fantasy, page 91 of 92

UnLondon is an abcity, an alternate London where all the forgotten things from our world go. When schoolgirl Zanna begins to attract an unwanted level of reverent attention from wild animals, bus drivers and, even, clouds in the sky, she and her friend Deeba find their way to UnLondon, where they discover the city is awaiting the coming of the Shwazzy, the chosen one who will defeat the malevolent, sentient Smog, as foretold by the (speaking) Book of the Propheseers. But Deeba (who is, it turns out, the real hero of Un Lun Dun) soon learns that not all things go according to prophecy.

This is China Miéville’s first book for Young Adults, but it certainly doesn’t feel like an author jumping on the current YA bandwagon (as he says in a recent Guardian interview, “I’ve been accruing image capital for a younger book for a long time and then I coagulated it”). What made it so readable for me was the constant level and quality of invention. Almost every one of its 520 pages brings at least one fantastic image or witty idea, sparking off little scintillations of the sort of pleasure only fantasy can give: unbrellas and other animate pieces of rubbish dragging themselves through back alleys, fireproof red squirrels climbing the November Tree which blooms like a firework explosion every 5th of that month, killer giraffes, a forest in a house, the frightening arachnids of Webminster Abbey… Best of all, these aren’t just throwaway ideas providing a glamour of invention, but are often meaningfully (and ingeniously) integrated into the plot.

The story itself doesn’t disappoint. Readers already familiar with fantasy literature will appreciate Miéville’s revisionary riffing on the cliché of the Chosen One, the prophesied hero whose destiny it is to defeat the Dark Enemy, which often leaves you wondering if there was any actual danger at all. (This isn’t to dismiss the idea of destiny in fantasy altogether — every child is, after all, biologically destined to grow into an adult, and so, at that point in their lives, can often feel in the grip of destiny-like forces beyond their control. Once you’re an adult, free will generally returns and you can do your best to forget, for a good few years, all about that other destined event — you know, the one that goes hand-in-hand with taxes.)

The other great cliché of fantasy doorstop series (Un Lun Dun is a standalone book which, unlike so many other fantasies, has the grace to finish, within the same covers, the story it begins), the quest to find x-number of meaningless “key” items so as to gain a magical weapon (best relegated to fantasy games, where at least it’s fun), is also neatly handled by Miéville’s stuck-for-time heroine. The UnGun she finally gains has got to be one of the best fantasy weapons out there, both in terms of power, and the fun it contributes to the plot. (How do you defeat a monster made of animate fruit?)

Written in a clear, up-to-date (though not slangy) language that will appeal to kids (while still offering the occasional stylistic diamond, my favourite being: “It laughed again, with a noise like a sack of dead animals being dragged across coal and broken glass”) and illustrated by the author himself, Un Lun Dun is a hugely enjoyable book, certainly for not-so-Y, not-so-A’s like myself.

I’m thrilled to say I’ve got a story published in the latest issue of the British Fantasy Society‘s award-winning magazine, Dark Horizons, recently under the new editorship of Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards. They’ve done a great job, and I’m really chuffed to be part of the line-up. I’m horrified, though, to realise that the last story I had published was in 1996! Largely, I’m ashamed to say, through lack of trying & general self-discouragement, but hopefully this will get me to put a bit more effort in that direction in future. I tend to fall into thinking, of the things I write, “Well I like it, but I can’t see how anyone else would.” — which is a surefire way of getting nowhere.

This story, “The Bookshop”, was basically inspired by a recurrent type of dream, in which I’d find myself in a wonderful bookshop full of all sorts of rare and interesting books, most of which don’t, in reality, exist. These dream bookshops would often be labyrinthine and ever-expanding, and I’d somehow never actually manage to make a purchase. One such dream was set in the upper levels of a real (but dream-modified) bookshop called, oddly enough, The Bookshop, which is on East Grinstead High Street. The Bookshop — the real one — has a wonderful secondhand section up some creaking old steps. It’s getting more and more difficult to find secondhand bookshops, it seems, so I count myself lucky to live in a town that has one. As wonderful as it is to find every book ever published via Abebooks or Amazon (I love them both), they can’t replace the surprise of finding the book you didn’t know you wanted, and would never have known you wanted, had you not come across it slotted unobtrusively on a shelf. When I think of the writers I’d never have read if it hadn’t been for old-style (non-internet) browsing: Ramsey Campbell, Theodore Sturgeon, Algernon Blackwood, Colin Wilson, E R Eddison, William Gibson, A E van Vogt (whose name I still don’t know how to pronounce), to mention a bare few — it’s not worth contemplating!

