This is the strictly impartial BBC news, operating on behalf of the Conservative Party

Auntie Beeb, Manufacturing Consent, Media
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Here’s how the BBC reported the news that the sacked Jarvis employers will finally get the money they have a right to:

Taxpayers will have to pay more than £3m in unpaid wages to former employees of York-based Jarvis Rail after the firm collapsed last year.

Trade unions for the 1,200 workers argued at an industrial tribunal that the company should have given 90 days’ notice of compulsory redundancy.

The claim is eight weeks at the maximum £380 per week under employment law.

The workers were made redundant when talks between Network Rail and the administrators finished in April 2010.

More than 350 jobs were lost in York, 300 in Doncaster and 80 in Leeds.

As Jarvis Rail no longer exists, the government has to meet the bill.

Imagine that! Three million pounds is almost half a banker’s bonus, which “the taxpayer” is also “footing the bill for” in the case of all the nationalised and subsidised banks… And it’s almost 3/1000th of the cost of those 14 new Chinook helicopters the Ministry of Defence has today announced it’s going to buy. But even though this too is “a bill footed by the taxpayer”, the BBC does manage to report that piece of news much more matter of factly, without cheap populist language. Apparantly wasting a billion pounds on war equipment is okay with the BBC, but helping some 700 or so families whose wage earners got sacked through no fault of their own is beyond the pale.

Golden Witchbreed – Mary Gentle

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of Golden Witchbreed


Golden Witchbreed
Mary Gentle
460 pages
published in 1983

It was the beautiful Rowena cover that got my attention, a long long time ago when I was browsing the English shelves at my hometown’s library. Showing a blonde woman in jeans and fur cape, armed with a stave and linking fingers with an obviously alien six fingered man, two swords at his side. That intriqued me, it promised both adventure and romance and it got me to pick up the book and that was how I got to know Mary Gentle. I’m not sure how old I was, but I must’ve been no older than sixteen-seventeen and Golden Witchbreed was arguably the best novel of hers I could’ve started with, much more easier to get into than most of her novels would turn out to be. But though I loved it when I read it and remember it fondly, I haven’t read it since. Which was why I put it on the list for my Year of Reading Women project. I wanted to know if the book I remember was still as good as I remember.

Golden Witchbreed I remembered as a planetary romance, emphasis on romance. It starts with the cover with the two lovers holding hands. The woman on the left Lynne de Lisle Christie, envoy from Earth to the primitive, medievaloid world of Orthe, there to represent both Earth to the Ortheans and to judge Orthe on its fitness to trade and partner with. The Orthean she holds hands with therefore should be her alien lover, Falkyr. I remembered their romance as central to the plot, the circumstances in which it took place ultimately forcing Christie to go on the run and having to travel through most of the civilised lands of Orthe. Apart from that recollections were hazy.

Read more…

UFO (Enemy Unknown)

geekdom, science fiction
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Found at James Nicoll’s, the title sequence of the old Gerry & Sylvia Anderson live action series UFO. Three years ago Brad Hicks called this his favourite retro future, which was when I first heard about it. UFO is one of those series that, if you didn’t catch it when it was first aired, you’ll never know about and I was much too young (or even born) to do that. Since then I have managed to watch some episodes and seeing this title sequence reminded me of how much it resembles a similarly named classic computer game, UFO: Enemy Unknown. So much so the 1971 television series has to have been an inspiration for the 1994 video game; which the Wikipedia entry indeed says it was.

UFO: Enemy Unknown is one of the best games I’ve ever played and one of the few that actually scared me. A combination of strategy/god game and tactical squad combat, the player is the leader of the X-Com organisation defending Earth against UFO attack, having to set up bases and manage funds to equip his squads, improve weapons and ships and do research. Once an UFO is signaled you can try to intercept it and if you do you can send a squad to capture it and capture or kill any aliens it carries. There are also alien infestations you may need to combat etc. It had relatively good graphics and decent, atmospheric sound effects for a mid-nineties game.

