FantasyCon 2009

A report by Pastrysatan

A weekend or so ago (September 18-20), Nottingham hosted FantasyCon 2009, the British Fantasy Society's Annual shindig, in the cavernous Britannia Hotel. It is a celebration of fantasy and SF publishing; books, magazines, comics and art (and freaky jewelry). It is a three day conference, covering a whole weekend. Sadly, I was only a day-tripper looking for a nice day out. Something for a balding, forty-something geek to enjoy. It also gave me the opportunity to check out what's hip, happening and trendy in the British fantasy scene.

In some ways, my little Avatars,  FantasyCon is a serious little conference. If you are used to comic-book conferences you will immediately notice an absence of fancy dress or leggy models in Sailor Moon costumes handing out leaflets. This seriousness carries over to the main business at hand; the drinking. Most of the proceedings take place in or near the bar. Consequently, almost everyone you meet from the second day on will be drunk or hungover.

Despite this bacchanalian caveat, FantasyCon is a grand day out, if I may be allowed to say so. Of course it is the people who attend that make an event like this. In the main, the attendance is made up of authors, fans and small press publishers. They are a friendly bunch and have even provided a meeting point for "newbies" to congregate and be introduced to the many goings on. A splendid idea, one that many larger conferences could benefit from.

With my splendid Leicester posse we decided to split up and sample the various activities. It was 11 am. There was a round table on vampires, a talk on writing weekends and a book launch by two small presses held in the bar. I will return to the launches later. The talk on writing weekends was canceled and so, a faute de mieux, let us wander to the vampire forests.

Given the popularity of American vamps, one would expect us plucky Brits to put on a good show as well. Sure, the yanks have True Blood, Moonlight, Buffy and Stephenie Meyers, but we've got Bram Stoker, the original dude with the 'tude. Surely we can kick bitey ass too? Sadly, it seemed not. The lament from the creatures of the night was despondent and plaintive. Night of the Lycans just wouldn't cut it in Leeds or Middlesborough. Blade would take one look at Southampton city centre on a Saturday night and decide to end it all. Twilight over here? When English 15 year old girls all look and sound like Vicky Pollard? You is havin a laff, you is! There were some age-old arguments:Paranormal Romance or Horror? Another argument pitted badly written, trash, mass-market vampires against the honesty,  literary quality and real emotional depth portrayed by the writers on the FantasyCon panel. Pity they write all this high-minded literature about characters that go "poof!" and magically turn into a bat when they get near a window.

An interesting shift in the market is a growing interest in historical vampire fiction. Though the biggest concern among those present was that the boom in vampires was coming to an end as readers tired of the formula.

The next panel I attended was an interview with the conference's special guest, Brian Clemens. Brian seems to have had a hand in  writing almost every single British Sci-Fi/Adventure series of the 1960s. His credits include The Invisible Man, Dangerman, The Champions, Adam Ant Lives and, of course his co-writing of The Avengers with Brian Rigby.

It was interesting to hear that the original partner for Steed (Patrick McNee), was supposed to be a male actor, Ian Hendry. When Hendry got a gig in Hollywood, Honor Blackman was hired. Her part was. therefore, written initially for a man --and they kept all the fight scenes in, despite the change of personel. It was the beginning of fighting, leather trouser-wearing, action-women. Honor was eventually headhunted for the James Bond films. After an interregnum where Elizabeth Shepherd wore the leather pants, Diana Rigg made the Emma Peel role her own.

At this point it was time for lunch. Leicester colleagues and I adjourned to a nice restaurant and a walk around Nottingham. I took the opportunity to visit 'Page 45', absolutely the best independent comic-book shop outside London. After spending all my book money on comics, I slunk back into the conference.

On my return I crashed into my final improving lecture. Its theme was 'The Green Man' and bringing myths up to date. It was pleasant enough. All the speakers referred to their own books whenever they answered a question and there was some light and fluffy Q + A about how swell and lovely myths all were. Nice and green and ancestor-friendly they are. It is why you should all support the use of bile from caged bears in Chinese medicine: It is based on wonderful myths by wise ancestors, not the nasty chemicals of our silly modern medical science.

Thoughts of medicine drove me to the bar where I sat through a number of press launches (I told you I'd come back to them), all of which were delivered to an audience of beer-monsters. I could not think of a worse nightmare for any author than having their book launched in such an appalling locale. Here is a list of what the organizers did wrong. A list that is no way exhaustive.

1) They held the book launches in a bar! A bar that was serving all through the conference. Throughout the day, the majority of people going there were groups who just wanted to chat, drink and network: i.e. they did not want to listen to book launches or other announcements. Given the widespread indifference of the bar crowd, the response of the publishers was to shout at everyone.

2) Some launches were accompanied by free wine. The wine was placed on the same table where all the authors were sitting. People queuing for the free wine did so by lining up in front of where the authors sat, obscuring them from view. A publisher would then stand on a chair and shout over the heads of the queue. "This is a brilliant book by Fred Blogs!", they would bellow. Fred Blogs, obscured by a row of bodies, could reflect in splendid isolation on all the benefits that small presses bestow on their authors.

