Who Gives a Bloody Pissing Fuck About Batman?

The economy is ghastly, people are suffering horrendous deaths from nerve gas in Syria, and millions upon millions of folk around the world are wondering where on earth they are going to get food for their families tomorrow.

So thank all the stars that I've been given a sense of perspective by the news that Ben Affleck is going to play Batman in some fanboy trouser stirring Superman versus Batman twattery. Twitter is in meltdown - most of the top ten trends all day have involved the words "Batman" and "Ben Affleck" in various combinations.

Stoked by SF mags wishing to keep a high hit count on their advert sodden webpages, the fires of this utterly unimportant debate have blazed all day.

Batman, I think, is a favourite superhero of the middle classes, as they empathise with his pseudo-troubled personality. As they struggle with where to buy quinoa, the independent coffee shop patronisers empathise with a man who struggled to be brought up among endless money and toys to play with.

While people immerse themselves in the privileged backstory of the bat, I have steadfastly refused to give a toss until now, an article written in 5 minutes while I watch a documentary about World Music on BBC4. How can anyone give a monkeys?

Me, I will read and enjoy proper sci fi, as more endless comic books get re-digested and recycled like the water in the International Space Station, and a real world rotates around the sun royally fucking itself up. Thank you and goodnight!

STORY - The Moth Man

The moth man stands overlooking the village from the hill by the garden centre, past the swollen brook and the sheltered home for mentally vulnerale adults. He had been a moth for several years, furry and nocturnal, hair unkempt and done in two long spikes at the front to act like antennae as he bumped about in the dark.

Every day he spent sleeping in a bush up on the hill, dappled by sunset shining through the privet leaves, and maintained by sweeet nectar squeezed from summer flowers and fruits. Then, as the sun began to set, he became more active, stirring from his shrubby slumbers and feeling the daily attraction to the settlement beneath him.

As the last sliver of the sun dropped below the horizon, flashing emerald green it it was a lucky day, he set off along the brook as it bubbled along happily down a meadow, the turbulent patches of water acting as a luminescent guide as he danced down the slope shaking his head, twitching.

The brook met a small river as the hillside flattened out. The lights of the village glowed softly behind curtains, but it was not these that drew the moth man, these luminosities were not compelling enough for his vastly altered cortex. It was those who had neglected to pull their curtains or lower their blinds, that were the irresistible candles that dragged him onwards.

And when he found such a window, all he could do was bang his head upon it until his forehead bled and his craked through the glass, and his stomach and chest were cut to ribbons. The only mercy he received were when the incredulous homeowner became aware of what he was, and mercifully turned the light out to bring him temporary relief, before he was driven on to another house.

And women screamed at him, especially the prettier one as his naked form flayed his lepidopteric self to shreds on the tasteless double glazing and UPVC surrounds, but he could never walk away.

For as everyone knows, they are drawn to pretty women as a moth is drawn to a flame. And his shattered body spent every night burning.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/08/2013

The Extreme Sinus Problems of Outland

Just been fortunate to find a DVD copy of Peter Hyam's "Outland" for next to no money in the usual shop of ill repute.

Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.

Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.

People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...

The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.

When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.

The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.

Brrrr. Shivers...

Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, and the Acid Spiders of Runaway

Runaway is a film little seen on the small screen these days, and I've never come across it in all my charity shop and market stall rummages either.

And before you ask, finding it on the internet is cheating!

It's a film that sticks in the memory though. Because of Tom Selleck playing a near future cop trying to establish why people's formerly docile domestic housekeeping robots have gone suddenly rogue? No, I'm guessing that at the time Tom was still kicking himself for not being able to take the Indiana Jones gig when it was right under his nose, and was trying to make up for it by appearing in unsuccessful movies like this one, or the X rated Indy movie Lassiter.

Could it be that the villain of the film, dastardly manufacturer of microchips that turns droids into killers is none other than Gene Simmons of Kiss? No, he makes a reasonably effective villain, if a little monotone and his tongue undeployed.

The reason the movie is memorable is, like The Black Hole with its terrifying bowel churning robot Maximillian, that the movie is stolen by a robot. Or rather robots, and unlike the powerful hovering Maximillian with his whirling blades, these robots are small, eight legged and yet just as frightening.

