As I have mentioned elsewhere a very good friend of mine is the writer Roger Ellory, who writes Literary Crime Fiction, bit of a niche you might think but his "A Quiet Belief In Angels" has been one of Richard and Judy's book club books. And an excellent book it is too.
Honestly I find Roger's writing breathtaking, that's the best description I can manage.
I have also commented on the fact that I don't read much nowadays due to lack of time.
Actually Roger has every right to be annoyed at me. My 5oth birthday yielded book tokens so I popped to Waterstones a couple of weeks ago and bought myself the Heroes graphic "deleted scenes" book - and another literary writer. Trouble is I tend to gravitate to the SF/F and among all the other writers I have never heard of (okay I should live dangerously) I found Iain M Banks and bought his "Use of Weapons".
Which I finished this evening. Very clever. That's all I'll say. No, I'll add "brilliant".
Now Iain Banks is a renowned literary writer, who condescends to write SF from time to time.
I jest. Iain M Banks is a completely different writer. You can tell because he's got the initial "M" in the middle of his name. Must be someone else completely.
As far as the print trade is concerned, and literary snobs, he is. That fact that the two Iains inhabit the same body is irrelevant.
I know I've said this before but how can some so-called literary writer claim that she doesn't write SF when she's written a novel set in the future where the planet Earth is suffering from the after-effects of extreme pollution? This is a true story, dear reader. Silly bint.
The problem is in the nature of mis-definitions. And I've said this several times before and I'm going to go on saying it: SF is not a genre, nor is Fantasy. They are settings. But things like Horror and Crime Mystery are genres because you can put them in any setting. For example, you can have Fantasy Police procedural (the Lord D'Arcy stories by Randall Garrett). "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" is historical fantasy ... political? (Why political? Well if you sum up what it's ultimately about it's either politics or a love story, I think political wins out.)
Then there's "Period": Past, Contemporary or Future. Steam-punk is historical SF. The conceptually brilliant "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is 1930s SF.
Arguably the concept of "Fantasy" is irrelevant since if the story is made up then it's fantasy. While the degree of fantasy is dependent on how far it departs from what is considered "real". SF is a fantasy which extrapolates physical or science. Magical fantasy adds features (and creatures) to the universe that are not generally considered possible or likely.
You could say that amount of "fantasy" is merely the "degree of unlikelihood".
Literary is just a style which can be applied to any setting/genre combination.
If you were feeling really enthusiastic you could draw a five dimensional chart with Period, Setting, Genre, Style, and Published date as the axes, plot all the books released in the last 150 years using the size of the dot to represent sales (which effectively makes it six dimensional) and discover fascinating things about how tastes have altered. Also spotting those areas of minimum density where one could place a book with content no one has ever done before.
(Though one caveat if you choose to do so: Sherlock Holmes was contemporary when his stories were printed and steadily retreated into historical. It's crucial to keep that in mind when plotting.)
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
What's on the turntable? "Headlong" by Queen from "Greatest Hits III"
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
After the weekend
Ah, the ignorance of it!
BBC radio 4 on a weekday evening has a review programme that can be very interesting though I dislike the main presenter, Mark Lawson. One of the reasons I dislike him is his contempt for Science Fiction in any form, so whenever there is a review or feature which has an SF element you can guarantee there'll be some snide comments floating about. And ignorance.
On a little filler feature this evening the most recent episode of Dr Who was mentioned, with its title "Planet of the Ood". A very good episode as it happens, but I digress. Mr Lawson demonstrated his ignorance by saying that it had introduced a new monster; which it didn't, since the Ood appeared in an earlier episode. But there was no reason to even mention it since the feature was about episode titles, and not the subject matter, he was trying to be clever and put it down with "monster" and demonstrated his ignorance instead.
So. Here I am back in Reading having been home for the weekend.
I had such plans for my Scriptfrenzy writing. It's a straight through train from Reading to Manchester during the week and I wanted to take a seat and work on my script for three hours. Unfortunately something got in my way: well, I got in my way. Well, my stomach to be precise. The train seats were too close together and my laptop isn't a little one. I was annoyed at myself, and then doubly annoyed because I hadn't brought a notepad with me. Tsk.
I have a family and it seems a bit wrong to hide in a room writing when they haven't seen me all week, so I didn't write while I was there. But the journey back was better, somewhat. I missed one connection (a train had failed at the platform we were supposed to arrive on) so I ended up on the wrong trains. But one part of the journey I managed to get a seat where the gap was bigger and had a good hour and a half of writing, and knocked out another 8-9 pages which was pretty good going.
As I have mentioned my script is inspired by the 10CC album "The Original Soundtrack" mainly the track "One Night in Paris", but other tracks where I can fit them in. One of which is called "Blackmail" and the protagonist has met the blackmailer. In fact this part of the plot is going to work very similarly to the way it does in the song (click for lyrics).
I've still got a way to go on the script, I'm on 38 pages, so 62 to go. That might seem like a lot but quantity isn't really an issue, it's just another deadline. I have 4 nights this week, 3 next week and 2 train journeys, that's 9 writing sessions so a minimum of 7 per day. But if I aim for 10 per session I'll wrap it up by the end of the weekend, and even if the train journeys turn into nothing I should still be able to complete it by the deadline.
Well that's enough the sums I suppose, I better actually do some writing.
What's on the turntable? "The Caves of Altamira" by Steely Dan from "The Royal Scam"
BBC radio 4 on a weekday evening has a review programme that can be very interesting though I dislike the main presenter, Mark Lawson. One of the reasons I dislike him is his contempt for Science Fiction in any form, so whenever there is a review or feature which has an SF element you can guarantee there'll be some snide comments floating about. And ignorance.
On a little filler feature this evening the most recent episode of Dr Who was mentioned, with its title "Planet of the Ood". A very good episode as it happens, but I digress. Mr Lawson demonstrated his ignorance by saying that it had introduced a new monster; which it didn't, since the Ood appeared in an earlier episode. But there was no reason to even mention it since the feature was about episode titles, and not the subject matter, he was trying to be clever and put it down with "monster" and demonstrated his ignorance instead.
So. Here I am back in Reading having been home for the weekend.
I had such plans for my Scriptfrenzy writing. It's a straight through train from Reading to Manchester during the week and I wanted to take a seat and work on my script for three hours. Unfortunately something got in my way: well, I got in my way. Well, my stomach to be precise. The train seats were too close together and my laptop isn't a little one. I was annoyed at myself, and then doubly annoyed because I hadn't brought a notepad with me. Tsk.
I have a family and it seems a bit wrong to hide in a room writing when they haven't seen me all week, so I didn't write while I was there. But the journey back was better, somewhat. I missed one connection (a train had failed at the platform we were supposed to arrive on) so I ended up on the wrong trains. But one part of the journey I managed to get a seat where the gap was bigger and had a good hour and a half of writing, and knocked out another 8-9 pages which was pretty good going.
As I have mentioned my script is inspired by the 10CC album "The Original Soundtrack" mainly the track "One Night in Paris", but other tracks where I can fit them in. One of which is called "Blackmail" and the protagonist has met the blackmailer. In fact this part of the plot is going to work very similarly to the way it does in the song (click for lyrics).
I've still got a way to go on the script, I'm on 38 pages, so 62 to go. That might seem like a lot but quantity isn't really an issue, it's just another deadline. I have 4 nights this week, 3 next week and 2 train journeys, that's 9 writing sessions so a minimum of 7 per day. But if I aim for 10 per session I'll wrap it up by the end of the weekend, and even if the train journeys turn into nothing I should still be able to complete it by the deadline.
Well that's enough the sums I suppose, I better actually do some writing.
What's on the turntable? "The Caves of Altamira" by Steely Dan from "The Royal Scam"
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