3) Forty or so books were launched. Not a single author got to read an extract of their own book at their own launch. Shocking.

4) When you could see the authors, you could not photograph them properly. The table they were sitting at was directly in front of a large window. A strong backlight meant that any photograph taken of the authors would have rendered them black, unrecognizable silhouettes.

At the bar, Leicester writer Jim Worrad and I, decided to give a reading of our work. We signed up and trekked up to the room. To an audience of six (all of them friends) we got to strut our stuff. We finished just in time to miss the Fantasy Banquet and trooped off for our tea. Sturdier hearts than mine later returned for the British Fantasy Awards Ceremony (Leicester writer, Graham Joyce, won the main prize for Best Novel). I, however, caught the train back to Leicester, arriving home in time for Match of the Day).

How does a mecenery manage to have a military title and a be a former preacher?

The following being transcribed from a video interview with Jake Cobb by Gordon Freeman, found at an undisclosed location.

JC: Name? ID?

GF: Gordon Freeman. Here’s my ID.

JC: Cool, come in, so before we start, you got folks?”

GF: No, but I don’t see how...

JC: *interrupting* Sorry it’s just, I got trust issues, you understand right?

GF: Yeah, sure, no problems.

JC: So, kid, where'd you want me to start?

GF: Start from the beginning, Mr Nu.. sorry Mr Cobb, in your words..

JC: Ok, kid, but one more slip and I’ll gut ya, and please, call me Jake.

GF: Sorry, Jake. Please continue.

JC: There ain't much to tell about my childhood. Grew up in a lovin' family home, parents wanted me to be a preacher, I wanted to travel and all seemed shiny. Then a few summers pass and, while I was off yonder with some friends, the gorram Reavers visited my home. My whole ruttin' family got killed an' worse. Some of them bodies couldn’t be found. I buried 'em all and said a few words, thought about stayin' but since I don't got nothin' there no more. Then a few friends, that I'd made on the trip, decide to join up to the Alliance Forces. They’d lost folks too and figured why not? They’d get to see the 'Verse and maybe, someday get their revenge, some notion of, I dunno, findin' out how or why the Reavers had come about. So I figure why not join em? After a while, I liked it. Not much later I earned the rank of Sergeant.

GF: I don’t understand, if it was so good, why’d you leave?

JC: Ah, good question.. see, the thing about bein' both a leader and a former preacher, your team and some of your equals, well they took to confidin' in me. Some of their thoughts were a might disturbin', some useful to know, one in particular would come in handy should things go sour. Yep, all was real good, and then the war came. A lot of foul stuff happened, ain't somethin' I want to see in print you understand, but I’ll tell you the main reason for my leavin'.

GF: You ok? You look a little pale...

JC: Nah, I’m fine, *sigh* yeah, where was I? Oh yeah, my real reason for leavin', the one the Alliance won’t tell anyone about. I wouldn’t know it, but the war was comin' to an end when it happened, must have been only a few months away, but durin' what would be my last tour, me and my squad where on a routine patrol and things went south. We was lookin' for resistence members in the area. I made the mistake of restin' up while my team went on ahead. About an hour later, I hear screamin' and gunfire from up the road where my team was, so I head off real quick-like, hopin' they were ok. And then I found them, the carnage was a mighty powerful kind of terrible. They'd come across a group of civilians who'd been hidin' a couple of resistence members. The whole squad had gone Shiang Jing Ping! The men tied to stakes, gunshots to the head, women defiled and battered to death, children slaughtered, and right there, plumb in the middle of it all, were my gorram team grinnin' like they'd just had a shindig. They’d tried to claim it was Reavers, but I knew better. Anyway when we got back to camp, I wrote all this down in an official report, and then things turned real ugly.

GF: Oh god *throws up* that’s horrible. Then what happened?

JC: Well, my C.O. called me in, I could tell he was fixin' for a real bout of shoutin' an' cussin'. Turns out one of my team was his Nephew. The kid had lied about his age to get in and I hadn’t said nothin' ‘cause he was a crack marksman. Still, hell of a way to find your nephew’s not only in the army, but accused of atrocities. He told me to "bury the report, or else!" So I said "or else what?" Man, the shouts where so loud, all I heard was the words ‘firin' squad’ and ‘insubordination’. Either way, I figured fer bein' dishonourably discharged.

GF: So what did you do?

JC: Well, I didn’t want be takin' no dirt-nap, and I wanted to keep my title and my good self out of jail, but bein' the preachin' kind, I couldn’t lie and tellin' truth would darn sure get me killed. Then I remembered all of those confessions. One in particular that, like I told you, would be bang-up useful if things turned real sour, and sour it was. I called the man in question, he was a real high rankin' officer by now and he’d heard the rumours about what happened. He said if I buried the report to appease my C.O. and promised that I ain't gonna tell no one else about what he’d done, and never call him again, he’d get me out on an honourable discharge. I took it. I didn’t tell him what my plans was fer once I got out, heck, with my skills I’d already decided to join the resistance, if they’d trust me enough. ‘Course, the war had finished by then.. so here I am, a gun-fer-hire! A merc to whoever’ll pay me.

