Review: Space Captain Smith

Space/Captain Smith
By Toby Frost

I picked this book up at a publisher’s fair. Reviews liking it to Hitchhiker’s Guide, Red Dwarf and Black Adder. Being a fan of all three, I couldn’t resist.

Set in a very British future, where the empire has been restored and stretches across the galaxy, Space Captain Smith is the comic-adventure story of a third rate captain who gets the job of taking a passenger from one planet to another, not realising the whole thing is a set-up, that he’s just a decoy to encourage the alien Ghasts to come out of hiding and attack.

It starts out pretty good and there are a few laughs along the way. The writing is tidy and uncomplicated and generally entertaining, but – and this is a big but – there are far too many hiccups that pull the reader from the story.

Modern references in science fiction novels are dodgy ground. If a reference can be justified by tying it in with the plot, a good writer can pull it off. Example: Red Dwarf had a great episode involving Stauffenberg’s briefcase (the attempted assassination of Hitler) and it worked well because a) Rimmer was so sure he knew his twentieth century history, and b) the audience knew he didn’t know a damn thing about history, and realised before he did that the case contained a bomb. The situation was central to the comedy, so the joke was relevant.

But when modern-day references come out of the blue, just for a cheap laugh, everything falls apart. I can’t believe in a sci-fi world when the author is dropping one liners that turn my attention away from what I’m supposed to be enjoying.

I put up with a couple of these hiccups, but when a scene opened with a reference to Nick Cave, quoting lines from O’Malley’s Bar, it was too much. Personally, I think Nick Cave is brilliant, and I love the Murder Ballads album, but I’m not so blinkered to believe that renegade space cadets will be discussing his lyrics 500 years from now. It just doesn’t do it for me – plus, the point he was making was only relevant to the song. It was nothing to do with the story.

I did try to read on, but was hit on the very next page with mentions of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels.

Sorry, too many other books out there. Too many better writers.

Colin Mulhern.

Pumpkin 2009

Finished! I could clean it up a little, but I wanted to get the candles in.

and here’s it with the lights out…

Colin Mulhern

Pumpkin Head

I’m all fired up for Halloween (or Hallowe’en, if I’m really picky). However you spell it, it’s a great time of year. I wish it was the big time horror fest that it is now when I was a kid. We never had pumpkins to carve; we used turnips, or suedes, if you’re southern – we called them snadgies. They were cheap, but they were incredibly hard to carve. Pumplins are a doddle.

I’m busy playing with ideas for what to carve this year. This is last year’s effort:

as modelled by Cameron. There were so many teeth, it was almost cut in two and started to sag after a few hours.

This year I fancy taking it to the next level. I had a practice this afternoon carving a photographic image of Matthew into a pumpkin.

The result is okay, considering it was rushed, but it’s not as much fun as a scary face. So I think I’ll keep to tradition and do a proper scary pumpkin, but I might go for 3D teeth or something.

Whatever I come up with, I’ll post a pic. So come back soon.

Happy Halloween!!!!

Colin Mulhern

Child Snatchers and White Vans

Lock your doors. Shut your windows. Turn out the lights.

No matter what, don’t… DON’T… leave the house.

This was the advice of a Year 5 girl yesterday morning, backed up by a group of friends, because… (cue haunting music) There is a man driving a white van, with blacked out windows, who is abducting kids from the streets around our school!!!!

Not true, of course. It’s an Urban Legend: the kind of story that sounds real, usually because the teller says something like: ‘It happened to a friend of my mam!’ hence their other name, Friend-of-a-Friend stories. Usually, the more macabre, the better.

When I was a kid I knew loads of these stories, and took great pleasure in scaring the hell out of kids bigger than me. Once, on a school trip away, when we were all supposed to be tucked up in bed, I reduced the hardest kid in the school to tears with a series of ghost stories that I swore were true. (Years later, this inspired a scene in The Devil’s Prayer).

I think the reason Urban Legends work so well is that because they are word of mouth, they come across as a shared secret, and in being told as, ‘it’s true – this definitely, definitely happened, honest!’ they have a stronger affect our imagination and natural fear of the unknown. You’re left thinking that if it happened to the kid in the story, it could happen to you.

