What If, Historically, Women Were Stronger Than Men?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Earths: Alternate Outcomes of Geological Developments & Prehistoric Times’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339081071&sr=8-1  

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339081015&sr=8-1  

Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043695&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor

Fear Of Putting A Foot Wrong In A New Job

As noted in my last posting, after 12 months of unemployment I have finally found work.  Whilst that has lifted a great deal of burden off me and lifted the threat of losing my house and never being able to own one again, it has opened up new fears, which in my weariness after joblessness, weigh heavily on me. 

One key fear is that I will not be able to do the job.  Much of the feedback I received from interviews over the past year has been incredibly negative.  One company sent me three pages of criticisms of my performance in the interview and another accused me of having lied on my application form because when they met me they felt I was incompetent and could not have been the man who appied.  When I was a teenager you were told that if you saw a vacancy for which you could match 4 out of 5 of the requirements you should apply for it.  That principle has long gone.  These days not only do you have to match 25 out of 25 of the listed requirements but also show evidence of what you have done.  I think this may be one reason why youth unemployment has reached a level even higher than in the 1980s even though overall unemployment has yet to reach that decade's peak.  Recruitment has become 'mechanised' and so the young without vast experience now do not even get the chance to show their potential because they are filtered out at stage one for not being able to say they have 3 years' experience using every piece of industry software listed on the job specification.  The increase in industry-specific qualifications which I have also noted on this blog, is an additional factor in this too.  By the time I applied for recent jobs, I was stretching every crumb of experience so as to match the specifications.  I was scrupulous in never lying, not even exaggerating, but now fear that I am simply not as confident or as skilled in the wide range of activities my job expects me to undertake as the interviewers believed as a result of my desperation to get interviews.

Other fears stem from coming into a new office and company environment.  I made a huge mistake in going to work for my last employer.  I had not checked what kind of working culture they had and so was really caught out when I found that it was a culture from the 1950s.  The snobbery and social class division at the company was incredible.  I was told that I should not be at the level that I as at, not because I could not do the job (I actually did it far better than my predecessor), but because of my social background.  I was told this blatantly by my line manager.  Bizarre things such as me being unable to say what my favourite recipe cooked on an Aga (a range oven burning wood or coal costing around £6000) was used to show how unsuited I was for the post.  I do not anticipate this in my new job, but it has made me very cautious of 'not fitting in'. 

In two of my last three jobs I have been bullied.  In my last full-time post a manager took a personal dislike to me from the start and taking individual words from emails portrayed me as setting up a 'resistance group' within the company.  She went around eliciting any negative comment or even neutral comment, that she could use to compile a list of complaints against me.  None of the complaints had substance and the word were taken out of context and blown up into some fantasy.  It made me phobic of saying or doing anything, knowing that even good work could be twisted some way to appear as a flaw.  The trade union representative found it incredible that she could do such things.  However, like me he recognised that these days you have little ability to fight back when someone even in a slightly more senior position decides to use the system against you.  Her behaviour cost the company thousands of pounds but they seem to have taken no steps to head off something like that happening again.  Procedures are wonderful for helping run a company smoothly, but too often in the hands of someone with a personal grudge, as I have seen happening too often to colleagues of mine, they can easily be used as a method of bullying.

Two jobs back from that I was bullied for a year by a colleague on the same level as me.  He was incredibly arrogant believing that anything that came out of our office had to have been influenced by his ideas and so should have his name on it rather than mine.  He was terribly impatient and assumed that if he sent an email it would be received instantly and in turn he would expect an instant response.  As anyone who has worked in a large company knows, this does not always happen.  I have had emails arrive between 4 and 14 days after they have beens sent and internal mail has arrived up to 2 months late.  In addition, I had other work to do other than that which involved him, often on behalf of more senior staff or with a greater urgency.  On aspect on which I was employed was my ability to time manage and prioritise, which I did.  Yet, of course, that often meant his work involving me had to wait in a queue, something he could not accept.  He was also critical of me for not being married or having children and so felt it meant I was immoral.  In fact I led a quiet, celibate life free from drugs and alcohol abuse.  This was not enough, the simple fact that I was unmarried implied to him that I must be a reprobate and unsuitable for work alongside him.  Both these bullies were 'nice people' liked by those they were not bullying and in both cases it proved impossible to make more than a handful of people understand how much I was suffering from working with them.  Bullying in 2 out of 3 jobs make me fear it will happen again, to the long-term detriment of my career.

I have certainly learnt not to say anything of my private life; not to have a photograph of my girlfriend or her child on my desk, because I have found these would be things used against me.  At my last job so many characteristics of my girlfriend (being from abroad originally, coming from a 'low' social class [daughter of a police officer], being a single parent, running her own business) were criticised and these criticisms were added to those of me, even though she had never even been within 120 Km of the company site while I was working there.  From now on I am going to keep all mention of my life outside work a complete secret.  Conversely, though, I do worry that I will be charged with being 'distant' or 'cold' because I cannot bring a wife along to work social events.  It seems ironic in an age when you have to complete extensive 'equal opportunities' forms every time you apply for a job, outlining your nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, marital status and any disabilities, to then find that even minor elements of these will, in fact, be used as a basis on which to criticise you.

Another thing I have learnt in the past 2-3 years is not to hold too tightly to the truth.  I think that I feel a real discomfort when lies are spoken partly because of Asperger's tendencies (and going for a proper diagnosis of that, I have now been persuaded, would be best put back if I want to keep my job).  However, as I have noted before, we are in an era of management culture which again smacks of the 1950s, with bosses feeling freer to say 'my way or the highway', to compel workers, no matter what their level to 'put up and shut up' rather than raising concerns about what is planned.  Of course, this is a trend which is prevalent in Chinese companies and government so I guess we should not be surprised to see it so common here in the UK.  In addition, the 'whip of unemployment' is back in full effect just as many employers were crying out for in the mid-2000s.  I am certainly cowed by it and know that in the coming year I am going to have to bite my lip and not speak out even when I see a plan which is bound for disaster.  It is ironic given that I have been employed for my expertise in 17 areas and have reached office manager level, that my views are not only not solicited but even raising concerns risks me losing my job.  You can term this the 'Titanic mentality' but it seems increasingly prevalent in British business and as a consequence projects are going to be driven through without sufficient discussion or reflection, based on the enthusiasm of one or two individuals rather than drawing on the knowledge of a range of staff.

Related to having to remain silent about any potential flaws in proposals is the need to check word-for-word everything that I write or say.  In my last post, emails would be checked literally word-by-word by my line manager and single 'offending' words were used as the basis for complaint. It was not about the overall content or the thrust of an argument, simply about the vocabulary used.

