Gnomic Statements XI.

 Let's all just take a moment and be afraid of the crazy lady, shall we?

- Sid
 

Requiem.

On Friday, October 31st, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight over the Mojave Desert.  The pilot, Peter Siebold, escaped with severe injuries.  The copilot, Michael Alsbury, died in the crash.

Since then, there has been a lot of talk in the media about the fact that space travel is inherently risky, and that although the death of Michael Alsbury is tragic, this will not deter us from the quest to expand humanity's horizons through the exploration of space.

Blah, blah, blah.

Space travel IS risky, no doubt about that.  People have died before this*, and there is every possibility that people will die in the future.  However, at some very fundamental level, Virgin Galactic's approach to space travel leaves a bad taste in my mouth, a bad taste which has very little to do with the expansion of horizons. The decision to sell tickets to space to the elite few who have a quarter of a million dollars in discretionary funds is like some odd precursor to the society pictured in last year's dystopian film Elysium, where the rich live in orbit and the poor are condemned to the wreckage of Earthbound civilization.

I don't want to diminish his death, but I can't help but feel that Michael Alsbury died so that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie could spend six minutes in space.

- Sid

* Some of those people have died at Virgin Galactic. In 2007, three people died and three were seriously injured when an engine exploded during a test.

 

De Castell, Dellamonica and Gibson

What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction? Fantasy can’t happen. Science fiction is something that hasn’t happened, but could.

Probables and Impossibles, 2014 Vancouver Writers Fest

Today I ventured out into the autumn rain to attend a Vancouver Writers Fest event featuring veteran science fiction author William Gibson, and newcomer fantasy authors Sebastien de Castell and A. M. Dellamonica, reading from recent work and discussing topics ranging from world building to the dark trends in contemporary fantasy. 

To be honest, I was there for William Gibson - I've been a fan since reading Neuromancer, his first book, back in 1984, and I have an enormous respect for the unique perspective and superb style that informs his work.  However, I was very impressed by both de Castell and Dellamonica, and found the event to be well rounded and entertaining.

Dellamonica described the process of laying the foundations of her third book, Child of a Hidden Sea, as deciding that she wanted to write something "fun", and proceeding to make a list of things that she thought qualified, like portal fantasy, biodiversity, "pirates!", sword fights, David Attenborough, sailing ships and so on, and finally deciding not to discard any of the ideas and to "write about all of them!"

She defines portal fantasy as "Narnia for grownups - the idea is to go through a wardrobe or you're picked up by a tornado, something that transports you to another world but you're originally from here," and discussed how the origin of characters in our world places their story in the time it's being written, with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe ultimately being about England during World War II, and the impossibility of thinking about Oz without thinking about the Dust Bowl.

In some ways, Gibson was the odd man out on the panel when it came to the discussion of worldbuilding.  As he pointed out, his writing rarely involves the construction of a fully-featured environment: "I start with a character and ... small objects, and the nature of the character and the nature of the small objects expand into an assumed world. I think ... that part of my technique has always been to rely on suggestion." 

He described an encounter early in his career with role playing game developers who were eager to transfer the cyberpunk reality from Neuromancer into a pen and paper game. One of their first questions was, "where does the food come from", part of a list of similar "Marxist" questions that Gibson was unable to answer. Ultimately, the developers gave up, deciding that Gibson's world was "not gameable".

De Castell describes Traitor's Blade, his debut novel, as "The Three Musketeers meets Game of Thrones".  Like Gibson, he also writes from a character-centric position - in Traitor's Blade, he began with the question: "What happens when the ideals that you've believed in for your entire life turn out to not* work?" and created an honourable, heroic character who lives in a corrupt, collapsing society. From that starting point, he "builds the world out based on explanations and questions," explaining that one of the most useful qualities that you can give your narrator is ignorance.

He feels that within a richly textured narrative, the props acquire a deeper level of significance beyond their physical attributes - what it means to a character to use a laser rifle versus a light saber, for example.

One of the topics that came up in the Q and A portion of the event dealt with the question of adaptation, which might well have been a red button topic with William Gibson, given the indifferent response to the film versions of his work and the fact that Neuromancer, his best known novel, has been in development limbo for the last 30 years.** 

However, Gibson handled the question gracefully, and it was amusing to watch the way the other two authors deferred to him because they hadn't been exposed to that particular situation at this point in their careers, whereas he was a seasoned veteran regarding the entire process.

The original question about adaptation mentioned games as well as movies and television.  Ignoring the issues of food production in cyberpunk fiction, I suspect that Neuromancer would probably adapt quite well to the current novelistic, story-driven computer gaming milieu.  Maybe it's time to revisit that idea, Bill.

- Sid

* The split infinitive is Mr. de Castell's, not mine.

** To my surprise, I recently found out that Johnny Mnemonic was not the only Gibson movie out there - his short story New Rose Hotel was also adapted to film in 1999.