Be honest now: is there anything more awesome than this?
No, there is not. Nothing says awesome like deliberately hobbling yourself by employing decades-old technology [1]. Fact.
[1] Does not apply to the fields of medicine, renewable energy, or kick-ass robots.
Monday, 9 March 2009
Saturday, 7 March 2009
The Wise Man Built His Dollhouse Upon The Rock
There is a certain amount of circumstantial evidence at this point that Dollhouse is shit.
Allow that to sink in for a moment: a Joss Whedon show that blows goats. I was as surprised as anyone.
It wasn't just the fact that people were down on it, either, since it's hardly unheard of for me to love passionately something everyone else thinks is horribly crappy. It's the specific nature of the complaints. If its detractors are to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt their veracity), Whedon has gone from shows that deliberately subverted the idea that women on TV should simply be eye-candy flesh-pots, to a show which embraces that idea with gusto.
A lot of people are very upset. It's hardly unheard of for a talented writer to go off their game, but deliberately embracing the very lowest common denominator bullshit exploitation you've always railed against? Well, that's something very different.
Here's the thing, though: what if it's all deliberate? Let me offer you two scenarios.
Scenario 1: the show is intentionally as uncomfortably voyeuristic and exploitative as the events it is depicting. One of the best things about A History Of Violence was the variety of motives, targets and consequences of the violence on display. You could almost hear Cronenberg asking after each punch or gunshot "Is this OK?" Are you morally justified in punching the school bully. If a sexual encounter with your wife essentially starts off as rape and becomes frenzied, passionate love-making, is it wrong?
If Dollhouse is trying to raise similar questions about the objectification of people (and women in particular), then forcing the viewer to question themselves as they are viewing doesn't seem like the worst idea in the world (q.v. Shivers, also by Cronenberg, with its stripteases, lesbian kisses, and women getting parasites in unmentionable places whilst relaxing in the bath). You can't try and do something like that and not be exploitative, otherwise you've already answered the question and you're trying to get other people to agree with you. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in this post BSG world it wouldn't be surprising that Whedon (who has admitted to learning from BSG's example, or at least lamenting that he can't do it they way they do) might want to pose a question rather than ram a moral message down our throats.
If that's the idea, then it seems to be working to a point. People certainly are discussing these questions. There's another question that's also being asked in addition, though, which is "How much longer will this shit be on the air." A film asking uncomfortable questions of the viewer by daring them to enjoy what's on display can work, but a TV show? Asking the same question every week? Not so much.
Maybe it won't be every week, admittedly, but we'll come back to that. The second scenario is this: Whedon has fucking well had enough of you. Yes, you, you pricks. The unwashed masses baying for immediate satisfaction. The knuckle-dragging mono-brows shovelling pizza into your face as you watch the latest celebrity reality show. The people who keep Ant and Dec employed. You finally ground the poor bastard down.
Whedon tells a story about the day he was heading back to his office after having a crappy meeting with some studio execs over his ideas for a new Batman film, and wondering how many more times he would need reminding that the suits don't give a damn about the creative process, only to get in to find that Firefly had been cancelled.
Maybe he's finally learned his lesson. Maybe he's finally abandoned the idea of ever getting something artistically impressive on the air ever again. Buffy only became something interesting in its second season, Angel followed in it's wake, and Firefly got put down before many of us had seen the first episode. Perhaps every episode of Dollhouse is a deliberate fuck you to the world, forty five minutes of tits and ass and jiggling and baby oil and sexual compliance. People keep saying they've heard the show picks up with the sixth installment, which Whedon wrote himself. I keep imagining the episode opening to reveal Whedon sitting in a chair, naked, screaming "Take a good look!" over and over whilst Tennyson's Ulysses crawls across the bottom of the screen. "Picks up" might not be quite the right term, I'll grant you, but it would make for a fucking excellent punchline, and at this point I'm not sure if there's any point hoping for more.
Allow that to sink in for a moment: a Joss Whedon show that blows goats. I was as surprised as anyone.
It wasn't just the fact that people were down on it, either, since it's hardly unheard of for me to love passionately something everyone else thinks is horribly crappy. It's the specific nature of the complaints. If its detractors are to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt their veracity), Whedon has gone from shows that deliberately subverted the idea that women on TV should simply be eye-candy flesh-pots, to a show which embraces that idea with gusto.
A lot of people are very upset. It's hardly unheard of for a talented writer to go off their game, but deliberately embracing the very lowest common denominator bullshit exploitation you've always railed against? Well, that's something very different.
Here's the thing, though: what if it's all deliberate? Let me offer you two scenarios.
Scenario 1: the show is intentionally as uncomfortably voyeuristic and exploitative as the events it is depicting. One of the best things about A History Of Violence was the variety of motives, targets and consequences of the violence on display. You could almost hear Cronenberg asking after each punch or gunshot "Is this OK?" Are you morally justified in punching the school bully. If a sexual encounter with your wife essentially starts off as rape and becomes frenzied, passionate love-making, is it wrong?
If Dollhouse is trying to raise similar questions about the objectification of people (and women in particular), then forcing the viewer to question themselves as they are viewing doesn't seem like the worst idea in the world (q.v. Shivers, also by Cronenberg, with its stripteases, lesbian kisses, and women getting parasites in unmentionable places whilst relaxing in the bath). You can't try and do something like that and not be exploitative, otherwise you've already answered the question and you're trying to get other people to agree with you. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in this post BSG world it wouldn't be surprising that Whedon (who has admitted to learning from BSG's example, or at least lamenting that he can't do it they way they do) might want to pose a question rather than ram a moral message down our throats.
If that's the idea, then it seems to be working to a point. People certainly are discussing these questions. There's another question that's also being asked in addition, though, which is "How much longer will this shit be on the air." A film asking uncomfortable questions of the viewer by daring them to enjoy what's on display can work, but a TV show? Asking the same question every week? Not so much.
Maybe it won't be every week, admittedly, but we'll come back to that. The second scenario is this: Whedon has fucking well had enough of you. Yes, you, you pricks. The unwashed masses baying for immediate satisfaction. The knuckle-dragging mono-brows shovelling pizza into your face as you watch the latest celebrity reality show. The people who keep Ant and Dec employed. You finally ground the poor bastard down.
Whedon tells a story about the day he was heading back to his office after having a crappy meeting with some studio execs over his ideas for a new Batman film, and wondering how many more times he would need reminding that the suits don't give a damn about the creative process, only to get in to find that Firefly had been cancelled.
