The Adventure Game - a Joy of my Childhood

The Adventure Game was always something that filled me with excitement when I was a kid. Along with Blake's 7, which I'm sure it used to share an evening with in the early 80s, it was something I'd wait to see with all the childish excitment my body could muster.

A feeling I never have any more, ever.

Some wonderful person has been putting episodes online! Here's a bit of the first one ever made, with the charming Juilan Bream and John Williams theme tune, and a somewhat familiar looking future newsreader on duty as a shape shifting dragon.

This is obviously the earliest incarnation of the show - the evaporating floor seen in this clip would be replaced with the more familiar "Vortex" challenge of later years. I remember in particular the "Drogna" - the currency the dragon residents, or Argonds, of Arg. Little plastic discs with a coloured shape on, their value was derived from multiplying the number of sides with the colours position in the "Richard of York Gave Battle" mnenomic - hence a red circle was worth 1, and a blue pentagon was worth 25.

I was so obessed with the Drogna it was a mainstay of my internal aspergic head stories for years.

I used to love the computer game sequence, where early on the team's alpha male would sit at the keyboard of an Apple 2 to play a little text only adventure, where the command "SUBTRACT ADDER" sticks in my memory for some reason. Later on came the BBC model B, and the game Dogran Hole, where a little grumpy space dog would go into a hole in the wall, to be guided by the bloke, again, in a 3D Monster Maze type game. Thus the team would be distracted from failing to work out Lesley Judd was the evil mole, as happened every week.

I was thrilled as anything when Paul Darrow, the immortal Avon from Blake's 7, showed up one week, although his beard was offputting and he met a dismal evaporation fate for failing to remember a "PENTAGON-RED" tile sequence or some similar slip up.

I miss this show. Of course, The Crystal Maze was similar in conception, right down to the idea you progressed by winning crystals, but its charm was negated by the fact the contestants were a bunch of dimwitted yuppie cretins in boiler suits, as opposed to clever people like Heinz Wolff and Johnny Ball. Nowaadays, we have Dale Wintin camping it up at dimwits on lottery garbage output.

The joy of childhood can never be returned. Seeking it drives you mad, but watch these clips and be reminded of it for a little while...

As a final treat, here's David "The Chinese Detective" Yip taking on the Vortex in a later series.

Sci fi at oxfam

 

I love the Oxfam Bookshop, usually some interesting books to be found in sci fi, fantasy, and also UFOs and Cryptozoology which I think are complete bunk, but I enjoy reading nonetheless.

Quantum Entanglement

I think the shoe analogy is the simplest way of describing Quantum Entanglement so that idiots, like me for instance, can understand it, but I can't find that video - you have a pair of shoes in separate boxes, open one and find it's the left one, then you know at that moment, even if it's on the other side of the universe, that the other shoe is a right one. Do this with paired electrons, the same thing applies.

I've been trying to clever, and envisage the use of this theory - as, I'm told by a work colleague, computer games have been doing. It's not something I've seen in any sci fi stuff yet, but I'm sure it must be there. I read about entangled computing in New Scientist, and I saw a you tube vid where someone was saying the concept did not make teleportation a possibility.

I think about communications...if information about shoes and electrons can be essentially transmitted across the universe instantaneously, then can more complex information, or conversations, or information from a spacecraft?

The proper scientists and theoreticians will probably be laughing and queueing up to matter me with logic mallets at this point.

Still, it does open up perhaps more realistic communications concept than any Star Trek "Sub-Space" radio for writing or filmic purposes. Who  knows?

One thing I know is that I don't know!

STORY - I am the Resurrection

Written while listening to the famous Stone Roses track of the same name.

I Am The Resurrection

I was brought down to the shore and nailed so firmly to the iron cross you could have dissolved me in acid and I'd still be hanging there.

In washed the sea and a wreckage of razer shells, mermaids purses and starfish drank the blood from the mud as it settled from my wrists and ankles. Moth faced children laughed at me as they made sandcastles that the incoming tide just bounced off.

This happened every day for three years, until the tide rusted the foot of the cross away and I toppled sideways into the surflife, choking on the sand and salt, being stung by mocking Portugese Men'O War and having my welts pissed on by acid bladdered thugs from the local seaside estate, straight through their tracksuits.

