A Synopsis of Squid
…Being an interview by Ollie Barder that just went live over at Forbes (or slightly less live over at Archive, if you’ve used up your monthly allocation of free articles). Ollie was originally drawn in because he’s Mr. Mecha and was intrigued by Secret Level’s “Armored Core” short―a big chunk of the piece goes behind the scenes of that particular project―but the remainder delves deep into my past, and shallowly into my future.
True fans will find much here they’ve read before: my favourite authors, my past travails as a marine biologist. I swear I’ve told that old Jules Verne plagiarism anecdote more times than I have fingers and toes. On the other hand, I’ll bet none of you have encountered the Canvas Submarine and Underground Hideout stories before (even the BUG didn’t know about that last one). And while you may have heard the occasional rumour, the ball gag has finally come off so I can officially talk (a little, at least) about the Blindsight series treatment I’m working on with Neil Blomkamp.
Photo credit: Do-Ming Lum/Tiger Mountain Creative Services
A mix of the novel and the familiar, then, in a publication that doesn’t generally do people like me. But if I’m honest, the highlight of the piece just might be the author photo by Do-Ming Lum: a contemporary picture that doesn’t hide my age, but also doesn’t make me look like a decrepit goof. A picture in which I managed, just once, to not roll my eyes or mug awkwardly. A picture containing an Easter Egg that references the subject of my previous blog post. A picture which, if I’m being honest, actually makes me look good.
I figure it’s because my face is in shadow.
I can only hope you finish Omniscience before you are consumed by your new modeling career.
I second that emotion
Nice interview, and it’s exciting to hear that Blindsight will finally be adapted! I’m also glad that it will be as a series of episodes rather than a movie. The short movie that was made was incredible, but there is no way even a long film could ever truly do it justice.
A Blindsight series? With Neil Blomkamp? Intriguing! Those I always fancied that it would make an excellent Anime under Mamoru Oshii…
Rifters trilogy is anime. Oshii would slap, ofc.
Blindsight is live action, no question. Kubrick still being dead, Nicolas Winding Refn remains my first choice for high-grade alien fever dream on miniscule budget.
Blomkamp? His past work’s too human. I hope Peter quickly breaks him of that. It won’t be Blindsight unless a viewer’s stomach drops out at the first shot and remains a bottomless gyre till long after the last.
Peter, I am proud to be your photographer. When you become world famous from the Blindsight adaptation, my plan is to retire after selling a million copies of that photo of you blown up into a poster.
Now i absolutely want a series of glamour shots of our host to hang on my bedroom wall.
I think Dr. Watts would look great in a black leather jacket and with an eyepatch, really leaning into the “handsome rogue” look. Maybe some star cut-outs like for those boybands of yore? Endless possibilities (to make money!)
Come on, K, we all know that if Peter is to wear anything at all during a photoshoot, it HAS to be a starfish costume (tho the eyepatch would make for a fun touch)
A Jethro Tull t-shirt is also obligatory.
I regret nothing.
(not sure the image uploaded, so link)
I’ll admit that a crossover between Starfish and Planet of the Apes had not occurred to me.
This is going into the Gallery, btw. As soon as I can figure out where the fuck to put it.
Does your gallery support BSL-3 or higher?
BTW, I am personally holding out for the “Dr Watts as John-Wick-by-way-of-Arthur-Curry” pose. Will pay top $.
Me and my credit card are open for all kinds of Dr. Watts photoshoots!
Check out my fan site on “OnlySquids”
yeah no
This is a welcoming blog.No kink-shaming.
why is that image hosted on npr.org lmao
Clearly, it’s a- Nah, too easy :p
You know, I am not young, I’ve seen some shit. Five wars, three revolts, two coups and a civil war. I’ve had my toes sewn back on and I’ve had a surgeon dig through my eyeball for that pesky foreign body.
What I never wanted to see is a rule 34 with my favourite existential dread sci-fi author.
This is a prime illustration of the difference between wanting and needing.
Now, I’ll just go get some tissues and the card, while somebody magnanimously drops that link somewhere in the comments…
Sorry, this may be impertinent but I just have to ask— can you wiggle the toes that were sewn back on?
Nah, I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. My toes are wiggleably fine as are both my eyes (although I was never able to wiggle them), and I always was smart enough to stay away from any of the real action.
Glad to hear you have all your toes ‘cause if you were to lose your hands you might need them like the guy in My Left Foot.
I have a revenue sharing agreement awaiting your signature for that “OnlySquids” venture.
Your thought that “if Peter is to wear anything at all during a photoshoot” deserves further exploration.
If we’re going down the ribald rabbit hole, then this opens up author portrait possibilities for a special reprint of Starfish; namely, the chocolate edition.
An eyepatch! (I think pursuing this in detail might open up a rabbit hole )
“the Blindsight series treatment I’m working on with Neil Blomkamp”
HOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCK
Dont hope. Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
With how things are currently going, Drumpf starts the nuclear apocalypse a day before the series goes live.
