Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (1978)

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Deep breath… and now, an exorcism of sorts.

A piece of classic 19^th-century science-fiction - and one that probably stands as my favourite – that I’ve steadfastly refused so far to review is H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (WOTW, as I’m going to call it). I’m not really sure why this is. Perhaps I’m just scared of getting bogged down in a marsh of Wells’ metaphors. WOTW is after all a thematically rich story that manages to comment on science, evolution, religion, colonialism, and the human condition. I have a lot to say about the book. It’s not easy to write an effective piece of commentary on such a dense work by scribbling furiously on the back of a beermat in the downtime between organising interplanetary smuggling runs and solving supernatural-related crimes for beautiful widows, all over the course of a burboun-soaked weekend (that’s how I’d like you to imagine I write all my reviews).

Instead I’m going to take the easier option first and talk about a later adaptation of the book: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds (or JWMVOTWOTW, as I’m probably not going to be calling it).

Which is a 1970s progressive-rock opera retelling of the tale.

With disco elements.

Oh yeah, and it’s set in the original Victorian time period.

Maybe this isn’t really the easy option.

Well, I’m going to make things slightly easier for myself by talking about how I first came across this batshit crazy musical. As a kid in the early 90s, I had a neighbour whose older sister knew that we liked a bit of sci-fi. Back then, sci-fi in movies or other media wasn’t really easy to come by though, and besides a few blurry, overwatched, taped-off-the-English-channels VHS versions of Jurassic Park and, um, Innerspace, we didn’t get exposed to an awful lot of scifi. Okay, there was Star Trek The Next Generation, but every eight-year-old knew that Star Trek wasn’t real sci-fi because there was too much talking and standing around and their ships moved real slow like submarines instead of fast with pew-pew-pew lasers like the ships out of Star Wars. And besides, there weren’t any dinosaurs or giant robots. Note that these are all lessons Star Trekitself has learned since: JJ Abrams’ new Trekhas lots of creatures and fast ships and no people standing around talking whatsoever, and definitely nothing that would make you think above the level of an eight-year-old. That’s called progress.

So the sister, bless her, presumably hearing the bizarre combination of Richard Burton’s drunken ramblings, blood-freezingly terrifying string music, and mysterious alien encounters that opens Jeff Wayne’s opus, didn’t think gee, that’s fucked up, what the hell was wrong with people in the 70s like any normal person would, but instead thought hey, my little bro and his weird friends sure would like this, where’d I put that Jason Donovan cassette where he vomits during the hidden track? I sure could tape over that shit!

So yeah, big thanks to her. We used to listen to the cassette in a garden shed that was our hangout. It had nice chairs and a boombox (well we probably called it a ghetto blaster back then, but you know, the world has changed for the better since then, so let’s get with it, yeah?). The album went on for what felt like hours.

And we usually emerged completely traumatised.

Uh-oh.

Seriously, I don’t think I ever equated horror with sci-fi before hearing Jeff Wayne’s lunatic endevour. Perhaps I was just a bit too young to deal with it, but for whatever reason the story always struck me as being very disturbing. I’d heard of War of the Worlds before and was desperate to read the book, but I’d never come across a copy of it, and the Jeff Wayne version was the first time I heard the story told in any detail. And was it ever heavy: Martians land in Woking in Surrey; cold, inscrutable and utterly alien Martians that set innocent people on fire and burned them to a crisp with weapons no humans can understand. Then they proceed to destroy (English) civilisation, leaving mankind a shallow wreck of its former self, peopled by lunatics and delusionals, with no hope of victory or redemption. There is the infamous 'happy' ending of course, though as a child I found it somewhat tacked-on. I found the description of the alien invasion chillingly realistic and believable, but found the quick-fix-it ending (nothing the humans do succeeds; the Martians are killed by bacteria) unconvincing and therefore unconsoling. And all of this set to the most otherworldly sounds that British 70s prog-rock could offer.

The red weed: H. G. Wells was ahead of the game with the whole 'invasive alien species' thing.

 

 A couple of years later, we discovered that another neighbour living down the road had the actual LP from the 70s. This opened a whole new level of trauma: the paintings of the Martians themselves contained within the booklet and on the front cover. The tripods just looked so alien; they seemed so organic with their insect eyes that we were unsure whether they were supposed to be the Martians themselves or if they were machines controlled from within, which only added to the horror. This lunatic notion, though clearly contradicted by the text, was due largely to one image of crows tearing bright red strips of flesh from a fallen tripod. But for me, the most stirring illustration was of a tripod destroying a London street, with Victorian pedestrians fleeing in terror, passing so close to the ‘camera’ that we can see the blood and sweat and fear on their faces. Horrifying. When I read the book now, I see it as an ingenius and original book in which the Martians are stand-ins for various issues that troubled the Victorian psyche. Back then, I couldn’t see anything other than the sheer horror of the invasion.

Aaaargh!

 

  














And possibly the most important factor that made this traumatic for me was that it was all happening in the 19^thcentury. I was deeply troubled that these people were being confronted by a horror that they had no means of understanding, never mind combating. They used useless superstition (ie, religion) to try to explain what was happening, because the truth was beyond anything they could understand. I found this incredibly sad.

Partly because of this exposure at an impressionable age, and partly because unlike virtually every other adaptation (that shitty Asylum movie never happened lalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU) the album keeps the Victorian setting of the original, it has always stuck with me as being the definitive version of the tale. Even as I read the book, and I’ve read it many times, when I imagine the Martian tripods wreaking havoc on small-town Surrey, it’s Wayne’s iconic silver green-bug-eyed tripods that I see. When the tripods raise their hoods to utter a call of triumph across the Home Counties landscape, it’s Wayne’s terrifying UULLLLLAAAAAAAAA that I hear. And I know that I’m not alone: a quick gander at the Amazon review for the album confirms that for many people, Jeff Wayne’s Warremains a disturbing and definitive retelling of Wells’ original.

Years later, I bought a 2-disc CD version of the album at HMV out of curiosity. It had always remained in my head as this incredibly spooky, terrifying story. And when I put on the disc that first time, I was absolutely flabbergasted …

…at how discoit was.

It’s amazing how things affect you as a child, and it’s amazing how your mind filters out the stuff that’s not meaningful to you. Back then, it was the visceral alien-invasion stuff that resonated. I didn’t really know or care what disco was, so that part of the experience simply washed over me. There’s no denying that the album is very 70s. But once Richard Burton’s stern (though surely not sober) voice began that ominous narration that I still know off by heart so many years later, and those eerie strings started their staccato wailing, something deep inside rumbled, my spine tingled with real fear, and I looked to the skies with trepidation.

SHE'S BEEN TAKEN... by the Martians.

The Khyber Connection (1986) by Simon Hawke

I really ought to like Kipling – as the so-called ‘bard of Empire,’ he represents the personification of the jingoistic colonial attitude that both repels and fascinates me. As a son of British India, and a writer who chronicled its zenith, he should be right down my street. But for some reason, I don’t enjoy much of his prose. I think it stems from a problem common to some fiction from times past: contemporary writers of the Victorian period weren’t trying to give their works a Victorian flavour, and as a result, readers today used to period fiction, with an interest in Victorian settings, are left wanting. For me, I find it strangely difficult to get a feeling for what life might have been like during the British Raj by reading Kipling… either he neglects to mention aspects of culture, or he overloads the reader with alien phrases and concepts without explaining them. Don’t get me wrong, I know my jemadar from my pukka-wallahs, but when but when a barkandaze and a havildargo out for a chukka on the maidan, well that’s where I check out.

