Fresh Perspectives: Star Trek V – The Final Frontier

Another installment in the Fresh Perspectives line, reviews written for the Genesis Basingstoke sci-fi club magazine.

Spock: Please, Captain. Not in front of the Klingons.

This is the latest in the series looking at classic film franchises and examining them with a fresh pair of eyes. We’re up to the fifth Trek film (even though I didn’t start writing the reviews until ST IV), and this is the one that gets all the dark mutterings, particularly about lack of budget and writers’ strikes and a certain professional …rivalry between William Shatner and James Doohan, culminating in Scotty being made to look a right fool. Galaxy Quest satirised the lack of a rock monster attacking Kirk in the end scenes, but in a sense paid homage to the film, which in my opinion is a profound exploration of the human condition …IN SPAAAAACE :D.

Not to be too clichéd, it’s a film of two halves. The first half is space fantasy, looking like a desperate need to attract Star Wars fans with the desert planet of Nimbus III and a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’ known as Paradise City, where even the Federation consul has gone native with apathy and exhaustion. The second half centres around the Enterprise’s odyssey to the centre of the galaxy (which I’ll excoriate in a moment), and the Vulcan Sybok’s takeover of the Enterprise and journey to the Promised Land of Sha-Ka-Ree at the centre of the galaxy. (OK, I’ll excoriate the bad science and bad continuity now. Star Trek lore has it that the centre of the galaxy is inaccessible even with FTL travel. I personally thought it was a metaphor for heaven and Sybok a suicide bomber trying to get his 72 virgins in attempting the impossible, so let it pass. But the second bit of bad science in it is…a planet at the centre of the galaxy. Think about it. No. Just no.)

The premise is, unlike the science, watertight. The execution is gorgeous, considering the limitations on the budget. Sybok is a convincing villain, pulling out all the stops to get on board the Enterprise, and actually saving them from the Klingons, still with a grudge against Kirk from a couple of films ago, only to end up with the crew at his mercy. Somehow, he manages to get Sulu and Uhura hypnotised and overcomes Chekov by some method we don’t know quite yet. Kirk, Spock and Bones are flung into the brig. Cue banter between Kirk and Spock, who couldn’t kill Sybok because they miraculously share the same father (despite twenty years of not knowing this, another convenient ass-pull for the writers, and I see how it could infuriate some fans) and an explosive entrance from Scotty, who has escaped Sybok’s slow takeover of the ship.

Let’s stop there and go back a bit. Firstly, the dusty desert of Nimbus III are balanced well with the stunning backdrop of Yosemite, where Kirk and co are relaxing on ‘shore’ leave. The tone of the film is set well by their discussion of the theme of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, an odd choice of song to revolve a plot around, but the more we get into the film, the more the idea of rationality versus irrationality takes over. This film, despite its reputation, was beloved of Sheldon Cooper, him off The Big Bang Theory who makes Spock look positively warm and empathetic and everyone laughed at him for saying so. It seems superficially obvious why – Sybok’s main tool of manipulation is of the emotions and inner pain of the Enterprise’s crew. It could be seen as antipathetic to the notion of human warmth and the need for the assertion of control over the instinct and emotion within us – a very Sheldonian notion. However, the message is actually embodied by Kirk: that inner pain is not a source of shame to be exploited – Sybok is turning uncomfortable memories against the crew, even targeting Spock’s soft half-human underbelly – but an integral part of one’s identity. Confront this, and like Kirk you gain mastery over the self, such that other people cannot wield it as a weapon against you.

This is a message that runs deeper than keeping a cold, unemotional front up as a shield against the world. I’ve always felt that some fandoms don’t quite get that message – one example being the brouhaha over a My Little Pony episode (Feeling Pinkie Keen from Season One, if you wish to look it up) which seemed to tick skeptics off for not being able to make leaps of faith reverberates around fandom to this day. Many disgusted bronies feared allowing their kids to watch that episode, lest they fall into an anti-logical trap designed for them by people of an anti-intellectual bent. At the other end of the continuum, It’s like the evangelicals who fulminate against Harry Potter because he uses magic, but don’t see J K Rowling’s real message about the nature of good fighting evil. Both sides, etc. But I think that MLP episode had a similar message to this one: that not everything is a battle solely between reason and unreason. Sometimes those who are too dependent on reason forget the inner senses and refuse to put their trust in things they can’t immediately see. Friendship and family ties are some of those magical properties where a leap of faith is sometimes required to create a bond between two people. After all, Spock is the one who refuses to kill Sybok, something Kirk might not have hesitated to do. He, the stony-faced high priest of Reason, takes a leap of faith that Sybok will not destroy them all.