Shadow of the Colossus is the second game to be released by Fumito Ueda and the rest of the design team behind Ico (see my previous blog entry on Ico), to which it forms a sort of prequel. The gameplay, though, is quite different. In that first game, the aim was to find your way out of a vast castle. Combat, though part of the game, was pretty much a distraction from the exploration, a sprinkling of action to keep the player’s pulse up. With Shadow of the Colossus, although there is an element of exploration (finding the lair of each colossus in a large landscape you cover mostly on horseback), combat is the main focus. But they’re not the sort of button-blasting fights you get in shoot-’em-up type games. In Shadow of the Colossus, combat is very much about puzzle-solving.

In Shadow, you control Wander, a lone warrior who has travelled to a distant, forbidden land with the aim of bringing a young woman, Mono, back to life. To do this, he must collect the life-force from sixteen colossi. This is a rather game-like excuse to go around killing them, really, but there you go. Unlike most combat-oriented games, the colossi are the only opponents you face; there are no minor hordes of mildly-distracting sword-fodder. And the colossi really are colossal. To defeat them, it’s not simply a matter of going up to them and swinging your sword till they fall over. You do have to find their weak-points and stab them till the poor things keel over, but in order to reach those weak points you have solve various problems. With the first colossus, for instance, it’s a case of getting close enough to jump up and grab the fur of his leg, then climb up and stab him in the right place. With later colossi it gets more complicated. Not all of the colossi walk on the ground, for instance — some fly, some swim, some burrow into the sand. Some have weak points covered by armour you have to work out how to break off before you can stab them. Most have weak points in hard-to-reach parts of their bodies (on the head of a creature twenty or thirty times your height, for instance), and while you’re trying to climb up to reach it, they’re trying to shake you off and smash you into mush. You have to look at the environment, or the way the colossus moves, to find clues as to how to approach each one.

I said, above, that you have to “stab them till the poor things keel over”, and I really did feel sorry for these lumbering monsters, even while I was trying to kill them. Largely this was because of their eyes. The colossi are wonderful creations, made out of a combination of fur and rock, in the main — carefully designed so you can’t tell if they’re living creatures or automata — but their eyes are small, round, and rather dumb, which always made me feel they can’t really be evil, so why should I be murdering them? That didn’t stop me shaking my fist in triumph whenever I did finally blitz one, though, because they got more and more fiendishly difficult to kill, and each time I managed to do it, it was a huge relief. This was one of the best aspects of Shadow of the Colossus (and the worst) — it was so addictive. The early levels were quite easy, carefully graded so you learn new skills and methods of approaching the problem of colossus-killing. But suddenly, about halfway through, just when I was thinking this game would be easy enough to finish, the level of difficulty trebled, and kept going up at the same rate. But by that time I was hooked. So, whereas it took maybe 20 minutes to complete one of the earlier levels, it took me about a week’s worth of hour-long daily sessions (alright, sometimes more than that) to get past the incredibly tortuous final level, after which I sat in a daze while the ending played out. (This is another slight criticism: compared to Ico, whose story was present right from the start, and kept progressing as you played, Shadow of the Colossus really doesn’t have much of a story till you’ve finished the game, when you get it all loaded into a big wodge of cut-scenes.) But, again, the worst criticism is, as with Ico, that the automatic camera angles so often work against what you’re trying to do, and can be quite frustrating — a minor point against an otherwise excellent game. I look forward to whatever Ueda and his team do next.

Shadow‘s official site can be found here. (It does resize your browser window, though, which is rather annoying.)