Superheroes are a problem.
Well, actually, they cause lots of problems (the biggest complaint being that they’re inherently silly), but the one that concerns me most is their intersection with the Post-Apocalyptic genre.
These two genres don’t mix. They can’t mix. The whole purpose of a superhero is to save the world, or at least some part of it. By their very nature, they mitigate against an End of the World scenario.
But at the same time, the genre invites the apocalypse to its door, again and again. Superheroes who save the world need to save the world from something. And therefore every superhero universe is constantly flirting with disaster. The apocalypse is permanently looming just over the horizon, far closer than in a sane and sensible world like ours (well, okay, a relatively sane and sensible world like ours).
But it never actually happens. At least, not for long. This is not to say that dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories haven’t been told in the superhero genre, it’s just that there’s always a way to hit the reset button, and it always gets used. The basic structure of some of these stories have been used so many times that they’re instantly recognisable. Here’s a classic example:
The hero or heroes are propelled forward into the future, and discover that something went horribly wrong at about the time they left, and now their world is a horrible wasteland/dictatorship/playground for alien invaders/whatever. They fight the enemies in the future, ally themselves with the last surviving heroes who didn’t get zapped into the future, convince them to help them get back to the past, and then make sure the problem never happens when they get home.
Every now and then someone tries to buck the trend – for example, the Wildstorm Universe had the above happening and then showed what happened when the superheroes failed to solve the problem, but even that’s about to be wiped away as the last bits and pieces of the cancelled Wildstorm imprint are folded into the DC Universe. On those rare occasions when an apocalypse does last, it’s always off on the side somewhere, like the Marvel Zombie world, or “Angor”, a world that suffered nuclear destruction mainly so that various survivors could cause problems for the Justice League. And even that one was rebooted a few years ago.
The superhero genre flirts with the apocalypse, but never marries it. Which is strange, given the attitude of the superhero genre to most others: one of utter inclusivity. It grabs bits and pieces from fantasy, science fiction and horror as and when it needs to, and is flexible enough to plunder almost anything else. Perhaps most delightfully, the Justice League was once turned into a situation comedy for a few years, both acknowledging the inherent silliness of superheroes and revelling in it (who can’t love the idea behind the one-shot Justice League Antarctica: getting rid of some annoying incompetent supervillains by placing them in a position where they can do no harm – protecting a virtually empty continent. Until they get attacked by penguin-piranha hybrids, of course...)
There’s one thing most superhero stories can’t do: come to an end. They go on, month after month, year after year, changing and modifying and telling the same basic stories to each generation as it comes, rebooting whenever things get too complicated. And because they never end, there’s one genre they can never really get hold of: Post-Apocalyptic. This is a strange paradox, because a superhero universe is, as I said above, constantly on the brink of apocalypse. Aliens are always ready to invade. Other universes hold worlds full of potential genocidal maniacs. Mad scientists are always inventing ways to end the world, even if only by accident. Brooding villains plot against the world. Disillusioned heroes can go off the rails at any moment. And let’s not forget how horrifying normal people can be when confronted with a wave of superhumans in their midst: the parallels between the Holocaust and treatment of “mutants” in Marvel comics are intentional and deliberate.
There are more than enough ways to achieve an apocalypse even in our world: how on earth do they manage it in a superhero universe when there are so many more, even given all the people trying to prevent it?
The short answer is: because the story must go on and must keep selling, or else all those people who work for Marvel and DC will be out of a job, and the shareholders of their parent companies won’t get the benefit of the constant reselling of these properties into other media. On the level of the story itself, there’s a strong impetus to show the good guy beating the bad guy, and morality winning out, however tenuously. Because, y’know, kids read these things.
This leaves an uncomfortable status quo for the superhero genre, at least for those of us whose interest has outgrown the youthful fascination with people in costumes hitting each other. Many of us are driven to look at stories outside the mainstream universes, which have the opportunity to come to a conclusion. But even then, they have a tendency towards a hopefulness that I don’t think reflects the true nature of a world that must suffer the presence of superhuman beings. Watchmen and Miracleman/Marvelman are probably the most obvious of these, both of which end up showing streets washed with blood and spattered with corpses. Despite this, both stories end on a more or less hopeful note as the terrible massacres provoke a response of rebuilding and co-operation. Both stories are, in different ways, inversions of the superhero-saving-the world story, but nevertheless, the world is saved. I think the fact that the number of superhumans in these stories is relatively small helps bring this about; a world with a wider flowering of superhumanity – such as in the mainstream superhero universes – would be in a lot more trouble.