It was when you went to actually fight the aliens that the game got scary. You could only see what was directly in your line of sight, especially in night missions you had little visibility and at literally ever corner some alien menace could hide. Add the music and sound effects, which though synthesiser based were quite spooky, then play late at night with the lights off not to wake anybody up and it could make you jump when you turned a corner and some nasty mo-fo was waiting for you…

I remember one time I had loaded my squad on a Shuttle, which had landed on the site of an UFO crash, I had moved my first soldier out, who had been armed with a grenade launcher, moved out the second one, then some alien fscker psionically possessed that first soldier and got her to launch a grenade right into the shuttle. Whoops, that was the squad gone…

Shorter me: I really should dig out my copy of this game again…

Joe Sacco: too controversial for the middlebrow Atlantic

Comix, US politics
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Here’s what The Atlantic gave me as a birthday gift last week, an utterly dull and middlebrow list of “10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction”. The complete list:

  • The Beats – Harvey Pekar et all: a history/biography of the Beats writers
  • Edible Secrets – Mia Partlow, Michael Hoerger and Nate Powell: food based extracts from the CIA files
  • A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge – Josh Neufeld: Hurricane Katrina
  • The 14th Dalai Lama – Tetsu Saiwai: the authorised manga biography of the Dalai Lama
  • The Stuff of Life – Mark Schultz, Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon: a biology textbook
  • Smarter Comics Business Books – no idea: all the same sort of tedious business books now in comics format
  • The Influencing Machine – Brooke Gladstone & Josh Neufeld: why we mistrust news media, written by an NPR commentator
  • The Photographer – Didier Lefèvre & Emmanuel Guibert: a photographer’s journey through war torn Afghanistan, set in 1986
  • Burma Chronicles – Guy Delisle: potted history of Burma and its dictatorship
  • The Elements of Style Illustrated – Strunk and White, adapted by Maira Kalman: that pernicious old style guide illustrated

So these are the finest examples of “comic books as journalism” The Atlantic can think off: adaptations of prose books, some treatments of not too controversial current affairs/political/historical issues, pop science and biographies of people everybody knows. Nothing too outre stylistically speaking either, all these books can be picked up and read easily by people not familiar with comics with no problems. It’s all safely middlebrow in both subject matter and execution, kinda dull.

The worst thing about this list is that this insipidness is a feature, not a bug. As the writer herself acknowledges in a comment, she has deliberately left out certain authors and books for fear of being controversial:

You guys are right–I almost included Footnotes in Gaza but chickened out at the last moment because the topic is so polarizing. I was already expecting heat from rank-and-file fanboys/girls about the overall list and didn’t want to brave the Palestine question as well.

That’s what you call self censorship. It’s not just that Joe Sacco is one of the best and most influential non-fiction cartoonists around, somebody who should not be left off any such top ten list, but as opposed to the majority of people on The Atlantic‘s list, he has actually done comics journalism. He went to the West Bank, Gaza, Bosnia, talked to people there, tried and confirm their stories, then distilled them into a coherent narrative, just as a prose journalist would do. Nobody mentioned above comes close to doing this. He’s not the only high profile creator missing: there’s no trace either of Larry Gonick, who with Jaxon, another missing giant, pioneered the idea of doing long form comics history. Also missing: Ted Rall’s account of his journey to Afghanistan, which happened not when it was the Soviets bombing the shit out of that country, but Uncle Sam. I would like to think its omission on this list was just ignorance, but I suspect it was political…

So yeah, that’s The Atlantic in a nutshell: bland, boring, politically constrained, trying to be “hip” but failing miserably.

I know rules are a bore, You know I’m no stranger

Comix, video
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His name is Judge Minty, not Dredd and he took the Long Walk more than thirty years ago, in prog #147. And now there’s a fan film to show what happened once Judge Minty took up retirement in the Cursed Earth, where mutants dwell. Which, no matter how it will look, can’t help but be better than what Sylvester Stallone did to Dredd back in 1995.

It’s also a good example of a) how powerful the fan fiction impulse is and b) how sophisticated it can become. It costs a lot of money/effort/expertise to make a movie and this is not a movie one can make a profit with. The Homeric impulse is universal.