More Than Human - book review

 

Theodore Sturgeon’s classic science fiction novel More Than Human was published in 1953 and won the International Fantasy and Science Fiction Award (1954). It comprises three connected stories – ‘The Fabulous Idiot’, ‘Baby is Three’ and ‘Morality’; the middle story was previously published as a standalone in Galaxy magazine in 1952; the book-end tales were written for the so-called fix-up novel.

The book concerns five beings – two little black girls with a speech impediment yet with the ability to teleport, an introspective girl whose mother was of easy virtue, one seemingly mentally impaired baby who can absorb and transmit thoughts, and a so-called idiot who is anything but and adopts the name Lone.

With intense psychological understanding, Sturgeon weaves the lives of these apparent ‘freaks’ and shows how over time they evolve into a single entity, a gestalt. The new human, perhaps? And he poses the question: would they be feared or embraced. We know the answer, of course. So this gestalt is secret, hidden from ordinary humans.

I don’t know but I can imagine Stephen King, among others, read this book and was influenced by its concepts and characters. There are definite similarities: the telepathic child, the dysfunctional characters, the underlying mystery and threat. And there are inchoate elements of the X-Men here too.

Sturgeon’s writing is colourful, imaginative and mindful of the human condition, and at times can pack a powerful punch.

More Than Human is still thought-provoking, even after all these years.

Glen Orbik - R.I.P.

Readers of Hard Case Crime will be familiar with the artist Glen Orbik. His output was outstanding, much of it harking back to the old pulp and noir covers of yesteryear. He died on 11 May, aged 52, too young to go. 

You can appreciate his work at his website here

http://www.orbikart.com/gallery/

My thanks to Paul Bishop for drawing my attention to this ‘In Memoriam’ article which features twenty covers by Orbik plus links to his artwork:

http://www.heavymetal.com/news/in-memoriam-20-paintings-by-glen-orbik-modern-master-of-pulp-cover-art/

Here are some of his book covers I’ve scanned from my library:

 

FFB - Spiderweb

Robert Bloch' Spiderweb was published in 1954; this book was one of a double offer from Hard Case Crime (2008), hence the bar-code on this image and the strapline ‘Two complete novels!’ The other Bloch novel was Shooting Star. Hard Case Crime brings to a modern audience old out-of-print classic crime novels plus new writing, with covers harking back to the golden age of pulp paperbacks.

Bloch’s novel is an enjoyable crime noir about Hollywood’s dark side. Eddie Haines is a washed-up radio jockey who can’t get airtime in LA. Then he’s befriended by Professor Otto Hermann who promises to make Eddie rich. All Eddie has to do is pretend to be a gifted self-help guru to the stars. It seems that Hermann has access to many secrets of the film stars and by using Eddie in his new guise of Judson Roberts, they can fleece unsuspecting pigeons. When Eddie meets Ellen and falls in love with her, he can’t get out of his deal with Hermann – because he too was being cunningly blackmailed…

Bloch gives away some of the conman’s secrets, which should be enlightening and educational. His characters use the psychological studies of the day to good effect to work subtle and convincing scams.

There are some great one-liners in this book. As the Professor explains about one film star hooked on astrology: ‘But she won’t so much as sleep with an assistant producer without consulting the stars.’

Bloch’s horror writing style is in evidence as well: ‘Poinsettias pressed myriad bleeding mouths to a garden wall.’

And he always likes to play with words – as evinced by some of his book and short story titles. Here, he goes all alliterative: ‘I eyed elkskin and surveyed suede.’

Of course he’s a master of the hardboiled style too; this is a great description: ‘She gave a look that would have made her a fortune as a glass cutter…’

Stephen King writes of Bloch, ‘Perhaps the finest psychological horror writer.’ [He’s keeping his options open, I guess, using ‘perhaps’.]

King’s writing pal Peter Straub says, ‘Robert Bloch is one of the all-time masters.’

I wouldn’t disagree with either of these gentlemen. Bloch is worth reading.

FFB - Write Away

WRITE AWAY by Elizabeth George was first published in 2005, and is still a useful and interesting writing guide.

from Amazon.co.uk here

 

Born in 1949, Elizabeth George wrote since the age of seven yet tended to avoid writing seriously as an adult until much later, finally getting her third attempt at a novel published in 1988. From that point on, she has written a novel almost every year, to great acclaim. She has won several writing awards and taught writing techniques. Much of her writing experience and teaching has been distilled into this excellent book.

