Gareth Pugh shows, not tells.

As I was driving into the sunset this evening, and trying – and succeeding – to suppress a sneeze, I wondered how different drama would be if humans didn't sneeze.  Now I'm put on the spot, I can't actually recall the details of a single instance of a sudden sneeze giving away Our Heroes to the Bad Guys, but I know I've seen it a dozen times. And I think "see" is the right verb. I can't remember it on the written page at all. It seems to be a television trope of some sort.

Then again, even if I read it, since the bald words make no dramatic sense on paper, I would remember it in my mind as having "seen" it happen.

I did check TV Tropes, which knows everything, but it didn't come up with any examples that I would likely have seen, and mainly concentrates on the Gale Force Sneeze of Comedy, although they don't call it that.  

I'm reading a Space Opera, or at least trying to. It's by one of the second or third tier writers – I won't name her, as there's no point – so, not Lois Bujold or David Weber. I picked it up for a buck at the Friends of the Library bookshop for no real reason except the volunteer who runs the store on Saturday seemed depressed, so giving him something for his afternoon's work seemed like a win/win situation. It has a picture of a neat young woman in a uniform on the cover. She's firing a...blaster, I'm going to call it. Heavily armed humans are running towards her and there's a lot of superstructure and starlight suggesting Space. The title appears to be a pun, using a word for one's adversary with a present participle that can mean either  "about to kill" or  "about to marry". That tickled my warped fancy.  Perhaps there would be Romance and Shenanigans and Romps! With Space Battles!

So why am I bringing it up?

Because it's really, really, really, really boring. I have no idea how it could have been picked up by a publisher.

It's not boring in the sense that say, even the thought of Anna Karenina is, or War and Peace. It's boring because nothing is shown to happen.  It opens with the Captain waking up in bed – always a strong opener, I find – and on page 2, she goes to the Space Kitchen (they're called galleys, apparently) and is offered a breakfast of Space Egg Custard and a spoon to eat it with. She then talks about all kinds of things that happened in the past with a crew member, thinks about a lot of things that have happened in the past as well, and then decides she'd rather 'microwave' a Space Pot Noodle instead, so she throws the egg custard away (in a 'recycler').  The crew member tells her how to access her own brain  'implant'; there's more conversation and then she goes to Space Bed again.  Afterwards she has to pause to run her sheets through "the 'fresher cycle" but not to worry! Action-packedness will return! Soon she's... sitting at her Space Desk where she and her implant run through a battle that happened in the past. She thinks about it a great deal,  but eventually decides she needs to blow off steam, so she goes for a bout of Space Judo with a crewmember.  Then, until I drifted off, she either talked about the past with her crew members or thought about the past with the help of her implant.  All the while, the ship is nearing a star system. We know this because people mention it, or think about it, on occasion.

Two other books are mentioned on the back cover but a semi-careful perusal of all available blurb didn't say this was the second book in a series of three, or for that matter vice versa. Even if this is all recap, couldn't it be buried in something other than Brenda Starr dialogue?

After a really long while, one character (on a planet, natch) goes fly fishing and catches a trout, which she subsequently releases. There's no sign that it's a foreshadowing, mirror incident or metaphor. She just likes fly fishing. At least she's doing it in the present and it's described. She isn't simply talking about it with the other bloke who is fly fishing nearby.

I realize that "show, don't tell" is a massive cliché, and good writers are always finding ways to get around doing it. I think you have to master the showing first, then incorporate it into the telling later to be readable, though. Hundreds of pages of directly quoted speech, with a few paragraphs of wondering and remembering every few thousand words might possibly be thrilling, if the characters followed some other basic rules of drama. For instance, if you want to grip the reader, any given two characters have to want something different. They don't have to be hereditary mortal enemies (although it helps); they can be simply want slightly different outcomes.  Jim wants to go back to port before Dr. Badguy releases a plague that could sweep the planet where his family lives while Jack wants to continue in pursuit of the White Space Whale to avenge his father's death or something.  Tension, conflict, drama.

Like the scene where the two characters are fly fishing. One is a dry fly fisher and one is a wet fly fisher.

Conflict! Drama! Tension!

Well, not really.

I was listening to the BBC World Service today and they were reading a short story, New Gods by Joe Dunthorne. It's available here, at least for today.  It's about a daughter coping with the death of her elderly mother, whose online avatar is now left drifting in a MMOG, and whose dead father's personality has been uploaded to a service that spams her regularly in his voice, asking when she's going to pay to 'see' him again.  There's some good jokes: The online castle is being stormed by an army bearing a banner in Gothic Script, "Whoo Yea Gareth Pugh!" "Gareth Pugh is probably in his fifties now," the story goes on. "Perhaps a ruthless property developer."

When cyberspace fiction is podcast into the intertubes after debuting the same day on the positively steampunk valve radio of the World Service, it really is time to bury science fiction, I think.  I liked the story, don'ta getta me wrongo, but when perfectly mundane young men can get this story on the World Service, SF is probably so indistinguishable from background that you have to go hunt somewhere else.

Radio Off

SiriusXM just dropped BBC Radio 1 from its lineup without warning. On the 2nd of August, I paid a year's dues, on the 9th, BBC Radio 1 disappeared to be replaced by a disembodied voice saying I can find songs like the ones I used to enjoy on several channels.... It didn't explain how I could find people like Annie Nightingale and Zane Lowe, or things like Radio 1 outside broadcasts from Ibiza, or the Live Lounge.

I cancelled - they gave me my dues back minus two bucks - complained, and will listen to Radio 1 on the website instead, although that wrecks the timeshift that XM used to put into it. (It was streamed five hours late, so the times on the BBC clock were correct for the east coast - three hours wrong for me, but not as weird as listening with an 8 hour offset.)

I'm not sure what the issue was. I've seen folk say that the BBC did it, as they are readying for iPlayer, and I've seen people say that XM simply backed out of the negotiations.  Either way, it wasn't a nice thing to do. And it's not like I have other things to take my mind off it, like lay-offs at work, the Crisis of Capitalism or the England riots.

Radio On (Chris Petit, 1980) DVD

Sound and Vision

Chris Petit's 1980 movie Radio On got its DVD release earlier this month. (Spoilers below.)

Radio On documents a road trip of Robert, an affectless man in the 'Winter of Discontent' world of pre-Thatcher Britain in 1979. His brother has committed suicide in Bristol. Robert recently received a parcel from him for his birthday, which he reviews before he starts on his trip. In it, there are three Kraftwerk tapes. He puts one in his car tape/radio, but never seems to get to like it. One track is 'Radio Activity'; it's semi-appropriate. Robert is a DJ in a factory, though not really a 'radio' DJ, employed to play requests, which he reads out but ignores, playing his favorites instead. The workers don't mind; in fact they don't seem to notice. Perhaps they can't hear over the machinery. He plays "Sweet Gene Vincent."

He leaves his unpleasant lover and bare flat in Camden, driving via the Westway and the M4 motorway out to Bristol to check his brother's house. The car's radio is on, playing anthemic pop from the late seventies. He hears a news snippet about a porn bust, which may be a clue. We never find out. He meets a squaddie in a pub, gives him a lift, but abandons him at Silbury Hill when he finds out he's crazed with PTSD from a tour in Northern Ireland. He plays primitive video games at a motorway service station. He is roughed up by a woman for occupying a location that interferes with her pool shot. At a petrol station he encounters the outside world, the American Dream, personified here by Sting. They sing Three Steps to Heaven together, but America is inaccessible; we see a clipping about the automobile accident near Bristol that killed Eddie Cochran and crippled Gene Vincent. Robert meets two German girls. One of them hates men. "There's no word for that in English," he tells the other one. "There's only a word for a woman-hater." He finds out his brother had a live in girlfriend. She doesn't want to talk. He and the German girl visit her mother by the sea. They talk in German about the granddaughter. He can't understand them.

He reviews his clues, projecting pictures against the angle between two walls. Bondage photos and tourist photos intermingled. He stands in the image, his face incorporated into the scenery as a twist of geometry, looking keenly into the projected face of his brother. Nothing passes between them. He drives his Austin Rover to a quarry, and parks on the very edge of the vertical face, Kraftwerk's Ohm Sweet Ohm thrumming out over the void gouged in the bleak winter landscape. Too late he remembers that the ancient car requires a hand crank to start. He's too close to the edge to use the starting handle. The motor car can go neither forward nor back.

He takes the train back to Camden.


Radio On doesn't have to mean anything. As you watch it, you infer relationships based on your familiarity with the language of film. Your inferences may or may not be correct; it doesn't really matter. The film itself is beautiful, shot in black and white (the DVD is un-restored and not as luminous-silver as it should be) each shot carefully composed. Each scene is held for much longer than is natural in a movie. Where a current movie may have four to fourteen camera angles set up for each minute and literally dozens of cuts between those angles in a minute, Radio On has two or three angles for a scene and cuts every one or two minutes. The effect is like being led through an art gallery by a docent who moves you from one piece of artwork to the next at his own pace. I didn't like it when I first saw it in the cinema, and I think that's why; the feeling of being held hostage, restricted by someone else's sense of time, annoyed me. I'm more tolerant now.

The camera angles chosen are unusual. Here's a few: A long shot from a tower block window, following the car over a motorway junction. A shot from a flyover looking at a hotel where separate windows frame two characters whom we know to be in the same room, but are now explicitly shown to be in different frames of reference. A plane coming in to land, slightly leading the car we're following. A visual poem as we watch Robert downshift the car as he comes to a road junction. The famous scene of the thick, soapy rollermops flailing at the windows as he goes through the car wash.

The sound is perfectly ambient. The film leads us in by fading the music played over the credits from the normal sound of in-home DVD music to the tinny, enclosed sound of music played over a car radio as we transition to a scene inside his car. It's a common opening, and yet it signals very strongly how the sound is going to be treated throughout. You can hear every space that the film depicts; make out its shape and the materials that it comprises. Jukeboxes, seabirds, the compressed-air whoomph! of cars passing in the opposite direction, all sound natural and live.

The music soundtrack is justly famous. It starts over the credits with David Bowie's "Heroes"/Helden, a song that is equal parts wildly inspiring and suicidally despairing. Its effect seems to come from the song's completely non-English sensibility. Instead of hanging on in quiet desperation, the song directs the listener to struggle, because we can beat them, though victory will be just for one day. Half in German, it's a perfect match for Radio On, which is the same. The rest is a roster of seventies music: Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovitch, Ian Dury, Devo.

The film has one oral pun: "Why do the English like to be at the seaside?" the German girl asks. "It's the last resort," Robert replies.



(All images are from the DVD)