The Anthropologists from Mars – early notes

All the aliens turn up at once, drifting aimlessly around the solar system like a bunch of early party arrivees. They can’t be seen or detected from by any Earth-based observatory. They are cloaked somehow.

An ore freighter en route from Titan to the settlement on Ganymede runs into an alien vessel. Literally. It decloaks, dwarfing the megaton freighter. The Earth ship backs up to take a proper look. The alien ship is a smooth grey cube five hundred miles on a side.

earth ship: we come in peace.

Minutes pass. Finally, a small red light appears near the centre of the surface closest to the freighter.

alien vessel: go away.
earth ship: repeat message. we come in peace.
alien vessel: look, just go. Seriously.
earth ship: request clarification of previous message.
alien vessel: are you serious? piss off!
earth ship: er…why?
alien vessel: you aren’t meant to be able to see us. if the cops notice you hanging around like a bad smell we’ll have our invitation revoked. Now shoo, before we subtract the intrinsic field from your [untranslatable] fusion device.

A pair of idential alien anthropologist tourists in human form, utterly imperturbable and indestructable, insist on involving themselves in a series of major earth-based conflicts and catastrophes. Althrough their profession insists they are ostensibly uninvolved, they are somehow always affecting the outcome of events.

humans: You’re clearly aliens. Why do you look like us? Was there an prehistorical diaspora of stone-age spacemen? Have earth people been breeding in space? Or did you abduct us and steal our DNA?
visiting alien anthropologists: Uh, neither. We had these meatstructures made so we could come down and hang out in your atmosphere. You know, blend in and check out the joint.
humans: But you’re over ten feet tall!
vaa: Ah, that’s just a scaling problem. Maybe we can shave a bit off here and there.
humans: And those, uh, gills? You know, on your neck?
vaa: Ventilation. You got any idea how hot it gets inside one of these?

Building Stories in Public

I’ve decided. Well, I’ve kind of decided. It’s somewhere between ‘Yes, I’m so going to do this’ and ‘Maybe I’ll do this some of the time’. Once or twice it’s been back to ‘This is a really bad idea’. That’s the kind of decision it is, my decision to do all my writing work right here on the blog. In public. At least, as public as this blog is, which is about the same as following a footpath to the middle of a very large wood in the small hours of the morning on the coldest night of winter and whispering at a badger. That is: public, but not exactly well-attended. Nevertheless, story ideas, notes, story developments, synopses, short articles and draft after draft after draft of the Novel will all arrive here in some form*.

I can’t provide a reasoned argument as to why this is a good idea. It feels like a good idea. Lots of people (probably most people, if not all) will tell me that it’s a really bad idea. After all, do musicians let you hear their work in progress? No, surely not, cry the detractors. They present the finished article when it’s ready to hear. But that’s not the way that all musicians work. Early drafts, demo tapes, remixes, alternate versions, live versions. Fan remixes, even (cf Radiohead’s recent Nude remix compo).

My idea in its purest original form was to put anything and everything here on the blog. Old stuff, new stuff, crap I’ve removed from story drafts, abandoned ideas. Then my internal auditors, my Jiminy Crickets, got wind of the idea via some neurological country road and sent in the mental heavy mob. You’ll hide the truly awful stuff, they insisted. Polish what you put out there. Edit it before anyone sees it. Delete blog posts you have second thoughts about, even. At first I agreed with them. Now I think I’d feel a bit like Winston Smith at his day job, erasing undesirables from newspaper photos. This kind of thing you either do or you don’t do. “There is no ‘try’” as the little green Jedi Master said.

Some crazy Buddhist teacher said

First thought, best thought**

So I’m going with that.

*I’m a little concerned about copyright stuff, but hey.

**It was Chögyam Trungpa, fact fans. Try saying that ten times quickly after a pint of whisky.

Universal Healing (prelim work)

Here’s a set of notes I’ve written up in a semi-formal manner relating to a story idea I’m chucking around. This stuff is just contextual background with a few seeds of this and that planted deep within. Not sure where I’m going with the whole Catholic bit or indeed with the Japanese. We’ll see.

It is 1937 and the British Empire is on the brink of war with the United States.

