Not Blade Runner Trivia

As a Blade Runner fan who talks about their affection for Blade Runner in the public arena, I am subject to people telling me Blade Runner trivia in order to gauge the limits of the information I have consumed about the film.

This is fun. I enjoy this. Sometimes there are things that other people have to share that are interesting, unknown to me, and actually true. It is a thing of joy.

The interesting part is a given, because it is about Blade Runner. That is causation. The unknown thing is less common, because I'm across it more than most people. This doesn't bother me. I really like talking about my favourite film. You had me at 'Bl'.

Actually, there are probably a lot of films that start with 'bl'. 'Blade' is probably also not enough, because, you know, Blade and the other ones of those that they made.

You had me at Blade Runner.

The last one is a bit of a weird one, because it isn't something that I can often verify while I'm standing there talking to you while you tell me these things. Sometimes, I know enough about what you're talking about to make a judgement call, but more often than not I will go and investigate it in the afterwards time.

However, there are some quite common bits of Blade Runner 'trivia' that are not in fact trivia. And they're super common. They get told to me a lot. And they all sort of come from a similar place, and concern the source materials of the film.

The first that I'm going to do you for is some combination of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the book on which the film is based) being: A short story; having not enough of a plot to make into a film; and having only a very vague relation to the film.

The novel (which it is) is 244 pages, and the plot of the film is an abridged version of one side of the narrative of the book. Even without touching on the whole digital Jesus preserved as an MMO plot, there are still a great number of major plot elements that happen in the sanctioned android bounty hunter plot that the film simply doesn't have time for.

If you really break down the film, there isn't a lot of plot. A great majority of the film is exposition stacked side by side as they wind through the climax of a much longer story that took place before the film even started. If Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was much emptier than that, Deckard would get some noodles with Batty who'd explain everything that happened prior to their White Dragon dinner date before Deckard shoots him over who gets the last giant, mutant prawn.

The next one is that the title, Blade Runner, is taken from William Gibson's Neuromancer. It isn't. It doesn't even appear in the book. You wan't a citation? How about, on page never the term 'blade runner' appears zero times in quick succession. Fuck you! Never mind that the book was first published in 1984, two years after the film was first released in cinemas. Yeah!

Before I explain where it actually came from, I'm going to put up my last bit of anti-trivia for this session, because I'm going to kill two synthetic birds with one electric stone.

William S. Burroughs, being the other great literary William in my life, did not write the first draft of the script for Blade Runner. I'm not going to lie, I've been so excited by that nugget in the past that I think I've actually promoted it in words on the internet. It might be out there right now. I'm not looking. Admitting failure is one thing, googling it is another.

This didn't happen.

You ready for that stone.

It is well documented that the title was licensed from a treatment called Blade Runner (later published as Blade Runner (a movie), which was written by the above mentioned William S. Burroughs, but instead of being based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? it's based on The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse, which is about a medical black marketeer, and was written in 1974. This is noted within the credits of the actual film!

Boom! Birds murdered!

I recommend Nourse's The Bladerunner and Burroughs' Blade Runner, but they're very much in my wheelhouse.

Look at that cover over there. It's fucking beautiful.

I don't hate when people tell me this stuff, but I hate when they argue relentlessly citing non-primary sources. Don't tell me the contents of a book you've never read, when I've read it a dozen times. Don't do that. At that stage I don't really care what your source is. I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I know full well what lies therein. You want to tell me about different contextual readings that you've read about without having read the actual book? Let's do that. That is interesting. I'm down.

The first person to tell me about watching Alien 3: The Assembly Cut within a feminist context had never seen any of the Alien films, and you know what, it's a game changer.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

I recently picked up The Peripheral by William Gibson, and a weird sort of thing struck me. It feels almost Dickian, by which I mean that it is on its way to the Philip K. Dick flavour zone.

It's turning out to be a weird experience for me. I love both of these authors, and not to suggest in any way that Gibson is losing his own personal flavour, but, the story feels like a polished PKD story. It feels like their worlds colliding.

Saying all of that though, there are distinct elements, and even ideas that feel like bolder versions of things one might've seen in Gibson's very early short stories. The ones in which the page looks right up at you, stares you right in the eye, and says, 'This is made up', but you end up meeting it all the way as it spins wildly, because it's good.

His first trilogy, that started with Neuromancer, is bold and reckless. Jammed with invented terms, mature themes, and cartoon vibrancy, it's completely unsubtle and unapologetic. It's brazen as fuck. Virtual Light and its sequels, on the other hand, are dirtier. Everything feels more real. Their world spins ever so slightly out of sync with our own, where Pattern Recognition is populated with characters that are believable corporate fantasy in a world that spins perfectly in sync just on the other side of the sun. The Peripheral is just the beginning of next world.

It feels more of a classic science fiction than he's written long form before, but it's all still distinctly him. They're his details. They're his characters. It's his world. More than that though, you can feel it in the words. Dick never spun like this.

Go see Matilda The Musical!

I think most of us love Roald Dahl. Most people I know have a favourite. Some people have favourites. Mine is Matilda.

It was one of if not my very favourite book as a child. It was certainly one of the only ones that I continued to love uninterrupted throughout my adolescence and into adulthood. I read it nearly every year. No, look, to be honest, it's more like every second year these days. Maybe more than that. Two out of three years I'll read it. I'm pretty sure that's right.

Anyway, there have been advertisements about for Matilda The Musical at the Lyric Theatre, and last night I was lucky enough to be invited to see it, which I momentarily considered turning down due to a recent lack of sleep, but I'm going to be 100% with you, it's better than sleep.

It's better than a lot of things.

Look, I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this sort of thing. Live theatre, musicals, children's books, the source material in particular, the wider works of Roald Dahl, Tim Minchin, and Dennis Kelly (who I only knew as the writer and creator of Utopia), and generally anything that I can later sing along to are all things that I love. Look at my face. LOVE!

So, bias? Maybe, but the audience around me seemed diverse in a great many ways. One had this weird nineties synthetic rainbow cap on, which I'm not sure they still make. So, time travellers probably are turning up for this.

The songs are clever and naughty in a way that makes you think that Tim Minchin wallows in Roald Dahl books osmosising their very essence. Words piled together in intelligent, hopeful, revolting ways that please all the most important word receptors. There are amazing things available to you here.

But, words and music can't be there on their own. They need to find their way to you, and it is done well. The performance and production is simply extraordinary. At no point was I not entirely enchanted by what was going on in front of me.

