Column 82, PCW Plus 112, January 1996
LIFE FORMS
One of the enduring time-wasters of computing is the `Life' game, invented by British mathematician John H. Conway in the 1960s and popularized through Martin Gardner's famous `Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American.
Life is sometimes called a solitaire game, but it's a no-player game. All you do is choose the original pattern. The rules of Life then take over, causing the pattern to evolve in often surprising and beautiful ways....
Life is played on an infinite grid of squares or `cells' -- but infinity comes expensive and much can be done on a PCW screen. Cells can be either `dead' -- empty -- or `live', marked with a character such as a capital O. At each move, the rules decree which cells will be dead or alive in the coming generation.
Here are the rules. Each cell in a square grid is touched by eight neighbour cells. If fewer than two of these cells are live, the central cell dies -- death from exposure. If two are live, the central cell is unchanged. If exactly three surrounding cells are live, a birth takes place: the central cell becomes live even if formerly dead. If four or more surrounding cells are live, the central cell dies of overcrowding.
These life/death calculations are made for every existing cell, and all resulting births and deaths are considered to happen simultaneously. Then you start again, to calculate the next generation of Life.... Imagine the horror of pre-computer days, when it was all done using tiddlywinks on sheets of squared paper! This is why Life is an absolute natural for computers.
Some Life patterns are static ( `still life'): if four live cells touch in square formation, the resulting `block' is stable. Some oscillate: three live cells in a row make a `blinker', which flips forever between horizontal and vertical thanks to two deaths and two births each generation. Some patterns explode into exotic, symmetrical shapes. Some die out quickly. Some can move around:
O O OOOThis is the `glider', whose shape wobbles and recreates itself at each fourth tick of the clock, shifted one cell diagonally from where it started. It can travel forever down the diagonal -- but other patterns may eat it or reverse its course.
At this point, do you remember the secret life of the PCW program MAIL232.COM? Start it up, press F3, select `Transfer as ASCII', press EXTRA and P ... and the screen becomes a blank Life grid. You can move around with the cursor keys, turn cells on and off with Return, and set the Life rules ticking away by pressing the space bar. See what happens to a row of ten live cells at the centre of the screen....
But it's awfully slow. This is why Life is a perpetual programming challenge, a wheel that keeps being re-invented to incorporate better tricks. Obviously you need to do a calculation involving eight neighbouring cells for every cell in the grid. No, wait, it can be speeded up by performing the calculations only for that part of the grid where action is happening. The rules of Life mean that births must happen next to existing live cells, so the `active' area is the smallest rectangle that includes all current live cells plus a one-cell border of dead ones. Judging from its slowness, the MAIL232 freebie doesn't take advantage of this. Where's that BASIC (or Pascal, or assembler) disk? First, check the public domain catalogues.
Life patterns can be exotic. There is an amazing `glider gun' that creates endless moving gliders. There is a `breeder' pattern, too big for the PCW or indeed my PC, which generates endless glider guns. Conway has proved that by using Life patterns too vast to be run on any physical computer, you can carry out any possible computer calculation whatever (e.g. check out Fermat's last theorem). The mind boggles.
Still interested? Three good books are Wheels, Life and other Mathematical Amusements (1983) by Martin Gardner, which contains the best popular treatment of Life; Winning Ways vol 2: Games in Particular (1982), by Elwyn H. Berlekamp, John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, which in one achingly condensed chapter takes Life from first principles to the brain-bursting limits of mathematics; and The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (1985), which carries on from there. Happy headaches.
Column 83, PCW Plus 114, March 1996
AT ANOTHER CROSSROADS
Once upon a time, a tiny software company called Ansible Information saw enthusiastic reviews of the PCW 8256, and bought one to play with. Base motives were at work: after selling add-on software for earlier computers, Ansible hoped for new worlds to conquer. Could its mighty programming division -- that is, the miscreant Langford -- adapt to the PCW?
The good news was that LocoScript contained just what we needed: a non-printing text mark, Reverse Video, that could be used to mark up documents for our trusty indexing program AnsibleIndex. (This extracts an alphabetical index of marked words and phrases, complete with page numbers.) More good news was that our favourite program compiler -- Borland's Turbo Pascal, used to write the original AnsibleIndex -- came in a CP/M version.