So what might a world constructed upon the basic premise of a superhero universe be like if it actually happened? What is that premise, anyway? I think it’s this: A world roughly like ours begins to see superhumans created on a large scale, by some uncontrollable and random means; some superhumans use their powers to help people, and some use them for more selfish ends.
(note that this isn’t the premise of a superhero story; it’s the premise of a superhero universe. Also, there will be variation depending on how long ago this started happening, but I’ll leave that to one side for now as it complicates things unnecessarily)
I think that if you have enough superhumans in the world, it ends up being doomed, simply because the kind of power to destroy that we normally reserve for parliaments and presidents is given quite randomly to ordinary human beings to use and abuse at will. Of course, the world will do its best to prevent this – I expect there would be pogroms and genocides in some places, intensely strict legislation in others, and at the very minimum a registration process for anyone with a superhuman ability – but in the end, it’ll be like trying to hold back the tide.
I doubt that it would necessarily be some massive cataclysm that ends it all in some sudden way, but rather a series of smaller disasters that erode the capability of the world to sustain life. Say, for example, a melting of the icecaps. Or a disease that wipes out a huge part of humanity, or makes them sterile. Or something that wipes out the crops that feed millions. Or disperses the ozone layer, letting in a UV flood. Or wipes out a nation with grey goo. Or the destruction of the moon, wrecking the normal tidal cycle, destabilising the earth’s spin and causing multiple asteroid strikes from bits and pieces of the smashed moon. All of these things can probably be moderated or contained, and maybe even reversed in the long term, given the power available to those trying to save the wold. But it’s easier to destroy than create, and with enough people carrying these kinds of powers, I don’t hold out much hope for a world suffering the affliction of superhumanity as it's usually depicted in a superhero universe.
As much as I still love the genre, this is one reason why I haven’t read a lot of it lately. Like most people who were alive at the time, I survived the Cold War, although I had a residual and constant fear of apocalypse. Living in a superhero universe would be like this, but vastly magnified: you wouldn’t know where or how the end of the world might happen, let alone by what method. A world that could kill itself in so many ways would be a world of constant nervous terror, even among the wonders that superhumanity could bring about. Plus you’d be witnessing the constant erosion of the life you knew as more and more of it was destroyed by calamity after calamity. Definitely not somewhere you would want to live.
Which would make it an excellent place to tell a story. If I ever get round to doing it properly...
(astute readers of my work have doubtless already recognised such a world. Astute readers of the reviews of my work will likely realise this is an oblique response to some (perfectly valid) criticisms of the work. I suspect that the above is something I did not make entirely clear in my novel. Either that or a) I'm completely wrong, or b) some people don’t like superheroes at all. Oh, well...)
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Nightmare Fuel
Imagine that you're a child, too young to understand anything much. And all the older children who think they know everything tell you: the world is going to end. That you'll die. Your brother and sister will die. Your parents will die. Your friends will die. You know they're not lying because you can see it on TV too. There are programmes your parents won't let you watch because they want to to sleep without fear, but they show trailers for them. You see a town like yours burn in a firestorm and glass milkbottles melt on doorsteps.
That's my earliest memory of the Cold War. It was 1983 or 1984, and Threads was shown one night, far too late for me to see, but the trailer kept me awake. They wanted people to know how horrifying nuclear war was, but it made no difference. The Cold War ground on for the rest of the decade and didn't stop just because people knew it was pointless and suicidal to launch nukes at each other.
It turns out that this approach was tried before, in 1956. Ed Sullivan showed a short animation on his wildly popular TV show, better known for introducing the US to The Beatles. He wanted to raise people's awareness as well. A far better blog than mine has the full story, and the BFI have gone to the trouble of sharing the film with us:
It didn't work then, either. The Cold War kept getting colder. The animation just scared a lot of children in my parent's generation, as I would be scared eighteen years later. It's been near on thirty years since then...
And the nukes are still there. And I'm still scared.
That's my earliest memory of the Cold War. It was 1983 or 1984, and Threads was shown one night, far too late for me to see, but the trailer kept me awake. They wanted people to know how horrifying nuclear war was, but it made no difference. The Cold War ground on for the rest of the decade and didn't stop just because people knew it was pointless and suicidal to launch nukes at each other.
