Friday 28 March 2014

Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist, ten years on


I am a big fan of Iain M. Banks' SF. I've read all the Culture books, apart from The State of the Art and Inversions if you consider that to be Culture; I'm of the opinion that he's one of if not the best British SF author of the past 25 years; and Use of Weapons ranks among my very favourite novels, horrifyingly disturbing though it is.

It's for this reason that I'm always slightly puzzled by the relative lack of awards he received for his SF. Specifically, the only time he was even nominated for a Hugo, arguably the most prestigious award in the field of SF and fantasy, was for his 2004 non-Culture novel The Algebraist. It's been ten years since its publication, almost a year since he tragically passed away, and we're coming up to the 2014 Worldcon at which he was going to be a guest of honour, so I thought it seemed like a good time for a look back at this book.

First off, I really enjoy The Algebraist, but I am confused about why, of all Banks' SF, this is the one that was nominated for a Hugo rather than Use of Weapons or Excession. Perhaps it was the fact that he hadn't written SF for four years by the time it came out and the anticipation contributed to its success, and it could very well be that it's one of his most purely entertaining, crowd-pleasing books. It probably is one of my favourites of his, but that doesn't mean it's one of his best. Still, it's spectacularly entertaining space opera, a thrilling adventure story which I would strongly recommend. It deserves to be read, especially since it tends to be overshadowed by the Culture.

It's largely in the world building that both its biggest successes and biggest flaws lie. Most of the action happens in the gas giant Nasqueron, where our protagonist Fassin Taak has been sent, and the construction of the civilisation within the gas giant is extremely impressive. The resident Dwellers are a Slow species, for whom entire human lifetimes can occur in the space of a lazy afternoon, and the bizarre ways they carry out their lives are never less than amusing. For me at least, there's an aura of mystery about gas giants anyway, and the extended journey Fassin undergoes while travelling through Nasqueron makes for a great space adventure story.

This could be another contributing factor to the wide appeal necessary for a Hugo nomination. It's probably the most conventional space opera Banks wrote, without meaning that as a criticism, in that it follows a protagonist experiencing a fairly traditional Hero's Journey to try and save his home from being destroyed in war. The framework of the story is rather familiar even if the details are not, and it could be that the resonances these kinds of stories have for so many people are what caused its success.

That said, the world building of the broader galactic community does get a bit out of hand. The Algebraist is a long book, and could have done with a rather more rigorous edit: all the details of the greater civilisation are interesting and well drawn, but they tend to arrive in the form of infodumps a bit too often, breaking the flow of the story somewhat. I suspect this is because the novel isn't part of Banks' already well-established Culture series, and so he was keen to mark out the differences between the two universes.

It's not necessarily a great novel, but it is a great read. It may not be top-tier Banks, but even at his lower ebbs his SF is of such a high standard that it's easy to recommend to anyone who's a fan of the genre. For those who aren't yet initiated, they're probably better off starting with the Culture before moving on to this relatively dense work. Still, if you read SF for escapism and want a cracking, thoroughly entertaining space opera, I can unreservedly recommend The Algebraist. Read it, and remember one of the genre's true masters, taken from us far too early.

Friday 14 March 2014

Remembering Hellblazer


Hellblazer, after running for 25 years and 300 issues, making it the longest-running comic at either DC or Marvel to have never been cancelled or rebooted, was cancelled a little over a year ago. Because of that, and because of the fact that more details about the upcoming TV series have been emerging lately, I thought it was a good time to express my views on one of my very favourite comic books.

I don't object to its cancellation in itself, even if it is weird to mark the Vertigo imprint's 20th anniversary by cancelling its flagship title. 300 issues is a lot, most of them were good to great, and it was definitely better to end on a high rather than drag it out and potentially squander what had been good about it. Plus, given that John Constantine ages in real-time, even if his ageing is slowed down somewhat by his demon blood, he was still 60 years old when Hellblazer ended, and it was probably time to hang up the trenchcoat. Death and Cigarettes, the final story, may not have been one of the all-time classics, but it was still a great one and a very fitting end to the series.

I do object, however, to the fact that Hellblazer, one of the most important comic books in recent memory and Vertigo's longest running book, was cancelled so that John could be rebooted and brought into the DC Universe – especially since the New 52 is, by and large, awful. Yes, he originated in the DCU in the pages of Swamp Thing, but even back then those characters were more or less cordoned off from the wider universe. Hell, John considered the Crisis on Infinite Earth to be basically a sideshow to the return of the Original Darkness, the great threat that he and the Swamp Thing faced together.

Even if we leave aside the problematic, One More Day-esque erasure of 25 years of character development, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective or from a creative one: cancelling a big-selling horror comic in order to put John in what basically amounts to yet another superhero comic. They risk losing the dedicated Vertigo readers who might not be interested in superheroes, as well as losing all the actually mature (as opposed to the New 52's superficially mature) content, urban fantasy and social commentary that made Hellblazer so special. I'm told the current Constantine title isn't all that bad, but I'm of the opinion that John simply doesn't belong in a superhero universe. There was an issue of his current title when he had a run-in with Captain Marvel (I refuse to call him Shazam) and ended up stealing his powers, which pretty much sums up my problem with that comic.

