Well, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and the rest have missed a trick there. A trick that myself and Bradley P. Beaulieu haven’t. So it gives me great pleasure to annouce the e-release of Strata, a dystopian SF thriller, which as well as featuring giant solar mining platforms, skimmer racing over the surface of the sun, and a dangerous rebellion, also explores the glorious, complex structure of our favourite star.

Strata is available at Amazon UK, Amazon US, and Barnes & Noble.

“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”

“Do they frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Hmm. Now, I usually post these entries with a view to accentuating the compelling elements of the openings of works of speculative fiction. I do that because I want to help promote good writers and also encourage readers into the genre. In this case I’m going to cast a more critical eye, because (a) George R. R. Martin doesn’t need any extra promotion, and (b) most people will probably be reading this analysis from the POV of readers/viewers familiar with the story.

As openings go, to my eye, although it has several sound fundamentals in place, it isn’t an opening that is a million miles away from what you might find in your average fantasy magazine slushpile. I wonder if this is why the series has been a relatively slow-burner. People picked up the book, read the blurb on the back, flicked to the first page, and decided . . . well, maybe some other time. It was only when a few “sneezers”, those important facilitators in any population, spread the word that the book was golden, that the book began its stratospheric rise. That was certainly the case for myself.

Martin breaks one of the cardinal rules of openings straight off the bat: beginning with dialogue. Although all so-called “rules of writing” can be broken, inverted, taught to do the cancan by a skilled performer, the reason behind not beginning with dialogue are sound. We don’t know the identity of the speaker. In such a case the only clues to the grounding principles of character and setting are able to come via the language and diction and other elements of direct speech. Dialogue openings usually work best when the speech conveys conflict and personality. (In fact the “100 Best First Lines” from novels contains only three that start with dialogue, and I wouldn’t even call them humdingers). “We should start back,” to its credit, does have a driving momentum, but its also somewhat pedestrian. Perhaps this is a ploy as the speaker, Gared, only appears in the prologue. Also note the bland “as the woods began to grow dark around them”. Perhaps you could make an argument that this is good transparent writing–which is certainly a strength in an 800-page brick–but it is still overly generic for a first line. “The wildlings are dead” is killer, however. Death within twenty-words is never a bad thing, and wildlings is suitably eldritch to pique curiosity.

“Do they frighten you?” in the second line brings a nice touch of verbal sparring, suggesting themes of bravery and honour, and “Ser Waymar Royce” is great name for an uppity knight who will be in opposition to our sympathetic POV, Will, who hasn’t even been introduced yet, but there is a duff note in the use of the word “just”; a measly piece of language that is best cut unless it’s used for resonance. Maybe I’m being harsh. Maybe it has a playful edge that warrants its inclusion, but I do think it is a “danger” word much like “suddenly” and “realised” and shouldn’t hang around the shiny gates of great novels.

All-in-all this is a solid, though not spectacular, opening to a work of epic fantasy. Perhaps that is a strength in of itself, what with epic fantasy being a largely conservative, largely comfortable sub-genre of speculative fiction. For intrigue, for worldbuilding, for dynastic sagas, for a reasonably diverse assemble of characters, and for simmering feuds involving magic over the aeons, no one comes close to George R. R. Martin. Openings though? Maybe he could up his game.

Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins) and nine other titles. Bodies in Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today Notable Book, and has been translated into six languages. Mohanraj has taught at the Clarion SF/F workshop, and is now Clinical Assistant Professor of fiction and literature and Associate Director of Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives in a creaky old Victorian in Oak Park, just outside Chicago, with her partner, Kevin, two small children, and a sweet dog.

Mary Anne is currently mid-way through a Kickstarter funding drive to finance the creation of a set of interconnected stories that will together form an erotic science-fiction novel entitled Demi-Monde. I recently caught up with her online to ask about this project and her writing in general.

The themes and issues surrounding human sexuality are front-and-centre in your pitch for Demi-Monde, but what I’m most curious about is the identity of the characters for these stories. Are there any ”principle” characters that will form a central thread through the novel, and if so, could you describe them? To put it other words, are you intending to explore a particular culture or cultures’ ideas about sexuality or are your aims more universal?

