When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

To properly appreciate just how disturbing Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit" is, you need to burn all your furniture, daub luminous graffiti on the walls of your house, and crank up the hi-fi to a volume that could liquefy human bone. That’s the scene Michael Douglas comes home to in David Fincher’s The Game. His life is being taken to pieces and it’s going to take more than the King’s men to put it back together again.

What makes Grace Slick’s original version of the song so much more unsettling than most of the "White Rabbit" covers is the way she delivers it so plainly. The tone is hectoring, not haunting; fanatical, not febrile. And that’s what makes it powerful. The stark, shouty simplicity of the presentation. The whole nightmare otherworldliness is right there in the lyrics, and Ms Slick delivers them in a relentless martial rhythm that has its own unstoppable momentum. You are dropping down a rabbit hole and there's no parachute. Dressing it all up in a self-consciously “weird” melody would only weaken it.

Are there other examples of that in other media? There’s a superbly creepy one in The Fearless Vampire Killers. When Alfie Bass sits up on his bier there’s no showing-off in the photography. Polanski films it the scene as plain and stark and shocking as a dream. It’s funny at the same time, of course, but that only makes it more unsettling.

Or how about the ghost stories of M R James? Unadorned prose and almost a humdrum narrative frame from which the supernatural pokes through like a mouse in the skirting board. I find that much more shuddery than Lovecraft’s florid prose, always so anxious to assure us this is all very, very frightening. Likewise, there are more scares in one minute of Let The Right One In than in all the last decade’s output of Hollywood horror movies, precisely because Tomas Alfredson plays it completely unplugged.

The best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “The Body” where any attempt to dress up the drama with eerie music and clever-clever direction would insulate us from the raw emotion. Instead, Joss Whedon strips that all away and we’re left with no cosy refuge such as the usual fictional wrapper would provide. Result: forty-four minutes of intense drama that leave you genuinely shaken.

Can you think of other examples from prose, movies, music or comics where simplicity delivers a punch that could not have been achieved through showmanship?

Mirabilis - the graphic novels!

Okay, we've got a month of big news coming up and this is just the start of it. In a matter of weeks you'll be able to feast your eyes on the whole Winter season of Mirabilis in the form of two glorious full-color volumes. Each book is 112 pages and will be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for around $19.99 each (or £12.99 in Britain). When we have the hard release date and RRP we'll be announcing it here, along with the first look ever at the stupendous cover painting of Volume Two - really, it should be in the Guggenheim. Oh, and then there's the apps... Stay tuned!

Forced landing among the gods

“Above the May Day celebrations in Worplesdon in Surrey, the clouds part and the halls of Olympus can be seen. Down flies an airplane to land on the village green. It’s the Wright brothers, believed lost several months earlier after disappearing into a thick fog off the coast of North Carolina.”

That’s how it began: a throwaway paragraph from a big brainstorming document that I did years ago, right after we first came up with the concept of Mirabilis. I put down hundreds of scraps of ideas as they came to me, figuring it was the best way to build up a picture of how fantasy flowed and ebbed through the year.

Each month had a little descriptive line. January: “Some rather queer things have been happening lately.” February: “Did I dream that, or did it really happen?” March: “It’s true; my cousin saw it with his own eyes.” April: “There are new things under the sun.” And so on to November ("Half sick of shadows") to the end.

Fast forward a while. It's 2008. Mirabilis is due to appear in The DFC and Random House have commissioned the Gazetteer for rather a tidy sum. So now Martin and I are working on ideas that would make the twelve full-color spreads that will form the épine dorsale of the Gazetteer – and later, we envisaged, comprise a rather nice Mirabilis calendar.

That first version we weren’t sure about for a couple of reasons. The flying machine was based on a real design by Clément Ader from the 1890s. In real life it didn’t fly, of course, but the green comet effect could change all that. Trouble is, it looks too science fictional, and people would think we were trying to do steampunk. The other problem is the placement of Zeus and Hera, who appear to be montaged in rather than directly interacting with the action. Martin and I mulled over it for days. He wrote:

“I showed it to Dave Carson, who knows about the Mirabilis concept, and he had no idea what we were trying to achieve in the picture, and found it confusing.”

So, on to the second version. Now Martin has brought the gods into the picture by moving them across and having the line of Zeus’s arm connect with the action below. I wasn’t happy with the flying machine, though. It looked like a real historical Wright Brothers contraption. Snag is, authentic and all, at first glimpse you’d think it was flying backwards. Martin pointed out that was how it would really have flown. But it forces a double-take about the wrong thing. You want your viewer to be going, “Ooh, that plane has flown down to the village green from Olympus!” not, “Have they got that plane the wrong way round or something?”

