It's Space Nazis on the Moon!

Chatting to a friend the other day, she informed me that she’d just been to see Prometheus and could not, in all honesty, recommend it.  On the other hand, she stated, she could recommend Iron Sky.  Now it so happens, I had seen it on the one day it was shown at the Tyneside Cinema a few weeks back.

If you are unaware of the Iron Sky film, let me elucidate.  A Finnish film, it concerns the consequences of an American moon mission discovering a Nazi base on the dark side set up in 1944, said base filled with fanatical Nazis awaiting their opportunity to return to Earth and re-establish the Third Reich.  In other words, space Nazis on the moon.  Or to put it another way, It's Space Nazis on the Moon!

This film is not only critic proof, it is criticism proof.  Any negative observation is completely countered by the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!  A kindly soul would describe the acting as wobbly, the script will not be troubling the Oscars committee, the humour is forced and not as clever as it thinks it is.  But…It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!

To be fair, the special effects are rather good and the design is spectacular with Wehrmacht overcoats and helmets/gas masks turned into space suits and 1940’s era technology applied to the space age.

 

 All that goes to just add to the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!  There’s even space Zeppelins.

It was only shown for one day in a few cinemas across the UK as a publicity stunt to showcase the subsequent DVD release.  Unfortunately, anticipation had grown so high (It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!) that this backfired rather spectacularly with the distributors being booed when their name appeared in the credits.  In at least a couple of cinemas, the run was extended to a week.

Here in Newcastle we only had two showings to satisfy our Space Nazis on the Moon! needs.  I went to the afternoon showing and was lucky to get a ticket. 

It was an odd experience watching it.  It is, probably, one of the worst films I have seen in a cinema and yet I hugely enjoyed it owing to the It’s Space Nazis on the Moon! factor.  There were a group of people behind who dutifully laughed at every leaden joke with a ‘ho ho ho’ that you never hear in real life, only light operetta, and I felt sorry for them.  No need to try to persuade yourself that this is comedy up there with Jacques Tati.  No need at all.  Just relax and revel in the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!

So I find myself in the odd position that I feel obliged to highly recommend a film which is, exerting every charitable iota I possess, not terribly good, but I must.  I’ll probably get the DVD in the fullness of time.  I have little option.  I’m sure you all understand.  After all…

IT’S SPACE NAZIS ON THE MOON!

The Reader's Fear of the Self-Published

There has been a little flurry of articles recently about self-publishing on-line.  These have varied from the generally approving to the sternly disapproving which is much as one would expect.  An interesting reaction, however, could be found among the below the line comments.  After just about every article there is a comment stating, in a tone ringing with the authenticity of experience, that the majority of self-published fiction is very bad.

Now I have to declare an interest here.  As you might be aware, and if you’re not it’s no fault of mine, I am involved with the weird fiction website Spring Heeled Jack and it is currently publishing a serial wot I wrote.

Anyway, back to the comments.  The curious thing about these comments revealing that the majority of self-published fiction is crap is that they are stated in a firm tone as if the commenter is revealing a hitherto unknown fact.  ‘Have you read self-published fiction?’ they cry like Jeremiah, ‘it is awful.’  You can almost hear their self-satisfied grunt as they sit back from the keyboard with the knowledge of a warning duly given.  Their job here is done.  The majority of self-published fiction is crap.

I know. 

I know a lot of it is awful because I’ve read some of it.  God help me, I’ve written some.

Now I’m doubtless missing something, but surely that fact that a lot of something is crap does negate the value of that small amount is good.  I am reminded of Sturgeon’s Law.  If you don’t know it, Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer in the 1950s who, in response to the statement that 90% of science fiction is crud, stated that 90% of everything is crud.

Another curious thing about these aforementioned commenters is that they often continue their condemnation of self-publishing with a smug aside to the effect that they themselves never read anything until it has been cleared by agents, editors, publishers and critics.  This seems to me a strange thing to boast about.  They’re basically boasting of the fact that they won’t do something until someone else tells them they can and confirms that what they plan to do is good.  In most fields of human endeavour such craven behaviour is not widely encouraged, in this specific area, it is a sign of superior judgement.

I have a horrible suspicion that these people are amoungst those who view reading as a way of showing their superiority over the rest of us rather than the life-enhancing joy it can be if you want it to.

But then what do I know?  My name’s A J Chadwin and I self-publish.