It turns out that this approach was tried before, in 1956. Ed Sullivan showed a short animation on his wildly popular TV show, better known for introducing the US to The Beatles. He wanted to raise people's awareness as well. A far better blog than mine has the full story, and the BFI have gone to the trouble of sharing the film with us:
It didn't work then, either. The Cold War kept getting colder. The animation just scared a lot of children in my parent's generation, as I would be scared eighteen years later. It's been near on thirty years since then...
And the nukes are still there. And I'm still scared.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Ideas
So I’m writing again. I have an idea for a novel – in fact, an idea I’ve had knocking around for several months. It came while I was idly musing on the multiverse in The Last Man on Earth Club; I recalled Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, with its hypothesis of ancestor-simulations created by advanced races, which might spawn further simulated worlds within worlds that were already simulated, something that could continue with levels of universe-nesting only limited by the processing power in the original universe.
Well, I thought to myself, a multiverse based on that idea would be an interesting setting and rather different to the usual story excuses we have for multiverses (quantums! branes! probabilities!), which are usually based on highly speculative physics. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has used this before, but still, if I can come up with the right characters and worlds and story it might be useful...
Which is to say, the idea is worth very little by itself. Ideas are only seeds that need to be watered with research, experience, hard work and more ideas. At this stage, I had no characters, no actual setting beyond the idea of a simulated multiverse, and no idea what the story was actually going to be about. All these things did eventually come after a lot of brainstorming, but the idea wasn’t enough on its own. In fact, the original idea might even end up being thrown out or just de-emphasised because some of the stuff I’ve created since then seems more interesting.
And yet without that original idea, I’d be nowhere.
So let’s take a look at ideas, and how to get them...
We’ve all been asked where our ideas come from, usually by friends, family and readers who can’t imagine how they could even start coming up with something like your finished book, and fail to realise how small and simple the first step can be. And half the time, we don’t even know where to look for ideas, or how to tell when we’ve found one that’s worth developing. And of course they can come from anywhere. Something that happened to you as a child. Something you saw out of the corner of your eye on the bus. Something you read in a newspaper. A shocking story about your family told over dinner by an elderly relative with Alzheimers who forgot they’d sworn never to mention it.
(oh wait... that last one is an idea in and of itself. Maybe not a great one, but certainly a seed from which a story could grow. See? You can get ideas while writing blog posts about trying to come up with ideas...)
Sometimes the universe just dumps an idea in your lap. The (very) recent death of a friend of the British Prime Minister in the middle of the Glastonbury Festival is of course a tragedy, but every writer of thrillers and mysteries in the UK has probably read the news this morning and been unable to avoid thinking how that could be the starting point for a story - after all, it's not a million miles away from the inciting incident of State of Play, an excellent TV series from a few years ago. Or maybe there's something that happened to you in your life that gets you started on a story. Or maybe someone tells you about a funny story from their life. Maybe you just stumble across something on he internet. But most of the time, you don't get that lucky. You have to go looking for ideas rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Of course, looking for an idea is usually the moment they dry up, because ideas are rarely the product of the more rational parts of your mind. They come more from the free-associating, pattern-recognising bits of your brain that usually go to work in your idler moments. You can call it daydreaming, if you like; when you’re not distracted by sensory input, or are doing something so routine that your attention can drift. Driving a car on the motorway, maybe. Public transport, for certain. Brainstorming works as well, because you’re deliberately not exercising judgement; just listing all kinds of crazy stuff that might possibly be of use, regardless of how much it makes sense. Somewhere in that list might be something unexpected and useful (which is what happened a few paragraphs ago as I was trying to come up with a list of potential places you could spot ideas).
Getting an idea is helped enormously by giving your brain something to free-associate with; information and knowledge it can recognise patterns within. So keep on reading, and not just within your own genre. Keep up with the news. Study history. Watch documentaries. The more you know, the more connections you’ll make when ideas come along. And pay attention to what people say: the smallest phrase overheard in a bar can lead to an idea. I got a short film script from hearing someone say he was playing eyeball tennis with someone he fancied; his phrase, but the visual metaphor immediately set my brain off thinking how you could actually show that happen, and make it funny.
