ArmadaCon 26

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Just back from ArmadaCon, Plymouth's annual Science Fiction & fantasy convention. This was its 26th year, and it's easy to see why it's been running for so long - it was an excellent weekend, in a nice hotel full of friendly, funny and fascinating folk. I didn't bother taking many photos (my 'phone can't cope with hotel lighting) but I did do some drawings. I've never been much good at capturing likenesses, but the costumes were fun to draw.


There was a nice line in the play by David Wake which opened proceedings on Friday night, when some time travellers arrive at a 2014 convention and say, 'Are you sure this is 2014? Everyone seems to be dressed in Victorian clothes...' A lot of the ArmadaCon regulars also attend the Discworld convention in Wincanton and/or take part in historical re-enactments, so there were some impressive mediaeval, Civil War and Napoleonic outfits on parade as well as at least two Doctors Who - but the default setting for SF fans now seems to be Victoriana, which is a bit bizarre. Still, the 'Tea Duelling' was fun, as pairs of frock-coated or be-crinollined competitors tried to out-genteel each other over tea and biscuits, under the watchful eye of organiser Dave Trace, with cello accompaniment by the amazing Miss Von Trapp. The lady in the trilby and the leg-of-mutton sleeves is meant to be the brilliant Frances Hardinge, who was guest of honour at ArmadaCon 25 and enjoyed it so much that she came back for more this year.


Meanwhile, much strangeness was going on in the lobby, where the very elaborate looking ArmadaCon fan film was being shot (it should be ready in time for ArmadaCon 27).  Actual science was provided by Gary Loveridge and Dr Bob (AKA Amanda Kear), who gave entertaining talks on (respectively) the Rosetta mission and strange reproductive techniques in fact and science fiction.


Andrew Cartmel (not pictured here) arrived on Saturday to talk about his books and his time as script of editor of Dr Who (back in the Sylvester McCoy years, which I mostly missed, but the episode he showed stood up very well).  And the charity auction on Sunday raised over £1500 for St Luke's Hospice, a very good cause indeed.





I had to dash off straight after the auction, so apologies to all the people I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to - I really enjoyed your company, and I'm sure I'll be back next year for more. Thank you so much for inviting me along!


Here's a link to the Plymouth Herald's ArmadaCon report.

And here's the ArmadaCon Facebook page, where you'll soon be able to find news about ArmadaCon 27 (which you should definitely attend).

Eiko Ishioka

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Sometimes, when you start to look into the origins of an image, you discover all sorts of unexpected connections.

A while back, I came across this great Japanese poster for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, one of the iconic movies of my teenage years.


I thought I'd post it on my Pinterest page (which is here, if you're interested, though I don't often use it)  so I went searching for information about the artist. It turns out to be the work of the designer Eiko Ishioka, who went on to collaborate with Coppola as costume designer on another of his films, Dracula


More interestingly for me, she also designed the costumes for Tarsem Singh's extraordinarily strange and beautiful movie 'The Fall', which I reviewed a few years ago. It's one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen, thanks in part to the costumes. Look at this! 


And these!

Image found on Cinebeats, where it accompanies this very good review of The Fall.

Not only that, she also designed costumes for the 'Hurricane' tour by the singer Grace Jones in 2009. I don't know a lot about Grace Jones, but I do remember being struck by the brilliant first single from Hurricane, Let Me Go. Listen to the lyrics; it's like a compressed autobiographical novel, with the singer playing both herself and her mother, and making us sympathise with both. 


Here she is performing Let Me Go live while dressed like a mad zebra goddess.


Eiko Ishioka died in 2012. There are more pictures of her creations on this Pinterest board.


Photo by Brigitte Lacombe, from eikoishioka.com
(which seems to consist only of this photo).



Patrick O'Brian

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Looking back at my last few posts, I find that I seem to have embarked on a series about Random Stuff I Like. And for ArmadaCon next weekend I'm putting together a talk on some of the writers who have influenced me over the years. Both of which seem like good excuses to dust off and re-post this piece on the novels of Patrick O'Brian. 


THE GODFATHER OF SAIL


"Why are you both reading Patrick O'Brian?" asked my son the other day, spotting that his mother is reading Master and Commander for about the third time while I'm on The Ionian Mission for what might be the fifth.  It's a reasonable question, and one which might be echoed by anyone who hasn't encountered O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, for to a casual observer they must appear to be cut from the same militaristic cloth as CS Forester's Hornblower yarns or Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels.  Hopefully the fact that we've both read and re-read the Aubrey/Maturin novels is proof that they offer something more than just tales of derring-do in the Napoleonic Wars.  (If I had to find a comparison I would say that they are more like Jane Austen, except that Patrick O'Brian excelled at writing battles, tempests, and shipwrecks, which were never really Jane Austen's strong point.)

The series began back in 1970, gradually grew in popularity through the eighties, and achieved huge acclaim in the '90s from the sort of critics who would usually sniff at books like these, followed by more widespread fame in the noughties with the release of the film Master and Commander, a pretty good screen version, although (or perhaps because) it doesn't follow any one book but mixes elements from many of them*.