Every character is exquisitely portrayed. Loving every character is easy. It will just happen. Trunchbull is monstrous, the Wormwoods are disgusting, and the children are cheeky, and they're all wonderful.

This is the way I will always remember Matilda.

You want this. You really, really do. Book tickets! It is far, far better than sleep.


Also, a big shoutout to my lovely brother for being sick last night, so that I was able to sit in his seat, eat his nibbles, and watch the show. Anytime you need me to help out when you're sick, just let me know. More than happy to pick up the slack.

Why I'm not reviewing Amazon's The Man in the High Castle pilot

Amazon has made the pilot episode for a mini-series based on Philip K. Dick's alternative history novel in which the axis powers won World War II, The Man in the High Castle, and some of you can go and watch it for free!

I love Pippy D. He isn't just the Dick du jour for me, but a staple Dick. There are times when he is probably relegated to a sort of background, cosmic Dick, but he's always there.

I love his work. I get deep into it in a weird way. There are lots of things I can say about it that would be generally considered to be pretty negative. Things that would prompt people to then say, 'What you've just said makes me not want to read this book you're brandishing at my face'.

What I can say with absolute assuredness is that Dick's whole psychological wavelength was his own. That, to me, is a truth. The dude thought up some shit that other people simply weren't thinking. Once thought up he would then pen that shit, and go about getting it published so that people could consume it, and eventually mine it for their own outputs.

When The Man in the High Castle came out, it was that sort of thing. The war was less than two decades won, and people were getting deep into the cold war that followed, and people weren't writing about alternate Earths on which the United States is occupied by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, who are themselves now engaged in their own cold war.

It is essentially a 1960s, cold war drama/thriller set on an alternate Earth, and more so the people who live there. That is what it is. Well, honestly there is more to it than that. There are other elements. Things I won't go into here.

Right there, on that alone, it is sort of a winner. It's a thing that people want to watch. It sounds like the kind of thing that you would make into a TV series. I thought so when I read the book so much that I started adapting it before I even finished it.

Now, Amazon agreed with me, and got a lot further with their adaptation than I did, and it looks good.



The Man in the High Castle was the first (and arguably only) Philip K Dick novel to win a 'major' award. He won other awards for other books, but he got a Hugo for this thing.

It is subjectively one of his best books.

Less subjectively, it has been produced by Ridley Scott, who amongst his many achievements directed Blade Runner, which is the single best adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. Fact.

It looks like everything that it should be, and people can watch it for free over on Amazon.

I can't watch it at all though. I'm Australian, and this activity is therefore verboten to me.

They have made a free pilot, off the back of which they presumably want to sell the rest of the series. They also presumably want to see what the market for such a series would be to markets outside their own so that they can try and convince those other markets to buy it in order to resell to the people that live there.

That makes sense to me. That sounds like a solid and open model.

'Do you want this thing we're thinking about making?', 'How many of you want this thing?', and 'Is it worth it for us to make this thing?' seem like really good questions to ask and on which to gather the sweet, tasty data.

That isn't what's happening. Everyone is essentially locked out until someone takes a punt on their region, which I kind of get (but still think is stupid), but I don't get locking out regions from the material you are using to see if people are interested in the product.

This is part of an unreasonably protracted slow death of an archaic model.

It would make a lot more sense if you could watch it on YouTube, seeing as it is, at this stage, essentially a promotional episode.



Dear Amazon,

Why are you making it so hard for us to like you?

Kind regards,

The Australian Market

The Unwelcome Invasion of Fact

Star Wars, A New Hope

The imminence of new Star Wars is a mixed bag. I'm glad The Mouse is in the house. I'm pretty happy Buy n' Large (did you see Wall-E?) with the way that happy-go-lucky rodent operates.

I mean, I am not down with the absence of mixed race couples among the older stable of characters. I mean, the mice stay together, and the ducks stay together, and Goofy and Pluto are both dogs, but one wears clothes.

Is that super awkward when Goofy goes over to Mickey's for dinner?

I was talking about Star Wars. There're new ones on the way. The bag is mixed. That's where we were at.

The bit that makes it less so good is that I was there in '99. A lot of us were.

In my more formative years I was a lot-a-bit unstable for Star Wars. The original trilogy. That was the only one we had. Then they broke that.

George came in and was all like, 'These are my toys and I have decided to destroy them.'

If you really got into The Phantom Menace, and it is your favourite of The Wars, then you can take it and every copy of Batman & Robin and I can bury you alive.

BYO shovel.

It hasn't been all bad since the 1983 release of Care Bears versus Space Nazis. The first Dark Forces computer game was great, and came out during a long forgotten time when not everything in the Star Wars universe was made of light-sabres. Shadows of the Empire (only the novel) was a really good character based story set between Empire and Return.

And then there are these two videos by Belated Media.

I know that very strictly speaking this stuff isn't at all any sort of official canon. It's all just the ravings of a yet another YouTube lunatic who says things like 'salmon-box' to describe a scenario in which you are forced to work within the confines of a metaphorical box (predefined criteria) during a task that already feels like you are swimming upstream (like a salmon is prone to do).

These ravings though, are sweet.

When it comes to expanded universes, fan fiction, and other questions of canonicity I'm about as libertarian as I get. You can choose your own adventure. That's up to you.

For me, the Belated Prequel Trilogy is canon, and I am more excited about the arrival of episode III than I am about episode VII. They've restored a sort of positive feeling for the future of the franchise that is something that has only recently arrived in me. I'm sure there are words for that.

Backing up for Improved Wordy Prowess

There is this terrifying thing that happens sometimes, and it is the kind of thing that can rock you right to wherever it is inside you that your words are made. I don't know why I don't just say what it is straight up. You've seen the title, so you must know where I am going with this.

Losing all, most, some, or even only small amounts of your writing can be devastating. I have had all of these happen. Well, I thought I lost everything once, but I had a bunch of bits and pieces here and there on Zip disks, and as e-mail attachments, and what have you, but it took a very long time to get a lot of it back together, and I lost versions of things I have never since been able to replicate. I also lost all known versions of some stories, including what was at that stage the longest and most complete thing that I had ever written.

The process of recovering from this is horrible. You aren't quite sure where to start. Do you just start pouring out everything that you can remember? Where do you start with that? Losing a few small stories is not a good feeling, but losing dozens of stories, some of which are tens of thousands of words, is sickening.

There are a number of reasons that things like this can happen, but the most frustrating is when whatever method(s) of backup you have decided to go with are the failing point. No one method is infallible. External hard drives will just die one day, online services may change their policies on you, and all recordable media will eventually corrupt. Any of these can turn into an expensive and/or futile retrieval operation.

