Arthur H. Manners

Author of science fiction, fantasy and horror

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Real Boys and Xenomorphs

Alien is my favourite film. It’s horror at its finest: based on suspense and dramatic tension and dark mystique (the latter thanks to H. R. Giger‘s infamous design for the sets and the eponymous alien). The jump-scare is barely present. Like Jaws, the fear comes from not seeing the monster, only knowing it’s hiding somewhere just out of sight.

Xenomorph
Image credit: Digital Spy

Five sequels have appeared since (not counting the Alien vs Predator crossovers). Following the fate of most sequels, they don’t approach the success of the original — with the exception of the first sequel, creatively titled Aliens, which is more of a science-fiction action adventure. But they each develop the mythos of the predatory aliens, known in the films as Xenomorphs.

I’ve recently rewatched the most recent, and perhaps the most vilified, instalments in the series: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Both are prequels to the original film, and the thirty year gap necessitated some stylistic changes.

These two films at first appear to sell themselves on the promise of exploring a prominent mystery from the original Alien: what is the Space Jockey, why was it carrying the Xenomorph eggs? The Space Jockey is found by the crew of the Nostromo after they pick up a distress call. They find an ancient crashed spaceship housing a giant, fossilised pilot: the Jockey. In the cargo hold they find thousands of eggs, one of which becomes the Xenomorph antagonist of the film.

The Space Jockey
Image credit: HeroCollector.com

Everyone loved the Space Jockey. There is huge mystique around it. Giger’s elephantine design, the strangely organic design of the chamber, the sheer scale of it (see the humans in the photo).

But ultimately the films are quite the disappointment in exploring the Space Jockey mythos. They turn out to be a race of super intelligent psychopaths who seeded the Earth with life millions of years ago, and since then somehow decided to kill all life with deadly bioweapons (the Xenomorphs). A mixture of bad story decisions, and probably some editorial interference from the studio, meant that the films simply didn’t live up to the hype.

I don’t think they could have possibly succeeded anyway, as the imagination always trumps reality. That is the primary reason the original film was so effective. The Jockey storyline was doomed to failure.

David the Android
Image credit: Den of Geek

But I still love both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, for another reason entirely. I think that the heart of these films is the android David. Throughout the films he has his own quiet, sinister subplot: he murders various people in pursuit of discovering more about the creation of life, the Jockeys, and the Xenomorphs. In the course of two films, he overthrows his tyrannical ‘father’ (who delights in telling David that he created him, but is bitterly jealous of his immortality) and becomes a cross between a philosophising monk and mad scientist.

David is Pinocchio’s dark side.

Committing genocide against the Xenomorphs’ creators, experimenting on humans, crafting the Xenomorph form in pursuit of the “perfect organism”, David spends both films pursuing the power of God, the power to create life. In doing so, he is looking for a way to become a real boy.

This aspect of both films is often overlooked, and on repeated viewing it is the standout storyline — the one that delivers. Michael Fassbender‘s performance brings it all together, and I find David to be the most believable and interesting quietly-mad character in modern film.

If there’s another Alien film in the pipeline, I’d rather see a David spin-off than anything else. Take a watch of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant if you haven’t already, and take note of David. I’m convinced it’s a masterclass in character creation.

H is for Hawk: when words fly

I recently finished H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. It’s a stunner.

I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books lately where you initially wonder how a publisher ended up green-lighting the book. Somebody’s dad dies to they buy a hawk and try to train it?

I mean, okay, sounds a bit off-the-wall, but I’ll give it a shot. It starts off smooth enough, and I thought it would be a bit avant-garde, a book about hawks that might be tenuously linked to some aspect of modern life. I was happy enough.

Then it span around and kneed me in the delicates.

The book rapidly becomes a beautiful account of a woman struggling with spiralling depression after her dad dies, as her regression into a childhood obsession with hawks. There are a lot of parallels drawn between her experiences and those of the writer T.H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King.

The style is strange, with autobiographical elements mixed with fictionalised snippets of White’s life. But this recipe makes the whole thing come alive. The prose could cut glass.

Some favourite snippets:

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.

Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.

Sanderson’s Gone Rogue

A few weeks ago, Brandon Sanderson posted a video that was almost perfect clickbait. If you don’t want anything spoiled, watch the video before reading on.

Spoiler alert

It turns out it’s not a confessional, but an announcement of a bold plan. For anyone unfamiliar with Sanderson: he’s a prolific high fantasy writer. He writes big honking doorstops of books. And in lockdown he ‘accidentally’ wrote an extra five books. Five.

(Why do the rest of us bother?)

Not only is he releasing these in 2023, but he’s doing it via a Kickstarter campaign. And the books are being released with the options to go in blind: just a book that arrives once a quarter, accompanied only by the knowledge that it’s a Sanderson novel. Or you can get some juicy previews already.

This isn’t unheard of in indie publishing, but Sanderson is a trad publishing heavyweight, so the video was seen a couple million times within 24 hours. This kind of experiment is new ground: a statement that one of the most successful authors in the world is pursuing his own publishing routes, embracing the hybrid lifestyle, and retaining his IP.

Writing Longhand

Like millions of other people, I would have Neil Gaiman’s babies (we’d sort out the mechanics). His world-renown literary works aside, he also gives a bloody good interview.

Tim Ferriss recently reposted a 90-minute chat they had a few years ago. I recommend listening to the whole thing, and any other Gaiman interview you can find (there are lots on Youtube, like this one with Amanda Palmer).

Story bloat driven by word processors

What really grabbed me today was Neil’s comments on writing longhand. He always writes his first drafts out in a notebook, and it affects not only his process, but he has observed it affecting others, too.

I’ll be paraphrasing hereon, but you can read the full transcript here.

Neil notes that before PCs with word processors were mainstream, he edited an anthology of short stories. Then, the word counts averaged around 3,000 words. Only a few years later, with more computers around, he edited another anthology, only to find that the average word count has more than doubled.

On a computer screen, words are cheap. There’s no paper or ink to waste. There’s no selection pressure on the choice of words — just use them all. I wonder if short stories are fundamentally more difficult to write by computer than by hand. Does the brain process the task in a measurably different way?

Gaming environments for success

Neil has a well-known writing habit: if he doesn’t write then he is free to do nothing, but he is only allowed to do nothing. In minutes, doing nothing tends to lost his charm, and he so he writes. Procrastination is short-circuited.

But he also does something else. Neil produces his second drafts by copying his longhand manuscripts onto the computer. When he does this, if he realises he doesn’t need a page or so, he just doesn’t copy it up. Instead of deleting a whole chunk of digital copy, feeling like he’s losing work, he in fact saves himself the labour of transcribing.

This approach of using technology, environment and ritual provides an environment where Neil maximises his chance of doing the things he’d rather do. It doesn’t have to always work, it just has to be better than the default state.

Chris Clear posted something similar recently:

Prime your environment to make the next action easy.

First drafts are just meet-and-greets

In any case, Neil doesn’t try to catch lightning in a bottle. Even the master doesn’t spit out perfect prose right away (though I suspect his first go is usually still disgustingly good). I’ll close out with his thoughts on what first drafts are for.

… Nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames … it is you telling the story to yourself.