In the wise words of H. Simpson: “Attempt is the first step on the road to failure”.
Yeah, hope often ends in disappointment, so what? It’s part of the fun. That’s why gambling addicts play despite knowing that they’re not gonna win.
At least hope is free, vegan and not tested on animals.
Who knows, we might just get ourselves a screen adaptation that rivals the LoTR trilogy in quality.
Oh, and nuclear armageddon is not an experience in the human existence, so you can just ignore it in your calculation. Set its probability to zero in terms of your plans and hopes, and the calculation result does not change.
Eh, if I happen to survive the nuclear apocalypse, I’ll fucking pantomime the series myself for a captive audience of painted rocks, if I have to :p
Gunna be honest, old Neil remains a one-trick pony. Everything he did after District 9 was mediocre at best. I try to blame shallow screenplays, but I’m on the fence. Can’t, won’t jump head first into the fanboy silliness. Blindsight has enough depth for fifty Nolans, so here’s to hoping Mr Blomkamp will manage to make Blindsight the sight to behold. I do remain cautiously optimistic.
Now that I have actually read the interview thoroughly, fuck cautious optimism. Blindsight adaptation? Yay! Sicario with vampires? Fuck, yay!
Also, thanks for Tchaikovsky pointer, added Shroud to my bucket list.
I do hear your reservations, though. Neill seems to be a master visual stylist; the bad stuff seems to come down to source material. That’s where I come in.
I did get a sneak peak at his Sicario screenplay, FWIW. It had some logic issues, but I expect those have been fixed since. And judging solely from the written pixels, I think it could be the best thing he’s done since District 9.
Just though: Sicario with vampires could make a terrific film in its own right, played lethally dead straight like Sicario itself.
FDA agents as partially-indestructible M16-firing killing machines who also have to stop for a refill every so often.
(Realized I’ve never watched Sicario 1 & 2. Disc’s just arrived in the mail, yay.)
*Patiently awaiting news on your new publications you have in the works*
Got one coming out in Lightspeed in a couple of months. Set in the Blindsight universe.
Finally we can read “Insect Gods” in English.
Any plans to update your Backlist?
God no. Not “Insect Gods”. “Insect Gods” is not a good story: it’s a handful of vignettes (some admittedly quite good) barely held together with duct tape. It was written under duress, and I hope it doesn’t ever appear in English. It was originally commissioned by my Russian publishers, so that they could get people to buy books they’d already purchased on account of the “bonus content”. In hindsight, I like to think of it as my own small effort to help the Ukrainian war effort, years before Putin even invaded.
The Lightspeed story is “The Twenty-One-Second God”. Its only authorized English appearance to date was as an audio edition, read by me, temporarily available as a prize in Locus’ latest fundraising drive.
Rock and roll, that’s amazing news.
Great article, love all the backstory. That author photo is most excellent.
I’ve read Blindsight countless times and one of my favourite things to do is imagining how I’d direct it if it was a movie. Always end up concluding it’s too much for a single movie and would go with a small TV series (6~8 episodes) with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s or Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s soundtrack and whatnot (yeah I also have unlimited budget on this thing).
So you can imagine how H Y P E D I am about having Blomkamp directing it. Cannot wait for more details on it (release date, casting, soundtrack, anything!)
Mr. Watts, words cannot express the joy of the news about a possible film adaptation of Blindsight, but can you share some information do you have plans to release a sequel to Blindsight and Echopraxia?
I apologize in advance if this issue has already been raised, but I can’t find any reliable information. Separately, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to you for these novels.
I know I’ve made some very poor decisions lately, but I can assure you my work will be back to normal. I still have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission…and I want to help you.
Just not this year. This year I have an episodic Blindsight treatment, a Sunflowers novella, a new story collection, the Apex screenplay, hopefully more Blur pitches (working on one of those now), an essay for an Italian art thing, and possibly―depending on the breaks―more video game work. Also possible insurgent resistance against the ‘Murrican invaders, if anyone up here will trust me with a gun (which admittedly they probably shouldn’t). I’m still totally psyched for Omniscience, but I’m even more psyched for a couple of these other projects, and they all have hard deadlines attached.
The way I see it, though, if the Blindsight series actually makes it into production, that’ll totally kick-start interest in Omniscience (which would be, after all, Season 3)― and I’ll have significantly more leverage in negotiating that contract than I ever did for Blindsight and Echopraxia (which, not to rehash old news, left me feeling somewhat less than enamored with my publisher).
So don’t think of this as a delay. Think of it as an investment.
I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.
I like Blomkamp’s work. I’m glad you’re working together. Should make for an excellent series.
I’ve always liked your writing origin story of, “they were forcing me to write fiction anyway, so I figured I’d just add some characters and plot and sell it as such,” but it was interesting to read the actual backstory.