We need to protect our words. We need to make sure that they are going to be safe. we need to make sure that they will always be there for us when we need them. That is why I am talking about this now, instead of talking about it after the cool software that exists. This is way more important, and has very little to do with writing, and more to do with protecting your writing.

Ideally you want everything backed up both locally, on an external hard drive, flash drive, or other external media, and in the cloud in one of those cloud services. I live out of my Google Drive, because it is big enough and it is free. It was there for me when I was ridiculously broke, and so I'm invested now. There is a relationship with Google Drive that makes me feel that my things are at their safest when they're with the 'G'. The other major player is Dropbox, which plugs into everything these days, which is great. This compatibility is very important for a lot of things, but there are always going to be some file syncing issues no matter which services you try to use, so it is good to try and be aware of them.

I would steer clear of SkyDrive, only because they once changed their policy on me and I lost access to all of the things that lived there. I had quite coincidentally backed it up a few days before losing access, but I still maintain that there was a poor effort made to notify me of these changes and what they meant for me and my words. Will they change it again? I don't know, but I am not particularly interested in finding out.

A friend of mine makes use of a number of these services, because 'they're all idiots', which isn't a totally bad idea. It is actually a pretty good idea, and while making sure they are all up to date can be a bit of a chore, it is worth the time for the piece of mind. A few years ago I experimented with having them all overlapping, because I was curious to see how it be handled. It turns out that it causes some file duplication issues, as well as some syncing problems if you have more than one of them installed on a machine. If you're super keen to do this, I suggest putting the others inside your Google Drive, and only installing your Google Drive on all of your machines. You will still sometimes have issues, but...

Actually, don't. It is a pain. When things go wrong, I seemed to be always finding out when it was inconvenient to actually resolve the issue. Unless you are on top of this kind of stuff and you manage all your own IT toys, this has the potential to really annoy you. Keep them separate. I got into this a couple of years ago now, and I could imagine them being able to fix this, and having it not be an issue anymore, but I can also imagine them not prioritising it, because making sure their products play nice with their competitors' products so that you can pay them all zero of your money is not the kind of thing that they are likely to make time for.

When you are signing up for any service, whether it be for backing up, online tools, software support, hardware support, or anything else you don't ever want to lose access to, it is important to use an e-mail address that you 'should' never lose access to. Do not use work/school/university/group/organisation/friend's/partner's/family's/shared/ISP e-mails. This has often struck most people as the kind of thing that falls well inside common sense when I tell them this, but most of the smartest people I know have done this at some stage in their life. Even an e-mail that you have been promised 'for life' is not guaranteed, as these promises do not usually reflect the actual contracts, service agreements, or policies involved in their delivery. I should also point out that I have told people this, then had them give me a hard time for patronising them, and then had them do this very exact thing less than an hour later. If keeping access to an e-mail address is reliant on you maintaining your involvement in a workplace, organisation, or relationship, DO NOT USE IT TO SIGN UP FOR THINGS!

The safest thing to do is use a Gmail or Live/Hotmail e-mail address in your own name. Other similar services, like Yahoo, are fine too. This is one of those things that you should probably adopt outside of your writing life too. This is fairly solid advice. The likelihood that you will be able to maintain your non-fee-paying relationship with an organisation like Google is far more reliable than the likelihood that you will always be with Optus/Telstra/<current employer>. In the situation in which an employer has provided you with a Gmail account (yes, this is a thing), get your own.

While we're on the topic, if you feel like you need to chime in about the unreliability of modern technology and you keep everything in hard copy, then you are going to get burnt one day. No pun intended, but it was definitely appreciated. I used to do a lot of writing on a type writer, because I like the noise it makes, and even though I never got literally burnt, my writing got wet, and I lost a huge amount of work. I was young, and the whole process was an indulgence that ended in a hard-learnt lesson.

No matter what process you use, things can go wrong, and you will never stop feeling amazing when a computer dies, or a backup fails, and you can get everything you have ever written onto wherever it is you are writing on now with a minimum of fuss. The feeling you will get whenever you watch those file transfer bars creep across the screen of a clean computer will never stop being one of the best parts of your year, and in my experience, will only get better and better as that folder increases in girth.

Jodorowsky's Dune DVD Special Features

I don't know that you've read Dune before. Some of you must have, but you should if you haven't. Despite the armada of lore expanding sequels, preludes, and interludes, it kind of stands on its own as a work of science fiction in terms of the important role that it has played within the history of popular science fiction. There are few works of fiction that are what Dune is. It is exquisite and exotic, and in its richness it refined a great many things we tend to take as given in epic science fiction these days.

The first attempt to adapt Dune never made it through pre-production, because people were pretty much out on the far edge of space trying to convince the money folk that if they made a 14 hour, science fiction bizarre-o-tron, then people would definitely turn up in droves to pay actual money for tickets.

Looking past the fact that a really good Dune would probably run somewhere closer to 14 hours than it would 3, they were getting on the different train to different town to the tune of many millions of dollars. This was all going on before Star Wars, which is very clearly heavily influenced by both the book and the the unmade film, came along and said, 'Relax, man. Space, you don't even know how cool it is. Have you seen these space wizards?'

Probably as a direct result of the Star Wars thing, a Dune would eventually be released to cinemas in 1984. Regardless, it would still be the first attempt that would leave the larger footprint in the landscape. While Jodorowsky's adaptation was never completed, the fallout of it's existence can be seen in Star Wars, and Blade Runner, and Alien, and Marvel's Avengers, and The Fifth Element. And. And. And. It may not have seen its own success, but it was muse to the greats. It mused? No. That means something else.

My own personal introduction to Jodorowsky's Dune was through 21st Century Foss by Chris Foss, which occurred years before I read the Frank Herbert novel, or saw the David Lynch film. The book contained only a few examples of Foss' contributions to the project, but they were striking. They were the kinds of burrowing insect that take up residence in your think organ. Over the years, my interest in science fiction art would bring me in repeated contact with the artefacts of this film that had never been made, and I discovered that it went beyond Foss. It was an artistic space conspiracy. Giger was there. See the picture? Moebius was there too. These were the guys that defined entire aesthetics for our amusement, and they were all there enrichenning the legs off this thing.

I could literally sit here for hours, so many hours, on end making up words to better talk/write about Jodorowsky's Dune (I haven't even started on the music), but I'm actually here to talk about Jodorowsky's Dune. Did you see the difference there? It is different. You missed it. Go back and look again. The second one is about the first one. It is a documentary, and I can't really explain how much wriggling I have done over this.