Queen Victoria has ruled over the British Empire for a hundred years and is now 118 years old. Like a latter-day Elizabeth she has declined to marry, still mourning the death of her consort Prince Albert some 76 years ago.
As world looks enviously upon the burgeoning Empire, the British continue to occupy ever-greater tracts of territory. The furthest outposts of the British Raj have crossed the Hindu Kush and extended well into Soviet territory, British South Africa now makes up more than 40% of the landmass of the African continent and the Confederation of Canada has become a puppet state with British forces patrolling the streets of Quebec and Toronto.
The United States is the only country in a state of open aggression with Britain, yet they lack the political will to take on this behemoth. Border skirmishes in the northern states continue. Ownership of the Great Lakes region swings to and fro during a war of attrition where the Americans are unwilling to give up their territory and the British seem content to allow the Americans to hurl themselves upon their defensive positions. The US continues to claim that its Alaskan territories were illegally occupied by British forces during the famed 1-day war of 1880 where the small American garrison at Sitka was surrounded by British forces and forced to surrender.
The Catholic Church has promised support to the US, but this has yet to materialise. Catholic countries across Europe are torn, their hearts following the dictats of the Vatican but their heads in a state of appeasement, reluctant to attract the attentions of Great Britain.
The depredations of the Great War left Europe in a parlous state, short of manpower and hungry for change. In spite of economic pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, Stalinist Russia has closed itself off from the outside world. With Britain’s attention mostly overseas, the National Socialist government of Germany has set itself up as the ‘new man’ of Europe, pushing forward an agenda of renewal and regeneration. One by one the protestant countries of Northern Europe have fallen in line behind Germany, succumbing to the attraction of new industrial technologies, improved agricultural systems and bold architecture.
Britain seems content to allow Germany to lead the way in Europe while it attends to its concerns elsewhere. At Berlin’s behest a treaty between the two states is being readied, promoted on the world stage as a partnership of trust and investment between two powerful forward-thinking states. For some this is a step too far; the United States sees the Treaty of Bastenach as the first step on the road to World Government and bitterly opposes it. The Soviet Union feigns indifference. The Catholic world watches closely, yet makes no overt statement.
Imperial Japan and China have sent envoys to ‘observe’ the treaty process. China’s representative has been welcomed and invited to reside at Sandringham for the duration. However, members of the Japanese envoy’s team are arrested by British Secret Service agents and accused of spying after only two days in the country. The special envoy, Tetsuya Akashi, is forcibly ejected from Britain and put on a plane back home. The rest of his team are held in Pentonville Prison, awaiting trial. Japan recalls its British ambassador and the relationship between the two countries, never warm at the best of times, falls to a new low.
The US accuses Britain of kow-towing to a puppet government. The real power in Britain, say the Americans, are the armed forces. Somehow they have engineered a silent revolution, taking more and more power for themselves until all that’s left is a façade of democracy. This accusation has an uncomfortable ring of truth to it. Since MacDonald was forced from power in 1935 no Prime Minister has taken his place. A National Coalition runs the country and there is no mention of elections.
But why should the British worry? Life is good, there’s food enough for all, the population grows and industry is strong. Our sun never sets. What does it matter who runs the country so long as they run it well? Anyway, there’s an Empire to look after, say the people of Britain, raising their chins and looking to the distance. The resentful bleating of the recession-hit Colonies are no concern of ours.

Woo. Terribly serious stuff. There’s another chunk of context stuff that gives a lot more away. I might post that later. Oh, and ‘Universal Healing’? Just a working title. Think nothing of it.

Fair, dammit

Oh, here’s another one. What is a ‘Summer Fayre’? In what way does it differ from a ‘Summer Fair’? Are we fearful that lexical confusion will strike potential revellers, leading them to the erroneous conclusion that they are being poetically invited to enjoy a fair summer? I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic when I say that most people can tell the difference between a noun and an adjective when given appropriate context.

Hum. It’s just a ridiculous archaicism. Fairs used to be Fayres. Fair Ladies used to be Ladies Fayre. We spell it differently now. Get over it.

Don’t even get me started on anything that begins ‘Ye Old’. I leave it to the reader to get to the bottom of that atrocious misuse of a long-defunct letter of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet.
All I will say is this: ‘Ye’ (if you must write it thus) is pronounced ‘The’. You will find out why here.

Passing on the Stairs, and Quantum Clouds of Bad Luck

I’m told it’s bad luck to pass someone on the stairs. Here at the Office, groups of otherwise intelligent people will cluster at the bottom of a reasonably wide staircase looking patiently upwards as a single person of average build slowly descends. Likewise, the same kind of people – they’re all fairly intelligent here; we don’t employ slack-jawed fools – will gather at the very top of the aforementioned staircase as someone (maybe the same person that was previously descending, maybe a different person altogether) slowly ascends. Often with a hot beverage.

Risk of an incident of scalding apart, why wait? Why not just continue the flow, up and down, ascend and descend. We have no irrational fear of passing one another in relatively narrow corridors, or through doorways, or whilst driving on narrow, twisty roads with irregularly-spaced ‘passing places’. What sets stairs apart? What mysterious quantum process is triggered by passing another person on the stairs?

Moreover, does it apply in public situations such as the 3-abreast stairs that descend to the level of the Metropolitan and Circle Line at Kings Cross Tube Station? Hundreds, nay thousands of people pass one another on those stairs every day. Does each one of them suffer bad luck? Perhaps the bad luck quanta ejected by the constant stair-passing are too confused by the maelstrom of commuters to finally settle on any one individual. Maybe the cloud of bad luck particles drifts aimlessly along the tunnels of the London Tube system, blowing a fuse here, tripping a set of points there, causing untold misery to tourist and tout alike.