In confronting what is really there on Sha-Ka-Ree, Sybok is mistaken. The arch-manipulator has been hoisted by his own petard; he was manipulated himself by an entity he thought to be God, but turned out to be an evil entity that needed a starship to escape his prison. Just as Kirk looks like he is ridiculing and rejecting God, however, the end of the film sends the message home that God isn’t ‘out there’. He’s ‘in here’. Warning people about pursuing false Gods – whether in the pursuit of power, money or other selfish concerns – is a message Christianity shares with Trek philosophy and other humanist doctrines.

I think I can safely give this one 5 Plutos out of 5. As you know from previous reviews, I have a low threshold for verisimilitude, and I don’t think I could find a single major fault with the film. It was engaging from the start, the last battle which Jeremy thought all a bit simple for the Klingons to destroy the evil entity wasn’t really that bad (to prolong it at that point would have cost money the crew didn’t have, and actually might have made the film a bit too long), and the comic bookends have some genuine warmth and emotion in them rather than just being a bit silly and trite.

Watch this film again. I dare you.

Birthdates

This month’s /r/fantasywriters competition entry: the brief was to write a comic story about magic getting out of control from fellow WordPress blogger and fantasy author WordsWithSharpEdges:

I love me some serious, thoughtful fantasy… but sometimes it’s fun to let your characters go on a romp and do something ridiculous like undermine the fabric of reality to impress a date or accidentally unleash eldritch horrors on the world while researching where missing socks go. In 2,000 words or less, write a funny short story where magic goes horribly wrong (or horribly right).

It’s also another adventure featuring Zbigniew ‘Zbych’ Piech, the captain depicted in my short story, The Orderly, available free from Smashwords via the link above. 

Birthdates

“Can’t let them get away with it, the murderous bastards.”

“What by Pierun the fleet was doing sailing away from Velikoryb at the time I don’t know.”

“Why you here then?”

“Well…s’appened now, ain’t it?”

“They’re evacuating Achava. Why aren’t they shipping us off? We’re closer than they are…”

“They’d ’ave to cross the Middle Mountains to get to us. They’d go for the Salvats first – the road’s wide open and Podhalensko’s just a coal-heap. Pile of slag’s not going to stop ’em if they’ve already got two cities of ours.”

Zbych passed through the outer office on his way into the receiving room. The first posters had gone up yesterday, the ink still wet from the printers; the first advertisements had been placed in the newspapers that day. The first refugees were arriving in Krovt, soaked to the bone with autumn rain.

And the first people were grousing about the Empire’s stupidity in moving that damn fleet back to Glasberg, even as they had come to volunteer to defend it.

As the clock struck nine hours, he was greeted by the press of bodies, and a queue that snaked all the way round the side of the Military Hospital in Krovt, several deep. Nothing like the thought that they were only a hundred and fifty versts away from the front to mobilise a city’s population.

“Here, guv’nor – you taking everyone?” a young man chirped as he gave the captain a playful shove.

“Most people, yes. If you can walk and hold a gun, you can fight. Stand aside.”

There was a little more to it than that, and this should have been done three months ago when the Lenks were first rattling their sabres. It could have been more orderly, and mobilisation might have discouraged them from landing on the dockside and attacking tenements full of ordinary people.

Zbych squeezed into the office where the recruiting sergeant was pushing back men from the table. “Any trouble, Vasya?”

At that point, one enthusiastic volunteer almost took the sergeant’s spectacles off with his copy of the illustrated journal Okno k Miru, Window on the World, a special edition with the army’s begging letter on its front cover.

Zbych shook his head and sat down, opening up another line. “Calm down,” he barked. “You’ll all get served.”

The room hushed.

“That’s better.”

The sergeant turned his eyes back to his own group of men. “You must be a wonder on the parade ground, captain,” he said as he handed the beetle-browed young man in front of him a card and told him to take himself to the medical officer. “You’re going to need it with this lot.” His lips had formed the word rabble, but he had thought better of it.

“It helps, Vasya.”

“You don’t sound too convinced,” the sergeant replied.