GF: I see.. well, that’s all.. I should be able to publish this as it is. I’ll be off. Here's your payment. It's all here, but you can count it if you like. I can see myself out.

JC: Ku, kid, ku. *looking out the window at the pristine-new car parked outside* Mind answerin' a few questions for me?

GF: *looks puzzled* Sure, go ahead.

JC: That your car out front?

GF: Yeah, why?

JC: Shiny. By the way, how’s Zed?

GF: Who’s Zed?

JC: *pulls out a silenced gun and shoots Gordon in the head* Supposed to be your boss, chwen joo! *Jake Cobb then leaves*

In response to 'Finding Nimoy', Alan Ball argues the case for the science-fiction reboot, and why we need it

My friend, and editor of Avatar Mark Cotterill suggested in his recent article 'Finding Nimoy' that science-fiction entertainment has a grim future ahead; banal, clichéd products designed by committee and part of a wider cynical process of brand synergy. In some respects he’s entirely correct as film making, TV producing and any other media platform is for profit, and executives answer to shareholders as much as they do to the audience the products are designed for. But, that is how the business has always operated: what has changed?

I think it’s naïve to suggest that a product born of influences from prior art has any less a credible existence than an ‘original’ piece. In fact, I believe the opposite - many pleasures are derived from using our own knowledge to expand on a text, making our reaction to even more enjoyable. A good show is still a good show.

A particular gripe was the reboot of Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009) and similar products of the late 60’s and 70’s such as Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica. His argument is that there’s lack of ideas in the media business in general and something is ‘lost’ in translation when the executives flitter through old reels and find something to re-invent. In some ways he has a point. Values change as our society moves on, ideas and philosophies are altered beyond recognition – this used to take hundreds of years – but in our fast paced lives of technology enhanced consumption, values that were set in stone 40 years ago are overturned completely. For this reason, Mark is correct: they’re cheap imitations lacking the values of the originals. 

But should we write them off as something lesser? Absolutely not. 

Star Trek was an incredibly risky proposition. Hollywood films always have an element of risk – controlled somewhat by in-depth audience research – but Star Trek was a real gamble. Paramount cancelled its shows - the previous TV reboot Star Trek: Enterprise had a terrible reception and the last movie Nemesis did poorly (grossing only $67m on a budget of $60m – they’d lose another $20m on world-wide marketing). According to Mark’s observations, films and TV shows with a tried and tested formulae are the way to success – yet these products are both ‘by the numbers.’ Enterprise follows a similar format to The Next Generation and Nemesis builds on the previous Star Trek movie outings, employing the same cast and narrative elements that were successful before. Yet they fail. In fact all Star Trek franchises since (the excellent) First Contact have declined in audiences and revenues. So why gamble on a dying brand? The key part of this is audiences. 

The formulae of many new shows are cut directly from their ancestors of 60’s television. A whole generation of viewers have seen that show – throughout the last 50 years. The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Blake's 7 and Dr. Who are surprisingly similar products. As Mark put it – if something is successful, why deviate from common and familiar elements? 

It’s the audience, and more importantly their values. The 60’s and 70’s were times of great change (civil rights, feminism), of great peril (Cold war, nuclear proliferation), the dream of better things (man on the moon and the space race). When these things were achieved or ended satisfactorily, these values became stale, even patronising. 

The 80’s & 90’s were different: my generation has no great cause, no enemy and with technology as great as it is, the future is now – cynicism is the death of wonder. It’s reflected in our TV too – X-Files, Stargate SG1, The Next Generation - it's ok, we’re all safe, someone is on it. The values have changed and as a result we needn’t borrow as much from the past (there are still elements, intertextuality, as all good stories need inspiration). 

Come the 00’s. In Arthur C Clarke’s greatest fantasies he wouldn’t have seen 2001’s events coming. Once again we have entered an era of great change, of great peril – and a new hope for the future. Like Gene Roddenberry’s show was a mirror to his time, then so is the reboot – and so are many other speculative shows.

These shows and films may pay homage to their predecessors in name, but they forge ahead with our new values, our new mission. BSG shows us the folly of our machinations, the downfall of our society by corruption and careless politics – and the hope at starting again through all trials. Firefly is a pastiche of Blake's 7 and borrows every element of it’s story from something else, yet is a thrilling tale of the strength of family against societies’ hardships. Other shows such as Fringe and Dollhouse have succeeded not because of their nod to the past but because they have incredible stories that pull the right emotional strings. 

Star Trek [2009] might borrow from a good idea, but the one that has been forged in its place is as relevant as its 60’s counterpart – the hope for the future after a time of great distress; the young taking hold and changing things for the better. 

The audience wins: the recognition of a good story, regardless of its background, a win for unconventional thinking. This week is the anniversary of the birth of another storyteller and perhaps one of the most ‘copied’ authors – HG Wells – a pacifist and socialist intellect, imitated by science fiction writers the world over. Is it coincidence that the Trek of the 1960’s would include the same ideas when they once again became relevant?  

Come 2009 where the audience is much more aware of previous texts, it is much harder to hide where the ideas are from – so it was brave indeed to not hide anything at all – an honest copy of a good idea. Long may that continue.

Mark E. Cotterill explores the strange new world of the Remake, the Sequel, the Prequel and the Star Trek Reboot

When the latest Star Trek remake came out in May this year I made the fairly radical decision that I would not go and see it. Even though I'm a huge fan of all things Trek (well, all things except Voyager and Enterprise) as soon as I heard they weren't just making the next film in the Star Trek franchise but actually remaking the original iconic sixties Star Trek series, I knew I wasn't going to like it - I didn't want to like it, but I didn't know why.

If you look at a list of the top grossing films of the last couple of years you will find a remake of Batman, a remake of Transformers, a remake of James Bond, an Indiana Jones movie, a trilogy of Spiderman remakes, a Watchmen movie and an X-Men prequel, amongst a multitude of other remakes, sequels, trilogies and series.

In fact the ideas these films are based on are very old indeed; X-Men as a comic goes back to the 1960s, Transformers was a 1980s toy advert thinly veiled as a cartoon, James Bond was a series of books which were turned into films in the sixties, Indiana Jones was a trilogy of action movies from the eighties which was itself based on old thirties and forties serials and Batman has been around since 1939.

Since Hollywood is in the business of making money, by creating 'entertainment' which might cost in excess of $100 to $200 million to produce, doesn't it make sense to base this entertainment on something with proven success? Doesn't it also make sense to make large scale, one-size-fits-all mass produced/mass consumed units rather than take a chance on dozens of smaller movies from unknown writers and directors which only a small minority of the audience might like? If this is true then I'm afraid we're going to be seeing even more movies based on an ever diminishing list of well known franchises.

Success breeds success. Everyone knows the most basic rules of producing a hit movie; if one kind of film does well, it gets copied and if a movie makes a lot of money it gets a sequel. It's an idea which goes back to those early b-movies and horror films which may have ended with the death of the monster, but when the film became successful it's revealed that the monster survived after all. The studios knew that they were guaranteed to make as much money as they had first time around so long as everyone came back to see the follow-up, but most often these sequels weren't as good as the original. One exception to the rule, and possibly the one which finally broke the trend, is the 1991 film Terminator 2, probably the most successful sequel ever made.

On the face of it The Terminator (1984) is a basic monster chase b-movie flick, but with an interesting twist; For the first half-hour or so of the picture the action plays out as a standard female-in-peril thriller. Only about 30 minutes in do we realise the Arnold Schwarzenegger character is actually a robot of some kind. The idea is so basic that, like the Terminator itself, it could run and run and by the time the sequel rolled around seven years later with the advanced special effects of the day and an extra Terminator added to the mix in the formula still worked.

Director James Cameron managed to both extend the story set up in the first film and convincingly develop the main character of Sarah Connor who went from being a frightened moped-riding waitress to an AK-47 toting survivalist who spends much of her life in mental institutions thanks to her foreseeing the approach of the global nuclear Armageddon. What's also interesting about Terminator 2 is that Cameron deliberately ends the movie with all the 'temporal' loose ends tied up. The chip which led to the creation of Skynet is destroyed and so is the Terminator from which it came, meaning the particular future that led to the creation of the Terminator can't happen either. Cameron was saying as clearly as he could to the audience that there was to be no third instalment, but thanks to a little 21st century retconning we did, and a fourth and a TV series.

So, certainly if a successful film gets a sequel then a really successful sequel must become a trilogy, and if we're talking about trilogies then we're talking about Star Wars. It's the origin point of what we mean by the 'Trilogy' in science-fiction where the modern action movie is born. The way George Lucas strategically places an action sequence at 10 minute intervals throughout the movie, where before a film may have had a climactic 'ending' or chase sequence somewhere in the middle. It was the first film to become so popular that a major studio agreed to not just a sequel but a whole trilogy.

Even though the story of Luke, Darth Vader and the rise and fall of the Empire spans the three films of the original trilogy the first Star Wars movie, later subtitled A New Hope, holds true to a more traditional three-act structure; there's a threat to the Rebellion (the 'Problem'), the Evil Empire who is trying to stop them (the 'Conflict') and a final act in which the Rebellion successfully defeats the Empire once and for all (the 'Solution'). If you look carefully you will see that everything in the story points towards this resolution at the end. The Death Star represents the Empire and is everything, once it's destroyed it will mark the beginning of the end for the Empire. Had the other movies not been made Star Wars on its own would still have made sense. The whole story-line about Darth Vader's past, his relationship to Luke and Leia and his involvement with the Emperor is absent and all Darth Vader as a character really does is go around scaring people and killing Ben Kenobi, which George Lucas later admitted was put into the script simply because he didn't have any more lines for Alec Guinness. The whole history between Vader and Kenobi which would later form the basis for the prequel trilogy is just a back-story and no more. Just like those 50's horror movies though, at the end of Star Wars the monster isn't quite dead.

