Chronopolis

The peculiarities of not being able to drive can sometimes mean a long wait at a bus stop.  5 minutes in a charity shop can usually render a science-fiction paperback for about 50p to help pass the time, and it was in this way that I picked up Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun, which has one of those weird, sexually suggestive covers that has nothing to do with the story.  One of the most interesting things about that story is its perspective.  It's set on a planet that is fairly similar to ours, but it's told from the point of view of a person who's spent his whole life living in cramped quarters underground.  Things that would be normal for the reader, like going outside into the open air and coming into contact with sunshine, are told to us as frightening experiences, with the main character longing for close walls and familiar stale air.  I quite enjoyed it as a trick, and Chronopolis does a similar thing.

Précis:  Guy in a world with no clocks becomes fascinated with time management, and ends up on the wrong side of the law trying to make devices to accurately measure time.

Taking a step back from our increasing obsession with cramming as much as possible into every waking hour, we see the burnt out shell of this kind of society from the perspective of one where there is no measurement of time.  JGB gives us a look at two different worlds at the same time, exposing the flaws of both.  Before clocks and watches were outlawed, the entire city population ran like clockwork, with staggered travelling times, working hours and lunch breaks to ease the strain on services and businesses.  It's the logical extension of alternate day driving, which helped a great deal to reduce smog in Beijing (filthy dirty city) during the Olympics, and a solution to the Half-Time Kettle Effect.

Amongst all the philosophical explication flying around, there is one snippet that I found very thought-provoking.  It comes from a conversation between an English teacher (it's always an English teacher) and the young hero, who doesn't understand how you could hurt anybody with a clock:

"Isn't it obvious?  You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something."
"Well?"
"Then you can make him do it faster."

Anybody with a job will recognise this as time-management, 'doing more for less' and the dreaded 'efficiency gains'.

Now here's a thing, since reading The Naked Sun, I've learnt to drive and got a car.  Now that I can get home faster, will I ever have to nip into charity shops in search of paperbacks again?

Zone of Terror

This is an interesting one, as it's not a story I've come across outside of this flash game.

Précis:  Guy goes nuts and bumps into his double doing what he did a few minutes ago.

The story is set in some kind of corporate retreat in the desert for employees working on a giant computer network to simulate brain functions to rest and relax, and also deal with the mental health problems that go along with stressful work. Full plot summary courtesy of the University of Wikipedia.

The resort itself, although much smaller in scale, is quite similar to Eden-Olympia, particularly with the high-tech corporate background and the overbearing, morally questionable psychiatrist living next door. I can definitely see in Zone of Terror the seeds of future novels. I noticed quite a bit of recycling when I was reading the novels, and now that I'm reading the back catalogue of short stories I can see where lots of his ideas are coming from.  At least they're coming from himself and not some other bugger (as far as I know).

One more thing that it did put me in mind of, and that's an article I read in a mostly pointless bulletin that does the rounds in my office, which usually contains the standard gripes of people working in the FE sector about money, politicians, OFSTED and money. I came across a name I knew from a place I used to work, and armed with a nice cup of tea, I read his article, which raised interesting questions about the current approaches to educational management that result in anything from stress to full mental breakdown. A prolonged Google effort has failed to come up with anything remotely resembling the article, so I'll summarise here:

Mental health and well-being in the workplace is really not given anywhere near enough consideration as physical health and well-being, although it can account for similar amounts of time off if it's not attended to properly. We bend over backwards drawing up and complying with risk assessments to protect ourselves and our students, and there are complicated procedures for reporting accidents and flagging up potential hazards. The same is not done for the mental, emotional and stress-related hazards that the author links primarily to management cultures. We offer counseling and support and stress- and anger-management courses, but the author argues that that's equivalent to offering a plaster cast to people who happen to break their leg on a slippery floor. We just couldn't get away with such negligence of physical health and safety, while current working practices in the UK seem to be based on sacrificing mental health and safety without regard for the consequences.

Like I say, it was an interesting article, and I was reminded of it while reading Zone of Terror, set as it is in the corporate mental health retreat. So there you are. A pretty good story that got me thinking deep thoughts again.  Good.

The Sound-Sweep

One of my current broken-record criticisms of the Russell T Davies Doctor Who is that not enough time is taken. Everything is rushing around, and everything is tidied up nicely, often implausibly, inside the hour. What it needs, according to me, is more episodes. Re-viewing some of the old Tom Baker stuff (now there's a guy who's genuinely bonkers) there are some great stories developed over four or six episodes. Time is taken to develop ideas and characters, and, crucially for science-fiction, time is taken to think about what's going on.

From the pants that was Now: Zero, The Sound-Sweep is a five-parter which does precisely this. It charts the relationship between a mute who is employed to hoover up sounds and a has-been opera singer who hasn't worked since the invention of ultra-sonic music. Once again we have an entire world that is fantastic, coherent and thought-provoking, created not by paragraphs of scene-setting, but by actions and interactions of the characters. We are shown how this world works, rather than being told.

