The Business
Posted 3 days ago by Scott AndrewsI just made a passing reference to Celia Johnson in an email and got sucked in to twenty minutes of wiki browsing.
Did you know Celia Johnson married Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s travel writing bro (who by total co-incidence I wikid the other day, and whose books sound like an absolute hoot) and their daughter is Lucy Fleming, of Survivors, who’s married to Chunky Gilmore from Remembrance of the Daleks?
God, the net just sucks time, doesn’t it?!
Also: every wiki browse ultimately leads to Doctor Who. It’s a fact, honest.
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Picked up a book the other day and started reading. Long time since I did that. It was strange to rediscover it, almost, and remind myself why, until relatively recently, I read at minimum a book a week every week. Reading’s fun, isn’t it?
In all the rush to write I’d forgotten to read. Bad Scott.
William Gibson doesn’t read fiction at all any more, finds it interferes with his muse. But may I be presumptious and suggest his lack of reading may explain why he produces so few books? I found reading again was a huge relief and an inspiration to get to work.
Anyway, the book in question was Iain Banks’ The Business. I first read it five or six years ago in a single afternoon and was wholly underwhelmed by the experience. But Simon Guerrier urged me to give it a second chance and told me to read it as a prequel to the Culture books, whereupon it makes much more sense.
And do you know, he’s right. It’s a bloody Culture book in disguise. Or at least, it takes as its premise – how could something like the Culture come about, and what kind of choices and moral framework could inspire it?
It lacks the grand guignol of his more gruesome tales, the broad comedy of Espedair Street, or the emotional power of The Crow Road. It’s a minor Banks. But it’s still a damn good read, with a likeable and well realised central character, a few of Banks’ trademark eccentrics, some interesting ideas well explored, and moments that made me smile or think.
The thriller plot is underused – too tenuous to follow initially, and then too poorly explained at the end. I’d have made more of that, it could have given the book a sense of urgency which it would have benefitted from greatly.
But Banks is a safe pair of hands, and even a less than stellar performance from him is well worth the time.
Coming after Song of Stone – the only Banks book I genuinely dislike – I felt at the time that maybe his powers were beginning to wane. But then he followed The Business with Dead Air, which Simon dislikes, thinking it too ranty.
For me, however, Dead Air was a breath of fresh air, and Banks’ rediscovery of his fury and moral outrage reinvigorated his writing in all sorts of fun ways. Dead Air is focused and pacey, laugh out loud funny and genuinely gripping. You can tell that he wrote it in a single frantic rush, carried away by the story and his passion for it, unlike its more measured, considered and slightly bloodless predecessor.
Plus, it has an entire chapter that consists solely of ‘Oh, shit.’ Which is a perverse form of genius.
I’ve now dived into his latest non-sci-fi tome, The Steep Approach To Garbadale. Two chapters in and it’s brilliantly written, shifting viewpoints and time frames with a practiced, masterful ease that’s deeply enviable, and drawing the reader into a story that so far feels perhaps a tad too reminiscent of The Crow Road, but which I’m sure will prove to be more than a retread of past glories.
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All this to distract from blogging about a really exciting commission I got yesterday, which I’m dying to shout about, but can’t. Soon though :-)
Impressions
Posted 5 days ago by Scott AndrewsSo my Stargate play is out a few days early to download from the Big Finish website.
This is the first time I’ve done something for a really established and vocal online fandom. Many of my mates write for Doctor Who and I’ve watched the pasting they get from fans online year after year and winced on their behalf at the things that are said about their stuff.
My turn now. The very first online review pithily states that ‘the story sucks’.
Feels almost like a badge of honour :-)
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New IGN article
Posted 11 days ago by Scott AndrewsI’ve got a new article up on IGN today – Top 2000AD shocks, featuring contributions from Mike Carey, Paul Cornell, Al Ewing, David Bishop, Matt Smith and Tony Lee.
