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.

Indestructible

For reasons over which we need not tarry I recently had cause to revisit the 1967 television show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. There are several notable and interesting things about it which I shall get to shortly however the most amazing personal revelation was that, contrary to my recollection, I had never actually seen it.

Captain Scarlet, as it was ubiquitously called, was first shown in 1967 and, no doubt, repeated many times over on budget constrained British commercial television of the 60s and 70s. The theme tune, which was actually the closing theme, with its bombastic refrain of INDESTRUCTIBLE was a constant in the playground of my primary school in the mid 1970s. So I thought I was familiar with the Captain Scarlet canon. As I watched the 32 episode series I realised I was not and had never seen any of them.

To summarise, Captain Scarlet is was a Supermarionation, more commonly known as puppetry, production set in 2068 when Earth is engaged in some manner low key, shadowy war with Mars and its implacable autochthonous lifeforms: the Mysterons. The first notable observation is that the Martians, in an invention born of fiscal restraint, are depicted merely as projected circles of light. This gives a fresh and interesting take on the problem visualising alien life forms. They are also, for unknown reasons, oft given to broadcasting their nefarious intentions at the start of each episode.

The puppetry demonstrated several technical innovations over previous Supermarionation productions such as Thunderbirds. The puppets were larger and possessed of more conventional facial physiognomy compared to the Thunderbirds which had the goggle eyed look of a surprised pug. In Thunderbird and earlier shows characters walking always proved problematic as they moved as if having recently soiled themselves or suffered a grave injury to the genitals. Captain Scarlet skilfully obviates this limitation of string borne puppets by the simple expedient of never having any character walk anywhere ever. All scenes are transacted by stationary characters.

Captain Scarlet himself is a curious Christ-like figure whose resurrection from death is often a plot device. However, the most shocking thing about Captain Scarlet when viewed from these more sensitive times was the sheer scale of the violence and mayhem. Terrorism by crashing an airliner into the sea, assassination by suicide bomber and shootings too numerous to catalog were all considered perfectly acceptable early evening viewing for children in 1967.

On the whole, thoroughly recommended.

Explorer to Prisoner in One Step

It's my observation that starting a new book can be a heady and liberating experince. The blanks pages stretch like an unexplored country on a map. Except, it's better than that as I can form the terrain according to my taste and will.

That's how I felt when I started work on Weft. My previous book, Redeeming Blood, was a tightly confined work as it was a sequel to Without a City Wall. I still very much enjoyed writing Redeeming Blood but its narrative and chronology was tightly constrained by what had gone before.

Weft, by constrast, was a completely different experience in its initial stages. As it shared no characters or events with my previous two books I was utterly unshackled and could do whatever pleased me.  What did surprise me was just how soon that book would start to form its own boundaries that had to be respected if the narrative arc were to be consistent and logical.

By the end of chapter 4, which would be about 20% of the way through the book if all goes to plan, my latitude to maneuver was already limited by the patterns of behaviour I had already established for my major characters.

So the moral of the story is: enjoy the liberty that the start of a new book affords because it doesn't last.

Starbound Interview with Lucinda Margaret K.

Transcript of an interview with the Gliese colonisation mission primary Pilot/Navigator from the United Nations Space Agency internal information channel Starbound on 1st August 2106.

Interviewer: Lucy, thank you very much for agreeing to join us on Starbound. We're very excited to have you here.

Lucy: Well, thank you very much. It's both an honour and a privilege.

Interviewer: Tell us a little about your background and family. Where were you born and how did you come to be an UNSA officer.

Lucy: I was born in Eurabian state of Northumbria in 2081. My father was a judge and a man of very fixed ideas regarding his childrens' scholastic prowess. All three of my brothers are borderline retarded and were therefore a profound disappointment to him in that regard. They all ended up in the army, obviously, but I went to boarding school were it transpired I had a modest talent for mathematics. Honestly, all three of them really are quite stupid. Can I say hello to them?

Interviewer: Er, that's great... And how did your UNSA career start?