Writers must read. It’s surprising how many would-be writers hardly ever read books. They can read and speak English, so they can write, can’t they? Well, probably not... They should read books on the subjects that interest them, the types of books they want to write, as well as books on how to write. In my time I’ve received so many manuscripts that lack even the basic understanding of page layout, sentence construction, paragraph formatting and punctuation – and yet all these basics are plain to see in any printed novel if the fledgling writers bothered to look.

Like all art forms, writing has to be practised and learned. Good writing is a combination of the craft and the art. You can’t teach someone to use the right vocabulary, to paint word-pictures in the reader’s mind – that has to come from within. But you can teach the technique of writing – and this is what George does with the aid of many examples from her own and other writers, such as PD James, Stephen King, EM Forster, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Martin Cruz Smith and Dennis Lehane.

There isn’t a right way to write a novel. There are thousands of authors and probably all of them have different approaches. But what the majority do have is bum glue - discipline. If you don’t sit down and write, then you don’t get the work done.

That’s the other thing to recognise – it’s work – hard work. Just because the writers enjoy what they do, it doesn’t mean that it comes easy to them. They have to apply themselves. And this shines through with Elizabeth George. She’s meticulous in her pre-writing planning.

Yes, you need to know what you’re going to write before you start, who you’re going to write about, what it will concern and probably how it will end. That requires planning and research. Not every writer plans in detail or even at all, but George advocates that the whole process of writing is far easier if you have a plan and she starts off by getting the idea then expanding on it to see if it has legs, then concocting the primary event that will propel the story from its beginning – in essence, the plot.

Then you need to people the world your story depicts – list the characters both generically and also specifically. By doing this, you’ll reveal relationships and sub-plots you hadn’t thought of, which is often a great feeling. You must always bear in mind that character is story and dialogue is character, too.

 
Then comes the research. The great danger with research is that it becomes so interesting – and time-consuming – that you never get round to the writing phase!

Up to now she still hasn’t begun the book. It’s still going on in her head in the subconscious. Now she creates the characters in depth then the settings – which include landscape – the physical places and the inner landscape of the characters. This is followed by a detailed step outline which will probably contain phrases and dialogue to be used in the actual writing, but it’s all steam-of-consciousness writing at this stage. A plot outline – where the logic of the storyline is checked - is the last preparation. All this has involved the craft of writing.

 
Now comes the decision where to start the novel – at the beginning, before the beginning or after the beginning, where the beginning is the primary event, the main plot. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s time to start writing the book!

The first rough draft of the novel is, to her, the easy bit – because she’s done all the background and familiarisation. The story flows and she can concentrate on the art side of writing. Usually, she writes three drafts – the third being the finished novel, ready for the publisher.

 
Of considerable use are her examples and guides in the final section. Here she reveals the Seven-step Story Line, breaking down the structure of a novel into seven major elements. Then she discusses The Writer’s Journey by Chris Vogler (a book I’d recommend for all budding writers or scriptwriters). This model actually divides a story into twelve parts that follow a pattern long-established in Western mythology.
 
If you aspire to being a writer and you haven’t read any ‘How to’ books on the subject, this is a good place to start; if you have read similar books, this is still worthy of your attention. Aspiring or accomplished, as a writer you’ll take away something from this book.

So, if you fancy yourself as a writer, read. In particular, read this book and learn from it.

***

Of course, if you want another viewpoint, you could try my book Write a Western in 30 Days, which reviewers point out is useful to writers of all genres, not just westerns!

 

E-book available from Amazon.co.uk here

and from Amazon.com from here

Writing tips - Go on… and on…

There are six writing tips from John Steinbeck to be found in this blog; worth a look:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/12/john-steinbeck-six-tips-on-writing/

 

 

This particular article also has an interesting link to 9 Books on Reading and Writing by Maria Popova, which includes books by Stephen King, Hemingway and Ray Bradbury. I can recommend King’s On Writing. I haven’t read Bradbury’s or Hemingway’s, but I think I will, as both are among my (many) favourite authors.

 

Anyway, to get back to the title of this blog post.

Steinbeck advocated:

‘If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.’

I agree with this advice. There are points in a story where perhaps some research is lacking, or  the characters are taking an unexpected detour that leads to a dead end (that’s dead end in the journey sense, not the mortality of the character!) Some might call this writer’s block. It isn’t – it’s simply a lack of preparation. If you write a plot-plan for your novel (or even short story), you know where you’re going with the characters (most of whom you’ve got to know in the preparation stage). Yet these impasses will inevitably occur from time to time as your plot-plan won’t be overly detailed (as then it would be a literary strait-jacket) and the devil is in the details, as we all know. In trying to get the details right, you can come to a stop. My advice is, don’t. Don’t stop, that is. Move on with the rest of the story’s plot-plan. The reason for the unexpected faltering stop might go away or a solution might present itself in your subconscious as your characters battle with the other obstacles placed in their way. Or you can return to that point when you’ve completed the entire work – add the detail – or excise it if it isn’t really necessary, since, as Steinbeck states, ‘it didn’t belong there’.

