow start, but when you watch seven episodes back-to-back it just ROCKS.

You know you should stop, and make the dinner. Or even stop for a drink or a toilet break. But then you think "nah - one more episode."

I hope they resolve the WGA writers' strike soon. I'll start getting withdrawal symptoms again before long.

Thought crime

When I was a lad I read a lot of science fiction. Many of the classic SF stories revolve around increased mental faculties of some description, either natural or enhanced with technology. In others the technology itself can think, or read minds.

More recently the subject was explored by Hollywood in 'Minority Report'. Like so many blockbuster movies, this is based on a short story by master of the genre Philip K. Dick written in the year of my birth and, unusually for such films, bearing the same name as the story.

Over the years I've been interested to note how often science, although naturally lagging behind science fiction, has eventually caught up. The most well-known example of this is Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of geostationary satellites upon which the world's telecomms networks (including the Internet you're using to read this) now depend. Some scientists have even predicted that a warp-drive such as that used in TV's Star Trek is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

So it was with great interest that I heard a news item some weeks ago describing how scientists have developed a brain scanner that can detect what you're thinking. By interpreting the patterns of brain waves, electrical activity and changes in blood flow, the machine can differentiate between one thought and another. Still in its infancy the machine is crude at present, but will certainly become more accurate with further development.

This opens up some possibilities for colossal social change. Civil rights groups will be sure to take against it and the potential for misuse is clearly enormous, but at a simplistic level it could allow instantaneous democracy for the first time. Problems of security and fraud have always dogged any suggestion of electronic voting, but with ubiquitous brain scanning it would be possible for the reaction of the populace to any new government initiative to be measured almost immediately. No need to sign up for the whole of a manifesto when each of its parts can be tested individually. And if a majority of the people at any given time thought they disliked the incumbent party, out they'd go!

And right there is the reason it'll never happen! Nice to dream though. Welcome to 1984, even if it is about 25 years late!

Book Review: The Many-Coloured Land

The Many-Coloured Land: First book (of 4) in the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.

I first read this book many years ago - probably not long after it was first published (1982), as I remember having to wait for the later books to come out. I also remember not noticing until quite some time later that a further trilogy - the Galactic Milieu - was out, and avidly reading those too.

Today I completed re-reading this first exposure to the Galactic Milieu, the Pliocene Epoch, the Tanu and the Firvulag on account of it being my choice for July's book in our book club. Unusually for me I've not reread it in the intervening 25 years and starting it again, this time in the knowledge that I'd recommended it to thirty-odd people almost none of whom are science fiction fans, I found quite a daunting prospect. Even more so after the first thirty pages.

Many-Coloured Land is one of those books that has to introduce very many key characters quickly before the story can really start, and May achieves this by providing short vignettes into the characters' back-stories, basically to set up why they've decided to turn their collective back on the 22nd century: a universe in which Earth has joined the Galactic Milieu of races, and at least some of its inhabitants have achieved "metapsychic operancy" (i.e. they have mind powers). But overloaded onto these vignettes is a host of detail on May's universe itself, the new races mankind has come into contact with, new technologies, the time gate, the colonised worlds, revised political structures. It's not exactly rare for science fiction novels to have to do this (think Dune!) but when you're reading it with the constant hope that a group of non-sci-fi-loving friends will enjoy it, these things stand out as making the opening chapters of the book...well...somewhat less than appealing.

It's been brought home to me several times recently how some of the best fiction around simply breaks the rules. In this case the "rule" I'm talking about is the received wisdom that you have to have hooked your audience within the first page - two at most. Now OK, if you assume May's target audience is SF readers and she's not interested whether anyone outside the genre picks it up, there's no problem. But rereading this novel after such a long time - it almost put me off from continuing, and I'm a lifelong fan of the genre and I already know I love this book!

Maybe those "rules" only apply to general fiction, where something has to be done to make the books stand out from the crowd. Maybe genre fiction isn't so tied to the opening. If you like horror, or crime, or SF, you can trust that you'll get to the gory/illegal/spacey stuff eventually so you're more inclined to put up with an inauspicious start. I don't know. All I know is it was tough going for the first 30-50 pages.

But then it took off.

May assembles a raggedy bunch of ne'er-do-wells and misfits and shoots them 6 million years into Earth's past into a well-researched epoch that should be just about perfect for humans to live an idyllic rural life. Temperate weather, lots of plant and animal life, rich fertile soils and no (or very few) dangerous animals about. Only it's not perfect, because it's been colonised by an exotic race - the Tanu - who have technologically enhanced mind powers and who have all but enslaved the humans who have been arriving via the time gate for the past forty or so years.

The subject of mind power is the one thing that makes this story irresistible for me. Since right back when I first read "The Not-Men" I've been enthralled by the idea of mental power. May assigns some new names and clear definitions to the various powers and divides them into five classes - creativity, coercion, farsensing, psychokinesis and redaction - but all the expected powers are there and with them the associated problems: rogue users, latency, unbalanced powers, operants with only one power, demi-god-like characters with all five at full strength (which back in the Milieu world would have given them coveted "grand master" or even "paramount" status). But actually in this first book the metapsychic facet of the story is really only there as a backdrop. It's part of the wordwork. For the most part, the eight central characters are either latent or weakly operant, and only two of them are gifted with the Tanu "torcs" that allow their latent powers to be amplified to full operancy.

Far from relying on dazzling displays of mental pyrotechnics, May uses the presence of the powers in subtle ways, sometimes to help the story along, sometimes to introduce conflict. The heart of the story is, as it always must be, in the overcoming of adversity by characters you are led to care about. And the build up of action and reaction with ever bolder and more unexpected barriers to the goals of the story. In a complete reversal of the galloping overload of the first few chapters, later in the book May deftly introduces new elements to the story - the Firvulag, the Ship, the Grand Combat, the Hunt, the presence of Madam Guderian, the Howlers - all threads in her tapestry and even teasing hints of stories to come in the passing references to Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless - stories that would not actually come to print for another ten years but which clearly had already been planned in the author's mind.

My initial trepidation allayed after the first 50 pages, I thoroughly enjoyed becoming reacquainted with this tale and I will definitely pick up the remaining three books of the Saga of the Exiles, as well as the later Intervention and the Galactic Milieu Trilogy as soon as time allows. It remains to be seen what the rest of the club made of my choice!

Blood Moon

We spent a delightful evening at Mick & Helen's last night. I guess we could call them our closest friends, because they only live a couple of hundred yards away! During the evening we were lucky to get a fantastic view of the total eclipse. It had already started by the time we walked round there at 8pm, with a noticeable flattening of one edge of the moon, but by 9.30pm a sizeable proportion of the moon had begun to turn red.

At that point we thought we were going to be unlucky as the moon disappeared behind the clouds for an hour or so, but by the time the eclipse was full, around 11.30, the clouds had parted again and we were treated to this view.

The meal was fabulous but the company was even better. It's a perfect set-up: Mick & Helen love to cook, and we love to eat! Annie had made copies of 'Heroes' in DivX format for us, and remembered to bring them round, so I hope I can find a VDU cable somewhere in my bag of goodies so I can connect my laptop up to our media box and we can see the first 16 episodes in glorious 50" plasma. Somehow I don't think there'll be much work done around the house today.