Tag Archives: criticism

Blasphemous Geometries

The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont presents his second attempt to produce an alternative shortlist for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form that looks a little further afield for the best examples of genre cinema of the last year.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Every year, with merciless and unceasing regularity, hundreds of fans gather at Worldcon. After a few days of discussion, networking and having their pictures taken in beards and Hawaiian shirts for inclusion in Locus magazine, the fans attend the Hugo award ceremony. This award ceremony is the climax of a cycle of discussion during which science fiction fans across the globe begin handicapping, second-guessing and complaining about the Hugo awards with varying degrees of bitterness, enthusiasm, alienation and excitement. It is a cycle that starts with the announcement of the Hugo Awards shortlists. This year’s cycle began on the 19th of March.

Being the kind of person whose bitterness and alienation always outweigh his enthusiasm and excitement, I see one particular Hugo – that awarded for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – as a wasted opportunity. Every year, instead of celebrating the rich tapestry of cinematic genre, the Hugo shortlist is dominated by heavily-marketed American blockbusters, more frequently than not based upon already well known pre-existing works such as books or comics. In fact, last year, the nominees were so spectacularly weak that I felt obliged to come up with an Alternative Hugo shortlist made up of good films that somehow failed to capture the attention of Hugo voters. This column is my second attempt at an Alternative Hugo shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Continue reading The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form →

The Adam Roberts Project

Book review: Abraham Silberschlag – Armada of Zion

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The Adam Roberts Project

Abraham Silberschlag, Armada of Zion (Velcro Books 2008)

[pp.477. $19.99. ISBN: 4321949312]

Armada of Zion is a book calculated to divide opinion sharply amongst its readership.  However well written, however compelling a storyline, however vivid the characters, this is a novel leaves an uncomfortable aftertaste for many readers.  But perhaps that’s all to the good.  Better a book to hate passionately or a book to love passionately than a book that is bland. Continue reading Book review: Abraham Silberschlag – Armada of Zion →

Blasphemous Geometries

Genre and storytelling in video games

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the roles of genre narratives and storytelling in the still-young media of computer and video games, questioning the received wisdom that that the form has matured noticeably from is simple puzzle-solving and goal-reaching roots.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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We exist in a world of brands. These days you can watch a film, read a book or comic, play a game, drink a cup of coffee and even have sex without ever leaving the vice-like economic grip of your favourite brand. As the darling of the monstrous cultural artefacts that are summer blockbusters, science fiction is at the cutting edge of what Media Studies theorists call Remediation.

Remediation is the idea that, rather than existing along a fixed technological time-line with new forms emerging fully-formed from new technology, new forms of media are produced via a process of back-and-forth between new technology and older mediums. As video game designers draw more and more hungrily upon literary and cinematic works of science fiction, it is important to think about what the process of remediation does to these works and how the process might be improved. Continue reading Genre and storytelling in video games →

The Adam Roberts Project

Power of Ten Billion Butterfly Sneezes – To Our Children’s Children’s Children by The Moody Blues

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The Adam Roberts Project

The Moody Blues‘ 1969 album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children employs the full tidal panoply of 1960s hippy musical effects (guitars, full orchestra, a forty-strong choir going ‘ahh! ahh! ahh! ahh!’ in the background, the sounds of rockets launching and various galactic boingings, plus lyrics spoken ponderously rather than sung) to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing. And what a tremendous achievement for humanity it was. The moon landing, I mean. Not the Moody Blues’ album. The Moody Blues’ album is really very bad, a walnut-whirling, quintuple-choc, bathful-of-treacle, gag-reflex confection that embodies all the most sicky-sicky aspects of 1960s music. The opposite of an achievement. A zchievement, perhaps.

The Moody Blues - To Our Children's Children's ChildrenThis is an album that takes the listener, via the Apollo programme, on a tour of the future solar system up to the year 1,000,000. The main themes are love, peace, children, innocence, children, our children, hope and our children. It’s as if the various members of the band were in competition with one another to put in as many heartfelt references as possible to ‘the eyes of a child’ and ‘the innocence of our children’, to ‘the web of love and peace’ and to ‘the eyes of a child’ again. Track 2 is called “The Eyes of a Child”. So is track 4. Actually track 4 is called “The Eyes of a Child part 2” but it amounts to the same thing. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m a father. I consider my children’s eyes to be perfectly lovely, thank you very much. It’s just that I don’t think it likely that either the beauty of my child’s eyes or the cause of world peace will be materially improved by wibbly hippy meanderings of the calibre of, say, the chorus to track 10 “Candle of Life”:

So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!
So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!

Two things are going to strike the listener as he or she wades through the goo that is To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children. One, inevitably, concerns the name of the band itself. The Moody Blues. The Moody Blues? At some point one of the founding members must have been listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson or some other great Blues musician singing about their dirt-poverty, the misery and hopelessness of their existence, about selling their souls to the devil or being crossed-in-love and shooting down their rivals-and they must have thought to themselves: ‘blimey! he’s a bit moody.’

One word to that: no.

The second thing that strikes the listener is the frankly odd mathematical principle at work throughout the album. Track 12 is called “I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Million”. This is Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children we’re talking about. Three generations, or an average life expectancy of over three hundred thousand years each. Is it that people in the future will live so long, or only that it will seem to be so long, because they’ll be listening to tar like this?

Then there’s the album’s first track, “Higher and Higher”, which begins with the sound of a Saturn V Launch. Then drummer Graeme Edge intones:

Blasting, billowing, bursting forth with the
Power of ten billion butterfly sneezes,
Man with his flaming pyre has conquered the wayward breezes.

Now every schoolchild knows that, breathing as they do through spiracles (those tiny holes in their flanks), butterflies don’t actually sneeze. But putting that on one side for a moment.

At launch a Saturn V rocket puts out about 35 million newtons of thrust. Dividing by ten billion gives us 0.0035 newtons per butterfly sneeze. This is the power to accelerate about a third of a gram (a paperclip, say) one metre per second squared, which I consider impressive sneezing power. You could probably flick a paperclip with your finger such that it accelerates at one metre per second squared. But you are much bigger than a butterfly. Butterflies vary in weight from 0.0003 to 3 grams. Even if we take a median figure the song is suggesting that a butterfly can accelerate something weighing, let’s say, a tenth of its own bodyweight simply by contracting its spiracles. Scaling up, this would be equivalent to a grown man sneezing so hard than an artificial leg flew off the table in front of him with the velocity of a greyhound out of the starting gate. Which, now that I come to think of it, is a suitable image with which to round-up this account of the Moody Blues 1969 SF album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children.

Blasphemous Geometries

To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the new generation of British science fiction writers.

They can be hard to spot – for one thing, they’re not explicitly marketed as such. And furthermore, instead of describing futures defined by ever-increasing complexity, they seem preoccupied with the very British pursuit of “getting away from it all”.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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In the November 2003 issue of Science Fiction Studies, Roger Luckhurst wrote an article entitled “Cultural Governance, New Labour and the British SF Boom”. In the article, he describes the emergence of a new generation of British SF authors in the context of a series of cultural shifts that neatly coincided with the election of New Labour in 1997. With the once glorious political force that was New Labour now consuming itself in flames of incompetence, cowardice, corruption and authoritarianism, it seems an appropriate time to look ahead to the next cycle of boom and bust in British Science Fiction; to a generation of authors intent upon leaving it all behind. Continue reading To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF →