Well, I didn't expect to only be blogging on Fridays, and I suspect that's just the way it's happened for these first three weeks.  Still, at least you know when and where I'll be.  This week I've been writing the new Hamilton novelette and plotting comics, including issues of Demon Knights that are getting close, numerically, to my previous personal best of fifteen issues and an annual (both Captain Britain and MI-13 and Action  Comics). I have high hopes to see an issue sixteen this time!  I'm waiting on both novel and TV spec script notes, and developing something new in a medium I haven't tackled before.  Also this week...

Scott Handcock is one of the producers of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield range, a Doctor Who production person, writer and actor.  He's supporting a very worthy cause, Invest in ME, by running a marathon in May.  Invest in ME seek to fund research into myalgic encephalomyelitis, and thus change the media perception of it. I've had first hand experience of what this condition can do to people's lives, and I urge you to contribute.

I did an interview with Comic Book Resources about Demon Knights, which seemed to go down well.

I suppose I've been asked odder questions, but, as a former Captain Britain writer (?) this leading politics site asked me how I felt about the prospect of Scottish independence, and I told them.

You can find the solicitation for Demon Knights #8, which is a one-off about the history of Xanadu and Etrigan's romance, with guest art from Bernard Chang here.

This is Ryan Kelly's terrific cover art for Saucer Country #2, coming in April...



And my friend Simon Spurrier has put out into the world, in support of his new novel, A Serpent Uncoiled, the following...



I went along to see War Horse this week, and there follows a review, which thoroughly spoils the plot, so if you're planning on seeing it, you may want to skip the next (long) paragraph...

War Horse is by no means a good movie, although it does contain some interesting, moving and memorable moments.  I've heard people call it 'saccharine', but that word's never made critical sense to me.  It's supposed to mean that one is not averse to sugar, but can spot fake sugar when one sees it.  This being the movies and not the news, however... it's all fake sugar.  And people who use the word 'saccharine' never seem to find the real sugar.  'It tried to move me but didn't' is perhaps a more honest way to put it.  (Or sometimes the complaint is just 'it tried to move me, and I hate being moved'.)  Myself, I'm all for blubbing, and I think heart strings are there to be tugged.  I got a little of that from War Horse, but actually not enough. And that's because... it's about a horse.  Every human being we meet is onscreen for a maximum of half an hour.  The script tries to make us care about them, it sometimes succeeds (that influx of Richard Curtis traits when the movie suddenly becomes about an old man and his quirky grand-daughter, and we're made to care about them very quickly and very well), but mostly fails (the German deserter boys are shot and we've hardly met them, so we don't care).  The nature of the film, a series of vignettes, is directly opposed to its aim, moving us.  And... it's about a horse.  Those of us who don't automatically love horseflesh are told it's a beautiful horse many times, and there are shots where the camera peers into its face, demanding an expression... which isn't there.  Because it's a horse.  Every now and then Spielberg does go for horse reaction shots, making it the central dramatic presence it would need to be to bear this movie's emotions on its shoulders.  But these look ridiculous.  (The 'who, me?' when nominated to pull the gun carriage is so pronounced it should have a Scooby Doo voice on top.)  So I think Spielberg went with his better instincts and largely shied away from them.  But there's nothing to take their place.  Black Beauty did the horse with many owners story with an emoting, sentient, narrating horse at the centre of it, and the movie of that was pretty weird as a result, but at least it got its full thump of emotional impact in.  This movie sometimes looks to the horse as an emotional centre, but tries to do it... realistically.  Sort of.  Maybe.  I don't know, stop asking!  That's the central problem.  I was initially quite pleased with the opening vignette of life on the farm.  A pretty realistic Devon, not American Devon, a movie about the problems of working people, okay, tottering on the edge of 'trouble 't pit' but daring that and getting points for not falling in.  But then there was that rock in the field.  And it was a Simpsons rock.  One of the standard Simpsons jokes is to portray an everyday annoyance as a grand Hollywood challenge, the moment of heroic fulfillment.  Which makes us see how artificial such moments are.  Our lad and his horse will plough that stony field and save their farm, they will make it, through sheer willpower!  Only... there's a big rock in the way!  'Go round it!' shouts the lad's mate desperately from the sidelines, like Marge might shout to Homer, but the lad is made of sterner stuff.  He puts in a last effort and the plough... slices straight through the rock, which breaks in two and lies there... obviously the sort of thing one could have picked up and thrown away.  Hmm, perhaps the mate could have done that instead of all the worried shouting.  In fact, how about just clearing the field of stones before the ploughing started?  Or, I don't know, perhaps one of those hundreds of neighbours could have lent them a ploughing horse?  Logic is an underhanded thing to use to attack a movie, but what this shows is a lack of concentration, a lack of meaning it, that the shape of a Hollywood movie rather than the real lives of working people is what it's important here.  Similarly, there's a neat metaphorical introduction to World War 1, but it trips on that business of realism.  We follow a group of professional cavalrymen, preparing well, taking every precaution, not just doing their jobs but actually being clever with it, and we start to think, hey, none of these people are fools, and this doesn't look like archetypal World War 1, this has an interesting non-cliched realism about it, perhaps this is an early battle, before the machine guns, maybe we're going somewhere interestingly different, and it'll all turn out to be the way they think it'll be.  They charge in, sending an enemy camp scattering, until... there's the completely unexpected (now) line of machine guns.  We've been suckered into believing in victory, just like they were.  Excellent.  Except... why is there a camp of genuinely unprepared soldiers, with a line of machine guns in the woods behind them?  Who was preparing for those shaving and breakfast-making lads to be routed and cut down?  'Next time,' one of them might well yell, 'how about we put the machine guns in front of the camp?!'  The power of that movie metaphor over-ruled realism, which would be the classic Hollywood way, except the magic trick wasn't good enough, we were encouraged to think about realism the moment before the metaphor hit.  There are some beautiful pictures in this movie, and some of them are too beautiful.  I accepted, in the same way, the poetry of the lad getting his horse back, but not the implausibility of the old man just guessing that was also his daughter's horse.  The nervous attempts at salt are what ruin the sugar.  Only absolute full-on commitment of a (bloody hell) Avatar kind could make this work.  You can't have a horse that's both a dramatic lead and 'just a horse, not a dog'.  You can't make a movie about the poetic epic futility of war and about the washout of the turnip harvest.  Spielberg and his writers flinch at the last moment and do not (haw) take the hurdle.  However, I must say that, if I was 12(A), and thus in one of the target audiences for this movie, the resulting shallow end depth of brief characters whose pain hurts us just a little might just feel like the most meaningful thing I'd ever seen.  And if that viewer was my child, I wouldn't want to dissuade them of that feeling.