I speak plainly and clearly, but now need to learn how to discuss issues, no matter how controversial they may be, in language as circumspect as that used in the court of the Japanese emperor.  When a single word in a set of minutes or a report can be used to suggest you are trying to undermine the company, you have to check and check again.  Not only that, you have to quickly understand what your managers and colleagues understand by certain phrases, even if that understanding is out of step with the rest of the industry.  In the age of desktops and laptops we are all our own secretaries, but from now on, I am going to get as much written by other staff as possible so at least to put a 'fire gap' between me and the readers of the minutes or reports, knowing that so much will be 'lost in translation' as we battle to know what the readers (not only those who the material is intended for, but anyone who may stumble across it later too) understand by individual words.

Another challenge for me is length of communications.  As I have noted before, there is a demand for everything to be very brief as if Twitter has become the baseline for our communications.  Again I have been criticised for the simple length of what I write, not the content.  I have failed to learn the unstated acceptable length for an email, which of course varies depending on the particular recipient and the subject being discussed on that occasion.  The length dismisses any discussion of the actual content and so makes it pointless for me to even bother communicating.  I have no idea what the acceptable length of communication is in my new job, but you can guarantee that I will be sending lots of single sentence emails filled with abbreviations; with separate emails to cover different aspects of a single case, rather than risking putting them into a single email or report.

My experiences make me feel as if I have become an outsider in the workplace and that, despite all my years of expertise, have missed out on the training on what seems to so many employers to be the 'standard' and only acceptable approach to working in an office.  Ironically it ignores things which on paper should be basics of office work, such as clear communication and avoiding discrimination on any basis.  I am certainly going into the workplace fearful of saying or writing anything wrong.  This has effectively castrated me as an employee, not willing to risk making comments on any proposals, let alone taking any initiative or leading an activity for fear that even minor differences from the 'norm' will be used to attack me.

A Year Of Living Joblessly

This posting started out being entitled 'Joining The Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed' to mark my year without a full-time job.  However, incredibly I have been offered a job which starts today, 12 months to the day from when I was laid off by my previous employer.  Whilst I have been incredibly fortunate, after 80 job applications and 29 interviews to have escaped unemployment (for now) and stop the sale of my house, I still feel it is worthwhile reflecting on the impact being unemployed for longer than all the combined previous periods of joblessness in my life has had on me.

The latest figures I can find for long-term unemployed people, i.e. those without work for 12 months or more, date back to summer 2010, so with the recession having continued since then, I imagine they are higher.  The figure in July 2010 was 787,000 people, with 50% of unemployed people over the age of 50 falling into this category, the suggestion being that they will never work again.  I have heard that current figures are over 900,000 people, though cannot find hard data to support that.   In addition, it is claimed possibly millions of people are in part-time work as they cannot get a full-time job and so there is also a category of long-term 'underemployed' who are not able to contribute as much to the economy as they could and would like to do.

Anyway, as of today, I suppose I can count as long-term unemployed.  The last time I had a full-time job was 12 months ago.  Strictly I suppose I am not counted because I worked for a couple of days per week for a period of six weeks around the start of 2011.  However, it did nothing much to raise my household income.  I guess I will also not count because I am not claiming jobseekers' allowance.  I exhausted my contributions based payments back in December 2010 and because the woman who lives in my house runs her own business and works more than 24 hours per week, I am excluded from claiming incomes-based jobseekers' allowance.  It is for reasons like this that there is always a discrepancy between the number of people claiming jobseekers' allowance, currently around 1.45 million and the actual number of unemployed people, now 2.48 million, according to BBC figures.  This is because benefits tend to look at the household income so an unemployed husband/wife (or co-resident lumped into that category) or grown-up child living in a house with a man or woman working will often not be entitled to any benefit, but still be without work.  If it had not been for HM Revenue and Customs realising that they had made a vast mistake in the tax I had paid, then by now I would have had my house repossessed and guess I would be begging friends to sleep on their floor.  I certainly count myself one of the lucky ones.

What does it signify being long-term unemployed?  Well, the first thing seems to be that people feel free to treat you as if you are feckless or lazy or an idiot.  As has been discussed before on this blog, I think this varies depending on the area you live in, as in areas of high unemployment, it has to be a fact of life for lots of people.  Living in southern England where the recession is only steadily biting, and especially in a district where most residents seem to be self-employed, the Thatcherite attitude that you are only unemployed because you want to be, persists.  Without any knowledge of the vacancies available or what qualifications you need to fill them  people insist that there is work.  As I know from trying to get jobs in local shops, these days it is not an issue of being qualified but having a whole array of industry-specific qualifications whether to work in a baker's or as a travel agent or an estate agent.  With unemployment high there are always lots of people around that have such qualifications that I do not have and so I got knocked out of the running at the application phase, especially these days when so much recruitment is about matching requirements to the applicant's statements as the first phase.  If you do not have a 100% match then you stand no chance.  So you get told that there is work and then bewildered questions about what you are doing wrong turn quickly to condemning you for being flawed in some major way.

Though less common than it used to be, there often comes the suggestion of setting up your own business.  Given that we are in a recession and established businesses are folding every day and 50% of new businesses collapse within 6 months, I do not see this as an escape from unemployment, just a way to quickly lose whatever money you may have remaining.  In addition, if we were all budding entrepreneurs, would we not all be doing it anyway?  As programmes like 'Dragon's Den' show, even many people who think they are entrepreneurs are often sadly deluded and many more people get rejected even on that show, than win funding.  Why should it be any different in real life?  The laziness comes in the assumption that that is the answer for everyone, when in fact it is only the answer for a small minority and then only with luck rather than skill.

Ironically, whilst long-term unemployment is usually seen as being your fault, people also treat it like an infectious disease.  Unemployment defines my life as it has for the past 12 months.  I go nowhere, I talk to few people, so being out of work and applying for work are the key elements of my life.  Yet the moment you start talking about them, you get the 'I don't want to hear that' attitude, almost as if it is a contagion that through talking you will somehow blight that person's job.  This myth is one the government and employers like to perpetuate, that unemployment is the consequence of your personal actions.  If you have been dismissed for inappropriate behaviour, then, yes, that is acceptable.  However, very many unemployed people have been made redundant as a result of lay-offs affecting hundreds if not thousands of people.

We have minimal control over our working lives these days.  Unless we can go back in time and change which career path we went down.  When I started in my industry back in 1994 it was seen as a secure one which was going through a period of boom and now it is in crisis.  How could I have predicted in 1994 that instead I should have been taking travel agents' qualifications so I could still get a job in 2011? 

People say 'save'.  I have done this throughout my life.  I used up my first batch of savings covering my mortgage while unemployed for five months in 2009.  I have now used up my redundancy package and tax rebate paying it in 2010/11.  Of course, I had mortgage protection, but it does not apply if you are not claiming unemployment benefit and you cannot claim that if someone in your house works for more than 24 hours or you have been in fixed-term contract work.  I should have saved the premiums on paying for that insurance.  If I had got a job just 3 months after being unemployed or even 6 months, then I would be comfortably off and ready for when the next crisis hit.  We are only at the start of the government-augmented recession, we have years of this to go.  It took from 1979 to 1994 before the economy recovered last time, so on a tight estimate we have about until 2023 before we can breathe easily in the UK, perhaps longer given how severe Cameron has been compared to Thatcher in the damage he is intentionally doing to the economy for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons.  However, all that money is now gone, so next time I lose my job it is going to be very nasty.

Of course, I have not been lazy. I have now applied for 80 jobs which works out at 1.5 applications per week, below the level of 2 per week that the Department for Work and Pensions insists on. However, that average does not reflect the seasonal ebb and flow of vacancies and that in some weeks I have applied for 6 vacancies and in others none. In addition, applying for jobs these days is not just about sending in your CV. On average I write 5000 words per application, with some as long as 10,000 words. The longest, with 51 requirements, took me 8 hours to complete. In addition, as so many applications are done on unstable online application forms, I have probably re-typed many thousands of words again when the system has crashed and lost all that I have input. I lost two hours' worth of work last month because they system decided to drop out. Another even timed me out, after three minutes, before I had time to set my password for the application, then would not let me access or delete or replace the account which only had my name and address on. When I emailed the company I was told that a lot of people had had a problem with the online application. Why not get it fixed then?

I estimate I have written 400,000 words in applications, enough for four doctoral theses or a series of novels (I used to calculate things on the basis of an Agatha Christie novel, they were 60,000 words long, but these days they seem very short, so probably 120,000 is closer to the average). Of course, a lot of it is repetitive stuff and I still have no idea why companies want to know which 'O' levels I got in the 1980s, what grade I got for each of them and the precise day (not just the month or year, but the actual day) on which I was awarded the qualification. What difference does it make if I got a B or C in Chemistry 'O' level on 29th June 1984 for whether I am a good office manager or not?

I have had 29 interviews which works out at more than one every single fortnight.  Of course, they have not been spread out evenly and things like Christmas, Easter and the run of bank holidays, means they have been ill-distributed; on 4 occasions I have had 2 on the same day.  I have applied for jobs ranging from £19,000-£54,000, meaning, in fact my life could have gone down very different paths if I had got a job from one extreme or the other.  The same applies to where I will end up living.  The geographical bounds of my applications are now Southampton-Swansea-Edinburgh-Colchester, an area which covers a large chunk of the UK's population and economic activity.  In southern England, of course, it is distorted because a lot of the jobs in a particular circumference are actually in France and some UK employers seem reluctant to accept applicants from other areas.  One employer in Hertfordshire actually said to me 'we've never employed anyone from the other side of the M25' as if it was an iron curtain.  It is bitterly ironic when the phrase 'get on your bike' has returned to attack the unemployed with, you find employers who have a difficulty envisaging employing people who live elsewhere even within the South-East region.  Of course, being unemployed, you cannot be picky, you know you have to be willing to go anywhere and rent a shitty room in a house that you have had to compete with six others to secure in order to get work.  Quality of life does not even come near the equation.

The biggest problem for me being long-term unemployed is the fear.  Having already lost my house and the career I once had, I worry how much longer this can go on and how much worse it can get.  Employers are reluctant to take on the long-term unemployed as if they have succumbed to their disease and are now incurable of all the bad habits that unemployment instills in people.  They do not understand that we are so desperate we are willing to work for poverty wages, wherever they choose and dare not question whatever outrageous demands they may make.  That is the impact of 12 months' lashing with the whip of unemployment.  I am doubly cursed now because I am over 40 too.  An article recently said employers see the over-40s as lacking energy and being fixed in their ways.  This is ridiculous, I have had to adjust so many times in my life, I have worked for four different employers at times, that I am honed in the art of being flexible and adjusting the work changes.  As for energy, I have never rolled in hung over like many in their 20s, I do not spend time texting my friends or updating Facebook pages, in terms of productivity I will be better than someone 20 years younger.  However, of course, such prejudices are not challenged and in fact as attacks on feminism have shown, in many ways, prejudice in terms of what you are is again acceptable, just as David Cameron and his supporters have desired.

Stretching out in front of me is an ongoing path of uncertainty.  Will I still be unemployed this time next year?  How much poorer can I get?  I know there will be loads of disappointment.  I have been rejected 28 times from interviews and another 51 times been told I was not even good enough to get there.  Every piece of feedback seems to contradict the one before.  Just recently I was told that I did not come across as sufficiently sympathetic to workers when apparently being overly-sympathetic was criticised in my last job.  Even now with work, nothing seems certain.  I have been incredibly lucky, but will always remain fearful that it will be short term.  I was laid off from my old job only 7 months after being appointed to it.

I am both weary of how long having no job went on for with no succees and retain a fear that this is the pattern my life will hold in the future especially as I progress further into middle age.  No-one seems able to offer practical help, they just seemed to be able to harangue me or avoid me.  Joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed does not permit access to a fraternity, rather you simply become classified a pariah.  Of course, I am grateful that I am now in a job, but I know that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in the UK in even worse situations with even less hope than me and I mourn for that and the long-term damage it is doing to the UK.

Why I Like The Movie Of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003)

I was reading last month that the movie, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003), ended Sean Connery's movie acting career.  The fact that he was 73 at the time and commanded a fee of US$17 million (equivalent to £10.9 million at current exchange rates) per movie, may be other feasible explanations.  A multi-millionaire tax exile, Connery is known to have strong views on who he works.  Certainly, director Stephen Norrington and Connery did no get along well in making this movie.  Norrington also retired from movies following the release of this one.  The movie took US$179 million (£115 million) across the world. Added to this has been a further US$48 million (£30 million) from video and DVD rentals and sales.  Yet, you read it was a 'flop'.  I think this is, partly, because it garnered poor reviews from the media, though I would have anticipated that even before it was released. 