Hellblazer's colours were revealed as early as its third issue, a bitter satire of stockbrokers and yuppies in the Margaret Thatcher era. And there's the rub: what made this comic so interesting and unique was that, even with the presence of magic, zombies and demons, it was clearly taking place in our world, and the themes and subject matter reflected this. John was a magician, but he was still just an ordinary working-class man from Liverpool, and tended to use wits to con his enemies far more than he actually used magic against them. The story Pandemonium, written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of John's first appearance in the pages of Swamp Thing, epitomises this: it's a brilliant, savagely angry condemnation of the Iraq War in which John thwarts the demon Nergal's plans by winning a game of poker. It encapsulates everything important about Hellblazer, and it's one of my favourite Constantine stories.

The current situation is kind of ironic in a slightly depressing way. DC has basically returned its superhero comics to the mindset of the '90s, and dragged John down into it as well, whereas the actual '90s, when superhero comics were in the toilet, was Hellblazer's heyday. That was Vertigo's golden age, Hellblazer was the flagship, and it remained the flagship for the next 20 years. It just depresses me that such a great, important comic book has been replaced by another disposable superhero title.

I guess we just have to hope that the TV series will do the character justice. And if nothing else, they've nailed John's look perfectly: I'm pretty sure the only way to get someone who looks more like him would've been to go back in time to 1988 and actually cast Sting.


Seriously, credit where it's due: this guy is John Constantine. Well done, NBC. There's talk of him not being allowed to smoke in the show, which would be irritating. Apart from the cigarettes being as indelible a visual aspect of the character as Superman's cape, they're a constant reminder of John's addictive, self-destructive personality, and one of the classic stories, Dangerous Habits, couldn't exist without his smoking addiction. Still, I'm allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic about this TV show. It can hardly be worse than the Keanu Reeves movie, at any rate.

Friday 7 March 2014

The Cthulhu Contradiction


As a follow-up to my piece about The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse, the Call of Cthulhu game I played a few weeks ago, I thought I'd write a more detailed post on my general thoughts about the system, and specifically, the big part of the game that just doesn't make sense.

First things first: I really like Call of Cthulhu. Mechanically it's very similar to Dungeons & Dragons, albeit with percentage dice rather than a d20 as the main ones you use, and the character stats and skills work in much the same way as their D&D equivalents. The big difference in terms of gameplay is that there's a lot less faffing about with the combat, which is a very nice change. Tabletop RPG combat can easily end up being dreary and tiresome, especially in D&D 4th Edition where you spend most of the time flicking through sourcebooks trying to remember what all your abilities do, but Cthulhu's is simple, fast, and often extremely tense because fights tend to be pretty difficult.

Naturally, the biggest draw with Call of Cthulhu is the one present in the name: the fact that it's a horror game based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, arguably the most important horror writer of the 20th Century – and it's in the horror where the system really shines. As I detailed in my last post on the game, it's very easy for things to go spectacularly wrong very quickly, and character death is an omnipresent worry – in the foreword to the famous campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep, which I really want to play, the author outright tells you that the characters are unlikely to survive to the end. It's a really nice change from being the heroic adventurers of D&D where success is assumed: here, you're just ordinary people up against forces so overwhelming and otherworldly as to be practically inconceivable, and failure is a very real possibility.

Unfortunately, though, there is a serious contradiction inherent in the idea of merging a tabletop RPG and the Cthulhu Mythos. By their very nature, RPGs are founded in mathematics, because there need to be defined rules for how the game works or things would go off the rails even more quickly than they usually do. Numbers are the most concrete, logical means of understanding the universe that we have – there's a reason you can't do physics without doing a hell of a lot of maths as well. The problem with that is that the fiction of the Cthulhu Mythos is defined by its incomprehensibility and illogicality: what makes the monsters of the Mythos frightening is that their natures and motives are simply beyond human understanding, and their physical appearance is often beyond the ability to describe.

In the story from which Call of Cthulhu takes its name, we have no idea what Cthulhu is, where he's from, what he's doing, or why he's doing it. That is what makes him frightening. In the game itself, Cthulhu is defined by numbers and statistics: his motives may still be vague, but the GM knows precisely what he is in game terms. Even though he regenerates them, the very concept of hit points, that most crucial of role-playing concepts, is antithetical to the Mythos; the idea that these cosmic abominations will die if you do precisely this much damage to them is profoundly problematic in terms of what makes Lovecraft's fiction so compelling.

Let me stress that it doesn't make the game any less fun, and I'm certainly not trying to put forward a solution. For me, this paradox is pretty much insoluble, because tabletop RPGs are and always have been grounded in maths. It's just one of those irritating things that stick in the back of your mind, and I thought it was an interesting point about the game. It's not as if I would want to change the way things are: Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic game, and if this contradiction is necessary for us to be able to play it, then so be it. But still, it would be interesting to see if anyone could design a game which doesn't run counter to one of the most fundamental tenets of the Cthulhu Mythos.