automatonrevolution

So..the question, well…one of the questions, thats flapping around the turmoil and disarray that is my brain, is whether or not the so called “Master of the modern technothriller” has finally given up the ghost. Has Mike Chrichton flipped? Is he bovvered? Is he having a midlife crisis? Did he write his latest “novel” on the back of a bus ticket?

See, the reason I wonder this, and the reason i wrote novel is inverted commas, is that his latest book, “Next”, really isnt very good, definately isnt up to par with even his weakest earlier books (Congo is better than this….thats how bad it is), and shouldn’t be classified as a novel. While it is his usual doorstop sized tome…the actual story is tiny. The rest, all the faux newspaper clippings and the side stories about the transgenic ape and the guy who gets arrested because people think hes been mucking around with the genetics of sea-turtles, are all blatant filler. Its like he hada vague idea that he battered out on a PC one week and then realised it was about a third of the size of his usual stuff.

Hes usually so good at doing characters, giving us details of who they are and what they think, mannerisms that define them as people without making them cliches. Next has none of this. Next almost reads like a movie script for a slasher film…its characters are THAT weak and paper thin…hard to identify with and harder to care about.

Its not good enough. Not from the guy who wrote Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. And this is perhaps the root of the problem. The “Stephen King” syndrome. Chrichton is SO big, and SO well known, that his books are always going to sell millions, so his publishers and editors are letting him get away with writing any old rubbish without reigning him in. Some tough editor really needed to thrown NExt in a bin and say “Mike, I dont care if you researched all this stuff…you can write better than this”.

They really should.

Pardon the pun. I couldnt resist. Warning, this is a rant.

I hate my subconscious. Its a git. It pays no attention to what the conscious mind does or does not know, or what it believes. Facts are right out the window. The subconscious deals with maybes and what-ifs and has long, convoluted storylines concerning the tiniest of events that the consciousness would dismiss as unimportant.
Its driving me nuts.
I hate the fact that in the back of my head Im worrying about things that I KNOW I dont have to be worried about. I hate that my subconscious just wont leave them alone, and keeps chewing over them like a dog with a very large bone.
Bah.
I have enough things to worry about as it is, thanks.

And I’d like to get some fecking SLEEP at some point, please!!!!

Ok time out. Whats with all the bitching about England and the World Cup? I mean, really. Give it a rest, huh?

Lets see…if they’re not moaning about the UK media coverage of the World Cup (missing the irony that all they are doing is adding to it….), they’re whinging about the apparently scandalous suggestion that since we’re in Britain, and England is part of Britain and also the only part that managed to get a team to qualify, then maybe we should give them a bit of support. Then theres the stustie that came about when someone complained about the frankly childish “any team but England” attitude, which would be considered racist if it were anyone but England…but is somehow supposed to be seen as “banter” because its England.

Gimme a break. Why is that we pride ourselves on being “the best small country in the world”, yet when it comes to our neighbors South of the border we have an attitude thats stuck 400 years in the past? Doesnt anyone else think its ridiculous to blame the England football team for the actions of a bunch of English Kings who’ve been dead for quite a wee while now.

Grrr. It just seems that every time England does anything that its inhabitants think is worth celebrating that we have to put up with weeks of anti-English crap in our media here.

So England got into the World Cup. Whoop-de-doo. Its shouldnt be an excuse for people to let rip with more variations on “We hate England cos we watched Braveheart once.” I’m sick of it. England is full of people who are pretty much like us, when you get down to it, but the way some people act you’d think that they’re all mutant troglodytes or something. And its the ordinary joes who are on the recieving end of all this ire. The ordinary bloke in the pub who gets a pint glass in the face because hes English. The grievences that form the chip on our collective shoulders really has sod all to do with 99% of the English..its with the Governments that have been making the decisions…so why do so many people insist on blaming the whole country for the actions of just a few? Why does Scotland insist on defining itself by the worst parts of its history rather than its best?

This anti-Englishness isn’t banter, its racism. Its not funny, its nasty. And it ill becomes us as a nation. We’re better than this. Its about time we started acting like it.