I have been reading how actors found 'The Matrix' difficult to understand even though school children I know have no difficulty with the concept of people being downloaded into computer systems.  We know from the example of the 'Fatherland' (1994) movie how audiences dislike movies which mess around with history.  They are often not certain of what really happened, so feel uneasy when this is subverted.  'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is both a counter-factual and a steampunk movie.  Outside Japan, steampunk is not familiar to the general movie-watching public, so this movie was always going to face difficulties in being accepted.  In turn, however, it was also going to battle with finding support among a 'cult' audience, partly because they always expect very close adherence to the original novel/graphic novel in any movie adaptation.  Similar problems were encountered producing the 'Watchmen' movie (2009) based on Alan Moore/Patrick Wilson's graphic novel (1986/7) of the same name.  Like 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (1999-2009) graphic novels, 'Watchmen' was authored by Moore and had counter-factual elements.

Alan Moore always distances himself from any movies made of the graphic novels he has authored.  Moore responded as equally negatively to the 'V for Vendetta' (2006) movie.  Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' graphic novels, argued that 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' movie failed because it was too far from the original source material.  Moore and O'Neill seem ignorant of the fact that no movie can be like a novel.  Directors are very constrained by the expectations of their audiences, as channelled through producers and movie-making companies, and, as noted above, the expectation especially in the USA is for movies which are eye-catching but do not seriously challenge the audience intellectually. 

Things which can be explored in a graphic novel, especially with illustrations as detailed as Moore/O'Neill's work, would be very bitty and messy in a movie.  Authors seem to believe that their ideas will work in any media, but this is unlikely to be the case and they have to yield to a whole different set of constraints: to expect anything else is very naive.  Novels of any kind can conjure up entire universes and refer easily in passing to many background elements that it can be very difficult to introduce into a movie without seriously disrupting it, or at best, slowing the pace of the movie to an extent which loses audience.  This has been recognised at least since '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) if not longer. It seems that many authors, even of graphic novels which have a 'cinematic' aspect to them, do not really comprehend, not only the 'language of film' but also what limits there are to its 'vocabulary' and 'grammar' when people are trying to make money out the movies they produce.

It does seem that Moore has great difficulty with the whole movie industry.  He was angered by the case brought by Larry Cohen and Martin Poll against 20th Century Fox who had made 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'.  Cohen and Poll argued that the movie had plagiarised their work called 'Cast of Characters' which they had offered to Fox in the mid-1990s.  The case was settled out of court.  Moore felt he personally was being challenged by Cohen and Poll and wanted a court case to exonerate himself of plagiarism.  He missed the entire point.  First, the case was not brought against him, even though his graphic novel came after their proposal.  Second, Hollywood finds difficulty in really engaging with good stories; see my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/03/lack-of-good-stories-in-hollywood.html  Consequently as they have often done with other good styles/characters they scrabbled around for a plotline to hang that setting/characters on.  Hence, they used that of Cohen and Poll, which, featuring some of the same characters as Moore's work, would have seemed ideal.  Again, this is more about the state of how the US movie industry and its prime audience (Americans) sees the right way to make a (financially) successful movie.

Of course, Cohen, Poll, Moore and O'Neill, had all raided a lot of other people's work, who in fact, seem to get no attribution anywhere.  The graphic novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' features, amongst others, characters such as Allan Quatermain based on the Allan Quatermain of the novels of H. Rider Haggard (published 1885-1927), Wilhelmina 'Mina' Harker from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897); Captain Nemo from 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' (1870) and 'The Mysterious Island' (1894) by Jules Verne; Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde from 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886) by Robert Louis Stephenson and Dr. Hawley Griffin from 'The Invisible Man' by H.G. Wells (1897). 

The graphic novels of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' make a point of taking characters from numerous Victorian and 20th century novels and yet, Moore/O'Neill seem to feel that the characters have become theirs rather than being the property of the original authors. O'Neill laughably complained that he did not recognise the characters as portrayed in the movie script; I wonder if Verne, Stoker, Stephenson, Haggard, et al, would recognise their characters at all in Moore/O'Neill's work?  Even the title of the graphic novel was borrowed from 'The League of Gentlemen' (1960 movie; from 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland). This preciousness about the graphic novels helped damp cult following of the movie.

A particular criticism of the movie is that characterisation is shallow.  This is again a laughable complaint.  Movies are far shorter than people think and lack time to fill in characters, especially as in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' in which there are so many lead characters.  In the movie, in addition to the characters listed above, there is also Dorian Gray who is pictured in the graphic novel, but is not a character.  Gray comes from 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1890) by Oscar Wilde. 

To appeal to the US audience and to have a character who is younger, Tom Sawyer is also featured; he appeared in four novels by Mark Twain published 1876-96.  Sawyer in the movie is shown as being 18, though if in 'Tom Sawyer, Detective' (1896) set in 1896 and showing Sawyer as 17, then by 1899 when 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is set he should be at least 20.  The League's opponent in the original graphic novel was Fu Manchu, but such stereotypical, dated portrayals of Chinese would have gone down poorly in the 21st century.  Consequently, in the movie, he is replaced by Professor James Moriarty from a number of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though he also referred to early on in the movie as 'M' a reference to James Bond's boss.  His use of the disguise of the 'Phantom', described by Quatermain as 'operatic', references the phantom of the opera in Gaston Leroux's 'Le Fantôme de l'Opéra' (1909-10).

The movie, then, has to sketch in eight major characters with Rodney Skinner replacing Dr. Hawley Griffin as an invisible man after Fox were unable to secure the rights to Wells's character.  Of course, there is a benefit that many of the audience would know these characters from other movies and the various novels.  Some will know them from the graphic novels (I have read all of these), though despite O'Neill's complaints against the movie, their characters are not particularly well developed in those stories either (graphic novels, like movies, lack the space novels have to develop characters, except over sustained editions). 

I think the movie presents a very exotic bunch of characters and in the limited space shows not only their personalities and some of their difficulties with their particular traits, but also the tensions between them. In an action movie with such a large ensemble I would not expect there to be time for much more; compare it to 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960) which similarly has seven heroes and one opponent to detail. Quatermain (who in the original novels died in 1885) is weary of his adventuring life and is patronising to Harker as a young woman. Jekyll fears being controlled by the beast of Hyde and this generates friction especially with Nemo, though the respect between the two grows. Nemo is shown as a worshipper of Kali and is described as a pirate, reflecting his anti-hero standing in the novels.  Despite being an Indian (a Hindu but dressing more like a Sikh), he is accepted by the white characters in a way that may have been unlikely in genuine 1899, though given that all the characters can be seen as 'outsiders' they may have muddled along.  Gray is a hedonistic snob who has had an intimate encounter with Harker, but whilst out for himself, seems also vulnerable given that Moriarty holds his painting.  Skinner is the one looked down upon and suspected, reflecting the real class divisions of the time; he is a burglar anyway, but he seems to be along for the adventure. 

