Friday 22 August 2014

Roundabout nights - ME4

Fasten your seat belts - the ME4Writers are ready to spin your head clean off!  Not content with assembling some Judicious Heritics- Medway's answer to the Avengers, they have set up the Roundabout nights @the Alexandra pub in Chatham

Roundabout nights is an ambitious live literary night, with an ever-revolving series of events. Once a week, every week on a Monday night. 7pm-10pm, the ME4Writers will host an event highlighting the spoken word. Here is a line-up of the next few meetings:

~ 1 September: She Writes – short plays about holidays
~ 8 September: Type’n’gripe at ME4-rum
~ 15 September: Spoken word
~ 22 September: Guest slot: Politics, plays and policies. Plays inspired by political themes
~ 29 September: She Writes – plays on a Byronic theme
~ 6 October: Type’n’gripe at ME4-rum

The roundabout nights are hosted upstairs at the Alex pub, unfortunately this is not yet wheelchair accessible.

Monday 18 August 2014

London lability - Loncon3

I have been astonished at Loncon3 by the number of transformational talks and events included in the programme. They question the assumptions made about cultural identity and (for me) norms as identified by my family and culturally milieu
Image by SM Jenkin
London by night, near East India DLR 
To be honest it has involved a lot of thought to question a number of these, but environments such as loncon3 have given me a chance to question this safely,  without hurting others or making myself an object of ridicule. 

London has always (has it?) been on the forefront of these dialogues, chosen or forced. This is merely part of a continuing dialogue started (who knows when). But the point I an trying to explore is this...

Attitudes in London adapts and change. Is this part of the traditional British gentleness regarding identity or part of the international absorption of cities to form a cultural melange..  a global village. What do you think? Does this reflect your experience?

Saturday 16 August 2014

The PEN of HG wells

Audrey Niffenegger spoke at Loncon3, for the inaugural PEN /  HG Wells lecture. PEN is an international association of writers, and it works to promote friendship and cooperation,  as well as freedom of expression. Their HG Wells lecture will showcase visionary and independent thinking in the tradition of Well's own work.
Pen
Ms Niffenegger chose as her inspiration the short story The Door in the wall to explore the tensions between (freedom of) thought, solitude and action/public life and activity. It is hoped that a transcript will be available soon, either from a national newspaper or the PEN website.

One specific idea of note was that:
Science fiction  can predict, but it is most powerful when it tells the truth

This has been reflected in a number of the discussions at Loncon3,  positing the idea of science/speculative fiction as transformational/ having the capacity to challenge the status quo. It has been a thought provoking and full programme so far.

Does this potential for transformation in science and.speculative fiction reflect your experience of it, as writer or reader, or does the need to make a living wage diminish this potential?

Image sourced from morguefile

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Utopia - morally righteous TV (SPOILERS)

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke

Have you been watching Utopia? The bold, if concise TV series showing late-night on Channel 4. You may have read the outrage in some newspapers about the violence in the programme - shown at 10pm well past the watershed- or the complaints about its alleged immorality. I would argue that Utopia is the most morally righteous programme on TV right now. Why? Because it deals with consequences. It deals with the consequences of choices that people make, or refuse to make.


The violence in the programme has a cost. When characters die, they are characters that we have come to know, even if briefly. They have names, motivations, back stories. We see the consequences not just on the survivors but on those who pull the trigger, and how this changes them.

However, the story has a bigger canvas than this. The catalyst for the story was a group of people on the hunt for a fabled graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments. Their search throws them in the way of an organisation called the Network. But this is where the simple us vs them dynamic hits a roadblock, and where the heart of the series resides. The network was set up as a direct result of one attempted  genocide, to try and prevent another. Philip Carvel, genius scientist and holocaust survivor sees all too clearly what people are capable of when resources are short and society breaks down. Combined with the threat of over-population, representatives of the network pose the question: what happens when the worlds resources start to run out? How will the resources be divvied up? How will people react? When even governments are failing to deal with the issue of over-population and dwindling resources isn't it better to act now? Because to willfully ignore the problem will lead to chaos and murder. Isn't it better to simply reduce the population to give the next generation a fair chance?

In this context the extreme nature of their actions can be understood, but can they be condoned? Their solution involves sterilising, even killing, large swathes of the world population. How far do you go to protect the human race, and how can murder be used to justify the prevention of murder? And isn't mass sterilisation going to cause social breakdown anyway?

So what prevents this from becoming a cut-price Bond movie? For me it is the very mundane nature of everyone involved, I can relate to it. Even members of the network are shown to be just as flawed as the original protagonists, just as vulnerable. The series shows ordinary people caught up in this debate, making choices both wise and rash. And always there is the question of what to do, what can be done? And who, if anyone, is supposed to make those decisions? The dynamic of the show keeps on changing and I find it a challenge  to keep up.

What would you choose to do?