George Lucas got the inspiration for Star Wars from many different sources, mainly from the clunky Saturday matinee serials he saw in his youth. If you look at the "what happened in the last episode" title crawl of Buck Rogers you will immediately see the connection, but he was also inspired by Japanese cinema and more generally fairy-tales. I'm sure every Star Wars fan knows of the links with Kurasawa's Hidden Fortress in which the whole story is told through the eyes of two lowly servants, but Lucas also recognised that anyone who didn't speak Japanese could still tell what was happening because certain stories, ideas and character archetypes are universal. The Young Hero, the Wizard, the Princess and the Rogue aren't just ancient but they are global and you can find them again and again in the literature of Europe, Asia, India, China and the Far-East. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away" sounds a lot like "once upon a time" and perhaps it's also significant that, unlike the majority of science-fiction, Star Wars isn't about the future and nor is it about 'us'.

The problem with fairy-tales though is that they have endings. Once 'The End' has appeared on the screen, it's kind of hard to carry on with the story, but in Star Wars those words never appear. Each time a Star Wars movie ends it's the beginning of the next one. Even Return of the Jedi had a follow-up, though not in cinematic form but a whole series of books. The Jedi Academy series and Tales from the New Republic carry on the story, or continue the legend, but if you're really sure that this is 'The End' then what else is there left but to go back to the beginning? Time for a Prequel.

The Prequel can confer 'real' status on a character; real people have histories so why shouldn't fictional ones? Like when every teenager suddenly becomes interested in what their parents were like as teenagers. We love these 'hidden histories' and maybe it's the reason why programmes such as "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Time Team" have become so popular in recent years. Prequels are also an excellent way of using a well established franchise but with a whole new area of unexplored territory to exploit.

According to Wikipedia; a prequel is a work that portrays events and/or aspects of a previously completed narrative, but is set prior to the existing narrative.

A prequel must be part of the same series as the film it precedes, but if, like the new Star Trek or Batman Begins, it starts the story (and the series) anew, it is not a prequel - but rather a 'Reboot'. With a reboot much, or even all, previous continuity in the series can be discarded. A reboot doesn't have to be consistent with the existing canon (all the previously established continuity) of the series and so this can be conveniently discarded and replaced with new canon, just as it was with the the TV series Enterprise.

Television has actually been doing reboots for a while with shows such as Smallville, Battlestar Galactica and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In each case the producers decided to simply ignore everything that had happened, whether it was the comic book, the previous series or the movies and concentrate on the essence or the core elements of the concept, while still benefiting from the familiarity the audience had with the series. This is pretty much essential with TV because unlike films the drama is spread over a much longer period, particularly with American shows which typically run over 26 episodes per season for several years. One of the big problems with a prequel or a series based on something that's already well established is that you, as the audience, often know too much about what's going to happen and who it's going to happen to, which makes it sort of difficult for the writers to spring the kind of surprises which weekly episodic television demands.

Certainly there has never been a TV series or franchise larger than Star Trek, spanning four separate series and ten movies across five decades; hundreds of episodes and thousands of hours, but the problem also persists for other long running series such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. When writers create a story there's one thing it has to be above all else; entertaining. This means that something new and original has to happen in every story and the longer a series runs the more difficult it becomes to come up with new ideas. Soon, writers are forced into creating ever more outlandish scenarios to hook the viewer in and the more something 'cannot happen' the more its happening becomes inevitable. How many times in a TV series does the lead character appear to have died, or the ship is seen in the trailer being destroyed, only to reappear at the end?

To achieve this trick writers often employ the 'reset button technique'. It is often introduced as a plot-twist which effectively undoes all the events of the episode. This could be achieved by using dream sequences, time travel, hallucinations or dozens of other variations. Perhaps the most extreme example being Bobby Ewings return from the dead after an absence of a complete season in the eighties TV soap Dallas. His wife wakes up and sees him in the shower and realises that the whole previous season had been a dream, but when something similar happened in the Spiderman comics in 2007 furious fans started a wave of protest and letter writing directed at the comic's Editor Joe Quesada.

The 'One More Day' story-line was an attempt to restructure the three main Spiderman series and reconcile the events of the various alternate timelines, but the result was a major changing of canon as Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane was erased totally from the history of the character, and with it the last twenty years of the comic's story. Loyal readers of the comic lit up the forums and even appeared on Youtube tearing up editions of issue number 545 and 'thanking' Quesada for wasting the last twenty years of their lives. The 'fix' was actually a particular kind of reset-button technique known as retconning;

Retroactive Continuity (retconning) is the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction.