The character with least substance in the movie is Sawyer who seems to be an insensitive American, rather arrogant towards European ways and foolishly being brash about Quatermain's personal losses and over-confident in believing he can seduce Harker; hardly a positive character.  He also wastes bullets in the way Americans are renowned for doing in numerous novels and movies.  This was always going to be a challenge for this movie in the USA: it is full of middle-aged European characters.

I like the movie because it quickly gives us a variety of characters that are different from the usual run of heroes and I think everyone has their favourite.  It is nice to see a movie without too many of the stereotypes of Hollywood action movies, though Connery comes close in his portrayal to many of his other roles.  The fist fight in his club in Kenya at the start of the movie reminds very much of his fist fight when his character goes to prison in 'Family Business' (1989) and his fight in a bar using just one of his thumbs in 'The Presidio' (1988).  Mr. Hyde appears very similarly running across Parisian rooftops as he does in 'Van Helsing' (2004) even down to the bloated upper body.  However, in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' he is captured (as in the graphic novel) rather than killed as he is by Van Helsing. 

In the movie there is ambivalence (in contrast to the graphic novel) as to whether the League is genuine or simply been created by Moriarty.  In the novel it is real and has been subverted by him so he can get his hands on cavorite (the material used in 'The First Men in the Moon' (1901) by H.G. Wells to propel Dr. Cavor's spaceship to the Moon) stolen by Fu Manchu. In the movie it is to get elements of the various members of the league to sell to the rapidly arming powers of Europe.  This fear, that individuals were seeking to profiteer from the clear steps towards war of the 1890s-1910s by fostering these developments, featured in novels of the time, such as 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915).

The world portrayed in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' both the movie and graphic novels, is not our world.  It is a steampunk world, i.e. with anachronistic and fantastical machinery present.  However, the portrayal of cities of the movie is even more distinct.  In the shots of London in July 1899 only horse-drawn vehicles are shown, but, in fact, the car, though rare, had appeared; by 1911 there were 240,000 cars in the UK.  Of course, none of them would have looked like the 1930s-style limousine (especially one with a hard roof rather than one of canvas or leather) used by Captain Nemo, but he would not have had to introduce intelligent people like the rest of the league to the word 'automobile' which had been in use in US newspapers since 1897.

The streets of East London where Dorian Gray lives and, especially, those of Venice shown later, are fantastical versions of these locations.  Venice from the air resembles the city in our world, but its size as a whole and the width of the roads running through it are both far larger than in our world.  You certainly could not raise a submarine in any of the canals and in reality the city has only one enclosed bridge crossing the canals, the famous Bridge of Sighs.  Leonardo Da Vinci produced maps of Imola and the Chiana Valley, but his plan of the foundations of Venice is a fictional McGuffin for the movie.  Thus, despite the huge hangar of Zeppelins in Berlin, we see a world where there are greater advances in technology (throughout history, given Da Vinci's work shown) but which have been kept by the privileged.

Like many steampunk stories, the technology that Moriarty and Nemo use, has simply been brought back in time by twenty-thirty years.  The tank used to attack the Bank of England is very characteristic of those used on the Western Front by the British from 1915 onwards, though it is manned by soldiers dressed in the uniforms adopted by the Germans in the middle of the First World War (when the spikes were no longer put on the helmets).  The uniforms of the men guarding the bank are typical of British soldiers on the Western Front during the war, notably the particular style of helmets.  Interestingly the Metropolitan police officers outside, wear the capes of Parisian police rather than the longer British style.  The radio signal that Nemo follows to track Moriarty to the Amur river on the border between Russia and China, had been public demonstrated in the mid-1890s and transatlantic signals were demonstrated in 1902, though with some possibly successful attempts preceding this, thus this technology is not too advanced.  The 'Nautilus' itself is probably larger even than a modern day submarine, but the missile it fires locking on to a radio signal, even just a couple of kilometres across Venice was not seen in our world until anti-ship missiles introduced by the Germans in 1943. 

We see flamethrowers used by Moriarty's men.  Flamethrowers date back to the 7th century CE but in their modern form were first demonstrated to the German army in 1901, so not out of step with the movie.  We also see assault rifles used by Moriarty's men in the movie.  The Italian Army had been experimenting with them as early as 1890; the Russian Army issued assault rifles in 1915 and through the First World War the French Army developed what can be seen as assault rifles in large numbers.  So, again, this is not an unfeasible development.  Nemo's crew have even more advanced weapons, using silver engraved versions of the British sten gun submachine gun produced from 1941 onwards in our world, though, of course, never as elegantly as the weapons Nemo's men have.  His own pistol is something unique that I cannot identify having an actual parallel.  The Winchester rifle used by Tom Sawyer is presumably an 1894 version as from 1895 onwards they were produced with magazines rather than rounds being held in a tube under the barrel; these were sold in a variety of calibres and 7 million of these rifles had been sold by 2006.  Quatermain's 'Matilda' is a so-called double rifle.  These guns are custom made and hand-fitted.  It may be a Holland & Holland, 'express' rifle firing often hollow or explosive tipped rounds; typically of .450 calibre aimed at stopping big game animals.  Such guns, with the two triggers as shown in the movie, had been around right through the Victorian period.

Though no submarine was the size of the 'Nautilus', they had been used during the American Civil War of 1862-5 and the first British submarine was launched in 1901, so the concept would not have been alien.  One interesting thing about the 'Nautilus' is that it uses solar power to charge its batteries for undersea travel.  In both world wars submarines tended to travel on the surface of the water as much as they could as they were reliant on batteries charged off diesel engines when underwater.  This is something which critics of the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981) miss.  (It is interesting that if you search on Google 'submarine controversy' comes up as one of the commonly selected options).  Yes, the submarine in that movie does not look precisely right, but certainly Indiana Jones could have remained on board as it went across the Mediterranean.  Remember that movie is set in 1936 and the world war has not started, so there would be no need for the submarine to submerge. 

Submarines in the First World War typically had a naval gun on deck and often this would be their prime weapon rather than torpedoes.  It is only people who have grown up in the age of nuclear-powered submarines who expect them to be submerged for more than a minority of the time.  To some extent, Nemo in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlement' falls into this trap of aiming to submerge when he has no need.  Of course, he might be about to enter the fictional undersea tunnel beneath the Suez Canal which allowed him, in the novels, to by-pass Africa when heading towards Asia.

