Irvine Welsh, Jimmy Savile, and the Violation of the Dead

It struck me years ago, as I read the collection of short stories within the lurid cover of “Ecstasy” that a certain character in one of the stories bore more than a passing resemblance to a real person. A very famous television personality in fact.

The short story concerned - “Lorraine Goes to Livingstone” features many things – novelists, bi curious nurses, but what sears the memory like a psychic brand over the 20 odd years since I last read the book, is the character of Freddy Royle.

Freddy is an Adge Cutlerish Somerset TV personality, presenter of a show that makes dreams come true for children amongst others and trustee and charitable sponsor of a major London hospital, has a dark side indeed. It is described by Welsh how the wriggling of a young girl on his lap had caused Royle a rather sticky afternoon, but this is nothing indeed compared to what he gets up to in the hospital mortuary, where he pays off staff to turn a blind eye to his favourite activity; having sex with the dead...

Sound a little familiar?

Amidst the depravity, a new coroner arrives at the hospital, and begins to investigate why some of the corpses are stained with semen and bruised around the anus. Well, this will never do! Freddy and the hospital's top administrator conspire to kidnap the coroner, shoot him full of muscle relaxant, and film him being penetrated by a prostitute with a strap on, this blackmail ensuring all their secrets will never come to light.

Hmmmmmmmm.

It all must be pure coincidence, of course! Welsh himself has neither confirmed nor denied that Savile was the inspiration for the Freddy Royle character, but to me, this is that word that you use when people do that...um...dissimulattion!

To me, there must have been stories freely circulating abbout Savile's proclivities in certain circles. But his celebrity and financial power prevented them from coming into the light. But who else was bought off? I doubt it stopped at hospital workers...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 27.06.14

The Sexuality of Sci-Fi

We are the only sentient species we know about at present, in a universe where the possibilities are nearly infinite.

It is thus disappointing, if unsurprising, that we can only see things through our own tediously heterosexual and missionary position eyes. Our imaginations, when they should be alive to every possibility, are thinking only of England.

We are so boring. This young child playing with his Star Wars figures, could see all manner of fun and games involving Squid Head and a Gammorean Guard, while EV9D9 the Smash Martian torture-bot of Jabba's Palace looked on approvingly. But no, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was only rubbish old male to female, humanoid snogging going on. The brilliantly realised array of species that frequented the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba's Sail Barge were about as sexual as a packet of crisps, save for the constantly ejaculating phallus that was Jabba himself, his scenes with Leia a blatant earth bound bukkake signifier.

As the Holiday Special showed us, Wookies like pornography featuring humans, rather than other Wookies, and how disturbing is it that Han Solo gets the white girl, but Chewbacca's father has a black woman served up to him as his fantasy?

Contemporaneously, H2G2's Zaphod Beeblebrox may have been sporting an extra head and three arms, but there was nothing to show that his dealings with Trillian were anything past Page 32 of the Joy of Sex.

We all know that Kirk may have been canoodling with all manner of green skinned – or more shockingly for 1968, black skinned – women in the traditional manner, but leap forward into the Next Generation, and the excitement of the final frontier was sharing screen time with Nescafe advert style sexual tension with Doctor Crusher and Captain Picard, and with Riker and Councillor Troi – another example of a mixed species relationship being portrayed in typically heterosexual penis to vagina coupling.

The First Contact movie presented us with the spectacle (cringing!) of Data getting it on with the Borg Queen, but for all his announcement that he was “Fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques” it was clear that this android to cyborg corpse coupling was going to be of a very standard format. Indeed, any alt-sex activities of the Star Trek Universe were always of the cloning, or assimilating variety.

It wasn't until Star Trek Voyager, that anything different to these standards were offered up to the viewer – Harry Kim had some form of bizarre intercourse with the ever stunning Musetta “Mansquito” Vander - “I'm not sure that was even legal” - and Kes and Neelix's long term interspecies relationship revealed some interesting little tit-bits about Ocampa sexual physiology that were very different from ours.

Still all het though. Even the radically inhuman creations of Species and Splice engaged in fairly conventional heterosexual intercourse.

The world of sci-fi literature, however, had been a bit more open to alternatives. Arthur C. Clarke's universe was hard-sci and asexual a lot of the time, aside to joky references to shipboard relationships with genetically engineered apes called Simps in “Rendezvous with Rama”. However, by the 80s, there were open references to homosexuality in the relationship between an American and Russian astronaut aboard the Leonov in 2010, the “Feys” of 2061, and butch surfing spacedudes recalibrating their sexuality in “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

Going back to the 1930s, Olav Stapledon, in “Last and First Men” actually envisaged fully realised, highly complex and rather incomprehensible successor species of man, with sub-sexes and full intercourse involving a large group of individuals, but these were a later species of man, albeit barely recognisable to us, rather than aliens.

