Twenty First Century Boy

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Twenty First Century Boy

Post apocalyptic fiction
I’ve been browsing the web, following up on my childhood enjoyment of post apocalyptic fiction. Mainly thinking in terms of John Wyndham, and my personal favourite John Christopher. Despite huge popularity, at least with librarians of the time, Christopher, or Sam Youd to give him his real name, is now largely out of print. He is probably best know for Death of Grass, and the children’s trilogy the Tripods. I fondly remember the trilogy set in a medieval future past, aroundWinchester. Also worth flagging up here, as I will doubtless return to it, that JG Ballard was the writer that really inspired me, in a way that I did not think fiction could.

Anyway, having been once diverted, as a child I found post apocalyptic fiction enjoyable, there was also the post apocalyptic fiction that seemed all over the television at the time, such as the Survivors, Judith Hann dropping a text tube and creating a quiet apocalypse, the Changes, though the Peter Dickinson books were better, and I suppose Living in the Iron Age, which gave me a lifelong desire to get a lurcher dog, which I have at last fulfilled.

Extending out further from these obvious examples, you could also add Watership Down which is in its own way a post apocalyptic tale, albeit a bunny apocalypse. It sits very well with the others, and it is difficult to imagine something similar being written now. Jumping back, the wartime industrialisation of death inspired its own fiction, the last of the Gromenghast trilogy, and the longing for an idyllic shire as respite from horror, in the Lord of the Rings. The pre-war horrors, albeit only culturally acknowledged later, of eugenics inspired other fiction, such as Brave New World. Had Nazism not put eugenics beyond the pale, it is curious as to where that science would have taken us by now. Before the war, the study of race, of doliocephalic heads, was acceptable. Now that we can conceive of manipulating dna, it could return in an altered, and now “acceptable” form. It was ill-conceived then, as different races, we have more in common, and upbringing has far more impact, and is more capable of improvement.

It is a truism that science fiction is about today, and not about the future, if the post war fiction came to terms with the war, the seventies and eighties tried to make sense of the mutually assured destruction of any nuclear escalation of the cold war, what is such fiction doing now? Well, I recently read and enjoyed a novel, Snow, but there is certainly no great taste these days for post-apocalyptic fiction. Steam-punk, setting fiction in a technological victorian empire is popular, 2000AD has given a variety of alluring examples, from the Gothic Empire of Nemisis, I was devastated when Kevin O’Neill dropped out of illustrating the series, as the first few pages are my favourite comic art ever, to Leviathan, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, from 2000AD alumnus Alan Moore.

If I were to write post apocalyptic fiction now, I do not think it would be so judgemental. My view of hunter-gatherer societies is a benign one, I have a great deal of respect for them. If man were to be forcibly returned to a stone age, then society would quickly be forced into a way of living that suited us well for countless millenia. Hunter gatherer society is not one of savagery. Even the horrors of radiation have lost their sting, after Chernobyl, we know that nuclear horror is survivable. You would survive by avoiding the badlands, by not being top of the food chain, by trying to develop some cultural adaptations to recognise and avoid radiation exposure, by being very careful to preserve good genes to pass on. Grim as life might be, I don’t think people would huddle together, depressed, fearful, beating the living daylights out of each other, after a spot of rape and being pillaged. If Inuit man could survive in the arctic, then future man could survive post apocalypse.

Society as we know it doubtless would not.



Why Blog?
As a child I always wanted to write novels. I have now written a couple, one of which I have web-published, the other lurks in a pile of notebooks. However I am now unsure of the novel as an art form. Whereas the early novels of Tristram Shandy and Henry Fielding are towering examples of wit, opinion, experimentation, we now seem to suffer mediocre fiction by the yard, emanating from every hue of celebrity. Wandering into a bookshop, I do not feel an urge to add to the huge yardage of fiction.

One problem is that originally there was some toil in writing, now there is none. There is toil in getting published, but that is hardly the same. And there seems to be a huge dearth of editors. But everyone with a wordprocessor is sitting there churning out a thousand words a day for an eager posterity.

What are all these books about, meeting some focus group demographic desire for box ticking fiction. Some ersatz form of mausoleum, your soul forever encased in soft covers.

I found writing a novel a struggle, I hate dialogue, I really have no empathy for anyone apart from myself, I am not much interested in plot, I would prefer to wallow in constraints, rather than transcend them, I enjoy subverting everything, including myself. Why struggle to fit into a novel, the countless thoughts that my imagination lets fly, harvesting only the odd one that happens to fly in roughly the right direction, at the right time.