The climax of the movie occurs close to the Amur river at a base that resembles some Russian palace but is filled with an extensive industrial plant.  This is very much in the ilk of the evil mastermind's lair in many movies and novels, which, of course blows up at the end.  Fortunately the 'Nautilus' is vast enough to take away all the scientists and families and other workers from the base, once Moriarty has been killed.

'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is an action movie, but one that I feel rises above many of its kind.  Its range of characters and its steampunk setting make it stand out.  It could never have been a close portrayal of the graphic novel, and yet it avoids being an entirely Hollywood version either.  Possibly this is due to its primarily non-American cast and portrayal of events, settings and behaviour that do not form part of current US consciousness.   In the time it has, I believe, it lays out a far more interesting range of characters and, in many ways, those who come out best from it are those who would not do so in a mainstream Hollywood movie.  Mina Harker is shown as a scientist, eschewing male attention and patronising attitudes.  She is a vampire and fights as effectively, if not more so, than her male counterparts.  Captain Nemo is probably the first Hindu hero I can think of in mainstream movie from the USA, bar perhaps those in 'A Passage to India' (1984) and the biopic 'Gandhi' (1982) and the recent, 'The Last Airbender' (2010), featuring many Asian actors though set on a fantasy planet.  He is gracious, innovative and a good fighter, also a conciliator.  As a consequence of these traits, it is a movie that I return to on DVD and enjoy.  I accept that given my taste for steampunk it would attract me more than the average movie watcher, but I certainly do not feel it should be remembered simply as the movie which seemingly ended Sean Connery and Stephen Norrington's movie careers.  Even if it is, they should feel no shame about being involved with it.

What If Josef Stalin Had Died Before The October Revolution In Russia?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Lives: 'What If?' Essays about Famous People in History’.  It is available for purchase on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375523868&sr=8-1&keywords=Rooksmoor

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375524378&sr=8-1&keywords=Rooksmoor+Other

Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375524438&sr=1-17&keywords=Rooksmoor

Published Writing: Rise in Quantity; Fall in Quality?

As I have commented before, like many people I tend to get the bulk of my news from the internet and rolling news channels.  In the UK I am aware that we have fewer news stories being broadcast at any one time than, say in France and Belgium, where news broadcasts seem to have twice as many main stories as their UK counterparts.  Consequently, I soon know all that is available about a particular story at any given time.  So that I have something more to engage with, I buy one newspaper per week.  This has long been 'The Guardian' on Saturday.  I tend to read it in the order of magazine, TV guide, news section, money section, jobs section and review.  The money and jobs sections obviously depress me, but sometimes have useful tips on what to avoid in terms of companies and errors in interviews.  The review section does cover music and art but is predominantly about books and writers.  At one time I thought I would one day be among that set; especially when, back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine became a member of the Royal Society of Literature, but now it is like an insight into an alien world.  To some degree it has got more distant because being unemployed my reading (and writing) always falls away sharply.  This is the longest period I have ever been unemployed, in fact, longer than all the previous occasions put together, stretching back over a career which is now 20 years long.  The other thing is that, certainties of publishing of writing and publishing seem to have disappeared, and the writing world and its literary sub-set, in this respect, is a very different place.  It is one, I guess, I feel disconnected from; I imagine those who work in the industry are probably feeling pretty lost too.

People have long spoken of the death of the book and there have been reports of young people from teenages onwards seeing no point in reading books.  To some degree, what a book actually is, has changed a great deal.  Not everyone has a Kindle, but there is a sense that those who read the most before are those most likely to adopt electronic versions of books.  Back in the mid-1990s, when the internet was coming into so much of society, I remember attending a talk by a university lecturer, speaking in East London, about the opportunities which the internet offered.  In the questions session at the end, there was a striking moment when someone in the audience pointed out that internet access was not free.  The speaker, presumably at that time using the internet for free at her university had assumed that was the case for everyone.  Her whole premise that the internet allowed democratic access to information was utterly undermined when it turned out that only a handful of people in the audience could access the internet. 

At the time I knew no-one who had it at home; I used to go to a local takeaway Indian restaurant and pay a fee to use their terminal for 30 minutes.  Of course, the growth of cyber-cafes appeared in the next few years, and I could go to an Easy outlet in a quite salubrious setting compared to the corner of a takeaway, but, still, it was apparent that I was paying.  As the speaker totally missed, the actual future of electronic media, is segregation.  This is not only on the basis of access and even then 27% of the UK population does not have internet access, varying between 17% in London and 41% of the population of the North-East.  In addition the quality of service varies across the country as the reporting of the difficulty of getting internet connections in Cornwall, certainly outside Newquay. Anyway, the speaker believed the internet provided a democratic access to resources, and, I guess if you consider you can use it in libraries (though usually at a fee) and centres assoicated with job centres, this is the case.  However, high quality, home access tends to be for the wealthier. 

Publishing in electronic formats takes this segregation a further stage in segregating those who can access material or not.  When will the day come when certain books, rather than as at present coming in print and electronic format, will just be in the latter, as that is the kind of affluent audience that publishers want to address?  With the news that Britain's last bookshop chain, Waterstones, maybe closing at that online retailer Amazon already has 80% of the book market in the UK, will it be possible to even buy a printed book if you do not have internet access, and importantly, a credit or debit card.  Even in affluent houses, unlike when I was a boy, when I could go to a bookshop and buy any book I wanted, nowadays I would have to engage a parent to pay for it using one of their cards.  The past decade certainly has seen increasing attempts to shut off the less wealthy from accessing more and more of what is being produced.

Aside from the increasing segregation of potential readers, on the basis of wealth and the related access, there is two other developments in publishing which are noticeable.  One aspect is something I have commented upon and of which I am a perpetrator.  The amount of writing, fiction and non-fiction, simply being pumped out into the media-sphere.  This is done in different levels.  Naturally there are thousands, perhaps millions of blogs and websites on which people post their writing.  As I have noted before, there is something like 42-49,000 finished novels in the UK which are entered into national competitions, and I imagine there are many tens of thousands more that are not put forward for competition.  These does not even begin to touch on the short stories that are produced or the poems.