Master and Commander is also the title of the first book.  It begins in 1802, when a young naval commander, Jack Aubrey, meets penniless physician Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon, Gibraltar.  Despite their shared love of music they are very different characters - almost exact opposites, indeed, for Jack Aubrey is big, straightforward, friendly, good-looking, a pretty conventional English Tory, an excellent seaman but a little naive ashore, while Stephen Maturin is small, rather ugly, reserved, physically clumsy, deeply intelligent, a keen naturalist, and a political radical of Irish/Catalan descent who took part in the failed rising against British rule by Wolf Tone's United Irishmen in 1798.  

But somehow they hit it off; Stephen sails as surgeon aboard Jack's brig the Sophie as she cruises the Mediterranean in search of French and Spanish ships, and so begins the enduring friendship which will be the subject of a further twenty novels.  War is always the excuse for the stories - Jack is ordered off to frustrate French or American plans in just about all of the world's oceans, and Stephen, finding that his hatred for Buonaparte exceeds his distaste for the British Empire, becomes an intelligence agent - but they are not simply war stories.  They are not really about plot at all, although the plots are good, and often nail-bitingly tense.  The real heart of the books is the characters; those two great central characters and all the lesser ones - hundreds and hundreds over the course of the whole series - who orbit about them.


O'Brian's approach to character is subtle; often he doesn't tell us what people are feeling; he just shows us what they do, and leaves it to us to work out why they do it.  They don't read like characters whose attributes have been thought out and noted down on index cards before the author set to work; they are inconsistent and perverse; they grow, and age, and make mistakes; the heroes sometimes behave in ways which make us think less of them, although they never lose our sympathy; apparent villains sometimes reveal a kinder side, or at least some reason for their villainy. And they all speak and think in a wonderful, rich, utterly convincing Georgian prose.  It isn't necessary for a historical novel to feel as if it were written in the era it's describing, but it's impressive when you find one that does.  (It's also rather infectious: I'm always warning Sam to put a coat on to preserve himself against the falling damps.  


The series is also surprisingly funny; when I started reading them I hoped to be entertained, and I expected to be informed, but I didn't expect to laugh out loud so often.  Some of the comedy is quite broad -  a reliable source of fun are the zoological specimens which Stephen brings aboard - wombats on deck; a beehive in the main cabin; a three-toed sloth which acquires a taste for rum ("Jack!  You have debauched my sloth!") - but most of it springs from the foibles and failings of the characters, and it grows funnier as we come to know them; Jack's tendency to mangle proverbs and quotations, and his infectious delight in his own bad jokes; the endless grumbling of his servant Killick, Dr Maturin's continuing inability to grasp the basics of seamanship and the nautical jargon which his shipmates spout, and the sly pride with which he uses the few scraps of naval terminology he does possess to baffle fellow travellers even less nautical than himself.

To a newcomer this naval lingo may be one of the most noticeable things about the books, and perhaps off-putting.  All this talk of double preventer backstays, futtock shrouds, bowlines, topgallants, studdingsails and flying jibs can seem a bit bewildering, and even the helpful diagrams which appear at the front of the more recent editions can't pack in a hundredth of the details.  Luckily for non-nautical readers we have Dr Maturin on our side; he is as bewildered as we by these reams of grommets, knees and catheads; even more so, perhaps (I don't think he is ever really sure of the difference between port and starboard) and the things we actually need to understand - the importance of gaining the weather gage in battle, for instance - are patiently explained to him by his shipmates in terms which even we can grasp.

Personally I find this cascade of odd, archaic, highly specialised words one of the many delights of the series, but I'm sure that some readers are equally happy to treat it as background detail; you no more need to understand sails and rigging to enjoy O'Brian than you need grasp the hand-wavey physics of Warp Drive to watch Star Trek.  And anyway, it is not all ships and sea: the books spend much time on shore as well; with Jack Aubrey's wife and children and his deliciously vile mother-in-law, with Stephen's contacts in the worlds of intelligence and natural philosophy, and with a vast array of characters met in foreign ports, some recurring, some mere passing sketches; admirals and ship's boys, noblemen and paupers, Frenchmen, Americans, Turks, Parsees, Chinese, Africans, even a pahi-full of Polynesian lesbian separatists, all vividly brought to life with a few words, making the series not just a portrait of the British navy but of the entire early nineteenth century world.

The tone changes subtly about half way through, when the Napoleonic Wars are running out and Jack Aubrey is in danger of being promoted to the rank of admiral, which would make him more concerned with administration than adventuring: time seems to slow down, reasons are found to halt the progress of Jack's career, and Stephen becomes rich enough to buy the lovely frigate Surprise.  Perhaps the later books are more historical romances than historical novels.  But none of that dents a fan's enjoyment in the least.