Retcons can allow the alteration of the back-story of a series by adding a new piece of information which sheds a whole new light on things. Star Trek has done its fair share of retconning over the years but probably the best examples are to be found in Star Wars. Most notably the changes made in the 1997 re-release of the films where some scenes were actually changed such as the controversial 'Han Solo shooting first', but even more changes were made when the films were released onto DVD for the first time in 2004. Following the release of Episodes I, II and III George Lucas altered the voice of Boba Fett using the actor who had played his Father Jango in Episode II and he added actor Hayden Christensen to the final scene of Return of the Jedi, replacing Sebastian Shaw who had played the older version of Anakin Skywalker, but the most bizarre retcon perhaps of all time occurs in Episode II.

In the original movie, A New Hope, a group of stormtroopers enter the control room where C3-PO and R2-D2 are hiding and one of the extras at the back of the group bangs his head on the door. Amazingly the 'mistake' was never noticed at the time and made it into the final cut of the film. It became a famous 'movie gaff' until 2002 when Lucas placed a small in-joke into the scene where Jango Fett boards his ship on Kamino. It's hard to make out, but he also bangs his head on the raised door as he enters the ship, the implication being that since Jango is the clone father of the Stormtroopers they have all inherited this inability to see where they are walking. Suddenly a continuity error becomes a whole back-story of its own!

If you want to see some of the worst retconning of all time though I don't think you could do any better than look at the new Doctor Who. Leaving aside the ingenious technique of having one actor replace another by means of a regeneration or twelve, the almost constant permanent extinction and reappearance of the Daleks and their leader Davros is perhaps the best example of using a retcon to simply repeat a good storyline. It seems that where the Doctor is concerned, whenever we're told that something is 'impossible' we can be sure that at some point it will occur; the more impossible it is, the more likely it's eventually going to happen. The ongoing cycle of making the rules and then breaking them might be fun for a while but eventually the dramatic credibility of the series is tested to breaking point.

So apart from making vast sums of money, what's really behind all this looking back and raiding the science-fiction of the past? I believe it really got started around the time we entered the third millennium, coincidentally when the Star Wars Prequels began. Once the magic date of 2000 arrived we stopped imagining the future and started living in it, but with all our attention focused on something called 'the Millennium-Bug', which threatened to bring modern western society to its knees, everyone was too busy to notice. The reality which science-fiction had been exploring for a century or so failed to materialise and in the year 2000AD the British comic which bore that date as its title suddenly became 'past tense'.

At a New Years party at the end of 2000 I remember playing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the TV in the background, but all it seemed to do was generate a feeling of disappointment and disillusionment in the room, or it may have been the punch. In the real 2001 we weren't taking shuttle-bus trips to low-Earth orbit, we weren't eating chicken sandwiches on the Moon and we weren't even watching BBC 12. Of course the year 2001 would become famous, or infamous, for a very different reason on the 11th of September and anyone who had any doubts about what kind of a future the 21st century was going to be, had them dispelled; We were entering a time of war, of fear and of great uncertainty. It's in stark contrast to the sixties when the original Star Trek series hit our screens.

During the 'space-age' of that decade, science was seen as reassuring, as being 'truth' and a provable fact about the universe we inhabit. Scientists were heroes who were delivering tangible results in areas such as medicine, transportation and communication. The early days of computing promised to transform our future world into something like what we saw on the bridge of the Enterprise. Interest in science and science-fiction grew, spurred on by the writers of the Golden Age who had enjoyed great popularity in the forties and fifties. Stories were based on the latest scientific advances in areas such as genetics, robotics and computing and many of the great writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke where themselves scientists. Their stories were rooted in science, but asked the 'what-ifs' and looked at the doomsday scenarios. Several of these great writers, such as Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison went on to write for Star Trek and followed in this tradition with episodes like "What Are Little Girls Made Of" which explored the possibility of transferring a human consciousness into a machine and "Space Seed" which speculated on the existence of a mass eugenics programme by the 1990s resulting in the creation of a race of super-men.

There was also an optimism about the future, that science would save us. The actor who received the most fan mail on the show wasn't the show's star William Shatner but Leonard Nimoy who portrayed the cold and scientifically logical Mr. Spock. Politically too the sixties was a time of hope, as well as upheaval and revolution, in the form of the civil rights movement in America and the feminist movement.

Many people now feels that science has failed to deliver and they just don't trust it any more. "Bad-Science" inspired movements like the moon-landing doubters, anti-environmentalists and creationists have gained more support than they ever had before and the take-up of science based courses at universities and colleges is now at an all time low. We are living in the 'information age' and yet our technology constantly lets us down. Our computer systems crash, our video conferencing calls break up and drop out and our space shuttles unexpectedly explode. We have even reached the point where someone will admit their ignorance about science and be proud of it, then they'll brand those who do show an interest in it as nerds and geeks.

Now it seems we really are 'driving forwards while looking in the rear view mirror'. What we are doing is trying to recapture that view of our own future through the eyes of the science-fiction of the past. Certainly if you read science-fiction rather than watch it at the cinema or on television there's much more originality and new ideas, which would seem to confirm the idea that Hollywood is financially motivated rather than making these kinds of films because of a lack of material. There's also the possibility that, as the great philosopher Paul Weller once wrote, "the public wants what the public gets" and Hollywood isn't really following a cultural trend at all but creating one. It certainly seems that over the last decade this kind of nostalgia boom hasn't just been confined to films.