***

“I’m afraid you’re too old, sir,” Zbych said, looking up into the eyes of a besuited man with sagging cheeks, fiddling with his watch-chain. “We only take those under forty.”

“I’m thirty-nine,” the man asserted. “I’ve not yet turned forty and I was…” He tapped the pamphlet he carried. “Look here: ‘18-40 year olds’. You’ve got to let me join up. I was born in Syevirmetyevo. Those are my relatives, sir…It’ll be short! Over by Yule, they’re saying! The Empire can’t possibly allow the beasts to take two cities without repercussions.”

Zbych took the pamphlet. Normal recruitment was up to the age of 35, but with the enemy pouring onto Krovot and Salvat soil like ants, forty was permissible. There were some men who looked to be in their late thirties in the corridor pushing their snouts into the room in quiet anxiety that by the time they got their uniforms it would be over. Zbych fixed the man with a stare.

It hit him right before the eyes. The man had only just turned forty-one. In fact, Zbych could read his exact date and time of birth. It came to him in a flash of light and a whirling of calendar dates, like the spinning numbers on his desk back at the barracks. 13 Sierpien, 1,930th year of the Insulan Calendar; in other words, 13 Sickle, the eighth month of the year. This was the end of Vieriesien, Heather, the ninth month.

“You’ve been forty-one for six weeks, haven’t you?” Zbych said.

The man, who had been nervously fingering his watch-fob and had his eyes cast down, nodded.

“You do realise you’d have had to show your papers at some point,” the captain said. “No getting away with it.”

“But you said…”

“We’re also at the mercy of the doctors,” Zbych said, cursing his simplistic statement earlier on. “If they don’t pass you fit, you won’t be going. If you want to help, the war office will need people. A good reference from your employer and you can help fill a younger man’s place at the stavka. But I suggest you remain in your current position. If the Middle Mountains are crossed or Podhalensko falls, we’ll be reassessing the situation. For now, Krovt is safer than you think. The trains out are packed enough as it is.”

Image by Gabriella Fabbri, duchesssa, stock.xchng. Filter by blog author

***

Zbych had known of his talent for ordering people about, and been wary about misusing it; no-one liked a bully. But this new ability seemed to have little consequence for his reputation. He checked everyone. He had to do it consciously, but for most people the dates fell in the right place and he waved people through. After a while, the vision of a spinning calendar disappeared, and he only saw the numerals.

Some he turned down pleaded that they were terrifically fit for forty, having followed this-or-that physical culture correspondence course. Some were old soldiers themselves, decorated the last time the Lenks had been restless and had to be put in their place, but Zbych noted that one man was even carrying a cane and trying to pass himself off as fit. He got a few pugnacious women try to pretend to be boys, but recommended that they seek employment in munitions factories further south if they could leave the city.

By the end of the day there were still people waiting, but he was permitted to clock off and hand over to another shift of officers. He walked down the line towards the entrance to the officers’ mess, looking at them through these new lenses and sending a few of the too-old and too-young packing. The sergeants were normally accommodated elsewhere, but he invited Vasya to the commissioned men’s refectory as a reward for his hard work. They sat down at a table, and Zbych produced a case of cigarillos. “Better than those papirosy.”

“Yup,” Vasya said.

Zbych lit a smoke, leaned back and relaxed. As his mind unravelled from the day’s stress, he suddenly blinked in surprise. Each person around him now wore their date of birth on their sleeve. The mess stewards. The orderly cleaning the floor and emptying the bins. A woman draped over the arm of her aristocratic lover, who was flouting the rules and had brought her in from outside, though no-one cared. Vasya himself.

He rubbed his eyes.

Then it seemed as if everything had a birth-date. The chairs and tablecloths, the food arriving on the table. The curtains delicately screening the continuing clamour of the new recruits from view.

The mess was plastered and painted in fresh colours, but he could see the date on which that paint was applied, not that long ago according the long string of numbers unfolding across the wall. The glass on the window beyond the curtains was etched with another date, and the ceilings bore their own stamp. He gripped the table as if the room was spinning.

Vasya had his hand on Zbych’s arm. “We need a glass of water,” the sergeant begged of the steward who had already brought them their meal.

“17 Travien,” Zbych said, nodding. He frowned.

“What? What has my birthday to do with anything?” Vasya asked.

“29 Sychen.” Cutting-month.

“Is that your birthday?”

Zbych shook his head and put his hand up to his mouth, as if he had just breathed fire.