Lucy: When I was 14, so that would have been 2095, my school recommended that I attempt the UNSA selection board. I did the preliminary aptitude and psychometric tests then I travelled to the UNSA Academy in Baikonur for the simulations and socialisation evaluations.

Interviewer: And you were accepted?

Lucy: Not immediately. I was rejected on the basis that I didn't respond in a positive manner to authority and would not take direction or follow process. So I thought that was that. However, a few months later they were having trouble getting candidates who could hack the requirements of the Pilot/Navigator track so they went to the bottom of the rejects pile and there I was.

Interviewer: How long did you spend at Baikonur?

Lucy: About five years, then I moved to flight training at the facility on Deimos. About four years ago I was assigned to the first Gliese flight as Pilot/Navigator.

Interviewer: What will the duties of the Pilot/Navigator be on the flight?

Lucy: I will do the orbital maneuvering of the colonisation ship, the Integral, at departure and arrival. I'll manage the reorientation of the ship from the accelerative to decelerative phases and execute the atmospheric entry and landing of the cargo containers. Finally, I'll fly the landers to the surface.

Interviewer: That all sounds very challenging. You must have moments of doubt and fear?

Lucy: No, I don't. This is a dangerous business and if I ever entertained doubts or fears I would have been killed ten times over by now.

Interviewer: Thank you very much, Lucy, for a fascinating discussion.

Lucy: Thank you.

Interviewer: Make sure you join us next time for an interview with Doctor Rafferty, the Integral's Flight Surgeon.

Lucy: You don't want to do that. She swears like a fucking docker.

Lem and the Library

My home town in England had a public library. It was built in 1903 at a time when the British Empire bestrode the world like a coal powered brass and iron colossus of mercantilism. It was a fine red brick building with a typically late Victorian Neo-Gothic rejection of symmetry. Inside it was magnificently appointed with mahogany shelves and balustrades that had doubtless been felled by hand in a steaming forest on the Bay of Bengal.

The interior of the library had a gallery that looked down into a central atrium. Such a thing would be unthinkable now, I assume, as the polyester clad underclass would regularly hurl each to their deaths from it. The library’s contemporary replacement is a concrete, steel and glass confection that was obviously constructed to the lowest possible cost and with the least possible amount of architectural imagination. From the pavement it resembles an abandoned car dealership of one the less prestigious brands.

It was in the original library that I discovered the works of Stanisław Lem. Lem was a Polish science fiction writer who was actively writing and publishing from the 1950s to 1980s. He never shirked from a deep investigation into philosophical and futurological matters yet remained eminently readable. In the English translations, at least. I am regrettably unable to comment of the accessibility of the original Polish.

Lem’s work was so profound and sagacious that Philip K. Dick theorised that the books had to be the combined effort of an expert panel of Polish scientists, philosophers and writers. Although Dick was, at the time, feeling antipathetical toward Poland as a result of some disagreement over royalties on his Polish sales.

The first Lem book that I discovered and the one that I would commend to new readers is Return from the Stars. It tells the story of an astronaut who returns from a voyage spanning centuries to discover that population of Earth have voluntarily submitted themselves to pacification in order to build a tranquil utopia. Not only is this book a penetrating meditation on what it means to be human and the nature of identity but it has also proved to be extremely prescient about the nature of technological development. Even though it was published in 1961 it predicts with eerie accuracy the ubiquity of electronic publication and distribution that is only just being realised now. Access to media, such as books and newspapers, is depicted as being instantly accessible by a tablet device known as an ‘Opton’. 

Stanisław Lem died four years before the launch of the iPad.

The Lost Book

When I was a child my mother was a librarian in our local college. Sometimes, when the exigencies of childcare demanded, I would join her at the library after school until it was time to go home. Here, it would be lyrical and fitting if I offered an abbreviated Kunstlerroman in which my youthful self discovered a lifelong love of literature and reading by exploring the library.

That didn't happen.

As far as I can recall I spent most of these evenings in the deserted library drawing WW2 aircraft. This was the 1970s and World War 2 was a much more proximate and socially relevant event than it is now. I had not particularly old relatives who had fought in it and their recollections were a strong cultural influence on me. So I whiled away those hours drawing Gloster Meteors and Messerschmitt 262s locked in combat over childish vision of war torn Europe under palls of HB pencilled smoke.