Well, the planet the stories are set on was settled by South Asians, so many of the humans in the book are from that ethnic background. Several generations away from Earth, but some of them have held on pretty tightly to their cultural heritage.  When it comes to sex, love, and marriage, you can expect some of that to play out in an arranged marriage culture.  It’s a topic I’ve explored before, in stories like “Seven Cups of Water,” (Bodies in Motion), but with a science fictional twist.  In the first story, you meet Jitender, a young Indian-descended college student — your typical science geek. But Anna, the blonde girl he’s dating, is from a planet several systems away, and her father’s corporation is deeply involved in the interstellar war that’s breaking out around them.  That’s going to have implications for their story.

Also, there are aliens. My story “Jump Space,” while not part of this book, takes place in the same universe — the protagonists there are a threesome, all human — and then one of them gets involved with an alien, and chaos ensues.  They may show up later in this book too – we’ll have to see how it plays out.

Science-fiction and erotica in of themselves are both popular genres of literature, but the combination is a much rarer art form. What does the addition of science-fiction to erotica allow you to do that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to? Which camp would you say your work has more appeal to, or is such a question unnecessarily divisive?

You know, I did once write a story about the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon VI, just because it was a fun concept.  And the combination is perhaps less rare than you might think — certainly a lot of contemporary fantasy has entire chapters that are thinly-veiled erotica.  And I’d be remiss not to mention the folks who published my first story ever — Circlet Press, which specializes entirely in erotica science fiction and fantasy, and which has published dozens upon dozens of books on that theme over the past few decades.

For me, for this book, I think this appeal is more serious than you might expect.  In part because my home country of Sri Lanka is currently emerging, badly scarred, from decades of civil war, I’ve been more than a little obsessed with war in my writing.  Not so much in the mechanics of the battles themselves (unlike many military SF writers), but rather in the consequences of the war for ordinary people. How does it affect their lives?  Now, I may revise the concept as I go, but at the moment, I’m expecting the book to focus on a single night’s events, from the first announcement of war breaking out, to a whole series of cascading events that follow.  There’s a potential for emotional intensity there that I think will add a lot to the character depth in the science fiction.  And while SF in general has come a long way in terms of characterization from what it once was, I’m always in favor of going deeper.

One of your previous novels,  ”Bodies in Motion”, is also a collection of interlinked stories. What attracts you to this mosaic approach when writing a novel?

I hope you don’t mind a slightly theoretical answer.  Short stories often focus on these intense moments in a person’s life (as opposed to a typical novel, where there’s perhaps more room for the detailed texture of quotidian activities).  A mosaic novel (also called a novel-in-stories) lets me juxtapose those intense moments into a dramatic narrative, while the spaces between the stories serves almost as a secondary narrative.  That’s probably not clear — let me give an example.  In Bodies in Motion, there’s several marriages, affairs, a sort-of murder, deliberate miscarriage, death in childbirth, a faked death…it’s probably way too much drama for a novel.  But you can get away with it in a set of short stories. And then there are the people who pop up in story after story, and each time you meet them, from another viewpoint, you have a new angle on their life, a new way of seeing them.  The girl who fled the arranged marriage in the first story becomes the unhappy mother in the next story…and then several stories later, perhaps a divorced grandmother. And then there are the people who never get a viewpoint story, but whose presence, or absence, tells its own story — the brother who disappeared, the son who married away.

Sorry, long answer!  I guess the real answer is that I love the linked-story form; I’m a little addicted to it.

I think I’m correct in saying that Demi-Monde is your first experience of using a crowdsourcing model to help finance a piece of creative work. Do you see Kickstarter and its ilk as an increasing important tool in the professional artists’ toolbox or something of a passing fad? What has been your experience of using Kickstarter, and do you have any tips for anybody who’s thinking of using this model?

