Deservedly Forgotten Sci Fi Classic: Moon Zero Two

Hammer Film Productions are well known for their contribution to the horror genre. During the peak of their creative and financial success from the 1950s to the 1970s they were responsible for the establishment of many of themes and tropes of horror films and their influence is still apparent now.

The studio also made some much less frequent forays in Science Fiction; most notably and successfully with the Quatermass tetralogy. Such notability and success was not acheived with another their Sci Fi offerings: Moon Zero Two.

In Hammer's horror output the films usually manage to transcend the very obvious lack of budget by treating the subject matter with charm and authenticity. Moon Zero Two unfortunately fails to rise above its financial constraints. It was billed at the first Sci Fi Western featuring many familiar themes from Western films such as claim jumping, six guns, a sheriff, bar fights and a female lead called Clementine. To this unpromising concept is added amazingly bad production values and frankly bizarre casting. The visual effects were by Les Bowie who, demonstrating the infinite possibilities of redemption, went on to win an Oscar for his work on Superman in 1978.

Despite being putatively set in May 2021 the titual spacecraft, Moon Zero Two, looks almost exactly like the Apollo LEM used by Armstrong and Aldrin to land on the moon only a few months before Moon Zero Two debuted to bemused audiences in cinemas. Science Fiction fails if it does not offer imaginative speculation and, despite the fanciful rendering on the film's poster, there was no speculation here. The film's maker merely offered what people had seen in reality only a few months previously.

The protagonist of Moon Zero Two, Bill Kemp, is played with a certain rigidity by James Olson. With an eye on lucrative transatlantic revenue Hammer obviously posed the question: "Who is the cheapest American we can get?" and got Olson as their answer. Bernard Bresslaw, more traditionally known for being Sid James' permanently confused sidekick in the Carry On films, managed to squeeze in an unlikely turn as hired goon in Moon Zero Two in between Carry On Camping and Carry On Up The Jungle. The outstanding performance is, as might be expected, by Warren Mitchell who plays avaricious inter-planetary hyper-capitalist J.J. "One Hundred Percent" Hubbard. Moon Zero Two is commended to you solely on that basis.

This Is Hardcore

I was recently invited to participate in the beta program for KDP hardcover publishing. Having been blessed with special favour from "Jeff" I felt it behooved me to explore the opportunity so I decided to make a hardback version of my book Weft available.

Feel free to order your own copy of Weft here.

The process of creating a hardback cover in KDP will be very similar to those that have endured the mental torture of the paperback process. A paperback cover file will not suffice and a new .pdf document with larger dimensions must be created. Scaling up the paperback file will not work as the alignment of the spine text may no longer be correct. There is a new and different Excel template available from Amazon to assis with this.

A further complication is that author copies are not available for order and it only appears to be possible to fulfil hardback orders for delivery in the United States. However the overall product looks very good and I am happy with the result.

Special thanks to Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design for helping with this project.

Six Sides

If you're a regular viewer of The Simon Rutter Show you will remember the enormous amounts of work, frustration and self-deception that took place in the creation of the novels "Without a City Wall" and "Redeeming Blood". I covered a small portion of the details in this blog post.

Both books had very complex structures with alternating narrative arcs set many hundreds of years apart and the first book, Without a City Wall, lacked a compelling conclusion. I had the idea that solution to both of these issues was to resequence the contents of both novels into strict chronological order and combine them into one book with four distinct sections. This solves both the complexity issue, as the events in the book now occur in sequence, and the ending problem as the whole saga now resolves in bloodchilling fashion at the end of the combined work.

I don't expect huge commercial success from this; it's a very personal work on which i learned my craft as a novelist. The books that followed such as A Dying King and Weft are superior exemplars of genre fiction.

However, if you have a burning desire to read a 250,000 word meditation on interstellar colonisation, ecology, the limits of representative politics, terrorism, transhumanisn, ethics, the atomisation of identity, cybercrime, end stage capitalism and nuclear war then the new combined book, titled Six Sides, is for you.

The cover was by Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design who did an amazing job of capturing the books many themes and expansive nature.

Buy it here:

US
UK
Straya

Forgotten Sci Fi Classic: The 1994 Brittas Empire Christmas Special

The Brittas Empire is a structural and thematic link from the golden age of British sitcoms in the 70s and 80s, as typified by Dad's Army, to the post-millenial cringe comedy that followed. Gordon Brittas is the developmental median between George Mainwearing and David Brent.

After five succesful seasons the Brittas Empire was gilded with the BBC equivalent of a Roman chaplet of laurels: the Christmas Special. The well established procedure for British sitcom Christmas Specials was to take the existing characters and situations and intensify them by placing them in an extreme context. The 1994 Brittas special honoured this tradition by the unlikely artifice of having the entire staff confined within Whitbury New Town leisure centre by a epochal snowstorm of Arctic magnitude that sweeps the south of England.

However, the special also innovated by having some scenes showing the fate of the characters thirty years hence on New Year's Eve of 2019. Even though the special aired on 27th December 1994 it was actually set before the events of the first season in December 1989.

Now that 2019 has been and gone it possible to assess how well the writers and producers of the show imagined life in 2019. The fact is, that from the small amount of material available, they got it amazingly right. The Brittas Empire Christmas Special turned out to be the most accurate depiction of life in the early 21st century in any work of Sci Fi in any medium. Predictions in Sci Fi and notoriously difficult. We only have to look at how the other storied example of life 2019, Blade Runner, to appreciate how good the Brittas vision was.

Three examples of where the 1994 special got it exactly right:

Ubiquity of electric vehicles. Most of the characters drive electric cars and the one who doesn't is chided for it by his partner. One the cars is a 1st generation Panther Solo which was an excellent choice as it looked futuristic in the 90s and was obscure enough that very few people would recognise it. In a demonstration of budgetary limitations placed on the creators it has electic vehicle sounds dubbed over it but the Ford CVH 1.6 engine that was in the Solo was still belching smoke and condensate on what was obviously a very cold day.

Acceptance of LGBTQ+ Relationships in public life. One of the characters is a cabinet minister in a tory government who is openly in a same sex relationship. This would have been unthinkable in 1994 when the disgraceful shadow of Clause 28 still loomed over the tory party.

Universal availability of navigation systems. In 1994 people would navigate on long road journeys by buying a piece of software that would provide text only directions which they would then print and shuffle through on the steering wheel while doing 90mph on the M18. In 1994 special an inquiry about how long it will take to get somewhere is met with the response, "the car's computer says 45 minutes." This is an eerily good prediction of the universal presence of GPS based navigation systems.

One example where the 1994 special gets it badly wrong:

The Prime Minister in 2019 is Sebastian Coe. From the persepctive of 1994 this probably seemed like a worthy predicition as the Olympian was, at that time, a tory MP considered to have a bright future in politics. If the writers had dared to posit that The Daily Telegraph's loathsome, mendacious and unscrupulous European correspondent would the be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom it would have been summarily rejected as a notion more ludicrous than the week long Arctic blizzard.

Cover Story

When I first published The Zhala Trilogy I had the notion that I wanted them to look austere and anachronistic. In particular I was attracted to the aesthetic sensibility of the designs Romek Marber did for Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. To me they communicated a stylish austerity that complemented and, at the same time, partially concealed each book's subject matter. So with character art commissioned from Brent Skinner that's what I did. I made my Marber Grid template and created my covers being very much pleased with the end result. The font used on all of the cover text elements was another wilfuly bleak choice and, in a final iconoclastic, flourish I reversed the normal orientation of the spine aping the style of a Russian or French novel.

While the covers greatly appealed to me it had somehow slipped my mind that I'm not the person who's supposed to be buying these books. Something more professional and commercially compelling was required. New covers were commissioned from Sarah Waites who did an absolutely oustanding job of capturing the essence of the books. The colour sequence of the originals has been retained in modified form and the character on the cover of the final book switched to Zhala from her father.

The Map of the Monarchy

I hate fantasy books with a map in them. However, I have learned from experience, that it is an oft requested feature from the reader. So here is the map of the Monarchy.  This was painstakingly constructed during the editing of all three books to remove geographical and temporal inconsistencies.

The Zhala Trilogy

After three years of not inconsequential effort the trilogy is complete. I enjoyed almost every aspect of creating these books. One would have to as the immense amount of mainly unrenumerated work would otherwise be impossible.

The trilogy sketches a distant world in a distant future in which Zhala rules as king using the same combination of deceit, guile and caprice that she used to become the Monarchy's ruler. She is assisted and occasionally hindered by her father and the diverse group of friends that form her cabinet.

Book I : A DYING KING
Book II: SORROW'S CROWN
Book III: OUT OF DARKNESS