So, the advice is, go on – and on – until you get to the end. That first draft is most important. Once you’ve got it under your belt, then you can build upon it, layer upon layer, infusing it with more character, sense of place, emotion, readability, narrative flow and clarity of thought.

'I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.' - Anthony Burgess. The emphasis is on 'go on'...

Guest blog - Mark Iles - A pride of Lions

Today, my blog guest is Mark Iles. He’s on a blog tour, so it’s probably a flying visit – maybe even in a spaceship (which my grandson would definitely like for his birthday in a few days’ time). I digress. I’ve known Mark for many years, having published two of his stories in my magazine Auguries – ‘Robins’ in #4 (1986) and ‘The Magician’s Assistant’ in #10 (1989), alongside such sci-fi luminaries as Charles Stross, Steve Lockley, Nick Daws, Michael Cobley, Steve Bowkett, D.F. Lewis, and Sydney J. Bounds to name a few. He also reviewed books for the magazine. That association continued and I illustrated move-by-Taekwondo move in his series of articles in Fighters magazine. So I’m particularly pleased that he has finally achieved his dream of getting his science fiction novel A Pride of Lions accepted and published. I hasten to add that I’d ceased being EIC of Solstice before Mark submitted his book and I didn’t see it until after it was accepted.

 

Mark is particularly pleased that A Pride of Lions was released on Friday 30^th August and over that weekend it hit two notable highs on Amazon Kindle:

 #1: books, Science Fiction, Colonists

#4: books, Science Fiction, military #4

An SF novel with a difference, A Pride of Lions looks at criminals in the future and how they might be dealt with. Thrown into the pot is a craving for revenge, a love interest, a psychopathic killer and the desperate battle for the very survival of humanity.

 

A Pride of Lions – Blurb

When Selena Dillon is caught in an assassination attempt on her planets ruler, she finds herself sentenced to 25 years servitude in mankind’s most feared military force, the Penal Regiments. Much to her surprise she enjoys the harsh military life and is quickly selected for officer training.

But something’s wrong, worlds are falling silent. There’s no cry for help and no warning, just a sudden eerie silence. When a flotilla of ships is despatched to investigate they exit hyperspace to find themselves facing a massive alien armada. Outnumbered and outgunned the flotilla fight a rearguard action, allowing one of their number to slip away and warn mankind.

As worlds fall in battle, and man’s fleets are decimated, Selena is selected to lead a team of the Penal Regiments most battle-hardened veterans, in a last ditch attempt to destroy the aliens’ home world. If she fails then mankind is doomed. But little does Selena know what fate has in store for her, that one of her crew is a psychopathic killer and a second the husband of one of his victims.

Can she hold her team together, get them to their target and succeed in the attack? Selena knows that if she fails then there will be nothing at all left to go home to.

A Pride of Lions - excerpt

In this scene Bryn Clayton, and his friend Singh Lacy, are involved in the counter-invasion to retake Bryn’s homeworld:

“All gone,” Singh said happily, eying his monitors. “They’re down; now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Even as Bryn hit the accelerator there was a deafening explosion and the little vessel slewed sideways. A shower of sparks exploded into Bryn’s face, momentarily blinding him, and he let go of the controls and grabbed at the sharp burns with a yell.

“Damn it,” Singh said, struggling with the dual controls as his friend cursed and rubbed frantically at his face, trying to clear his vision.

But it was too late. With a high-pitched two-tone warble the ship slewed towards the ground and ploughed into the side of a hill.

Flames erupted as the two men shook their heads in an effort to clear them and unstrapped themselves. Grabbing weapons and backpacks from the stowage under their seats, they leapt from the emergency exit and ran frantically over the grass to the safety of a rain-filled ditch a short distance away. Crouching in the stagnant water, they covered their heads with folded arms, expecting the ship to explode at any moment.

It didn’t.

 
For a while the silence was broken only by the slow tick of cooling metal. Bryn breathed a sigh of relief and ran his fingers over the burns on his face, deciding that despite the stinging it was all still there and that there was nothing serious.

“Well,” Singh said matter-of-factly, checking Bryn’s burns and then spraying a fine cool mist of honey-smelling healing gel over them from the first aid kit in his pack, “at least the water’s warm.”

