Comparisons

There has been great pleasure derived from reading lots of stories over the last sixty (odd) years.

I started out, at first, with HG Wells and Jules Verne but there soon came more contemporary work and, of course, the ‘classics’.

Those old stories were the product of equally rich imaginations as those we have today but were written much differently and to a different audience.  The social milieu was much different, too, so that there are things that we cannot grasp completely now that were easily understood then; similarly, there are aspects of the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare that we consider, perhaps, childish.

Let’s just pause, for a moment, and think about Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling was a great storyteller.  He was, quite possibly, one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

He would admit that he was not a writer in the classic sense that would be applauded by purists (and critics) but his stories are superb.

Racist, though.

If you told him he was a racist he would, in all probability, just give you a blank stare – clearly wondering what on earth you meant.

He is a racist by our standards, by the standards of now.  Today.  Not then.

Perhaps, in a hundred years time our current batch of authors – yes, me too, will be regarded as ‘odd’.  Perhaps I will be regarded as ‘sexist’. I believe I am not but I do like women but, then, I am a man so it would be natural, surely.

Many of our ides and social commentary will gradually become dated.  The future moves closer as we slide, gently, into the past.

So it is with the ‘masters’.

‘Romeo and Juliet’ was a love story that tugs at the heartstrings.  It lasted about three days.  He was seventeen and she was thirteen. Acceptable then. Now?

We could analyse all of those olden stories and find that they are not quite how we like to think of them.

Just scrutinise the ‘Merchant of Venice’ or Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. For that last one, if you thought ‘Game of Thrones’ was racy...

George RR Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’. Brings us sharply back to the present.

This is the book that was turned into an excellent TV series called ‘Game of Thrones’.

The book is better. No, seriously. I do not say this because I am an author (and I’m proud of my stories, of course) but because it is true.

I have, previously, beaten this topic to death on the ‘Blog’ so we will move on.

Many great books have been turned into films and TV series – some successfully and some less so.

L Ron Hubbard (who once, famously, said that selling science fiction stories at a penny a word will not make anyone rich, it would be more lucrative to invent a religion. Which he did) wrote ‘Battlefield Earth’. It was an excellent book. The film? Was most entertaining but it wasn’t like the book. Yes, the critics panned it but it was still a good film for us sci-fi buffs for all that.

Recently I’ve been reading some new authors (checking out the competition).

Ray Owen’s ‘The Hole’. An exceptional story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Ted Iverson’s ‘Search for FTL’. Fascinating story and, like Ray’s book, told from a different angle.

There have been a couple of others but, having watched the TV series based on George RR Martin’s book, the effect is the same with them all.

These new books are different.  Each has it’s own character in the same way as Chaucer and Shakespeare are different and they, in turn, are different from Wells and Verne and Conan Doyle, et al.

This is a new age.  We have a different media pounding us. We are all interconnected by mobile ‘phones, internet, radio, TV, newspapers.

The changes that have taken place, not just technologically but socially, in the last fifty years have been overwhelming.

My Mother was on the development of a new, war-winning device called RADAR in the thirties. Aircraft are only a shade over 100 years old.

In my lifetime we have progressed from land-based telephones to small hand-held devices; huge radios driven from the mains or bigger batteries through ‘Transistors’ to today’s micro-technology of iPods and such; we have moved into the jet age where travel is for everybody and not just the rich; we have become aware of more through intensive media coverage.

Drugs have always been available but the access to them is easier and the delivery systems are much more efficient now.

We know about the world, we know what is happening in far-flung corners of it but we are less familiar with what is happening to us – in our locality.

We are becoming inured to pain and suffering, it is becoming ‘normal’.  We have calluses on our mind so that our focus is on ‘getting ahead’ at all costs; people who are different or who have less are ‘losers’, wimps’, useless people.

This is the world that the modern writer faces.  We write about what we know. We write about what we see and feel.

It is amazing that we write anything.  It is stunning that younger authors, like Ray and Ted, write with feeling and sensitivity for their subject.

They, among others, give me hope for the future – whatever they will think of us.