I’m still very new to Kickstarter — I pretty much just heard of it because of my friend Tim Pratt, who used it to fund a novel in a series, after the original publisher decided not to continue.  He met his goal easily, which was very encouraging to see. And Tobias Buckell, whom I just did a joint interview with, is doing the same with one of his series — he’s halfway to his goal now, and I think he’s probably going to make it.  Crowdsourcing has been around for quite a while — Bruce Boston has been using it to fund his short-shorts for years — possibly decades, now.  But Kickstarter has a really smooth and attractive interface that makes it very easy for people to use; I think that’s a big plus.  I thought it was worth a shot — and my experience has been positive enough so far that even if this project doesn’t get funded, I might try another one later.
In terms of tips, I’d say stick to the recommended 30-day window (Kickstarter has a page explaining why), and be willing to promote heavily and creatively (not annoyingly!) during that window.  I lost a week to illness partway through mine, and I’m a bit worried that that’s going to hurt my chances of reaching my goal.  We’ll see.

Being a writer myself, I’m endlessly fascinated by other writers’ processes for making stories appear on the page. What is the typical origin of a story for you? Do you need an intensely private space to write or can you slam down the words while the kids are playing by your feet? What is your guiding principle or creative philosophy when you’re in the act of constructing a scene?

I can’t write around the kids — I wish!  Occasionally I can manage final proof-reading type edits around them, but that’s it. My stories all start with character — there’s a person, they have a problem, they’re trying to solve it, the world (in some form or another) is getting in their way.  I usually think through at least the opening for a while before I start writing; sometimes I even keep myself from writing, to let that energy build, while I keep thinking about the story. Once I have a fair bit of dialogue and the voices are clear in my head, I try to block out enough time that I can draft the entire story if it goes well. And then I write.  I usually write my stories in one draft — “Seven Cups of Water,” for example, took seven solid hours in a coffeeshop. But then it was done.  This is another reason why I like mosaic novels rather than typical novels — when I tried to write a typical novel, I was deeply frustrated to realize there was no way I could write it all in one go!  I think it’s much harder to maintain voice when you have to stop and start again. You can get some of it by retyping the last page or two, but it’s still not quite the same.  Usually I can fix voice issues in revision, but it’s much harder than getting it right the first time.

You currently reside in the United States, but were born in Sri Lanka and much of your fiction is concerned with the culture of your birth. Do you think it is ethical for writers to explore cultures of which they have no personal connection? What advice would you give to someone who is attempting such a project?

Short answer, yes!  Long answer — can I point you to John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, where I answered a related question at length? Here’s why I think all writers should write characters of color, and how they should go about it to do it well.

Mary Anne only has nine days to go to fund Demimonde, so if, like me, you’d love to see that novel come to life why not consider popping over to her Kickstarter page and pledging some greenbacks. Thanks for those great answers, Mary Anne! ]]> http://www.stephengaskell.com/writing/kickstarting-half-a-world-an-interview-with-mary-anne-mohanraj/feed/ 0 http://www.stephengaskell.com/first-line-friday/first-line-friday-servant-of-the-underworld/ http://www.stephengaskell.com/first-line-friday/first-line-friday-servant-of-the-underworld/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:17:48 +0000 stephengaskell http://www.stephengaskell.com/?p=643 French writer Aliette de Bodard is up this week with the first novel in her “Obsidian and Blood” trilogy, Servant of the Underworld, which is set in an ancient Aztec world suffused with magic. Let’s take a look at the opening:

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips–preparing him for the long journey ahead.

As befits the character of a priest of the dead, the language of the opening is measured and stately, a sense of reverence pervading the lines. In the first sentence the quiet, the shrine and altar, and our POV’s ritualistic bow all indicate that this is a man for whom observance of traditional rites is paramount. Already we’re being clued into one of the major sources of conflict for the novel: the tension between what we think we should do and what society expects us to do. Additionally, the corpse on display is not only a strong visceral hook, but acts as a symbol of anticipated transformation; our priest’s world is going to be turned upside-down in the coming pages. The social station of the priest is established right off the bat too by the mention of the identity of the body: “a minor member of the Imperial Family”. This is certainly no run-of-the-mill religious leader. The fact that the death is a result of “a boating accident on Lake Texcoco” gives a strong flavour of the locale and gives us subconscious overtones that water is dangerous. That’s a pretty hard-working sentence!

More power structures are revealed in the second line with the revelation that our POV has priest underlings, who although bandage the mortal wound as best they can, fail to make things perfect. The implication being that our POV might’ve done a better job–that he is no paper tiger of a leader. Reading between the lines again, the open wound also suggests that perhaps others will let our POV down. Next we get a strong visual description of some of the preparations of the corpse, “many-coloured cotton” and “a jade bead” which brings the scene to life. Curiously, there is no mention of any smells–a consequence of the embalming practices or perhaps a hint of some emotional blindness? The “long journey ahead” reinforces the notion that these priests are critically important. Death may take someone from the land of the living, but their soul is still at stake. Compelling stuff.

De Bodard has already garnered much critical acclaim for both her short fiction and her novels, and I hope this gives you a taste of why she is so highly regarded. I can’t wait to see what she does next now her “Obsidian and Blood” trilogy is complete.

Mantell Sector, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, Delta Pavonis system, 2551

There was a razorstorm coming in.

Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night. The archaelogical dig was an array of deep square shafts separated by baulks of sheer-sided soil: the classical Wheeler box-grid.

Well, anybody who’s reading these lines probably already knows that Revelation Space is a classic hard-sf space-opera–the cover is suitably moody and dark and depicts an elaborate spacecraft passing a crescent-illuminated planet or moon–but nevertheless I do still like the space-and-time focusing first line. It gives an immediate sense of the scale at play (I’m assuming we’re doing a zoom-in rather than a zoom-out–from light years to light minutes in eight breathless words) and tells us this story is going to take place over a big canvas. The year 2551 is a bold statement that Reynolds means business. I mean, setting the action five hundred years into the future raises my expectations a lot. I want to see novel technologies, a transformed ideological/political landscape, and weird bifurcations of humanity. Any hint of a rehash of terrestrial colonialism set to the backdrop of space is going to be seriously disappointing.

So, onto the first line proper: “There was a razorstorm coming in.” I’ve seen the “there was” construction derided in some circles as weak writing, but as I’ve mentioned before, I think it carries a certain power. Obviously the most interesting part of this sentence is the invented noun “razorstorm”, which certainly manages to trounce the notion that you mustn’t talk about the weather straight away. In fact, I imagine the advice about not starting with a weather report (It was a dark and stormy night . . .) precisely came about because it was such an effective device for an opening that it soon got overused and became cliche. Here the line not only gives us scary, unique weather, but also gives us momentum, an impelling motion that gets the narrative engine turning–the razorstorm is coming in. Good stuff.

Then we get character identification: Sylveste. A name that is nicely balanced between familiarity and strangeness (warning bells might’ve started sounding if our protag was called Bob or Sdkljd’G*gehd–personally, maybe because I’m more a “visual” reader than an “aural” one, unpronounable names never bother me so much, but it’s never a good idea to alienante a good proportion of your readership because they can’t say your heroes’ name). We get a nice subliminal hint that Sylveste is perhaps something of an outsider, or at least not a conservative stickler, from him standing on the “edge”, but equally that he is not a workshy layabout from the mention of his labours. Nothing spectacular, but solid character traits for a POV the reader can get behind.

The next line is a fairly dry, technical description of the dig, which gives us a clear picture of the scene, and perhaps a little more insight into the orderly-mind of Sylveste. In terms of the “rules of writing” it’s a good example of the fact that there is no line between description and character. Everything that comes to the reader, every single word, comes through the filter of a character’s viewpoint; there aren’t plot bits and then character bits and then setting bits–it’s all one glorious melange of motive and sensation binded by language. It’s what makes fiction writing so bloody hard.

So, what do we have? A person in a place with a problem. An opening as solid as the Queen’s Gambit in chess. Classic.

In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask.

Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains.

Okay, so we’ve got a character waking up, but this isn’t the pedestrian version that litters way too much bland fiction (I wonder if this tendency is a consequence of the fact that so many aspiring writers are half-asleep when they start drafting at 5am or whenever they get up to throw down some wordage). First of all, we’ve got this intriguing place “Zoo City” in the very first line. We know about Zoo City from the title of the book, but Beukes immediately lets us know that this isn’t a metaphor, but a real place. What’s more, we’re going to be experiencing Zoo City from the inside. We get the feeling this is a rough-and-tumble place from the statement that “it’s impolite to ask”; usually this is code for criminal activity. Curiosity piqued and stakes raised in the space of seven words. Neat.

While our sub-conscious digests that weird gestalt, the next line grounds us in scene with an arresting description of sunlight through glass. It’d be so easy to write something insipid and formulaic at this juncture e.g. “sunbeams dappled the bed”, but we get something unique, something tasty. Nouns like “sulphur” and “mine dumps” and verbs like “seeps” and “sears” give us vivid sensory hooks into the world, and, at a deeper level, have thematic resonance. Zoo City is going to be dirty, polluted, harsh, painful. No whining on behalf of the character, just facts plainly stated. I would argue that is a small stumble here, though, “mine dumps seeps” could easily be parsed the wrong way, breaking up the flow.

Then we get properly into the character’s head: “My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder I really need to get curtains.” This is a gorgeous one-two beat. The first part keying us into contemporary culture, while simultaneously clueing us into the moral landscape this character inhabits (she’s the Batman figure saving folks from the Joker et al); the second part letting us know she’s not some holier-than-thou type and she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She’s one of us. She has to deal with crap like curtains! Reader identification.

Lauren Beukes is one of the best things to have happened to science fiction in a long time. Spread the word.

The ship didn’t even have a name. It had no human crew because the factory craft which contructed it had been evacuated long ago. It had no life-support or accomodation units for the same reason. It had no class number or fleet designation because it was a mongrel made from bits and pieces of different types of warcarft; and it didn’t have a name because the factory craft had no time left for such niceties.

First, it should be noted that this is the first paragraph of the prologue, a literary unit which has gone out of fashion to some extent. For a science-fictional universe, a prologue can be an especially useful device for delivering setting and background which is vastly at odds with the present-day, without encumbering the driving narrative with stodgy infodumps. Handled as it is here, a prologue can be a powerful tool for establishing a wide-angle framing narrative and an awe-inspiring sensawanda.

The first line is a textbook example of a compelling hook: “The ship didn’t even have a name.” Banks is an experienced writer, and we trust that he’s not just giving us some throwaway comment. Protagonists are usually the first named character in any novel, so Banks is immediately clueing us into the fact that the ship is the main player here. The curiousity is piqued on two levels: first, ships aren’t normally characters, so maybe we’re in the territory of AIs; second, why doesn’t the ship have a name?–and what else has it been denied given the factual “even”.

He gives us the answer in the remainder of the paragraph, brilliantly raising the stakes as he enumerates all that the ship lacks. No human crew because the factory craft has been evacuated. No life-support. No class number. No fleet designation. He then grounds us with the identification of the ship as a “mongrel” made from “bits and pieces of different warcraft”. Literally the underdog, which both raises our sympathy and gives us a compelling relatable image lest we’ve had our empathy tested by all the technobabble.

Evacuation suggests imminent danger, again raising the stakes. Things don’t look too good for our machine hero! A perfect place for a resourceful protagonist to impress us with its ingenuity. At this point we know we’re in far-future SF territory because we have machines that can–without any human help–build ships. Not just odd ships either. We’ve got classes and fleets suggesting some large-scale action. My inner SF geek is excited: space-opera!

The final clause brings us back full circle to the beginning, exemplifying the idea of a paragraph being an elucidation of an single idea. In this case we learn why the ship doesn’t have a name: “the factory craft had no time left for such niceties”. Time’s up. And already I’m rooting for this guy. That’s some heavy literary lifting in one single paragraph. Bravo.

I suppose you might be thinking: no time for a name? But these are super-multi-tasking-speed-of-light-AI-thinkers. Banks has an answer for you. You’ll just have to pick up the book to find out.

Signal to noise ratio is going to plummet.

Therefore, to do a bit of signal boosting for the people I consider making original, compelling, important work, I submit the following list of  writers. In no particular order:

Ken Liu

Ken writes emotionally powerful work dealing with exploitation, colonialism, and marginalized peoples, often combining technological speculation and cultural tradition. Protein chains, computing algorithms, and virtual environments feature. An excellent introduction to his work is “The Literomancer”, which appeared in F & SF last year. Ken’s website has links to many more pieces of his work.

Nnedi Okorafor

Africa is a continent that is grossly underrepresented in speculative fiction, but Nnedi Okorafor’s powerful tales such as “The Go-Slow” and “Spider the Artist” go a little way to redress the balance. Nnedi’s fiction captures vibrant, violent places where rampant capitalism meets celebrity meets traditional culture. If you want a glance at the state-of-the-world in all its magical, entrepreneurial, amoral glory, Nnedi’s imagined futures are where you should head.

Gord Sellar

Based in South Korea, Gord Sellar writes poetic SF stories where robots seal their uprisings with pork grease, yakuzas double-deal, and junk-DNA is anything but. Gord’s work often skewers uncomfortable societal trends, forcing reflection on where today’s exponentially complexifying world could go without strong political leadership. I believe he is currently working on a novel.

Nina Allan

“Flying in the Face of God” was shortlisted for a BSFA Award, and is a taut piece of storytelling that examines space exploration from the point-of-view of those left behind. A frequent contributor to Interzone, Nina writes careful, quiet stories where the characters are so real they could knock on your door. Dealing with memory and landscape and the state-of-being, she is speculative-fiction’s best kept secret. “A Thread of Truth”, a collection of her short fiction is available from Eibonvale Press.

Please spread the word so these excellent writers don’t get lost in the noise. They are perfect for people who “don’t read sci-fi” too!

Engineering Infinity, Solaris Press

Following on from fellow Aliette de Bodard’s thought-provoking post on the Prevalence of US Tropes in Storytelling, I thought I’d get a few things off my own chest regarding the depressing patterns I’ve seen in Hollywood filmmaking.

Where to start? Well, for one, where are the stories about ordinary people? So many mainstream films these days are focused on empowered individuals. Empowered by weapons, or money, or political power, or magic, or technology. Where are the stories about the marginalized, the sick, the elderly? For the vast majority of us we don’t experience power, but the opposite.

I wonder why such films are largely absent from our screens, especially American exports. Is it because we watch films so that we can identify with the “hero”, however briefly and absurdly? In the UK there has been a tradition of socially-conscious filmmaking from directors like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and Andrea Arnold. Films like “Secrets and Lies”, “Kes”, and “Fish Tank” depict a social realism which can lead to powerful, transformative experiences for the viewer. Most Hollywood stuff, by contrast, is deeply apolitical. After watching Batman or X-Men or The Bourne Identity cinemagoers might leave their local multiplexes with adrenaline racing, but how often do they leave with their political intellects stimulated? Maybe I’m being selective with the movies I’ve mentioned, but I’m struggling to think of more than a handful that tackle issues that the average person faces in the contemporary day. Don’t get me wrong, I love the entertainment value of great cinema. But can’t it sometimes do something else? Maybe the films reflect a global culture that is out-of-control and the only rational response is escapism.

The marginalization of the ordinary gets magnified as we follow our hero on his or her journey. Our protagonists are often blinkered, magical beings who are not held accountable to the same physical, economic, and situational realites that the rest of us are. I am absolutely sick of ridiculous chase sequences where the people we’re supposed to be rooting for leave horrifying trails of destruction. In real life there’d be wrecked lives. I can’t put that out of my mind, and I wish a filmmaker would confront that.

This leads me to my next bête noire. The idiot plot. If hip, young directors want us to follow their “special” leads–and I’m perfectly happy to enjoy a spectacle–they could at least make the set-up plausible. Today I watched Hanna, a visually and acoustically arresting film that began with an intriguing premise: a man and his daughter living a very simple life in the snowy wilderness where they chop wood, hunt elk, and read excerpts from the encyclopedia. In six languages. So far, so intriguing. Turns out (and this isn’t really a spolier since the blurb on the back of the box covers this) the man is an ex-CIA agent and he’s spent years training his daughter to be the perfect assassin for a spot of revenge. Okay. Ho hum. Because there’s no film if the daughter goes out and assassinates the target straight away, what do they do? They notify the target that they’re coming. That’s the point that somebody in so some office, when they were discussing the script, should’ve pointed out that wasn’t a very smart move on the part of their heroes . . . maybe they did and got shouted down. Avoiding the idiot plot isn’t that hard. You just get a few people to read your story. They’ll quickly ask you why your main character is doing something dub on page nine. And eleven. And sixteen . . .

Wow, I haven’t even got to depiction of other cultures, the portrayal of women, sexual and physical violence, speculative conceits and worldbuilding etc etc, but I’d like to end on a positive note for now. So, can anyone give me some recommendations for socially realistic films from Hollywood?