On one of these occasions, I did something different. Instead of drawing aircraft I pulled a book from the shelf and started reading it. I have no recollection of the selection criteria but I would be amazed if it were anything other than an attraction to the cover. The book was a science fiction novel and I was immediately captivated by it. In the callowness of youth I didn't realise that it was exemplar of the much derided Portal genre and should therefore have been hurled away with a snort of derision.

These are the salient facts about the book which I can recall:

• It concerned a group of people who had been abducted from Earth to a mysterious island for study by aliens.
• The method of abduction was a shiny object on the ground which transported the luckless finder to the island when picked up.
• The protagonist of the novel and principle abductee was a man from New York.
• One of the other abductees was a female television journalist.
• There was a single gun on the island possession of which was held to be a very big deal.

That's it. That's what I can remember. I would dearly love to revisit this book now that I know I'm not supposed to like portal stories but I can't as I don't know the title or author. From the vague, and possibly incorrect, clues above does anyone have any ideas?

Books I'd Like to Read But Don't Want to Write

• A first contact SF novel written from the point-of-view of the aliens. I have a lurking suspicion that this already exists. Tell me if you know.
• A alternate history of Europe from 300 B.C. to the present which explores the question of what would have happened had Alexander III of Macedon turned west to defeat the Romans instead of heading east to give the Persians a shellacking.
• A Neuromancer sequel in which the AI from Alpha Centauri makes contact and connects into the matrix wherein Case has to battle it to the death.
• A fantasy trilogy in which... Hang on, scratch that, I don't want to read any fantasy.

Hunger

"There are no miracles or mysteries in cycling. It's just a question of how much you can suffer."

So wrote Irish cyclist Sean Kelly in his highly recommended autobiography Hunger. I am starting to come to a similar view on the subject of writing SciFi novels. You can sit around, looking at a blank screen and a flashing cursor, waiting to be touched by the ethereal finger of Arthur Charles Clarke to gain inspiration or you can get on with it and write something. Every day.

I finished my second novel, Redeeming Blood, this week and from the first word to the last it took me just over eight months. As my first book took me over five years this is a very welcome improvement in productivity. What was the difference in the two experiences? Well, by the time I started the second book I had detected a modicum of appetite for my first book in the industry. So I started to believe that this is something I could really do and I wanted to do more of it. In short, I got hungry and worked relentlessly hard at the second book.

In my not entirely unbiased opinion I believe the second book is a stronger piece of work in some ways than the first. It has more coherence and better structure from not having such a protracted gestation.

In other news, my third book will be called Weft and will not be related to WaCW or RB but will take place in the same imagined future. I have a storyboard and some notes for it but I am going to take a break after the death march of simultaneously rewriting WaCW and finishing RB. So the first word of Weft will not be written until 1st July 2016 and will not be complete until spring 2017.

Sci Fi on TV

While doing nothing in particular on the Internet I noticed that Corey's The Expanse is being adapted for television. This is obviously another sign of the television industry's never ending quest to find the Sci Fi equivalent of GoT. See also RGB Mars on Spike.

What strikes me about the still shots from The Expanse is that it seems to be lots of good looking young people with great hair in a lowest-common-denominator vision of what things will look like 200 hundred years hence.

It looks like every post Battlestar Galactica reboot Sci Fi show that's filmed on the cheap in Canada. We need a SciFi show with a genuinely different and new visual language that demonstrates the otherness of the future.

Dubai

It is a tragedy that George Alec Effinger did not live long enough to see his vision of the Budayeen made real in the United Arab Emirates.

In the Marîd Audran novels he describes a vast commercially vibrant metropolis in the Middle East around which visitors from the jaded, declining states of the West would stagger in awe.

When Effinger published the first novel in the trilogy, When Gravity Falls, in 1987 such a vision of economic and cultural ascendency of Asia and the Middle East seemed fanciful. From the perspective of 2015 it looks prescient