Tweet tweet
Posted 16 days ago by Scott AndrewsFollowing the uprisings in Iran via Twitter is a fascinating and vexing thing. Sifting through the mass of tweets to get the kernels of info, and trying to filter out the noise and deliberate misinformation is hard work. But it’s strangely visceral.
The authorities are tracking and arresting twitter users in an attempt to silence them. Brilliantly, a counter tactic has emerged – all users of Twitter are being asked to change their profile to list them as being in Tehran. This means the authorities are being deluged by posts ostensibly from Tehran, and have a much, much harder job to do rooting out the protestors.
Simply by changing my profile info in Twitter I can make a genuine, practical contribution to an uprising halfway across the world. How bizarre this all is.
My preferred source so far is persiankiwi.
If you want evidence of how this is all unfolding, this series of tweets from persiankiwi is stark – it’s like listening in to the radio broadcasts of SOE agents in wartime France:
our lives are in real danger now – we are the eyes – they need to stop us
RT all my posts as much as possble to help confuse censors
DO NOT RT any other tweeters posts unless u are 100% sure they are GENUINE
any proxy addss shown on twitter is possible trap – freedom twitters in Iran DO NOT follow – YOUR LOCATION IS VISIBLE
several arrests today after tracking thru twiter proxys
To top it all, tweets like this one are appearing:
hackers pls target vezarat ershad website – we know they jaming from that proxy
A virtual call to arms to hackers all over the world to take down government computers and prevent the protestors’ connections being jammed. And you bet geeks from Seattle to Dunedin are booting up their computers and joining the fight. Is the first worldwide geek cyber battle taking place right now? We won’t know til the post-game analysis, but chances seem high.
Rumours swirl madly, unconfirmed, and it’s hard to know what to believe.
Many sources in Iran claim that the army is refusing to open fire, and word is out that some generals have been arrested, presumably (my inference) for refusing to obey orders.
At the same time, there are lots of reports that arabic speaking non-Iranian riot police have just begun to appear. If true, this implies that TPTB know that they have are losing, or have already lost the support of the army and are importing foreign troops to help sustain order. If proven, this is very important.
The Baseej militia – a kind of radicalised free-form army, is towing the party line and trying to suppress the demos – they were the ones responsible for opening fire a few days ago – but feeling is that even with Baseej support and outside help, things look bad for the regime unless they can persude Tank Commander to open fire. And so far he appears to be saying no.
Even the national footie team has taken a united stand against the coup.
To top it all, the Majlis Khobregan may have called an emergency meeting. This is the council which appoints – and can dismiss – the Ayatollah. This raises all sorts of thoughts – if they’ve decided Ahmenijad is toast, they may wish to dump Khameini as well, as they are too closely allied. They may hope that a new Ayatollah would put distance between the clerics and the now doomed election rig. It would be a desperate move, but who knows what they’re contemplating.
Just speculation, mind.
And furthermore
Posted 17 days ago by Scott AndrewsBridget Kendall at the BBC weighs in with a thoughtful and informative article on the methods of state supression and concludes:
“there are two key issues to watch: whether a government is prepared to use force, and whether it can effectively control the information space. And it could just be, for all the power of cold metal bullets, that it is the second virtual tool that is the most crucial.”
I would add prepared and able to use force, which brings us back to Tank Commander.
She also relates this fascinating anecdote which testifies that controlling the information space has been impossible for nigh on 20 years:
“I remember Mikhail Gorbachov’s former ideology chief, a liberal reformer called Alexander Yakovlev once recalling how his bosses in the old Soviet Politburo ordered him to cost the business of jamming all satellite TV. This was the mid-1980s, in retrospect the last dying decade of the old USSR.
“Mr Yakovlev said he looked into it, and reported back: radio jamming was expensive but just about doable. But when it came to TV jamming, it was just too expensive. The genie was effectively out of the bottle. The Politburo had to accept that the USSR could no longer practically enforce an isolated information space. ”
A blunt instrument like satellite TV was impossible to contain; the constantly mutating, nimble footed hydra of the internet just laughs at the attempt.