There are also websites run so that people can simply put up their writing, some are genre based, some are simply general.  If you are bored at your desk you can spend hours simply reading stories, for example, on vampires and a whole sub-genre of 'fan fiction' stories written about characters appearing in movies or particularly television series.  I know that people from other European countries often access such free resources as an easy way to improve their vocabulary and their knowledge of contemporary English.  I suppose that this is a true democratic approach to writing, that so many voices can now be heard.  Writing, especially fiction, must be one of the largest hobbies in the UK at the moment.  For some people, like me, for whom it has been a hobby as long as I can remember, there is a feeling of 'why should I bother?', any more.  I read a comment in 'The Guardian' a few weeks back from a reader responding to an article about creative writing courses.  Like many other commentators he noted the difference between skill and talent, most of us can gain creative writing skills, but most of us lack the talent to write well.  He had qualifications in creative writing, but had come to the conclusion that the world did not need any more creative writing which was below the standard of the great novelists and so he had ceased writing, in theory making room for better writers to shine.  I have found myself being tempted to follow that path too. 

Perhaps it is vanity, that I would rather not be a writer at all than be a poor quality writer.  However, perhaps it is not the correct approach, and I should just write for the enjoyment in brings me; recognising that the only reason why I feel uneasy, is because there is a sense that if you write you must publish: 'everyone can be a millionaire/so everyone has to try' as The The satirised back in 1986.  In addition, I certainly know there are writers who are far worse than me pumping out content, so, to some degree, it is not simply vanity, but pride too, that: why should they be putting their stuff into the world, when I could be putting out better?  I recognise that neither vanity nor pride are acceptable motivators, hence I remain conflicted over whether to even bother writing.

The other development in writing, is a decline in quality, mainly around the lack of editing.  This is unsurprising.  I take a lot of time editing my postings and especially my fiction, before I put them online, but even then, months later I got back and see loads of errors that I have missed.  Regular readers of this blog, going back to an older posting may have found it has changed a great deal from what they might remember.  That is because I have gone back to it and have been startled by errors I missed at the time.  No author can spot everything even with the passage of time.  You are too close to your writing to be able to do it.  Automatically your mind makes the connections and understands the message in a way that any reader could not do, thus you miss weaknesses.

Self-publishing comes in a number of forms these days.  Here I have already mentioned posting on blogs and fiction websites, but, of course, you can self-publish or publish on demand into print form as well.  I discussed issues around this approach back in 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/01/publishing-on-demand-sales-only-quality.html   In the old days this was called 'vanity publishing', you paid a company to publish what you wrote with little quality checking and certainly no analysis of any market demand for the book.  These days, authors have both run towards this approach but have also been driven towards it too.  Publishing houses have been struggling for at least twenty years and the online environment has not helped. Despite the fall in production costs other things like publicity and the risk of backing an author who does not succeed are so great that they have sought other approaches; even a great author can fade, think of how many books aside from 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' (1994), that Louis de Bernières has written, which you cannot name.  He has, in fact, written seven others and some short fiction too. Similarly, another author who wrote a 'must read' book in the 1990s was Joanne Harris, author of 'Chocolat' (1999). She has produced 14 other novels 1989-2010, including 12 since 'Chocolat' but I imagine, like me, you could not name a single one. Thus, publishers put more of the work on to the author, that in the past they would have done themselves.

I have known there published first-time authors who have been compelled to handle their own publicity.  Unlike self-published authors they do not have to buy the books from their publisher in order to sell them on, but they do have to organise trips around the country to signings.  I do wonder, with so many bookshops disappearing in the 2000s where such events will now take place.  If you want to do a signing for free at the bookshop in Whitby during the Gothic Weekend, you have to join a very long queue and show your previous sales figures before they will even consider you.  Everyone wants a sign of success before investing anything in a new author.  In fact self-publishing is becoming a route into being published by a publisher. 

Authonomy is run by HarperCollins publishers.  Authors put their material up there for comment and a few are picked up by the company.  A couple of years back one of the three novels they selected had already been self-published and had been selling, before they took it on.  The website explicitly mentions self-published authors as well as unpublished, and in fact, if you look at the list of novels for users to comment on, they all have front covers already, suggesting that in fact they have already been printed.  I suppose self-publishing has now become what community colleges are to universities in the USA, they prove the quality of the applicant before you let them go any further.  I do not know how many hundreds of novels go on Authonomy, but the number picked up is in single figures each year.

We live in an age when audience participation is seen as the sure way to get what the public wants.  Television programmes that allow you to telephone in to determine the fate of the contestants are among the most viewed ones broadcast.  The same goes for fiction.  I have commented on the Amazon competition for new novels a few years back.  I began participating as reader when they reached the 5000 novels on the 'short list'.  Amazon naturally elicited my comments and I contributed as the numbers were whittled down.  However, by the time that they reached the list of 10 novels, I backed out.  I realised that a kind of homeopathic process had been going on and that the 10 novels left completely lacked originality or spark, they clearly ticked genre boxes and were least offensive to the most number of readers.  None of them engaged me in the way the tens of others I had looked at previous had done. 

This is the challenge to the issue of the author giving up writing, that the pathways to publishing that are in place, increasingly do not bring forward great literature, in fact, the reverse.  This may be why there is such a popularity for novels from languages other than English.  Of course, the cultural differences are of interest, but there might also be an issue that the process in which books come to be published, mean that different types of books succeed say in Brazil or Sweden, than would be the case in the UK.

The other element which publishers are economising on, is editing.  As I noted earlier in this posting, editing is a challenging activity.  Traditionally editors were very knowledgeable and intelligent people, not only able to spot inaccuracies and non-sequiturs, but also to contribute to the very fibre of the story, in terms of how characters developed and their actions.  This is a very challenging role and one that needs a high level of literary knowledge as well as 'people skills' in communicating it to the author; skills, which I discuss below, the average reader lacks.  The cost of editing is increasingly being seen as one that can be avoided: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing but the consequences in terms of the quality of the books we buy seems to already be biting hard.  Note the review of all the errors in Henning Mankell's final Wallender novel, 'The Troubled Man' (2011): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/troubled-man-wallander-henning-mankell-review clues disappear and Wallender's character alters, from a morning person to an evening person in the course of some tens of pages.  The reader is left seeing the novel as disjointed.  Now, Mankell is a good, successful author, but he, like all authors needs an editor, something it once was the publishing house's job to provide.  A notable case was 'The Corrections' (2010) by Michael Franzen, published by HarperCollins, for which it was noted that an unedited version actually was printed, despite a corrected one being produced.  This shows you that even with a big publishing house, the skimping on editing aspects is having an impact.

I suppose there must be an industry in being a freelance editor.  Whereas in the past when the publishing house would do this, it is given back to the author for them to be responsible for.  I know that some websites offer this service, but my engagement with such editors has been very unpleasant mainly because they forget that any author invests a lot of themselves into a novel and it is hard when it is torn apart.  Alright, if it is not good enough for others to read, say so, but instead you get 'death by a thousand cuts' lots of picking of very minor things, which generally, in the age of the wordprocessor can be rectified very quickly, yet you have to be harangues about every mistake made.


