Simon T. Kaye

My third piece for First Drafts, the blog of Prospect Magazine UK. I’m quite pleased with this one.

I offer a few critical thoughts about how the show was wrapped up. I think most sensible folk agree that it was unsatisfying. But I also argue that the fun was always in the magnitude and cleverness of Lost’s web following.

I’ve got a bit of form talking about Lost on this blog – take a look through the ‘TV’ category if you don’t believe me. I think I’ll miss it.

My Prospect post is here, and here is a little extract:

Perhaps Lost’s creators shelved whatever overarching explanation they had originally concocted when they realised that it could never compare to the intricate, crowd-sourced theories of their viewers.

Oh, and beware the spoilers.

Don't worry, this isn't the Enterprise

 My dad introduced me to Star Trek. As a child, my brain was quickly filled up with the incredible idealism, aspiration and earnest good-nature at the heart of the show. I loved it. I loved the original series best of all, but the others were just great, too. I memorised the technical manual. I subscribed to the ‘Fact Files’ for years (though they contained very few ‘facts’).

Voyager was the beginning of the end for this love-affair. Maybe it was just a matter of timing – maybe I started to see how often the plots were being recycled, got to that stage in adolescence where cynicism overpowers optimism. The films took a turn for the worse, as well. Enterprise… well, Enterprise just had an appalling theme tune. I’ve been secretly trying to chew my way through the supposedly less-awful third season for a while now, and it’s tough going.

To cut to the chase, I lost interest. Th0ugh whole sectors of my brain remain dedicated to the layout of Deck 17′s Jeffrey’s Tubes and the middle name of Picard’s brother’s wife’s Tribble, I felt alienated from the show and the films. It seemed stolid, unrealistic, badly written and lazy. And to think that I could have learnt a language instead (no, I don’t count Klingon).

So just as it’s impossible to explain fully what a Star Trek obsession meant to this bullied little boy, it’s very hard to outline quite what put me off, either. But my dad? He was there before me, and he stuck around after I moved on as well. So it was clearly paramount (phnarr) that he and I see this latest entry together.

Let me try to put this in context: dad wore a T-shirt to the screening. On this T-shirt: a massive front-and-back image of Quark the Ferengi’s snaggle-toothed face, and a bit of text outlining some of the Rules of Acquisition. My dad can put most geeks to shame. He’s been doing it for a lot longer, to be fair.

A curious fact: out of all Star Trek, the original series has aged the least. It’s design ethic and budget are so clearly from a different age of television that the clunk and quirk that seem inexcusable in the more recent series are instantly forgiven. The writing is fantastic in places, some of the science fiction ideas are real classics, and the central triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (the holy trinity; the warrior, the mage and the cleric; the ego, the superego and the id) still sparkles on today.

It’s these mechanics that the new film had to live up to, really: the emotional and science-fiction heart of Trek that has kept the first series fresh for decades. Or so I thought. (I’m actually moving into a review now, honest).

This film has no ‘science fiction’ in it. It’s purest fantasy. There’s no exploration of philosophy, future politics, moral dilemmas or the like. And it doesn’t spend a hell of a lot of time developing characters, either. This is not the film of the original series. This is, in fact, the film that would be made from the original series if there had never been any films or spin-offs.

Draw a line right after the last episode of Season 3 of Kirk’s adventures. Or perhaps after Spock’s death in the Wrath of Khan. (Or, okay, just after the end of the third film). Now build a movie.

What’s the upshot? It makes Star Trek magical again. I’m not going to witter on about how it relates to the post-Obama optimism of a new era or helps us forget our credit-crunched woes. It’s a good film because it has surprising reverence for the mythology that gives Trekkers wet-dreams  – and successfully translates the stylistic and historical essence of Trek into a modern, self-aware cinematic language.

For the record, I’m wondering if this is the first in-universe reboot in the history of cinema. We are tied to the timeline we remember, and all deviations from it are excused, in one elegant sweep of J.J.Abrams’ pen. It’s the best possible utilisation and acceptance of everything that’s come before: this is the timeline that we want. It’s the utopia, Dr Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. Our understanding of all other Star Trek forms the emotional weight for this reboot.

This is just as well, because the film could use another ten minutes of character moments and dialogue. Who thought that anyone would ever write that about a Star Trek film?