Maybe he's finally learned his lesson. Maybe he's finally abandoned the idea of ever getting something artistically impressive on the air ever again. Buffy only became something interesting in its second season, Angel followed in it's wake, and Firefly got put down before many of us had seen the first episode. Perhaps every episode of Dollhouse is a deliberate fuck you to the world, forty five minutes of tits and ass and jiggling and baby oil and sexual compliance. People keep saying they've heard the show picks up with the sixth installment, which Whedon wrote himself. I keep imagining the episode opening to reveal Whedon sitting in a chair, naked, screaming "Take a good look!" over and over whilst Tennyson's Ulysses crawls across the bottom of the screen. "Picks up" might not be quite the right term, I'll grant you, but it would make for a fucking excellent punchline, and at this point I'm not sure if there's any point hoping for more.
Friday, 6 March 2009
Prevaricaton Tools: Crustacean Division
Here is what's preventing any work getting done up in Statistics Tower this afternoon.
I would suggest treating this not as a game, but as a combat simulation. I mean, it might seem like fun, but if the denizens of the oceans ever do create giant lobster AT-ATs and kamikaze octopodes, we're all pretty screwed.
I would suggest treating this not as a game, but as a combat simulation. I mean, it might seem like fun, but if the denizens of the oceans ever do create giant lobster AT-ATs and kamikaze octopodes, we're all pretty screwed.
Friday Comedy: Dave Chapelle
While we wait for me to be able to foist pictures of my miniatures on you once again, let's take a couple of weeks to revel in the healing power of laughter.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
The Prince, The Pauper, And The Pianist
Face my spoiler warning, feeble humans. Within this post are the darkest secrets of BSG exposed.
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This might be a good time to explain that there's a reason why these comments on a new episode of Galactica take a day or so to appear. This reason, contrary to common sense, is not that I am too busy writing up my thesis (though I acknowledge entirely that that should be why), it's more that I find it much easier to decide what's important about a given episode once I've spent a little while reading other people's opinions, and deciding why they're wrong.
Case in point, Jacob over at TVWP (yes, Kimmy, I have sampled his fruits and now I cannot turn away!) is scratching his head over why the Chief can recognise when an Eight is Boomer, but Helo can't work out when one isn't his wife.
There's an obvious answer [1], of course, that Boomer wanted the Chief to recognise her (as part of Operation: Steal Kiddy) and wanted Helo to not recognise her (as part of Operation: Totally Fuck Some Dude In Front Of His Wife Who You've Bundled Into A Cupboard That You Didn't Even Close Because You Are Retarded), or one could simply point out that Chief recognising an Eight does not mean all people can recognise all Eights ever (especially when your working on reptile brain and your biggest concern is whether you can use your wife's imminent mission as an excuse to skip foreplay), but there's a much more interesting and needlessly long explanation. And I like needlessly long...
Here's the thing: it's a lot easier to recognise something after the first time you lost it. Which, I grant you, isn't exactly the most penetrating insight in the world. You can ask anyone who's ever been in love and had their heart ripped out, for a start.
Hey, guess who's been in love and had their heart ripped out? In addition to having spent some time suicidal, been revealed as a machine, and had his wife first kill herself and then turned out to have cuckolded him?
What's tragic about what happened to the Chief isn't that Boomer played him like an overweight fiddle, or even that his best hope from this point on is that he dies of boredom in the brig whilst the Fleet and the Cylons argue about who gets to show him the crappy side of an airlock. It's how Boomer got to him. "Here is what you could have won". He's so sick of the truth that he'll jump into bed with the first illusion that comes along even though it's illusions that have fucked him every step of the way. Believing Boomer and he could be together. Believing Cally would do. Believing his life as the Chief meant something, and was worth protecting, to the point where wanting to kill himself didn't strike him as a good reason to take a break every once in a while.
Even more heartbreaking, when he suspects Boomer has betrayed him his first response is to leap back into the fantasy, to realise that she's stolen that too. That's so depressing it doesn't even make any fucking sense!
Recognise Boomer after years apart? I'm amazed he doesn't think call them all Boomer, and he just happened to get lucky this time round ("lucky", obviously, being a relative term here). The man was desperate for something to live for. Hell, he's always been desperate for that, ever since Boomer got shot by his future wife, and yet the universe saw fit to just keep throwing away the things he relied upon whilst he was searching. All he wanted was something to run towards, but fate wouldn't show him where it was, and then decided to make him progressively more lame.
You only recognise something after the first time you lost it.
Helo has never lost Athena. He's fought with her, and he's shot her dead, but every time she came back to him. On top of that he has a healthy child, and is apparently pretty much bullet-proof. Chief spent weeks terrified he would end up airlocked for the crime of finding out he was a Cylon, and he was very nearly right. Helo willingly defied orders at NCD 2539, and in the process guaranteed the survival of a race hell-bent on exterminating his own. Somewhere in the region of 2,000 people are dead because of that, but that's OK, because he's Helo.
Helo doesn't need to recognise his wife. He just needs his wife to recognise him. To know the prince when she sees him. I'm not saying Helo loves Athena any less than Galen loves/loved Boomer, I'm just saying that if something lies within reach for long enough, you stop looking when you're picking it up.
Recognising what you've lost and failing to recognise what you have is probably the overarching theme of the episode. You can stretch the metaphor a bit by pointing out Adama is so concerned about the Galactica that he's not there when Roslin collapses (though the Gods know that there is some grim poetic justice in the idea of Adama not taking enough notice of Roslin post-nebula), but mainly this fits in relation to Starbuck. She lost her father, she lost her mind, and she lost her life. In that order, literally if not necessarily poetically. The first caused her to give up the piano, the second made her useless as a Viper jock and thus purposeless as a human being, and the third fucked her up so bad even being reborn didn't seem to help (though I don't really want to get on her case too much about that last one). The Chief keeps having things taken from him, Kara responds to everything she loses by chucking something else away herself (or abandoning it, even after Prince Helo has spent fucking months getting it all back for her). It takes her Chip-Dad (yay for crazy chip people, we must surely be getting close to that reveal [2]) to remind her that losing what we love doesn't necessitate abandoning those things our love motivated us to do. [3]
Galen could probably have done to hear that speech too (guess his own Chip-Lady got quiet once she'd saved him from taking a nuke to the junk). It's a hard thing to do, I know, recognising that our efforts are no longer going to be rewarded, that the goal we were working for has been taken from us, or maybe that it was never there and we've just been projecting like a Cylon would. The trick is not to change what it is we're doing, but to change what is we love. It's too easy, and too limiting, and too false, to say we love a person, or that we love life. What we love are pieces of the whole. It may be most pieces, or even almost all, but still; it's pieces. Facets. We love them so much that we tolerate the surrounding crap at worst, and at best we accept it with a glad heart, as being completely worth the effort. The Chief fucked up because he knew each piece so well that he couldn't stand to be without them anymore. Helo fucked up because he never saw the need to learn where the pieces fit in the first place. And Starbuck?
Well, the jury's still out on Starbuck. Give it time.
[1] There's also an obvious corollary that those who whine about nitpickers tend to be much more cool about it once they find a nit they want to pick, but that's another story.
