The future back then

I had an odd introduction to Star Trek. Before I even knew the TV show existed, I came across the first ST book by James Blish in the newsagents on Wych Hill in Woking where I used to hang out in the hope of grabbing occasional US imports of Conan and Lin Carter books. The Pokemon Go of its day, that book-hunting. This must have been late '68 or early '69.

OK, so I'd heard of Blish and I figured this was in the same vein as Eric Frank Russell's Men, Martians & Machines. It was only when I got home and read the blurb that I realized the stories were adapted from TV episodes which were not, as it turned out, going to air in Britain until the summer of '69. My mental image of the characters was informed solely by that cover. So I read the stories envisaging Spock as green and Bones looking like an older Jimmy Olsen.

I gave the book to a friend of mine at school who was taken to hospital with rapid-onset diabetes. He and I used to swap Ace Doubles (back-to-back SF books) that you could buy super-cheap in Woolworths back then, so I figured he'd enjoy Star Trek. A few months later the BBC started running the show and all my friends became Trekkers. But I got there first.

With its grown-up storylines and in-built socialist humanism, Star Trek was always going to appeal more to me than the reactionary trend in SF typified by tropes like - well, royalism and mysticism and black-&-white morality and libertarianism. Naming no names. It was another era; an age of reason and hope. We were boldly going together towards a future that never contained the likes of Trump and Brexit.

Why we need comics we can care about

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

Holmes improvement

On the whole, I'm in favour of reboots. Often the cultural drift in society results in a movie or book or TV show that started out fresh and exciting starting to feel out of touch. It certainly happened with Star Trek - which, if not actually dying, looked like a franchise suffering from Alzheimer's under Brannon Braga and Rick Berman but was gloriously rejuvenated last year by J J Abrams and his team. And they did that by going back to the original series and figuring, "If Gene Roddenberry had launched this in 2009, how would he have pitched it to get the equivalent effect that in had on audiences in 1966?" In the same way, an English translation of War & Peace, say, can always be contemporary, but the prose must seem increasingly archaic to a reader in the original Russian (and French).

That's why a reboot can be so effective. It's like a new translation.

Last week Roz and I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan about the same time I was watching original Star Trek, so I could easily be defensive about such a major reboot. Yet... a few years ago at Christmas the BBC broadcast a Holmes TV movie with Rupert Everett. And it was perfectly good, and Everett was excellent in the part. But it all felt rather too cosy, a comfortable mystery to watch when stuffed with turkey and mince pies, and I got to thinking that's probably not the effect the Holmes stories would have had on Victorian readers. Because when Holmes went over Reichenbach, the public outcry was immense and men went about in black armbands - and, well, yeah, fans will be fans, but you don't ever get that level of excitement from a cosy little detective drama about ticking clocks and puffing pipes.

The new movie tackles the so-what problem head on. Holmes was always meant to be a flamboyent, brilliant, unconventional and slightly disreputable central character, and who plays that combination better than Robert Downey Jr? I grant you this is not the Holmes of traditional dramas: the tall, thin, loftily commanding figure as drawn by Sidney Paget. And yet this Holmes is convincingly a genius, a misfit, one who is a master of all the facts but fares less adroitly in polite society.

Jude Law's Watson is a stronger character than he comes across in the stories - as he needs to be on screen, where the personal reserve we can accept in a literary first-person narrator would not only come across as blandness, but would weaken our impression of Holmes's genius too. And this Watson indulges in little bits of bad behaviour too, though unlike Holmes he recognizes the very specific contract under which Victorian society granted men a degree of licence to do so.

So those elements work, and the relationship between the two is sparky and engaging. It's more of a modern bromance than a Victorian friendship, true, but in a toss-up between historical accuracy and emotional veracity, a good storyteller should always plump for the latter.

Best of all, though, this is no sedate whodunnit to be mulled over in a cosy drawing room. It's a cocaine-shot-in-the-arm of a movie: visually thrilling with some fantastic set-pieces, driven like a hansom down narrow streets at high speed, written and directed with real verve and energy. Oh, and like all the great Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it steers a course very close to the supernatural without ever quite losing sight of the beacon of rational explanation.

Currently it's taken about a tenth of Avatar's revenue at box office (which is one of those things that makes me feel like giving up writing fiction, frankly) so you should get out there and see it on the big screen while you can. I'm going to be buying the DVD too, you bet, but this is a movie that merits the full cinematic experience.

"Just a story" is no excuse

When you have characters in a story taking action that’s out of proportion to the emotion you’ve built up, that’s melodrama. When you have something happen that doesn’t make any logical sense, that’s hokum.

Now, I loved loved loved the new Star Trek movie. Ordered the special edition on DVD, can’t wait. But there is that one little bit that I just have to put mental blinkers on for, and that’s where Spock decides to stick Kirk in an escape pod and blast him off the ship on account of he’s been a very bad boy and the brig just won’t do.

Maybe you’re saying, “Don’t you see? That shows how upset Spock was!” Nah, that’s a lame excuse. People show more restraint than that every day, and they don’t even have the advantage of being half Vulcan. The writers needed Kirk in that pod to keep the plot moving, so they just hoped we’d accept the idea of Spock being so worked up into a lather that he’d behave like a little kid whose toy got broke.

And why did they need Kirk in that pod? So he could land on a deserted planet and meet up with Spock’s future self and get told some important plot stuff. So that’s piling hokum onto melodrama.

Now, remember this is a movie I adore. You know that Yeats quote, “Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams”? This movie decidedly did not tread on them. It took them and it made them into something brilliant. It made Star Trek as great as it always should have been – as great, I mean, as it was in my 11-year-old imagination. I’m going to keep saying that so you know this is criticism of a loved one.

But that bit with the escape pod is still melodrama and hokum. And what’s more, the writers knew it.

In a recent interview, J J Abrams mentions a deleted scene:

"In the scene, Spock explains that [the encounter of Kirk and Spock Prime] is a result of the universe trying to restore balance after the time line is changed. They acknowledged the coincidence as a function of the universe to heal itself."

Abrams was right to drop that scene in favour of keeping the mystery, because a mystery is always going to be preferable to a really dumb bit of blather like that. That’s the writer’s equivalent of covering the bad brickwork with a coat of plaster. But if they had wanted an honest logical explanation, older Spock could simply have said he planted the idea in young Spock’s mind. That reincorporates the Vulcan mind-meld, so we know it wasn’t cooked up just for the sake of this one plot point. Doesn’t normally work over hundreds of thousands of miles, sure – but who knows the range of contact between two near-identical minds? And it explains both young Spock’s crazy overreaction and the apparent fluke of Kirk and old Spock’s meeting.

If I get a meal cooked by Raymond Blanc and he burns the steak then I’m going to send it back. Literature and cuisine – they’re both crafts. I want to believe good stories, but I don’t see why I should make allowances. The better the story, the more it’s important to get every detail right. Seduce my disbelief, don’t just count on it to tie itself up. And if you see me cutting corners and sticking on plot patches in Mirabilis or Sweet or anything else, shout it out loud and clear.

Oh, and go and buy the Star Trek DVD right now because it was the best movie of 2009 by several parsecs.