fantasy, page 91 of 92

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.)

An Alice in Wonderland style adventure, MirrorMask was apparently commissioned when executives at Sony realised that two Jim Henson-created films, Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal (a favourite of mine), which were regarded as flops at the time of their release, had gone on to generate a pretty much constant stream of sales on video and DVD, and so they wanted something new in the same vein. It’s a pity they didn’t have the courage of their convictions to back the idea with a good sized budget, because the result, MirrorMask, has a made-for-TV feel to it, perhaps due to the rather flat, overbright lighting that resulted from, as director Dave McKean points out in an interview included as an extra on the DVD, their not being able to afford the sort of full-scale 3D rendering required for the really complex ray-tracing that sets big budget animated and FX-driven blockbusters apart in terms of final look and polish.

MirrorMask starts in the real world, with teen Helena (played with a lot of charisma by Stephanie Leonidas) grumbling about having to work in her parents’ circus. Then her mother falls ill and Helena retreats into a dream world created out of her many drawings. The dream-world’s Queen of Light (played by Gina McKee, who also plays Helena’s mother) is in some sort of coma, from which she can only be awoken by a certain charm; meanwhile the Queen of Darkness is sending out dark tentacles that calcify whatever they touch. Helena decides to go on a quest to wake up the Queen of Light, only to discover that her place in the real world has been taken by the Queen of Darkness’s daughter, on the run from her over-protective mother.

It seems a bit mean to criticise a film for having ambitions above its budget, particularly as this is Dave McKean’s first full-length movie, and something he is obviously passionate about. (You only have to listen to the DVD commentary, where co-writer Neil Gaiman has nothing to contribute aside from the occasional interruption along the lines of, “Oh, look at that there, that’ll become significant later,” whereas McKean sounds like he could fill another DVD or two.) The dream-world he creates is full of visual invention — though I’d say over-full, because it never quite gels into feeling like one place, but shifts in tone and feel from scene to scene. For instance, some of the world’s inhabitants are human in all but that they wear masks, whereas others are barely-human collages of objects. (The police force are so weird I couldn’t work out at all what they were supposed to be.) In terms of the action, threats arise suddenly and inexplicably, and are often escaped without any clear indication of how it was managed. (For instance, when Helena and Valentine go to see the two floating giants and are forced to flee when the Queen of Darkness’s black, calcifying tentacles close in — why don’t the tentacles keep chasing Helena and Valentine? How do they escape these things that are obviously so fast and powerful?) In such a truly dream-like world, it’s difficult to feel at home and allow yourself any expectations of what’s going to happen next in the story, and so the result is a film that, for me, looks great in stills and individual scenes, but which doesn’t quite have the immersive quality of The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth.