Currently Tweets of Old, a Twitter account that tweets news from the turn of last century, is tweeting children’s letters to Santa. Not a demand for iPads or lengthy transcriptions of Amazon links to be seen!

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This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.

If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.

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JasonJ, commenting on Charlie Stross’ post The Death of Genre, said this:

Tags, as long as they are accurate, are just what I’ve wanted. I long ago stopped bothering to seej just fantasy or just sci-fi – there are plenty of sub-groups within both that I just don’t care for, but there’s no quick way to spot them, even with the book in my hands. Tags could do that for me. I don’t need a genre, I need a range of subject matter.

And genre is a rather subtle limiter too. I would mentally classify quite a number of favourite 18th, 19th, and early 20th century classics as fantasy, but according to the world at large they are simply “literature” (and owing to their age and establishment as classics, people I speak to just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of, for example, the works of Dumas or Haggard being fantasy). If I went looking by genre I might never find them. Remove genre and just use tags like “adventure”, “swash-buckling”, “futurism”, or even “bodice-ripper”, and finding books to match your interests becomes so much easier.

As a virtual DJ, I myself find that the existing Genre field in ID3 tags is increasingly restrictive. Obsolete, even, given the way musical styles subdivide and combine, not just on a per-album basis but a per-track one as well.

Increasingly, a song, article, image – or book – will reflect the influences of more than one traditional genre. For instance, I have a catch-all genre I call ‘bronycore’ (i.e. music created by fans of the TV cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic), but in that genre are tunes whose style ranges from classic filk (e.g. The Beatle Bronies) to dubstep, chiptunes, rave… you get the idea, crude as this example is.

However, tags are only as good as the tagger. An item may emerge with no tags at all, or be plastered with as many tags as the tagger thinks are even remotely relevant.

Personally, I would prefer a more subtle system of weighted tags: searchers can add to the weight of tags they consider most important, or irrelevant to the content. Yes, such a system would be open to abuse, but so are any other cataloguing fields. (Twice I have obtained completely misnamed files through Songr. Not good when you’re performing live!)

Whether or not such a system is feasible in the real world, however, is open to debate.

State of Emergency (first book in the E-Force Series). Fisher, Sam.

In the 1960s, Gerry Anderson electrified the world with the adventures of the Tracy family – also known as International Rescue – in the Thunderbirds television series.

In 2009, Sam Fisher attempts to update the sci-fi philanthropy for the modern age, and in my mind fails miserably. Either that, or Mr Fisher writes for television, hence this watery slurry of breathless action, eclectic topicality, and half-remembered Saturday morning shows.

There is also the question of just who selects books for our local library!

The villains are hopelessly one-dimensional. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are ultra-wealthy idiots whose sole purpose in life is to make money and crush their enemies with the aid of the Dragon, a Russian assassin whose psychopathy is unbounded.

(If anyone ever, for whatever reason, decides E-Force would be a boffo idea for a TV series, I insist that only Supermarionation will do justice to Mr Fisher’s work, if only for the villains alone.)

The Tracy family, and all its filial solidarity and tensions, have been replaced with an ensemble of drag-and-drop stereotypes, including the square-jawed captain and the socially and physically crippled computer genius. The interactions will not only be hopelessly predictable, but again only puppetry will suffice.

Finally, there’s the technology porn. Inter- I mean, E-Force – is supplied with futuristic gadgets thanks to a civilian version of DARPA – there’s the other conspiracy theory for you – working twenty years in the future wearing colour-coded boiler suits. This requires glowing descriptions of holographic wrist-video-phones, the Big Mac, and all the other gadgets. Oh, and the de rigeur AI, and the nonsensical descriptions of a hacking attempt.

Sod the puppets. Saturday morning limited animation for this turkey.

So we have – what, exactly? Modernised and watery versions of the Thunderbirds, albeit with unlikely features and powers. Just the thing to rescue Lady Penelope – no, I mean the environmentally-friendly senator. From a blown-up conference centre in Los Angeles. And, of course, the Farce – hang it all, Four Horsemen – aren’t brought to justice, because this is, unfortunately, the first book in the series.

You have to admit Mr Fisher presses all the right buttons. Conspiracy theories, apocalypse-philia, anti-capitalism, future technology, secret bases, terror attacks on US soil, environmentalism, David and Goliath: all are thrown into the pot along with the hapless puppets and stewed into a breathless mess.

Perhaps this book was misfiled in the library – it reads more like a piece of juvenile fiction or a novelised action movie than a piece of adult fiction. Also, it smacks of technophilia and anti-governmentalism; the senator is rescued by a para-governmental agency, while the official channels are all clogged. The government, at the end, does nothing about the Four Donkey-Riders. (Well, of course not! There’s at least one more book of this unoriginal rot to come before someone, such as Anderson’s estate, recognises Mr Fisher’s plagiarism.)

If there is one redeeming feature about this book of leftoeuvres, it is its relatively short length. It starts as it means to continue, with plenty of action, right up until you realise you saw it all before when you were six or seven years old.

Spend your money on a boxed edition of Thunderbirds DVDs instead. Thunderbirds are F.A.B., but E-Force is P.O.O.

Originally posted 30 November 2009