Listen to the popular music of the last ten years and you'll hear something which wouldn't sound out of place in the fifties or sixties, in some cases it is even recorded using original equipment from that time. Perhaps the worst thing you can say about the music of today is that it doesn't even offend your parents who after-all were probably into punk, heavy metal and hard rock in their formative years. Likewise motor manufacturers have been resurrecting old brands such as the Volkswagen Beetle, the Mini and the Fiat 500, all cultural icons of their time. When we look back at this first decade of the new millennium will we really be able to see a definitive style any different from the nineties, or will it just look like an agglomeration of styles from the past?

I think each generation has to rebel against its parents, not simply by overturning and throwing out the old ideas just for the sake of it, but by having an unwillingness to accept everything on face value, to re-examine and doubt everything that's accepted as 'just the way it is', otherwise the culture risks stagnation and nothing will change. Judging by today's popular culture then it's clear that this generation has completely failed to do this. Rather than rebelling against our parents we've become them! Think about it for a moment; when they were young did your parents drive a Beetle or a Mini or a Fiat 500? Did they watch Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica or Doctor Who? Did they read Watchman, X-Men and Spiderman comics?

I think it's for this reason that the success of the new Star Trek troubles me so much. Already there are rumours of a sequel, and no doubt a trilogy, even a series and so another 'old TV show' makes millions of dollars for a Hollywood studio and the vicious circle goes on, but that's not the worst of it. I think about what happens to the original whenever a 'cheap copy' is made. Something is lost. Those old episodes of Star Trek were not as slick or impressive as the new movie, but they were somehow more genuine. Placed next to the new incarnation in direct comparison they can't possibly look as good and the same goes for all of the other titles I've talked about in this article.

So we are robbing the past, using it up. Soon, there might be nothing left to remember, and then where will Hollywood go for its ideas?

One of the best computer game reviews I ever read was written by two poets who had been given the task by some enterprising Sunday Magazine editor who had no doubt grown tired of the kind of cynical and world-weary copy his twenty-somthing gamer staff had been submitting to him.

The poets were not gamers and had been presented with the game "Thief 2: The Metal Age". They explained that, like poetry, their enjoyment of the game was entirely dependant on the degree to which they put themselves into its world. For the poets this wasn't so much a game as an environment which you entered and this idea of 'entering the world' of something, whether it be a game, a book or a movie has stuck with me because it made me realise that these activities aren't just passive - Playing a game is a two-way process. It also explained why I had never really liked poetry.

Of all the games I have played over my many years as a gamer it has always been the ones which allow the most freedom that I have enjoyed the longest and the most intensely. In July of this year I clocked up 12 months of playing Grand Theft Auto IV. 

At the time of it's release I was at college and didn't dare buy it because I knew how all-consuming previous GTA games had been, and also how each new edition becomes more addictive than the last.

Like Thief, GTA presents the player with a 'world' where they're free to do lots of things, most of them illegal, but  this freedom gives the player room to be creative, to come up with ways of completing a mission (or just mucking about) that the designers hadn't necessarily thought of.

So this, in a homage to the Beastie Boys single of (almost) the same name, is my Open Letter to Liberty City.

1. The Arrival

When I first arrived in Liberty City, it was dark. At the start of the game you, as Niko Bellic, meet your Cousin Roman, drive him back to his cockroach infested apartment and get your head down. It isn't until the next morning that you're really at liberty (geddit?) to wander where you please. When this does happen the impact the world you find outside your Cousins battered front door is so detailed, so immersive and so realistic compared to previous versions of GTA that you almost forget to immediately steal a car.

There's litter on the streets, spilling out of garbage cans and blowing along the sidewalk. Everything looks dirty and grimy. Someone speaking Russian wanders by chatting into their mobile phone. Light streams in through the slats in the elevated train-tracks above your head. Everything is so ordinary that to find it in a computer game is extraordinary.

2. The Environment

Unlike virtually every other video game, the world seems to exist for it's own sake and not just for your benefit. Stand on the street corner and you can watch cars and trucks roll by, people shouting abuse at each other, even other crooks getting chased down and arrested by cops (it's nice when it's happening to somebody else for a change).

So often in most other video games the environment, the level, feels like a theme-park ride. You walk down a corridor, someone pops out from a door, you shoot them, then walk down another corridor - there's only one way to go and enemies dutifully wait for you to shoot them.

That does happen to some extent in GTA IV but most of the missions are not tied to a particular location and those that are still sometimes have multiple ways in or out. I remember toughing it through one mission where you had to gain access to a lawyers office, get past security by pretending to be applying for a job, shoot your interviewer (how many times have you wanted to do that!) and escape back through the building. On the second attempt I missed the target and accidentally blasted out the glass in the window behind the desk - I had found an alternative escape route!