I think it is David Bowie, who else, who actually through the vision of Nicholas Roeg, gives us an idea of what a realistic form of alien sex could be...messy, genital-less, and with no-need for penetration at all.

And indeed, for all the stress and violence it causes, higher forms of life in the universe will probably have abandoned sex. And who can blame them?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry

H2G2 versus (H2G2)2

This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.

I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.

I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.

Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.

It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.

Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.

Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.

The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.

So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.

I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.12.13

The Magic Book

In every library there is a magic book. You just have to find it.

It’s different in every library. It might be a book on new styles of management in one, a camping guide in a second and a large print copy of a Jackie Collins in another.

Its magic properties vary too. Sometimes nothing happens other than all the text in every other book in the library turning dark green. Sometimes it transports you to another library where the magic book begins with the same first letter as the one you touched. It could make you a Prince or even a King of the land that you live in, or it may turn you into a rat.

The method of magical activation is never constants. Touching the book’s spine may be enough to invoke the power of wizardry, but in other cases you may have to lick page 39. In general, the more powerful the magic invoked, the more extreme the method of initiating the spell. There is a book in the University of Ougadougou that makes 85 golden cows out of nothing if you slam your genitals between pages 283 and 284 of the manuscript – Volume 15 of the Encyclopaedia of Bacteria. All spells found in romance works are activated by pressing your nipple to every instance of the word “the” on the blurb on the inside cover.

It is always fun to watch people look for magic books. Especially the most dedicated of seekers.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/10/13

The Wonder of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

I may have written about this TV series and book before, but really, I don't care. If I have, whatever sentiment I expressed at the time hasn't changed, so please accept my consistency over time, if not my memory.

I've been re-reading my small hardback copy of the book endlessly at work, and before that, I used to read it religiously every time I went to stay at my father's when I was young, scaring myself by reading it late at night, but unable not to and save myself some nightmares in the process. And further back, I remember seeing the TV series when it first appeared, and always having to turn my head away at the last second to avoid the Skull of Doom's terrifying gaze.

I had started to reading about UFOs at a similar sort of time, and was already a confirmed astronomy nut, 7 years old. But a scaredy cat one, the paradoxical stargazer uneasy in the dark. They all spoke of a world that opened up far beyond that of a reasonably teasable - if not bullied or utterly miserable by any means - little boy with platinum hair with muddy brown streaks in it, who never really fitted in.

It was a huge world, with no boundaries, inhabited by creatures of a fantastic nature, who unlike the monsters and creatures of the children's stories he found so, well, childish, there was a possiblity that they might exist. The Yeti maybe a far fetched thing to believe in, but it is still a far more likely thing to exist than a bad tempered troll beneath a bridge.

The Patterson Bigfoot film scared me witless, the film I saw for the first time on this television programme, the familiar jaunty man in a gorilla suit lolloping across the forest. The child me saw the still close up of the "creature's" face staring at the camera, out of the screen, and it made my heart judder.

There was the Alma, the Loch Ness Monster and the other wonderfully named water monsters Ogopogo, Manipogo, Champ, and Caddy. There was Loy's Ape, the Pgymy Elephant, the King Cheetah, the Giant Octopus, the Giant Squid. Many viewers may have been introduced to Fort and Forteana, and more scientific mysteries were covered, based around the rhyme and reason behind ancient sites like Stonehenge, Newgrange, the Nazca lines and the Chalk figures of the South Downs.

All these stories delivered with a slightly scary Gordon Honeycomb narration.



 Some of these creatures, like the Giant Squid and the beautiful (thanks to a mutation) King Cheetah, are now known to exist. This does not subtract from their near-fantastic nature.

And so, as I sat in a works canteen with rain lashing on windows, the grey endless outside, the grown up me read of these wonderful and strange entities and occurences, and it filled my brain with knowledge and transported me away. I wish the book were ten times longer.

The Sport of Huxley's Brave New World

We've had a real festival of sport the last few days; Wimbledon obviously, but also Formula 1, and the tortuous action of The Tour De France - a sport where a lot of debate and murmurings these days is of a highly scientific, and indeed science fictional, nature.

I was thinking of Aldous Huxley.

His "Brave New World" describes a world where needless consumption is necessary to sustain its economic and caste-based social structures. Sport is not immune; nothing simple can exist, everything must be complicated to the n-th degree. Huxley mentions several of these athletic pursuits.