Any other problems? Well, the Macguffins arguably fly a little too thick and too fast. There are few attempts to make plausible the ‘magical’ parts of the plot. What the hell is this ‘red matter’? I understand the appeal of just being shown what it can do, and the urgent need to minimise on technobabble. But… it’s unsatisfying. Similarly, our Romulan baddie, while overall very competently played by Eric Bana, seems to have minimal motivation for chasing Spock through time and blowing up whole worlds, Death-Star style (by the way, I love that his ship is just some miner in the future and it can totally outgun everything in Kirk’s era. I also love the idea of destroying a planet by making a big hole in it and planting a black hole). Yes, Romulus was destroyed. But Spock tried to save it. It’s not enough to say that you’ve spent a couple of decades “forgetting normal life”.

I have every expectation that this sort of problem is solved by the accompanying prequel comic-books, but the film ought to sort out motivations properly, at least.

Spock is more emotional in this film than in his previous incarnations. The attempt to explain this seems to be based on his fundamental decision to go to Starfleet instead of try for the Kohlinar, the ceremony that’s supposed to eradicate emotion altogether. But it’s still a departure. In fact, of all the new actors approaches to the classic roles, I think I find Zachary Quinto’s the most difficult to swallow.

But I’m nitpicking really. This is a great film, and it’s clearly being positioned to replace Star Wars and fill that yawning gap for big budget sci-fi adventures. It’s charming and funny.

I love that Kirk’s cheat on the Kobayashi-Maru is finally shown to us. I love that the new Enterprise is gorgeous. I love the way the film starts with a bang, and ends with an awesome version of the original theme tune (thanks, mr. Giacchino). I look forward to the rest of the trilogy (please please please).

Last word: my dad, more suspicious of this ‘rebooting’ nonsense than I, said that he loved it. Let’s just trust him on that.

Okay, I know I’m a little behind the curve here. Everyone and their uncle have already completed Bioshock three times, one for each different ending (well… two-and-a-half endings, I suppose), and once on Hard so that they can get their final, shiny XBox 360 ‘achievement’. And a great deal of these people have taken the time to write about it.

It’s one of those games, where the disparate, hazy community of hobbyists seems to surge into debate as one. Where you don’t feel like you’re done with it until you’ve talked about it. Head over to RockPaperShotgun for a collection of excellent critiques and links to reviews, interviews etc.- including an encounter with Bioshock‘s creator, Ken Levine, that’s really a must-read.

All of this- and much of what shall follow here, to be sure- is riddled with spoilers. If you live on the moon or have no real interest in the medium, then you might be unaware of the fact that Bioshock includes one of the all-time-greatest-ever twists of anything ever, somewhere just after the middle of the game. If there’s ever any chance that you’ll pick it up to play for more than a few hours together, you DO NOT WANT TO HAVE THIS TWIST SPOILED FOR YOU. So stop reading, please. And stop reading comment threads, articles, reviews, walkthroughs or editorials from the gaming community until you’re done with Bioshock. Look, just play it, alright?

It’s unlikely that I’m going to have anything to say here that hasn’t already been mentioned by others already. All the same, and perhaps with an eye to my rant of a few weeks ago, here are some thoughts.

Firstly, I’m glad I took my time over the game. I got it the day after it was released, and have played it slowly ever since. This morning I finished, which is perfect because as of next week I’ll actually be a busy human being again. Now, the forums are stuffed with people bragging about how they completed the game in one or two sittings, with only ten or less hours of play. And there’s some strength to the argument that games, in general, are far shorter than they used to be, and whether or not this is a Good Thing. But I am very thankful that I had stuff to do, and so couldn’t follow my impulse to storm through the game in a couple of all-nighters. The richness of the environment, of the atmosphere- decaying, retrograde 1950s art-deco opulance- absolutely demands reflection.

And it’s this that leads to my first real criticism of the game. It’s too busy. I recognize that the tight, enclosed space of the game helps lend it much of its horror, and makes possible the kind of closed-circuit mechanic (gatherer/hunter/guardian) that makes the whole thing special. But it’s stuffed with action, and noise, and light, and movement (voluntary or otherwise). Momentum is one thing, yes- but there isn’t a spot in the game where you can simply observe your world without the loud buzz of a nearby camera, the maniacal shrieks of some splicer in the distance (boy do voices carry underwater), the thump, groan and miniature earthquakes of a Big Daddy that you haven’t got around to dealing with yet. There isn’t enough space to make the whole thing feel like a city, which is what it’s supposed to feel like. Horror and action work best where the breaks feel like breaks, where you can contrast the action and the fear with, erm, absence of action and fear. The game, on occasion, was simply too loud. The Thief series arguably does it far better-and freedom, too. But more of that later.

If I had created a soundtrack and effects as sumptuous as these, I’d probably play them loud as well. The voice-acting is simply the best I have ever encountered in a video game, as is the script. The game’s plot and twists are very script- and delivery- dependent, and a lesser game might have let you down on this.

It’s also these twists that make Bioshock, I suspect, the first game to contain a truly effective critique of the medium. After having my own poodleish antics thrown in my face as they were here, it’s actually going to be hard picking up another shooter anytime soon without seeing the lines, the joins, the places where all the bloody orders just stop making sense. In this sense, Bioshock is not just a great story- it’s a story that could only have been told as a computer game. This alone sets it on a plinth, in the company of very few others. That it also takes the time to say something we didn’t know we were all already thinking, to be truly reflexive, almost Brechtian in tearing down the third wall, showing us a mechanic for what it is… that’s just phenomenal.

Part of the strength here is in subverting a fundamental weakness. Compared to Deus Ex, Bioshock is practically a half-life-esque linear shooter. Slightly disappointingly, this doesn’t really alter after we have the essential nature of our hobby used as a major plot point. My initial excitement at realising I had to collect some elixir but that there were two batches of it in different parts of the game world was quickly quashed. I needed both, of course. What looked like a big decision turned into a minor one- not ‘what would you like to do?’ but ‘what order would you like to do it in?’.

This holds true throughout. Real divergences and areas not required by the main plot are few and far between. This is a retrospective qualm, however, as I felt constantly driven by the game’s plot- even in the final third. There was enough emotional investment to make me seriously want to push through to the end. Most games don’t offer you such a compulsive experience. If they do, you can be damn sure they won’t give you much of an option to ignore it. Bioshock does, in places, and that’s nearly a miracle.

And the key mechanic for the game’s compulsion is where Bioshock‘s ‘spiritual successor’ status comes in. Both of your key enemies in the game are essentially godlike, and this is a direct echo of System Shocks 1 and 2. Atlas/Fontaine (note the references to Rand’s books here in the monikers of our key nemesis) and Andrew Ryan all, inevitably, remind us of Shodan. And the best thing I can advise you to do here is read and enjoy Kieron Gillen’s essay on the queen of all game villains, here. Come back when you’re done.

Shodan, of course, was the real Deus Ex Machina – or Deus Est Machina. As a gameplay mechanic, she was a stroke of genius. We fear specific things- death, the unknown. More than these we fear a malevolent god. And Ryan, in the first part of the game, fulfils these same roles. As you progress, he mocks you, taunts you. He sets traps for you, punishes you for resisting him. When one god is felled- not because you defeated him but because the bastard ordered you to, to prove a point- our new, worse deity takes over. This one really is the devil, because he’s a trickster. Like any trickster, he gave you all the clues you needed- visual suggestions- the tattoos on your arms, the momentary flashbacks, the repetitions of that phrase.

This is why I don’t think the game’s finale- the much admonished Boss Fight- was a bad idea. In fact, I enjoyed it. I’m not a truly skilful gamer, and so found that the difficulty was pitched just right- frustration vs. excitement. The plasmid/tonic technologies even give a decent in-game excuse for such a titanic figure to struggle against, which is more than I can say for most games. Like every other part of Bioshock, this last section was self-aware. It was The Way Games End. It was a Boss. The removal of your regeneration system was important here. too. You fought, you died, you fought harder. Eventually you won, and you felt that familiar flush of victory- and then you hated yourself for it, because the game’s just told you that you’re playing a game. But critically, in an experience where you can’t die, not ever, where all your fear and anger stems from a sequence of gods- you are given the power and the opportunity to destroy one. Not because you were told to- but because you wanted to. That’s satisfaction.

Andrew Ryan’s ‘utopia’ of Rapture is an explicit and repeated homage to the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand. To what extent is it a critique of them? As the man himself intones: “It wasn’t impossible to build a Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

Levine has said that he is attacking absolutism- in that any absolute ideology is dangerous. But I believe that Ryan represents the impossible predicament of a totally anarchistic society. He betrays his own ideals in order to attempt to do away with Fontaine, nationalising assets, forming armies, even introducing state-led capital punishment. Bit of a departure for the ultimate libertarian. The destabilising element is, of course, a twisted side of human nature. Fontaine is a crook with ambitions. Within a super-capitalist society such as Rapture, he is free to become the biggest fish in the pond. The ultimate flaw with Objectivist ideology, as with any, is that there will always be someone willing to subvert it to their own ends (in this case, a nihilistic con-man).