Being a man who derives an extraordinary amount of pleasure from the special features included with really beautiful science fiction films, this is most definitely in my wheelhouse.

I am deeply invested at this stage, and I'm wondering already if there will be special features on the DVD. Will it basically be a DVD of special features for a film that I can never watch? I crave this experience. You may not know me personally, but this is the kind of person that I am at my very core. We will become Tantalus. That is actually the second time in two days that I have used that reference. Anyway, we will be able to see, but never have. I'm not going to lie, I'm already excited about the 25th anniversary five disc collector's edition box set. Except, we won't be using discs in 25 years. Look out for it on Google Play, and Steam. They'll have it when the quarter century rolls around. In the meantime, hangout at the website, and watch it when it comes.

There is also a great interview with the Frank Pavich, the director of this thing about the thing, over at The Verge, which is worth the time it would take to read it.

I just went crazy with the pictures on this one. You need them though. They're good for you. Imbibe! I didn't really write enough words for all of these pictures. I could express my excitement with actual words, but it would probably be more concise to squeal and wriggle. There would also be yelping and snacking. Snacking!

Having not yet seen it, there is only one thing of which I am 100% certain: At 90 minutes, it isn't long enough.

And more pictures!

Did I tell you to go to the website? They have a gallery with high quality images that you can get excited about.

Where did all the good time go?

I'm not going to talk about how to write well. I don't think I am the person to come to for that sort of thing. Not on account of my inability to string words together in a pleasing fashion, but because I'm yet  to present much evidence that it is something that I can do. If it's what you're looking for, there are lots of books on the subject by a great many people whose opinions on the matter are backed by the weight of this evidence.

Before quality though comes productivity. This is the first step. A blank page may hold infinite possibilities, but a full page holds the first step to not wasting them. I can talk about productivity. I have productively written for a number of years now. I can sit down and write a 2,000 to 5,000 word story outline in an hour. I do a lot of different types of writing, and I do it with both stealth and ease. If you're looking for stealth, then you are going to need to invest in a quiet keyboard, or a pen. Pens are quiet. If you're interested in ease, then keep reading.

Words aren't always in the habit of being there when we want them. This isn't really about the words though. It isn't about writers block either. That's just a name that we use. Despite all appearances, writing is like drawing, playing the cello, or anything else we need to train ourselves to do with ease. For the most part we tend to assume that however many years of school and university have prepared us for this, but think about the time we would put aside for 2,000 words, or 1,500. Where do we now find the time in our lives for 85,000 words? In reality you are more likely to need to find the time for whatever the actual number of words it is going to take you to write 85,000 good words. Words that carry with them everything that you need of them.

This isn't something that I figured out. It is something I researched. It is something the authors that I respect discovered through necessity, because for them it was part of the trade. A skill that needed mastering in order that bills be paid. Tom Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, Agatha Christie, Edmond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Steven Moffet, and so many others relied on their ability to continue to write whenever it was needed of them.

My first step in understanding this process was the work of Philip K. Dick, whose prolific output and commitment to the concepts behind each of his works is, to my mind, without peer. Dick wrote when he was sleep deprived, discontent, depressed, detached, and, most importantly, when he made the time. Dick wrote a lot of material that he was not happy with (the majority of which was not published), but if you were to say that only 1 in 5 of Dick's published stories is worth reading, that would still be 10 novels and 20 short stories.

Apart from a (very bad) novel I nearly finished instead of attending class when I was in my late teens, I spent nearly a decade staring at screens and pages instead of actually writing, because I wanted each moment that I found for my writing to be of a certain quality and to ring of an increasingly specific literary timbre, and I proudly prioritised certain stories and themes based on arbitrary bias, often relying on writing only 'when it came to me'. My work suffered as a result, because there was never enough of it.

With but a single exception, no story I had ever started had reached more than 7,000 words, and by early 2010 I had just over 100 stories with nearly a dozen drafts each, none of which were near completion. Then at a time when I only had one guaranteed hour a day to myself I went from having no real literary focus to having the first 20,000 words of a novel in a fortnight. I had most of my characters, and a plot that didn't have too many holes to be patched. It wasn't a new story. I had been sitting on parts of it for a half dozen years or so.

In the months preceding this point I had made the decision to just write anything. I would grab lunch, and probably a coffee, and sit down and write anything. 'The Sandwich Diaries' became a constant friend during this period, as did frustrated letters, vignettes from my childhood, film reviews, and snippets of fiction. I wrote when I was tired, I wrote when I couldn't think clearly, I wrote when I hadn't slept for days, and I wrote when I really didn't feel like it. For 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week, I wrote anything I could.

I should be clear at this point that I am not advocating any sort of punishing regime that is likely to destroy your passion for writing, but instead it is about training yourself to continue to operate creatively when you have nothing left. You will no longer be restricted to 'when it comes to you'. You can be the commander of your own writing. They're your words.

It is important to understand that productivity and focus are not the same thing, and they both require different skills and approaches. I had trained myself to make the most of a period of focus. Over the months that followed, the number of stories that I had on the shelf (it was a digital shelf) expanded to over 200, but the average girth of each was equivalent to my previous front runner.

I'm writing this as much now for myself as I am for anyone else, because it is something of which I need reminding. I took a year away from the two stories that I have that exceed 50,000 words, because 'I didn't have the time'. The time was there, but I didn't make it. I made the time for other writing, but The Book, if there had to be only one, was put aside. But, now it is back, and the dance begins again.

Sunday Runner

I'm not really one for a tremendous amount of running, which is why this isn't at all about running. I'm not going running on a Sunday. I mean, I have done, but I don't talk about it. The title is misleading. Deliberately so. That's what I do here. Mislead. Deliberately.

What I am really one for is a tremendous amount of Blade Runner. Back to back. You are probably wondering how someone back-to-backs a single film. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you already know. Well, there are five versions of the film and a about two days of special features. There is a whole replicant reference to be had there, but I'm going to move on. I like to all-in-one-go this, starting with the workprint and ending with the retrospective documentaries. I don't tire of this. Not yet. It happens at least once a year. Actually, it happens at least twice a year.

This was enabled when I was given a five disc DVD boxset for one of those present giving things that happens throughout the year. I can't remember which one it was, which isn't really important. What is important is that I have been enabled, and I know who that enabler is. I think it was a birthday. The selfish Christmas.

