Whilst on holiday in Torbay, on 7th July I visited the “Visions of the Future” exhibition at Torquay Museum.

This was a 9-week display of original props and costumes from some of the most famous, modern science fictions films. There were displays from Star Wars, Alien, Predator, Prometheus, Riddick and more.

It was great to be able to see the costumes close up and have the time to really appreciate them. I was surprised at how flimsy the BSG Viper pilot’s costume was, especially when contrasted with the heavy build of Kane’s spacesuit from Alien.

It was also cool to see an original hypersleep capsule from Prometheus; the styling and decoration made it seem quite realistic. There was also an original storage cylinder which was interesting to see but hard to photograph in the display case.

I’m really pleased I took the time to walk around this one-off display in Torquay!

Back on 21st June my brother and I visited the “Sci-Fi by the Sea” convention in Herne Bay… we had a fun day out!

This annual event is organised by local people as an attraction to draw people into the town. There was a lot of interest and the tickets had sold out before the day – luckily I had prepaid, phew!

Many people were enjoying the cosplay and I was very impressed with some of the costumes. There was an excellent display of props and costumes for Dr Who. I find the Weeping Angels particularly creepy and couldn’t resist that piccy…

There were lots of people in Stars Wars cosplay of course! Here are my favourites (I think I annoyed Yoda by being more excited with the Stormtrooper’s costume!).  Fewer people were enjoying Star Trek cosplay but that was more than made up for with this excellent Enterprise Bridge set – how often do we get to sit in Picard’s seat?

My Second Place Award goes to Michael Keaton’s Batmobile.

My FIRST PLACE award goes to this Blake’s 7 Federation Stormtrooper – perhaps I should have shown my ID when asked!

And that was it for 2015 – maybe next year I’ll go in cosplay!

A good understanding of past events shapes our appreciation of the present and helps us to make plans for the future…

Unfortunately, it seems to me that many people have learnt little from the garbled hodgepodge of History they were taught at school and probably don’t pay attention to contemporary news events. Their understanding of ‘history’ is mostly limited to their own direct experiences and some awareness of a few family tales – not a very solid foundation for Society to act from.

I am sure that every generation feels that its successors lack an appreciation of the historical and cultural context of modern society. Part of the problem is that both groups are right: younger generations tend to look for opportunities in the future and naturally disregard the constraints on thinking that older people have acquired. Older people can tend to think that the younger generation’s ideas are reckless because they disregard those same constraints that they believe are sensible. It becomes harder to reconcile these two positions when the generations no longer share a common cultural perspective.

Some recent conversations with younger friends and colleagues are pointing to a divergence between our ideas of national Culture. I was talking about the current sabre rattling by Russia following their annexation of Crimea in March 2014. The unconventional warfare tactics used by Russia to seize another European state’s territory, combined with their subsequent threats about their military and nuclear weapons capabilities are already triggering defensive responses from NATO. Indeed, Russia has recently announced a (credible) large-scale improvement in the capabilities of its ICBM arsenal.

The normal ‘man in the street’, growing up in the era since the end of the First Cold War, cannot fully appreciate the completely uncompromising, totally ferocious nature of the Total Warfare that was narrowly avoided between East and West.

When considering other, smaller, hot wars and conflicts, the lack of first-hand accounts in their families and Hollywood’s steady output of war films gives them an unrealistic vision of how bad things could really get.

Yet the level of tension between West and East already feels very much higher than we have experienced over the past twenty years following the end of the Cold War. Russia is exerting pressure on national borders: there are frequent reports of their aircraft being intercepted and diverted away from national airspaces, and in October 2014 Sweden mounted a week-long search for a suspected Russian submarine violating its national waters.

Perhaps we should more properly say that the First Cold War ended in 1991 with the ending of the Soviet Union, since it seems clear that in many important ways, a Second Cold War has already started. We can only hope that these factors don’t eventually lead to a direct confrontation between East and West, Russia and NATO. Even if they don’t, the experiences of the latter 20th century showed that a Cold War can trigger intense Hot Wars (eg Korea, Vietnam).