Phew, that went on a bit.  You'll be here for the Sherlock solution, I should think.  Sorry, here we go.  (And there will of course be huge Sherlock spoilers here.)

At the end of this season of the wonderful Sherlock, Holmes seemed to be forced, in front of Watson, to fatally jump off a building.  It's later revealed that he survived.  The cliffhanger, pleasingly, is not 'did he?' but 'how did he?'  Now, I have no special knowledge, but I thought it would be fun to share with you the solution I spent the evening boring my wife with...

It's obviously all about Molly.  Sherlock tells her he trusts her and is going to need her to do something.  And then he sets up the final confrontation on the roof of the hospital where she works.  So what can Molly do?  Well, let's combine that with the only other plot point left hanging in a show which always ties off every dangling thread.  Moriarty has set it up so that the little girl he kidnapped screams when she sees Sherlock.  How did he do that?  By employing someone who looks very like Sherlock, possibly (because he's famous enough now) a professional Holmes impersonator.  Then he would have had to kill this arrow pointing to his 'discredit Holmes' plan, and might have done that in front of the child, in order to traumatise her.  So Sherlock would suspect that there's a dead body somewhere in London, that will probably have passed through Molly's morgue, that not only looks like him but is even dressed like him.  Molly has time to find that body.  There's an unknown length of time between the death of Moriarty and Watson arriving.  During that time, Molly brings the impersonator's body to the roof, and holds it up on the edge.  Sherlock, meanwhile, goes over to the roof of the building opposite, looking down on Watson from behind when he arrives, and talking to him on his mobile from there.  (He asks him to keep his eyes on 'him', and not start looking round at the other buildings.)  Sherlock jumps down onto a lower level just below the roof he's standing on (because his job here is done and he has to get away swiftly), and Molly pushes the body off the roof.  I don't think Holmes can have had anything to do with the cyclist thumping Watson, because what guarantee is there that any particular blow would produce exactly the right disorienting symptoms?  But it's too convenient to be an accident.  Perhaps Moriarty had left orders that if Watson was seen running towards the body, this medical man should be prevented from attempting to save Holmes?  (It would be really neat if Holmes was that cyclist, but there just isn't time.)  Even without the blow to the head, it's probably that after a fall like that, with Molly whisking the body away afterwards, Watson wouldn't have been able to tell the impersonator apart from his friend.  Molly works with Mycroft to erase inconvenient details like DNA identification, and we see Mycroft saddened not at the death of his brother, but at the lengths to which his brother has had to go to save himself from a situation of his making.

And that's it.  Obviously, I expect the very clever Steven Moffat to have come up with a solution that trumps that one, I'd be delighted either way, but that's how I'd get out of it.

Today's music video, from my box of favourite tunes of all time, is from The Andrews Sisters.



I've always loved swing, the first real pop music that worked like pop is supposed to, ecstatic release and teenage rebellion.  War turned that music from insidious moral destroyer to great because the troops like it.  The Andrews Sisters were The Beatles for the US military, and the sheer pop plundering of this track, plus the fact that it's right there beside the prospect of immediate death, make it vital even today.  There's the rumble of a Weimar pit band somewhere in there, the enemy's culture repurposed, as it always has been by soldiers.  Much more to the front is a huge debt to black music.  This is what pop always has been: black music played by white people.  (Louis Armstrong was famous enough when this was made for the 'jazz style' singing on one chorus to be even possibly an impersonation of him.  I've always wondered.)  And God, how much sex is written between these lines?  Look what she does to that upraised trumpet.