Anyway, That's why I am talking about it now. I'm doing it this Sunday. I'm busy. Don't call me to do your things, because I have a doctor's appointment, or I'm washing something, or I have actually made real plans with real people, and I'm too wrapped up in writing this to check right now. If it is you that I have made plans with, it isn't that I have forgotten, it is just that I live in the moment. Right now. Now this one. And, now.

Not really. I've forgotten. I won't have when I check, but that'll be not now. That will be later. Maybe before Sunday. Maybe not. It will be.

Im not likely to invite anyone, because it renders the obligation for pants equal to, or less than, zero. It's harder to get mustard on your pants if you're not wearing them. Fact. Unless you keep them in the kitchen, or in a mustard cupboard. Also, fact. I have mustard on my favourite shorts at the moment, and I've washed them a couple of times, but I can still see the stain. This too is a fact. A sad fact. This might be about as informative as I get. Conjecture!

What I really like to do is lead into the viewing with PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, because then you have the whole picture. You understand the whole process. The transition from Dick's head to Final Cut, and in the end that is what I'm there for. The process from one to the other. All those minds and hands that bend it from beginning to end. It's heavily documented.

I'm actually not aware of a film that is as heavily documented. Look, maybe those Middle Earth movies, but the whole production of Blade Runner is an incredible thing. It's an arduous creative journey. A journey of censorship and creativity, in which prejudices and conflict abound. There is even a death that comes early on in the piece. At one stage it would've seemed late, but the story just kept going. It is a story of relationships and passion. People find treasure, and there are technological changes that redefine possibilities. It is an incredible journey of realisation and the beauty in imperfection.

That's what I am there to engage with. It's part of the reason I really like Philip K. Dick too. He was amazing. Like otters. Otters are amazing. But, the beauty of PKD's work went beyond the sum value of the individual piece that spanned thirty years and amounted to some fiftyish novels and a five volumes of short stories. The whole body of work is itself something to be appreciated and understood.

Dick was prolific. The guy basically never switched off. For three decades he wrote immensely personal works on fear, paranoia, responsibility, sexuality, love, prejudice, politics, philosophy, religion, community, nationalism, illness, and war in a format that was easily accessible.

Great tracts of his mind are laid bare, and we are able to watch how it changed. We can see the same ideas go through a half dozen distinct variants before reaching their most iconic. In some cases even the earlier, often distantly related, drafts of later works were published as whole and complete works in their own right. It is like living in somebody's creative process, and not just somebody, but Philip K. Dick. It is a truly astounding thing to which to be granted access.

That is what the whole of The Blade Runner Experience offers us. An insight into an incredible process, but it also offers us the opportunity to see how Dick was popularised. It is an exquisite thing.

And for the record, if you are going to watch one version of this film, it really should be The Final Cut. They did a really bang-up job. They really, really did.

The Days Ahead

To some degree, I find myself thinking about the work of William Gibson more frequently due to the work that I do and the way that I live. Not that I am a writer like he is, though I do and have written web copy, which is a kind of corporate, wired up sort of writing that lives in the worlds hewn with his own, but the vast majority of my professional life has been as a freelance ICT professional. Not that I ever call it that. That doesn't happen. There are other words that are often more specific. The technology bases covered are diverse and far reaching. I often think of the work that I have done, and the work that I do, and there is a relationship to the organisms that populate cyberpunk. I'm one of those. That's what I think.

I've had the speak wheeled at me in a variety of fashions, I've lied to printers to make them distribute ink in the manner for which they were originally designed, trawled through archaic data on dying systems at the behest of its owners, and coded towards functional artificial intelligence. That's not all of it, but it is some of it. I may not be the neuromancer, but I'm playing in the same parks. This is the world I live in. I'm pretty sure I've eaten synth-spaghetti, and probably slept on it. In reality it is the world we all live in, though your eating habits are your own.

The synth-spaghetti stained days of keyboard-for-hire are a part of something else. The journeyman years. They have a function. They built who I am, and the way that I learn.

These are important days.

The Prophets of Cyberspace: A Rough Guide to Cyberpunk v1.0.3

originally posted on 2010-04-26-0223
at Ray-guns and Spandex
migrated to Sci-Fi Snot Rash

In the late seventies a new flavour of science fiction began to take shape. It's earliest visible family characteristics had first appeared in both 'new age' sci-fi and the authors of the beat generation. In the intervening time it had slowely formed a new definition for itself through the works of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, until reaching a point in the early eighties when the cultural obsession with excess and mass media provided the perfect literary genesis pool for the emerging counter culture prophets of cyberpunk.

Abandoning galaxy spanning empires and laser toting aliens in favour of more familiar settings. Abandoned territories and near future cities became neon wombs breeding cybernetic street gangs, corporate warriors, and digital pop-stars. Cyberpunk takes us into worlds not that far beyond the horizon. Deeply entrenched in the mundane with elements just alien enough that they might be happening in another city, in another country somewhere, instead of on the other side of tomorrow. In the three decades since its first oredictions we can clearly see that the anticipation of the popularity of reality television and the total pervasion of the internet happened somewhere between Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid and William Gibson's Cyber Space Trilogy.

With much of the origianlly fictitious elements of cyberpunk having become parts of our everyday lives it comes as no surprise that many other brands of modern science fiction carry these same elements that were at one stage the calling cards of cyberpunk without fully submersing themselves into the stream. The Matrix is more thematically in sync with post-apocalyptic or machine war SF than it is with cyberpunk. Link all mimics of any punk movement, they wear the colours, but run in different circles.

It was never just a collection of hacker stories set in glass walled mega-cities and the suburban wastelands that surrounded them. It's a voice and an ethos defined by the very culture that birthed, where the corporate world has adopted the methods and tactics of the street, wrapped in a setting that is thrown at us. Chapters barely clock in at a page, and read more like scenes from a film. And the pacing of the books are measured in frames per second, with the charging mbps of the prose consisting predominantly of artificial street speak, and stream of consciousness.

If you are interested in running deep in the pure flavour, books like Snow Crash and Blood Music deliver in spades, but if you are a sci-fi film junkie, Cypher, New Rose Hotel, and Natural City are uncut, and measured from the source.

For me and my money, nothing sits closer to the heart of cyberpunk than the literary link hopping of Mirrorshades, Burning Chrome and the erroneously named Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Collection. Short story compilations straight from the aforementioned neon womb in portions that have been coded and optimised for the short attention span generation that shared its childhood.

He who controls the spice

Dune is an unbelievably good book. There are factions, and an empire that is mostly made up of jerks, and space wizards, the imperial guard wear red, and there are giant worm things living in the sand on desert planets. It's also about a teenage boy who after being hidden from the empire discovers that he is one of the aforementioned space wizards and proceeds to take back his legacy. It's basically Star Wars.