Concerning Moomins

A friend gave me this slightly plaintive looking moomin as a present recently:

The Moomins were, of course, created by Tove Jansson and if you haven’t read the eight volumes that make up what is somewhat grandiosely known as The Moomin Saga, then you have a treat in store.

They are children’s books sure enough, but such joyous ones. Or at least the early ones are.There’s a facebook application where you can identify which Moomin character you most resemble. I took it and was informed that I was Moomintroll:

I was slightly disappointed as for all that Moomintroll is, pretty much, the hero of the series and is in all but one of the books, I had been holding out for Snufkin, who is so much cooler.

The first five books are cheerful enough, though Moominvalley Midwinter has a melancholy streak to it.

But the surprising one is Moominpappa at Sea.

I suspect that these days children’s books about the male menopause pretty much fill up the kids’ shelves in Waterstones, but back in the early ‘70s they were not so common. I remember my mother reading this one to me as a bedtime story and stopping off now and again to ask me if I wanted her to continue. I did, but in a wide-eyed, slightly scared way. It’s an uncomfortable read yet, though excellent.

The joy of the stories is the number of sympathetic and beautifully drawn characters. There’s the Hemulen who always wore a dress that he had inherited from his aunt:

the sinister yet ultimately tragic Groke:

the mysterious and enigmatic Hattifatteners:

and if you find the Snork Maiden a bit too pliant a female character:

she is all but off-set by the true star of the series, Little My!

Tove Jansson also wrote excellent books for adults, but that is for another time. For the moment, let’s finish with the last words of The Exploits of Moominpappa:

"…a new day…can always bring you anything if you have no objection to it."

Me Blogger, You Reader

I recently read Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, mainly as a result of hearing an radio documentary about the character who is apparently a century old this year. It turned out to one of those books that is startlingly unlike what you are expecting. Previous examples I have come across are You Only Live Twice, the James Bond novel, which is breathtakingly unlike the film, and The Day of the Triffids which we read at school. I still remember my fellow pupils saying with increasing desperation, ‘But when are we going to get to the bit in the lighthouse?’*

*This makes sense if you’re of the age to have seen the 1962 film version which starred Howard Keel for some reason.

Well, Tarzan of the Apes is a bit like that. There’s none of that ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ stuff. Tarzan is highly fluent in first Apeish and then, somewhat unexpectedly, in French. English is his third language, as far as I can make out, and he speaks that with remarkable ease.

Weirdly enough, Tarzan in the first instance can speak Apeish but read English, having found books for his education in his parents’ hut. In one of the more disconcerting sequences of the novel, he takes a few years to teach himself to read, with the skeletons of his parents lying by him. He does not know that they are his parents, but it still makes for an odd, yet touching, image. Oh, and if you think it is unlikely that a teenager could teach himself to read from first principles with only the aid of a primer, at least it is more probable than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the creature learns to read by peering through the hole in the wall of a peasant’s cottage, this view luckily allowing him to look over a child’s shoulder as she looks at her school books. Honest.

I have a soft spot for Edgar Rice Burroughs and first read him as a child, specifically At the Earth’s Core which was a highly entertaining film at a time when decent children's films were few and far between. England, in those distant days, laboured under the dread hand of an organisation called the Children's Film Foundation which made, God help us, highly worthy films which occasionally starred Keith Chegwin. I say no more.

Anyway, onto this bleak cinematic landscape, At the Earth’s Core burst with a glorious pre-Star Wars exuberance. With truly appalling special effects (only its predecessor, The Land That Time Forgot had worse, again ask any UK subject in their ‘40s about the pterodactyl in that film, I dare you) and a cast that included Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro and the thrice blesséd Doug McClure, it was a joy, an action filled adventure about two Edwardian adventurers who gain egress to an underground world by virtue of brilliantly designed mechanical ‘mole’.

Or so I remember. In a move I may well come to regret, I have ordered At the Earth’s Core from lovefilm and I suspect that it may not quite live up to my memories. But just as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was compelled to shoot the albatross, I am similarly bound to do this.

Mind you, I might appreciate Ms Munro a bit more on this viewing.

Wish me luck.

