It’s slash time! Further thoughts on slash fiction

Dedicated fan(s?) of this wondrous blog of mine may have been wondering how I’ve been getting on with my researches into the topic of fan fiction.

After all, there’s a hell of a lot of it about – and it’s a while ago since I last reported back.

Fear not, slash freaks of the world!

Yes, there is plenty more B7 fiction out there.  Yes, I have continued to download and read it as best I can.

And now I have bravely hacked my way back through all the dense undergrowth of the B7 fanfic world to bring you my second exclusive (in the sense that it is written by me, rather than anyone else) report.

Here for your attention are some of my latest thoughts and conclusions.  Please be aware that they are purely my personal opinions, so do feel free to differ whenever you like.

Because the characters have already been introduced to the public arena and displayed there for the enjoyment of the audience, they are considered by the fans to have become an integral part of popular culture.  This means that they are assumed by many to be public property rather than private.

Like famous characters from myth, legend and folklore, they now exist independent of their original creators.  They belong to the fans, not the television company, the people, not the masters.    

Indeed, it is clear that many fans from many different fandoms specifically employ fan-fic as a way of removing the characters right out of the control of the production company.  As amateur writers, they are not subject to market pressures.  Therefore, they can permit themselves much more freedom and flexibility in creative and artistic terms than the canon writers.

However, certain themes, concerns and dilemmas turn up time and time again in fan and slashfic.  This would tend to suggest very strongly that these more artistically independent literary genres have now developed a complete set of conventions and tropes all of their own.

Judging by the sheer number and huge variety of B7 fanfic stories out there on the Internet and elsewhere starring Kerr Avon, the charismatic computer fraudster's huge host of adoring female fans want to BE him every bit as much as they want to have sex with him or experience what it might be like to have him fall in love with them. 

By using him as their protagonist, they get the chance to see, hear, smell, taste and feel life from Avon's unique viewpoint.  And it certainly seems to prove a heady experience.   

As a man, society positively encourages you to be clever, sarcastic, greedy, selfish, an individualist, lecherous, disagreeable, anti-social, unhelpful and the complete antithesis of a team player or a follower.  Once under Avon's skin, you will now be congratulated and admired for all these defects of character, rather than rejected and condemned, as women so often still are when they display the self-same characteristics as he does.

It turns out that Vila Restal also has his coterie of women admirers.  This is much smaller than Avon's, but every bit as enthusiastic and dedicated.

Just as with Avon, it seems that there is much to recommend life from the male point of view, rather than the female.  If you are lazy, cowardly and dishonest, but also friendly, intelligent, quirky and amusing, you might like to try on Vila's personality for size some time (see Vila Restal's E-Mails for a particularly good set of stories in this respect).  Once again, you will probably find that society at least excuses these deficiencies in you, when it doesn't go all out to admire and celebrate them.

Fancy being a tall, strutting nasty bastard with a moody temperament and severe attitude problem but great line in savage wit?  (Bad-ass eye patch, sexy tight black leather uniform and seriously cool shit-kicker boots come included, plus fully charged laseron ring to zap the buggery out of anyone who's had the temerity to piss you off in any way at all.)  Then Commander Travis is the man for you.  In his guise, you get to be as rude, aggressive, hateful, unfriendly, determined, obsessive, unhinged and unkind as you could possibly want.  Yet again, these are not qualities that our present society likes to acknowledge in the female of the species, let alone condone in any way.

Now, as a woman, I understand perfectly that even today, many members of my gender still envy the greater freedoms and possibilities open to men in our society.  I can certainly identify and sympathise with the female actors from the original version of B7 when they complained that many of the scripts were sexist, leading the women characters to often lose out in dramatic terms compared to the men.  Nor am I exempt from secretly wondering what being a man is actually like.  So I can definitely appreciate just why so many of these fanfic writers are so keen to investigate a mode of life so radically different to their everyday reality.

What does continue to puzzle me is the comparative lack of interest in exploring the female point of view.  Okay, the nascent genre of femfiction offers a very promising corrective to this tendency, but it still has quite some way to go before it manages to catch up with the massive great splurge of male-centric fan and slash fic already out there.