My grandparents’ stories about living through World War II showed me that warfare is very unpleasant and not to be desired unless all else has failed. Even though I had those first-hand accounts to learn from, I did not fully appreciate what their tales of fighting and battles meant until I witnessed the daily news reports about the Falklands War (1982)…

… and now we reach the point I want to make: when I mentioned the devastating impact of the sinking of HMS Sheffield on the men and our nation’s chances of winning the Falklands War, my colleagues asked “what was that?” They knew essentially nothing about extreme courage and bravery of the men who fought in South Atlantic. The names and stories of HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry, HMS Fearless, RFA Sir Galahad, RFA Sir Tristram and the Atlantic Conveyor were all unknown to them. These key events in our recent history still resonate on world diplomacy today. Yet their knowledge of what happened can be summarised in a single pop-culture sentence: “It was something to do with Thatcher and we won.”

Trying to link this recent history to the warnings that can be drawn from the First Cold War fell on profoundly uniformed and uninterested ears.

Growing up in the closing decades of the First Cold War filled me with a respectful dread for the terrible knife-edge that ideological conflict places the survival of billions people. I remember news reports of mobile US Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) prowling the English countryside from RAF Greenham Common. Each GLCM had a range of about 2400 miles and could reach Moscow, making most of southern England a target for Soviet missiles. Meanwhile our nuclear-armed submarines were holding a near-silent vigil in the oceans as massed conventional forces held a tense stand-off along the Iron Curtain.

This is just one area where modern Culture is diverging from my own. Reconciling the different perspectives takes patience and energy. Now that the UK is at last recovering from the recession (using the term based on actual experience and not the specialist economic terminology used by reality-denying politicians) caused by the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, I hope that our society will once again remember the value of the generations learning from each other.

I was walking around Ramsgate Harbour again this morning and really enjoyed the quiet calm that a light fog had brought in…

Despite it being a fog-bound, low tide, Sunday morning, there were still things going on, including the fishermen making sure their nets were ready for their next trip out…

George Clooney does a great job of evoking the sense of a fishing boat leaving harbour in the film “The Perfect Storm”:

Captain Billy Tyne: “The fog’s just lifting. Throw off your bow line; throw off your stern. You head out to South channel, past Rocky Neck, Ten Pound Island. Past Niles Pond where I skated as a kid.

“Blow your air-horn and throw a wave to the lighthouse keeper’s kid on Thatcher Island.

“Then the birds show up: black backs, herring gulls, big dump ducks.The sun hits ya – head North. Open up to 12 – steamin’ now.

“The guys are busy; you’re in charge.

“Ya know what? You’re a goddam swordboat captain! Is there any thing better in the world?”

These lines always bring a tear to my eyes…

Col Chris Hadfield covers Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the ISS – I can’t believe I missed this last year!!!

I picked up the story of Col Chris Hadfield covering David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” over breakfast this morning… and I simply CANNOT believe that I missed this last year.

This cover is the most beautifully poignant song I have heard in years – it literally had me in tears!

Well done Col Hadfield, “… you’ve really made the grade”

If you missed the video you can get it on YouTube here…

I saw two of my favourite sci-fi genre films back-to-back at Vue last night: Ridley Scott’s “ALIEN” followed by James Cameron’s “ALIENS”… WOW, what an experience!!
 

ALIEN made the most lasting, influential, cinematic impression on me as a lover and writer of science fiction.  I first saw it on VHS video in about 1985, some six years after the original cinema release.

I remember being:

* captivated by the sense of realism that flowed from the harshly industrial Nostromo sets,

* enraptured by the balletic orbital manoeuvring of the landing sequence (so beautifully enriched by Jerry Goldsmith’s music),

* totally drawn into the sense of being on a different world as the crew walk towards the derelict, before

* being increasingly terrified as the film accelerates with tense horror after the infamous ‘chest-burster’ scene.