Inspiration can go horribly wrong, of course. Especially when you’re young, and every idea you encounter seems new. The worst ideas I’ve ever seen are usually ones which are essentially rip-offs committed because the writer was bowled over by a film or a book and mistook that sense of amazement for an idea of their own. The major turning point of Fight Club, for example, inspired more than one script I had to read through back when I was helping people learn to make films, and they were all tedious, tedious, tedious.
So it’s important to exercise some judgement on your ideas when they come. That’s where the rational part of the brain wakes up and gets to do some work as well. So here’s some quick things to consider about any given idea:
• Are you interested in this? You probably are since you realised this was an idea in the first place. But you might still get ideas that don’t quite fit the kind of thing you write. The idea about the elderly relative spilling family secrets that hit me a few paragraphs ago is probably not one I’ll use, because I write science fiction. The idea was interesting as an individual scene, but I can’t see it going anywhere that keeps me interested. And if I’m not interested, I can’t expect anyone else to be. Maybe it'll be useful one day, but not right now. So make a note of it, and move on...
• Has it been done before? Well, pretty much everything has been done before, so you can’t rule out something just because someone else got there first. It depends on how specific your idea is; a multiverse based on Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument is very vague and will likely result in something different to other attempts at the idea. If, on the other hand, your idea is about an American adventurer who has his or her adventures while operating as an archaeologist, you’re likely to be compared to Indiana Jones no matter what you do. You’ll need to find a new angle that makes your idea sufficiently different, or make a note of the idea and move on...
• Can it be marketed? Okay, so you might think it’s a bit early to be considering this, but even so, you should be keeping an eye out for it. Some ideas just write the blurb all by themselves. The Last Man on Earth Club was one of these; the original idea is pretty much what’s in the description on Amazon, and people tend to comment that it’s the concept that motivated them to buy the book. You don’t need a marketable idea as your starting point, but if you find one – jump on it! (and bear in mind that you still have a hell of a lot of work to do)
• The most important thing of all: can it be turned into a story? If it’s just a setting, can characters be inserted who will do interesting things? If it’s a character, can you imagine interesting things happening to them? If it’s something else, can it be developed into something more than a static situation or scene? Of course, in order to figure this out, you need to know what a story is, so here’s one very quick and dirty definition: you get your characters up a tree; you throw rocks at them; you get them down again. It doesn’t have to be an adventure. But events need to happen, and characters need to go through them. If you can’t see how a story could happen... make a note of it, and move on.
And then once you’ve got an idea that makes you interested, that isn't completely unoriginal, and that you can turn into a story, and that can be marketed (maybe), all you’ve got to do is write the damn thing. Which is where it gets a lot harder. More on that some other time...
Well, I thought to myself, a multiverse based on that idea would be an interesting setting and rather different to the usual story excuses we have for multiverses (quantums! branes! probabilities!), which are usually based on highly speculative physics. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has used this before, but still, if I can come up with the right characters and worlds and story it might be useful...
Which is to say, the idea is worth very little by itself. Ideas are only seeds that need to be watered with research, experience, hard work and more ideas. At this stage, I had no characters, no actual setting beyond the idea of a simulated multiverse, and no idea what the story was actually going to be about. All these things did eventually come after a lot of brainstorming, but the idea wasn’t enough on its own. In fact, the original idea might even end up being thrown out or just de-emphasised because some of the stuff I’ve created since then seems more interesting.
And yet without that original idea, I’d be nowhere.
So let’s take a look at ideas, and how to get them...
We’ve all been asked where our ideas come from, usually by friends, family and readers who can’t imagine how they could even start coming up with something like your finished book, and fail to realise how small and simple the first step can be. And half the time, we don’t even know where to look for ideas, or how to tell when we’ve found one that’s worth developing. And of course they can come from anywhere. Something that happened to you as a child. Something you saw out of the corner of your eye on the bus. Something you read in a newspaper. A shocking story about your family told over dinner by an elderly relative with Alzheimers who forgot they’d sworn never to mention it.
(oh wait... that last one is an idea in and of itself. Maybe not a great one, but certainly a seed from which a story could grow. See? You can get ideas while writing blog posts about trying to come up with ideas...)
