On The Road to Worldcon 75 with Janos Honkonen, Kaaron Warren and William Couper

On The Road to Worldcon 75 with Janos Honkonen, Kaaron Warren and William Couper

The Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland is drawing near! To get into the mood the independent publishing house Osuuskumma has launched a series of blog posts, where writers around the world talk about their work, the fandom, cons and everything spec-fi. Let’s see what’s happening in Finland, Australia and Scotland!

Who are you people and what’s your background as an author?

Janos: I’m Janos Honkonen, a spec-fi writer in my early 40’s, and I currently live in Turku, Finland. I have so far published one novel (Kaiken yllä etana, 2013), a bunch of short stories mostly in Finnish but some in English, and some comics. I’ve released one work of interactive fiction (read: a text adventure game) that won the 2012 Spring Thing competition, and I’m incredibly lucky to have landed a full time day job writing for video games.

Kaaron: I’m Kaaron Warren, a writer living in Canberra, Australia. I have four novels and six short story collections, horror and science-fiction mostly. I’ve been writing since I was a kid and published my first short story in 1993.

Will: This person is William Couper. I’m a writer from Scotland, living in Kirkintilloch. I’ve had a few short stories published in the last few years, mostly it’s been horror, but I do meander into sci-fi and fantasy when the fancy takes me. More recently I’ve waded into the murky waters of self-publishing.

Why do you write speculative fiction?

Will: It’s fairly simple: escapism.

As a kid in Scotland if you were a boy you were expected to join the other boys playing football (or soccer, depending on your bent), but I was never that interested in the game. But, no matter where it was, at home or on the playground, the boys were expected to congregate and kick around a ball. A lot of the time I didn’t, I would go off and do my own thing, which was exercising my imagination. A lot of it based on television and films.

Horror films hooked me early, too, so when I picked up my first novel, it was a horror novel. A lot of my teenage years were spent cooped up in my room and that’s when I started writing short stories and eventually books. Writing stories I wanted to read, and still want to read.

Long story short, I write because it’s an extension of the habit of living in my own head.

Janos: I pretty much grew on old school sci-fi, such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and my favourite, Stanislaw Lem. It was discovery and escapism, but the kind of escapism where you accidentally learned new stuff and got new perspectives to the world. (Although, oh boy - does Heinlein read differently at 15 and at 35.) From sci-fi I went to horror, and cheap thrills aside, for me it kind of did to human condition what sci-fi did to the universe. Horror switched the telescope to a microscope and gave new, terrifying ideas of what humans can be.

William Couper

I’ve written stories ever since I was a kid, and sci-fi, horror and later magical realism just were a perfect fit. What I want to do is to offer the same kind of thing to the readers which I got as a young reader: being entertained and a little bit educated at the same time.

Will: I’ve never read Heinlein, but I’ve heard people say there’s a difference in reading experience depending on age. What is that difference?

Janos: FASCISM. Heh, okay, not quite the goose-stepping kind, but the ideological layer kiiinda shines through. Even in his YA-book Have Space Suit--Will Travel the protagonist (SPOILER ALERT) pretty much shrugs away the bad guys being eaten alive and the evil race being wiped off in a genocide, because “there’s a limit how much you need to understand criminals”.

Will: Ah, yes, that whole business. Ol’ Bobby Heinlein’s, um, enthusiastic politics. Stuff you don’t quite notice as a kid, but it’s like a siren once you’re older.

Janos: Like the novel Starship Troopers. Not really the sarcastic look at glorifying the military like the film is.

Kaaron: I’m probably a combination of both of you. I grew up in a household full of books, my dad being an avid reader. He loved SF and still does, so I read Heinlein, Asimov and the Nebula Winners, over and over. Once I discovered horror, through those terrifying old comics such as Weird Tales of the Macabre, I was hooked, just like Will. I discovered Stephen King via the movie version of The Shining, believe it or not. I can still remember standing in Woodwork class, hearing the radio commercial for the movie and thinking, “I’m seeing that, no matter what.”

What’s your latest publication?

Janos: When this comes out, it might be a short story called Eläimet huutaa, ihmiset ei huuda, in English “Animals scream, people don’t scream”. It was published in an anthology of body horror stories, and it’s an amalgamation of all the worst real world dentist stories I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances. The name of the story is a quote from a dentist with a real old school bedside manner.

Will: That guy sounds utterly charming.

Admittedly, It’s been a while, but the last thing published by someone else was last year with Mykes Reach in the Lovecraft anthology, Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, by Ghostwoods Books.

Kaaron: Oh, gosh, dentist stories….love that title, Janos! I wrote about a dentist in Dead Sea Fruit. She knew what sort of person her patients were by the smell of their breath. Creepy. I actually do have a collection of baby teeth that don’t belong to me or my children.

My latest story in print is Furtherest, in Cemetery Dance’s Dark Screams. Inspired by the true story of some missing children, and the dummies police made in an attempt to figure out who took them. It’s an Aussie Beach horror story.

What are you working on now?

Janos: Day in, day out, I’m of course hammering together the game in the day job. It’s a very much narrative game based on a comic, so it’s not just writing barks for enemy soldiers. I’m also trying to put together a treatment for an Augmented Reality game for another outfit, but I might have to drop that.

On the literature side of things I’m trying to get the second novel off the ground. I have one concept that got slightly overrun by a very similar award winning novel right when I was starting to write it, another good beginning where I ran into an impasse with background research, and a third one that’s too straightforward to keep my interest. So, heh - good at starting novels, but currently lacking the follow through. I’m working on a bunch of short stories, though, and I’m translating a long ass story of 18th century pirates of the Baltic Sea and modern wreck robbery in English. There’s also an English language film script on the back burner, waiting for another production to finish.

Will: I’m challenging myself at the moment. I’ve decided to do something non-fiction, but it’s still spec-fic adjacent which is...cool, right? I am putting together a book about my experiences and thoughts on Magic: The Gathering. I’ve never written non-fiction to the length I’m aiming at for this book, so we’ll see how that shakes out. It’s a totally different process of collecting your thoughts and codifying impressions. Remembering incidents from twenty years ago and trying to present them in an interesting way has been a big challenge.

Kaaron: What made you decide to focus on that part of your life, Will? Sounds like a really interesting concept! All those characters, in real life as well as in the game!

I’m working on a couple of things. Finishing a robot story for Twelfth Planet Press but being distracted by the research, as can happen so easily! I’m also working on a novel inspired in part by a jail break that almost occurred from Goulburn jail. My novel imagines what happens if they got out.

Then there’s the giant monster who lives under Old Parliament House here in Canberra, and the eternity cult story, and the one the car left abandoned by a cemetery, and...

Will: Funnily, it’s something I cover in the book itself, but to cut it down, in part it was getting back into the game last year and realising it’s been hovering around in the background of my life in the years since I was first introduced to it. Another part was because I did a short-lived column on a website about my thoughts on and experiences of the game. When the people running the site had to shutter it, I didn’t want all this work go with it.

Kaaron: I look forward to reading it. Nice that some of the work is done already!

What’s your process?

Janos: With short stories I’ve been lucky to have had a lot of those “the idea just came to me” moments. A great example is the story that I’m just about to publish in English as well, The Air Itself Caught Fire. I was taking part in an anthology, but my original idea was too derivative of an older Finnish sci-fi story, and frankly rubbish. As the deadline crept near, I decided to drop the anthology. When I was leaving for lunch from my then day job, suddenly the non-fiction book I was reading and a random thought collided, I walked to the lunch in fugue, and when I got back to the office the story was there. It took two sessions to write quite a complete first draft. Some others I’ve managed to kickstart with the “a wall of crazy composed of post-it notes” method.

With longer texts, like novels, this doesn’t really work too well. I tend to start writing with very vague ideas, and to see where the story is going. I suck at planning ahead, which is what I am learning how to do.

Will: Sitting at the keyboard.

Maybe some crying. Certainly frustration. A smattering of other vaguely clichéd writing process things.

I don’t have a fixed process. Ideas come to me from all over. I’ve had the moments of inspiration, an idea sparking or a whole story winding through my brain fully formed. The moments before I fall asleep have been good for giving birth to concepts. I’ve also simply brute forced a story or used free-writing and mind-maps.

Once I have an idea, I’ll scribble it down in a notebook. It might sit there for a while, or I’ll expand it into a plot and character sketches. From there the story will be created.

Or I’ll get an idea and white-knuckle it to the end.

My process is chaos, uncertainty and the terrible, terrible fear it won’t work this time.

Kaaron: Will, I’m with you on that terrible, terrible fear it won’t work this time! I’m never really sure, even when I sell the story. I’m always wondering what I missed, how I could have worded things better.

Like both of you, I tend to start with the idea, the moment of inspiration. In my research for the robot story, I came across a description of a ‘very slow robot’, and had this image of a robot digging for a thousand years to rescue someone. I really like it but can’t use it at the moment!

Then I’ll try to figure out what the story is about. Often this is scribbling notes and just letting my imagination wander around. It’s also researching, reading, talking to people. For the monster under Old Parliament House story, a friend mentioned the urban myth that there are great pools of diesel in the basement there, and that was the final clue I needed to finish the story.

I work out whose voice I’ll tell the story in, because that really decides where the story will go. Sometimes it takes writing a few pages of description of the place, or a nutting out of the original idea, but I usually get there in the end. Once I have the voice, I can bash out a first draft.

I usually do at least five drafts, I reckon.

Where does the magic happen? Where do you write and work?

Janos: When I was an overachieving freelance journalist, I spent over seven years writing at home, so currently whatever apartment I live in live in isn’t a place where creativity dwells in. I used to write mostly on the move, in bars and cafes and such. Unfortunately I got my neck broken for me and caught a slight case of paralysis, so I can’t be that mobile anymore. I had the huge luck of getting an awesome work room in a local game incubator, though, where I do most of my writing and game prototyping.

Will: Nothing spectacular. Due to space, I write in my living room, at a desk.

Kaaron: Gosh, Janos! A broken neck...one day you can tell us the story of how that happened. I most write at home, moving around the house, following the sun. I like to write in our National Library, which is quiet and smells of old books, and has the most amazing paper archives. I’ve found letters from artists I admire, talking about the settings that have inspired them, and much much more.

What is the zeitgeist with speculative fiction where you live ?

Janos: Right now the Finnish speculative fiction field is enjoying a golden era. The large publishers are struggling a bit, and they don’t necessarily publish a lot of “marginal” literature such as domestic sci-fi. The thing is, smaller independent publishers are popping up to pick up the slack, and there’s almost a glut of anthologies coming out every year. It’s amusing to see the non-genre critics and reporters lament “the death of short stories”, when on this side of the fence the yearly amount of published stories is around 200-300.

One noteworthy thing is that in the year 2000 a spe-fi novel won the most prestigious literature award up here, Finlandia. The novel was Not Before Sundown (Troll - a love story in U.S.) by Johanna Sinisalo.

Will: The wrongest question to ask me. I’m not one of the spec-fic cognoscenti. Anything I try to add to this will be open to accusations of almost stone age ignorance. So I won’t be foolish enough to try.

Kaaron: I’ll have to see if that novel is available in Australia! I’d love to read it. Genre is doing okay here. We still struggle to be seen at the literary festivals, though that is changing a lot with writers like Garth Nix and Kate Forsyth finding great success. We have a number of excellent small press publishers who focus solely on Spec-fic.

What is the spe-fi community like where you live?

Kaaron: There’s a goodly bunch of us here. You’ll meet a lot of them at Worldcon! I’m not sure how many are coming over, but a lot! We don’t have a lot of conventions each year (annually one in Melbourne, Perth and Canberra, with the National Convention usually held in one of those cities) and so we tend to attend them well. I’ve always found it to be a very supportive community, and I try to welcome new writers in just as I was welcomed.

Will: Again, since I’m not completely, plugged into the community, I’m not too sure. From my limited perspective, the UK as a whole has a solid bunch of people, especially on the sci-fi/fantasy side, guys like Charles Stross and China Miéville standing as giants. You’ve also got Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Alan Moore.

Closer to home, there’s Hal Duncan and Neil Williamson doing interesting stuff. There’s no doubt more and I apologise for my ignorance.

I’m not terribly sure what’s going in the horror-side of things. Which is probably terrible, given I profess to write mostly in that genre. Am I the worst? I think I might be the worst.

Janos: The sci-fi, fantasy etc. community in Finland has been very thriving and active for such a small country. We have a tradition of zines which have offered a great way to get published, Finncon has brought in guests of honour and offered the usual non-commercial con fare since the 80’s, etc. Traditionally Finncon has been quite literature oriented, but it has evolved with the times.

A thing to note is that the Finnish fandom is and has been quite egalitarian from the beginning. By this I mean it hasn’t been strictly a boys’ club where the women are seen as groupies or just girlfriends, and they don’t generally have to prove they are “real” fans. Oh, and I was told the representation of women publishing short stories in professional and semi-professional levels has been so strong, that in 2000’s it may be that more short form spe-fi is published by women than men.

Will: That’s a very interesting observation about the Finnish spec-fic scene. What do you think accounts for the higher numbers of women being published in Finland? What do you think the rest of the world could learn from it?

Janos: Someone who was in the trenches back then told me that there was a contingent of female fans right from the beginning, and female editors working in semipro zines. No doubt this paved the way to a fandom that’s more equal, and helped establish women as writers. Apparently there were some boys’ clubs, who - and I quote - “tried to reconquer their manly field, drunk and in jest”, but apparently nothing very serious. Seems like we dodged some bullets which are still drawing blood here and there, especially in video game and comic circles.

What’s your relationship with and thoughts about WorldCon?

Janos: I’m interested to see what’s it about, and perhaps to see some friends and contacts from abroad. I’m not much of a con person, frankly. I went to RopeCon a few times in the late 90’s and the turn of the millennium. No, despite the name it’s not a bondage thing, but the biggest non-commercial role-playing con in Europe. I and I’ve visited Finncon only once, which was last year when my short story was nominated for the yearly Atorox prize. I don’t have anything against cons as such, they’re just not generally my thing, especially the bigger commercial ones. I’ve been to Supanova for work, and although it was nice, it was a bit… clinical compared to the craziness of the local non-commercial cons I’ve gotten used to. I’ve also been to SDCC for work once, and man, I’d rather chew my leg off than do that again. Nevertheless, skipping Worldcon would be just stupid for both personal and professional reasons, and I’m pretty confident it will be a nice experience!

Will: I’ve heard of WorldCon, but I’ve never been. I’ve been to a few conventions before, with the idea of making contacts. The experiences have been good on a purely fun level, but an absolute failure in a business sense.

Well-run conventions are essential for the life of the communities they represent. They get people together, they build relationships. Fans getting to meet their favourite creators and like-minded folk keeps things vibrant. Creators get to talk together, compare notes or simply unwind. Conventions are a net positive for everyone.

Kaaron: Janos, there’s no way you could miss this one! I wish I was coming over for it. I went to Worldcon in Montreal, which I loved, and in Melbourne, which was fantastic because it was in my own country so nowhere near as expensive! I found both of them huge but small at the same time. There are thousands of people there, but you find your own small group, or various small groups, and hang out with them. I met a lot of people I’m still friends with in Montreal and the same in Melbourne. I’m always inspired at conventions, both with ideas for stories and motivation for keeping at it.

What is the greatest challenge for you as an author?

Will: It’s a terrible admission, but concentration is the biggest dragon I need to slay when I’m writing. When I’m fully committed, everything’s great, it’s like my mind is on rails and stuff just flows. Other times, I tap out a sentence or a paragraph and then something catches my attention and I go, ‘ooo, a shiny’ and half an hour later I haven’t written any more. It’s a constant struggle.

Janos: I’ve lately had to admit to myself that I’m not a very prolific writer when it comes to novels. With short stories I’m doing okay, I have 5-6 of them coming out in different local anthologies this year, including one translation, plus one comic. The thing is, if you want to make a career as an author, you should be able to crank out novels in some predictable fashion. Maybe things change, maybe not, but that’s what’s currently bugging me.

Also, as I mentioned, I’m not as mobile as I used to be, which makes it hard to do the kinds of outdoorsy spontaneous things I used as palate cleansers for my brain. It makes it a bit harder to concentrate on being creative. The words hide in places where I don’t have an access to anymore.

Will: Aye, the challenge of having the constant flow of work is another major thing. Because my workstyle is so, not quite random, but less than consistent, predictability is a severely limited commodity.

I also agree that having things outside of writing, no matter how small, can keep the engine turning over.

Kaaron: Definitely good to have something else going on outside of writing. I’ve heard it called ‘refreshing the wells’ and that works for me. One of my greatest challenges is finding clear amounts of time. With a family it can be tricky. Even though my kids are teenagers now, they’re all very present in the house. I decided some time ago that this can’t stop me, though. If you wait for the perfect moment and the perfect place you’ll never get anything done. So I try to get over that! I work two days a week in a second-hand shop, and that provides me with a lot of inspiration!

Janos: Oh, a store with creepy dolls. Tell me, is it one of those Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppes that you can find only when it wants to be found?

Writing with children in the house, phew - it’s sometimes hard for me to concentrate when there’s just one adult around. I guess it might build a certain kind of work ethic, though. Like you said, not waiting for the perfect moment, but barreling through.

Kaaron: Funny you should say that, Janos, because that’s how I describe it sometimes! It really does seem that way. We have the most remarkable finds there. I found the school geography book belonging to my best friend’s brother, who lives two states away and hadn’t seen the book in about 45 years! It just came into the shop!

You really do need to re-think writing time with children around. I wrote one story while making a pot of bolognese! Inspiration hit and I knew I had to get it onto paper. So I scribbled pages in between chopping the carrot and the celery, stirring in the tomatoes, all that!

What is the latest work of fiction that made a big impression on you, or your biggest influences overall?

Will: I don’t think I’ve got one, single major influence. Like my working method, it’s all chaotic. There’s not one work and there are numerous authors and I find it impossible to whittle anything down to a singular.

The first novel I read was a big guiding factor, even though it was schlocky as all hell. It inspired my love of writing and of the horror genre. Reading a lot of Shaun Hutson drew me in further, grisly and over-sexed as a lot his books are. Dean Koontz was one of my favourite authors for a long while, but, like Janos’s attitude to Heinlein, reading Koontz’s work with a more mature eye does it no favours.

I suppose an obvious influence is Lovecraft. You know, without the hideous racism. The idea of strange things inhabiting the universe that can destroy us without knowing appeals to me. And weird monsters. I like weird monsters.

Terry Pratchett is another big influence, mainly for his storytelling ability and style. I’ve read most of the Discworld books and, more recently, the Long Earth books he did with Stephen Baxter.

It’s all a bit of a mish-mash of different sources, adding lots of different flavours to what might be called ‘my work’.

Kaaron: Stephen King and Daphne du Maurier, definitely. Early influencers and I still re-read both at times. I love reading short stories, and those are what I often read. Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies are a must, as are Paula Guran’s and our Australian ones too.

Janos: Oh, I remember only one story from Daphne du Maurier, Blue Lenses. I read it as a kid, I may have been around 10 or 11, and it has haunted me to this day. I just may have a story coming out next year that just may play with a similar idea.

What has made the biggest impression on me in the last few years is Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men. It’s kind of corporate occult sci-fi, and the style is quite literary and refined. It’s a book that’s hard to pin down, but I was totally blown away. And I’ve got to say Kaaron that your novel Slights is something I’ve recommended to people maybe twice this year alone. It got under my skin in a good way.

As for the influences, I’m a big Philip K. Dick fan, and I enjoy both reading and writing stuff where the reality is somehow malleable. I guess that shows in my first novel, and the second one I’m trying to hammer together. I also want to do something like what Neal Stephenson does in his novels, which is to educate while entertaining. Almost all of his books have taught me something and made me dig up more information about the subject. I guess that’s what I aim to do with many of my short stories: to sneakily impart information about for example marine archaeology, the pirates of the 18th century Baltic Sea, the history of the atom bomb, and so forth. I guess a big part of this is also the fact that the old school hard sci-fi taught me so much about science that I want to do something similar.

Kaaron: The recently released movie My Cousin Rachel is another of hers. It opens in the book describing a gibbet. That setting inspired one of my own stories!

Shillin’ like a villain: what works of yours would you like to promote to people?

Kaaron: I have a novel out from IFWG Publishing which is the first book to win all three Australian genre awards. It also won a Canberra Critics Circle Award, which is cool! That’s called The Grief Hole. It’s the Book of the Month at the Big Book Club on ABC Canberra. You can listen to an interview about it here. There’s an illustrated version of it, by the amazing artist Keely van Order. A stunningly beautiful book.

Janos: In Worldcon, our publishing outfit Osuuskumma International will release an anthology of spe-fi stories from new and established Finnish writers, including me. The anthology is called Never Stop – Finnish Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and you can find more information here. You can buy it on paper here, and as an ebook for example in Amazon. My contribution is the story I mentioned earlier, The Air Itself Caught Fire. There’s also a collection of 100 word drabbles called The Self-Inflicted Relative out for Worldcon, and you can get it here.

The third and last volume of the comic anthologies I’ve been writing for, Torsobear, is out this summer. The genre of the anthologies is fluffy-noir, which means something like “Sin City meets Toy Story”. Great fun to write, and I got absolutely splendid illustrators for my scripts.

Will: Cthulhu Lies Dreaming is still available from Amazon and other outlets, you can find out about that here.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve published a bunch of Kindle books and they’re here.

Recently I made my novel Dark Eve available as a print edition and that is here.

Two Sides? No Sides!

We're in the final big mudslide before a general election.  Political fuckers from all sides are getting their licks in, trying to persuade us poor unejicated plebs what's best for us, in a particular tone taken by Westminster political spods.  You know, the ones who are all tied to City of London vampires.  The ones who don't want working people to get a fair shake because of some vague ideological standpoint that pay equality is bad.

Don't ask why, it just is.  Shut up and keep watching Eastenders, Coronation Street and whatever the current reality TV is.  BBC News will keep you informed of what we want to tell you and how you should think about it.  We've also got The Sun and The Daily Mail for you to read.  Oh, and by the way, inserting rusty pins into your genitals is a fucking fantastic idea.

But I digress.  That's a conversation for another time.  Or have I said all I need to on the subject already?  DRAMATIC MUSIC!

That was an interesting digression.  Right out the gate, whoosh, go off ninety degrees to where I wanted.  Back on point, fucko.

Since the Scottish independence referendum there's been heightened political engagement in Scotland.  We saw droves of people rush to join the SNP and the Greens.  In the wake of a number of promises broken and others Satanically twisted in their fulfilment, we watched as Labour turned into a pariah party in Scotland.  They and the Tories worked hard to stop people from voting for independence, and they succeeded, in an entirely, hilariously, pyrrhic way.  Instead of a small portion of the Scottish population eyeing the Westminster lunch club suspiciously, now a big chunk of the country looking really closely at that prawn cocktail and wondering how many jobs were lost in order for the tubby MP to have it.  Not that Westminster give a fuck, their most important voting demographic is also their biggest, funnily enough, and resides around the south east of England – right on their doorstep.  Still, it's something of a worrying niggle to them I imagine, like those head aches and the voices.  Oh, the voices.

No, Mister Stumpleflush, I can't possibly do that with a corkscrew...

So with all that as a wonderful background, with Scotland's populace suddenly more engaged and in a perfect position to turn the screws on Westminster.  What do we start doing the moment we've got this level of engagement?  What's the bestest idea you can think of with this all going on?  Anybody?  Nobody can guess?

We split into tribes.  Yay!  Something positive is taking place, let's suck all the fucking good from it and turn it into a Who Can Call Each Other Cunts Most contest.  Yep.  We'll erect tents at either side of a fucking ravine and scowl at each other.  Get a nice big animosity inflation unit going to blow huge floats that hurl insults at the people on the other side.  And possibly sprays cat piss at them while they're at it.

It's like a fight over territory between two factions of chimps, except without all the screaming, shit-flinging an– oh, fuck it I can't even finish that sentence.  That level of lie would implode the entire fucking planet.

It's just really nasty.  It's like there's something burrowed in human psyche that means we can't just be a majority on something.  We have to schism down the middle and throw bodily fluids at each other.  Nice foetid ones at that.  The ones we've collected in jars over the years and let get good and decomposed.

There's nothing wrong with being at different side of a political discussion.  That whole thing of robust political discourse being an important corner stone of democracy is a valid argument, but the problem is, in our fractious internet age, people retreat to be with people of the same political standpoints as them.  It's natural.  We don't want to spend every day being told we're wrong and it's good to be around smarter people who can give us ideas to defend our standpoints when we do encounter people who tell us we're wrong.  The sticking point comes when we don't leave these groups and they become an echo chamber.  Those conditions are arsehole ideology breeding grounds.

It also means when people of different political opinions come together from these places, dripping with the absolute smelly determination they're right, it turns into sloppy shit fight.  You know what's horrible in a political discussion?  I'll assume you actually want to know and haven't just wandered off with your fingers in your ears going, "I don't do this.  I don't do this," like a cunt.  It's when anyone, on any side, rolls their eyes and goes, "That's just typical of what your side says," as if to dismiss them.  I do it when I'm reading shit the Tories are up to, and I'll probably do it a dozen times today, the difference being is that I'm not in discussion with someone with a differing opinion.  Yet this is an accepted part of political discussion, even including the inevitable snorting.

It's not even isolated to internet or private conversations, it's used in the highest political discussions in the land.  This is a response you'll see in assemblies and parliaments right across the land.  Like it's some kind of all-powerful weapon against ideologies that will cut an opponent off at the knees without a response.  They're right about one thing, it is hard to respond to, outside of 'you're a cunt'.  Of course it's typical of what one political view would say if it aligns with their political view.  Fucking morons.

It ties in with the whole thing of a misunderstanding of what robust debate actually means.  Watching footage from the House of Commons is like watching a bunch of unsupervised and undisciplined school kids scream at each other from across the play ground.  It's a football away from a couple of MPs rolling around on the floor punching and biting each other.  It's rowdy, it's horrible, it doesn't get much done and that seems to be the way our political wanks want it.  If that's how top level political discussion goes, what does that leave for the rest of us?

That's right.  Festering penis scrapings.

For fuck's sake, we need to be a bit more mature about how we discuss these things.  Yes, you disagree with what that SNP person or Tory person is saying, but outright calling them a cunt isn't going to get you anywhere, even if it is justified.  Passion is good.  Passion gets shit done.  Foaming mouthed, eye-rolling raving makes people reach for the fucking cattle prod.

Pack it in you fucking idiots.


Will

Back On Pandora.

Well, it's not really back on Pandora.  In case it wasn't immediately obvious, I'm talking about the follow-up to the game I had an embarrassingly long obsession with – Borderlands 2^* – that means I'm talking about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!.  That exclamation mark seems to be quite important and makes further punctuation difficult.  I think they did it on purpose, just to annoy people.  Like me.

I'm going to go ahead and spoiler the shit out of this game.  It's been out for over a month, but if you've stumbled (miraculously, because hardly anyone seems to) on this post, haven't played Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! yet and want to, I'd close the door quietly on the way out and come back when you can tell me I'm talking shite.

I'll come out and say it right out: I enjoy this game.  I've been playing on my own and with my wife since it came out on 17^th October.  I've kept abreast of the digging into the game and know quite a bit myself, so I decided to give my thoughts on it thus far.  A review, if you will.  But I'll say it again, despite anything else I might say, I enjoy this game.  It is flawed, and because I have the best interests of the game at heart I see those flaws and want to salve them.  Not everybody's going to agree with me, but tough shit.  Opinion, man!  OPINION!  But really if I were a journalist, I'd be the kind who meekly writes the most harmless stories when I know the terrible truth and then after years is found overdosed on booze, sleeping pills and painkillers.  I'm brave, me.

So, what do we have?  I'll tell you what we don't have, it's not Borderlands 3.  That's something that needs to be said outright.  From its setting – the time between Borderlands and Borderlands 2 – to its general feel – it's a tweaked version of the Borderlands 2 framework.  Borderlands 3 will probably be an evolution of what's gone before, and although we have some interesting things happening in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! it's not different enough to be that new game.  I can see why some people have been prompted to say it's a glorified DLC, but it isn't that either, fortunately.  The campaign is too substantial and the four, going to six, playable characters are all hallmarks of a separate, if very linked and similar game.

In this game we follow Handsome Jack, the villain from Borderlands 2, as he gets help from a new group of vault hunters to overcome a new threat to Pandora.  This all takes place on Pandora's moon Elpis and involves all the Borderlands-y insanity and ludicrous violence we've come to expect since the first game.  You get a bunch of twists and turns on the road through Jack's inevitable downward spiral.  It's all fun and mostly funny.  Not everything reaches its hilarious potential.  Davis Pickle is a bit of clunky misstep, the Artful Dodger thing raised a smile for a moment and then I started rolling my eyes when he explained every...bit...of...fucking...rhyming...slang^**.   That aside the story bobs along and we're introduced to the Australian-themed moon with all the cultural nods and winks that entails.  I'm sure there are some American-baffling Home and Away and Neighbours references buried in it, fortunately I haven't seen those, and I'd be too embarrassed to admit I had – fucking soap operas.  I giggled a lot at the wider cultural references and, of course, Mr Torgue.

Also to put in the 'cool' category we actually get to hear what the vault hunters think of all the crazy shit that's going on.  Their reactions lend some humanity and, at times, hilarity to the narrative and its nice not to be in control of a voiceless cypher.  Especially as there's the sense that these are supposed to be independent characters and not faceless clay to be moulded like in any number of RPGs.  Some of the dialogue can get tiresome, though, especially if you're playing the game for an extended time.  For the most part it works and is an extension of what was done with the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep campaign expansion.  And including different voice overs for the two (current, because after the implementation of Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode in Borderlands 2 I'd be surprised if it didn't make a return here) playthroughs was a great choice as well.

The game feels like Borderlands 2 and the characters and weapons handle in much the same way.  The addition of lower gravity and air-poverty are cool.  The need for oxygen in large parts of the game isn't as terribly intrusive as people feared and it's a lot of fun to use it to soar over Elpis and slam down on...I would say unwitting, because some enemies seem to be fucking clairvoyant...foes.  The enemies are still almost mindlessly aggressive, so you have situations where they are trying to shoot at you through walls, which is frankly weird.  The new cryo element is another great addition and much better than slag.

Now, we come to the segue-way from me being purely complimentary to me being critical.  Loot is still a problem in this game.  Mostly, you can charge through with the weapons you pick up, get from the golden chest or missions^†.  What if you want the rarest of the loot?  The legendaries.  There are a bunch in this game, some of which return from Borderlands 2 or look exactly like ones in Borderlands 2, which was a bit disappointing in itself, but not awful and gave a little extra bit of familiarity and a link to the games nominally bracketing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.  The drop rates are still an issue, one-in-thirty from sometimes quite challenging enemies still feels mocking.  It's even worse, now that I know that legendaries, skins and heads are all linked to the one pool.  Character customisation shouldn't have to come at the expense of hours upon hours of grinding and legendary equipment shouldn't be made even harder to get because those same customisations push them out.  You shouldn't need to fight a raid boss thirty times to get a single legendary, if anything it should have a high chance to drop multiple legendaries.  It all goes back to what I said before about the difference between frustration and fun, dudes.  There have been people who defend this policy, often with empirical data, but the act of playing a game isn't quantifiable with numbers, it's a lot more about how a player feels and if we feel like we're getting a bit screwed (whether we are or not) it's going to impact our enjoyment and whether we pick up another one of your games.  Here's a wee, hastily thought out suggestion for those with the numbers mind: have a sliding scale dependent on the type of boss.  Mini-bosses will have a one-in-twenty chance to drop their legendaries, main bosses have one-in-ten or -twelve and raid bosses have one-in-five for one, one-in-ten for an extra and one-in-thirty for a third.  Raids should never drop anything lower than blue, either.  That would make raid bosses more rewarding and rewarding is what this is all about, right?  I'm sure I'm right.

This neatly moves me onto the other great frustration about the game and that's the non-respawning enemies with assigned loot-drops.  Why have an enemy, with a legendary that has that horrible drop rate, that you can't get to go after again?  It beggars logic and it's ruler-across-the-knuckles mean.  I can see a vague argument that it's in keeping with Borderlands, but why add such an unfair feature?  There are plenty of call-backs to the first game and that's one of the shittier ones.  It's a bizarre decision, but then Gearbox seem to enjoy their bizarre design and gameplay-tweaking decisions.  The most recent of which was lessening the drop rate of a grenade from an uncommon enemy, when most players hadn't seen the drop.  I think it comes from a bunch of people saying they'd seen this item drop a few times.  This was a tiny percentage of a community that, has been said time and again, is a tiny percentage of the overall player base.  It's nice that Gearbox pay attention to the community, but this is just silly – it wasn't game-breaking and the item dropped isn't that great, so why mess with it?

Admittedly, the legendary problem has been mitigated by the addition of the Grinder, into which you can throw items you don't want and possibly get items of better quality.  That's a fucking cool feature, I have to admit.  They've also boosted the quality of the equipment you can buy from vendors, so that legendaries have a good chance to appear in the items of the day.  And it's even better when you can afford them, and it means money actually has value again in a Borderlands game.  Those are design decisions I can approve of.  However, not everyone wants to play that way, they might be weird and messed-up^‡, but some people like to farm allocated drop sources for their stuff.  These people don't want to stand at the grinder hoping to get the item they want, they want to go out and find a high-powered enemy and make them PAY!  Reducing so many enemies to single-instance encounters robs the players of end-game experience.  And we want end-game experience, we want to play this for ages.  Choice is a big part of the Borderlands experience and the choice to get equipment in different ways will extend the life of the game more than making enemies bullet sponges.

And that's the problem, and a problem I understand Borderlands 2 suffered from early on, too, there's not that much to do once you've completed the game a few times.  The single raid boss isn't enough to sate most players.  There is more content to come and that's good.  There is a single campaign add-on advertised.  I really hope this is groaning with content.  An absolute ideal is something that's as long as Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! main game.  That's unlikely, but it would be wonderful if it happened.  Regular events would be another fantastic way of boosting the life of the game.  Things like scaled-down versions of last year's Loot Hunt event would be fantastic, with a weekend or a week of an item or two getting a drop boost.  We've already had the Jack-o'-Cannon in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! for Halloween and it was a great bonus.  You have the power to make us want more, Gearbox!  You know, by giving.

So those are my thoughts on Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel after over a month playing it.  It's a great game and, with a few tweaks, can be a terrific game.  I'll be playing it for some time to come.  Shooting insane arseholes in the face is surprisingly addictive.

^* And you can read all about that creeping insanity: here (part one) and here (part two), if you're so inclined.  The first one caused a tiny (not being ironic, it really was barely visible) stir on the Gearbox forums, but hardly anyone read the second.  Maybe I got gun shy after the first.  Some people got quite aggressive and unpleasant and it didn't encourage me to want to discuss the matter on the forum further.  A needless explanation there, for people who didn't care.  And unexpected poetry!

^** His sister, the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady-inspired, Eliza does the same.  Now, she's a character that deserves the hate Pickle gets on the Gearbox community forum.  In a game full of nasty sociopaths, she is one of the worst: screwing people over and leaving others for dead is all par for the course in Borderlands, but we're expected to like Eliza.  Problem is there's nothing about her that is likeable.  Even Handsome Jack's funny.  Eliza is just a monster and it feels off, even for Borderlands, to let her go about her dastardly business.

^† Admittedly, the mission rewards are still some of the best in the game.

^‡ Okay, okay, it is fun to go off and shoot a baddie in the face until he tearfully hands over the legendary you've been after.  Within a reasonable time-frame, not three days.



Will




P.S. Gearbox, gies a writing job.  I can write good!

Goodbye, Doctor.

Well that was a big pile of fucking terrible.  Obviously some of you out there don't agree.  You're strange and wrong, of course.  What am I talking about?  Doctor Who, of course.  That little BBC show that was off the air for about fifteen years and was brought back in 2005, to much fan fare and fandom creaming.  Really, about nine years down the line the shine's tarnished a bit.  And by 'a bit' I mean its now about as shiny as a tennis ball.  So it goes without saying I feel the need to go on a spoiler-ridden rant about it.

Seriously.  SPOILERS, morons.  If you don't want anything given away because you haven't caught up don't read on.  Although, I don't think anyone who is interested in Doctor Who will be behind that much.  You never can tell.

I'll admit I was one of the many people who got very excited when it was announced Doctor Who was going to return.  I watched it as a kid.  From what I learned more recently I was the only one in my household who enjoyed it.  How's that for making you feel shit?  Makes me feel like I was some kind of pre-pubescent dictator of the television.  That just sounds hilarious when thrown out into the ether.

So, the excitement in the year or so before Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to the screen was quite palpable^*.  Christopher Eccleston was a good choice.  An actor with gravitas and the ability to play it light.  And ears, such magnificent ears.  My enthusiasm lasted through that first series.  Even then, there were concerns.

I mean the format for Doctor Who was always multi-part stories, told in half-hour chunks.  Davies came back and changed the format to stand alone forty-five minute stories.  It wasn't too terrible, for a while, but we'll come to that.

Then there was Rose Tyler.  In the first of this new series, the preoccupation with the companion was quite refreshing.  Rose Tyler wasn't a terrible character, and I was surprised how good an actress Billie Piper is, being more accustomed to her previous incarnation as teeny pop performer.  Now I see that's when the rot started to set in.  Russell T. Davies ran with this and Steven Moffat's taken that cue and gone further with it.  The companion being either a fawning cypher or unreasonably stubborn.  Whatever the companion, they shoved in one of my pet hates about modern storytelling: the pathological need to have a romantic subplot.  It's not the pinnacle of story, most of the time it's as interesting as overhearing a loud teenager's phone call.  Now we're here, on the cusp of the abyss^**.

The latest series of Doctor Who has been a dismal affair.  It's not just the preoccupation with the companion, in this case the empty vessel that's Clara Oswald, but let's dwell on it a moment.  In a show that's ostensibly a fantasy/science fiction premise, it felt like a lot of time was lavished on the life of Clara Oswald.  It's happened since Rose Tyler, through What's-Her-Name^† and Amy Pond.  These last series it's been turned up a couple of notches.  To the point it felt like a standard drama with some sci-fi spotted through.  Not even interesting drama.  The most mundane and boring stuff they could dredge up:
     "What's for tea tonight?"
     "Chips."
     "Oh, okay...Oh look.  The Doctor."
Wouldn't have been so bad if the sci-fi stuff counterpointing it was at all interesting, but it was like a shot of beige thrown into a wall of grey.

It doesn't help that Steven Moffat can't seem to write women.  This post here details his many crimes against women characters.  Clara Oswald was a dull character who was supposed to have strong traits, but never managed to show them.  She could have been played by a washcloth on a stick with 'Clara Oswald: Strong Female' stitched on it^‡.  In the last episode of the latest series The Mistress describes her as a 'control freak'.  What?  I never got that.  You can't just say that without having the character display it.  She was deceitful and wilful when she wasn't being a compliant puppet, but control freak?  And her wilfulness was always used in the most stupid way, in order to advance a plot that was in danger of plunging down a hole and managed to find another one.  Not that plot holes worry Steven Moffat much...

...Because, as Cracked observed, Doctor Who currently lives in a fucking plot hole.  And fuck does it.  I couldn't even tell you what the last few episodes were about, they were such a mess.  I have been chided in the past about my stories lacking internal logic.  You know, that thing where, no matter how nonsensical something is in a story, it makes sense in context.  Sapphire and Steel was great at it.  Most people couldn't follow what the fuck was going on, but there was a sense of some underlying logic that you just didn't understand.  Current Doctor Who tosses that out the window BECAUSE SOMETHING FUCKING COOL IS HAPPENING!  That only works in small doses, when entire episodes are full of contradictions it gets tiresome.  It feels like the writers have been throwing things on a page and hoping they miraculously come together.  That only works with stir fries.

I could even forgive the twisted mess the stories have been if they had been interesting, but they have completely lacked any kind of excitement.  You can see they want to be, like the kid who's wearing the glasses and drawn-on scar, really wants to be Harry Potter, but doesn't quite do it.  Russell T. Davies wasn't great at this kind of narrative excitement, but he did manage it, possibly by pure chance, in all the arm-flailing and scurrying around.  These recent episodes have been plodding affairs desperately pointing at the screen and shouting, "See!  Excitement!" while pointing at a tree.  The stakes never felt that high.

The stakes should have felt high, since the reboot, the series has been running on series-wide arcs.  These in themselves aren't a problem, but it's the need for a new story every week that's ground down the poor show.  It's the same problem that dogs American television, with its obsession for twenty-two and -four episode series.  It gets tired.  There's only so much that can be mined out of a premise.  Before for Doctor Who, that took almost thirty years, with the previous longer-form, multi-part stories, but it's been accelerated this time with so many stories being thrown at us in a series.

And the cardinal problem, for me, is that in a show called Doctor Who, we haven't seen that much of the Doctor.  Whether that's actually the case, I don't know, I'm sure some pedant will show me a spreadsheet showing, empirically, the Doctor was in the show the most.  The problem is, stories don't run on empirical evidence, they run on feelings and if you leave viewers feeling like the eponymous character hasn't been seen enough, you've done something tragically wrong.  Yes, they pulled it off in Blake's Seven, but there was actually a valid narrative reason: Blake was dead.  What's Doctor Who's excuse?  Steven Moffat wants to concentrate on Clara and Danny going down to Asda?  We really need to know how many times a week they see each other?  Come on, that's not drama, that's a desperate bid to make people turn off the television.

For me, after discussing it with my wife, it comes down to a basic problem: Doctor Who is a pure nostalgia-fest.  People who watched the original run, like yours truly, and loved it.  We are hoping for a snippet of that feeling, but for me at least, it's not coming.  I've tuned in week after week only to be disappointed and bored again.  Yes, there have been good things, but they're bogged down and buried by the utter shit.  Don't trot out that tired, "it's a kid's show" bit, because that's no excuse for shitty writing.  Doctor Who is tired now and I suspect a proportion of people tune in hoping it improves, only to be disappointed, their little forty-five minutes of sadness on a Saturday night for a few weeks.  This could be the only thing keeping it afloat.

After the Christmas episode, I'm out, and I'll probably cringe my way through that.  I can't handle the disappointment any more.  I can't handle the fucking terrible stories, either.  The final episode of the recent series was an exercise in not creating tension.  It was remarkable that scenes with a plane besieged by Cybermen could be so boring.  It was so bad I can't even come up with an amusing simile that encapsulates tedium.  But Michelle Gomez was fucking amazing.

There are some things that can be done to improve it: for a start, give us the Doctor, doing things, being mad, solving problems like a fucking beast.  He's smart and he's resourceful, but that hasn't come across well recently, because he's been mostly absent.  Ditch the cult of the companion, it's the worst while giving us an interesting companion, even go so far as a non-human or non-contemporary human.  Think through what's happening in the story more, dude.  Pulpish madness only works when there's a baseline somewhere, without that, doesn't matter how mental that baseline is, the viewers are floating around with a nothing plot.  I'd even plump for longer story arcs, two or three episodes to tell a story and let it breath more – the, "woo! thrown into the plot" thing makes me weary.

None of the above will happen, mind you.  Too many people are vocal in their love of Doctor Who, but for me it's lost its appeal.  It's a bit sad, but I'll be off watching things that are fun, instead of hoping for another episode of Doctor Who to end.

^* I may have jumped up and down clapping at one point.  It's out there, deal with it.

^** Hyperbolic?  Me?  I resent your unspoken implication and challenge you to a duel.  That I won't turn up to and call you a prick for going.

^† Yeah, I skipped the series with Catherine Tate, because I found her comedy vapid and unfunny, I couldn't imagine watching her as a companion.  I might have been wrong in my assessment, but that's where we are.

^‡ Before anyone starts shouting at me for some misogynistic slight, Danny Pink could have been played by another washcloth on a stick with 'Danny Pink: Man'.



Will