Admittedly there is a hell of a lot of B7 fanfic out there that I haven't managed to read yet - and more is being produced and published in many different formats all the time.  I can only offer my personal opinion based on what I have had the opportunity to examine so far. 

Bearing this continuing sexist disparity in mind, you might think that the predominantly female writers of fan, slash and gen fic might make slightly better use of their artistic freedom and independence to start redressing the balance a bit more.  Whatever your personal sexual and emotional orientation might be, Servalan is still a very strong, attractive, charismatic woman with a lifestyle to envy.  So why not try enjoying her immense power and influence for yourself?  If you agree that Jenna and Cally, Soolin and Dayna never got the chance to shine properly, why don't you provide them with the ideal opportunity to do so?

True, there are some attempts at this already out there - but still not nearly enough.

No doubt many of the deficiencies of fan and slash fiction can be blamed on the fact that 90% of its products are, to put it bluntly, not very good (just like practically every other area of human endeavour you care to name, really).  Perhaps it is slightly unfair to start pointing the finger at writers who are often inexperienced, untrained and lacking in the basic talent to ever be able to produce an artistically successful level of fiction.  With time and practice, some fan fiction writers eventually learn how to create very good stories.  A few of them then go on to work as professional writers and even end up penning completely original series and characters of their own.  However, most won't.

Those who are lacking in experience or ability, as well as those who prefer to write slash, gen or fan fic for personal reasons as opposed to purely artistic ones, may find it quicker, easier and more reassuring to cling to the safety rafts offered by the tried and tested tropes.  Not only do they offer much needed support for their literary techniques, but they also ensure that the writers keep providing the fanbase with more of what it already knows and loves.

Let's face it, Avon is the most popular choice for a protagonist purely and simply because he is by far the best-loved and admired canon character in all of Blake's Seven.  If you stick with him and make him sympathetic to the readers in some way, then you are guaranteed a large audience for your story.  And the chances are good that many of them will be inclined to like it - or at least more prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.

At the time the original series was broadcast, Servalan was both greatly loved and celebrated by many viewers and critics for being a trailblazing superbitch.  Quite why so much of this appeal has since evaporated remains unclear.  Perhaps it is because the stiletto-heeled, red-lipsticked, immensely shoulder-padded Eighties dominatrix is so completely out of keeping with our current zeitgeist.  Can you imagine the Supreme Commander judging contestants on The X Factor?  Or owning a pink mobile phone encrusted with Swarovski crystals?  Or keeping a chihuahua in her handbag?  Or doing a Britney Spears and shaving her head in public when the stress all gets too much?

Even so, you might still think that Servalan would have a lot to offer a female writer pissed off at the way that modern society treats women.  Surely there is plenty of scope there for vicarious revenge and satisfaction, not to mention savage satire.  In the realm of gen fiction, she could have an absolute field day dominating the men.  Travis would seem the most obvious choice for her sub here, but I'm sure Blake, Tarrant and Vila might all also enjoy being bossed about a bit on the quiet.  If you want to be really naughty and subversive, even Avon himself could do with putting on the frilly pink pinny and polishing her floor some time.

Judging by the way some heterosexual male fans drool as soon as Servalan's name is even mentioned, there definitely does seem to be a market out there in fandom for this sort of thing.  There must also be heterosexual female fans who swoon at the very thought of being cruelly dominated by one or other of the male characters.  So where are the stories for them all?

Possibly Avon's overwhelming popularity with the fans might be inhibiting some writers from coming up with stories that could be interpreted as portraying him in any sort of a negative light.  Though judging by all the many wild and wonderful antics he already gets up to in slash and gen, I'm sure he wouldn't hesitate to try out and enjoy both domination and submission if he got the chance.

            

When it comes to dominating women, Travis would be a complete natural.  You might even argue that this would be the logical dark and disturbing flipside to some of the episodes from the canon series itself (most notably Seek-Locate-Destroy and Hostage). 

So why don't we get to see any of this? Perhaps it is because sexual enjoyment tends to be seen as a sure sign of a character's capitulation in both slash and gen fiction.  If you can make a character experience an orgasm, then you have won a victory over them.  If a so-called 'evil' character like Servalan or Travis manages to do this, it would turn the moral basis of the entire series upside down.