The first, if it qualifies as a sport per se, is "Centrifugal Bumble Puppy", and is the only activity Huxley describes in any detail at all. It is a child's game in which a ball or some other object, is thrown into a sort of tall tower device, which as it rotates at high speed spits the ball back out via a series of random direction chaging contrivances, for the children to catch. Sounds fun enough. But Huxley's other games are more shrouded in mystery.

"Obstacle Golf" sounds straightforward enough, to me, it sounds like crazy gold played on a full golf course scale - imagine hitting a four-iron through the legs of a hundred metre high donkey. But his other golfing game, "Electro-Magnetic Golf" is more curious - I envisage a standard golf game where giant electro magnets act upon a metallic core of the ball in a complex, but predictable, manner. The ball swings about all over the place as it flies down these magnet surrounded fairways. Perhaps the game is played in three dimensions - a hole suspended in mid-air amid the powerful magnetic fields.

Escalator Squash is another sport referred to by Huxley, his character "Helmholtz Watson" is mentioned as a world champion at it. One's mind can only boggle as it conceives a variant of squash played in an enormous court, played with a super bouncy ball, with elevators and lifts filling the space like a crazed version of Chuckie Egg. Of course, it might be a smaller scale version played on shopping centre escalators, but really, that would be boring.

The real humdinger, however, is "Riemann Surface Tennis". A mass game being played by several hundred pairs of lower caste players is mentioned, but no other description is given.

Hardly surprising really, as a Riemann Surface is a one dimensional complex manifold surface used in hyper-boggling topological studies. A simplified version of it looks like this;

Fancy a hit about on that folks?

Mr Huxley, if I hadn't done it a thousand times already, I take my hat off again to you sir.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.07.2013

BOOKS - Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"

I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on this sci fi work for a couple of weeks; a book that kept me happily entertained as I sat reading it in a pub with a couple of excellent pints of Reverend James.

The work, although like so much I read seeming to owe a little or lot to Banks' Culture novels - the "Gods in the Machine" characters seem to bear a resemblance to Culture sublimed races perhaps, and the grossly inhuman yet fully sentient and realised alien species reminded me of the fauna found in Banks - throws in Steampunk and retrotech elements to create a universe very much of its own devising.

The main thrust of the novel is the effect, 200 years in the future, of a non-incorporeal seemingly vastly superior race called The Festival on a planet where a sort of Tsarist elite rule over the peasant society. In return for entertaining anecdotes, the Festival offer the peasantry cornucopia technology that can create absoloutely anything, thus triggering an accelerated communist revolution that goes from village Soviets to a techono-overkill situation in a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the regime in charge of the planet, send out a battlefleet that although with a structure like that that fought in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, is equipped with faster than light technology with the potential to affect the past. This attracts the interest of a number of parties, who send out agents to "monitor" these efforts...

I enjoyed the novel. It doesn't have the complexity or richness of a Culture novel, but is correspondingly more human and a lot easier to get into. Stross is also exploring our contemporary issues in this work, like freedom of information, the problems and benefits of high techonlogy, and the nature of tyranny, benign or otherwise. There is a follow up I'd like to read, and I would recommend the book to the fan of intelligent sci fi. Especially in the pub with a beer!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/06/13

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.

Ray Bradbury - The Silver Locusts

This shift, I've been getting through my elegant, silver be-covered 1960s paperback of The Silver Locusts, a 1950 Ray Bradbury novel that seems to have been collated out of a serial, or collection of short stories, from Pulps like Amazing Stories.

I've not finished it yet, it is hard to get a proper reading stint in when you're surrounded by loud folk whose idea of a cultural decision is whether to watch "Top Gear" on Dave or Dave Ja Vu. But after a sticky start where the rather "folksy" language somewhat bogged me down, I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the story by the dreamlike construction and western pioneer fairytale atmosphere.

The chapter where someone constructs "The House of Usher" on Mars, and populates it with double bluff calling robot doppelgangers, is an absolute standalone standout. The Martians themselves, in contrast with the zippered green suits and antennae creatures of the sci fi of the times, are never truly revealed in themselves - they exist only as delusions of loss and desire in the humans that see them.

Think of the alien manifestations in Carl Sagan's "Contact", and The Gelf of Red Dwarf, and no doubt many more besides, and you think of the apparent influence of this tale. I couldn't also help but think of the reports of UFO encounters described as "High Strangeness", which again this novel seems to predict compared with the friendly Adamski "Nordic" Extraterrestrials, or on the other hand the terrifying Hopkinsville Goblins found in reports of the time.

Better known in the US as The Martian Chronicles, a big budget TV miniseries was made that I've never seen, but attracted derisory reviews. I hope to track it down soon.