There’s so much to be said about this great work. It neatly summarises everything a piece of interactive art should be. Embrace it, love it like a brother. Lose yourself to Rapture. I really feel that there’s no coming back. The only first-person games that appear remotely palatable after this are Half Life, Thief, the first Deus Ex and maybe sandbox games like Oblivion or GTA.

Rapture really has changed the world.

… to the UK, and how. The first season ended on such a high; a sequence of episodes which included the high political maneuverings of Caesar, the omens of his destruction, the single most gory arena battle ever committed to celluloid, the rending of a family by infidelity, the incestuous seduction of a future emperor…

 It’s wonderful, really. Rome is interesting because it decides to be absolutely as historically accurate as it possibly can in the most weird places- setting and period detail, backdrops and sets, cultural taboos and sexual mores, while paying very little attention to the actual accepted narrative of the era it portrays. And it really does work; it feels authentic enough for us to suspend our disbelief even as it re-renders an ancient story to fit its medium.

And this is nothing new; when Shakespeare was writing his great Roman plays, he certainly only paid cursory attention to actual alliances and facts as they were then understood. When Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius- in every sense Rome’s precursor- He put his audience ahead of some bookish obsession with absolute historical accuracy. See also the new Thermopylae film, 300.

It shows an acceptance of several important points: firstly, the greatness of these original stories, these narrative inheritances, is in their themes, not their facts. The stories of Troy and Alexander, Persia, Greece and Rome are the templates upon which a narrative tradition was founded. They are blueprints, their earlier incarnations (when history was not so clearly delineated from story) as subjective as the more recent attempts to turn the past into art and entertainment (hopefully a bit of both at the same time).

Implicitly, this kind of production displays a snippet of real wisdom: that any attempt at a historical drama is immediately and automatically divorced from the literal facts of its historical context. And this does not need to be a bad thing. Historians themselves are only ever working with second-hand, subjective material. There is no ‘primary source’ which was never itself secondary Not even the buried stones of an ancient culture are immune from the fact that they were crafted.

So let’s enjoy a bit of modern, artistically driven historical truth; the kind of truth that resides in Rome’s hilariously undiluted attitude to sex (“I’m not leaving this bed until I’ve fucked something.” “Fine! Go and fetch that German slut from the kitchen…”), or in Rome’s playful references to the still-popular version of events propagated by Shakespeare (“It wasn’t a bad speech, Brutus… maybe a bit cerebral for that crowd…”).

And, best of all, it’s beautifully written, passionately performed, seductively filmed and has absolutely glorious production values.

Rome Season 2 Episode 1 repeats on the BBC tonight a little before midnight. Watch it.

The five-part BBC documentary, closely associated with the similarly themed, titled and authored book, ended last night. And, by all that is holy, it’s the first documentary in some years not mainly involving whales that I’ve felt driven to watch every last minute of.

In attempting to tackle a broad-brush history of the years since the war in a primarily political way, the most obvious comparison is with fellow ex-journo Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, a slightly older book. The bearing is similar, even if Marr’s work is more ostensibly a popular history than Hennessy’s. Even the political alignment is identically portrayed (in that it is hardly portrayed at all- good to see), both histories littered with semi-personal anecdotes (Hennessy’s constant references to events that simply must have been disclosed to him in some shady curry-house just off parliament square, tie still loose from the struggles of the lobby; Marr’s mentioning last night of his own immediate- and flawed- reaction to the swift “victory” in Iraq).

But Marr’s vision is clearer, if more vague; his hypothesis more interesting, and his presentation more charismatic. Based upon the documentary along, Andrew Marr’s is the better history.

I like Andrew Marr. I think many people do. He has a gift for images, for easily relatable metaphors which somehow always stop short of being patronising- comparing the British-Scottish union to a pizza being pulled apart, but still connected by molten cheese, or describing the heady, commercial ‘loadsamoney!’ days of the 80s as ‘like being properly drunk for the first time’.

And of course, Marr has a pretty interesting perspective on the last fifty years or so. He has served as a newsroom hack, a lobby correspondent, the editor of a broadsheet (back when the Independent was a broadsheet), the BBC’s political editor, and now a roving, quasi-historian with a penchant for accessibly intellectual radio and television programming and friendly interviews with VIPS on sunday mornings. His Scottish origins and very English current existence come into play as well; with the Scottish Nationalists in power and talk of a referendum on Union membership, Andrew Marr speaks of cheese stretched between two slices of pizza with a degree of personal certainty. Andrew Marr, you see, is the Mozzarella.

