Ashley Clifton

Ten Things I Love About “Alien”

Next year will mark the 45^th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s landmark sci-fi horror movie, Alien. I saw the movie when I kid way back in 1979. Here are ten things I (still) love about it:

The Opening

For a movie that has the second-most disturbing scene in the history of cinema (the shower scene in Psycho is #1), the film starts with an empty field of quiescent darkness. The single letter I appears in the middle of the screen, and over the next few minutes as the opening credits appear and disappear on the screen, the I is joined by other letters to eventually form the single title: ALIEN. Talk about building tension. And what a great title it is! Both a noun and an adjective, it sums up everything frightening about this film. Namely, the fear of being consumed by the other, (the one outside and the one inside).

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Stupid Girl”

When I first heard the band Garbage, I was struck by lead singer Shirley Manson and her fabulously expressive voice—at times monotonal, at other times growling. This pale goth girl from Scotland had somehow tailored her vocals to exactly fit the manic-depressive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Indeed, I would argue that the band’s premier song, “Stupid Girl,” is the definitive song of the period (yes, even more so than Nirvana’s brilliant “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). In the song’s now-famous lyric, the narrator accuses an unnamed girl of being…well…stupid. In fact, the aspects of her stupidity are those evidenced by practically every person under 40 in modern urban America: vanity, self-absorption, consumerism, nihilism.

And fakery. Especially fakery. “[I] can’t believe you fake it…” as Manson sings portentously to the stupid girl in question. What is she faking? Being human.

What I’m Reading: “The Peripheral”

A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.

As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).

Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.

How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?

Friday Night Rock-Out

If you were alive in the early days of MTV, you probably remember this gem from Kiwi pop group Split Enz. It’s got everything an 80’s New Wave hit should have: trippy synthesizer riffs, an infectious hook, and a truly bizarre video (complete with the players dressed in New Wave zoot suits). And—oh, yeah—it’s also a great dance song.

Enjoy!

Shameless Plug

Well, it’s official. My book is now available for pre-order (make that pre-pre-PRE-order) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, etc. (Yes, even Walmart.com.)

I’m not asking you to buy it (although it would make an excellent gift for that special someone in your life; or for your boss, co-worker, distant relative, crazy uncle, etc.). But if you want to help me out, please request that your local library buy it. Most public libraries have a “Suggest Materials” link on their website. Or you can just ask a librarian. (Duh!)

Here’s a link to the book on the publisher’s distribution site:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741923/twice-the-trouble-by-ash-clifton/

Random Dose of Optimism

In his amazingly good sci-fi novel, The Peripheral, William Gibson describes a environmental cataclysm called The Jackpot. The name is perfect, in that it evokes not a single-cause catastrophe but rather a horrific alignment (like the diamonds on a slot machine) of multiple ones. Global heating. Drought. Pollution. Pandemics. Poverty. Et cetera.

But, as is ruefully noted by the protagonists of Gibson’s novel, The Jackpot hit at almost the same time as a technological revolution (actually several revolutions) that might have avoided it. Geoengineering. Nanotechnology. Artificial Intelligence. Fusion power. Genetic engineering.

All of these fields are exploding, right now, in the early 21st Century. That’s why I’m guarded optimistic about humanity’s chances of surviving the next fifty years. (Note that I said “surviving”; it’s going to be incredibly challenging, and will involve great suffering and sacrifice.) Many environmentalists scoff at this kind of optimism. There is no technological silver bullet, they warn, that will get us off the hook.

And, of course, they’re right. There is no big silver bullet. But there might be a lot of small silver bullets that, if aimed precisely (have I tortured this metaphor long enough?) might at least blunt the looming crisis.

After all, we’ve been here before. In the mid-20th Century, scientists were warning that current agriculture techniques would not be sufficient to feed the booming post-war population of Earth. A global famine was almost inevitable. But it didn’t happen. Why? Well, in a word, we innovated our way out of it. Improved science resulted in the so-called Green Revolution, which allowed farmers to feed millions more people on the same amount of arable land (which they continue to do to this day).

So, I like to collect articles about possible new “revolutions” that might help us survive, and even thrive, in this century. Here is an article for The Guardian about how scientists are manipulating natural enzymes to break down plastic into basic nutrients (i.e., food). Yes, plastic into food. Will it pan out? Will it be scalable? I don’t know. But it gives me hope.

Check it out…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste

Friday Day Night Rock-Out

When I was in college in the 80s, there was only one dance club in town that didn’t play the usual top 40 pop music. It was a little joint called My Friend’s Place, and it wasn’t actually in town, but rather out in the county between Gainesville and Hawthorn. We called it MFP, and every Friday and Saturday night around 10:00 we would make the long drive down Hawthorn Road to where alone sodium lamp marked the entrance. MFP was really just an old warehouse that some enterprising folks had converted into a club, and the dance floor wasn’t much bigger than a squash court. But my friends and I whiled away countless hours doing our best Alt-Rock dance moves, (weight on the heels, shoulders tilted back, smug expression on the face, arms doing the wavy thing down by the waist, etc.; ahhhh, it was great). The Smiths, The Cure, The Violent Femmes, ABC, XTC, Killing Joke, The English Beat and even a little U2 were blended into the mix by the unseen DJ.

It was an important era in my life, and the most iconic song from it was Lips Like Sugar by Echo and the Bunnymen. The Bunnymen were so cool, so slick, so melodic, and so dark that they weren’t just a Great Alt-Rock Band. They were a Great Alt-Rock Band’s Great Alt-Rock Band. I think that Lips like Sugar, along with The Smith’s How Soon is Now, are the two greatest songs of the genre.

Anyway, Happy Friday, and rock on…

Jehovah vs. The Force

I find it ironic that, here in America, we have only two socially acceptable ways to identify ourselves with regard to religion: you’re either a believer, or an atheist.

Yeah, this is crazy. For all kinds of reasons.

We all know that the first category—believer—really describes a vast spectrum of religious faith, from rigid practitioners of an orthodox religion (which, in the U.S., probably means some brand of Christianity or Judaism), to non-practicing believers (i.e. lapsed Catholics, lapsed Jews, etc.), to people who believe in God but don’t correspond to any formal religion (we had a whole class of such people in the middle of the 19^th Century—the Transcendentalists.)

But what most people fail to realize is that the category of atheism also includes a spectrum, one that is almost as broad and diverse as the believer category.

What I’m Reading: “`Salem’s Lot”

I love Stephen King. I watch his interviews and lectures on YouTube, and I re-read his book, On Writing, once or twice a year, finding it one of the best meditations on the craft around, not to mention a very fine memoir. I follow him on Twitter (er…X), and you should, too (he’s @StephenKing, if you’re interested).

And yet, in one of the stranger ironies of my adult life, I went over twenty years without reading a King novel. Sure, I once devoured books like The Stand and Firestarter in high school, but then I became an English major and, for a multitude of reasons, I stopped.

WHAT I’M READING: THE DESCENDANTS

(Author’s Note: The recent tragedy in Maui got me thinking about one of my favorite novels of the past twenty years, The Descendants, which is set nearby. I am reposting this essay about it as a kind of semi-tribute.)

Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.

Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.

So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.