Bryn gazed at his friend. “Yeah but it stinks; a bit like your sense of humour.”

“Quiet, isn’t it? Listen. No birds, nothing at all. Not like before the invasion. It’s kind of eerie.”

“Personally, I’m just thankful we’re alive. The bugs must have seen us come down; we need to get the hell out of here.”

Bryn recognised the ruined city and bridge over the river that lay about a mile or so away. He’d arranged to operate in this area and no one had begrudged him that, given that this was his home world. If he was right then his town was about fifteen miles from their current position. He was about to impart this knowledge to Singh when, with a deafening roar, another landing craft appeared above them. Hovering, it disgorged its troops but remained overhead protectively for a moment, before shooting skyward once more. It was soon lost in the low-lying clouds, as she returned to her mother ship for more human cargo.

A small, thin sergeant strode up to the two friends. He planted both feet in the mire and, with hands on his hips, looked down at them and said loudly, “Hello chaps, tracked you in, of course. Thought it would be jolly nice of us to come and look after you. After all, we don’t want you wandering around aimlessly and getting yourselves killed, now do we? We’ll need you to give us a lift back out again when this is all over.”

“Rather decent of you, old boy,” Singh retorted, getting a dig in the ribs for his efforts from Bryn as he stared at the man’s greying goatee.

Just then the sergeant touched his ear-piece, twisted his head towards the city and said quite calmly, “Better take cover lads, there’s some beasties coming.”

“I don’t believe this guy,” Singh said quietly, looking up at Bryn, as they cocked their machine pistols.

“If I was you, I’d shut up and take cover,” Bryn replied from the side of his mouth, moving to the edge of the ditch and following the other men’s gaze as they too flung themselves into the trench and other concealments about them.

A few seconds later, the Manta came into view…

7 Questions

I’ve posed seven questions for Mark:

1.  How far are you down the road for the sequel, The Cull of Lions?

I'm at around 24,000 words and the target is 60-80,000. I'm hoping to finish this early in the New-year.

2.  You seem drawn to militaristic sci-fi, which has a big following. Has your naval career had a bearing on this, or have you always liked that sub-genre?

I've always been drawn to it and drew on my experience in the British armed forces. I'm also an avid fan of Babylon 5, Star Trek and such like. I'm a firm believer that someday we will indeed travel to other planets and stars, and if we do and those worlds are inhabited it will make us the invaders. Will we give up and go away? Of course not, we'll just land anyway and imagine what we'd do if the boot was on the other foot. Even if we don't meet other races mankind has always been plagued by war, and I can't see the future as any different.

3.   What prompted you to write about a female protagonist?

The book kind of wrote itself. I had no intention of a female protagonist, it just happened that way. It's certainly unusual. My two youngest children are girls and you always worry about what will happen to them if both parents are no longer around, so maybe that had something to do with it.

4.   Will The Darkening Stars series be a trilogy – or open-ended?

It's designed to be a trilogy but you never know. Once these books are finished another twist might occur to me and draw me back. The trouble with writing is that once you have an idea in your mind for a tale it haunts you until you write it down; and that, of course, is only the beginning.

5.   Research is important for a writer. What kind of research do you do for sci-fi?

I read extensively, particularly technology news and anything at all about space – such as the

Martian colony projects, space engine development, and the many Earthlike worlds that are being discovered by telescopes.

I also research weaponry. It’s common knowledge now that the Royal Navy carried Laser weapons during the Falklands War, although these were designed to blind the pilots. The Americans have recently shot down target aircraft with beam weapons fitted to the phalanx point defense system and they’ve been working on a microwave laser called the Active Denial System, as a form of crowd dispersal. It’s claimed that within a few years such weapons will become standard. Although I foresee handheld lasers and so forth becoming commonplace I believe we will always have projectile weapons – although the ammunition is bound to change, perhaps becoming smaller and yet more lethal. This, of course, will allow us to load more ammunition.

Another area of interest is ancient civilizations, how empires rise and fall, and of course health issues. All of these can be transposed into the future. Likewise crime, which has always been with us and always will, but what kind of crime could there be then?

6.   Okay, you're in a small café on an asteroid, huddling with three of your favourite writers (living or dead). One specializes in Sci-fi; another in Thrillers; the third in Short Stories. Who would they be, and what one – and different – question would you ask each of them?

For Scifi it would be Kevin J Anderson, his ‘Saga of 7 Suns’ is excellent. I’d ask how on earth he keeps track of so many characters and their traits.

Thrillers I’d choose Dan Brown. I really enjoyed The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. I’d love to know how he researches.