Spice is central to the plot of Dune and to my cooking. That's where I was going with this. It isn't about Star Wars. A comparison between these two science fiction epics is a tale for another day. They both even had prequels that were added years later. They both had genre defining classic PC games. But, I'm not here to talk about that. Not today, Galvatron! I'm here to talk about cooking with spices.

The key to Indian food is the spice, and the preparation, and probably some other things. I could discuss the preparation and go into those other things here, but that is not what I am doing. I want to talk about the spice, because I had that whole thing about Dune at the beginning, and I thought the title was a clever reference to Dune and the guy that sells me my spices. Look, I've pretty much ruined it now, but that's your fault. If you guys would just shut up for a second and let me finish, I could be doing this with something resembling the sort of grace and prowess you might be used to on other more gazellesque blogs.

This is my guy. His house has taken Arakis, and it looks like this, and it is here. He is not Indian, but that doesn't change what is in the packets. The packets are the same. They are from India, and are full of Indian spices, unless they are importing them before they package them, but that seems like a silly thing to be doing. I wouldn't do that. Nor should you, were you in such a situation. Just package the spices that they have there.

I visited recently and his range has expanded. He carries a variety of things now. He always did, but it is a wider variety of things. Paneer! That's a kind of cheese. I'm not meant to have dairy. I do though. It also has a great many other ingredients that you would use in an Indian feast. It's getting busy up in there. I'm so street. I'm not really. I'm not country either. I'm pretty soft. Very soft. I'm all soft toys and the great indoors. TV. Fridges. One TV, but multiple fridges. One would just be for sandwiches. And Indian leftovers. And the cheese I'm not meant to be eating.

The thing that is probably most appealing about this place as your Arakian supply depot is the price. It is not costly. Not costly at all. Cost effective blue-in-blue.

Also, I am pretty sure that the store has an 's' on its sign in the appropriate place. I think that is a Google Streetview related typo. That's where the picture is from. I stole it. I'm also pretty sure that the sign says 'indian grocery', and not 'indi grocery'. You can check for me when you go.

Am I helping him or am I helping you? Both. Everyone gets helped here. Everyone within a certain radius of his convenience store, which is opposite Victoria Park. 257 Broadway. There are other Indian grocers and carriers of Indian spices around, and I am aware of some really good ones in Canberra and Sydney's Northern Beaches, but this is where I go. This is my guy. He controls my spice.

Ezy Convenience Store
257 Broadway, Glebe
9518 4690

Echoes of Yesterday's Tomorrows

During a time in which it was possible for me to accurately depict my age on a single hand I invested heavily in the sort of science fiction wonderlands that were often presented to me in the animated adventures of Captain Future. The whole thing is a fairly aged concept of what our distant futures were going to be like. We operated from a different sort of point of view.

Captain Future goes way back. Not like the Barsoom Mars scene in which the nudity was rife. That's ancient. A hundred and change. But Captain Future goes back further than most of us. If both my maths and understanding of the age range and make up of the current population is accurate, he goes back further than most of us. He'd be seventy four this year. Well, he is in the future as a fictional character so he wouldn't even have been born, but you know what I am getting at.

I had a deep love for this flavour, and some part of that has become deeply intwined with the sort of science funktion themes songs of Captains both Future and Harlock. I've made previous mention of my affections for this particular auricular experience, but what I have neglected to pass on was that the also previously mentioned Mark Mercury not only brought us the Space Pirate Captain Harlock theme, 'Take to the Skies', but also the Captain Future theme, 'Captain Future'. Good name that. The latter. Clear. Concise. To the point. Not easily confused.

The theme song, and as a result the greater body of Mark Mercury's work, is important to me. My introduction to Captain Future was through a trailer for the show, which was nothing more than the opening title sequence, resplendent with theme song (it can wear a theme song),  with a brief nugget of explanatory narration delivered at me through the Communications and Entertainment Limited VHS release of Space Pirate Captain Harlock. In hind sight this sort of thing might be considered evidence of their phonic relatedness, but that would be some pretty loose deductive reasoning on my part.

I can't actually find the exact advertisement with the narration, but it is a lot like the video above. This trailer was all I had to go on initially, but was enough for my fertile young mind to begin building upon. The fascination ran deep and polluted my later explorations of Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future stories, in which he was 'Captain Future, Wizard of Science', but also flowed through the entirety of that sort of exquisite space faring, time travelling nonsense that they epitomise. I bandied about the verb 'pollute' back there as though I take some issue with the lasting impact that this has had, but let me be clear: this is akin to 'polluting' an altogether pleasant romp in the hay with some post coital Grand Designs. It's a good thing.

Mark Mercury, the man who artfully captured my attention and piqued my interest in the Captains is still out there making his music. In much the same way that Kevin McCloud is still out there making Grand Designs. And, like Kevin with his show, it strikes me as the sort of thing that he enjoys doing. Even the briefest of encounters with his work will leave you with the distinct impression that this particular fellow is a little keen for space. I too am keen for the space. It's what I fantasise about. I could spend weeks telling you about my cosmic day dreams, but I don't yet have the requisite theme song. 

Big Boy Dinners and Planetary Defence

I ate a can of spaghetti sauce for dinner a couple of nights back. I was sitting there with the sauce, and it occurred to me that it was probably going to be the tastiest part of the meal that I was about to eat. Why wouldn't I just have that? The pasta would dilute the flavour with its plainness. Why do we even make pasta? Pasta is just convention. Convention isn't the boss of me. I'm a grown up. I get to make all sorts of decisions now. Decisions like eating cans of Campbell's Spaghetti Sauce as stand alone meals.

Part of being a grownup is the responsibility to ask questions of what you are presented with  on an everyday sort of level. Should I cross when the man is green, or should I wait until he is red? You should go when he is green. That one is a bad example. It is a safety thing that comes down to everyone being on the same page. It isn't really open to individuality. Being your own person when it comes to traffic lights is how accidents happen. There are other things though. There are so many things. Things where you can safely be open to seeing the truth of that thing, or another associated thing. Should you eat toast upside down so that the flavour goes on your actual flavour receptors? I know Dr Seuss wrote a book that openly denounces a war over which side of your bread the flavour should live on, but I think it is because he would most likely favour public education, backed up by an efficient and thorough eugenics program. This is another bad example. Don't question this either. Just do what I tell you on this one. It's gotta be flavour to the tongue.

