Hell Is Another Country for Sci Fi and Fantasy

Welcome to the Negative Zone. A parallel universe to the main reality of Marvel comics, the Negative Zone has many wonders to offer. The whole dimension is suffused with a breathable atmosphere, which allows for cool intergalactic battles without having to worry about little things like explosive decompression or asphyxiation. It is also home to an almost endless horde of man-eating super-insects, a prison for the worst super-villains in the multiverse and… not much else.

Scenic Negative Zone. That awe and wonder Mr Fantasic mentions? Not so much.

The same can be said of every major comic book universe. DC has the Phantom Zone, a barren wasteland where the greatest villains of Superman’s home planet are imprisoned. In Archie Comics, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face villains that have almost exclusively crawled their way out of Dimension X.

And why?

Why do all these monsters and villains come from, or get trapped in, a single alternate dimension? The second question is easier to answer, of course. Chucking a godlike super being into another dimension is clearly a much better method of disposing of him than locking him up in your local prison. It would be even better if any of these superheroes could find a way of stopping the villains from returning but hey, you can’t have everything, and who doesn’t love a rematch?

The second question is more interesting, and goes a little deeper. Why is it that these places exist solely as breeding grounds for monsters (The Negative Zone and Dimension X) or as prisons to hold psychos that already exist (The Phantom Zone)? Are we really expected to believe that these places have nothing redeemable about them? That there is no art or culture, no religion or music or anything of merit in an entire universe?

Of course, the laws of probability and the many universes theory, around which comic books realities tend to be built, would say yes. If every possible version of every possible world does exist, then surely there must be worlds where nothing good has ever happened, ever. Worlds where all anyone ever does is fight, and kill, and destroy. Worlds with no redeeming qualities.

And in terms of narrative, it’s much more satisfying to have an easily identified enemy with an obviously evil background, both historical and geographical. Having a character like Sauron come from the land of cupcakes and rainbow univ corns would be a tad confusing. Although it might explain why he was always in such a foul mood.

And when you start to look at it like that, you can see the same thing happening all over the shop. Take Mordor from JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. A region of arid desert, mountains, the occasional volcano, and hordes of evil creatures, what good has ever come out of Mordor? One of the possible origins of the Orcs, as proposed by Tolkein, is that they were originally ‘East Elves’ or ‘Avari’ that were captured and corrupted by Melkor (the Devil in Tolkein’s mythos). Add to this the fact that their costumes in early illustrations appear to have more than slight Middle Eastern influences, and it isn’t that much of a leap to realise that the Orcs are basically Middle Earth’s equivalent to every negativised Eastern group from Huns to Muslims. Now, I don’t want to cast aspersions on Tolkein’s attitude towards other faiths. But Tolkein is well known for the heavy Christian influence in his work. And my point is this; Why does Mordor need to be the source of all evil, and not one tiny bit of good? Why does evil have to spring from a desolate, foreign land with no redeeming features to it?

Artist’s impression of an Orc by Antoine Gledel.

Evil, the worst evil, the kind that barely registers on the level of human comprehension, has to be externalised. It has to come from somewhere separate from our world, or a world that we understand, so that we can accept its existence. We don’t want to believe that humanity, or anything that looks or acts or feels like humanity, can be responsible for this level of destruction. We can’t even accept that something that comes from the same universe would act like this. So we have to push it to the boundary of the universe, to the edge of the map and, if possible, over the edge.

The Phantom Zone: Rocks, clouds, and skulls. That is all.

And as for the possible race association I alluded to earlier, well, it’s not that surprising, is it? Particularly in America, where a whole generation has grown up viewing the Middle East as nothing more than the source of pain and chaos. In a centralised West, everything beyond one’s borders becomes a negativised other. We don’t see the beauty and culture that these areas contain, because all we are presented with is an endless stream of information about all the horrors that they contain.

Even if evil does come from ‘our’ world, it is preferable that it come from far away. A few decades ago, almost all villains in actions films were vaguely Eastern European. Today, they tend to be Middle Eastern. As a society, we identify problem areas of the world as sources for conflict in our entertainment. Real-life disaster zones become fuel for fiction, granting villains their point of origin while ignroing everything else these places have to offer us. And just check out htis page from Astonishing X-men a few years back. According to Wolverine, nothing good comes out of Africa. The whole place is basically Hell on Earth, and he goes on to say that anyone who gets into power basically turns evil as soon as they’re in office.

Skirting over the thousands of years of culture, the cradle of humanity, and the countless examples of natural beauty.