RIP Richard Carpenter, 1933 - 2012

So farewell then Richard Carpenter, television scriptwriter. Depending on your age and viewing habits you might have happy memories of Catweazle, The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Dick Turpin,Smuggler or Adventurer. For myself, however, his finest show was Robin of Sherwood. Partly this is nostalgia, I was enjoying being a student when it was first shown, but also because Carpenter managed to do something not many have done. He changed the legend.

The original Robin Hood ballads concern an outlaw who fights against Sir Guy of Gisborne, a corrupt monk, the Sheriff of Nottingham and the King. His companions are Little John, Much the miller’s son and Will Scarlet. And that’s about it. No Maid Marion, no Friar Tuck and, most noticeably to us, no stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Oh, and no Richard the Lionheart or Prince John.

Maid Marion, Friar Tuck and the rest were added as time passed. Walter Scott in Ivanhoe transplanted him from the reign of Edwards I to III (where internal evidence from the ballads places him) to the reign of King Richard I. the Victorians added the giving to the poor stuff and decided that he was a displaced nobleman (Robin, Earl of Huntington rather than Robin, yeoman of Locksley). Douglas Fairbanks and, gloriously, Errol Flynn made him a laughing force of benign resistance looking to restore the King and so everything was in place. The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene, was a highly popular TV series in the 1950s.

Then along came Richard Carpenter and Robin of Sherwood in 1984. I can remember the excitement. The series was heavily advertised and Robin was positioned as a rebel, I remember one advert labelling him as a rural guerrilla as opposed to the then popular phrase 'urban guerrilla'.

And it was fun. There was Clannad’s music and high production values and heavy use of location shooting and all was well. It ran for three series, surviving the loss and replacement of it’s lead actor, and was brought down by the financial collapse of Goldcrest Films, who put up the bulk of the money, not by a drop in viewing figures.

To me the most interesting thing about the series is its additions to the Robin Hood stories. Richard Carpenter is on record as stating that he was surprised that, unlike the King Arthur tales, there was no magic in the Robin stories, something he proceeded to correct. A strong celtic mysticism runs through many of the stories. This, however, did not take and subsequent re-tellings have remained firmly rationalist. But something else was, possibly, added. In the first episode the villain has a sidekick, one Nasir (played by Mark Ryan) who, in the original script, was defeated and killed after a swordfight with Robin. The producers, however, were so taken with Mark Ryan’s look and performance that they decided to change the script and have Nasir instead join Robin’s band. Richard Carpenter originally balked at this, but then acquiesced which is why, incidentally, Nasir has hardly any lines in the first series.

Then along comes the Kevin Costner film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And what have we here? Robin has a Saracen sidekick. Jump to this century and the BBC’s last version of the series had Djaq (Anjali Jay), a Saracen, albeit a female one this time round.

So it is possible that Richard Carpenter and the makers of Robin of Sherwood have added to the legend just as Walter Scott and various others have over the centuries. And that, I feel, is an achievement to be proud of.

Now There's a Weird Thing

Back when I used to be in charge of a charity second hand bookshop, a fun game was to infuriate those volunteers who were science fiction fans by firmly putting George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in the general fiction section. ‘But they’re science fiction,’ they would wail. I would then gently point out that they were also highly respected literary works and therefore could not be science fiction for science fiction cannot, by its nature, be respected literarily.*

*not 100% sure if that’s an actual word, but microsoft word spellcheck isn’t complaining though it is complaining about ‘spellcheck’. It also rather presumptively put a capital ‘M’ to microsoft (and has just done so again) without so much as a by-your-leave.

SF authors have been complaining about this for years and look hungrily at crime fiction which has acquired a patina of respectability over the last few decades. But then, detective stories never had the true pariah status that SF had. It was acceptable to admit to a liking to them while maintaining an intellectual front, in much the same way as high-minded people occasionally admit to a liking for soap operas, though at all times making it clear that said liking is an amusing eccentricity akin to always wearing something purple.

An exception to this rule was John Wyndham, here in the UK anyway. His ‘cosy catastrophe’ books were acceptable though the 1970s Penguin editions that I own have this gloriously Oxbridgian put down in the ‘about the author’ section: ‘…[Wyndham] decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily known as “science fiction”…’ which brilliantly dismisses both the genre and its readers in one elegant swoop. The BBC 1950s Quatermass serials by Nigel Kneale also fell into this camp.

I myself was an avid SF reader for a couple of years as a teenager and as science fiction is like malaria and LSD in that it never entirely leaves your system, I still occasionally read some.  And I do so with the distinctive feeling that I am doing something mildly embarrassing.  Proper readers do not read such nonsense.