I remember paddling off Robson Bight in the late 90s, prohibited from going in because the orcas that came in there to rub their bellies on the rocks were protected under provincial legislation. The crazy thing was that the fed’s fisheries act superseded whatever provincial protection was in place, so we were stuck sitting in our kayaks outside the bay while these massive diesel spewing fishing boats set up right inside it. Writing this now it sounds too stupid to be true, but I saw it. It looks like they may have changed things so that no boats are allowed in now, but given what I experienced I’m guessing you’re not exaggerating when you say they wanted you to make shit up.
Just to be clear (and not to diminish FAO’s own political cowardice/short-sightedness), it was not the feds who were herding the research. It was the guy running the consortium, who’d harvested bags of money from the US fishing industry by going on tour and telling people that the sea lion problem was their own personal Spotted Owl, and wouldn’t it be great to get ahead of this thing by making sure that the guys doing the research into it were, you know, on their payroll and not Greenpeace’s? For all I know the industry never even exerted direct pressure; it was just this one guy, building his own personal empire and playing politics with an ecosystem.
He succeeded, too, far as I know. I’ve kept a few documents from those days, just in case.
Lighting is everything as you get older.
I always respond with trepidation when my work is seen by a REAL artist. In this case, Peter’s image was captured entirely with natural light. I was (seriously!) trying for a Rembrandt/Old master feel, but didn’t nail it.
Congrats on the news and not only do I thank you for writing all your books I also appreciate your existence—tho I’m not sure a big silver dildo on the shelf sends the right message. I thought this was a kid safe blog.
You do know my feelings about human larvae in general, don’t you?
Butter sauce and a nice Riesling?
What about squid larva?
How do you manage to look so damn good?
Vaseline, apparently. Smeared across the lens.
That’s… A roller-coaster of a post.
Please. We won’t discuss where or under what circumstances I use vaseline. But never ever on the Sacred Photography Gear.
Dammit, there is no possible way that I can take credit without being obnoxious, arrogant, or incorrect — or all of the above.
Bask in the reflected chiaroscuro glory, comforted that the squids will now eat you last.
Do you have anyone in mind to compose the soundtrack for Blindsight? if not, Dan Romer (Maniac, Station 11) or Christobal Tapia de Veer (Annihilation) would be *choice*. I would froth that, and I suspect you would too.
Ligeti.
I’ve given no real thought to the Blindsight soundtrack. I have some thoughts on the Starfish adaptation, though.
whoa,I thought about that,when I read it while listen to “Goliath”by Woodkid.It also appear in DeathStranding Collections
This easily ranks with “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea” as cliffhangers go.
*cough cough* :p
I’m thinking an upbeat sea shanty might work for Starfish.
Oh bloody hell—now I have Starfish playing in my brain with the cast of Spongebob. You bastard.
The music of Annihilation does make people’s scalps tingle, but I don’t really think it’s suitable for the oppression of blindsight.
Agreed, although Ceba was only suggesting a composer, not the OST itself. Annihilation does a pretty good job of establishing alien, albeit within familiar electronica. Big dirty clipping horn.
No doubt Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar will get bounced about too (for obvious reasons!), although parts of Blade Runner 2049 (a mostly forgettable film) might be a better influence.
On a TV budget the composer selection may be a bit more constrained, especially for something as Marmite as Blindsight. And, frankly, Blindsight needs a limited budget: big money would just smooth all its sharp pointy bits into inoffensive mass-market nubs—not interesting at all.
…
I think the trick will be to approach Blindsight as not one but two soundtracks:
Within Theseus, there is human music. Look to the Apollo missions and their taped playlists for guideline: What does a crew of idiosyncratic borderline-posthumans like to listen to as it plays and works? Johnny Cash, Opera, Punk. Most of all, what would Keeton, modern Pinocchio on his personal journey to become human, use to fill the empty spaces—indeed, would he at all? Maybe his soundtrack is the random mechanical hisses and ticks of operating machinery that gradually gains melody and rhythm. So much of soundwork is subconscious. Yet it’s foundational, especially for a story such as this.
Obviously there’s rights clearances to consider, but if Theseus’s audio background can be pulled from existing catalogs then I think in-ship playlist can do all the heavy lifting of grounding these not-quite-humans. This crew needs an audience to care, not relate, otherwise you end up with Sphere (a perfectly cromulent concept utterly boned by viewers immediately recognizing who’s going to live). Especially with surgical-autist Keeton, arguably the least relatable or sympathetic protagonist, at least at the beginning.
And then, there is the Outside: deep space, the void around Rorschach, and the void within. I wasn’t kidding about Ligeti: Kubrick’s stargate sequence chose his work for good reason. Stripped back viciously to cathedral organ and human voice alone, atonal, impenetrable; pure soundscape. If the Theseus soundtrack is human-crafted electric guitar, lyrics, drums, Rorschach’s must be its polar opposite: the background radiation of the universe, amped up to 12.