Few films have managed to combine such wonderfully innovative scriptwriting with world-class acting, a haunting score, game-changing realism in set design, with a genuinely unique vision of horror (Giger’s monsters – apparently when Dan O’Bannon first showed Giger’s paintings to Gordon Carroll, the producer recoiled saying ‘This man is sick’).

One quote I really like is the foreshadowing of Brett’s death:

   Parker: If they find what they’re lookin’ for out there, that mean we get full shares?

   Ripley: Don’t worry, Parker, yeah. You’ll get whatever’s coming to you.

   Brett: Look, I’m not gonna do any more work, until we get this straightened out.

   Ripley: Brett, you’re guaranteed by law to get a share.

And wow, did he get a share!

When James Cameron’s ALIENS came along in 1986 I was old enough to see it in the cinema.  I remember enjoying the film as more of a sci-fi adventure yarn than a horror movie – after ALIEN that was a surprise.

The biggest shock was that The Alien was no longer invulnerable: as long as you had enough firepower you could survive contact with ASH’s “perfect organism… [whose] … structural perfection is matched only by its hostility”. Cameron had obviously taken the franchise on a completely new direction.

Whereas Scott’s ALIEN is full of memorable settings and relentless tensions, Cameron’s ALIENS runs on a full tank of memorable dialogue and one-liners. Some of my favourite quotes from the second film include:

On the Sulaco, shortly after the marines have woken from hypersleep:

   Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?

   Vasquez: No. Have you?

and also… with the marines preparing for the drop:

   Ripley: I feel like kind of a fifth wheel around here, is there anything I can do?

   Apone: I dunno, is there anything you can do?

and of course… in the APC after the marines barely escape from the Aliens’ surprise attack:

   Vasquez: Okay. We have several canisters of CM-20. I say we go back in there and nerve gas the whole fuckin’ nest.

   Hicks: It’s worth the try, but we don’t know if that’s gonna affect them.

   Hudson: Let’s just bug out and call it even, man! What are we even talking about this for?

   Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

   Hudson: Fuckin’ A!

The second movie was fun and memorable, and spawned some computer games I have enjoyed playing, but its lasting impact was very much less for me (I actually prefer David Fincher’s ALIEN 3 to ALIENS).

I’d always wondered what the Big Screen experience of ALIEN was like. I’d heard and read the legendary tales of people vomitting in the cinemas when it was released and I felt intimidated to try it for myself. I’m so glad I got brave enough to try it (with some friends for back-up) – it was AWESOME and the experience will stay with me forever!!

 

I’ve said before how much I love walking around Ramsgate Harbour. I find it both very relaxing and exciting, there is always something going on!  Since we returned from holiday in Dorset I’ve seen some interesting things, and enjoyed one marvellous moment of innocent expression which reminded me that not everything is spoiled in Thanet yet…

 Recently the harbour played host to the UK Border Force vessel ‘HMC Vigilant’. It was fantastic seeing a larger boat in the harbour and she was attracting a lot of attention from interested passers-by (including me!).  I was interested to read that, despite the militaristic style of Vigilant, the crew are not routinely armed and the vessel has no fixed armaments. It must take especially brave crews to chase criminals at sea unarmed.

I was also interested to see a sailor sculling his dinghy with a single oar over the transom. He made it look easy and seemed very comfortable standing in his boat.  I don’t think it would have been so stable if I had been paddling.

Thanet is definitely a hard place to live. Years of high unemployment, low expectations and social deprivation are, in my opinion, taking their toll on the friendliness of the population. It seems that each generation becomes harsher than its predecessor and I worry about how low things will sink.

Based on some conversations I have had with local Law Enforcement and other public bodies, I don’t think that government (national or local) has the willingness to take the actions that would be needed to remedy the problems of casual aggression and selfishness that I encounter in the towns and on the roads – indeed, the Police view is that we should be ‘tolerant’ of small crimes rather that enforce the relevant laws.

But… I saw today a small sign that things don’t have to be like that: I saw a child’s chalk writing on the edge of a pathway which reminded me that innocence is our natural state.