Our guest today is Jessica Langer, who received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2009.  She's published widely on postcolonial theory and practice and science fiction in many different media and geographical contexts.  She lives in Toronto, Canada.  I met her at a World Science Fiction Convention (I think it was in Japan), and she quickly became one of editor Lou Anders' 'rat pack'.  She's got a new book out.  Take it away, Jess...

First of all, many thanks to Paul for lending me his space for a few paragraphs.  I've been a constant reader for a while, so it's fun to take over the microphone temporarily.  I've been invited to discuss my new book, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2011 (despite what Amazon may tell you).  I understand that print copies just became available in North America, and you can also find it as an ebook via Palgrave Connect.
     First of all: what is postcolonialism, anyway?
     That's a question with just about as many answers as there are postcolonial critics, and everyone defines it a little differently.  Acknowledging the ongoing academic debate, though, I'll try to simplify it: postcolonialism is a field of study that relates to the consequences of the past five or six hundred years of world history, in which various major powers have been busy building and subsequently losing their empires. In some cases these consequences are vast and permanent, and are economic, cultural, political, linguistic, social, gendered, racial, sexual, religious.  Postcolonialism, therefore, is about all of those things, though different critics tend to focus differently.  For instance, Robert JC Young, one of the Big Names in postcolonial studies, calls race, culture and sexuality the three legs (or, as he puts it, 'mediating term[s]' [Young 97]) of the colonial triangle; they're all systems by which colonial authorities controlled and exploited the native populace.  Edward Said's theory of Orientalism - his critique of the European 'othering' of its colonial subjects - is another concept that is associated with postcolonial studies.  This may be starting to sound a little more familiar. 
     So what does science fiction have to do with any of this? 
     Science fiction is, at its very heart, about otherness.  Another time, another planet, another kind of intelligent or unintelligent being, another dimension, another universe, another version of reality, another version of yourself.  It is, as Darko Suvin famously wrote, a literature of 'cognitive estrangement' (Suvin 4); of trying to conceptualize something that is in some way other.  
     Colonialism is also, at its heart, about otherness.  Another culture, another language, another kind of resource, another political system.  Here, though, it's not about imagining the other, but rather about exploiting him and her: taking the useful parts and suppressing the rest, the threat.  
     John Rieder, in his excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (to which my book functions as a kind of sequel), writes that 'science fiction exposes something that colonialism imposes' (Rieder 15).  I'm afraid I'm not quite so quotably brief, but my argument is similar, though a little more specific.  I look at two particular images that come up over and over in science fiction literature: the figure of the alien, whether a humanoid alien or a robot or a Tribble or whatnot, and the far-flung planet or undiscovered land, whether the Moon or Mars or Europa or Pern or Gethen or the centre of our very own Earth.  I call these two images the 'Stranger and the Strange Land'.  (No, it really has nothing to do with Heinlein's book of the same name; his title, modified, is pretty apt for my purposes, though.) 
     And here, I'm going to quote from the book itself (a quote which you may already have read if you read the excerpt posted on io9 in December): 
     'These two signifiers are, in fact, the very same twin myths of colonialism.  The Stranger, or the Other, and the Strange Land – whether actually empty or filled with those Others, savages whose lives are considered forfeit and whose culture is seen as abbreviated and misshapen but who are nevertheless compelling in their very strangeness – are at the very heart of the colonial project, and their dispelling is at the heart of the postcolonial one.'  (Langer 3-4) 
     Throughout the rest of the book I look at all sorts of different things, from Japanese science fiction (Japan, which went from pseudo-feudal victim of free trade imperialism to imperial power to industrialized democracy over the course of about a hundred years, is a fascinating case study from both a postcolonial and a science fiction point of view) to Canadian First Nations science fiction to Indian science fiction to District 9 to World of Warcraft (yup...) to other contemporary writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Ian McDonald and Vandana Singh and Saladin Ahmed.  If I may say so, it's a fun romp, and I think you might enjoy it. 
     (References (because I'm an academic and it makes me uncomfortable not to cite things properly): Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2011 Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1979. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.)

We've never had references on here before!  Thank you very much, Jessica, and I look forward to reading the book.  Now, on these Casual Fridays I've been continuing my series of (sometimes vaguely useful) writing tips, that began with forty of them during the Twelve Blogs of Christmas.  So this week's is...

43: 'Eight'.  Numbers stand for things.  Three is the number for impact (two sensible examples in a joke, the third gets the laugh, two (very brief) ordinary messages on the hero's answerphone, the third is the killer).  Six is evil, seven is magic.  (Secret Six, The Magnificent Seven.)  Eight is 'too many'.  There's the old story of the professor heard walking along debating with his friend, ticking off points on his fingers and saying 'eighthly'.  Sherlock tells John that's he's already thought of eight theories.  That feels like more than anyone could hold in their head.  The next number with meaning is twelve, and that feels honest again, for reasons only those more tuned in to archetypes could guess at.  If you want too many people, items or concepts, too many is eight.

And that's it for today.  I might see some of you at the BSFA open meeting (with Christopher Priest as the guest) on Wednesday.  Until then or next Friday, unless something huge happens in-between, Cheerio!