Fiction and reality reflect each other to such an extent that it is so much easier to have two-dimensional villains from matching backgrounds. Evil can’t come from within us, so it must be externalised. But to make that externalisation satisfying, to merrit the world-destroying wars we wage on the likes of Annihilus, Sauron, and Krang, they, and their people, and their worlds, can have no redeeming features.

Dimension X. See that Eden world? Yeah, no sentient beings are allowed on those.

So why don’t we flip it? I would like Marvel and DC, and any writer anywhere, to mix things up. Show us the good in the evil dimension or country. Don’t just fill it up with 2D monsters. Create real, flesh and blood characters with proper cultures and histories beyond the need to lay waste to everything they see.

Because yes, the world beyond our borders can be horrifying. But it can be kind of beautiful, too. If we let it.

General Maintenance: A Short Story for Terry Pratchett

 Those of you who follow this blog will know that Terry Pratchett’s death hit me pretty hard. I wrote a post about it, in which I talked about his influence on me as a writer. You can read that here. But I also wanted to do something creative as a tribute to him. I had a little shuffle through my old work, and came up with this little number. Of all my work, this is the one that I think most reflects the influence that Terry Pratchett had on me. In fact, while writing it I pretty much pictured Godfrey as a doppelganger for Terry.

 This story also first saw the light of day as part of an anthology that I put together with the Cardiff University Creative Writing Society. Entitled Let the Darkness In, it was the first anthology produced by the society to be sold in both physical and online copies, and was put out to raise money, happily, for the Alzheimer’s Society. I don’t think there are any copies of the anthology left (you’d have to get in contact with the current CUCW president), but if you enjoy the story, and want to support a worthy cause, I’ve put the link to the Alzheimer’s Society below. Alternatively, my amazing mother is running both the London and Brighton Marathons for the same charity this year, so I’ll put a link to her Just Giving page there as well. Your choice.

He walked through the stars, whistling.

The Executive scowled. Sound couldn’t travel through the vacuum of space. And here he was, whistling. A road of red brick formed in the void just ahead of him, pulled together from space dust and pure will, and dissolved again moments after he had passed by. The Executive himself was simply stood in the void. There was no need for all of this nonsense with ground, after all.

The man looked old. Old enough to be thinking about retiring, certainly. His white beard, tinged only slightly with the suggestion of grey, fell halfway down his chest, while his long hair was tied back with what looked suspiciously like a piece of string. He wore a pair of dirty blue overalls, covered in stains and patches. Behind him was his assistant, dressed in matching, although much newer, overalls. The boy looked barely old enough to be out of school, and the scraggily moustache that he was trying to cultivate only served to reinforce this impression. He carried a large tool box in one hand, and a step ladder in the other. The Executive brushed an imagined speck of dust from his impeccable suit.

“Afternoon,” the old man said, drawing level with the Executive. He had a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. The Executive fought the urge to point out the impossibility of this fact without oxygen present. For that matter, it should have been impossible for the man to speak at all, but then he had a well-established aversion to more elegant matters of communication.

“Well,” the Executive said, waving his arm, “There it is.”

‘There what is?’ the old man said, stamping out his cigarette on the ricks beneath his feet. A shower of ash fell off the edge of the road, spinning and coalescing into what would, in several million years, be at the centre of a new-born star.

“That, Godfrey. The great big tear in the fabric of reality,” the Executive snapped.

“Ah, yes,” Godfrey said, looking up at the rift. The tattered edges of space flapped as though caught in a breeze, the tear undulating across the skin of the universe. Beyond it, there was a darkness that was so much blacker than even the deepest space. Which, as Godfrey would tell anyone who would listen, was actually a very dark blue. He had personally wanted to go for a nice duck-egg, or perhaps cream, but the Executive had been insistent.

‘Well, you’ve had some cowboys in here, and no mistake,’ Godfrey said cheerfully.

“Is that all you can say?” The Executive demanded.

“Well, what more is there?” Godfrey began to roll another cigarette. “I’ve told your lot a thousand times; the old thing wasn’t built to last this long. It’s not my fault if it can’t stand up to the general wear and tear.”

“We don’t want excuses, Godfrey. We want to know what you’re going to do now.” The Executive tried to remain calm. Godfrey was famous for his lack of respect, and was known to enjoy toying with those who were his betters.

“Don’t see why anything needs to be done, sir. We could just leave it.,” Godfrey suggested.

“Leave it? It’s a hole in reality, Godfrey. We can’t just leave it. Think of what might be lost.”