The bad news was that LocoScript 1's document file format was insanely complicated. Weeks of forensic analysis were needed before our software could reliably read these cryptic documents and spot the page breaks. The PCW AnsibleIndex began to sell like, well, fairly tepid cakes ... and, seemingly mere days later, along came LocoScript 2 with a different insanely complex file format. Back to the padded drawing-board! We vowed to pull our own heads off rather than go through all that again for LocoScript 3 -- at which stage, kindly Locomotive Software allowed us a peep at their own specification sheets.
Next came the horror of the 3.5" disc drive. One day someone urgently wanted software on 3.5" disc ... embarrassing, since we only had a 3"-drive PCW 8512 (our 8256 had died, while the 9512 fell victim to Alan Sugar's famous practical joke whereby tripping over the printer cable blows the memory chips). In a fit of insanity I wrote software to handle PCW-format 3.5" discs in an IBM PC drive, and copied our stuff from the 8512 via cable link: a triumph of penny-pinching dedication over common sense.
Now we're seeing magazine previews of the fabulous new PcW16, and biting our nails. Most owners of ageing PCWs will be asking themselves: "Is it really a PCW if it doesn't have LocoScript?" (Many may opt for a cheap second-hand IBM PC and LocoScript Pro instead.) We small software developers have different worries, as follows:
First, the PcW16 won't run CP/M programs like AnsibleIndex. Time to chuck out that Pascal development kit and redo everything from scratch in assembler -- a fearful pain in any case, and doubly so for this new and inscrutable operating system devised for Amstrad by Creative Technology. Will the system's function calls be documented for developers? Who knows?
There is talk of CP/M emulator software being released one day ... but promises are cheap, and in any case CP/M programs will be hard to market for the PcW16: "I have to buy this emulator thing as well?" No one ever got rich selling PCW comms software, precisely because the PCW needs an additional (non-cheap) serial interface before it'll talk to a modem.
Second, the PcW16 seems designed to discourage use of anything but the supplied programs. It has a flavour of the Amstrad NC notepad computers, where you can't change your software at all. Yes, in theory, it's possible to load new programs into the PcW16 "flash RAM", a sort of permanent M drive, and run them from there. But the flash RAM apparently has to hold the operating system, the supplied software, and all your working documents, fonts, spreadsheets and databases, with the 3.5" drive being mainly for backup and transfer. People won't want to keep this precious space cluttered with extra programs ... but repeatedly installing and deleting them sounds like a chore.
Third, 1995 ended with ominous rumblings about the future of Amstrad Consumer Electronics. Sources say the trouble centres on Amstrad's budget PCs, which in today's viciously competitive market weren't quite "budget" enough. The PcW16 could well be unaffected ... but unless it quickly grabs a large market share, it could equally well be short-lived. In which case, investing months of software development time will have been a mistake.
And I still don't know whether the PcW16 word processor (imaginatively named WORD-PROCESSOR) uses a document format suitable for our own speciality of add-on indexing software. We stand dithering at the crossroads. As someone says in the movie Things to Come: "The PcW16 ... or nothingness? Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?"
Footnote: when even LocoScript Software decided not to bother with the PcW16, Ansible followed suit. Maybe Amstrad felt the same -- has anyone actually seen the thing for sale?
Column 84, PCW Plus 116, May 1996
UNSPEAKABLE RESEARCHES
Secrets of writing? At a recent SF convention Christopher Priest gave a presentation called `The Prestige Workshop', explaining the arcane research into things like nineteenth-century stage magic that lay behind his nifty novel The Prestige. Which reminded of my own recent researches....
I'd been invited to write a short story imitating H.P. Lovecraft's `Cthulhu' horror stories. (Lovecraft died in 1937, but is still a cult author.) These tend to be about dread creatures from beyond space and time, so appalling that mere sight of them blasts one's mind, sort of like Alan Sugar. Dear old Lovecraft wrote about them in a special style all his own, best described as eldritch, miasmic, nameless, blasphemous, gibbous, and all too fond of the foregoing adjectives.
How to do Lovecraftian horror without just sending up his style? I looked up his story `The Call of Cthulhu', which had always intrigued me: following a 1925 earthquake, an unpleasant city emerges from the Pacific deeps, and its architecture is eye-hurtingly inhuman. One hapless seaman chased through this labyrinth of slimy stones just vanishes into an angle of rock that somehow reverses itself like an optical illusion.
Right, I thought, I'll tell the story of how this chap came back -- and opened The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher, because Escher actually drew the impossible geometries that Lovecraft wrote about. Imagine an Escher building rotating on a graphics screen until one of its angles reversed and the man emerged. No, said the story guidelines: the action must happen between the World Wars, so computers were out, and the relevant Escher prints weren't done until the late 50s. Think again!