Another example would be the Voltron hedgehog in Western Australia, which is very clearly not a giant milk carton. People will tell you that it is a milk carton, but milk cartons don't have eyes. It's very clearly a giant robotic hedgehog that is ready to fly into space at a moment's notice to defend the Earth with its laser spines. Laser is way better for this sort of giant robot battle action than keratin. Keratin is fine for letting house cats know that you are not to be trifled with, but when you're defending a planet you need laser. Years of research have gone into this.You can't see the laser spines right now, but you can see where they would come out. It can't use its laser spines inside the atmosphere, because too much of the good stuff would be ruined. Not good 'good stuff', but parts of Western Australia 'good stuff', which is still something that I have been lead to believe is not something that one wants ruined. There are people living there. This is second hand. I don't know this from my own experience. I'll look into it.

I know it's not as visually appealing as the plug-and-play, robot-lion gestalt stationed out of Japan, but it's a lot more awesome than nothing. It would need to be thoroughly investigated, but I'm pretty certain that it doesn't form up with other giant non-native robots. I haven't seen any about. Not that I've done that thorough investigation that I mentioned earlier, but I like to think we'd notice. You know. As a nation. Perhaps now that you know to be on the lookout you'll find the rest. I'm not saying for absolute certain that there is in fact more of these things squirrelled away around the country, but if you see something, let me know. It would be absolutely like the Australian government to go for the 'most cost efficient' option. Japan has both Lion Force and Vehicle Force Voltrons, and the Power Rangers, and who knows what else. They're prepared. We are not. There is a budgetary committee that has left us in the lurch on the whole invasion front.

No one could ever accuse Australia of becoming involved in an escalating arms race that would lead to mutually assured destruction on an interplanetary level. No one!

Understanding Screenwriting

I guess in a lot of very real and important ways Tom Stempel's Understanding Screenwriting is one of my very favourite books. Whether you fancy yourself a writer of any kind, or simply as a consumer of those things that have been written, there is something within these pages for you.

There are a lot of books about screenwriting, written by screenwriters, and script doctors, and the cats' mother (she had a litter), and that guy that wrote nearly every episode of Babylon 5, and a lot of them act like a how to guide, but Understanding Screenwriting is more of an exercise in foundations and core understandings. That's why it has the title that it has. The title is apt.

The website makes claims to the contrary, going so far as to openly state that it is in fact 'a practical how-to (or how-NOT-to) guide to writing a screenplay', but it is not this. It isn't. They are trying to tell you that it is, because unfortunately that is what people think will write their script for them. Scriptwriters will write your script for you. Not books. A book won't do that. This book is more important than that though. It is a series of incredibly accessible, well written case studies on the history and theory of screenwriting.

Will it make your scripts better? I'm not promising that, because that is a silly thing for any book to promise. People take what they want from everything that they read. If you're thoughtful, and open to criticising your own work in a productive sort of way, then it will most likely do for you what you want it to do, except write your script for you. I don't know that I am that sort of person. If I ever have a script made into an actual film, I will let you know what this book did for me in more concrete terms. I do know that I wrote a great many scripts using a great many how-to books, but it wasn't until I read this that I realised what atrociously toxic nonsense I was producing.

Why does all of this make it one of my favourite books? I mean, it is more or less responsible for me not writing any scripts for the better part of five years. I just stopped. I looked at the scripts that I had been writing and just stepped away from the computer. Well, I didn't do that. I wrote other things, and played games, and spent a lot of time on YouTube and Wikipedia. This was a good thing though. I have read this book from cover to cover, at least once a year since I first read it, and am actually reading it again now. Not right now. I'm not reading and writing. It is an incredibly easy read, and it will leave you with a lot to think about. It should change the way that you think when you write, but it might not. It might just be one of the most interesting books that you ever read about scripts and screenwriting.

The book loses me a little bit in the last section, in which he talks about bad scripts, wherein the author suddenly trades clever insights for snarky putdowns. It isn't the whole last section, but there are whole parts of the last section in which nothing useful or productive is said, but instead reads a lot like one of those negative to be cool film reviews. In his discussion of Dune he admits to never having seen the film all of the way through (and makes no mention of having read the script) while making a valid point about adapting long novels, but Dune had far more hurdles facing the adaptation than the length of the source material. Then there are parts like his commentary on Willow that are completely useless (and possibly the worst written parts of the whole book). I'm not disagreeing with what he said about Willow, I just don't think it is useful. It can be boiled down to: I think this movie is boring, don't listen to Joseph Campbell. It just sounds like he doesn't like Willow, and wants to say something mean about it.

I would really like to see a second edition, with a more thoughtful last section. Stempel is clearly very clever, and I would love to read a less trendy approach to bad scripts from the same part of his brain that wrote most of the rest of the book.

There is actually a lot more that I want to say about how it has altered the whole process of writing for me, but I'll say that when I actually have something to show for my efforts. Right now, I don't have that. I have started writing scripts again. This year. A couple of days ago. Same day I started reading this book again. I'm good at starting things though. It's always in the finishing that I

Naked Lunch

I've talked about Burroughs before in such a way that might suggest that I am familiar with his work. I like to think that this is true. He pumps my engine, literarily speaking. Not literally speaking. I don't have an engine. It would be fair to say that I have read a great deal of what Burroughs has put out into the world. Most, but not the vast majority. It should also be made clear that this does not take into account the huge body of work that was not 'put out into the world'. There was this sort of odd beginning to it in which I was first put onto Burroughs by a video game magazine. This was in 1993. I gradually made my way through the books discussed within over the years to follow.

It would've been about late '95 that I read Naked Lunch, which would've made me twelve or thirteen. I honestly didn't really know what to think of it right away. This isn't to say that there was no thinking. There was. I thought things about it. I thought a lot of things about it. I very quickly thought it was the kind of book that I shouldn't really let people know that I was reading. I was kind of operating in that mode at the time. I also thought that there were a lot of things in it that I didn't really understand to the extent that the author had perhaps intended. There were a lot of things being thought about a lot of the things that I came across in the book. It's that kind of book though. That's what it does to you. There will be things about things.

Naked Lunch is an experience in literature. A lot of people have tried to emulate it over the past 54 years, with varying degrees of success. As is the way with such things. For my money that's what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was. Naked Lunch is scarier though. It's far more deranged. It is the product of a really broken mind. Where Thompson's glibness manages to pull off comedic, Burroughs is dark, because the situation he is in falls pretty neatly into the 'nightmare scenario' category.