[At this juncture, I do have to admit to having discovered a few stories that attempt to address some of the above issues.  There was one very amusing one from a fanzine collection [A Short Tribute To Mr Hill - from Ultra 1] in which Avon teleported into Servalan's bathroom when she was still in the tub one morning, tied her up, injected her with memory erasing serum and had his evil way with her.  After he had vanished back to the Liberator again, she screamed at Travis to come and rescue her. Travis however was so fed up with Servalan bossing him about and humiliating him in front of the other officers that he simply undid his trousers and also proceeded to have his evil way with her.  Then he just left her lying there stark titty naked in the rapidly cooling bathwater. 

[For her part, Servalan didn't seem to mind either of these gruelling experiences too much.  But just in case she did, the memory erasing serum would blot them both out forever.  This seems a shame, as I'm sure both men would be more than keen to have her remember every detail for as long as possible, whatever their respective motives may have been.

[Following a bit of a bender at the pub over the road from the Adelphi campus after a hard evening's work on the MA course, I (with the aid of my trusty mobile phone) stumbled across another tale in which Cally was gay by inclination, but was having sex with Commander Travis because he was basically raping her.  He was quite determined that she should experience an orgasm - so of course she was fighting with all her might to make sure it didn't happen.  If she was gay and he was a rapist, you might conclude that it wasn't at all likely.  But this is gen fiction, so it doesn't follow the rules of standard narratives (let alone real life).

[This was an absolute shocker of a story for so many reasons - which is why I was snorting at it in sheer horror and disbelief not only on the bus, but also in Abduls while I was waiting for my post-prandial kebab.  I'm sorry if I upset anybody as a result.  It was truly disturbing to me as a woman to read such awful stuff, so I sincerely hope that Travis hasn't got up to any more of this sort of thing anywhere else (or any of the other male characters, come to that).]       

Some critics of slash fiction believe that another of its key functions is to provide its writers with the ideal forum to engage in a bit of underhand gender bending.  Presumably, this means that when Blake and Travis end up as the submissive partners in gay sex in these B7 stories, this might be a codified way of identifying them as women rather than men [Re-Education?]. 

Now, it seems there could be two potential ways of looking at this standard literary trope in slash fiction. 

Perhaps some women writers employ it as a slightly sneaky method of examining aspects of male characters and the relationships between them that weren't really addressed in very much detail by the scriptwriters of the canon series (who, you will remember, both were - and still are, even today - almost exclusively male).  Now fair enough, I wouldn't by any means be the first B7 fan to agree that the series could have well done with just a touch more tenderness every so often, and a few less shootings and explosions. 

But it's still slightly depressing that so many of these writers seem to feel that the only way the male characters can express and explore the gentler sides of their personalities is through sex.  If this is, in any sense, an accurate depiction of real men in our contemporary society, then my sisters, there is plenty of work still to be done.

Bashing Avon over the head with a massive great brick to render him (usually) temporarily helpless, so forced to accept the tender ministrations of Blake, Tarrant or Vila, strikes me as a bit drastic, to say the least.  I am still surprised that he hasn't ended up with permanent brain damage as a result of all this hurt/comfort genre induced violence.          

In nine cases out of ten, it is this fully functioning version of Avon that forces Blake, Travis, Tarrant (or sometimes poor Vila, of all people) to accept and embrace their 'femininity'. 

Now, what I want to know is - who the hell has decided that Kerr Avon is the so-called 'right-thinking' B7 fan's accepted paradigm of an alpha male?  Why does he so often seem to have the right to decide what 'masculinity' is and isn't in the B7 universe?  Who says in these type of stories that Blake, Travis, Tarrant or Vila aren't real men in any sense?  Why can't a 'true man' be idealistic?  Or a pompous berk?  Or paranoid?  Or nasty? Or cowardly?  Or pretentious?  Or gay?  (etc etc amen … )

Why does a man have to metaphorically conquer another person, win a victory over them, in order to encourage them to come to terms with their more vulnerable side?  Because the central theme of Blake's Seven is the refusal of the individual to buckle down and accept the tyranny of the system, many fans would argue that it is particularly right and fitting that this conflict should be expressed in artistic terms through vicious struggles for dominance between the different characters.

Whatever your opinion of Avon's various partners in slash sex/relationships, his frequent insistence on forcing his own conception of masculinity upon these individuals sometimes comes across as positively fascist.   