[2] I don't want to jump the gun here, because Moore has managed to pleasantly surprise me regarding such things in the past, but at present I'm concerned that if the common assumption that there is a third faction involved here, hence the chip-people and the back-up Starbuck, that it's somewhat narratively unsatisfying for them to turn up (at most) four hours before the end of a sixty hour story. Condense that down to a film and you're talking about about a new group arriving six to eight minutes from the credits. In other words, if a show about the virtues and pitfalls of faith and dogma and stubbornness and misinterpretation i.e. what religion is all about ends with a fucking deus ex machina, I will have to kill a large number of people, and I won't even be all that sorry.
[3] Also, this is to my knowledge the first time a piano has ever been used to link together two critically important plot points in a television series, and that is worthy of respect, I think.
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This might be a good time to explain that there's a reason why these comments on a new episode of Galactica take a day or so to appear. This reason, contrary to common sense, is not that I am too busy writing up my thesis (though I acknowledge entirely that that should be why), it's more that I find it much easier to decide what's important about a given episode once I've spent a little while reading other people's opinions, and deciding why they're wrong.
Case in point, Jacob over at TVWP (yes, Kimmy, I have sampled his fruits and now I cannot turn away!) is scratching his head over why the Chief can recognise when an Eight is Boomer, but Helo can't work out when one isn't his wife.
There's an obvious answer [1], of course, that Boomer wanted the Chief to recognise her (as part of Operation: Steal Kiddy) and wanted Helo to not recognise her (as part of Operation: Totally Fuck Some Dude In Front Of His Wife Who You've Bundled Into A Cupboard That You Didn't Even Close Because You Are Retarded), or one could simply point out that Chief recognising an Eight does not mean all people can recognise all Eights ever (especially when your working on reptile brain and your biggest concern is whether you can use your wife's imminent mission as an excuse to skip foreplay), but there's a much more interesting and needlessly long explanation. And I like needlessly long...
Here's the thing: it's a lot easier to recognise something after the first time you lost it. Which, I grant you, isn't exactly the most penetrating insight in the world. You can ask anyone who's ever been in love and had their heart ripped out, for a start.
Hey, guess who's been in love and had their heart ripped out? In addition to having spent some time suicidal, been revealed as a machine, and had his wife first kill herself and then turned out to have cuckolded him?
What's tragic about what happened to the Chief isn't that Boomer played him like an overweight fiddle, or even that his best hope from this point on is that he dies of boredom in the brig whilst the Fleet and the Cylons argue about who gets to show him the crappy side of an airlock. It's how Boomer got to him. "Here is what you could have won". He's so sick of the truth that he'll jump into bed with the first illusion that comes along even though it's illusions that have fucked him every step of the way. Believing Boomer and he could be together. Believing Cally would do. Believing his life as the Chief meant something, and was worth protecting, to the point where wanting to kill himself didn't strike him as a good reason to take a break every once in a while.
Even more heartbreaking, when he suspects Boomer has betrayed him his first response is to leap back into the fantasy, to realise that she's stolen that too. That's so depressing it doesn't even make any fucking sense!
Recognise Boomer after years apart? I'm amazed he doesn't think call them all Boomer, and he just happened to get lucky this time round ("lucky", obviously, being a relative term here). The man was desperate for something to live for. Hell, he's always been desperate for that, ever since Boomer got shot by his future wife, and yet the universe saw fit to just keep throwing away the things he relied upon whilst he was searching. All he wanted was something to run towards, but fate wouldn't show him where it was, and then decided to make him progressively more lame.
You only recognise something after the first time you lost it.
Helo has never lost Athena. He's fought with her, and he's shot her dead, but every time she came back to him. On top of that he has a healthy child, and is apparently pretty much bullet-proof. Chief spent weeks terrified he would end up airlocked for the crime of finding out he was a Cylon, and he was very nearly right. Helo willingly defied orders at NCD 2539, and in the process guaranteed the survival of a race hell-bent on exterminating his own. Somewhere in the region of 2,000 people are dead because of that, but that's OK, because he's Helo.
Helo doesn't need to recognise his wife. He just needs his wife to recognise him. To know the prince when she sees him. I'm not saying Helo loves Athena any less than Galen loves/loved Boomer, I'm just saying that if something lies within reach for long enough, you stop looking when you're picking it up.
Recognising what you've lost and failing to recognise what you have is probably the overarching theme of the episode. You can stretch the metaphor a bit by pointing out Adama is so concerned about the Galactica that he's not there when Roslin collapses (though the Gods know that there is some grim poetic justice in the idea of Adama not taking enough notice of Roslin post-nebula), but mainly this fits in relation to Starbuck. She lost her father, she lost her mind, and she lost her life. In that order, literally if not necessarily poetically. The first caused her to give up the piano, the second made her useless as a Viper jock and thus purposeless as a human being, and the third fucked her up so bad even being reborn didn't seem to help (though I don't really want to get on her case too much about that last one). The Chief keeps having things taken from him, Kara responds to everything she loses by chucking something else away herself (or abandoning it, even after Prince Helo has spent fucking months getting it all back for her). It takes her Chip-Dad (yay for crazy chip people, we must surely be getting close to that reveal [2]) to remind her that losing what we love doesn't necessitate abandoning those things our love motivated us to do. [3]
Galen could probably have done to hear that speech too (guess his own Chip-Lady got quiet once she'd saved him from taking a nuke to the junk). It's a hard thing to do, I know, recognising that our efforts are no longer going to be rewarded, that the goal we were working for has been taken from us, or maybe that it was never there and we've just been projecting like a Cylon would. The trick is not to change what it is we're doing, but to change what is we love. It's too easy, and too limiting, and too false, to say we love a person, or that we love life. What we love are pieces of the whole. It may be most pieces, or even almost all, but still; it's pieces. Facets. We love them so much that we tolerate the surrounding crap at worst, and at best we accept it with a glad heart, as being completely worth the effort. The Chief fucked up because he knew each piece so well that he couldn't stand to be without them anymore. Helo fucked up because he never saw the need to learn where the pieces fit in the first place. And Starbuck?
Well, the jury's still out on Starbuck. Give it time.
[1] There's also an obvious corollary that those who whine about nitpickers tend to be much more cool about it once they find a nit they want to pick, but that's another story.
[2] I don't want to jump the gun here, because Moore has managed to pleasantly surprise me regarding such things in the past, but at present I'm concerned that if the common assumption that there is a third faction involved here, hence the chip-people and the back-up Starbuck, that it's somewhat narratively unsatisfying for them to turn up (at most) four hours before the end of a sixty hour story. Condense that down to a film and you're talking about about a new group arriving six to eight minutes from the credits. In other words, if a show about the virtues and pitfalls of faith and dogma and stubbornness and misinterpretation i.e. what religion is all about ends with a fucking deus ex machina, I will have to kill a large number of people, and I won't even be all that sorry.
[3] Also, this is to my knowledge the first time a piano has ever been used to link together two critically important plot points in a television series, and that is worthy of respect, I think.
Commanding The Kingfisher (Final Part)
22nd March
Jessa was jolted roughly awake as the ship changed its course. Why aren’t the dampers on? she thought groggily. Christ, I hope it isn’t Thursday. Wait. What the Hell am I talking about? Angrily she shook her leaden head, trying to knock loose some sense.
Instantly she regretted the move. Her head hurt far too much, and the recollections that flooded in almost made her wish she hadn’t woken at all. Keigh, the navbots, Harlan, the R’Dokken: how much pummelling could the human mind take before it just lay down and surrendered? And shouldn’t she be dead already?
Apparently the universe wasn’t quite finished with her yet. There was nothing to be done but to open her eyes and work out how life would be screwing her this time.
At first glance it was immediately obvious that she was no longer on the Kingfisher. The bulkheads were the wrong colour, a filth-streaked maroon rather than matt grey; and they angled strangely, not perpendicular, and shifting at various points that confused the eye.
Jessa herself was strapped down to a crude acceleration couch; the hair floating on either side of her confirmed she was still in zero-g. She tried snapping her wrists back to free her from the couch’s restraints, but the straps remained defiantly tight. She was a prisoner. The R’Dokken wanted her alive. It was a realisation that brought her no comfort whatsoever.
Twisting her torso as much as her bonds allowed, she craned her neck to study her surroundings. She could see another couch opposite her; recognised the pale, unconscious face of its occupant as Gallagher. His severed calf was capped with some kind of plastic medical seal. Next to him was a third couch, on which lay a blonde woman Jessa didn’t recognise; although her bloodied jumpsuit claimed she was an engineer. The woman was missing both arms and a section of her lower jaw; all of which had likewise been sealed with blue plastic. Jessa could make out a fourth couch next to hers, but the strange jutting of the bulkhead made it impossible to see the occupant’s face. The faintest scents of disinfectant and blood circled her nostrils.
“I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” said a voice Jessa recognised.
Harlan.
Rage grabbed her immediately. Not the hot explosion of a lover’s anger, but the freezing stranglehold of pure, focused hatred. She didn’t want him flinching at her indignation; she wanted him dead.
“Get me out of these restraints,” she said, every word sharpened and frozen.
Harlan floated into view from somewhere to the left. He was soaking wet, and a breather mask hung from around his neck. Obviously he had just been visiting his new friends. His severed arm had been replaced with a rudimentary artificial limb of dark red metal; studded with spines.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked, his eyebrows raised quizzically.
“Because then I’ll be able to connect your urethra to your saliva glands, you treacherous son of a bitch.”
“Ouch,” Harlan said, his face slashed with an arrogantly superior grin.
Now she did feel begin her fury beginning to heat up.
“You bastard,” she snapped. “How can you stand there and look me in the eye? You sold out your fucking species, Harlan, not to mention me; you should be choking on your own shame right now.”
Harlan’s smirk vanished.
“Contrary to what you’ve always believed, darling, the simple fact that you are angry with me does not necessarily mean you require an explanation. Or an apology.”
“Don’t twist this into some kind of domestic!” she shouted, “People are dead, you two-faced bastard. What did they offer you, huh?”
“Well, they gave me this shiny new arm,” he said. The appendage whirred as he waved it at her. “I tried explaining to them that the spikes would be hell on a night, but, you know. When world’s collide.”
“You’re still joking?” she spat in disbelief. “You can’t even take this seriously, can you? You’ve killed God knows how many people; our friends, and you-”
“I will NOT have you judging me, Jessa!” he bellowed suddenly. Despite her anger, Jessa found herself jolted with surprise.
“You think I’m doing this for a pat on the head?” he said angrily. “Look around you, honey. This galaxy isn’t big enough for us and the R’Dokken. The bastards are everywhere. XI have no idea; no-one does, but those bastards have been colonising for centuries more than we have. If war breaks out; we lose; end of conversation. And the only thing that’s stopping them is that they’re not sure that . They’d much rather avoid outright combat, as long as their convinced they’re winning the cold war.”
“And that’s where I come in. I’ve been doing it for months; feeding them just enough scraps to keep them satisfied, and just enough misinformation to keep them worried that we might be stronger than we look.”
He looked at her straight in the eyes.
“So, you tell me, Jessa. What would you prefer? The odd ship going missing here and there, or the end of our entire civilisation?”
“Is that it?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Is that the best you can manage? Even if I bought this crap about buying peace with the R’Dokken; it doesn’t justify what you’re doing. For Christ’s sake, look at you, Harlan. Listen to yourself. You’re enjoying this. Our friends are dead, that or crippled; and you’re strutting around like you’re some kind of secret agent? I’d have more respect for you if you’d at least admit you’d been bought.”
Harlan sighed, and pushed himself off the deck to glide toward her.
“You stay the fuck away from me!” she warned him.
“Please, Jessa; I only want to show you something.” He reached under her couch. There was a pair of clicks, and then her uncomfortable slab was floating. Harlan grabbed the couch, and pulled it effortlessly toward a cargo entrance ramp that formed the right bulkhead. She felt the couch tilt until it was perpendicular to the deck, allowing Jessa to see out of the small porthole in the ramp.
There, a few thousand kilometres away, lay the Kingfisher. It had been mauled almost beyond recognition, barely a square metre of its hull was not blackened or buckled or missing entirely.
“Take a good look,” Harlan said softly, moving to stand beside her. “I’m not responsible for the nature of her demise. Only the location. You can thank Gabe for everything else. You’re a doctor, Jessa; how many more R’Dokken would our captain have to have killed before you’d have accepted the Kingfisher as a reasonable price for having it all done with?”
“So now you’re arguing it was a humanitarian effort?” she said, although with a fraction less rancour than she had managed before.
Harlan shrugged. “That gas you inhaled knocked you out for over six hours. It took me almost exactly that long to persuade the ‘pedes who run the mining op out here to let you go. Fifteen cargo ships like this one, each of them carrying eight or so survivors.”
“So one hundred and twenty of us got out,” Jessa said coolly, “Out of two hundred and fifty hands.”
“Do you even know how many people the captain had executed?” Harlan asked her. “I lost count after the first dozen. And a lot of the crew died in the battle. The message I sent on that spacewalk requested casualties be kept to a minimum; but no-one told that to security. Maybe if the captain surrendered, but…” With a final shrug, Harlan dismissed the subject.
As Jessa watched the vessel that had been her home for the last four years shrink into the void; she was suddenly struck by how small it was, how insignificant against the backdrop of a hostile universe.