These robot spiders have a seriously unpleasant, double threat. Not only do they inject their victims with acid to cause agonising pain, as is happening to Mr Simmons here;

they then explode.

They have a sinister, vibrating motion, coupled with an ability to jump like mechanical fleas onto walls next to the quivering necks of their victims...

...before plunging their acid dripping needles into the vulnerable flesh.

The film isn't an out and out turkey, it is watchable and although it never made Selleck into a major action star like he must have been hoping, he does a decent job. But to an 11 year old boy, as I was, the performances and the script just don't register.

What makes the impact is the thought of having killer robot spiders inject agonising, burning acid into your neck, a thought sufficient to make you go to sleep with a pillow over your head for a fair few nights!

Words copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/05/2013

STORY - The Brain Drain

It's not hard, perhaps, to see where the inspiration for this piece came from.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/04/2013

The Brain Drain

As I turned on the television, I had been feeling great all day. I had been running, been cycling, had a great idea for ending world poverty, and after a cup of tea had begun to map out an organo-metallic cure for cancer. An attractive girl had phoned me up to line up a date, and my latest expressionist painting was coming along a storm.

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...

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.

The Mad Death and Urban Foxes

The fact that baby eating Urban Foxes are in the news at the moment immediately made me think of the 1981 BBC TV Rabies drama "The Mad Death" - see clip above - where foxes were involved in spreading an outbreak of Rabies throughout the British Isles.

Never mind babies having their fingers bitten, this TV show showed in gory glory the real chaos foxes can cause. This poor infected Alsation in the clip, foaming mouth spreading diseased saliva in front of the faces of terrified children and shoppers, was just one victim.

Any of the humans that got infected started frothing at the mouth like they'd been eating Remegel filled with Ariel Automatic, but this was the least terrifying part of the deal. Violent hallucinations followed, involving the insane faces of foxes, naked women with golden foxes eyes for navels, and worst of all, the constant sense that you were drowning, even in your own saliva. Hydrophobia. Ugh and double ugh.

To a ten year old boy, the whole thing was pant shittingly scary. Every trip abroad from then on involved nervous scouting for any sign of mangy looking dogs or cats. Not even that, any animal was potential death on four legs; an inquisitive German Shephard in a french town called Josselin scared me so badly I vowed to my parents I'd never visit there again.

And so far I haven't.

So remember this TV show when you next read about babies being attacked by foxes. Cute Mr Fox isn't just walking infanticide; he's a chicken killing bio warfare weapon of foamy mouthed mass destruction to which the only solution is a vulpine final one...and no doubt the chaps in red jackets on horseback will be calling for just that.

Memories of the Space 1999 Eagle

An image of my childhood, the classic toy Eagle transporter from Space 1999. At home in Scotland, I used to have one of these in our home up on the hill, overlooking the Bowling Green and the museum, and the long lawn me and the Murray boys used to play golf on with little plastic clubs and balls.

I used to hide in the strange cupboard under the stairs that didn't have a door, rather a maroon velveteen curtain, and make whooshing noises as I pretended to be Commander Koening or that Aussie guy called Alan who was always my favourite. Even then, I was a childhood who spent a lot of time looking inwards rather than out, although I had a fair few friends.

I always remember the episode where they thought they had returned to Earth, only it was an illusion placed in their minds by these blobby looking aliens that looked like the ones in "It Came from Outer Space".

Tragedy finally occurred when I made a high speed release of the transporter pod once too often, and I broke the release mechanism. The pod probably flew off behind the dusters and retro carpet sweeper, never to be found again, and the now rather skeletal looking spaceship ceased to appeal to me. It just didn't feel right.

Alas, like many things I owned in childhood, it would probably be worth a fortune now if I still had it in good nick...

The Decadent Future - The Hunger Games, and The Fifth Element

It struck me, just before a lampost nearly did, as I cycled to work this morning, how much the capital city sequences of the "The Hunger Games" reminded me of the fabulous Besson and Gaulthier (oh yeah, and Moebius I think) created world of The Fifth Element...