Stephen King is a great short story writer. His tale ‘The Boogey Man’ stayed with me for a long time and is about a man whose sleep is broken by his child screaming. When he investigates he finds his boy being attacked by a monster from out of the wardrobe [the rest excised, spoiler alert – Nik]. I’d like to know whether it haunts him as much as it does me.

7.   How would you finish this statement: "I bet my readers didn't know (this about me) …”?

I’m often inspired by nightmares. I’ll wake up sweating and write it all down, then go downstairs to make some tea and toast and start to craft the tale.

Many thanks, Mark.

Mark’s bio

Mark works for Southampton University, and also as a freelance writer. His short stories have been published in Back Brain Recluse, Dream, New Moon, Auguries, Haunts, Kalkion, Screaming Dreams, and the anthologies Right To Fight, Escape Velocity and Monk Punk. With an 8^th Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo he’s also written non-fiction for Combat, Taekwondo & Korean Martial Arts, Fighters, Junk, Martial Arts Illustrated, profwritingacademy.com and calmzone.net.

His first full length work was Kwak’s Competition Taekwondo, and he also has a short story collection entitled Distant Shores. A Pride of Lions is the first in The Darkening Stars series. Having written features and fiction for over 30 years Mark applied to do an MA in Professional Writing. A Pride of Lions had been bouncing around in his head for some time, and he seized the opportunity of the MA to produce this first novel as part of the course. Mark says it’s without doubt the best choice he’s ever made, as it really focused him, and that getting this novel accepted is the perfect conclusion to a wonderful experience. He’s now focusing on the second book in this series, The Cull of Lions.

Links

www.markiles.co.uk

www.twitter.com/welcometoearth

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/mark-iles/33/67a/822

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Iles/279162705557698

Books

Distant Shores: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Distant-Shores-ebook/dp/B008SD4KOS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347182066&sr=1-1

Kwaks Competition Taekwondo: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kwak%60s-Competition-Taekwondo-Mark-Iles/dp/B000FTHGFI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325614714&sr=1-1

 

 

Book of the Film: The Shawshank Redemption

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is one of four novellas in the book Different Seasons by Stephen King, published in 1982. The film was released twelve years later. When I was studying scriptwriting, I was bowled over by the sheer perfection of Frank Darabont’s script, from the brilliant opening sequence through to the wonderfully emotional end. Indeed, while the novella is a virtuoso performance, King getting into the skin of the narrator ‘Red’, the movie surpasses the book in its storytelling power and characterisation. That doesn’t take away anything from the original source, however: the book deserves to be read and certain passages will move most readers, even when they know the story behind the Rita Hayworth poster…

I’m not a fan of prison movies and it was quite a while before I got round to watching the film. And I read the novella much later. As a writer myself, I can see that King cleverly has his cake and eats it too. Although the story is told in the first person, we see a lot of events where Red was not a participant or observer, thanks to the canny comment that the prison grapevine provided him with all the salient details.

As with a number of films, several characters are blended together, and successfully so. The fates of Tommy Williams and Brooks Hatlen are different in the book. The book’s ending shows merely the promise of what is actually revealed in the film.

Just in case some readers haven’t seen the film, the story goes something like this: In 1947, Andy Dufresne was charged and sentenced for murdering his wife and her lover. He never contested the prosecution’s facts. Andy became a new inmate in the Shawshank facility and was taken under the wing of Red, the prison fixer who could get almost anything smuggled in – except women, drugs and guns.

The prison regime was brutal and unpleasant, with the warden and his men wangling deals to feather their own pockets at the expense of the cons. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a gang of so-called ‘sisters’ who were brutish rapists targeted Andy, and though he fought back, he suffered many defeats and humiliations. But they never broke his spirit or dented his hope in one day walking out of the prison. Red admired Andy and they became firm friends.

Red the narrator is humorous, worldly wise and very observant, and totally believable in King’s hands. In the book’s Afterword, King states that his prose style is ‘fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes downright clumsy.’ He considers his work to be the ‘literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.’ I’m sure that many of his critics would agree with him. And yet, he taps into the hearts and minds of thousands of readers with that same prose. As he writes at the beginning of the book, ‘It is the tale, not he who tells it.’ And the story is all – comprising vivid characters, a fraught situation, raw emotion and the small guy hoping and working to beat the odds. That comes through in the book.

So, if you’ve seen the film but haven’t read the book, make that journey. You’ll be rewarded by finding a lot of nuggets plucked by Darabont to enliven his masterpiece film, and you’ll come away knowing that the naysaying critics of Stephen King are so wrong.