Blindsight lives or dies by its ability to create and maintain extreme contrast: the cramped close excruciatingly intimate environment within Theseus, discomfiting yet still recognizably human—a safe space of hope, fear, and human waste recycling—and a universe outwith, that is already perfectly adapted to scramblers and hard-vacuum life, that has no place for us within it.
And, remember, we shot first.
…
Just finished rewatching Interstellar. Beautiful to look at but I didn’t rate it on story the first time around (it was a few years ago). This time I got to “No parents should have to watch their own child die” and ugly-bawled my head all the way to end of credits. There are very few things in the universe that can still do that to me. Honestly, story’s still kinda pish (weirdly, everyone complains about the Roko’s Basilisk at the end, but that part’s fine; it’s the whole quitting Earth bit that smelled), which is a problem if suspension-of-disbelief gives out prematurely. But, as emotional hook goes, can’t fault that ending.
Blindsight has a much harder job. So much of it is internal. The Gang alone will be hell to translate to screen (for a 2hr film I’d say simplify to 2 conscious personalities or you’d dig yourself a hole); but again, musical playlists could be key to making that character work without having to draw an obvious diagram (c.f. Lynch’s Dune, poor sod). And Keeton, JFC (but at least SK, being ship’s observer and thus narrator, has voiceover control—often an ugly crutch, e.g. original Blade Runner theatrical release, but here it could be useful, supplying both early exposition and receptacle of crew’s humanity towards the end).
Anyhoo, that’s enough rando braindump for the night.
*Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in front of Pepe whiteboard*
Soundscapes are a bane of screens, big and small. These days there are no music in film anymore. Just these “soundscapes”. Superhero movies are the biggest offenders, but everyone else isn’t doing great on that front either.
Also, space must be silent. That’s what makes such a vast, endless, abyssal thing so claustrophobic. No one can hear you scream.
And, most importantly, there’s a reason it’s Blomkamp working on the script with the Doctor, not you or me. I may shit-talk him, but I do remember that he has made one more district-nines than we have. So it’s very unlikely our opinions will have any weight before the release.
We may watch different films.:) That said, my idea of a deep space hard-scifi soundscape is deep space’s raw EMR rendered audible. (As a starting point.)
Yes! I noticed Interstellar did this; big click-clunk dockings without the usual instructive mechanical sound we’ve been trained to expect. Ditto 2001. It worked very well, building drama.
This doesn’t mean the soundtrack is silent, mind you. Interstellar had incidental music pad its vacuum; 2001 in-suit breathing providing its own stress beats. True silence also works, but probably best in moderation. Generally, if you’ve got atmosphere or physical contact you’ve got “legitimate” audio source.
Standing within Rorschach could supply low-frequency sounds (the thumping of approaching scramblers); high-frequencies might be its hallucinatory EMR breaking into radio comms, plus familiar breathing and human chatter. Plenty ways to make interesting sound environments which aren’t Star Wars pew-pew pablum. And one can bend rules a bit, e.g. a chasecam following a suited human sprinting through Rorschach could still hear the world from the character’s perspective. And the team’s radio comms, obviously, are something to which the audience is privvy. So when the sound does suddenly cut out to absolute silence, then cuts back in seconds later, the dramatic punches are heightened.
Again, strong contrasts. Familiar pop-culture playlists onboard Theseus can make it a safe space and humanize its not quite human crew. Outside, everything needs to be unremittingly foreign.
I like your point about hearing the environment from the characters’ perspectives. Showing their umwelt. Sort of along the lines of What is it like to be a Bat? by Nagel.Or in this case an apex predator like Sarasti. What does a vamp hear compared to a human? A non baseline human? Or sound as it is processed by the gang? The scramblers? Skillful way to delineate characters.
We understand the characters better when they are silent than when they are speaking. Talking can feel disruptive.
Within Rorschach it’s obvious: we’re just piggybacking the spacesuited characters. Kubrick already did this yonks ago, so steal from the best.
The thought of hearing Theseus from the vampire’s perspective though… ooh, that’s intriguing. All the little clicks and hisses the human brain automatically filters out, boosted to build a rich 3D space instead. (No idea if it’d work or there’d be place for it, but. Is Matt Murdock busy?)
Just finished watching Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy which, like Beyond the Black Rainbow, is quite the visual treat. (Maybe poaching the DP if Panos didn’t already eat him to gain his power.) Sound design to a similar level of bugnuttery would be quite the thing. Plus sound from one environment can be mixed with visual from the other, and vice-versa.
Gang just needs a good enough interpreter. See Serkis as Gollum / Smeagol, MacAvoy in Split + Glass, or Pattinson in Mickey 17. Or, seeing as those are all dudes, Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve all the way back in 1957, or Lilly Rose-Depp in Nosferatu, more recently.