Somewhere along the way our society is corrupting that, and I would cheer our civic leaders if they could find ways to help our next generations to hold onto some of the natural innocence they held as children… for all of our sakes.

I only discovered Gabo’s writings last year and rapidly fell in love with Macondo and the sumptious insights into Colmbian life that he shared with us. The world is smaller without him but he leaves us with a marvellous mix of tales…

I very quickly came to appreciate the sense of post-revolutionary reality that he could portray (as in “No One Writes to the Colonel”, for example), the surreal world of religion and love that he showed in “Of Love and Other Demons”, and the real harsh world of the Colombian drugs war in his non-fiction “News of a Kidnapping”.

In Western Europe we put a high value on life, we value the contribution of the individual and go to great lengths to protect our people from harm. I get a very different perception about life in Colombia.

If there is a single sense that I can take from all of Gabo’s writings, it is that, overall, life is cheap in Colombia:

From ‘No One Writes to the Colonel’:

‘And meanwhile what do we eat?’ she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: ‘Shit’

And the terrible death of Marina Montoya in ‘News of a Kidnapping’:

In her bed, Marina looked like a marble carving, with her hair disheveled and a pallor so intense that even her lips were white. Then the Monk spoke to her in the affectionate tones of a grandson.”Get your things together, Granny,” he said. “You have five minutes.”

… Maruja confronted the Monk, her voice steady.”Are you going to kill her?”

… The Monk bristled.”You can’t ask a thing like that!” he said. But he regained his composure right away and said: “I told you she’s going to a better house. I swear.”

… AT DAWN THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, January 24, the body of Marina Montoya was found in an empty lot north of Bogotá. Almost sitting upright in grass still damp from an early rain, she was leaning against the barbed-wire fence, her arms extended… dressed in a pink sweatsuit and a pair of maroon men’s socks… the head of the corpse was covered by a hood, stiff with dried blood, that had been put on with the openings for the mouth and eyes at the back of the head, and it was almost in tatters because of the entrance and exit holes of six bullets fired from a distance of more than fifty centimeters…”

What a very sad death at the end of so much fear.

Of course, Gabo’s most famous work is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and nobody who reads it will ever forget this chronicle of the struggles of the Buendías and Macondo.

As I write this blog update it is now 13 days since the world was plunged into possibly the most significant political crisis since the official end of the Cold War.

Russia stands accused by much of the International Community of having violated the sovereign territory of Ukraine by surreptitiously invading Crimea.  The Superpowers are bandying threats and apportioning blame, while the gentle peoples of all countries wait in a moment of suspense, hoping for a peaceful conclusion and fearing conflict.

As I recently commented in my essay entitled “Some thoughts about Post-Apocalyptical fiction – how bad could things get?”, the Western World and Russia entered into a totally committing arms race that spanned nearly fifty years of threats between the end of the Second World War and US President George H.W. Bush’s speech on Christmas Day, 1991, which acknowledged the end of the Cold War.

Immediately after the Second World War, US President Harry Truman told the USSR that the US would be taking a “tougher” stance against them.  The Cold War started at that moment, with East and West then facing each other across a no-man’s-land of differing ideologies The USA and USSR, the two major global Superpowers, invested literally trillions of dollars on the development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The United States had detonated its first device in 1945 during the “Trinity” test that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and subsequently the end of the War in the Pacific. The USSR followed with their detonation of “RDS-1” in 1949. An escalating cycle then followed of threat and defence, ‘Massive Retaliation’, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD) and then strategic ‘sufficiency’ within ‘limited wars’.