Sometimes the universe just dumps an idea in your lap. The (very) recent death of a friend of the British Prime Minister in the middle of the Glastonbury Festival is of course a tragedy, but every writer of thrillers and mysteries in the UK has probably read the news this morning and been unable to avoid thinking how that could be the starting point for a story - after all, it's not a million miles away from the inciting incident of State of Play, an excellent TV series from a few years ago. Or maybe there's something that happened to you in your life that gets you started on a story. Or maybe someone tells you about a funny story from their life. Maybe you just stumble across something on he internet. But most of the time, you don't get that lucky. You have to go looking for ideas rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Of course, looking for an idea is usually the moment they dry up, because ideas are rarely the product of the more rational parts of your mind. They come more from the free-associating, pattern-recognising bits of your brain that usually go to work in your idler moments. You can call it daydreaming, if you like; when you’re not distracted by sensory input, or are doing something so routine that your attention can drift. Driving a car on the motorway, maybe. Public transport, for certain. Brainstorming works as well, because you’re deliberately not exercising judgement; just listing all kinds of crazy stuff that might possibly be of use, regardless of how much it makes sense. Somewhere in that list might be something unexpected and useful (which is what happened a few paragraphs ago as I was trying to come up with a list of potential places you could spot ideas).
Getting an idea is helped enormously by giving your brain something to free-associate with; information and knowledge it can recognise patterns within. So keep on reading, and not just within your own genre. Keep up with the news. Study history. Watch documentaries. The more you know, the more connections you’ll make when ideas come along. And pay attention to what people say: the smallest phrase overheard in a bar can lead to an idea. I got a short film script from hearing someone say he was playing eyeball tennis with someone he fancied; his phrase, but the visual metaphor immediately set my brain off thinking how you could actually show that happen, and make it funny.
Inspiration can go horribly wrong, of course. Especially when you’re young, and every idea you encounter seems new. The worst ideas I’ve ever seen are usually ones which are essentially rip-offs committed because the writer was bowled over by a film or a book and mistook that sense of amazement for an idea of their own. The major turning point of Fight Club, for example, inspired more than one script I had to read through back when I was helping people learn to make films, and they were all tedious, tedious, tedious.
So it’s important to exercise some judgement on your ideas when they come. That’s where the rational part of the brain wakes up and gets to do some work as well. So here’s some quick things to consider about any given idea:
• Are you interested in this? You probably are since you realised this was an idea in the first place. But you might still get ideas that don’t quite fit the kind of thing you write. The idea about the elderly relative spilling family secrets that hit me a few paragraphs ago is probably not one I’ll use, because I write science fiction. The idea was interesting as an individual scene, but I can’t see it going anywhere that keeps me interested. And if I’m not interested, I can’t expect anyone else to be. Maybe it'll be useful one day, but not right now. So make a note of it, and move on...
• Has it been done before? Well, pretty much everything has been done before, so you can’t rule out something just because someone else got there first. It depends on how specific your idea is; a multiverse based on Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument is very vague and will likely result in something different to other attempts at the idea. If, on the other hand, your idea is about an American adventurer who has his or her adventures while operating as an archaeologist, you’re likely to be compared to Indiana Jones no matter what you do. You’ll need to find a new angle that makes your idea sufficiently different, or make a note of the idea and move on...
• Can it be marketed? Okay, so you might think it’s a bit early to be considering this, but even so, you should be keeping an eye out for it. Some ideas just write the blurb all by themselves. The Last Man on Earth Club was one of these; the original idea is pretty much what’s in the description on Amazon, and people tend to comment that it’s the concept that motivated them to buy the book. You don’t need a marketable idea as your starting point, but if you find one – jump on it! (and bear in mind that you still have a hell of a lot of work to do)
• The most important thing of all: can it be turned into a story? If it’s just a setting, can characters be inserted who will do interesting things? If it’s a character, can you imagine interesting things happening to them? If it’s something else, can it be developed into something more than a static situation or scene? Of course, in order to figure this out, you need to know what a story is, so here’s one very quick and dirty definition: you get your characters up a tree; you throw rocks at them; you get them down again. It doesn’t have to be an adventure. But events need to happen, and characters need to go through them. If you can’t see how a story could happen... make a note of it, and move on.
And then once you’ve got an idea that makes you interested, that isn't completely unoriginal, and that you can turn into a story, and that can be marketed (maybe), all you’ve got to do is write the damn thing. Which is where it gets a lot harder. More on that some other time...
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