What remained of my first idea was a setting: Lovecraft's imaginary Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. The story must take place in the 20s and 30s, a time when modern physics was making exciting leaps. Aha: my degree is in physics, so the narrator would naturally be in the science faculty, giving the idea of Lovecraft's evil `Cthulhu gods' somehow manipulating physics research to their evil ends. I began to see how the story finished, without knowing its beginning.
Rather than invent needed street names in Arkham town, I remembered an obscure 1979 volume called An Atlas of Fantasy by J.B. Post, which contains maps of imaginary lands like Oz and Narnia and Middle-Earth -- and a street plan of Arkham, including how to get from the university to the asylum. The trick is never to throw books away ... and to catalogue them all on your PCW!
The real stroke of luck came when (after a long hunt in the Langford Book Graveyard upstairs) I traced a slightly cranky volume called The Fourth Dimension by C. Howard Hinton, M.A., of Princeton University. This teaches how to use coloured wooden cubes to visualize four-dimensional objects like hypercubes -- or, I realized, Lovecraft's impossible angles. My edition of Hinton was published in 1912, so there would surely be a copy in Miskatonic University library in the 20s. Martin Gardner's pop-maths collection Mathematical Carnival (1977) gave more background on Hinton's cubes, including a warning letter from someone who'd found them dangerously obsessive and hypnotic.
So now I had a university professor who by obsessively visualizing the Hinton cubes managed to contact that man who'd vanished into a geometrical paradox. What next? Having been outside space and time (aha! the story title could be a line from Poe's verse, "Out of Space, Out of Time"), the unfortunate chap would somehow bring back insights into the nature of the universe. Time to look up Isaac Asimov's nonfiction Asimov's Chronology of Science & Discovery (1989) to check on the timeline of 1930s physics research. Aha again! After that, a few dates and times needed confirmation: the handiest reference was Stephane Groueff's Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (1967).
Then I wrote the story, whose general drift you might now be able to guess, but which still had surprises for me. In fiction, research books provide scaffolding; the final product always has an unexpected shape. I surprised myself by extracting two exceedingly yucky horror scenes from the above (one partly based on memories of a Holbein picture in the National Gallery, which I have on CD-ROM), and by needing to look up Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot for advice on delirium.
There probably has to be a better way to research stories, but it works for me....
Column 85, PCW Plus 118, July 1996
CRITICAL MASS
So there you are, staring alternately at the PCW screen and a tall stack of rejection slips, and wondering about a change from sending out the stories and articles about which editors are so wilfully obtuse. How about ... writing book reviews? It seems so straightforward: read a book (if you don't read lots of books anyway, the writer's life is not for you), say what you think of it in a few wittily trenchant words, and get paid for this.
Of course there are complications. Most newspapers and magazines find unsolicited book reviews approximately as welcome as the Great Beast 666 at a vicarage tea-party. Unless you have some kind of literary clout (a published book or two helps, as does being a well-known DJ or serial killer), the way is hard and stony. Judging by how I got my one stint of regular reviewing in a national newspaper, the best bet is to buy lots of drinks for pals with literary connections, in case one day The Guardian rings and asks them to recommend a reviewer.
One friend believes in wearing down magazine reviews editors by camping in their office until they give you a review book just to make you go away -- but this technique should be used with caution. It's the old Catch-22 of publishing: work must be pursued with savage persistence (if you don't ask, you don't get), but this very persistence can easily make editors so tired of you that they pronounce a technical term of literary criticism which goes, "Sod off!"
But suppose you have at last acquired a coveted review copy. Do you rush eagerly to read it? Problem one is that the reviews editor has probably assigned you some ghastly volume you'd never normally dream of reading. Problem two is that even if it's a novel you coveted, the book is no longer just a book. It has become homework. Afterwards there will be a test, whose single essay question counts for 100% of the marks.
Right, you've read it. With any luck you feel a surge of joy and energy at the discovery that you actually have a few opinions about the thing. You switch on the PCW ... but hang on, here's this commissioning letter that came with the book. Better check the arrangements. A cold shock of horror afflicts your innards as you discover that the finely judged essay you planned to write, lovingly examining all aspects of style and content, has got to be crammed into 150 words.