As if to make the point, a pair of torpedoes, fired from somewhere to port, raced into sight; their bright burn trails scorching her peripheral vision. She blinked, and when her eyes sprang back open, the Kingfisher was gone, swallowed by an expanding explosion of billowing plasma.
“Strange as it may sound, I think I’m going to miss her,” Harlan said to himself.
“It’s your fault she’s dead,” Jessa pointed out, her gaze still fixed on the conflagration outside.
“Who said I was talking about the Kingfisher?” he said, kicking off against the bulkhead. “I’ll be back in a while to strap your couch back down; but right now I think my two former women need a moment together.”
“And what happens then?” she asked.
“We dock with a R’Dokken void-runner, then we rendezvous with the Hammerhead at Quosium.” Harlan voice replied. “We’ll exchange you and the rest of the crew in exchange for some juicy compensation for Gabriel’s… indiscretions.”
“What about Gabriel?” Jessa asked. “Is he still alive?”
“As much as he was last time you saw him. Keigh too.”
“So where are they now?” she continued. “It’s hard to imagine the R’Dokken just handing him over after what he’s been up to.”
She couldn’t see her husband of course, but she knew him well enough to be able to hear it when he smiled.
“Like I said, sometimes you have to make the aliens feel like they’re winning.”
***
Gabriel’s mind re-booted before his eyes did. He wasn’t sure why, but he had been expecting a headache. Certainly there hade been a great many in the recent past, or so he seemed to recall. Things had apparently improved since then, his brain felt surrounded by mist, rather than fire.
More had gone than the pain. The earlier cramped imprisonment of his thoughts had lifted as well, leaving Gabe feeling finally, luxuriantly free. It he could have stretched with his mind, he would have done; it felt like he had been asleep for days.
As the feeling of elated freedom subsided, Gabe began to realise more had changed than he had realised at first. His mind seemed almost crystalline somehow, thoughts did not so much rise and submerge as freeze and shatter. Suddenly the expanse surrounding his consciousness seemed less like liberation, and more like isolation; an endless plain of windswept ice that had swallowed him whole.
And all around him he could feel someone, something, breathing down the back of his mind. Something watching. Something hungry.
“Is the procedure complete?” he heard someone say. Gabe didn’t recognise the voice, or even the accent. Something about it was-
“It is,” came another voice.
“Then you may reactivate your sight,” the first speaker responded.
Without wishing it, Gabe found himself obeying.
Gradually his vision swam back into focus as his eyes adjusted to the green tinged light which surrounded him. The image that greeted him was wrong somehow, fractured. It was if he was staring through broken glass, except that the breaks were not the chaotic web of a shattered pane, but in regular tessellation.
But he was still fully capable of seeing the two armoured R’Dokken that stood studying from across the small, bare room.
Automatically he tried to leap to his feet, but his body would not respond. In fact, he couldn’t feel his body at all! He was left helpless and numb before his foes.
“Are you in there, Captain?” one of the creatures asked him.
His confusion at the question was ripped aside as his thoughts froze with horrified understanding.
The R’Dokken wasn’t using a translator.
That could only mean-
A child’s scream made Gabe glance to his right, although he felt no control over his neck. There, held in the thick tendrils of a third alien, lay his daughter; kicking and screaming as she was lifted from a barbaric-looking capsule, all black curves and illuminated probes.
“Keigh!” he shouted, thick with desperation and compassion, but no sound came. The presence inside his mind radiated amusement. Still trying to watch his helpless child escape the clutches of the R’Dokken, Gabe felt his gaze wrenched down to his own body.
It was no longer there. Instead, a seemingly endless line of armoured ridges greeted his horrified eyes. Thin, sharp legs rippled as they registered the cruel mockery of their owner.
“He is here. I feel his fear,” said his voice, in response to the earlier question.
God, what had let happen here? He had driven himself and his daughter into the clutches of the enemy.
Keigh, I’m sorry, was the only thought he could form.
“Excellent,” said the first alien. “Get the human spawn to the shuttles; we have no further need of her.”
“Daddy?” Keigh cried through her tears; then she was swept from the room.
“I now address you; Captain Merriman,” the alien continued. “I am sure by now you are aware that there is no way for you to respond. You are however required to listen.”
What else could he do? Desperately he tried to galvanise the alien’s muscles into action, control its body as he had done Keigh’s.
Oh, God. Keigh. How could he face what he had done to her? What she had been forced to endure.
With crippling certainty, Gabe knew whatever was to follow, he deserved it utterly.
The alien continued.
“Know also that your current… host can hear your thoughts. We have questions. Questions which you will answer. The most specific regard our companions who stepped aboard your vessel at Kellarealm Starport; but we have a great many more general questions for later. Defence codes, fleet movements, and other topics of a similar nature.”
Without the translator mangling the creature’s speech it was all too easy to make out its harsh glee.
“And you will tell us, Captain Merriman. Ordinarily I would provide descriptions of the torture methods available to us. However, it is our experience that humans rarely respond to the threat of pain, only its application.”
“Perhaps we should, as your people say, “cut to the chase”?”
There was the sudden roar as pipes above began to blast out saltwater. Each R’Dokken shed its suit, and Gabe felt feeling returning to his, no, its body. Above the sounds of the rising water, he could make out another noise, a loud vicious buzzing. His captor glanced up to show him the source of the sound; an ugly-looking buzz-saw heading inexorably towards their shared midriff.
Davis’ words floated into his thoughts “The R’Dokken sense of self-preservation is markedly less pronounced than our own”.
The saw bit into flesh just as the salt water reached the wound. As the brine flowed into the ever deepening gash, and Gabe was shredded by agony beyond description, he found he was denied even the capacity to scream.
Epilogue
Jessa was jolted roughly awake as the ship changed its course. Why aren’t the dampers on? she thought groggily. Christ, I hope it isn’t Thursday. Wait. What the Hell am I talking about? Angrily she shook her leaden head, trying to knock loose some sense.
Instantly she regretted the move. Her head hurt far too much, and the recollections that flooded in almost made her wish she hadn’t woken at all. Keigh, the navbots, Harlan, the R’Dokken: how much pummelling could the human mind take before it just lay down and surrendered? And shouldn’t she be dead already?
Apparently the universe wasn’t quite finished with her yet. There was nothing to be done but to open her eyes and work out how life would be screwing her this time.
At first glance it was immediately obvious that she was no longer on the Kingfisher. The bulkheads were the wrong colour, a filth-streaked maroon rather than matt grey; and they angled strangely, not perpendicular, and shifting at various points that confused the eye.
Jessa herself was strapped down to a crude acceleration couch; the hair floating on either side of her confirmed she was still in zero-g. She tried snapping her wrists back to free her from the couch’s restraints, but the straps remained defiantly tight. She was a prisoner. The R’Dokken wanted her alive. It was a realisation that brought her no comfort whatsoever.
Twisting her torso as much as her bonds allowed, she craned her neck to study her surroundings. She could see another couch opposite her; recognised the pale, unconscious face of its occupant as Gallagher. His severed calf was capped with some kind of plastic medical seal. Next to him was a third couch, on which lay a blonde woman Jessa didn’t recognise; although her bloodied jumpsuit claimed she was an engineer. The woman was missing both arms and a section of her lower jaw; all of which had likewise been sealed with blue plastic. Jessa could make out a fourth couch next to hers, but the strange jutting of the bulkhead made it impossible to see the occupant’s face. The faintest scents of disinfectant and blood circled her nostrils.
“I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” said a voice Jessa recognised.
Harlan.
Rage grabbed her immediately. Not the hot explosion of a lover’s anger, but the freezing stranglehold of pure, focused hatred. She didn’t want him flinching at her indignation; she wanted him dead.
“Get me out of these restraints,” she said, every word sharpened and frozen.
Harlan floated into view from somewhere to the left. He was soaking wet, and a breather mask hung from around his neck. Obviously he had just been visiting his new friends. His severed arm had been replaced with a rudimentary artificial limb of dark red metal; studded with spines.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked, his eyebrows raised quizzically.
“Because then I’ll be able to connect your urethra to your saliva glands, you treacherous son of a bitch.”
“Ouch,” Harlan said, his face slashed with an arrogantly superior grin.
Now she did feel begin her fury beginning to heat up.
“You bastard,” she snapped. “How can you stand there and look me in the eye? You sold out your fucking species, Harlan, not to mention me; you should be choking on your own shame right now.”
Harlan’s smirk vanished.
“Contrary to what you’ve always believed, darling, the simple fact that you are angry with me does not necessarily mean you require an explanation. Or an apology.”
“Don’t twist this into some kind of domestic!” she shouted, “People are dead, you two-faced bastard. What did they offer you, huh?”
“Well, they gave me this shiny new arm,” he said. The appendage whirred as he waved it at her. “I tried explaining to them that the spikes would be hell on a night, but, you know. When world’s collide.”
“You’re still joking?” she spat in disbelief. “You can’t even take this seriously, can you? You’ve killed God knows how many people; our friends, and you-”
“I will NOT have you judging me, Jessa!” he bellowed suddenly. Despite her anger, Jessa found herself jolted with surprise.
“You think I’m doing this for a pat on the head?” he said angrily. “Look around you, honey. This galaxy isn’t big enough for us and the R’Dokken. The bastards are everywhere. XI have no idea; no-one does, but those bastards have been colonising for centuries more than we have. If war breaks out; we lose; end of conversation. And the only thing that’s stopping them is that they’re not sure that . They’d much rather avoid outright combat, as long as their convinced they’re winning the cold war.”
“And that’s where I come in. I’ve been doing it for months; feeding them just enough scraps to keep them satisfied, and just enough misinformation to keep them worried that we might be stronger than we look.”
He looked at her straight in the eyes.
“So, you tell me, Jessa. What would you prefer? The odd ship going missing here and there, or the end of our entire civilisation?”
“Is that it?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Is that the best you can manage? Even if I bought this crap about buying peace with the R’Dokken; it doesn’t justify what you’re doing. For Christ’s sake, look at you, Harlan. Listen to yourself. You’re enjoying this. Our friends are dead, that or crippled; and you’re strutting around like you’re some kind of secret agent? I’d have more respect for you if you’d at least admit you’d been bought.”
Harlan sighed, and pushed himself off the deck to glide toward her.
“You stay the fuck away from me!” she warned him.
“Please, Jessa; I only want to show you something.” He reached under her couch. There was a pair of clicks, and then her uncomfortable slab was floating. Harlan grabbed the couch, and pulled it effortlessly toward a cargo entrance ramp that formed the right bulkhead. She felt the couch tilt until it was perpendicular to the deck, allowing Jessa to see out of the small porthole in the ramp.
There, a few thousand kilometres away, lay the Kingfisher. It had been mauled almost beyond recognition, barely a square metre of its hull was not blackened or buckled or missing entirely.
“Take a good look,” Harlan said softly, moving to stand beside her. “I’m not responsible for the nature of her demise. Only the location. You can thank Gabe for everything else. You’re a doctor, Jessa; how many more R’Dokken would our captain have to have killed before you’d have accepted the Kingfisher as a reasonable price for having it all done with?”
“So now you’re arguing it was a humanitarian effort?” she said, although with a fraction less rancour than she had managed before.
Harlan shrugged. “That gas you inhaled knocked you out for over six hours. It took me almost exactly that long to persuade the ‘pedes who run the mining op out here to let you go. Fifteen cargo ships like this one, each of them carrying eight or so survivors.”
“So one hundred and twenty of us got out,” Jessa said coolly, “Out of two hundred and fifty hands.”
“Do you even know how many people the captain had executed?” Harlan asked her. “I lost count after the first dozen. And a lot of the crew died in the battle. The message I sent on that spacewalk requested casualties be kept to a minimum; but no-one told that to security. Maybe if the captain surrendered, but…” With a final shrug, Harlan dismissed the subject.
As Jessa watched the vessel that had been her home for the last four years shrink into the void; she was suddenly struck by how small it was, how insignificant against the backdrop of a hostile universe.
As if to make the point, a pair of torpedoes, fired from somewhere to port, raced into sight; their bright burn trails scorching her peripheral vision. She blinked, and when her eyes sprang back open, the Kingfisher was gone, swallowed by an expanding explosion of billowing plasma.
“Strange as it may sound, I think I’m going to miss her,” Harlan said to himself.
“It’s your fault she’s dead,” Jessa pointed out, her gaze still fixed on the conflagration outside.
“Who said I was talking about the Kingfisher?” he said, kicking off against the bulkhead. “I’ll be back in a while to strap your couch back down; but right now I think my two former women need a moment together.”
“And what happens then?” she asked.
“We dock with a R’Dokken void-runner, then we rendezvous with the Hammerhead at Quosium.” Harlan voice replied. “We’ll exchange you and the rest of the crew in exchange for some juicy compensation for Gabriel’s… indiscretions.”
“What about Gabriel?” Jessa asked. “Is he still alive?”
“As much as he was last time you saw him. Keigh too.”
“So where are they now?” she continued. “It’s hard to imagine the R’Dokken just handing him over after what he’s been up to.”
She couldn’t see her husband of course, but she knew him well enough to be able to hear it when he smiled.
“Like I said, sometimes you have to make the aliens feel like they’re winning.”
***
Gabriel’s mind re-booted before his eyes did. He wasn’t sure why, but he had been expecting a headache. Certainly there hade been a great many in the recent past, or so he seemed to recall. Things had apparently improved since then, his brain felt surrounded by mist, rather than fire.
More had gone than the pain. The earlier cramped imprisonment of his thoughts had lifted as well, leaving Gabe feeling finally, luxuriantly free. It he could have stretched with his mind, he would have done; it felt like he had been asleep for days.
As the feeling of elated freedom subsided, Gabe began to realise more had changed than he had realised at first. His mind seemed almost crystalline somehow, thoughts did not so much rise and submerge as freeze and shatter. Suddenly the expanse surrounding his consciousness seemed less like liberation, and more like isolation; an endless plain of windswept ice that had swallowed him whole.
And all around him he could feel someone, something, breathing down the back of his mind. Something watching. Something hungry.
“Is the procedure complete?” he heard someone say. Gabe didn’t recognise the voice, or even the accent. Something about it was-
“It is,” came another voice.
“Then you may reactivate your sight,” the first speaker responded.
Without wishing it, Gabe found himself obeying.
Gradually his vision swam back into focus as his eyes adjusted to the green tinged light which surrounded him. The image that greeted him was wrong somehow, fractured. It was if he was staring through broken glass, except that the breaks were not the chaotic web of a shattered pane, but in regular tessellation.
But he was still fully capable of seeing the two armoured R’Dokken that stood studying from across the small, bare room.
Automatically he tried to leap to his feet, but his body would not respond. In fact, he couldn’t feel his body at all! He was left helpless and numb before his foes.
“Are you in there, Captain?” one of the creatures asked him.
His confusion at the question was ripped aside as his thoughts froze with horrified understanding.
The R’Dokken wasn’t using a translator.
That could only mean-
A child’s scream made Gabe glance to his right, although he felt no control over his neck. There, held in the thick tendrils of a third alien, lay his daughter; kicking and screaming as she was lifted from a barbaric-looking capsule, all black curves and illuminated probes.
“Keigh!” he shouted, thick with desperation and compassion, but no sound came. The presence inside his mind radiated amusement. Still trying to watch his helpless child escape the clutches of the R’Dokken, Gabe felt his gaze wrenched down to his own body.
It was no longer there. Instead, a seemingly endless line of armoured ridges greeted his horrified eyes. Thin, sharp legs rippled as they registered the cruel mockery of their owner.
“He is here. I feel his fear,” said his voice, in response to the earlier question.
God, what had let happen here? He had driven himself and his daughter into the clutches of the enemy.
Keigh, I’m sorry, was the only thought he could form.
“Excellent,” said the first alien. “Get the human spawn to the shuttles; we have no further need of her.”
“Daddy?” Keigh cried through her tears; then she was swept from the room.
“I now address you; Captain Merriman,” the alien continued. “I am sure by now you are aware that there is no way for you to respond. You are however required to listen.”
What else could he do? Desperately he tried to galvanise the alien’s muscles into action, control its body as he had done Keigh’s.
Oh, God. Keigh. How could he face what he had done to her? What she had been forced to endure.
With crippling certainty, Gabe knew whatever was to follow, he deserved it utterly.
The alien continued.
“Know also that your current… host can hear your thoughts. We have questions. Questions which you will answer. The most specific regard our companions who stepped aboard your vessel at Kellarealm Starport; but we have a great many more general questions for later. Defence codes, fleet movements, and other topics of a similar nature.”
Without the translator mangling the creature’s speech it was all too easy to make out its harsh glee.
“And you will tell us, Captain Merriman. Ordinarily I would provide descriptions of the torture methods available to us. However, it is our experience that humans rarely respond to the threat of pain, only its application.”
“Perhaps we should, as your people say, “cut to the chase”?”
There was the sudden roar as pipes above began to blast out saltwater. Each R’Dokken shed its suit, and Gabe felt feeling returning to his, no, its body. Above the sounds of the rising water, he could make out another noise, a loud vicious buzzing. His captor glanced up to show him the source of the sound; an ugly-looking buzz-saw heading inexorably towards their shared midriff.
Davis’ words floated into his thoughts “The R’Dokken sense of self-preservation is markedly less pronounced than our own”.
The saw bit into flesh just as the salt water reached the wound. As the brine flowed into the ever deepening gash, and Gabe was shredded by agony beyond description, he found he was denied even the capacity to scream.
Epilogue
Somewhere in the darkness, the artifact screamed. It had been screaming for as long as it could remember; ever since the silver creatures had wrenched it from its home in the rock. He had bellowed with rage at the shining monsters, but they had not heard, or else had chosen to ignore it. They had clutched him in their ridiculous thin appendages and stolen him away to their metal lair. There they had become pink rather than silver, and ridiculously soft and ugly. It had hated them even more then; hated them so much it had sung with the screaming. Soon enough, they had come to answer his song, and the fleshlings had died in agony and terror. The artifact was pleased.
But after a little while the long creatures made of steel had arrived, and it had found itself stolen once again. Once more it began the song, but this time there was nothing to hear. He was left with nothing but his cries, and the many-legged creatures were as deaf to them as the pink things had been.
He spent some time underwater, and saw his new captors change; grow smaller and more delicate, but no less hateful. Then the pinks had him again. And all the while he called out to the void for rescue, for deliverance. Nothing ever came.
And now here it sat, again at the mercy of the hideous coiling creatures. Once more alone and submerged, where its screams sounded strange and hollow.
But although it had almost given up hope, it refused to give up its call. One day, one day soon, it knew that it would be answered.
And then the long creatures would die. The pink things too. Every single one of them. And when that time came, he could finally stop screaming, and instead, he could begin to laugh.
The End
But after a little while the long creatures made of steel had arrived, and it had found itself stolen once again. Once more it began the song, but this time there was nothing to hear. He was left with nothing but his cries, and the many-legged creatures were as deaf to them as the pink things had been.
He spent some time underwater, and saw his new captors change; grow smaller and more delicate, but no less hateful. Then the pinks had him again. And all the while he called out to the void for rescue, for deliverance. Nothing ever came.
And now here it sat, again at the mercy of the hideous coiling creatures. Once more alone and submerged, where its screams sounded strange and hollow.
But although it had almost given up hope, it refused to give up its call. One day, one day soon, it knew that it would be answered.
And then the long creatures would die. The pink things too. Every single one of them. And when that time came, he could finally stop screaming, and instead, he could begin to laugh.
The End
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
From Autum To Spring
Some context first. Like a lot of other people, I was somewhat dismayed by George R. R. Martin's Livejournal post regarding the hate mail he's been getting over his increasingly delayed fifth installment of A Song Of Ice And Fire.
Like every other right-thinking person in the world, I have no trouble believing that anyone who writes to someone purely to tell them they aren't working hard enough (unless it's to a member of Congress) is, a priori, a dick. Nevertheless, the fact that telling someone to work harder, or to point out to them that they are fat and might die and that this would be bad for us, is the action of a grade A douchebag doesn't really change the fact that the book is stupidly late at this point. In other words, just because people are scum for lambasting you for your mistakes, it doesn't mean mistakes weren't made [1].
I wrote an email to Martin himself along roughly those lines (at least I think it was along roughly those lines, I was drunk) at the time, mainly because it bothers me when people express an idea I am kind of on board with in such an aggressive and cack-handed way. I mention all this purely to demonstrate that I am not one of the frothing must have book now loonies peppering the internet; that I'd rather have a better book later, and that only the twin fact that men are mortal and writers don't stay on their game forever make time anything of an issue.
However...
The first season of HBO's adaptation of ASoIaF will commence filming this Autumn. Assuming for the sake of argument that they film one season a year (which doesn't seem a particularly unsafe bet), then right now they will finish filming what actually currently exists in 2012. That's less than four years from now. (Edit: Jamie points out in comments that they are filming the pilot at the end of the year, not season 1, so you can probably add a year on to every date I've given here).
A Dance of Dragons has already taken more than two years longer than originally expected. Even if Martin's current completion estimate of this June turns out to be true, then it will still have taken him more than nine years to write it and its predecessor. That is to say, even if Dance... is finished by 2012 (which seems pretty likely) and then The Winds of Winter manages to materialise by 2013 (which is certainly possible, though the amount of time needed to convert it into a script format etc might be a worry), it's almost impossible to believe both Winds... and A Dream Of Spring will both be in existence by 2014.
I'm told Martin has said that should the show outpace the novels, the headsheds at HBO can come up with their own ending, with perhaps him involved steering it along.
Well, let's be clear. The show will outpace the novels. I know I can't see the future, but I will eat a particularly jaunty hat should this not occur. Well, that's maybe a bit foolish. There is obviously one way that it might not happen; the show might get cancelled before it gets to whichever season it would have to try bookless. This is hardly a preferable option, obviously. If you're going to film a serial in progress, running out of fans before you run out of material doesn't really seem like that much of an improvement.
So let's assume the show does get to the point where the writers run out of published material and decide to make shit up. The way I can see it there are three possibilities.
[1] To be absolutely fair, it appears the vast majority of the complaints weren't along such comparatively reasonable lines. Having said that, you're never going to get anywhere if you only address those who didn't have a point and ignore those who did.
[2] Full disclosure; I started reading this series in late 2002, so there are people out there who will be way more pissed than me.
Like every other right-thinking person in the world, I have no trouble believing that anyone who writes to someone purely to tell them they aren't working hard enough (unless it's to a member of Congress) is, a priori, a dick. Nevertheless, the fact that telling someone to work harder, or to point out to them that they are fat and might die and that this would be bad for us, is the action of a grade A douchebag doesn't really change the fact that the book is stupidly late at this point. In other words, just because people are scum for lambasting you for your mistakes, it doesn't mean mistakes weren't made [1].
I wrote an email to Martin himself along roughly those lines (at least I think it was along roughly those lines, I was drunk) at the time, mainly because it bothers me when people express an idea I am kind of on board with in such an aggressive and cack-handed way. I mention all this purely to demonstrate that I am not one of the frothing must have book now loonies peppering the internet; that I'd rather have a better book later, and that only the twin fact that men are mortal and writers don't stay on their game forever make time anything of an issue.
However...
The first season of HBO's adaptation of ASoIaF will commence filming this Autumn. Assuming for the sake of argument that they film one season a year (which doesn't seem a particularly unsafe bet), then right now they will finish filming what actually currently exists in 2012. That's less than four years from now. (Edit: Jamie points out in comments that they are filming the pilot at the end of the year, not season 1, so you can probably add a year on to every date I've given here).
A Dance of Dragons has already taken more than two years longer than originally expected. Even if Martin's current completion estimate of this June turns out to be true, then it will still have taken him more than nine years to write it and its predecessor. That is to say, even if Dance... is finished by 2012 (which seems pretty likely) and then The Winds of Winter manages to materialise by 2013 (which is certainly possible, though the amount of time needed to convert it into a script format etc might be a worry), it's almost impossible to believe both Winds... and A Dream Of Spring will both be in existence by 2014.
I'm told Martin has said that should the show outpace the novels, the headsheds at HBO can come up with their own ending, with perhaps him involved steering it along.
Well, let's be clear. The show will outpace the novels. I know I can't see the future, but I will eat a particularly jaunty hat should this not occur. Well, that's maybe a bit foolish. There is obviously one way that it might not happen; the show might get cancelled before it gets to whichever season it would have to try bookless. This is hardly a preferable option, obviously. If you're going to film a serial in progress, running out of fans before you run out of material doesn't really seem like that much of an improvement.
So let's assume the show does get to the point where the writers run out of published material and decide to make shit up. The way I can see it there are three possibilities.
- The alternative ending doesn't live up to what came before, because whomever decides to be in charge of wrapping shit up just doesn't think along sufficiently similar lines to Martin for it not to be horribly jarring;
- The alternative ending kicks all kind of ass, to the point when we read Martin's own conclusion (whilst sat in our Martian living rooms during our daily robo-massage) we all think it's shit, and try not to think about the decades of investment some of us have put into this series; [2]
- The two endings are quite different but equally satisfactory.
Obviously, of the three, the third one is preferable. Notably, though, it still bothers me as an idea. I suspect this is my experience of adaptations talking. I don't think I can enjoy a book as much if I've already seen a film or TV adaptation of it. I spend less time immersed in the narrative and more time cataloguing the differences between the two. Maybe I'm alone on that, but at the very least the inevitable cross-pollination will blunt the experience. When Lord Whosisname gets killed by Prince Thingimy and as a result claims the Iron Throne, "Holy shit!" is a preferable reaction to "And to think it was Ser Oojimaflip in the TV show!"
The answer to all of this is pretty obvious, I guess: don't watch the TV series. Which, my basic weakness as a person aside, is probably what I'll have to do. I suppose I'm just bummed that my best case scenario for the TV adaptation of some of my favourite novels is now "Gets to the end and doesn't fuck up the last few hurdles that someone new slapped together, in a way that doesn't actually become apparent until the books themselves are done and I can get to check the show out."
The answer to all of this is pretty obvious, I guess: don't watch the TV series. Which, my basic weakness as a person aside, is probably what I'll have to do. I suppose I'm just bummed that my best case scenario for the TV adaptation of some of my favourite novels is now "Gets to the end and doesn't fuck up the last few hurdles that someone new slapped together, in a way that doesn't actually become apparent until the books themselves are done and I can get to check the show out."
[1] To be absolutely fair, it appears the vast majority of the complaints weren't along such comparatively reasonable lines. Having said that, you're never going to get anywhere if you only address those who didn't have a point and ignore those who did.
[2] Full disclosure; I started reading this series in late 2002, so there are people out there who will be way more pissed than me.
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