His poetry, on the other hand, I often find quite inspiring. Check out this excerpt from Arithmetic on the Frontier, which Simon Hawke uses to warm the reader up for his Afghanistan-set piece of sci-fi pulp nonsense, The Khyber Connection:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come down to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

And go to your God like a soldier.

Masterful. Kipling was writing about the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80, which was only the second time the British had stuck their bayonet into Afghanistan’s business. To be a completist: they got a sound drubbing in the war of 1839, did a little better in the war of 1878, ended things quite quickly in the war of 1919, and as for 2001? Well, they’re still there. It’s their longest one yet, and still counting! I love that for the recent BBC show Sherlock, they updated Doyle's characters to modern times, but didn't have to change the plot point that Watson had fought in Afghanistan because it was still contemporary!

Incredibly, there was another skirmish tucked in there between these encounters; one not quite large enough to have earned the title of a ‘war.’ This was the siege of Malakand, a region in what was then called the ‘Northwest Frontier Province.’ The British had set up this area as a buffer zone to prevent British India from sharing a border with Russian territory, but their careless border-shifting had irritated enough tribesmen to cause them a headache. Dissatisfaction eventually spilled over into violence and rebellion. It is this conflict that is described in The Khyber Connection.

The book is from a completely insane (but enjoyable) series called Time Wars. The central conceit is that after time travel is discovered, nations at war send agents back in time to historical conflicts to fight it out there rather than in their own time. A group called the Time Commandos (hell of a goofy name) attempt to police these conflicts in order to prevent temporal anomalies. But things are even more complex than that, because it appears that in a previous book, our heroes accidentally created an alternate timeline that merges with their own at certain points in history. Both timelines may cause the destruction of the other, so each is out to destroy the other. The Time Commandos encounter alternate versions of themselves from this other timeline; they’re essentially the same people, though they may have lived their lives differently.

Anyway, typically for a time-travel story, things get off to a confusing start. A temporal soldier (that is, a soldier from the future) who has been sent back to the 1987 conflict gets himself murdered by an Afghan dervish who looks strikingly similar to him. More than similar: they are the same man. During a clean-up operation, Future War Control (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway) figures out what this means: the alternate timeline people are up to something nefarious in the Khyber Pass in 1897! And so the Time Commandos are sent to nineteenth-century Afghanistan, and before you can say ‘Elphinstone’s ghost’ they’re up the Khyber without a paddle, or however the saying goes.

Leaving aside their base-dwelling, cigar-chomping boss, the Commandos are a power trio: Priest, an everyman character, Delaney, a hot-headed Irishman and typical rule-breaking maverick, and Cross, a 12^th-century French peasant girl who’s taken up living in the future. Yeah, she’s basically Laureline from the weird French comic Valerian. They’re simply drawn but likable characters. They disguise themselves as a missionary, soldier and nurse respectively to infiltrate the British forces invading Afghanistan.

Early on in the proceedings the reader comes across one of the odd conceits of the series: in this universe, certain fictional characters are real historical persons. The Commandos come across three soldiers called Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris. Yeah… I guess there aren’t that many well-known literary characters associated with the Afghan Wars. I’d not heard of these three before and I didn’t even suspect that they were a literary reference until I read the afterword. They’re taken from several short stories by Kipling as well as a book called Soldiers Three, as it turns out. Later on, they meet a Hindu water-carrier called Gunga Din, who is to play an important part in the proceedings also.

Apart from these, Hawke has packed his version of the Khyber Pass with an array of bizarre characters. Most of them we get only the barest introduction to; six books into the series, Hawke has amassed quite a lot of continuity baggage. There’s Dr Darkness, a man who has become able to travel instantaneously anywhere in the universe but can’t touch anyone else, there’s an enemy agent who has impersonated so many other characters that our heroes no longer know what to call him, and there’s not one but two rabble-rousing Islamic messiahs stirring up trouble, one or both of whom may also be imposters from the future. In fact, there are scenes in which it seems that barely anyone in this historical scenario is who they’re supposed to be. Oh, and did I mention Winston Churchill? Yes, Churchill really was involved in the Siege of Malakand as a young man. Hawke has juggled the dates around slightly to make him fit in with the other historical events he references, but in a novel that messes with history so much already this hardly seems worth griping about.