I've also completely avoided rooms full of guards by landing a helicopter (stolen of course) on the roof of a hotel, climbing down to the end-of-level-boss, shooting him and then climbing back into the helicopter. Whether it was intended by the designers or not is irrelevant. It makes sense in the game and means that every mission potentially can be played differently each time. You often get to choose which vehicle and which weapons to use on a mission and a rocket launcher can make a huge difference to the outcome of a street race.

The City itself is such an amazing feat of programming that quite often it's entertaining enough just to stand and watch the rain, or the shadows moving across the ground, or the reflections in the water (or maybe I'm just weird). People dash about with umbrellas or newspapers over their head when it rains. They sit on park benches reading books, they stand and have conversations with each other.

3. The Music

Whenever you get into a car you will hear whichever radio station the previous occupant was listening to. Rip off a Rasta's wheels and you'll screech away to the strains of Bob Marley. Jack a Liberty City Yellow Cab and you probably here the right wing nut Richard Bastian on his talk show 'Intelligent Agenda'. This being a city with a large Eastern European population you're also likely to hear a lot of music from the Russian station, Vladivostok FM. The music adds to the environment. And name me another game that has a soundtrack which features music so diverse as Philip Glass and the Stooges.

4. The Cops

Don't pay too much attention to the radio though, or you'll probably wind up hitting a cop car and setting into motion a sequence of events which always, always ends up with the same outcome. Once the red and blue lights flash cops will appear from every direction and shoot at you or any vehicle you're in. They are much improved over previous versions of GTA, but they're still as dumb as a box of rocks.

They aren't totally stupid; They will take cover to avoid being shot and if you're in cover, they will try to out-flank you or get in behind you. If you try to get away from them by car they will ram you off the road and surround you so you can't move, but they will also jump off bridges into the river, run each other over and use a shotgun while standing in a gas station. What the Liberty City Police Department lacks in intelligence though it makes up for in numbers.

5. The Cars

Given that the game is called Grand Theft Auto you might expect that cars would feature fairly highly on the the list of cool stuff, but they don't. The cars in GTA IV are actually pretty boring, probably the most boring thing in the game. This might be because, well with cars it's all been done before hasn't it? The cars aren't supposed to be exciting, they're meant to look like the ordinary cars you see on every american street on every cop show, and they do.

The driving physics are also the worst I've ever experienced in any video game. On-line races are particularly hard to complete as the only way to get any car around a corner is to use the hand-brake and hitting even the slightest dip in the road will send you into the air.

6. The People

It's the people that really make a city, and Liberty City is the worst city in America, according to it's tourist information. Everyone talks a lot, whether they're complaining that you've just run them over, chatting on their phones or running down the highway screaming simply because you pulled you're Kalashnikov on them. 

7. Online Gaming

This is probably the best thing about GTA IV. Not being an experienced on-line gamer I'm not absolutely sure how much better the gaming experience is compared to other games, but in what other game can you reverse an ice cream van over your opponent while playing Ride of the Valkyries backwards and lobbing Molotov cocktails at an Ambulance?

What's amazing is the level of interaction that can be achieved between the players given the amount of freedom they have to do what they want. I was once in a Cops Vs Crooks game at the docks, crouching by a wall when the shadow of a player on the roof of the building I was leaning against ran along the wall in front of me. I stopped for a moment to contemplate the fact that the other player might have been on the other side of the world and the light from the sun to cast the shadow was being ray-traced in real time by the middleware running on it's own dedicated processor, and then I got shot.

Online gaming is always chaos. Most of the time this is a problem which needs to be fixed. Race Driver: Grid, for example has a big problem with other racers just ramming you off the track when you might be trying to race 'normally'. GTA IV doesn't solve this problem because it doesn't need to, the chaos makes it more fun. GTA races routinely involve starting with a very fast sports car, picking up a machine gun, shooting all the cars at the front of the race then getting blown up. If you're not winning you can simply opt to find a bus and park it across the road, or wait near an obstacle for a competitor to crash and pull them out of their car and drive off with it. Other players of course will try to shoot you dead, but the anarchy of the game sort of makes sense.

8. Comparisons & The Future

GTA IV is, for me anyway, the ultimate game. It doesn't matter what else I play, I keep coming back to it. No other game I've played has the same depth, involvement or sheer entertainment value. One year on, I can simply boot up my PS3, load GTA IV and spend an evening 'playing', without getting bored. Of course, I would like someone to come along and do better. The promise that the next generation of consoles offers is quite mind-blowing really, especially to me, who remembers when computer games had 1 colour and involved nothing more complex than shooting a little green blob.

I think games like GTA, and Thief, is where the future lies because they aren't just 'interactive movies' or 'theme-park-rides' like most other games are. The art of making video games is still in it's infancy, like the movie industry was about 100 years ago. In terms of technology, it's like when the movies just got sound. We have the ability to create environments and narrative structures which interact with the players, even multiple players, in ways which a book or movie cannot.


Mark E. Cotterill