Not seen MacAvoy’s Split so can’t comment on that performance. (Too much of a wuss: Henry is the last serial killer film I watched, and that was 20 years ago!) Serkis and Pattinson are dual (and obviously dueling) personalities, both terrific performances but I imagine far easier to pull off than four [mostly] cohabiting roommates. Whoever is cast for James will need some impressive range.
One great advantage of a ~6hr TV format over 2hr film is it allows plenty space to roll out characters. A first episode can lay down a Keeton “Imagine…” exposition of the Gang’s neural setup and get viewers comfortable with the two dominant, well-contrasted, Susan and Sascha personalities, leaving the Michelle-Szpindel relationship and Cruncher to emerge in ep 2. James provides the emotional heart to a crewful of autists, so doing this character full justice will be wonderful.
…
p.s. Where are my manners? Congrats to Peter, Neil, et al on this news—great progress! May Blindsight speed into production and win all of the gongs, so we devoted bucket of crabs may resume our Omniscience naggings!
Gah, the crawl has swallowed my attempt at replying!
I was gonna recommend youtubing his performance, at least, but seeing as I am at my PC right now, I might as well facilitate. Enjoy 😀
re: 6h format, the idea that’d come to mind was to have the different personalities played completely straight, with no initial explanation until the entire gang has been shown (maybe one per episode would take too much time / be too artsy for modern audiences*, but at least have them be appreciably different characters in different scenes over 1-2 episodes)
Also this one!
The biggest challenge won’t be distinguishing the Gang’s 4 operating personalities but…
Dug from long-term memory [1], #5’s reveal did not work in the book: no clear agenda, too late to effect outcome, and generally lacking emotional gut-punch. (My sole, but decade-durable, criticism which I emailed to Peter the other day.)
This might be corrected the screenplay by:
1. Introducing the saboteur—or at least its influence—much sooner. Segue from Keeton’s pure hallucinations of ship cabling sliding like scrambler limbs, to physical system glitches and failures emerging above the base rate for a hard-rad environment, cultivating PKDick-sian uncertainty and paranoia, and culminating in the lab blowout that delivers Cunningham and his “captive” scramblers for Rorschach’s analysis.
2. Making the fifth personality obviously inhuman, via non-verbal vocalisms and radical movements, taking advantage of audiovisual storytelling. Again, this inhuman presence can be revealed gradually: Piter de Vries’ discomfiting eye-roll (Dune 2021) is similar to the scrambler’s eye-roll as it toggles between visual processing and pure computation.
A smart audience will no doubt peg the returned James as probable Rorschach agent in any case, so trading that last-minute surprise reveal (which is lost in all the other climactic chaos) for deep emotional conflict stretching 20–40mins could be much more satisfying drama. (Yes, it’s much more conventional too; but, hey, if it works, it works. Plenty other places to embed the Wattsian horrors.)
The 4 personalities should be played straight, in that the crew already knows the Gang and how it functions: the personality switches are a nothingburger to them. (Excepting where an unexpected switch annoyingly interrupts a conversation, but that too is expected by them.) The audience doesn’t know James or anyone else, however, so I’m pretty sure ep1 will require a Keeton-supplied overview of each crew member. This is Keeton’s job, after all—both in-story character and as a narrative device. Get these character-establishing infodumps out the way quickly, so the script can start evolving the relationships between them. [2]
Like Annihilation, Blindsight’s an observational study of how selected humans interact with each other and with an alien, and how these interactions change them. It’s the deltas that matter. [3]
Whereas Split’s an onion-peeling exercise: McAvoy’s reveals are the point, the surprise, and the entertainment. The Horde is what’s important.
Modern audiences are a lot more genre-literate than past decades when Dune 1984 tickets came with a Who’s Who pamphlet and Blade Runner its famously cheese voiceover. But the audience still needs adequate grounding so their attention’s firmly on the narrative, not still figuring out who/what the players are. TV/Film storytelling is not like a book: there’s no manual option to flip back a page and re-read for clarification. The audience has to be able to keep up. Lose your audience, no season 2 for you!
—
[1] You have not experienced Blindsight until you have read it in the original puke-green edition.
[2] This doesn’t mean establishing infodumps should be boring, mind. Compositing voiceover with animatics and flashbacks has plenty of potential: e.g. a young bandaged Keeton robotically beating a bully child down on the ground as everyone else’s gaze turns up to the descending Fireflies.
[3] One can debate whether Blindsight’s central mystery is Rorschach itself or the crew’s response to it. Ditto Annihilation, Solaris, 2001. Trying to decide which—unknowable MacGuffin or human condition—is part of the fun, ofc.