I suppose that if I were a proper reviewer I would be pointing out faults as well as high points, but to be honest I can barely think of any.  It's true that some of the books end rather suddenly, but that's just a good reason to start the next one.   It's true that The Hundred Days, the penultimate book, written very soon after the death of Mrs O'Brian, comes perilously close to jumping the shark when it abruptly kills off several major characters, hustling them off-stage with barely a goodbye.  It's also probably true that the female characters are less engaging than the men: it seems that you have to be outwardly beautiful to qualify as an O'Brian heroine, which is odd in a writer so attuned to his characters' inner lives.  Stephen's great love, Diana Villiers, can be particularly annoying; forever running off with richer, better looking men, and forever being forgiven.  What does Stephen see in her, I wonder? But I don't mean that as a criticism of Patrick O'Brian;  I'm just infuriated by Maturin, and wish he would settle down with some nice, sensible lady naturalist instead. (Indeed, towards the very end of the series just such a lady is introduced, so he might have done so had the story not been cut short by O'Brian's death.)


And that, I think, is what makes Aubrey/Maturin so readable and so re-readable; the characters come to feel like old friends, and it is always good to be back in their company.  The series may have ended but, like Blandings Castle, 221b Baker Street or Bag End, the stern cabin of HMS Surprise will always be there waiting for us, a small, comfortable space upon a vast ocean, filled with music and laughter and good conversation and the smell of fresh coffee and toasted cheese.







Patrick O'Brian's novels should be available just about everywhere. (Nowadays there are even special editions without ships on the cover - 'For The Ladies', I presume, or people who don't want to be seen reading sea-faring tales.)  He also wrote several unrelated novels, and an excellent biography of Picasso.  



*I thought Russell Crowe made a surprisingly good Jack Aubrey.  Paul Bettany did a creditable job as as Dr Maturin, but he was just too good-looking, and too clean: I imagine Stephen looking more like Hugh Laurie's baleful Dr House, but dressed a in blood-stained frock-coat and a vile wig, under which he's keeping a dead shrew which he plans to dissect later.  One of the striking historical details of the books is that Stephen, for all his scientific brilliance, has no inkling of germ theory - how could he, being a man of his time?  His filthiness is a running joke, and he thinks nothing of eating dinner or opening up a patient with same knife he's just used to dissect a decomposing dolphin.

My First Favourite Book

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I'm often asked what my favourite book was when I was a child,and I usually say The Lord of the Rings or The Eagle of the Ninth or something. But the first book I can remember really loving was this:



My mum and dad gave it to me as either a Christmas or a birthday present, when I was about five. It's a bit too advanced for a five year old, but I was mad on dinosaurs at the time, and this was the only dinosaur book they could find. I didn't mind, because they read it to me until I was old enough to read it to myself.


The illustrations of lumbering, earth-coloured dinosaurs are very different from the lively, highly-coloured beasts that fill dinosaur books today and, to be honest, some of them are quite crude, but I wasn't bothered at the time; I remember being amazed at how realistic the pair on the cover were, and also the allosaurus on the title page - I thought they looked like photographs. (Actually the cover may be a photograph of a museum exhibit, it's hard to tell. The interior illustrations are by a U.S. illustrator called Sol Kirby). I spent a lot of time drawing these dinosaurs, and some of the pages still show the scars where I pressed a bit too hard when I was tracing them.


Of course, I'm not suggesting that you should all rush out and buy this; much of the information in it is long out-of-date. I found a blog which tears it to bits, pointing out all the errors and misconceptions; to a reader in 2014 these dinosaurs are as quaint as the ones at the Crystal Palace. But it did bring their world vividly to life for me as a child. It's written as a jaunty travelogue, with lots of background detail, much of it told in the present tense.

'Now let us imagine we are in a tropical jungle 219 million years ago. It is the dawn of a new day. We are wandering through the undergrowth and presently we come to a clearing. He we see the small dinosaur, COELOPHYSIS (seel-O-fiss-iss), which was one of the carnivorous saurischians of the Triassic period.' 

I remember it feeling almost as if I were there. It was quite gory, too...

'Dimetrodon slashes and tears at Eryops's exposed neck; the amphibian turns and tries to escape into the water and safety. Dimetrodon bites deeply into her neck. In return, Eryops tries to bite off her assailants's leg,but succeeds only in inflicting a small, superficail wound. Dimetrodon now attacks Eryops's body with his sharp teeth, and kills her. Then he begins his meal.'

So I suppose this was the first book I encountered which built a detailed imaginary world: maybe it was quite influential.


It also expanded my vocabulary. At some point in the early '70s I fell on my sister's dolls' pram and cut my mouth quite badly; on the way to hospital the ambulance man said, 'I think you'll survive', and the word instantly called up an image of page 33 (below)...

'The next dinosaur we meet is an Ornithischian about thirty feet long, called Camptosaurus (CAMP-to-sawr-us) which lived about 140 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, and survived through many upheavals and changes in dinosaur fortunes.' 

...so I knew I'd be OK.

When bookish people talk about how much they love books, they often just mean fiction, but a non-fiction book can be just as inspiring, and just as page-turning, as a good novel. And forty-something years later, I still love dinosaurs.