For a short, pulpy book the science-fictional elements and time-travelling shenanigans are both rather complex and in-depth. The reader very quickly gets buried in a mess of techno-babble that’s hard to keep up with but does have an internal consistency if you’re paying attention. The universe created is lively and interesting, with much world-building done in very few pages. It’s perhaps telling that the multiple time-streams plot is actually less baffling that the real-life explanation given for the political machinations of Afghanistan at the time: not even a sci-fi author could make those sound sensible!

There’s so much going on in this little novel that the history gets short shrift, though there are interesting tidbits, and anyway I’m always happy to read about 19^th-century Afghanistan. I’ve enjoyed one other Time Wars book so I’ll pick up a few more if ever I see them, though they’re definitely not common in 2^nd shops these days. Recommended if you like cheesy scifi action that actually gets rather complex. And as a final aside, the book did provide me with a few more works of Kipling’s that I enjoyed, in particular during a drunken bar scene where Cross, the female Time Commando, surprises the other soldiers by belting out a few verses of this song from Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. Great stuff!

Production Update on my New Game 'Singapore!'

Here's a map I made for my latest Far-East trading text adventure game, Singapore! You can play it here: Link.

Several months ago, I discovered the game Tai-pan!, which is based on the book by James Clavell. I enjoyed reading the book about a year and a half ago, primarily during glorious summer afternoon sittings outside The Volunteer in deepest Surrey, with a pint of ale beside me as I read. The game is just as good - it's an old game, and pretty simple, but with enough nuance to keep it interesting. It's pure gameplay, with virtually no descriptions, atmosphere or plot, however.

I took inspiration from this to create a game using Inkle, the same online interactive-fiction generator that I used to create the well-received Sand and the Scarab back in January 2013. The premise of Singapore! is that the player is the heir to a small Far East trading company. They can travel around an open-plan world, voyaging between different ports, transporting goods and wheeling and dealing. I did a fair bit of research into what these places may have been like in the 1840s, the period during which the game is set, and had a lot of fun filling out the world with period details. There's pirates, troublesome British authorities, smuggling, and dirty-dealing unsavoury characters. Like most of my projects, I wrote the bulk of the game in intense, whiskey-fuelled sessions over a couple of weeks, then lost interest. Several months later, I picked it up again and found that I quite liked it. I'm now endeavouring to finish it.

Making the game completely open-ended produced some problems with the software. Inkle is a brilliant, if simple programme that focuses on allowing the creator to write and not worry too much about programming. There are some simple commands that you can insert so that the game knows which paths the player has taken, and it can modify the experience because of these. But with the player's ability to carry out a large number of tasks in any order, I began to run into some of the limitations of the programme. Some of these I have been able to overcome with some creative game-structuring; some of them I've been less successful with. So far, there's still a few places where scenes repeat and things don't quite happen in a logical manner, but these should only be noticed if player's are doing slightly odd things, such as repeating the same patterns where they don't need to.

Since the initial writing sessions, I've spent a bit of time in Singapore for real. I can't say that I've changed a lot of the game since then, as Singapore today is an ultra-modern city that largely scorns any architectural links with its past. But my trip to the East has certainly reignited my interest in the project.

I'm taking the step of having some friends playtest this game rather extensively before I present it to the world, as it's large and complex enough that it's now difficult for me to spot every logical inconsistency. If anyone reading this is interested in playtesting and sending me some feedback, you can play the game here. I'd appreciate anything you may have to say!

The map above shows the different ports the player can travel to. I was hoping to have it show up at the beginning of the game, but Inkle doesn't allow you to control the size of images used in the games, and it's currently showing up far too small to be of any use.