This documentary was also an attempt at mythologisation; at crafting a popular, unitary narrative from the thousands of strands of an increasingly complex national history. Marr sticks his fingers into all sorts of pies, discussing the fortunes of British cinema as if it has a real, causal bearing on the flow of the story of the British People. And usually- usually- he pulls it off.

There is the feeling that Andrew Marr desperately wants to understand the changes this country’s been through for himself; the way that the economy was changed, the opening of the gates to globalisation, even the threat of the greenhouse effect. This is a journalist’s personal attempt to come up with some sort of unified field theory for his own recent history.

The transition from career journalist to historian is frequently attempted, if commonly failed. Someone once wrote that the newspapers are the first draft of history; to Marr, as to so many others, it must seem the most natural thing in the world to have a crack at the second draft, as well. Or even the third. Marr chose wisely in writing first about himself, and then the history of his own profession in My Trade, which is excellent reading for anyone.

Complaints? The series was too short. Covering six decades of history in a total of five hours is a tall order for anyone. That’s about one year of history for every five minutes of screen-time; clearly inadequate. The problem with this approach is that the emphasis has to become about what is ommitted rather than what is included. For example, the last programme was full of implicit criticism of Blair’s foreign record, but it never once mentioned Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, or Bosnia. Picking the quote that matches the story is a journalistic, rather than historical, practice.

Nevertheless, this was some of the most compelling documentary work that I’ve seen for some time. Not enough is done to catalogue the years following World War 2- especially given the hours upon hours of documentaries devoted to that conflict. Andrew Marr’s excellent new series was a good first step in addressing this deficiency.

Well, I needed a few days to think things through- not just about that epic final double-bill, but the way the whole season now stands in the light of its events.  And of course, the real challenge will be in doing this without any spoilers. Hummm.

Season 3 was incredibly disjointed, in some ways. It really was. The six-episode mini season thing at the beginning only sort of worked, let’s be honest. The truly memorably stand-out from those was of course The Cost of Living, which simply rang every bell that the best of Season 1 had, though staying with the somewhat unsatisfactory season 2 pattern of saying absolutely nothing of any interest for four episodes and then stuffing half a season’s worth of revelation into 45 minutes.

I was absolutely terrified for the show’s future at that point, I can remember. The emphasis seemed to have shifted to the power-plays between various groups on the island rather than the central mysteries. Moreover, they were using silly ways of addressing big stuff left hanging from the Season 2 finale. Again, the word has to feel disjointed. Disjointed, disjointed.

The writing was, with a few notable exceptions, failing to reach the Season 1 highs. The trend had been set in Season 2- instead of showing, Lost was telling.  The elegance and the naturalism of the writing and the dialogue was somewhere being lost, the subtlety sacrificed to exposition of the clunkiest kind. The writers clearly wished to be able to appeal to a new audience, since the viewing figures were descending and ABC was messing with screening times.

But I can’t say how reassuring, how impactful and intriguing and exciting the last four or five (or even six or seven) episodes have been. It’s high time for all you folks who lost the faith to suck it and see again. The particular, structural alteration revealed at the very end of the Season 3 finale I think is a masterstroke; I can only hope that the mechanism is used with similar skill in future. Those of you who have seen it know exactly what I’m talking about. Also, the return of a perennial mysterious character as double-act with Locke is exceedingly welcome.

The fact is, the show had to change. Deep down, we all knew it did. Season 1 was where the fun was easy and the gains immediate: introduction, surprise, random and strange things, self-contained episodes, big themes, boys-own adventures. But it couldn’t last forever. Thematically, the show had to progress the very second a few answers- or the keys to answers- were given away. Season 2 saw many of those growing pains. And the second half of the third season is where the payoff began.

I suggest that everyone catches up immediately.

There. No spoilers. It can be done.

Everyone loves receiving packages in the post. I especially like the little non-commercial ones- with the textured white or brown recyclyed, reinforced paper exterior and that slightly spongy tightness as you pick it up or receive it from the postman, betraying the fixed masses of bubblewrap just beneath the surface.

Beyond such aesthetic concerns, there is an implicit promise from such packages: no matter the postage stamp, no matter the size: what’s inside was dirt-cheap, probably second-hand, bought not from Amazon but some other, private seller over the internet. And, in my case at least, is almost certainly an out-of-print science fiction novel.