And Urban Legends don’t just freak kids out. I’ve heard many, many stories told to me by adults, convinced they are true; convinced they have happened to a friend of a sister at college, or an Aunty out shopping, including such classics as:

• The escaped lunatic hiding in the car
• The axe under the driver’s seat
• The flat mate’s scarf
• The babysitters and the killer upstairs.

The internet has created new versions: Michael Jackson’s ghost on YouTube is a big hit (in the eighties it was the ghost in Three Men and a Baby, and further back there is the ghost in The Wizard of Oz, later debunked when the DVD showed it to be nothing more than a bird stretching its wings!). The April Fool’s Day virus is an annual event, and 9/11 resulted in hundreds of urban legends of terror plots and government conspiracy.

Basically, if there’s something you can gossip about that makes someone else look first in disbelief and then horror, then you’re halfway there.

Of course, this didn’t help the year 5 girls with their fear of the white van. One girl was in tears at the prospect of going home that day. Telling her it was just a story wasn’t enough. Luckily, I found an Australian newspaper reporting the very same story back in May. I showed her the most important line in the report:

Two days later, police informed the media that the attempted abduction report was false, that the young girl had made it up.

‘See how stories spread? It’s taken 5 months for that story to get from Australia to here.’

She finally nodded and agreed not to spend any more time worrying.

But there is another side to that story; the real curse of the Urban Legend…

If there is someone in our local area, driving a with a white van with blacked out windows, the poor bloke is probably wondering why groups of kids are pointing and screaming whenever he drives past.

colin mulhern

Contact Page

I have finally figured out how to do a contact form on WordPress. Turns out it’s a doddle. For those interested, just type:

into your page.

So if you want to send me a message, pop over to the contact page and give it a try.

Guest Blog

My first ever Guest Blog has appeared over at Strictly Writing – a very active writers’ blog with loads of contributers. Here’s a link: http://strictlywriting.blogspot.com/

Advice to a Young Writer

A short while back, I had a year 6 pupil asking me a few questions about writing. I began by giving what I thought was good advice. About halfway through I realised I was talking utter rubbish – not that what I was saying was wrong, but that it was inappropriate. It was too defined. This is probably because I usually only talk about creative writing to adults – not to kids.

With adults, it’s easy. You imagine they know the basics so you concentrate on the technical side: character development, point of view, show not tell, plot, structure, grammar, punctuation – none of which help you become a writer. They help you become a better writer, and they are things you need to develop if you really want to master the craft, but like any craft, these technical issues are skills that you develop over time.

Anyway, a few nights before my chat with this year 6 pupil, I had the choice of staying in, watching a DVD of LOST – or go to a photography exhibition.

I’m not a big fan of exhibitions, and because I’ve been to opening nights before, I convinced myself that I knew what to expect, which is why I very nearly stayed in, but at the last minute I decided to go along.

Some of my expectations were right: The photography was great, the wine was fine, and the crisps were cheese and onion. What took me by surprise, what I could never have imagined, was the fifteen minute conversation I had with a clown.

And this was no run-of-the-mill, bog standard circus clown. This girl, with a mild, almost Australian, inflection to her Geordie accent and beautiful, large, expressive eyes, is a clown doctor. Her job is to go into the children’s ward of a hospital, holding a doctor’s bag full of jokes and props and make the kids feel better.

I knew that this was a rare opportunity, so I forgot about the photographs and kept this girl chatting, finding out as much about her role as I could.

And that’s what being a writer is all about. It’s adding to your arsenal of experiences. It’s about realising that it is more valuable to listen than to talk, to watch rather than look, to question rather than take for granted.

So getting back to my advice to my year 6 pupil. I sort of stopped mid sentence and said, ‘You know what? If you really want to be a writer, forget about writing, because you’ll do that anyway, and you’ll learn all of the skills along the way. If you really want to be a writer, you need to get out there and live life: to experience, and watch, and listen.’

And that’s pretty much it, because it’s those experiences you exploit when you finally sit down and decide to write something. Whether it’s a historical romance, or the something like the story I’ve just started – a science fiction short about a robot, working part time as a clown in a hospital. Something I definitely could not have written two days ago.

The clown doctors – click to visit their site

Review: The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol
by Dan Brown

I’ve read far too many negative reviews of Dan Brown’s previous books to really care whether I should be judging this on literary merit or on entertainment factor. I think a lot of those reviews come down to either frustration or jealousy. And that’s fair enough because Dan Brown has a bizarre style of mixing a simple thriller plot and cardboard characters with masses of information told directly to the reader. Any writers’ group will hail all three as elements bound for disaster, so it’s no wonder they get wound up when he sits at the number one slot.

In The Lost Symbol, he delivers the same technique, and just like his last four books, he pulls it off. I found this novel incredibly readable, I liked the massive info-dumps and managed (mostly) to ignore the jar between info and story. The story itself is fun and fast with plenty of twists and turns but I ended up with a feeling of being short changed.

The reason, I think, is that in this 500 page novel, each chapter is only about 4 pages long. At the end of each chapter there’s half a page of white space, and then another half page before the next chapter. That must be about 80 blank pages in all. More than half of the novel is information, so that leaves around 200 pages of story. But many scenes are told from different perspectives, doubling up on what you already know. In the end I’m left with a story that feels like four scenes long. Entertaining, yes, but lacking in substance.

As I said at the opening, sometimes it’s nice to judge a book on entertainment factor, and I was entertained for pretty much the whole book. It’s not the best thriller in the world, the characters aren’t going to live with you after you close the book, but there are a few great scenes and a few things to make you go, “Hmmm.”

Overall feeling – not as good as The Da Vinci Code, and nothing to get worked up about, but a few hours of free time well spent.

Colin Mulhern

Dan Dan Dahhhhnn!!!

Cue gripping music, drumroll, audience shuffling nervously on their seats, curtains twitching with hidden movement. And in the dead air before the show begins you can’t help wondering if it’ll match your expectations…

I know too many writers who slag Dan Brown to high heaven, so I hope they’re not reading this because I can’t wait until Tuesday when his fifth novel, The Lost Symbol hits the shelves.

I was handed The Da Vinci Code by my dad long before the hype exploded, so I was lucky in not having a clue what it was about. I usually hate info-dumps in novels, but for some reason, in that novel, it worked rather well, and I was hooked. I went onto his other books, loving Digital Fortress and Deception Point, but I’ll concede that Angels and Demons bored the hell out of me, and the helicopter escape was just plain silly.

So… I’m ready to see if he can come up with the goods again. There have been a plethora of imitations; the few I’ve tried just haven’t caught my attention in the same way.

No need to wait until Tuesday though. One of the Sunday papers has the first two chapters, so I’m off for a walk to the shop.

Laters…

Colin Mulhern

Review: The Boy with the Topknot

The Boy with the Topknot
by Sathnam Sanghera

There is nothing about this book that yells at me to pick it up and read it. Not the cover, not the blurb. Nothing. Subtitled as “A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton” the back cover sells it as a trip down memory lane and hints at a few family skeletons. Big deal. Added to that, it was really difficult to find, so if wasn’t for the local Reading Group suggesting it as a title, I would have never even heard of it A shame really, because what the blurb fails to mention the one thing that held me throughout: mental illness.

Sathnam was in his mid twenties before he realised his father was taking medication for schizophrenia. This revelation takes him on a journey of research and discovery, learning that his sister also has the condition, developed while she revised for her school exams. But his main focus is his mother, and how she coped with her arranged marriage, domestic violence and life in a land where she couldn’t speak the language.

As a memoir, it is certainly engaging, deeply moving and peppered with humour. On the down side, Sathnam’s own neurosis never lets up. His internal debates and worries are an important element of the book because one of the main threads is Sathnam’s desire to get his mother to understand his own struggle of feeling trapped between worlds, and that his British side is equally as important to him as his Indian side, but it ends up becoming irritating and getting in the way of the characters you really want to know more about. I’m trying not to be too harsh on this point because the book is a personal memoir, and written subjectively, but at times he just irritates and overpowers everything in his path.

Overall, The Boy With the Topknot reads well and is a fascinating secret window on a world that would otherwise remain locked in its box, but on finishing, I couldn’t help feeling it would benefit from some heavy editing.