Yet, over the last ten to fifteen years, this has been slowly changing and SF, along with its cousin Fantasy, has been creeping into the light of day. No idea why, though I suspect the emergence of comedians such as Bill Bailey and Simon Pegg, with their open love of Star Wars, Doctor Who and Star Trek, has a lot to do with it. As indeed has the successful re-launch of said Doctor Who. There is naturally still a lot of crap SF out there, but Sturgeon’s Law does apply.* There is also the appearance on the scene of China Miéville, the critic’s darling.

*’90% of science of fiction is crap, but then 90% of any everything is crap’, derived from an article by Theodore Sturgeon, a Golden Age SF author

I think this is great, of course. As those who have waded through previous blogs may have noted, I am all for people reading what they like to read rather than what they feel they should read and although science fiction is not entirely my thing, it is akin to it.

I am very occasionally asked just what kind of fiction I write and I find it slightly hard to answer. To date there’s not been a spaceship in sight so I can’t say SF. Fantastical things almost invariably occur (talking animals, chatty corpses, tetchy Arthurian knights and pre-christian survivals to name a few) but if I say Fantasy then just about everyone thinks Lord of the Rings and I really don’t write that kind of thing. I could say Ghost Stories but I don’t always write about ghosts and they are rather integral to the whole ghost story package. Horror Fiction always makes me think of James Herbert and those interminable NEL paperbacks about giant flesh-eating crabs or slugs or whatever that swarmed around newsagents in the 1970s and that’s not my bag either. Speculative Fiction is a phrase I dislike, it lives next door to the phrase ‘graphic novel’ which is a graduate’s mealy-mouthed excuse for reading comic books. No, I shall go back to the early 20^th century and re-claim the adjective that I think best suits my jottings: I write Weird Fiction.

All of which is a highly roundabout way of mentioning a website that I am involved with and which has just launched. Called Spring Heeled Jack it will, I trust, become a home to some weird fiction. You can find here and I hope you enjoy it:

www.springheeledjack.org.uk

PS

It is my avowed intention to one day write a story in which the title of this piece makes up the opening words as spoken by one character to his or her companion, while pointing past them.

A Traitor to the Written Word

I recently acquired a kindle and have therefore, in the eyes of many, renounced any rights I may have had to call myself any kind of a reader. One acquaintance, when I told him, said mournfully that this was one more nail in the coffin of the book, which rather exaggerates my book-buying levels. A friend announced her disappointment in me and gazed upon me with sadness as if I had been denouncing the evils of the objectification of women and then asked her to wait outside while I nipped in to buy the latest copy of Playboy. And then there was this article in The Guardian which was so snobbish that I at first thought it was some kind of satire. It wasn’t.

In one article somewhere, I read that there has been a big rise in sales of ‘trashy’ (for want of a better word) fiction. This is, apparently, because no-one can tell what you’re reading when you’re using an e-reader. I have to say, I rather like that. I’m rather hoping that this might be the beginning of a resurgence of popular fiction á la the great days of the pulp magazines, a market so eclectic that it could support at least two editions of a magazine given over solely to stories about pole-vaulting. Honest. And if you look down on pulp fiction mags, remember they did give us Raymond Chandler.

So what’s it like? Well, I can say that reading a kindle is painless, certainly better than reading from a computer screen, and I do appreciate the volume of free material there is available, and the number of gloriously cheap classics. There is also the access of books that are out of print. One of my acquisitions, for a small sum, has been all five of the Dr Nikola novels by Guy Boothby. Written in the late 19^th century, they are mad novels about an evil villain (the eponymous doctor) who was stroking a cat while being polite to his victims about seventy years before the James Bond films joined us. The first two books were in print fairly recently, but only those two and I’m not sure if they’re still available new. They are.

As promised earlier, I have not destroyed my existing books and in some cases I read the book at home and the kindle edition while travelling. Kindles are good, but they’re not a replacement for books, yet, and books still hold several advantages over them, the key one being that you do not require a battery to read them. Will they replace books? I honestly doubt it but as so far the effect of them seems to have freed up people to read what they want rather than what they should, increased access to classic literature and given new access to almost forgotten books. And they irritate literary snobs. In my electronic book, that’s always a winner.