It is advisable to do the cramming. Reviews editors hate writers to go over length. They also hate writers who deliver under-length copy. But they do show their appreciation of those who write exactly to length, by cutting it some more. You think it's impossible to cut your perfect, condensed prose any further? Fear not: the hellish skill of a trained editor can always find a way, usually by removing either the one phrase without which a sentence becomes meaningless, or the punchline of your favourite joke.
So -- at last the work is done! A polished, gemlike review, for which you will receive a tiny but gratifying sum of money. In exchange you assign the publishers ... blimey, what's this? Full world rights in perpetuity, denying you the right to reprint the thing even in your own Collected Reviews? Time for an enjoyable argument with the reviews editor, who will point out that the publishing company needs world rights because they might want to reissue the magazine on CD-ROM or the Web anywhere in the world. Fine, you say, but why insist on exclusive rights forever? Why is it necessary to debar you from ever re-using the piece yourself? The reviews editor mutters something about having to follow Big Multinational Company Policy, as enforced by Mr Genghis Khan of the Contracts Division. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
(Toadying footnote: our very own PCW Plus publishers, Future Publishing, have a substantially more humane approach. Well, slightly. Well, a bit.)
At last the review is delivered, and with any luck at least 80% of it will be published, with several of the sentences appearing in the order you wrote them. Congratulations: you have become a professional reviewer. Now it is time to send in your invoice and try to get paid. This is where the fun really starts!
Column 86, PCW Plus 120, September 1996
BARON MUNCHAUSEN REMEMBERS
"Ten years of PCW Plus!" cried the famous explorer and raconteur Baron Munchausen. "This calls for champagne! Dear me, I remember those old days of 1986, when I made my way through the impenetrable and life-threatening Dratsma Jungle in search of the legendary Graveyard of the Missing Address Marks."
"Did you find it?" I asked incautiously.
"A Munchausen never fails -- though in that bug-infested maze, dark peril stalked me at every turning. My only weapon was a crude but serviceable copy of LocoScript 0.5. Again and again savage tigers attacked me. But as each fearsome beast was in mid-spring ... I would dextrously hit the Erase function key and blast it into Limbo!"
"Fancy that," I said.
"Then I reached my goal. Imagine the awe and majesty of the scene, in that ancient forest clearing where all the address marks from damaged PCW discs crawl away to die. Some of these tragic relics were so old as to be in runes or cuneiform. But before I could fill my pockets with the priceless treasure -- there was a tremendous roar, and I knew that some fearful beast of the jungle threatened me!"
"Something usually does, at about this point," I murmured. The Baron gave me a hurt look, and I hastily refilled his glass.
"It was an appalling monster -- oversized, overspecified, overpriced, garishly coloured and with eyes like fearsome Windows -- a veritable Ponderous Critter, or PC. Death or bankruptcy stared me in the face. There was only one slim chance! Much though I regretted the cruelty to my trusty steed Joyce, I whipped out an emergency CP/M system disc and ... booted her up."
"Er, exactly what good did that do?"
The Baron smiled. "We Munchausens are stronger than common men. Such was the force of my boot-up that my PCW steed and I at once went flying through the air, high above the forest -- clean out of danger! It was the work of a moment to ask directions from a friendly duck that came flapping by --"
"Excuse me, Baron," I interrupted. "Of course I believe every word you tell me, and would never so much as dream of questioning your veracity, but exactly where did you learn the language of ducks?"
"Every PCW, my friend, comes with a manual of Basic Mallard. Of course, even when I had properly set my course for home (using the duck's very clear GOTO statements), I was still in the throes of mortal peril! Falling to earth from such a height would inevitably be a fatal system crash. It was an even trickier predicament than when, as I told you last time we met, my shirt-cuff became caught in the PCW disc drive while LocoLink was running, so that I myself was horribly sucked into the hardware and converted to IBM format. How I escaped --"
I raised a warning finger. "No digressions, now."
"Oh, very well. Where was I? Yes, soaring high like a cannonball above the Earth! Luckily I am a quick thinker, and still more luckily a spider from that jungle had nested in my famous tricorn hat. With the aid of its silken thread and my trusty RS-232 interface, I connected to the World Wide Web and purchased numerous copies of AnsibleIndex, LocoSpell, Masterfile 8000, Microdesign, Mini Office Professional, Protext, and many more. As I had requested, these items were heaped into a large pile, on which I landed as softly as a feather --"
"-- because it was a pile of software," I groaned, looking feebly around me for a sick-bag.
