INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (2 page)

EDITORIAL

NICK LOWE

W
e don’t normally think of theatre as a medium in which sf thrives, outside a small canon of tourist-bait musicals that treat the genre as either a convenience or a joke. A few greybeards remember the brief utopian moment of the late seventies and early eighties when UK outfits like Impact Theatre Cooperative and Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool were putting sf in the vanguard of alternative performance, while in the US Chicago’s Organic Theatre had built up a bulging portfolio of original and adapted work under founder director Stuart Gordon – years before Charles Band’s Empire Pictures propelled him to greater fame as a filmmaker with his debut
Re-Animator.
But if a lot of us would struggle to nominate anything of comparable moment since those, it’s not as if sf theatre went away.

The other week a couple of wonderful postgrads, Chris Callow from Lincoln and Adam Roberts’ student Susan Gray from Royal Holloway, put together an event called
Staging the Future
: the first international conference on sf theatre, with
NYRSF
legend Jen Gunnels keynoting, and reports from around the world on adventures in the theatre of the imaginable past and present. We had Shakespeare and Coward, Ayckbourn and Miéville, early-modern lunar larks and adaptations from
Frankenstein
to
Princess Mononoke
, and an amazing gallery of variations on post-apocalyptic and posthuman performance. I got to exhume memories of Ken Campbell’s 22-hour epic chronicle of the UK counterculture
The Warp
in the derelict Regent cinema in Edinburgh in 1980 with a young Bill Nighy (and then-struggling playwright Terry Johnson taking Jim Broadbent’s parts because Ken knew he could plumb toilets). We were introduced to the work of Bella Poynton, a young campus playwright who’s been pushing the limits of theatre space, time, and action to Stapledonian extremes, staging an interstellar war or a ten-million-year human-machine romance with beguiling warmth, wit, and sense of embodied wonder.

There’s an old misperception that theatre is a medium in competition with film, and doomed to try to mimic its art of illusion. But theatre is above all a space of suggestion and implication, where embodied physicality can conjure worlds with a gesture or line. In that respect, it’s far closer to what sf does with the written word, only kissed with the spell of live mimesis and response. The moment that wrote the grammar for western theatre was the young Aeschylus’ staging of the
Iliad
with two actors, no set, and a single location. It’s a moment that theatre re-enacts nightly: as Salford’s Bob Moyler, who put on his gloriously unnerving Capek homage
Public Service Robots
, remarked in our session on end-of-the-world theatre, “You could show the apocalypse on stage with a biscuit.” Nor are the medium’s moments of glory the tears in rain that might be feared. Impact’s Russell Hoban collaboration
The Carrier Frequency
has been the object of a meticulous tribute reconstruction off a video of the original staging. Daisy Campbell, daughter of Ken, is following up her celebrated revivals of
The Warp
with a long-hoped-for resurrection of the SF Theatre’s breakout production
Illuminatus!
Even Stuart Gordon has found his way back to theatre, not only with 2011’s
Re-Animator: The Musical
, but latterly branching out into the kind of work that made Organic Theatre risky and notorious in the first place; his latest is the stage horror
Taste
, a dramatisation of the Arwin Meiwes consensual-cannibalism case. And the fans, as fans will, are networking. Jen Gunnels has a Facebook group, more conferences are mooted, and a dozen of the participants in Susan and Chris’s event were working on sf plays. The oldest spectacle is suddenly, thrillingly, the newest.

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

‘All You Zombies’ Dept.
‘Which Bafta and Emmy-winning actress is the great-grandfather of the former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith?’ (
Independent
quiz)

Awards.
Gemmell
(heroic fantasy). Novel: Mark Lawrence,
Emperor of Thorns
. Debut: Brian McClellan,
Promise of Blood
. Cover: Jason Chan for
Emperor of Thorns
above. •
John W. Campbell Memorial
: Marcel Theroux,
Strange Bodies
. •
Nebula
: Novel: Ann Leckie,
Ancillary Justice
. •
Prometheus
(libertarian) special life achievement: Vernor Vinge. •
SF Hall of Fame
: Leigh Brackett, Frank Frazetta, Stanley Kubrick, Hayao Miyazaki and Olaf Stapledon. •
Bram Stoker
(horror). Novel: Stephen King,
Doctor Sleep
. •
Sturgeon
(short): Sarah Pinsker, ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss’ (
Strange Horizons
).

The Weakest Link.
Host: ‘Which G.O. wrote
Animal Farm
?’ Contestant: ‘I’ve got George Osborne in my head.’ (BBC
Pointless
) • Host: ‘Which British author wrote
The Jungle Book
?’ Contestant: ‘E.L. James.’ (ITV
Ejector Seat
) • Host: ‘In what novel by H.G. Wells does an inventor travel into the future?’ Contestant: ‘
Great Expectations
.’ (ITV
The Chase
)

Publishers & Sinners.
Angry Robot discontinued its Strange Chemistry (YA genre) and Exhibit A (crime) imprints in June, ‘due mainly to market saturation’ – that is, others have more successfully saturated the market.

GRRM Is Everywhere.
The BBC apologised for accidentally sending test-only news alerts to millions of BBC News app subscribers, including the deeply shocking ‘BREAKING NEWS No nudity in latest episode of
Game of Thrones
!!!’

Queen’s Birthday Honours.
John Barrowman – Captain Jack Harkness in
Doctor Who
and
Torchwood
– was made an MBE; so was composer Laurie Johnson, who scored
Dr Strangelove
and wrote the
Avengers
and
New Avengers
TV theme music. Patrick Woodroffe, not the late genre artist but the lighting designer for the 2012 Olympic ceremonies – whose stage projects include
Batman Live
– became a CBE. (BBC, 14 June)

Silly Season.
Daily Mirror
headline: ‘Retired US Marine claims he spent 17 years on MARS protecting five human colonies from Martians’. Perks after 20 years of duty: ‘a retirement ceremony on the moon that he claims was presided over by VIPs including ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.’ Gosh.

Ian McEwan
sold his archives to the University of Texas for $2 million, and in an interview revealed the sf delights awaiting researchers: ‘…my novel
Atonement
started out as a science fiction story set two or three centuries into [the] future.’ (
Guardian
)

J.R.R. Tolkien
’s Balrog is remembered in the naming of a 16-foot, 900-pound crocodilian from 60 million years ago: Anthracosuchus balrogus. (
International Business Times
, 3 June) But was it a giant flaming reptile? Did it wield a multi-thonged whip?

Court Circular.
The 50 pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain, ruled the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals on 16 June – rejecting the ever-rapacious Conan Doyle estate’s argument that copyright protection for the ten remaining 1923–1927 tales should extend backwards over the entire Holmes canon.

Eoin Colfer
, author of the ‘Artemis Fowl’ fantasies, is now the third Irish laureate for children’s fiction: Laureate na nÓg.

Thog’s Masterclass.
Radiophonic Workshop Dept.
‘He walked in and heard a sound like a tomb.’ (Lee Child,
Tripwire
, 1999) •
This Day All Thogs Die.
‘Indignation and confusion appeared to flush through Chief Mandich in waves, staining his skin with splotches like the marks of an infection.’ ‘Anodyne Systems, the sole licensed manufacturer of SOD-CMOS.’ ‘He fluttered his hands in front of his face to ward off emotions for which he had no use.’ ‘He shook his head. Carried by its own momentum, his head continued rocking from side to side on his weak neck.’ ‘Her voice ached like Morn’s arm.’ ‘Food and coffee had rubbed the smudge from his gaze.’ ‘Min’s jaws clenched and loosened as if she were chewing iron.’ ‘Smoke seeped out of her hair as if the mind under it had been burned to the ground.’ `Lane hid a grin behind a fringe of unclean hair.’ `His voice sounded as bleak as hard vacuum.’ ‘Standing rigid, as if he were remembering a crucifixion, he shouted.’ ‘The sound of knives filled Hyland’s voice.’ ‘Blaine wore her sexuality like an accusation.’ ‘In response he brandished his beard at her like a club.’ (all Stephen R. Donaldson,
The Gap into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die
, 1995)

R.I.P.

Ken Brown
(1957–2014), UK fan, convention-goer and regular book reviewer for
Interzone
in the David Pringle era, died from pancreatic cancer on 19 May; he was 57.