Vasya chortled. “Come on, sir, enough of this. You’ve been doing this all day, telling people when they were born. Let it go.”

“1 Tsvetien.”

“Flower-month? What’s got into you?”

“25 Zhovtien!” Yellow-month.

“Knock it off, captain. You’ve had your joke.”

Zbych put his head in his hands and tried to articulate what he thought was happening, but each time he opened his mouth, a random date came out.

The sergeant stood up and called over a steward. “Get Doctor Chislenko. He knows magic when he sees it. Maybe he’ll know what’s going on.”

Zbych took a drink of water, hoping that this might solve the problem, but it didn’t. He stood up and ran out of the room.

 ***

Doctor Arvid Chislenko stood over Zbych in the private consulting room. “Bit of an embarrassing problem, eh, Piech?”

Zbych nodded, dumbly. He could still see all the dates on which everything was made; the room’s equipment was brand new, the bedlinen, the stethoscope, even Chislenko’s chair. The Osipovo hospital had recently been upgraded at vast expense. A couple of friends had complained that the money had gone to the army rather than the shabby public infirmary in Krasnaya Polyana. In amongst his fear at the runaway talent, he was curious as to what he’d see there if he dared look.

“Well, don’t worry about this being permanent,” the doctor said in his pinched voice. “You’re not mad. Just under the influence, so to speak, of what happens when we forget magic is a tool rather than a crutch.”

Zbych smirked and coughed.

“It’ll wear off overnight. I could put you out with valeriate if you want.”

The captain opened his mouth, and then realised what might happen if he spoke. So he reached for a scrap of paper on the doctor’s desk, manufactured on the 9 Sierpien the previous year. 4 Krasien 12 Bieriesien 6 Liutiy he wrote.

“Nice handwriting,” Chislenko observed.

Zbych flung the pencil across the room.

“Temper, temper. You’re a grown man, not a little boy. Nod for yes, shake your head for no. Now, would you like to go to sleep now? To save yourself from further humiliation?”

Zbych nodded.

Doctor Chislenko gave a cold smile and mixed up a glass of sedative. “Go and get ready for bed, and for goodness sake don’t try and communicate with anyone. I’ll let the brass know what’s happened.”

 ***

“Will I be able to do that again?” Zbych asked the doctor a few days later, the next time they ran into each other in the mess. The recruitment surge continued, and men were awaiting dispatch to the front. The regular army was holding Podhalensko, but the Lenks had reached the Kila at Paszynsko in Salvatka, eighty versts from Krovt, where an artillery battalion had held the Krovot bank making use of an old fort and prevented the enemy from crossing the river.

“You mean determine someone’s age just from looking at them?”

Zbych nodded. As Chislenko had prophesied, the night’s sleep had done him good and he had been hoarse but speaking properly in the morning.

“You still have that ability, but a magician must keep control of his talents,” Chislenko said with a curt nod. “There’s a reason you don’t like to bark orders at people, isn’t there?”

“I want people to love and respect me. I read about how Bulovkin cultivated his regiment and gained their loyalty through kindness rather than fear.”

“But they won’t if you make a fool or a bully of yourself. Am I right?”

Zbych took a drink of his tea. “You’re right.”

“Good man,” Chislenko said, with a smile, warmer this time.

Fresh Perspectives: Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

The second in a series of film reviews originally published in the Genesis Sci-Fi club magazine. I write a column reviewing older movies as well as recent releases in a semi-coherent fashion. This is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The rating system is plutos, a gold standard our book group made up because a Pluto is neither one thing nor the other, as were a lot of the books were were reading. Enjoy.

What does it mean, ‘exact change’? – Spock

The title to this excellent slice of the Star Trek pie is a little misleading. The crew, still effectively renegade at the end of The Search for Spock, take a detour in time to save Earth from a sinister probe ionising the atmosphere in the 23rd century, and end up in the 20th century – very conveniently in the time at which the film was made! – searching for the solution. Which is…

…whales. Humpback whales. Whose song is the only thing that can reassure the probe and get it to leave Earth alone (yeah, it’s the sort of story that sounds like it really ought to be about sharks, as in jumping sharks, but let me finish). And nuclear wessels, courtesy of Chekov. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The problem for Earth is that these whales are extinct and so the gang must find a way of getting a specimen to the 23rd century.

This is a hilarious film, quite far removed from the erudite seriousness of much of the Trek franchise, and I enjoyed the way it played out without a major battle for ascendancy, even at the climax of the film. Instead, Kirk takes a genuinely peaceful approach to researching acquiring his maguffins, and there are opportunities for some excellent misunderstandings as the crew make their madcap way through San Francisco in 1986. Some of it is utterly predictable – the marine biologists are running out of money and George and Gracie, the humpback whales, are to be released into the wild just at the start of the whaling season.

The wild-eyed biologist, Gillian Taylor, is up against the evil bean-counters, and Kirk has to convince her to trust him as to his intentions, largely through schmoozing her at a nice restaurant. But there are a lot of light touches that stops the film being Star Trek: Free Willy. Spock’s swimming with the whales is a neat touch; his communion with them through telepathy is heartwarming; despite his often cold demeanour, he really cares about the future – in his first scene, we see him doing some idle research, possibly on the 23rd century’s version of Wikipedia, and he drops the hint that ‘humpback whales are extinct’, showing us that the law of conservation of detail is alive and kicking. (Anton Chekhov – the Russian playwright – once said: ‘If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’) I guess this is when ‘Save the Whales’ could be played unironically, but obviously the deeper message of the film continues to be one of grave importance.

The film progresses in a haze of bon mots, cheesy subplots such as the adventures of Chekov looking for a new power source for their vessel, and other mayhem caused directly by the clash of cultures. The point at which one expects Chekov to be booked as a spy is brushed aside with a laugh – even they think he’s somewhat … mentally deficient. I get the impression they wanted to make something cheaply and cheerfully, and it certainly works well to keep the viewer’s attention.

I’m going to give it four out of five plutos; it is a little cheesy and contrived, but it doesn’t suffer overly much for it and it delivers a few moments of classic comedy to keep it from becoming far too ponderous a story. The really nice thing is that, like when Marty McFly in Back to the Future was quite happy to swap his initially crappy existence in the wastelands of small-town America for a better life where his father was a famous sci-fi author, so is Gillian Taylor not overly bothered about going forward to the future with Kirk. The thing that had me thinking was ‘did they violate the Prime Directive by interfering with a culture without FTL travel?’, but that’s a bit pedantic of me.

Go watch this film again. I doubt we will get a remake of it, so it’s a moment of Trek history that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is all the better for it.

But don’t forget — exact change only.

Fresh Perspectives: Iron Man 3

The first in a series of film reviews originally published in the Genesis Sci-Fi club magazine. I write a column reviewing older movies as well as recent releases in a semi-coherent fashion. This is Iron Man 3. The rating system is plutos, a gold standard our book group made up because a Pluto is neither one thing nor the other, as were a lot of the books were were reading. Enjoy.

Iron Man 3

Tony Stark (the indefatigable Robert Downey Jr) is just perfecting his latest way of getting into his suit, when an evil terrorist smashes through his house with tracer missiles and wrecks a rendezvous with an ex-girlfriend and her mutant plant genetic code. Meanwhile, the evil Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is waging a campaign of destruction throughout America and beyond. In other words, it’s a big, dumb movie from the people who brought you …other big dumb movies.

Except it’s not quite so dumb, though it is big and loud. I saw Iron Man a couple of years ago when it was just on at a friend’s house and no-one could be bothered to change the channel, so thanks to that little moment of glorious madness, I knew I’d enjoy this before I went in. I’m not really into the genre: I just love big dumb movies with big dumb heroes who get the girl at the end and have a cute black sidekick in order to cross all the i’s and dot all the t’s. (Pepper Potts and Warmachine do play a bigger role in this one; I get the feeling I need to see Iron Man 2, because Warmachine is a new character to me, working closer with the US Government than Stark/Iron Man does.) Unless they seriously messed with the superhero formula, and made this all about the terrible angst of being an internationally renowned, sexy, rich guy with a basement full of toys that you can use to shoot and blow up terrorists (actually, wait…ALL superheroes have to feel this way now, it’s a legal requirement – see also the upcoming Superman Man of Steel film), it was going to have an easy ride, because although I’m not really into the Avengers metaplot, it’s an entertaining way to spend a bank holiday afternoon.

The good thing about the film is it doesn’t take itself terribly seriously: there is serious action, and yes, a bit of angst over what Tony Stark saw in New York during the Avengers Assemble movie, but it’s all mixed in with some hilarious moments. Sadly describing one of the best would also be a humungous spoiler, as would speculating on whether there will be an Iron Man 4. Much of the comedy is all in the timing, but Iron Man’s crazy manoeuvre to get all thirteen survivors of an air crash to safety is enjoyably cheesy, and the way Stark fumbles around with his suit is typical of the crazy inventor. There’s the creepy Bond Villain action from Guy Pearce (or, as I’m informed, Mike Young from Neighbours), Tony’s attempts not to get punched in the face by his own codpiece, and the will-they-won’t-they romp at the end across a disused oil tanker to rescue the President, with a dramatic role for both Pepper and Warmachine that makes strides forward as regards the place of women and ethnic minorities in action films. The villain is also an equal opportunities employer too.

It’s both exciting and hilarious in equal measure. Superman and Batman might be played absolutely straight but I do get the impression Iron Man is meant to be a little bit more tongue-in-cheek. I’m not saying that I instantly want to jump into the whole series of Avengers films and watch them start to finish, but I would like to see Iron Man 2 at some point and fill in some of the blanks.

I’ll give it 4 and a half Plutos. The half mark is really lost because the film is a bit too tongue-in-cheek in some places, and the role of the Vice President is never fully explained (I suspect there was more but it got left on the cutting-room floor). But it’s an enjoyable romp – so definitely worth watching. If you haven’t caught it at the cinema, then I would advise giving it a look on DVD.

Fantasy Legal Systems (cross-post from /r/fantasywriters)

I write a lot of legal plots into my books – I seem to prefer characters going through due process (albeit warped by power relationships, bias, greed and so on), and my plots vary from the prosecution of a murderer to the pursuit of characters by the police and venal local magistrates. I am a law student between academic gigs (just sent off another application for PhD funding for next year) and so I guess my books reflect my interest in the law.

Also in my gaslamp pseudo-Victorian setting, with a more powerful bureaucracy, more advanced communications (telegraph and railway) and characters who have lived much of their life in town, escape is a less attractive proposition than it might be, say, in the average mediaeval fantasy where the response to pursuit by a constable of the watch seems to be jump on your horse and get the heck out of Rivendell.

There’s also the option of prison rather than execution. Mediaeval justice was very cut-and-dried, but by the 19th century, prisons held petty criminals and people got released. Conditions weren’t great, but at least people came out alive once reformers had got rid of the probability that someone would, e.g. succumb to typhus, once called ‘gaol-fever’ in reference to its spread within the prisons in existence up until the late 1700s/early 1800s (transportation was one response to a reduction in the actual numbers of people executed for minor crimes; the Bloody Code did make an inordinate number of crimes punishable by death, but juries were notorious for reclassifying felonies as misdemeanours to save a prisoner’s life – even by absurdity, such as revaluing the theft of 30 shillings as a value just below the felony threshold). So when Robert Jordan has two characters arrested by the Whitecloaks and taken to Caemlyn to face the gibbet, he has to have them rescued to avoid almost certain death. In more modern settings, in contrast, despite the obvious problem of propertied men passing judgement on the unpropertied, there’s a distinct possibility for a fair trial.

I’ve seen a number of sci-fi programmes (Blake’s 7 springs to mind) which have conjured up alternative legal systems based on technology we don’t have access to IRL, and so there’s also the possibility for a fantasy society to have a completely fantastic justice system, utilising divination and other magical tools.

In my case, magic was specifically barred from being a defence or prosecution, mainly because of a spate of witch-hunting several hundred years prior to the main story, and I recently formalised this explicitly in my books: magic could not be used as a reason to prosecute someone: i.e. sorcery and witchcraft were made legal and no-one could be brought before a court charged with putting a hex on someone that led to their injury, but in exchange, it also could not be used as a defence unless there were a reasonable number of eye-witnesses that saw a magical act. Additionally, the dead cannot testify without a medium present in court, so to protect a defendant or plaintiff from the interests of the shaman getting in the way, this evidence is disallowed.

In The Black Magician series, Trudi Canavan, however, had a complicated system of mind-reading the accuser to determine the truth of their complaints and seeing the situation through their eyes in order to determine whether or not the magicians subject to this system even had a case worth bringing. It works well with her various bullying plots where Sonea, her heroine, is subject to some real cruelty because of her humble background, and it’s how one of the magicians also finds out about another wizard’s misdeeds.

I wondered, I guess, who here has thought much about the subject and can answer these questions.

• Who are your judiciary? Is it all left to the monarch, or has the system spawned justices of the peace (in England, originally the king’s representatives when he was busy with the Crusades), or a formal magistracy?
• What is the process? Are there lawyers? Is the judge an inquisitor (as in continental European legal systems) or are they an arbiter between adversarial sides? Is there common law, or a fully codified index? (I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I’d be here all night, but my characters have a textbook which not only details the judicial system, which is a common law system, but also gives landowners specific rights over their peasants which a few characters insist on interpreting on various whims such as which serve the plot).
• What magical tools do the characters have at their disposal? How is magic taken account of during the process? Does it make justice more objective (such as in Feist/Wurts’ Daughter of the Empire) or is magic too subjective or rare to work properly in a judicial context?
• Is there any legal pluralism? (e.g. where different sections of society are tried in different ways. In the real world, mediaeval clergy had certain benefits which were gradually rolled out to the ordinary people through a few mutations in the law, and then gradually rescinded until complete abolition at some point in the 1700s; also, Russian peasants were subject to a specific country legal system, separate from urban courts, which held them to moral as well as legal standards of behaviour. They could also be flogged until relatively recently – the early 20c IIRC. I used this sort of thing in some of my later books, but am currently trying to establish it in the early books just to make sure it doesn’t look like an insane ass-pull in order to torture my MC in new and interesting ways later on.)
• What is punishment like? How do you stop the law from killing off your MC or POV characters? Or do you, like GRRM, follow through on a punishment involving death every so often so that readers don’t get too complacent regarding the survival of the characters you write about?
• Do the characters stand their ground when under threat of arrest, and try to prove their innocence through wit or technicality, or do they flee, knowing that justice is broken?
• Speaking of which, is justice dispensed by a wise judiciary trying to uphold fairness in the face of noble opposition, or a corrupt establishment propping up other interests? I actually decided that my setting was coming out of a spell of comparatively liberal views into a more hardline, conservative or even proto-fascist system. So the judges are fairly anxious to be merciful, but the juries and prosecution tend towards the vicious. The magistrates actually recovered the right to enact corporal punishment on the peasants, after it falling into disuse for a while, and with growing unrest want it to be extended to urban workers who rebel against the system – this is not too dissimilar to what happened in Russia, and we all know how that ended; in fact, it’s a plausible reason why discontent could well lead to outright and successful revolution, which was always a sticking point for me in the early stages of developing the storyline.

The Network Premiere of All Stitched Up – A very special Doctors Who episode

Introducing the finished version of All Stitched Up, a creation of the Genesis Sci-Fi Club, Basingstoke.

Thanks to: David and Susan Offen James, Paul Russell, Jeremy Ogden, Antony Walls, Ann Bingley, and Louise Stanley (myself).

Eight out of twelve Doctors would approve! (The other four have sick notes from their mummies.)

Doctor Who and the Hare-Brained Plan of Doom

A reposting of an article from September, from louisestanley.blog.com, trailing the actual release of the video. Jeremy can explain it better than I can!

With the impending 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, which falls almost at the same time as the annual ArmadaCon science fiction convention in Plymouth, the thought has occurred that the occasion should be marked as only fans are capable of – by coming up with a completely implausible and over-ambitious idea and making it happen in an implausibly sort period of time.

That said, this particular idea was hatched several months ago, but due to real life (and occasionally in my case, the cricket season) getting in the way, it’s only now that we’re actually doing something about it.

So what is this plan, I hear you ask.  Well, it involves a multi-Doctor story, on a scale that, let’s face it, has never happened in the TV show before and certainly won’t be happening this year.  And how in the name of The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe are we going to achieve this, you might ask?  All I can say, is that the assorted incarnations of the Doctor we are featuring in the film and their various sidekicks, enemies and supporting characters are products of the well known practice of alchemy with wool (ie, knitting and crocheting), they are mostly a few inches tall and for the purpose of this story are going to be animated (with huge apologies to Oliver Postgate).

The plot?  Well all I can reveal is that unlike on TV (where ‘everybody Hurts’) there won’t be any previously unseen incarnations of the Doctor, but despite this another one of his big secrets will be revealed, and a couple of familiar locations will be visited.  Familiar to whom?  (no pun intended).  Well that’s another matter.  All I can say is that at least one of them will be completely safe and have big bolts on the doors…..

Jeremy Ogden