Martin wrote:

“I think the machine we need to use is the Model A Flyer from 1907. It was the fourth machine they designed, the first to feature two seated occupants – a requirement to secure a US Army contract. It was the first to be 'mass' produced, not sure how many but they were also built in Europe – so the truly pioneering vibe of the first three Flyers is slightly lost. But it's the first design where we can show two occupants – except the brothers never flew together, at the request of their father to avoid a double tragedy.”

And that brings us to the third version. The line of action is much clearer now, and Martin suggested accentuating that by having the suggestion of a “vapor trail” down from Zeus’s hand. It’s also much more dramatic in the way the airplane is buzzing the cricketers. We discovered that Zeus’s many epithets included Phyxius, god of flight, so it’s reasonable that he might take an interest in Orville and Wilbur’s experiments. (He was also sometimes known as Terminalis, protector of boundaries, which explains why he would be observing a village cricket match.)

We were still not completely satisfied with the picture, and I suspect by this time that Martin was coming to the conclusion that it would work better if he chose what to illustrate, rather than have me foist impossibly complicated compositions on him!

In the end, the concept changed anyway. I felt that Worplesdon was getting enough coverage in Mirabilis (the Sidney Sime connection, you see) and we needed to show more episodes from around the world – specifically, from other parts of the Empire, to show the global transformation of the Edwardian era that Comet Meadowvane was causing. Hence the report to the Royal Mythological Society moved the whole thing over to India:

Dear Professor Bromfield and Doctor Clattercut

An extraordinary event took place during a recent cricket match between the royal court and the local British regiment. The court was 150 for 4 when a great rock slid like a cloud across the sky, and down from it came a buzzing machine made of wire, wood and brown paper.

The contraption landed in the middle of the pitch, driving two deep ruts right across from mid-wicket to the stumps despite the hardness of the ground at the time of year. I barely threw myself out of the way in time, after first giving the propeller a sound clout with my bat, whereupon a young fellow wearing a leather hat and goggles leapt out crying, “For Pete’s sake, mister, why’d you have to go do a thing like that?”

When my temper cooled a little, I discovered the two occupants of this aerial machine were brothers by the name of Wright. Having taken off from a field in North Carolina back in January, they flew into a storm and were forced to land on what they thought was Bermuda, but which turned out in fact to be the flying island of Laputa. The island was carried around the world by the trade winds, and by chance the brothers Wright had completed repairs on their vehicle and were ready to take off again just as they passed over our pitch.

The question is, would you say this occurrence is ground for abandoning the whole game, or did the court (as the umpires ruled) forfeit the match? We cannot resume play now because the monsoon has arrived.

Very truly yours, Prince Duleep Singh,
Lahore

Dr Clattercut replies: Please do not treat the brothers Wright too harshly, your royal highness. Americans don’t understand cricket and so they probably think they've done nothing worse than if they had disrupted a game of baseball.

Prof Bromfield: Yes, and in any case the harm is done. The umpires have the last word, no doubt about it. You’ll get nowhere arguing with them, any more than with the Fates.

Dr Clattercut: It is the Graeae, of course - the three “grey sisters” of Greek myth - who share but a single eye between them.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Have you spotted the DVD-style extras that are going up on the main Mirabilis website? Many of these are articles based on earlier blog posts, but you especially won't want to miss "The Forgotten Year", which is a big all-new feature about how the arrival of the green comet changed everyone's lives in the Year of Wonders.

Not only do you get some of the broadest hints we've ever let slip about the direction the story is taking, you can also feast your eyes on some stunning super-sized Mirabilian artwork by the incomparable Mr McKenna. This is why Hollywood producers have him on speed-dial.

The picture here shows the care and attention Martin gives to his work. Because that view of Mr Stoop the removal giant, which in most artists' portfolios would count as a near-finished picture, was the rough that ended up on Martin's cutting-room floor. You can see the final version on the website, and it is at a completely different angle, a more dramatic scene, and with a gnarlier-looking giant. But this is simply too good to throw away, don't you agree?

Le monde à l'envers

Spot the difference - it's one of our comic book covers (all coming shortly to an electronic tablet device near you) only this is the French version which we're even now getting ready for Angoulême. And while sorting out both the print and app versions of the Winter book (in English, that is) we're also revamping the website with a bunch of articles and artworks. So keep an eye on what's happening over there and in a few weeks we'll give you the release date for those other goodies.