The Baron frowned. "Have I told you this adventure before? ... So all was well, except that my PCW keyboard was damaged as we landed -- one keytop was battered to a PASTE. It only remained to call Amstrad Technical Support: they answered the phone at once, eager to do everything in their power for any customer, and Alan Sugar himself assured me that it didn't matter at all that I'd violated the warranty by opening up the machine to install the extra RAM and some ewes. A replacement part arrived free of charge by special courier on the very next day...."
"Hang on there! Although I trust you implicitly, Baron, I don't think I can quite believe that one."
For the first time since I'd known him, Baron Munchausen blushed.
Non-PCW-using readers may need to be told that the Amstrad PCW keyboard has special dedicated keys like CUT and PASTE; that most versions came with a programming language called Mallard Basic; and that Amstrad technical support was/is ... legendary. Yes, legendary would be the word.
Column 87, PCW Plus 122, November 1996
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
Another instant urban legend of the computer world was circulating recently, popping up all over Internet and even making it into occasional newspapers. This is the one about the customer who phoned the technical support hotline to complain that the cup-holder on the front of his IBM PC was broken, and please could it be replaced under guarantee? `Cup-holder???' thought the baffled expert, and asked a few cautiously probing questions ... whereupon he was removed in strong hysterics after realizing that the relevant feature of the computer was in fact the compact-disc tray that whirs in and out at the touch of a button. This, curiously enough, is designed to take featherweight CD-ROM discs and not huge dripping mugs of coffee.
No -- surely this story has to be a myth? I think so. I think we can also disbelieve the older tale of the typist who meticulously blotted out errors on the PCW Locoscript edit screen using Tipp-Ex and a little brush.
But on the other hand, I do in fact know someone who genuinely experienced another legend from the early years of desktop computers. `You must make daily backup copies of your discs,' the office secretaries were told. Came the day of the inevitable disaster, and our chap went in to restore all the lost work from these backup copies, and was awestruck to be presented with a thick ring-binder full of carefully-made photocopies of floppy discs.
Many witnesses also attest to the existence of computer users who found an ingenious way to store important discs so they'd always be conveniently to hand. You simply fix them to the front or side of your filing cabinet with powerful fridge magnets. Now why didn't I think of that? (Kids! Don't try this experiment at home!)
Not so mythically resonant, but just as frustrating, was trying to sort out the software customer who simply could not get the hang of the Alt and Extra keys. No matter how many million times you explained the need to `hold down Alt and press C' (to get the Copyright sign), this person's internal brainware would always rewrite the instruction as `hold down Alt for a bit, release it because that's what the silly man obviously means, and then press C' ... shortly followed by a wail of `I did just what you said and it doesn't work!' This is an amusing way to delude the expert at the other end of the phone line that your keyboard must be broken.
Then there was the phone enquiry about a PCW that didn't start at all. Not a flicker from the screen, not a glint from the disc-drive lights. Expert, scratching head: `Er, are you sure it's plugged in?' Annoyed customer: `Of course it is! What do you think I am, stupid?' This, explained the technical-support man with twenty years' experience, was the wrong approach; and he demonstrated how the conversation should go -- as follows. Expert, with great confidence: `There can sometimes be trouble with some defective plugs. Can you look at the pin side of the mains plug to make sure it has the BS 1363A mark?' Customer: `Hang on, I'll just go and look.' (Short pause.) `Oh gosh, you'll never believe this, but it wasn't ...'
From the same bottomless pool of legend, there's the proud mother who chuckled fondly as her ingenious toddler fed Drive B with Rich Tea biscuits (and the slack-jawed repair man gasped, `Crumbs!') ... the absent-minded fellow who used his document disc as a coaster, which was fine until he actually spilt some sticky, sugary coffee ... the thrifty person who re-inked a ribbon with best fountain-pen Quink, the result being like something out of a horror story by H.P. Lovecraft, all awash with blasphemous ichor ... the clot who complained of a serious, intermittent system fault in a PCW whose power came from the top of a stack of mains adaptors, three high and wobblier than New Labour policy ... the inspired genius who literally cut through all the difficulties of 3.5" to 3" disc conversion, with a single stroke of the office guillotine ...
Such are the stories that the old hands of computing swap in the pub. Of course, if they heard the ones that customers tell about them -- appalling tales of non-delivery, missing parts, failure to turn up, condescending rudeness, bug-ridden software and incomprehensible manuals written in post-structuralist jargon -- why, they'd be shocked. In fact, they'd probably sue.