Here is the beauty of internet shopping. People always complain that the likes of Abe Books and Amazon are putting the little sellers out of business. I was present at an extremely irritating lecture given by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, on the subject of ‘the challenge of new media’, and he essentially said the same thing, even though he had the dignity to admit that Abe is one of the sweetest things on God’s earth.

The end of the little businessman, the corner bookshop? Nothing could be further from the truth: there is a whole new generation of specialists and second-hand dealers, people who have come up through eBay and actually started small businesses. It’s the hobbyist’s dream, and also just simple, good news for people who are willing to do a tiny bit more legwork. The truth is, none of us are ever likely to pine for a certain book ever again. And this is a good thing, seeing as the vast, vast majority of all books are currently out of print.

The world of publishing is particularly cruel to science fiction authors: even after that monumental moment of actually selling a story, they have to face the fact that their initial run will be small, the book will never get properly marketed, the front cover and editing will be a shambles, and the finished product on the bookstore shelf will be almost unilaterally ignored due to a combination of the above factors and the truth that most readers have an enormous chip on the shoulders about science fiction as a genre. And sci fi books don’t get second chances. You’re either phenomenally popular, relative to more mainstream fiction, or you achieve a very short-term success within the relatively miniscule confines of your genre’s base readership.

And yes, massive amounts of science fiction is very very bad. In America particularly, the genre was essentially hijacked by nonsense-nationalists and ideologues during the 60s and 70s. The whole thing became politically charged and polarised: space-hippies roamed the spacelanes in every chapbook while the other side of the fence saw ridiculously overbearing libertarian dreamworlds, projected into the future or else crushed by the inevitability of the apocalypse. Apocalypse everywhere.

This is the start of a very dangerous thing: the ‘genre staple’. Think on those words. Try saying them aloud. Learn to loathe them. ‘Genre’ is as unnecessary a piece of terminology as any outside the elitist, pretentious realms of literary or media criticism. It confines, renders rules where the creative process ought to run wherever the creator damn well pleases it to. Add a ‘staple’- the repeated theme (connote that it is repeated ad nauseam). What is a staple? Why, it is the stodge at the side of your plate, the complex carbs excised from your atkins diet. It’s tasteless so that you can put other things on top of it. It’s comfort food.

And make no mistake: a ‘genre staple’ is as much invented by an author as by a critic. We can all accept a little of it- there’s a reason a cliche becomes a cliche, after all, and a few people did it first, or did it second or third or fourth in vaguely original ways. The post-apocalypse novel is an essential part of our literary geography now, and rightly so. But when even otherwise great books are marred by endless, meaningless cold-war bleating (see Greg Bear’s Eon) you can see where the science fiction authors shot themselves in the foot. It’s not a genre, it’s a culture, with as much negative as positive. But it’s also utterly dismissed now, and partly because science fiction writers have failed to do themselves any favours.

But in amongst the reams of books that have been published once, or trialled for a second run and then abandoned, or lost to dodgy reprints, or edited into oblivion before being consigned between the covers of a cheap anthology: in amongst all of those now-invisible words, there is the quality stuff that simply deserves to be recognized.

This morning, in a textured white envelope, beneath the bubble-wrap, I received a 1972 edition of the novel Phoenix by Richard Cowper, which was the pseudonym then under use by a certain John Middleton Murry Jr., who had previously published several excellent books under the name of Colin Murry. The man can write, by god, no matter what he decides to call himself:

Like a match struck up to the zenith of the northern sky the rocket flared, dwindled, and was lost behind the thin scrapings of cirrus. Within minutes the silver-white smoke of its trail, nudged to the east by the prevailing breeze, had crooked outwards into a colossal question mark which slowly melted away. Long after all trace of it had disappeared, Bard still leant against the railing of the penthouse balcony, gazing upwards.

Three hundred feet below him the evening exodus was beginning. The express track of the pedaway was already sprinkled with homeward-bound commuters speeding out towards Hendon and Golders Green, while the mono-rail cars from the Baker Street terminal, pinned by lancing shafts of sunlight, wriggled like slim silver-fish as they squirmed their way through the reticulated traceries beyond Regent’s Park…

Now if any of you have even heard this guy’s name before- any of them- then I’ll buy you a pint.

I bet I’ll read this tomorrow and write another thousand words about science fiction and genre-wars…