Juvenilia - a leaf from my salad days

I'm not sparing my own blushes today, as here is "Cubic Capacity", a science fiction story I wrote when I was fifteen years old. It's a miracle it survived, buried at the bottom of a box of Conan and Solomon Kane books. Normally I'd throw something like this away, and reading it today I have to cringe at some (most) of the prose. Who was my literary role model - Isaac Asimov?

But instead of shoving it back in the box I'm gritting my teeth and putting it up here, because there is something interesting about it. It shows the early influence on my fantasy and SF tastes of series like Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart and Pratt and deCamp's Tales from Gavagan's Bar. I didn't know it then, but those authors must have been inspired by Dunsany's Joseph Jorkens stories - and that particular blend of British whimsical fantasy is the very lifeblood of Mirabilis.

(I will say one word of apologia for my fifteen-year-old self: his youthful opinion of politicians has surely been confirmed by the actions of Blair and Bush in initiating the second Gulf War. I wouldn't trust guys like that to run a borough council, let alone talk to folks from another star...)

"Cubic Capacity"
by David J Morris (aged 15)

"You're always going on about the crazy stuff the manufacturers are turning out these days," called out Marty across the lab. "Well, take a look at this. Free sample, came this morning."

I caught the measuring cylinder he'd tossed over to me just in time to stop it from careening into the apparatus I'd laid out for an organic synthesis later that afternoon.

"What's the matter with it?" I said, turning it over in my hands. "Looks exactly like the dozens of others we've got in the cupboard. Only it isn't broken."

Marty smiled. “Drop it."

“Huh?”

"Go ahead, drop it."

"You can sweep it up," I snorted.

"It won't break." He came over to where I was standing and took the cylinder. "What do you think it's made of? Glass?"

"I'd have said so."

"Looks that way at first, but I don't think... Well, look."

He hurled the measuring cylinder at the floor. Instead of shattering, it hit with an almost metallic twang and bounced, reverberating with a very low note which took the better part of a minute to die away. When I bent and picked it up, I could still feel ticklish vibrations in it.

"So what do you think it is now?"

"An unbreakable glass measuring cylinder that doubles as a tuning fork." I shrugged. "I don't see what's so special."

"Unbreakable glass! I dropped the damned thing down three flights of stairs. Not a scratch. A kind of glass that special gets a mention in the journals."

"Maybe it's some sort of plastic." I set it down on the bench. "Look, Marty, I wouldn't call that manufacturer crazy; he stands to make a tidy profit. In two years, of course, he'll have destroyed the market for re¬placements, but by that time I don't think he'll care."

With an insufferable smirk, he said: "That wasn't what I meant. Take a look at the graduations on the side."

I did, and frowned, then sighed in resignation. “Good God. What cretins these mortals be."
Because the graduations were marked logarithmically.

Marty and I stared for a bit at the cylinder, and then at one another, and then we began to laugh that breed of frustrated laughter born of long dealing with incompetents.

"What on Earth," mused Marty after a moment's pause, “do you imagine might have motivated the powers-that-be at Gremlin Control that inspired them to come up with this little gem?"

Maybe I should explain – though maybe, if you're a chemist too, I don't have to. Gremlin Control is the result of our speculation as to who it is dreams up the little things (like bunsens with the air intake welded shut, or water heaters with only two effective settings: fast freeze and rapid boil) that render so delightful the otherwise monotonous tedium of work in a laboratory.

According to the markings, the cylinder would hold ten to the twenty-four c.c.s when full. I'm a skeptic. As a kid, I used to think Galileo had faked that Tower of Pisa experiment. But I put the measuring cylinder under the tap anyway. After all, the logarithmic marking didn't prevent me from measuring out volumes accurately, since every power of ten was stressed on the side just as each c.c. would be on a regular cylinder. That was the only thing that was wrong.

But no it wasn't. Now I saw the cylinder wasn't filling up. The tap kept running but the water level hardly moved.

Marty reckoned they had put two gremlins in the one cylinder, with one letting out the water through a hole in the bottom. That wasn't right, though; there was no hole, and the cylinder was becoming heavier in my hand. After a minute I put it down in the sink, with the tap still running.

"It's filling slowly," Marty said as he peered over my shoulder at it. "Funny thing, that. Let's see."

He reached out and began to pick up the measuring cylinder. Then he put it down again, quickly.

"What is it?"

"Sam— that thing must weigh at least two kilos!"

“Makes sense, I guess…” I murmured, half stunned. “It’d be, what, twenty-five c.c.s a second for about eighty seconds. Yeah, two kilograms. Makes sense."

"Not to me, it doesn't. Where has that cylinder got room for two litres inside it?"

I bent nearer. Well, look at the level of the water. Just over ten to the three. Makes sense."

"Sam, don't say that again. But ... hmm, you can see now why it would have to be so strong. Ten to the twenty-four c.c.s would exert quite a pressure."

I had to laugh at that. "You're not seriously suggesting anyone could use it to measure that much water. It would take longer than the lifetime of the Universe to fill up, unless you had a very special technique for pouring in the water."

"It would, wouldn't it," concurred Marty. "'Why make it to hold that much, then? And who's going to use a measuring cylinder like this, anyway?"

I thought for a moment. “What was the name of the firm that supplied it?"

"Altair Labware. Never heard of them before. Odd name, though. Now, you don't think..."

I saw where his train of thought was going and jumped it. "Don't get fantastic about this. It has to be terrestrial. It uses c.c.s, for one thing, and logs to base ten. And the fact that it's built to hold far more than anyone's ever going to be able to put into it must mean that the people who are going to be using it are used to conventional measuring cylinders and they don't want to change to some other design with a more reasonable capacity. Was this the only one of its kind in the box?"

"Yes." Marty took out his spatula and began to suck it. One day he's going to do that while it still has part of his last experiment on the end. "Listen, Sam— and don't say I'm being fantastic, because after seeing this measuring cylinder, the word has lost all meaning! Suppose this is an import from Altair, built there for a foreign market. Earth."

"Where is their market, then? And why should they be making ordinary lab equipment as well?"

“That would be a cover.” He leaned forward over the bench, warming to the subject. "The market would have to be our top scientists. Scientists get into communication with Altair, they're not going to tell the politicians, are they? Politicians aren’t even competent to handle international affairs, much less interstellar. What they would do, of course, would be to start importing Altair technology – and that would require new types of lab equipment. I guess people like you and me aren't high enough up in the pecking order to have been told. Or maybe they reckoned industrial scientists couldn't be relied on to keep quiet about it."

"And are we going to keep quiet about it?"

"Sure!" Marty looked self-righteously shocked. "If it leaked, how long do you think it would be before some bright military spark got the idea of shipping a few dozen H-bombs back to Altair?"

"Tell me, Marty, what is it that gives you such a rosy and optimistic view of your own species?"

He grinned. "My lifelong interest in history. I'll write a letter here and now to the managing director of Altair Labware – has he got green skin and bug eyes, do you suppose? – telling him about the mix-up. With any luck he'll keep us supplied with free apparatus for months." He turned at the door. "And turn that tap off before the measuring cylinder goes clean through the sink.”

A week later, a van from Altair Labware arrived and two uniformed delivery men hauled out a crate which seemed almost to float on the little, castor-like attachments under it. We hurried down from the lab. Before they drove off, one of the men handed Marty a note. It was in reply to his letter:

'Dear Sir: Please allow me to apologize for the error in sending you one of our logarithmic measuring cylinders, and to thank you for returning same. I regret sincerely any inconvenience to your work that this mistake may have caused. I am taking the liberty of sending you a crate of normal measuring cylinders in the hope that you will find them useful. Please feel free to write again. — Harold T. Marx, Managing Director/Altair Labware.'

"I do believe," Marty said, pointing at the label on the crate, "that there's been another clerical error. Listen: 'One box (standard), twenty-fourth power logarithmic measuring cylinders'."

Frantically, we tore off the top. There, indeed, they were: arranged in no particular order, ten logarithmic measuring cylinders.

I removed them carefully there and then and scattered the chips of polystyrene packing material. Then I picked at the corners of the cardboard partition beneath and lifted it out to get at the next layer.

And sighed.

There, arranged in no particular order, lay one hundred logarithmic measuring cylinders…

And on the wireless tonight...

A short while ago, Roz and I headed over to Devon so I could work with Leo on that Apple-y project that we aren't quite ready to unveil yet. (I say Devon; it was also Somerset, because you cross the border in walking to the pub. And "apple-y" is a pun, coz that's where the pub is, ie Appley in Somerset.)

Well, as all work makes Jack a dull boy, whenever we're slogging away to a deadline like that, we of course make sure to fit in a bit of fun, beer, food, natter and computer gaming also. And on this occasion, arriving as we did on a Thursday evening, Roz and I were corralled onto the Bantering Boys radio show for some confabulatory silliness. Listen to our guest spot here and tune into 10Radio every Thursday at 9pm BST for more in the same vein.

The illustration is from a fascinating piece on this TV history site which shows a number of trading cards from Victorian times depicting the future as it was imagined back then. Rather handy for Mirabilis, eh what?