“Something could fall out,” Godfrey’s assistant said, speaking for the first time. As if to illustrate his point, a small planetoid drifted passed them, and vanished into the tear. The Executive glared at the boy.

“I think they’re more concerned about what might fall in,” Godfrey said.

“Listen, Godfrey. We don’t care how you do it, just fix it.” With that the Executive was gone, his body dissolving into a nebula of light that spread itself out across several hundred star systems before finally fading away entirely.

“Show off,” Godfrey muttered. He lit the cigarette.

“Right lad,” he said, blowing out a smoke ring which settled around another nearby planet. It was a rather pleasing effect, he thought.

“Pass me that duct tape.”

 My Mum’s just giving page:  https://www.justgiving.com/Hazel-Rochez/ 

 The Alzheimer’s Society page: http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/ 

Goodbye, Terry Pratchett; Noli Timere Messorem

The internet has gone mad. A man has died, plunging an entire community into unexpected grief. Earlier today, Sir Terry Pratchett, author and creator of the Discworld, Truckers, Long Earth, and Johnny and the Bomb series, passed away after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s. Across the world avid readers, fans of fantasy literature, are paying their respects. TV and media outlets are badgering those closest to him for a statement. His family, as is their right, have withdrawn from the public gaze to be with each other, and my deepest condolences go to them.

The news of his passing shocked me. All of his fans knew that his health had been deteriorating since his diagnosis in 2007. At first I thought it was a mistake, like the time everyone thought Cher had died instead of Margaret Thatcher. Terry Pratchett couldn’t be dead. It just couldn’t happen. It was like NASA discovering a colony of angels living on Mars, or that eating condensed lard helps you lose weight, or that you can turn back time by putting a DVD in the toaster and humming ‘Waltzing Matilda’ while balancing on one leg. But as more and more articles popped up online, I had to give in to the truth. Death had finally come for Terry, pulled him up onto his white horse (or possibly into the sidecar of his motorbike) and had rode away, leaving us to wonder just what the hell was going on, and, once we’d come to terms with the idea that this was reality, to grieve..

But how to you mourn the passing of someone you never met? How can a quantify the impact that Pratchett had on me, as a person, as a writer? It wasn’t just the hours of entertainment, the comfort, the joy that I received from reading his work. It was the connections and routes that it led me down. It was because of Pratchett’s work that I discovered Neil Gaiman, another of my literary heroes. Good Omens, the novel they collaborated on together, remains a staunch favourite of mine. And it was because I followed Gaiman on facebook that I discovered his wife Amanda Palmer, who’s music now features on every playlist in my iphone. Terry Pratchett is, in so many cases, the starting point in the chains of authors and artists that I know and love; Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, Stephen Baxter, Alan Moore, Ursula Le Guin… the list goes on. And so many other writers that I already admired were his friends and fans. His work has followed me, informed me, supported me for most of my life. Pratchett and Gaiman’s work even formed the basis of my Undergraduate dissertation; ‘Mythopoeia in Modern Fantasy Literature.’

As a writer, too, Pratchett has been more of an influence on me than anyone else. Everyone keeps mentioning the sheer volume of work he turned out in his career; over seventy books. But that doesn’t begin to describe the depth, intelligence, wit, and beauty of his work. Pratchett didn’t just write seventy books. He created an entire world, an entire universe, with countries, towns, and cities populated with people who don’t just exist to be entertaining characters; they’re real people. He built cultures and religions and mountains and gods out of worlds, and he made them solid and logical and mad. They had both substance and style in abundance.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I might not be a writer if not for Pratchett’s influence. In so many ways, he is the benchmark against which I set everything that I write. It is one of my deepest regrets that I never had the opportunity to meet him and tell him how much he meant to me. Not just as a writer, but as a person. For the work he did for charity, the big two obviously being

I am so, so sad to know that Terry Pratchett is no longer with us. Alzheimer’s (the same disease that took my grandmother several years ago) has denied the world yet another beautiful, talented, wonderful individual. Pratchett wrote over seventy books in just forty years. By my reckoning, Alzheimer’s Disease owes us at least another twenty books.

I want to close with a quote from one of Terry Pratchett’s own books. Mortality and the afterlife get a lot of attention in Pratchett’s work, which isn’t surprising when one of your most popular characters is the anthropomorphic personification of Death. And although I know that there are many apt quotes that relate to today, this is the one I’m going to go with. It’s from Reaper Man, one of my favourite Discworld novels, which was written the year I was born. If a person’s life is measured on the legacy they leave behind, and the impact they have on others, then Sir Terry Pratchett made one hell of a splash.

 “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…”

                     – Sir Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991)