Many fanfic, gen and slash writers reveal themselves to be confirmed 'relationshippers'.  For them, it is essential that they use their artistic freedom from the constraints of the original canon scripts to ensure that characters who remained firmly apart on screen finally get it together on the Internet or in a paper fanzine.

If the scriptwriters refused to play ball with all those lovely hot cases of steaming sexual and emotional tension, then the fans lose no time in making up the deficiencies for themselves in one way or another.

Hence in B7 fiction, Avon and Cally are often paired for love, Avon and Soolin for sex, Avon and Jenna because they are both bored and frustrated and want to piss off Blake in some respect, Jenna and Travis because it forms a bittersweet secret between two tough cookies who have both suffered a lot behind the scenes and need something to cheer them both up a bit [Death Of A Friend], Blake and Avon for sex/love/who the hell knows what else on one or both sides (delete according to personal taste and need), Servalan and Avon because she is secretly hankering to be conquered by a REAL man, Avon and Vila because it seems so bloody obvious to those who want to combine it with the taste for classic slash.

Even though Carnell is meant to probably be bisexual in the famous episode Weapon (bit of a Freudian slip for a title considered in the current context, but can't be helped!), I agree you certainly wouldn’t have got away with two of the main characters being gay or bisexual and engaging in a gay relationship with each other at the time the series was originally transmitted by the Beeb.  So the slasher and fem-shippers in particular make the very most of the opportunity that fanfiction offers them to explore types of sexual and romantic relationships that couldn't really be treated by the original series.

As the Mary Sue/Marty Stu approach is so strongly discouraged by so much of fandom, fans who want to get it on with their favourite character but either can’t or don’t want to invent an original partner to help them do it, are probably best off assuming the mantel of another canon character as a sort of avatar.

Therefore, if you are a heterosexual female fan of Avon who wants to enjoy a heterosexual relationship with him, for however long, then you need to find a female character who didn’t get it on with him in the original programme – but you think there was still something of a definite attraction or interest going on between him and her.  Your precise choice of avatar depends on what type of fantasy relationship you want with him, how long you want it for – and the sort of canon female character you either identify with or would like to emulate.

So if you fancy yourself as tough but dreamy and sensitive, you love Avon and want to capture his heart, you would probably go for Cally [as in The Secret Miracle from Ultra 1].  If you reckon yourself tough and glamorous, but pragmatic and independent-minded, you’re bored, frustrated, feel subtly rejected by Blake, consider him a pompous dickhead and need to have your brains screwed out before you explode, you would choose Jenna [as in Unholy Alliance from Ultra 1].  If you are impossibly tough, outrageously glamorous, totally selfish and eat other men for breakfast, but secretly long to be conquered and turned into a REAL woman who finally knows what true love is, then you must be Servalan [as in If You Would Have Power from Horizon 15]but how many of us are lucky enough to have a personality or real life anything like hers, let’s be honest?).

Tales from typographical oceans

So, SO glad that I just missed being a teenager during the Seventies.

All right, I DID have to contend with reaching maturity just as Mrs Thatcher and her various minions starting consolidating their hold on the country.  Possessing a mind totally unsuited to the traditional Ferenghi way of thinking proved a serious disadvantage during the era when profit was king, as did my hippy-dippy tendency hair during the concurrent reign of new wave.

But at least I didn't have to listen to prog rock.

Could hardly avoid it yesterday evening, though.

Flatmate was listening to the Stuart Maconie show on Radio 6 - which featured the alleged Yes 'classic' Tales From Topographical Oceans as the album of the week.

Even the so-called 'highlights' that Stuart had selected for public consumption proved beyond all reasonable doubt to the listeners out there just why punk had to happen.

Every single sodding tune seemed to meander up and down and round and round and back again, chewing the end of its own bloody tale like the ouroubouros snake of ancient symbolism for hours and hours on end, yet never really getting anywhere.

No wonder people had to be off their heads on drugs, drink or both to enjoy this sort of music.

Flatmate commented that one track sounded just like the 'introduction' to something.

"What?" I replied.  "A hobbit opera?"

Then we both fell about laughing.

But it's true.

