If all has gone well with your writing so far, by now you may have some favorite practices: maybe you always outline your pieces, or you just start writing with a vague scene in mind to get to, or you scribble a bunch of scenes on index cards and then try to figure out what order they should go in. You may have a sense of some special strengths and weaknesses: maybe people tell you you have an ear for dialog, or you have trouble with action scenes, or your settings come out convincing and vivid, or you couldn’t write romance if Jane Austen were sitting in your lap.
So how did I go from last month’s topic about geoengineering to cancer treatment? Well, for one, keeping the Earth healthy is a bit like doing the same for humans: harder than you’d think. Systems engineering on a fairly complex level that we don’t entirely understand. This is also a personal topic. Cancer used to be an academic concept for me. Not any more. Science fiction lost a brilliant voice to cancer earlier this year, when Kage Baker died of it. Now I have friends and family with cancer, and it has become a palpable evil rather than something distant that I don’t want, like elephantiasis or malaria. I’ve seen it, and I don’t like it. Continue reading An Old Enemy: Fighting Cancer→
This being the multi-media future and all, I would like to begin this column by asking you to consider a video taken from Charlie Brooker’s BBC 4 TV series Screenwipe :
Now, I consider this to be one of the most enjoyable rants I have ever seen on television. Aside from a few minor quibbles (“kick to the nuts spiritually speaking”? Redundant “low self-esteem engine”? Pointless pun, far too on-the-nose) I think it is exquisitely written and paced. It takes us from a sedate and happy place and slowly builds into a frenzy of anger and frustration before collapsing into an abyss of sorrow, alienation and resignation – a rise and fall exquisitely supported by Clint Mansell’s score from Darren Aaronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). It is everything that a rant should be. But is it right? Does the media really ask us to identify with an endless procession of impossibly glamorous and accomplished caricatures? In some cases, yes. Continue reading Fantasies of mere competence: Football Manager 2010→
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