The powers that be decided that I had suffered enough, and when the tide finally washed over by sunburnt head, that was the end of me. The blue sea faded to indigo, then black. It was over.

Then the dawn came, unexpected, out of time. Secured between four horses ridden by saints, slowly moving away from each other, an inch a day...

It never ends.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20/03/2013

Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Sunshine has always been one of my favourite films, yet Danny Boyle was so put off by the response it got he announced he was never going to touch the sci fi genre again, and Prof (Then Doctor) Brian Cox who worked as a science advisor on the film before his current TV omniescence jokes about what a complete box office disaster it was.

I can't understand why, and yet I can understand why.

The film itself suffers from an attack of schizophrenia about 2/3 of the way through. Prior to that it had been a work of hard sci fi, with lots of lovingly constrcuted shots of technologically non far fetched spacecraft heading towards a vivid, beautiful and active sun; a sun that acts as a major character in the film, a sun that causes some of our intrepid group of scientists and astronauts to undergo a kind of solar psychosis.

Then the Icarus 2, the spacecraft on a vital mission to save humanity by launching a manhattan sized nucelar device into a faltering sun, docks with its predecessor, and the film lurches awakwardly into slasher mode - Mark Strong with a growly voice and a bad case of psoriasis rampages around with vibrating knives and an artistic sense of how to pose murdered botanists. You never see the maniac in any other than a hyperactive blurred fashion, which I always assume was done to hide dodgy make up work. It really doesn't work as horror or science fiction, and this combined with its hard sci fi credentials ensured its box office doom.

Yet there is so much to enjoy about the film, I'd happily watch it again and again - this piece is prompted by two viewings last night. The cast, including Boyle's favourite actor of the period Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans and Hiryoki Sanada, is great; the music by John Murphy and Underworlde is stunning; and finally the celstial spectacle mindblowing with a huge sun burning its way into the minds of the characters and the viewers and a simple, affecting scene of the crew watching a transit of Mercury that has become one of my favourite shots in cinema.

I'd recommend this film for late night viewing with a strong rum and coke - turn the lights out, and the sound up, and let its beauty wash all over you.

Iain M. Banks - Fearsum Endjinn

Well, have just finished readingh this, my 5th Iain M. Banks novel, and delivered it back to the sad green trolleys where library books go when they get returned.

It's not one of his Culture novels, being an earthbound story with a side serving what might be called "Virtual Reality", but shares a lot of their characteristics - separate storylines featuring three or four main characters that gradually come together for the finale; an interest in aritificial means of mind expansion, and an initial threat to humanity from a rather vague source ultimately secondary to the threats its appearance pre-empts.

As ever, it is a brilliant, vibrant read, if a real headache to get into at first because of the phonetic text style speak one of the characters employs, but ultimately as with every other Banks sci fi work I've read, it has one major frustration. The ending is just a colossal anti climax that doesn't really seem to resolve anything.

It's maddening! The journey is always amazing and engrossing, but always far more interesting than the destination. I suppose that vague threats generate woolly endings, but it always disappointing from such a wonderful writer.

STORY - What Are Hooples?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/03/2013

What Are Hooples?

The warp probe sent out to Tau Ceti found the first signs of extra solar life on the fourth planet of the Tau Ceti system. The 11^th dimensional transmitter sent back instantaneous pictures of a lush, green world ripe with oceans of water and a temperate climate. The temperature was clement, and the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere was an absolute giveaway.

Life was present. But what kind of life could not be ascertained by this single rapid flyby.

Another mission was commisioned, this time with an automatic lander shaped like a bedstead with a couple of eleventh dimensional imagers upon it. Tau Ceti 2 was launched from the Geo-Synchronous ring under ion drive, until it reached beyond the orbit of mars and engaged the gravitational warping propulsion which caused the probe to surf Space Time on a series of waves. It reached the star system in barely two weeks, and sent back quantum entangled messages instantly saying it had arrived and would it be alright to deploy the lander thank you very much?