If hobbits write and perform operas, then that's just what I would imagine them to sound like - Mozart crossed with Steely Dan.

Meanwhile, if you want to hear a real tale from a topographical ocean, here's one:

Is nothing left?  Have all things passed thee by?
The stars are not thy stars.  The aged hills
Are changed and bowed beneath the ills
Of ice and rain, of river and of sky;
The sea that riseth now in agony
Is not thy sea.  The stormy voice that fills
This gloom with man's remotest sorrow shrills
The mem'ry of thy lost futurity.

This extract from a sonnet to the trace fossil of Oldhamia was penned by John Joly, former Professor of Geology at Trinity College, Dublin.

Now, he may have liked wearing a radioactive hat in order to test the effect of the gamma rays on his memory, but he displays a much subtler understanding of the immensities of geological time than the assorted members of Yes.

Plus he gets to the point a damn sight quicker.

What a load of old teapot! Inside The Floating Island Of Madness again

Can now report back that I have now finally finished reading The Floating Island Of Madness - somewhat earlier than expected, mainly because the bloody thing is only 24 pages long.

Yes, that's right - 24 pages.

Now, many great works of past and present are on the shorter side, it's true.  But usually something of this length would be described as a 'short story', rather than a 'book'.  A book needs to have enough heft to it to prop up a wonky dining room table in an emergency.  24 pages of pulp fiction is simply not enough to do it.

According to a quick Google search I've just done, The Floating Island Of Madness was originally published as a short story in one of these Astounding Fiction type magazines.  So why wasn't it then included in some 'best of ... ' collection of their short stories and novellas?  That would have made a lot more sense than reprinting it as a standalone.

But then, what do I know?  I'm not what Ben Aaronovitch would no doubt refer to as one of the gibbons of the publishing trade.

To compound the offence, they then had the cheek to describe it on Amazon as a 'classic'.

It isn't!

It's pants!

Well, I did warn you that if it continued to keep up the good work, then I would probably let you know all about it.  If we swap the word 'good' for the word 'bad', then I can in all conscience keep my original promise to you.

You'll no doubt recall that author Jason Kirby prefers not to bother himself with those extraneous little fripperies of the story-telling trade such as character and motivation.  He is also enough of a radical to dispense entirely with narrative tension and an action-packed ending as well.

Returning to the story at the point where we left off last time, after the three captive secret agents had injected themselves with harmless vials of water in order to pretend to be mad, they were summoned before mad Algy Fraser (makes him sound like he's Franky's brother or cousin, doesn't it?  Have visions of him parading down the East End in the Sixties, dressed up to the nines in the sharpest cut and narrowest lapelled of Italian-tailored mod suits, and drinking at the bar of the Blind Beggar, arm wrapped firmly round Barbara Windsor's waist.  But anyway!).

Fraser naturally wants to make sure that the official insanity juice is taking its due effect.

Luckily Foulet the French agent has already studied abnormal psychopathology in some depth, being a pretentious Gallic intellectual by trade, and so the other two decide to copy him in both gesture and word, just to be on the safe side.

Fraser appears to be reasonably satisfied with progress so far, but informs the three that Brice the Brit has to undergo a second dose of loopy latte at the hands of Doctor Semple because his brain is much tougher than those of the other two (yes, you heard it here second).

Meanwhile, Fraser will put Ainslee the Yank and Foulet 'under the nourishment ray'.

This involves installing them in a tiny room kitted out with a device similar to a sunray lamp that bathes them in a deep orange light which feeds, waters and relaxes you all at the same time.  Quite why Fraser couldn't have flooded the market with these marvellous contraptions, even back in the Thirties, and made an absolute mint we don't know.  But then, he is supposed to be stark, utter, raving bonkers, so perhaps a bit of simple market research and business forecasting might be slightly beyond his mental capabilities at the moment.

Once they have topped up their stomachs and their tans sufficiently, Fraser starts interrogating them.  He insists they tell him what their respective countries have found out about him and his evil plans for total world domination.  Naturally he’s extremely proud of his nefarious plots, so he doesn't exactly neglect the full and detailed explanations of them that we have all come to expect from the malevolent mad genius of popular imagination.

Of course they realise that being ‘mad’, they are now supposed to have forgotten everything about their previous lives. So they look really vacant and don't reply.