In my experience editing certainly cannot be left to amateurs who seem to lack even the awareness of the relationship between writer and their work that proper editors have.  I am aware that a lot of my writing has flaws.  There are issues like character development, behaviour and feasibility of actions.  However, I am never challenged on these.  The feedback I receive falls into two categories.  The largest feedback is picking up on individual words or names that I have used.  I have even have had people whose names I have inadvertently used in the story, complaining.  I take a lot of effort to get the detail correct.  However, clearly not as much as the seemingly hundreds of people who scour the internet looking for minor errors or even the frequency that certain words are used in a piece of fiction.  I like to get things correct, but am now fearful that too many readers have an entire novel ruined by a single word. 

Famously, in his James Bond novels, written in an age when publishers' editing was at its height, Ian Fleming made technical errors, such as which pistol fitted which holster, but I doubt that has stopped many people enjoying his novels even fifty years later.  However, anything I put up is liable to be heavily criticised because I feature the character's name more than a certain number of times, or do not use the contraction that is in common use today, or something of that nature. 

I think one issue is the severity of the language used in the feedback I receive.  Yes, I make mistakes, but a single wrong word does not seem to be the grounds for me being a total idiot or unfit to write as I am all too frequently told.  It is hard to take criticism of any kind, but to be harangued by editors or the public does nothing to improve the quality of the work, it just encourages the author to abandon it entirely as a waste of time.  This is ironic given that it takes months or years to write a novel, and five minutes to drive an author away from ever touching it again. 

To some degree you understand why people adopt self-publishing, they by-pass at least some of the criticism.  However, as I have noted before, this does not lead to better books.  Some compromise between not receiving editorial feedback at all and being harangued so harshly that you give up hope must be found.  While I doubt it would succeed, you almost need websites to train readers on how to be effective editors rather than simple hecklers.

One key problem is the difference between the popular view of something and the actuality.  Novels often face this, whether they need to be altered to fit into what the readership expects or stick to their guns and put down what the author knows to be true, or wants to be true in the fictional world they are creating.   The woman in my house was reading the poem 'The Hollow Men' (1925) by T.S. Eliot the other day, online.  The site she accessed it on allowed readers to make comments.    An interesting discussion had developed about the significance of the poem, especially its relationship to the First World War.  Many of the commentators seemed to be school children, and I liked the fact that these days when assigned to 'do' a poem pupils can discuss it with others around the world.  I have a feeling many of the people going to the particular site were Americans and there was a lot of parallels drawn to the experience for US society in the wake of the US intervention in the Vietnam War (1965-73/5).  However, such interesting parallels and an engaging discussion was constantly knocked aside by what I call the 'nitpickers' coming on to remind commentators that the First World War was not in the 1920s (though the impact Eliot was talking about continued through the 1920s and 1930s in the way the impact of the Vietnam war went on long after the 1970s) and that the First World War was fought in Europe (neglecting the fighting in Asia and Africa and the oceans) and Vietnam is in Asia.  The sense was, as you find on so many sites commenting on writing whether produced by professionals or amateurs, is that the text and comment on it too, must simply refer directly to facts; no parallels or comparisons are permitted. 

Another common difficulty is that commentators assume that the author has to be like their characters.  Do not dare feature a homosexual character or show a story from a criminal's perspective or have someone with psychological differences or comes from a non-Western culture.  The assumption, too often, is that, you are not clever in writing from a different perspective than your own as would have once been the case, but that you must simply be drawing on personal experiences and so must be as 'sick' as the characters you portray.  As I have noted before, if we only wrote about what we knew personally fiction would be incredibly dull and nothing from a historial period would ever feature.

I guess a lot of feedback is about power play, whether writing to the author directly (of course, far more easier than ever in the age of email; authors are now not distant characters but often pretty accessible)  or dismissing people's comments as irrelevant because they are more imaginative than a standard recounting of what the text contains.  Such a recounting of the text is in itself a kind of assertion of power, effectively telling readers that they are too stupid to understand it without someone's help (though, perhaps, all of us who review things are guilty of that; maybe it comes down to an issue of tone).  The power play comes to the fore in the second type of feedback I receive, people telling me that the outcome of the story was entirely wrong.  Often this is on the basis that the direction the narrative took was not the one that they expected (which personally I feel is a positive attribute, but given what I noted above, perhaps writers are obliged to adhere to set story patterns rather than be surprising) or was simply not a topic that was of interest.  You begin to ask why did they bother continue reading if that was the case.

Most websites that carry fiction categorise it; they often have a profile of the author.  Consequently, it is very easy to find out what kind of story you are likely to be reading and even the author's take on particular issue that are likely to appear.  Even more than before we are not compelled to 'judge a book by its cover'.  Yet it is clear that people slog through the novel just so they can tell the author how wrong they have got it.  I guess in an age of consumer choice and viewer power, there is an expectation that novels should also permit this.  I know some even allow readers to pick the next step in the writing, but even then the path the majority selects is not going to please everyone.  I encourage commentators who do not like how my stories unfold to write their own version.  However, it seems that those who are capable of making stinging criticisms lack the ability to commit to something longer, even if it would be more to their taste.


As we head on into the 2010s, what do I see as the future for writing and publishing?  I think the amount of writing will probably not decrease, but the number of printed books will.  There are going to be even clearer spheres of writing that people access: electronic books that the privileged will access through some device (and publishing houses are battling to keep the price high, hence the EU challenge on monopoly grounds) and free comment put up by people on blogs and websites.  What it is apparent is that whilst the quantity will be greater than ever, the quality will be poor.  There are good writers on the internet and good writers in print, but we are going to have to stomach far more errors and anomalies in what we write than we would have expected, especially in printed boooks, even just a decade ago.

Internet fiction is not unpoliced, but the 'editors' and 'critics' adopt a very combative style, which does nothing to help authors develop.  Those who will listen to the criticism will be turned off writing anything more by the aggressive, dismissive tone of the commentators and those who do not give a damn about such comments, will keep publishing with no editorial input.  We probably live in an age with more being written and more accessibly than ever before, but the question remains, that, when there is no effective way to bring objective views to bear on what is produced and popular opinion squeezes the life from novels coming forward: is any of it any good?

What If The Taiping Kingdom Had Persisted?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Down Other Tracks: Alternate Outcomes of the 19th Century’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338820140&sr=8-1

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338820087&sr=1-5

Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043896&sr=8-3&keywords=Rooksmoor