I toyed with the idea of a novel of file cards, short standalone texts, that might one day be composited together, John Cage has done some writing along those lines, M, and William Burroughs is the king of the cut up. But the ambition to write was tucked away, I was not sure what I wanted to do, but although writing a novel was close, it was no cigar.

But things are different now, and I suppose that a blog is what I make of it, and maybe the blogosphere is where Tristram Shandy walks now.

What not blog
I am writing this at 6.45 on January 2007. I suffer from migraines, and find it easiest to stick to complete regularity of waking and eating. Accordingly each weekend I wake before 6.00 and come downstairs. Some quiet time, with my head still full of half sleeping creativity and looseness. Also sharing a house with wife, two daughers, and dog, it is fine to have some quiet time.

I intend to blog publish more or less in the order written, and more or less in first draft. However I hate spelling and grammer mistakes, so I’ll delay publication briefly to check through the text. However I will not generally check my facts, so if I don’t have recall of technical detail, or spelling, then in error, in it goes, checking facts just seems too tiresome.

I have signed the official secrets act, so nothing particularly about work goes in, largely on the grounds that it seems unfair to talk about other people, in whatever catty frame of mind I might happen to be, giving them no right of reply. However also probably inappropriate to write about work anyway.

This will probably be predominantly about whatever happens to exercise my thoughts, so intitial randomness can be expected, followed no doubt by predictable tedium.

Accordingly, although it is about me, it is about me in the oblique way, of commenting on books I have read, rather than placing me in the context of people I know, and things that I do.

on Apple
I first bought an apple macintosh computer way back, a Powerbook 165c, with 4meg ram and an 80 meg hard-drive. Eventually traded up from that to one of the early iMac models, and recently got a new iMac.

The 165c was vastly better than PCs, and an object of deep love. The first iMac was okay, but lacked the same differential from PCs of the time. The current iMac is in my opinion hugely better than the PCs on offer.

Technology lends itself to futures thinking, Nicholas Negroponte endlessly writing about publishers not being in the dead tree business, bits and bytes, rather than vinyl and paper. The Digital Economy by Tapscott struck me as very good when I read it too. But the history of IT is not generally one of innovation in terms that we can readily understand. Apple seems unique in recognising technological potential and putting it into a useable product. Taking the mouse from Parc, putting a graphical user interface out there, internet ready iMacs, taking out floppies, shifting to usb, recently the ipod, itunes, webcams as standard. There was also lest we forget, the illfated, much derided Newton with handwriting recognition, the most beautiful computers know to man, at prices on ly a design museum could afford, their ability to piss off everyone who dealt with them within a few years, suppliers, users, etc.

I suppose Apple leads rather than following. It recognised the potential of flash drives, to create music players, the technological possibility led to a product. It recognises that most people are permanently connected to broadband, so it is okay to design hardware with broadband updatable operating systems. It recognises convergence, dealing with data, not dead trees. So itunes is a digital amazon. Your ipod works with your itunes on your imac. Your diary, your photos, your music, your contacts, all synchronised without effort. So now we have broadband, and ipods, we can have podcasts and audiobooks. There is also .mac, priced beyond my scope. Apple is becoming the sort of multiplatform, multidevice, multiapplication monster. Get an ipod,trade up to an iphone (name not currently owned by apple), connect to your imac, synchronise to .mac, and browse itunes, use isoftware. Every one a revenue stream, everyone going back to Apple, so that if like amazon, itunes makes a loss, no worries, you make the money on the ipods, or if you take a share of the mobile phone market, you make shedloads of money on phones, that means you can sell computers at a loss. In the past microsoft was the unloved behemoth of IT, but apple is morphing itself into the sort of creature that those who instinctively disliked microsoft feared.

Open standards, accessible for all, open source, in html the whole world runs free. I suppose that being so long the over-educated rebel at the back of the class, better read and more cultured than the teacher, apple is ill prepared for running the school. That comes with different responsibilities. It is a duller job. Less self indulgent.

But why so bad, if making money on phones subsidises free updates to an operating system, if the software and innovation are as good as they are, if we all keep on getting such good things, so cheaply, if apple can continue to exceed our expectations and redefine our tastes, maybe we should just live with it.

When does the free thinking rebel turn into the unwelcome tyrant, maybe Steve Jobs should be thinking of checks and balances, an apple welcome in a wider world.