There is a lot going on here. Firstly, the effect that our environment has on us is a recurring theme in JGB's work. In almost everything I've read of his, much of the weird behaviour stems from living in holiday villas, or near Heathrow, or next to a shopping centre, or in a block of flats. In The Sound-Sweep is the sheer levels of noise that exist in our day to day lives that has the most profound effects on people, particularly as the sounds linger in walls, floors and furniture, repeating, haunting people until a janitorial figure comes along and hoovers them up for you. Although the bulk of the story hinges on the possibilities of blackmail using the echoes of past conversations, what struck me was something else. This is a story about noise pollution.

I can't help but think that I only noticed this because JGB left enough space between the chapters for me to figure it out.

Hiatus Part 2

Well I never!

I polished off The Restraint of Beasts in a couple of days.  Magnus Mills is great for that.  Really light reading, nothing really happens, and the books are quite short.  I find that I can usually eat up the pages and chapters within a couple of days, although for all its simplicity there's a lot more going on.  It's a bit like Animal Farm, which is a nice story about talking animals.  Magnus Mills is also very funny, but only if you get the joke.  Some reviewers on Amazon clearly didn't, hence the mixed reviews. Anyway, I'm rambling.  Good book, nothing really happens (or does it?), you learn a lot about putting up fences and it's very very funny.

So that took a couple of days, but my prolonged absence can be explained by the birth of my son, David, who arrived around lunchtime on the 10th, and has been causing time-management problems ever since.  Among the many things I will eventually teach him (dancing is okay for men, listen to women, Han shoots first), JG Ballard is one of them.  It will have to wait until he's in his teens before he gets presented with Crash, or High Rise, and I'll have to seriously think about A Clockwork Orange.

I'll try and find some time between feeding and burping and changing the little guy to keep up with reading and posting here.  When he gets old enough for a bedtime story, I'm not sure Vermilion Sands will really be appropriate. It looks like we'll start with Animal Farm then...

Hiatus

Brief hiatus while I read a belated Christmas gift from my dear sister, The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills.

Coming up after the break, The Sound-Sweep.

Now: Zero

This one is a bit crap.

Reminded me a little of the Olmstaff Method, but that's a far superior story.  Also reminded me of bickering roleplayers who "could just do that and kill you, ah but no, if you did that, then I'd just do that and kill you"

Pish.

The Waiting Grounds

Just dug out the tea set and had some seriously fine long-jing.  On the back of that, time to catch up with some blogging.

Continuing the science-fictioney theme of Track 12, this longer story is set in a familiar trope:  the remote mining colony in space with only a handful of people and the discovery of ancient bits and stuff.  It's the setting for so many stories I can think of, and probably has its roots in jingoistic colonial adventure stories in which missionaries hack through remote jungles and happen upon Thuggee cults and Hindus spelt 'Hindoo'.

Interestingly enough, the missionary thing gets flagged up in The Waiting Grounds, when a box of religious texts, including bibles, the quran and the talmud among others, turns up in the inventory of stuff left behind by two missing explorers.  It's not explored or explained in any detail, but it was an interesting thing to notice.

In short, strange carved monoliths are found, listing a couple of millennia of dynasties in various star systems in five different languages, including English.  Cue cosmic trip across space-time to the end of the universe.  It's quite a bit like 2001:  A Space Odyssey in that respect, although the protagonist gets plopped back where he was, left to contemplate his place in the universe.

The general consensus seems to be that this story is uncharacteristic of his writing, in that it's not set on Earth and are written fairly straight, with little irony.  One of the things I did notice about The Waiting Grounds in particular is the setup of the characters.  It's fairly standard science-fiction stuff: the hero arrives, there's been some kind of mysterious event, there's a character who knows more than they let on, the mystery is investigated, horrors ensue, minds are blown but the hero lives to recount the story.  Amongst the novels I've read, Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come all follow this pattern.  This is not lost on others who are familiar with Lovecraft.

Track 12

A short one here, before the longer one coming up (The Waiting Grounds).

This one was a bit weird.  It felt like something that Poe would have written, or Lovecraft in a thankfully much less wordy way.  It has the same fascination with the possibilities of technology, and the same sense of the macabre.

It also has a chap called Maxted, a name which later turns up in Kingdom Come.  Reduce, reuse, recycle...

Not much more can be said about the story than is said on the Wikipedia page, but I detected vague hints of a small commentary on surveillance society in the story of a scientist who secretly records his wife kissing another man.  The sound of the infidelity is caught with hidden microphones, magnified and amplified by the scientist, and is turned against the other man, who he kills with poison.  It's nice and Orwellian, or it looks that way to me, at least.  That might say more about me than it says about the story, however...