Very good points. Only thing I’d add is that, in terms of narrative vis-a-vis reveals, the book is first-person and told via curated retrospective (f.ex: Keeton simplifying the crew’s speech unto normie-intelligibility), that is, in the continuum of show vs tell, he himself can only tell, and that plays into the chaotic nature of the story and into the general confusion of the ending – he’s just aboard for the ride while posthuman+alien pandaemonium breaks out all around him, and we’re aboard for the ride while he tries to tell us about it what little he himself felt, and thinks that he perceived and understood, of it all.
A video medium OTOH makes it much easier to show whatever can be depicted visually, while at the same time making it harder to obfuscate or condition viewer perception (often requiring audiovisual tricks where a book would just require omission or clever phrasing), so unless sticking exclusively to scenes in which Siri is himself present, many avenues would open regarding how to illustrate plot details. I’ve just checked the book itself and Bates is the one who tells Keaton about the new personality, so using a distinguishing mannerism, or a ConSensus glitch, as a Chekhov’s Gun trope (ala the De Vries eye roll you mentioned) could serve as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it non-Siri-PoV indication of the point where it happens the first time, and then it’s just not mentioned again until it’s relevant for it to kick in out of the blue.
Completely unrelated, I think I’ve figured out the blog UI thing for telling when our comments are submitted; when we click Post Comment, at least on desktop Chrome, there’s a super duper tiny and discreet loading-ish indicator at the top right of the screen, which lasts for like one-second and then disappears. Seemingly, once it disappears, that’s the actual confirmation that
Rorschach has taken overthe comment is actually sent.Yes, although first-person storytelling is almost certainly not the right viewpoint for the screen adaptation, aka “show, don’t tell”. Basil Exposition popping up mid-action would roll audience eyes harder than the scrambler’s.
A Blindsight series has to work as an ensemble piece, not least so audience cannot predict who lives/who dies ([cough]Sphere[/cough]). The Siri Show would crater—the Keeton we meet in Act 1 is dull as dishwater. Which is the point. [1] Until Keeton grows sufficiently human that the audience can emotionally clip onto him in Act 3, the emotional core is Susan James (“Baby Spice”), with the James-Spzindel romance and Bates-Sarasti antagonism providing the heat on top.
However, Keeton’s “Imagine” VOs should work great as bookends: establishing the character foundations for narrative to work on, and strongly positioning Keeton’s passive neutral-as-Switzerland observer-recorder in the opening,
There’s plenty opportunity in the middle for Jake Sully-style light diarizing just to keep Keeton occupied, cueing scenes and glimpsing into his state of mind as its carefully cultivated sterility erodes. But that’s never the focus: the players’ interactions are.
Jimmy Stewart talked of creating moments. More than a decade after reading it, there are moments of Blindsight still playing on my visual imagination clear as IMAX. From Peter and Neil, I expect hooks. And may we all be the fish on that line, snapping at fireflies. Glorious.
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[1] Keeton has to be boring for his arc to work as a hero’s journey, even though Keeton never emerges as a classical hero. His achievement is all internal: allowing himself to feel.
[2]
Hey, I’d be all for Basil exposition, as long as Keeton, Sarati AND all the Scramblers are all played by Mike Myers.
Agreed on “Imagine” as bookends, disagree on Keeton being dull. Then again I barely know how to people, so there’s an element of relating there that would not be replicated on normies :p
re: postscript Keeton, I just have to:
*record scratch* *freeze frame* *hold the revolution* “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
I am, and forever remain, unrepentant.
Now, the question we’re all asking ourselves: Which of the Skarsgårds will play Sarasti? :p
Looking forward to the moments™.
This demands an Ominous Voice:
“It can be arranged.”
I watched the Jimmy Stewart vid and I agree with him. For me ‘the moments’ in Peter’s books are the emotionally charged ones such as the monster losing Mandelbrot. There’s a lot of content I’ve forgotten in the trilogy but that scene really stuck with me. We’ve all lost beloved pets and Peter writes really well about those feelings and succeeds in making you feel sorry for Achilles.
The scenes with Colonial are also memorable. I think he’s my favorite character.
I’ve noticed something else re the commenting system. When a comment is held in moderation for approval, and I approve it, it appears on the site. But when a comment is automatically approved, sometimes it doesn’t. It shows up in my stack as approved, but when I go to the blog it isn’t there. I have to manually unapprove it and then approve it again for it to stick.
Also, there actually is, the the novel, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hint about James’s Fifth Element. There’s a point where Sarasti, without explanation, holds James back when the rest of the crew goes exploring. Keeton reads something foreboding in the relevant topologies.
I mean, you definitely are aware that this blog engine is rubbish, you can’t not be.
I can appreciate an old school man sticking to his old school ways, but I never pegged you for someone to turn away from the truth.
If you’re willing to find a replacement – there are ways, although I’m not gonna sell it to you as a ‘hassle-free’ endeavour, even if it can sometimes be ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’. Otherwise – you’re stuck with whatever the fuck this is.
When I submit comments they get posted. Seems okay to me.
Not only is it rubbish, it’s old rubbish. I’m still running WordPress 5.6, and the current release is 6.8. And whenever I try to upgrade, the system tells me I’ve already got the latest version.
Apparently this is because I installed WP in the “crawl” subfolder, rather than just leaving it in “htdocs”. I don’t know why this should make any difference, but that’s what my domain provider tells me. So clearly, the first step would be to try and migrate WP to the new location, but these things always fuck up, and would require hours of debugging, and I just have too many other things on my plate to justify spending the time on improving something that works okay, just so long as I’m willing to click manually on every posted comment.
Oh, another example:
“[James] was wondering why Cunningham had been summoned to Sarasti’s quarters earlier in the shift, why he’d looked at her so strangely afterward. I wondered about that myself. A quick check on ConSensus timestamps showed that her medical file had been accessed during that period. I checked those stats, let the shapes bounce between hemispheres: part of my brain locked on elevated oxytocin as the probable reason for that conference. There was an eighty-two percent chance that James had become too trusting for Sarasti’s liking.”
I like that. Technical details definitely won’t translate to screen, but the emotional beats, momentarily stuttering then adopting new rhythm, is just the ticket.
Cunningham was never a likeable chap, but James likes everybody. To detect him toggle from cold to sub-Kelvin, and not understand why, will hurt her.
Nail the screenplay, I think, and your actors will love you [and also probably dream of feeding your gizzards to Bruce].
Sam Morton? Projects a little worldly-wise for the “Susan James” I normally think of, but turns emotions on head of a pin.
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Damnit, I lent my puke-green copy to a friend and he went and killed himself so I didn’t get it back. I do have the grand red housebrick edition (the one that will kill a cat if dropped from 2 feet). Time to excavate the great crags of books and videos that I’ll never get through before dying, to find where damn thing’s hiding.
Busy absorbing Max Evry’s A Masterpiece in Disarray (I’m a sucker for Lynch’s bombastic beast; it’s up with Flash Gordon). Alan Baker’s The Lighthouse Keeper is ostensibly next on heap† but I’ll see about putting Theseus in parking orbit as well. Gotta admit,
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† I can recommend The Vanishing (2018) and The Lighthouse (2019) for those who like cinematic psychohorror island-dry.
As a long-time Gwent player, I love seeing my favorite game being represented by one of my favorite authors. SHUUUUUUUUUUUPE!
Sidenote unrelated to this post. End of capitalism from the sidebar is actually bad thing imo, given that the two ideological groups that are currently trying to replace it are fascistic/theocratic autarks and tech-feudalists.
Yeah, fair point. Still, capitalism is the main manifestation of Human greed that’s dug the hole we’re in, and I regard tech-feudalism as a subspecies of capitalism. That leaves the autarchs―and while infinite growth on a finite resource base is kinda baked into capitalism’s DNA, there’s nothing in principle that says a dictator can’t have an ecological focus (ecototalitarianism was one of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background elements in my rifters trilogy).
I can assure you there’d be a lot more green space and a lot less extinction if I were running things, for example…
Well, between public executions of CEO’s, public executions of politicians and private… erm… contemplations of your vertebrae collection – you wouldn’t have time to write Omniscience.
Yeah, nah, between eco-utopian socialist garden with free love, free drugs and a secret police – and Omniscience I’m choosing the existential dread of staring in the face of my own insignificance.
If Stalin could watch cowboy movies late in the night with his terrified cronies, God-Emperor Watts, may his reign last forever, has plenty of time to write Omniscience in between rubber-stamping the execution orders.
If your flunkies are just terrified enough, your well-oiled (all ecologically sourced of course) killing machine practically runs itself! And i am sure you can build a solar-powered guillotine or something.
>may his reign last forever
Implying it might not?
Oof, boy, that’s some crazy talk. Let me refer you to our reeducation facilities…
Get a room, you guys.
In the glorious eco-state of Wattsistan (Name under development) Room 101 is ALWAYS open and ready.
It’s been years since I read Starfish but the government decisions in the series never struck me as particularly ecological.
Confuse not the author with his characters…
This is true.
I mean, who would OP wish to receive a free toe-rub from: Achille Desjardins or Dr Watts?One a sadistic sexual murderer in the reliably reassuring BTK mold, a cuddly Hannibal Lecter on a slightly off-day. The other hoardes gutted mammalian spines in his boudoir and openly advertises this; and that’s just the weird shit we know about, Dog only knows how far down that Mariana Trench goes. I mean, have you read his books? Jeepers.
You’re so dramatic. At the risk of being pedantic it’s gutted mammalian ‘vertebrae’ not spines. Sissy.
Scratch that. Vertebra. As in the singular.
Anyhow, who doesn’t have the odd beaver incisor or whale bone kicking around in the junk drawer or gathering dust on the windowsill.
Ooof. I mean hiding in the underwear drawer along with the old Polaroids.
An artist takes license, obviously.
(I’m certain I threw out all my sheep skulls decades ago. BRB)
I mean, they did try to stop the spread of Behemoth with whatever means necessary. The current admin would just deny that there even is a problem, and/or blame immigrants/DEI/wokeism and use it as a pretext to deport those people into concentration camps.
The most unrealistic part about our hosts books are governments that try their utmost to do the right thing and listen to scientists. Pure science fiction, as it turns out.
If we’re going to blame anyone it should be the leaf blowers. I’ll personally help with the roundup.
Hush, you. Competency porn FTW!
Blomkamps’ palette is earthy. I always imagined Blindsight in William Egglesten type high chroma saturated hues.
Great point! Eggleston crafts a great look; very pretty.
I would suggest earthy metallics for Theseus, neutral plus lines and blocks of strong colors to sharpen specific edges (this includes crew uniform). This is a functional spacecraft, after all. Look at Apollo, obviously. Lose most (not all) of its thunky switches and dials for simple green glass cockpit—the captain flies the ship, after all, on spoken [but not necessarily verbal] instructions from the vampire—keeping a few for patches of texture.
Cockpit, green-illuminated (light from simple glass screens), straight business. Medbay, slate blue/green, swimmy pukey. Hab, earthen browns over metal frameworks, embracing humane. Spine, yellows, grays, white and blacks. Fab, reds/oranges, descriptive. Labs: ask a scientist, ofc.
For Rorschach, blacks for superstructure (look up “pharaoh’s serpent” for the ideal textures), slick oilys on inside, gritty matts on out. Then illuminate the whole lot over with screeching primaries and secondaries—flux. Look at very high voltage experiments and Cherenkov radiation for starters, then keep going.
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Light = energy, specifically EMR. Brilliant saturated primary colors = high energy discharges.
Bonuses too for making it both highly dynamic and very low-cost, e.g. directed spotlights + color gels + light shutters + smoke, all in-camera work (minimize additional-cost CGI to be added in post).
Think how the original Star Trek deliberately offset chunks of primary colors next to large slab grays, and how they lit it all too. Those guys definitely knew their color theory: the gray takes on the complementary hue; a thorought Wattsian neural processing trick. Cheap to paint, easy to modify appearance by swapping color panels, replacing gels.
High-intensity LEDs and modern digital cameras grant tons of freedom never available to those old-school artisans: ability to light and film a cramped 360 set completely practically, with the occasional pull-out wall for variable camera positioning. I suspect camera work will switch between fixed position and in-hand “found footage” styles according to scene; another source of strong contrasts.
Blindsight needs to be built on the cheap, keep costs down (so studio middle managers don’t stick their thumbs in which will cack its story up). Neil will have learnt from D9 and Elysium the value of keeping budget down and cost of raising it up.
Lots of old-school film tricks for inspiration and techniques. Oh, and ’80s video analog filters; visual novelties many a music video overused, long since gone out of fashion—now a perfect opportunity to put them on blast. Plundering these historical vaults in these days of perfectly-preprocessed digital-everything would instantly set Blindsight apart.
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Mustn’t forget scramblers… they’re a deep space species, so in theory why would they care? But they have eyes—lots and lots of eyeballs—so EMR must have practical function. Maybe draw streaks of violet in the flesh winding between those myriad black/white swivelling eyes? Perhaps the scramblers see one another and Rorschach itself primarily in ultraviolet and infrared ranges†, so what we audience will see are the human-perceptible tailings of that.
(Damnit, now I wish I’d gone into set design/creature fx.)
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† UV and IR are where our most interesting space telescopes point, ’cos that’s where all the interesting stuff is: high-energy action and scaffolding of the universe.
Visually, the negative space is important. If you see a bunch of pictures hung in a gallery the eye registers it as background wallpaper. Not so if you isolate a painting. Same thing with music or sound, it’s the absence of rather than the presence of sound (a pause) that can really set off a note. Run on sound like run on sentences don’t work.
These are not unique insights and yet most filmmakers tend to invariably go with the more is better approach.
+1. If anyone starts greebling all the things, break their fingers.
Impressive. I’d hire you.
All that pleasant silliness aside and your impressive physique notwithstanding, I’d say it’s pretty obvious that your low-key Blomkamp collaboration is the part of this interview that captured the most attention.
Is there truly not a single meaningful thing you can share with the audience about either of the two projects aside from their existence?
What about them rubber scrambler wieners? Any progress on them?
inb4: a groupie grovelling again
Always great to catch up on the full interview over a coffee break. I was already familiar with Brunner and your other favorite authors from past lectures, but I hadn’t heard of Hiron Ennes or Rachel Rosen. Thanks for the recommendation!
Really looking forward to the Blindsight adaptation and the Sunflowers novella.