Alan Moore speaks

I was kept very busy this week finishing editing and setting up my mate Pádraig's incredibly Massive Mega Moore Marathon - its a new (15, 000 words or so, phew!) interview with Britain's Wizard in Extraordinary, Mr Alan Moore. In fact its so big I had to break it into three sections across three days on the Forbidden Planet blog - part one is mostly concerned with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, especially the new third volume Century, the first volume of which comes out this month (Century 1910), the second next year (Century 1969) and a final part which is set in the present day after that.

It will surprise no-one who knows Alan's work to learn that the subjects and themes and references covered are diverse, from the Threepenny Opera to Jack the Ripper and Monty Python. Part two is where Alan talks about future projects and other works (including doing some work for a local youth culture mag which included Alan telling the kids the truth about drugs! Brilliant), taking in magic and James Joyce along the way, with the third and final part, which I posted up yesterday, is where Alan graciously agreed to take some selected questions sent in by readers of the FP blog. Its enormous but fascinating reading - many thanks again to Alan and for it.

On a related note, earlier this week we found out that media analysts Cision had posted a list of the top fifty blogs in the UK. As you might expect its dominated by politics blogs and blogs from established traditional media like the BBC and the Guardian. And in there at number 31 a solitary entry from the worlds of comics and science fiction - the Forbidden Planet blog. Needless to say I am surprised and delighted - I started that blog just over four years ago, now we have several contributors and its grown a lot (so much so that its a real juggling act for me to balance keeping the blog fires stoked and working on the main webstore; usually that means I end up doing a lot in my own time to keepit going, as do some of the contributors). And its nice that its grown so much since I started it and that a lot of folks in comics and SF communities check it out, but to see that its in the top 50 of all UK blogs? That its up there with Guardian blogs? Wow. Just goes to show that if its done correctly (and honestly) a good blog presence can be more effective (and cheaper and more enjoyable for you and your readers) than huge amounts of advertising. That's the sort of thing that can happen when you embrace blogging culture as a company instead of screaming hysterically at it.

Happy birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

Happy birthday to a writer who has been one of my favourite authors since I was a boy - happy 200th birthday, Edgar Allan Poe, born January 19th 1809 and died October 7th 1849. Or perhaps he didn't die but was simply bricked up alive in a catacomb... Dead for a century and half and still influencing other writers, comics artists, movie makers, not to mention setting out the basic template for the modern detective several decades before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Holmes.

In fact it seems to be quite a year for anniversaries on the literary calendar - there's Poe, of course, its 200 years since Charles Darwin was born too, 150 years since On the Origin of Species was published and 150 years since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Conan Doyle's delightful adventure yarn of explorers and dinosaurs, The Lost World, is the central plank of this year's One Book, One Edinburgh campaign in February (Doyle being a local lad - in fact he would have studied not far from where I work), following on from the last two years where Cam Kennedy and Alan Grant created graphic novel adaptations of Stevenson. There will be events, free books, school events and other happenings.

This time it will also extend to Glasgow and ties in with the Darwin 200 events across the UK, including a graphic nove biography of Darwin by Simon Gurr and Eugene Byrne, all of which I hope helps gets younger readers excited and reading and maybe the Lost World will give them an interest in dinosaurs then natural history (so they know to tell 'intelligent design' eejits to feck off when they encounter those brain-damaged idiots). It certainly did for me a kid, leading me to look for factual books on dinosaurs, then geology, evolution, which tied in with interests in astronomy and space exploration, being able to apply that learning to other bodies and... Well, that's kind of the point, once you start a chain of reading like that it sparks off more and more ideas and questions, leading to more reading and a continually growing link of reading and learning that goes with you through life. All from a good adventure yarn and some dinosaurs.

Mailer

New today that one of the best known novelist of the last half century, Norman Mailer, has died. In truth I've never been quite sure what to think of Norman - the Naked and the Dead is a powerful read worthy of space on any reader's shelves, but a lot of his other work I find uncomfortable. He belongs to the mid-20th century class where writers were almost the rock stars of their day - long before spoiled musicians would get drunk, stoned and into fights Mailer and his ilk were there, living it all. He even head-butted Gore Vidal once (I'm sure there are others who have wanted to). Thinking about it, it is surprising he lived so long, you'd half expect him to self destruct like Brendan Behan. Most modern writers aren't quite the same - sure many of them enjoy a decent drink (and I've been lucky enough to share a few drinks with a handful of them) - but the excesses of the Mailer type writers is something more confined to musicians these days.

I suppose in a way his behaviour wouldn't have been out of place at one of Byron's parties a century and a half earlier. As I said, I've never been quite sure what to make of Mailer the man - I'm not sure I'd like to have been around him personally and yet at the same time we need colourful characters in literature as elsewhere, acting out what we can't or won't do, almost like a catharsis, and we like reading about it, whether it was Byron and Shelley's antic, Mailer, Werner Herzog or Pete Doherty. Part of us looks on disgusted at their selfish indlulgence and bad behaviour and another envies that they seem to be able to get away with it.

It reminds me a bit of a story I once read of a hotel manager making up the bill for - I could be wrong, my memory is hazy - I think it was the Who or a similar 60s/70s rock band after they did their usual and trashed their rooms. Their tour manager asks why the hotel manager looks so pissed off - after all they will more than pay for the damage. It isn't that, he answers, do you think when I was at school this is what I dreamt I'd be doing for my life, running a hotel? You guys are living the lifestyle the teenage me wanted to do and will never get, I just get to pick up and tidy after you. Tour manager smiles understandingly, tells the hotel manager, go pick a room and smash the living crap out of it to your heart's content and stick it on our bill, mate. Rock'n'roll. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. It has a certain allure and you're often left wondering if they act that way because they are spoiled or if that reckless self-indulgence and belief normal rules don't apply to them is what made them write great poetry, novels or songs? The medium and artists change with the decades but the song remains the same...

Neil writes

Nice post on Neil Gaiman's journal showing the rather lovely notebooks he writes some of his stories in by hand after taking himself off to a quiet location.