Column 88, PCW Plus 124, Xmas 1996
THOG'S MASTERCLASS
An early and much-appreciated 1996 Christmas present was my copy of Sarah LeFanu's Writing Fantasy Fiction (A&C Black, £8.99). Besides containing much good advice, this quotes me, and instructs aspiring writers to read my SF newsletter, and -- best of all -- recommends study of the awful warnings in the newsletter's `Thog's Masterclass' department.
What is Thog's Masterclass? Good question. This is named for Thog the Mighty, a dimwitted barbarian hero invented by fantasy novelist John Grant ... who like me does much reviewing and copyediting, and likes to collect specimens of barbarous prose which somehow get into print. This isn't just nitpicking. Thog's focus on how things can go wrong invites a closer look at one's own sentences. It's also encouraging to see that published -- even best-selling -- authors commit such bloopers.
One problem is failing to visualize what's being described. `He lifted her tee-shirt over her head. Her silk panties followed.' (Peter F. Hamilton, Mindstar Rising.) Or: `The green fur made it look like a Terran gorilla more than anything.' (Michael Kring, The Space Mavericks.) Or: `Sweat broke out on his brow as he wrestled with his brain....' (Julian Flood, `Control'.)
It's also unwise to forget what you wrote in the previous sentence. `Susan awoke to an absolute silence: the traffic outside the hotel had been utterly stilled. John was in the bathroom -- she could hear the shower running.' (Robert Charles Wilson, The Divide.) Or, indeed, in the same sentence: `So instantaneous and final were these lethal rays that the destructive act was over in but a few minutes.' (Nal Rafcam, The Troglodytes.) `The brassy September blue overhead had been obscured by invisible storm clouds.' (Emil Petaja, The Nets of Space.)
The ambiguities of English make it all too easy to write sentences that can be read in a way you didn't intend -- like the famous newspaper headline POLICE FOUND SAFE UNDER BED. `She knew how to embroider and milk a cow.' (Connie Willis, Doomsday Book.) `He swept the antechamber with the eyes of a trapped animal.' (Poul Anderson, `Among Thieves') `Something jumped in the back of Morgon's throat. It was huge, broad as a farmhorse, with a deer's delicate, triangular face.' (Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed.)
Even famous authors do it! Unlikely Geography Dept: `She wore large bronze earrings made in an obscure country which rattled when she laughed.' (Brian Aldiss, Remembrance Day.) Implausible Physiological Tricks: `His mouth, for a moment, ran liquid and then it slid, almost of its own accord, down his throat.' (Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation.)
Want to write evocatively, poetically? Beware of excess: `When they finished eating, they would lie silently under the blankets until sleep shuffled over the roofs to the leaded skylight and threw itself down on them, sprawling like a wanton over their faces.' (Felicity Savage, Humility Garden.) `Arias plunged his blue-grey regard into hers.' (Anne Gay, To Bathe in Lightning.) --- that is, he stared into her eyes. `Her very existence made his forebrain swell until it threatened to leak out his sinuses.' (Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark.)
Similes are fraught with pitfalls. This SF description of a space elevator seems, er, understated: `Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable ...' (Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars.) Next, horror combines with fruit salad: `His head suddenly began to peel, the flesh tearing away from the bone in ragged strips, like a pink banana.' (Robert Holdstock, The Stalking) And this one makes you wonder about the author's kids: `They were featureless and telic, like lambent gangrene. They looked horribly like children.' (Stephen R.Donaldson, White Gold Wielder.)
Occasionally, the problem is just thickwittedness: `He absorbed Latin in two hours yesterday! It took me a whole year just to learn the Latin alphabet.' (Screenplay, The Lawnmower Man.)
In fact, authors are human and make mistakes. But Thog's bloopers are multiple mistakes, since in an ideal world the editor, copyeditor or proofreader should catch these things. Sometimes they do, only to be overruled. Consider this sentence from the proofs of Robert Jordan's doorstop fantasy blockbuster The Fires of Heaven: `Elayne wished the woman would just revert to herself instead of bludgeoning her with a lady's maid from the Pit of Doom.' Alerted by the daft image of bludgeoning someone with a maid, one reader issued a warning query. And lo! the author realized that the sentence could indeed be improved, and he carefully altered `the Pit of Doom' to `the Blight'. Oh dear....
More Thog And at this point, with mere hours' warning even for the editor, Future axed the magazine. The miserable sods never even sent me a complimentary copy of the issue with my last appearance.