The message was returned in the affirmative, and the lander was deployed. It rode an atmsophere rich in oxygen and inonised neon that made everything glow blue-green, and settled on a small island in the middle of a purple sea of freshwater heavily laced in iodine.

Within seconds, the camera registered curious lifeforms, rounded creatures covered in thick curly brown fur, with dark black eyes showing through the upper half of the body. Short arms and legs with six fingered hands were used as with humans, and the mouth was small and “H” shaped and rather hard and horny looking, as if it was used for eating crustaceans. They regarded the camera with an unfrightened interest, and tapped out a musical rhythym on the titanium surface of the lander.

“My god!” cried one of the mission controllers. “They look like Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople!” and it was unanimously decided that our first ever stellar neighbours should be known as Hooples.

Ah the joy and hope of those naieve times. Little did we know what peril these inoffensive looking Hooples would pose to the Earth, and how devastating their first ever “tour” would prove just as soon as they mastered the eleventh dimension warping technology we had delivered to thier doorstep.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/03//13

John Wyndham - The Outward Urge

As a follow up to what I said of Asimov, and the similar "clunk-tech" sci fi writing of the 50s, I find myself writing about John Wayndham's - "The Outward Urge" - a novel essentially compirisng four novellas linked down through a family's timeline about how a putative conquest of space might work. It's another sci fi novel
I'm reading in my breaks to get myself away from the soul destroying work environment.

It is written in collaboration with a proper scientist of the time (says the blurb, although the Lucas Parkes mentioned turns out to be a pseudonym for Wyndham himself for stylistic reasons) and purports to be a serious exploration of how the nuts and bolts, and politics, of space exploration might develop through time, seen through the eyes of Britain in 1959.

"Don't expect another Day of the Triffids" warns the back cover write up, and indeed, nothing could be further from the walking plants action stingathon of that classic work. This book is a dry as dust, stiff upper lip hard sci fi work, a work of girders and inflatable domes, grind, toil, and cold war missiles.

It is a hard read. Not because of anything technical, or high concept language or anything like that, but because frankly it is so very boring. The characters are cardboard cut outs of heroic english conventionality given to the gin and pipe smoking cliches of the time, the peril isn't very exciting; and the book seems to read like a less imaginative version of Arthur C. Clarke early works written ten years earlier.

But it isn't just the writing style that's the problem. The idea that Britain would be building massive space stations in the 90s, and later landing on the moon in competition with the Russians and the Americans, must have seemed ludicrous, if patriotic, even in the late 1950s as Sputnik and Explorer were already bleeping their way through near space. The idea that space would be used essentially as a launch site for nukes might have reflected the worries of the time, but the missiles themselves, which as described sound like space borne steam engines, seem like something from Verne and a bit low tech even for HG Wells.

I wish us Brits were up there in Space, but this far fetched piece of speculation must have seemed so dated even then. It also goes to prove that what I said about living the low tech imagination of 50s sci fi, does not always hold true!

Multivac and the World of Valve-Punk

I don't know if "Valve-Punk" is a thing or not, but it's a term I increasingly mentally use to describe the short stories of the 50s golden age of Pulpy magazines, and collections like "Earth is Room Enough" by Isaac Asimov.

At the moment I only use it 'mentally' in case I get regarded as a fruitcake for using it in public.

It's an analogue world, a world of tremendous artifical intelligences that can only be accessed by dipole switch, lever and punch card. I world of spaceships that can travel faster than light, but folk can only communicate with each other using a Bakelite telphone with a far out name.

Fantastic machines exist, and no-one gives a damn about explaining how they work. They just clunk and whirr and overheat...and they just work! dammit!.

Solid state? Transistors? No thank you! Everything is vacuum tubes the size of your arm, and chunky glass valves, and things that light up, and things that chatter and hammer like a typewriter. Computers don't talk, or have screens. Like Asimov's multivac, they exisit in caverns the size of a city, are full of people working within them - shades of men working within the brains of greater men in Olaf Stapeldon - and get on with the serious business of deciding elections results from the thoughts of just a single man, or working out just exactly why humans have a sense of humour.

The answer is unspoken, merely spat out on rolls of ticker tape.

How I love the idea of this clunking, whirring non-digital world where we can yet reach the stars...