It is a testament both to the cost of developing nuclear weapons and the restraint of many developed nations, that today only 7 other nations are known to have developed these terrible weapons of mass destruction. In Europe, the United Kingdom and France also developed “the bomb” (known in the UK as the ‘nuclear deterrent’). China followed just a few years later with their detonation of “596” in 1964. The US, USSR, UK, France and China are all signatories to “The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” (NPT), which at least holds out a credible hope for restraint in their manufacture, and disarmament in the future. Outside of the NPT, India, Pakistan and North Korea are known to have nuclear weapons. Israel is strongly suspected to be a nuclear state, with secrets from its nuclear production facilities being famously leaked to the world by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 (his story is sensitively told in the film “Secret Weapon”). There are fears that Iran is also attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

Why the focus in this Blog entry on ‘Nukes? – Simple: on 27th and 28th February 2014, following a period of unrest in Ukraine, Western media started to report that Russian armed soldiers had entered Crimea (which had been gifted to Kiev by Khrushchev in 1954). These soldiers appeared in large numbers and were apparently well-equipped, but significantly they were not wearing any uniform insignia. These soldiers are claimed by Russia to be local ‘self-defence forces’ and not Russian troops.

Most other nations and the United Nations have not accepted that statement and demanded that Russia de-escalate the crisis and remove its troops immediately. Russia has asserted a right to use its military to protect the lives of ethnic Russians living in Crimea, and on 6th March the Crimean Parliament asked to join the Russian Federation, saying it would put that request to a referendum on 16th March. The rest of the world has essentially stated that any such change of affiliation or referendum would be illegal under Ukraine’s constitution… and so a war of words has rushed around the world.

In the meantime a pro-Russian ‘New Crimean Army’ has been sworn in. I saw a news report of them parading which reminded me very much of the fascist posturing of the fictional storm-troopers in the old sci-fi series Blake’s 7. It the circumstances weren’t so serious it could have seemed almost insanely comical.

The only sane moment for the public of Western nations has been that both the US and USSR have seemed very reluctant to escalate the Crimean Crisis into full-blown war. Even the Ukrainian government in Kiev has been reluctant about that, but given its capabilities next to those of Russia, this is understandable.

Despite other complaining noises coming from the West, things seemed to be settling into a predictable pattern of diplomacy that would end with Crimea becoming part of Russia.  The Western public were then further shocked on 4th March with the announcement that Russia had test-fired an RS-12M Topol inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM).

When I saw that test reported on the BBC News website that night I clearly thought ‘Oh my God, this is it!’ Thankfully this was a scheduled test that had been expected for months, but the decision to continue with it at a time of such heightened international tensions seems irresponsible to me.

Nobody wants Crimea 2014 to be the spark for a new global armed conflict, but I very much suspect it will have triggered a new Cold War.

So now we are all waiting… waiting to see what develops next and how the US will respond. Retaliation seems to be expected to be economic rather than military, and I am thankful for that. I live near the longest airfield in the UK: a quick run of the online application “Nukemap” showed that my town would be destroyed by a single warhead from such an ICBM and there would be very few (if any) survivors– a sobering thought and a reminder of the trust we place in our politicians to wisely use the power vested in them by the people.

28th December was a lovely day and I decided to have a walk around Ramsgate harbour. The south-east has been hit with a lot of unusually strong storms this Christmas but on this day the weather was quite pleasant!

Ever since I was a boy I have enjoyed the atmosphere around the harbour. In those days it was much busier though, with a constant bustle of fishing boats queuing to unload their catches and pleasure craft moving around.

I remember one magical night, sitting on the edge of a platform in the outer harbour at about midnight to watch a crew unload their catch. A whole shoal of flatfish rose from the harbour floor to circle their boat under the yellow cast of the artificial lighting; it was an almost surreal moment.

Today the fishing fleet is very depleted but the harbour is getting plenty of use by Fisheries, Pilots, Lifeboat and assorted survey vessels. It is still a busy place for pleasure craft but somehow they don’t seem as glamorous as they did when I was growing up.

Ramsgate was in many respects a tough town to grow up in. Over the years, when compared to most of the rest of the south-east region, it seems to have become even more deprived and degraded. This leads (in part) to a fierce outlook on life and very direct, harshly strong views being held. There can be strong prejudices and long memories over past political follies.

I noticed this freshly painted graffiti while walking towards Port Ramsgate. It seems that even ten years later, the February 2003 “dodgy dossier” used by the Blair government to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq is still casting a long shadow over the Labour Party’s credibility.