I rewatched The Hunger Games over the weekend, and got stuck into the reasonably generous DVD extras, a rare thing on a plain old DVD these days. The powers that be want us to shell out for our extras on all The Blu Rays no-one seems to be buying. For all its origins as a piece of (horror word) "Young Adult" fiction , the film does end up being highly watchable yarn, thanks to a strong performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

And yes, I know it's a rip off of Battle Royale. Matters not.

So yes, at first that Effie Whatever person appears, and she's got fantastic shoes on, and a wig, and look, she keeps re-appearing in differently coloured wigs, and now Katniss and her drippy pal are in the big city, and everyone is dressed in these Regency inspired futuristic outfits or whatever, and it's all contrasted with the homey peasantness of the naieve kids, and also the gleaming holographic technology.

And yes, it reminds me of the Fifth Element, where the opression is more corporate than fascistic, yet the folks still live in super high rise squalor in apartments so cramped the shower occupies the same space as the fridge; yet folk dress in highly stylised parodies of fashions of many periods, and the entire aesthetically glorious world seems to be entirely populated by models.

There's a story to tell here I think, the comparison just begs to be made. Unfortunately, it isn't me to tell it. I love the idea of writing about film, but I just don't have the language. I want to write about the style and look of the film, but when trying to describe the wigs as I did above, I couldn't think of the right word. Restoration? Georgian? Ah, just go with Regency. That's probably close enough. I could use the word dystopia but it would probably just cause me dyspepsia as I tried to explain properly why it was a dystopia.

And then, actually trying to criticise one above the other, how can I do that without really knowing what the respective directors and designers were trying to state with their visions of the decadent future, and whether they achieved their goals or not. I haven't got any notes either, if I'd known I was going to be seized with the desire to write properly, I should have sat assiduously with notebook and biro making all the oh so logical and pertinent points I was going to make about both films.

I didn't. I was just taken heavily with the notion of writing about this idea as my hands cracked and dripped blood as I wandered upset amongst the endless racks and boxes, seeing the pen as the means of escape, but not knowing quite how to go about it...I love the Fifth Element more, and it looks far better, but why? *shrugs* I can't really explain it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/01/2013

Alien Resurrection - is it really so bad?

I needed to tidy, I needed to cook soup. I needed distraction that enabled me to lie under my duvet on the sofa and not do anything.

Not fancying another dose of Hawk the Slayer, I put Alien Resurrection on, which was sitting neglected next to it on a particularly dusty part of the shelf. I thought I might try and watch it with fresh eyes, and see if it is truly as bad as I remembered.


Alien is a classic piece of atmospheric, and let us not forget, sexual, horror. Aliens is a crash bang action fest where the extended cut should be avoided. And Fincher's Alien 3 gets slated by many, but I rather like it thanks to its strong cast and oily, greasy vibe. Where does Alien 4 fit in?

Needless to say, even taking a charitable view, it is comfortably the worst of the 4. Again, it's a strong cast with it's cultish crew of Ron Perlman, Dominic Pinon, and Michael Wincott, and Winona Ryder is not so really out of place. But it's script writer, a certain Josh Whedon, is. "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!" is symptomatic of the "yoof interest" awful dialogue that finds its way into the script. Add to this the endlessly clanged desire to explore Ripley's historic desire for motherhood results in a clearly not giving a toss Sigourney Weaver creeping around like a genetically engineered incestuous abuser, muttering in am dram fashion when she isn't cosying up to xenomorphs for some borderline interspecies nookie.

"I'm the monster's mother..." "You mean....my baby?..." Weaver breathes, and the audience giggles, turning into outright cackles when Brad Dourif's signature oddball introduces "The Newborn", the human-alien iceberg that sinks the movie in many more pieces that the Titanic went down in. Looking like a heavily KY'd Scooby Doo villain, the brain eating space pug dog roars, whimpers and coos through 'emotional' scenes with Weaver that plunge the depths of emetic bathos.