Then Fraser demands to know whether the nations are afraid of him.  Do they realise that it is he who brought about the Wall Street crash?  (This is seriously no joke - he most definitely claims that he and his agents were the ones responsible, rather than the world's bankers and politicians, or the global economy buffeted by the vicissitudes of recent history.)

The men answer in dull monotones.

But does the world KNOW that Fraser is its master?

"Master," drones Foulet, just to drive the point home.

Abruptly, Fraser announces he has now changed his mind, and takes them outside again.

There he releases a secret catch.

A trapdoor swings open in the bottom of the island.

They peer through it at the desert plain two thousand feet below.  Surely mad Algy is not going to pitch them straight through the opening to their certain death?

Er, no.

Even Algy Fraser is a bit too subtle for that.

Instead, he points to a small metal ladder running down from the trapdoor to who knows where.

He forces them to climb down this into a small chamber that hangs off the underside of the island just like a gondola off the bottom of an airship.

Then he locks them in there for the next three days.

Because they suspect that Fraser may have also invented his own version of CCTV and even now be monitoring them round the clock, they still have to pretend to be mad.  This involves looking dense as pigshit whilst moving and speaking as little as possible.  Again, Ainslee follows Foulet's expert lead.

Due to the need for caution, conversation is necessarily somewhat limited.

On the third day, Fraser returns.

Addressing them as sane men this time, he demands to know how they are now feeling.  Apparently, the first dose of the madness serum only last three days.  However, successive doses will prove cumulative in their effects.  As he has so abundantly proved already with all the prisoners he took earlier.  So - are they finally ready to talk?

At this point, the modern reader may be heartened by such splendid evidence of devious mind-screws and good old-fashioned emotional manipulation.  Perhaps Algy will match Hannibal Lecter and co yet!

Ainslee and Foulet both vow never to give in to the demands of the 'cruel, power-loving, scientific machine', even if they have to die in order to save their respective countries from the depredations of his vile plots. 

Coming as it does after a soothing session in the tanning salon and three whole days vegging out in the Thirties version of an isolation tank, you would hope (indeed, you would probably be praying by this juncture) that this difference of opinion might do something to rachet up the emotional tension level a bit.

Basically, their dilemma boils down to this.

Fraser will only let them out if they talk.  If they don’t, then he will use his handy mad genius Swiss pocket knife to cut through the four cables that attach the isolation pod to the underside of the island.

No prizes for guessing that Fraser rejects Foulet’s attempts to reason with him, fearing a trick.  The men both refuse pointblank to talk – and so he starts cutting the cables, one by one.

Just as he has almost finished severing the third cable, rescue arrives!

Yes, it’s Brice the Brit.

Clamping a handy pair of steel cables to the roof of the pod, he opens the roof hatch and proffers them a ladder.  While Algy is distracted with his efforts to cut through the final cable, they climb out back onto the island.

He launches forthwith into his lengthy explanation of events.  (Lengthy explanations of events seem to be a favourite narrative device in pulp sci-fi from the Thirties, judging by the various short story collections I’ve downloaded from the Manybooks site so far.  More on this topic at a future date, maybe.)

While they were locked away in the isolation chamber, Brice did receive a second injection of the madness medicine – but this didn’t bother him because he’d spotted a phial of the antidote just casually lying on barmy Dr Semple’s desk.  Why Fraser isn’t concerned about the possible security ramifications of such terrible carelessness isn’t explained, though I suppose if you happen to be a mad genius, locking dangerous medications away safely when not in use probably isn’t high on your agenda of things to do to achieve total world domination.

When the doctor was distracted, Brice simply injected himself with this to reverse the effects.  Wonder how he knew for sure that this was the antidote?  Was the bottle clearly labeled ‘ANTIDOTE TO MADNESS SERUM – DO NOT EXCEED STATED DOSE’?

Next he spent the next three days doing his best impression of Foulet’s Method acting style ersatz insane slave.  This seems to have gone down pretty well with the captive audience, as he was given liberty to go wherever he liked around the island.

He discovered that in fact the weight of all the people and machinery is not sufficient to keep the island from flying all the way up into space.  Four giant lamps situated at each corner of the desert beam up more of the mysterious rays discovered by Fraser.  The rays meet just underneath the island and combine their forces to anchor it down into a stationary floating position (technical explanation courtesy of Jason Kirby and his personal interpretation of Seriously Bad Science).