The surreal vignettes give it life as the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland of a different time and place, which I'm fairly certain that I've said before. I know I've said it with my mouth at parties and bus stops, but I'm fairly certain the main gist of that message exists somewhere else here in writing.

I should be clear at this stage. Where Fear and Loathing is a recounting of actual(ish) events, Naked Lunch is 'semi-autobiographical'. The degree of actual biography involved in Naked Lunch is probably less than in the two books that immediately preceded it, Junkie and Queer, but those don't really give you much of an indicator. I ended up reading Junkie and Queer afterwards, but I think you should read them before hand. Order of publication is probably the way to go in this case.

Burroughs was responsible for a whole literary armada. I'm not sure that he really gets the recognition that I feel he deserves in this respect. His work inspired other literary admirals who were more directly influential, but all those subsequent ships wouldn't have set sail without Burroughs. They wouldn't even have been wrighted. It would've been an entirely different naval scenario. 

The boats are books here.

Science, now with less science

Science has been a bit of a buzz word lately, especially since everybody 'fucking loves science'. The unfortunate thing is that most of the 'science' that I come across isn't science, and is often in no way scientific. This is clearly anecdotal, but I've heard similar concerns emerge unsolicited from from other fully grown people. Lets start with something simple. Atheism != science. If you were indoctrinated into atheism by your family, that has nothing to do with you being 'sciencey' or analytical. Pictures of animals and the natural world could quite easily be relabelled 'I fucking love God', and be used to support claims of his engineering prowess.

I'm not down with religion. I don't dislike it. It just isn't my scene. I'm very fond of people who do it in their life, but I don't do it in my life. I lack faith, and while there are times when I wish that I was capable of it, at the end of the day I am who I am. I perceive the world in a certain way, and the thing that I really get down with is improving that perception. I kind of like being wrong these days; That is how you learn, and learning is where it is at.

I think there is also this animosity towards science from certain groups, because they think that science is this completely unbending thing made of facts that have to be known. Science is a methodology and an approach. It is a way of taking the information that we have and then figuring out what other information we might need. Through science we change the way that we understand things. That's cool. Science says to us, "We're not done. We may never be done." We do our bit, and then the next generation does theirs, and then it just goes on like that. That's cool.

If you are one of those people out there who 'fucking love science', you should read What is this thing called science? Actually, it doesn't really matter who you are or what your deal is, this book is fantastic. Read it and then ponder on how the people around you process 'the news' and political leanings and cultural opinions. It is interesting to me how many people cite a lack of evidence as the justification for not being religious, and then espouse non-evidence based rhetoric without even taking a breath. It's ludicrous. Especially around election time. I will warn you that this book is highly likely to make the vast majority of political discussions that you are likely to come across sound irredeemably imbecilic, which might actually be a plus.

Before you see Ender's Game

I saw my first poster for Ender's Game yesterday. I've said my piece on that movie, and for those of you who have read it it is pretty clear that my piece has nothing to do with the quality of the film, which I couldn't possibly have seen at the original time of writing, or the quality of the book, which I loved. The short version is that the guy, Orson Scott Card, is openly opposed to the same sex marriage and the "homosexual activist agenda."

Since my last diatribe on the situation, I have spoken to a person who when first coming across 'the kiss' in Ender's Game as a child, was so excited that they thought kissing other boys might be something that they might want to get involved with themselves. Later they grew up and became a kisser of men, so if there is a scoreboard somewhere for this kind of thing, surely that could be chalked up as an own goal.

Globalhead

Given that we now live in an age in which touchscreen read-a-ma-jigs are consumer goods, and that I have a couple that lurk about my life begging for a basic sustenance of wi-fis and power-watts, it seems perverse that I would be reading a tactile as all fuck, hard copy, print edition of Bruce Sterling's Globalhead. The dude is cyberpunk. He is the guy that pointed fingers and named names with Mirrorshades, and there is actual ink on actual pages. I'm practically choking on the ham-fisted irony of it all.

Whatever format you manage to find it in, Globalhead is an above-average collection of above-average short fiction written by this one guy who is far more interesting than he lets on. Bruce Sterling is that certain brand of conman, who has some how managed to convince the world of his own lack of importance, but in reality what he has done is quietly produce an abundance of something exquisite out of the perversely mundane. As my years have ticked on I have occasionally found myself presented with the works that he has deigned worthy to be free, whether they be podcasts, novels, short stories, non-fiction, whatever, and without exception I have found the view on the world with which I am presented Borroughsian in its aptitude for making me reassess what was admittedly a fairly limited outlook on my own reality.

Like Burroughs, he seems to drift around under the surface where even people who have heard of him have often failed to actually ingest anything he has produced himself. For me, for a long time, he was the Mirrorshades guy, and then later the other Difference Engine guy who isn't Gibson, and only later was he a proper entry in my literary vocabulary. Sometime around when I first read The Artificial Kid. I guess, like a lot of people that have written cyberpunk over the years, his greatest crime was that he didn't write Neiromancer, in the same way that Diana Wynne Jones didn't write any of the Harry Potter books. Their names and their output go unrecognised in the wake of the iconic representation of their genre, but in both these cases what you are deprived of is a rich and varied body of work. As Jones is to children's fantasy, Sterling is to an era of science fiction, and you would be hard pressed to find someone in each respective arena who has explored it more thoroughly.

In writing each of the various entries in Globalhead, Sterling has drawn on a truly herculean list of ingredients and influences, and has produced an arcane distillation of the late Twentieth Century that lies heavy with concepts of dangerous nationalism and technological nightmares. Sterling is clearly a man with a gift for the ordering and arrangement of fine words, but what sets him apart from the vast majority of other writers is his strength for variety, making Globalhead the perfect introduction to his body of work.

Beyond whats already mentioned, I highly recomend Zeitgeist, his closing keynote for IDEA 2006 (available free as a podcast), and The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder in the Electronic Frontier, which is available as both a book through iTunes and as an app through the App store, which, as I write these words, am currently trying to download. A lot of his work is far harder to get hold of than it should be, but I'm yet to come across something that wasn't worth the effort.

In the end, I get off on Sterling solely because of the way that he rolls. A lot of authors write a certain way, and that is kind of where it ends. You pick up one of their books and you know what you're investing in, more or less. Where Sterling differs is that for him it's about exploring ideas, and when you read Globalhead, you'll see what I mean. It makes sense that 'Our Neural Chernobyl', 'Storming the Cosmos', 'Jim and Irene' and 'The Sword of Damocles' all come from the same place and are available in the same place.



The image included above is the Bruce Jensen cover for the Bantam paperback edition.