John Cocchi
(1939–2014), US film historian whose
Second Feature: The Best of the ‘B’ Films
(2000) covers much sf and horror, was found to have died circa 16 June after being missing since April; he was 74.

Philip Curtis
(1920–2012; late notice), UK teacher and author of much sf including the 12-book ‘Mr Browser’ series for younger readers, opening with
Mr Browser and the Brain Sharpeners
(1979), died on 10 October 2012 aged 92.

Felix Dennis
(1947–2014), UK publishing baron who long ago featured in the
Oz
trial and whose Dennis Publishing magazines include
Bizarre
,
Fortean Times
and
Viz
, died on 22 June; he was 67.

Oscar Dystel
(1912–2014), US publisher who turned around the ailing Bantam Books in the early 1950s and remained chairman until 1980, died on 28 May; he was 101. His bestselling acquisitions included
The Exorcist
and
Jaws
.

Nancy Garden
(1938–2014), US author of fantasy, horror and LGBT fiction for younger readers, died on 24 June aged 76. She won the 2003 Margaret Edwards Award for life achievement in YA literature.

H.R. Giger
(1940–2014), influential Swiss artist and designer noted for his surrealist/decadent ‘biomechanoid’ paintings and (most famously) his creation of the alien technology and grotesque monster for
Alien
(1979), died on 12 May; he was 74. Giger received a Spectrum Grandmaster Award in 2005 and entered the SF Hall of Fame in 2013.

Mihail Gramescu
(1951–2014), award-winning Romanian author of several sf novels and collections who was part of his country’s 1980s ‘New Wave’, died on 13 May aged 63.

Sam Greenlee
(1930–2014), US author of
The Spook who Sat by the Door
(1969) – a near-future novel of black uprisings, filmed in 1973 – died on 19 May aged 83.

Dan Jacobson
(1929–2014), South African-born novelist whose works include the dystopian
The Confessions of Joseph Baisz
(1977), the post-holocaust
Her Story
(1987) and the alternate-history
The God-Fearer
(1992), died on 12 June; he was 85.

Daniel Keyes
(1927–2014), author of the powerful, unforgettable sf tragedy
Flowers for Algernon
(April 1959
F&SF
; novel 1966), died on 15 June aged 86. The short
Flowers
won a Hugo and the novel a Nebula, both richly deserved. Numerous media adaptations include the film
Charly
(1968). SFWA honoured Keyes with its Author Emeritus life achievement award in 2006. His last published book was
The Asylum Prophecies
(2009).

Jay Lake
(1964–2014), US author of the popular ‘Mainspring’ and ‘Green’ sf sequences plus many short stories, and editor with Deborah Layne of the
Polyphony
anthologies, died on 1 June from the cancer that had besieged him since 2008; he was 49. He won the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.

Philippa C. (Pip) Maddern
(1952–2014), Australian author and academic much admired for a number of stories beginning with ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City-State’ (1976
The Altered I
), died on 16 June.

Tony Palladino
(1930–2014), US illustrator and graphic designer who created the distinctive fractured typographic title for
Psycho
(both Robert Bloch’s book and the Hitchcock film posters), died on 14 May aged 84.

Mary Rodgers
(1931–2014), author of the popular children’s fantasy of identity exchange
Freaky Friday
(1972; twice filmed, 1976 and 2003) and its sequels, died on 26 June; she was 83.

Mary Stewart
(1916–2014), UK author most famed for her Arthurian ‘Merlin Trilogy’ –
The Crystal Cave
(1970),
The Hollow Hills
(1973) and
The Last Enchantment
(1979) – died on 10 May; she was 97.

Patrick Woodroffe
(1940–2014), UK artist whose work appeared on many sf/fantasy book covers – also some music albums – died on 10 May aged 73. He published several art collections, plus quirky self-illustrated stories like
The Dorbott of Vacuo
and
The Second Earth: The Pentateuch Re-Told
(both 1987).

Herbert Yellin
(1935–2014), whose Lord John Press (founded 1978) published signed, limited editions of modern authors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, Dan Simmons and Ray Bradbury, died on 13 June aged 79.