And then we have Jeunet's direction. It seems to me that he feels pretty early on in the piece that his chances of making a visceral masterpiece have been fatally compromised, and so decides to lather the gore on and seemingly stick cameras down people's throats on several occasions, while trying to fit in a bit of humour such as spaceship General chap Dan Hedaya giving a cornball salute before picking his cerebellum out of an alienised hole in the back of his skull. But the nadir is the scene where clone number 8 Ripley meets the previous failure versions of herself, seemingly including Captain Caveman in a jar; and Joey Deacon clone strapped to a bed dribbling "kill me" before meeting a humane and painless death at the end of a..er...flamethrower.

"Kill Me?" "Kill Us" chanted the audience.

Sleeper Service

As is a favourite pastime of mine, I was out running while listening to Radio 4. I'm old now you see, and I don't have portable DAB. I wish I could be listening to 6 music like a cool, old, sad guy.

In any case, there was a wonderful documentary broadcast about the London Euston to Inverness and beyond Sleeper Service train. Leaving London at 915 at night, it wends its way up North, beyond such glorious places as Crewe, Preston and Carlisle. It's an expensive, rather wealthy business person past-time to be sure, which is ironic, as the accomodation must be rather cramped and spartan even for first class.

But I loved the sound of it! The comradeship, the relationship between regular travellers, the barman reporting the bar being drunk nearly dry. I love the idea of long journeys, of adventures. I'm sure that if I had my own cabin on that train, I'd nestle into my bunk and pretend to be a spaceman being out into suspended animation, and dream of stars.

I just imagine the possibilities for stories, for adventures. A murderer on the train, mutated DNA, he can crawl down the side of a speeding train into YOUR window. The train disappears on going into a tunnel, never to emerge...aliens kidnap the whole train...a tunnel floods with the train inside...one of the passsengers is a political dissident and other passengers are a secret service assasinsation squad, polonium poisonings amidst the half wine bottles and plastic glasses...women who are mermaids in disguise seinding the train to the bottom of the Firth of Forth...poison gas attack, poison fish attack...pollock spray cyanide in the carriages, halibut shoot survivors...passengers bodies rip as train food found to contain alien eggs...

All the possibilities. And the best you got was Snakes on a Plane on a Train. Pah.

I still so want to go though. And maybe the story will happen while I write it. Like the tableaux Iain M. Banks describes on the "Sleeper Service" he wrote about

SHORT STORY - Spindizzy - three minute writing exercise

Spindizzy

I found that if you rotate really really fast, while standing looking at an apple tree in my garden one steel grey day in September, that you can make the world stop. There I was, doing the whirling dervish thing as cackling fruit hung pregnantly upon the bough, the sick feeling in my head bringing bile to the back, then front, of my throat.

I spewed all over a dandelion plagued patch of lawn, but never stopped.

A robin and a blackbird were laughing and pointing their wings. There was a rushing in my head. I brought up more of my stomach and a lot more of my liver and kidneys to nourish the sickly grass.

I was moving so fast my finger tips were starting to burn with the friction of the air.

And then, all stopped. I slammed against a quantum wall as I had predicted; my body stopped instantly with no momentum. 345,599 revoloutions per second. That was the speed predicted. That was the speed I had hit.

And at the moment I hit it, the world stopped rotating, its inertia failed, and I was able to watch all the people and animals not glued or velcroed to ground level shooting off into the ky like they'd been thrown off a roundabout and dashed into bloody pulp upon the arc of the heavens.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/01/13

Prometheus

Got round to watching this on Christmas Day.

I'd been led to believe it's very bad. It isn't. It's just a wee bit "meh" - with odd sorts of plot holes that either the film, or my own stupid brain, aren't explaining.

Like why is there a Geiger illustration of an alien seen in the Engineer habitat before anything resembling "The Alien"  - which seems to be created by genetic chance event instigated by David the android - exists, and David's motivation for carrying out a little unpleasant human experimentation isn't really explained.

As is also to be fair typical for movies of this nature, characters do daft things for no reason; "ooh look we're in a bit of this unknown habitat where strage creatures are afoot, let's stay here stomping about like idiots instead of leaving." That sort of thing. Other characters seem to have absoloutely nothing to do in the film whatsoever, hello to you most of the Prometheus crew!

The film is pretty. It has great scale. It's not unenjoyable. But the equation "Ridley Scott plus Alien Prequel" provides a lesser answer than what we hoped.