Yes, there is an off switch.  Yes, Brice discovered where it was.  And yes, he’s just managed to turn it off.   

Without losing any time, he urges them to climb into the plane they originally came in.

As the island and its inhabitants soar off to their certain deaths in space, the agents calmly fly off into the sunset.  Brice jumps off the edge – but he’s okay because he’s managed to find a parachute and attach it to his back without anyone noticing.  The other two simply land on the desert floor and pick him up when he touches down.

And, that’s it, folks.

So, let’s take a moment to quickly summarise what we’ve just learnt:

1.)  If you are a genius, no one else understands what the hell you are on about – including the author.  Therefore, you tend to talk in what sci fi great Larry S. Niven refers to as ‘bolonium’ (aka industrial strength professional jargon bollockese).

2.)  When you are mad, you tend to do things just for the sheer hell of it.  Your normal powers of logic have been suspended for the duration.  Therefore, you build a floating island and live and work on it purely because it seems incredibly cool, not for any scientific or strategic benefits that this might bring you.

3.)  Mad people deserve no understanding or sympathy.  Even though most of the nutters living on the island were brought there against their will and have been driven insane thanks to regular doses of the medically unlikely serum, none of the three agents makes any attempt to help or save them.  This is despite the fact that Brice has discovered the antidote.  Instead, they must all fly off to their death along with Fraser and the island.

4.)  Either the local tribespeople living in the desert underneath the floating island haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary (very unlikely indeed, when you consider the fact that Fraser has installed four enormous arc lights in each corner of their domain) – or nobody in the English-speaking world of the Thirties considers their opinions to be worth listening to.

5.)  Many readers during the Thirties must have thought that pulp fiction counted for nothing as an art form.  Hence the endless proliferation of tired tropes, such as mad scientists, and constant lapses in narrative logic, like the business with the  insanity serum antidote.     

Commander Travis is innocent

Commander Travis may be a hard man.

He may be a seriously nasty bastard if you manage to get on the wrong side of him.

He may end up a pretty unhappy and disturbed character.

But he isn't - and never has been - either a psychopath or an extra-terrestrial!

Over the past 30 years, many sci-fi fans out there have had no hesitation at all in calling him either or both.

Anyone who jumps to his defence, especially a woman, is immediately accused of being, at best, a bleeding-heart liberal like the Modern Parents from Viz, or, at worst, a star-swept lilac-haired tangerine-eyed Mary Sue who needs to buy a copy of Women Who Love Too Much and start reading it immediately.

Well, my answer to that is BOLLOCKS.

Okay, I freely admit that Travis (Mark 1 version) is perhaps my favourite character ever from Blake's Seven (albeit followed extremely closely by Avon and Servalan.  Vila and Carnell are also pretty good creations).

His story arc in the original version is extremely sad and even today I cannot bring myself to watch the end of Star One.

The problem is, I've always felt that Commander Travis, like many of the canon characters in this series, ended up suffering from a seriously bum rap.

Now, the first question I'm sure the scriptwriters of the new audio reboot must have had to ask themselves is: how did this misfortune happen?

Like detectives, they must have had to go back to the scene of the crime to re-examine it.

And the scripts of the original series unfortunately show that a lot of the blame has to be laid at the doors of the writers.

As a scriptwriter in training, I've always thought that it would be a vital part of the job description for the writers of a show to have the ability to create plausible, three-dimensional characters that exchange lines of snappy, vivacious dialogue with each other and prove a real joy for the actors to play.

If they cannot deliver on this promise, then they need to start looking for an alternative career immediately, as there will be a whole great gaggle of wannabes streaming through the back door to replace them.

That's why it surprised me so much to learn of Terry Nation's alleged deficiencies as a writer.

According to the seriously academic study of him that was published not that long ago by Manchester University Press, he was never that hot on writing dialogue.  It didn't matter which show he was working on, the same problem cropped up time and time again. Even though the basic working conditions of the late Seventies were very different to those of today, it was still considered a pretty tall order indeed for him to write every single episode of the first series of Blake's Seven all by himself.

I imagine that he was well aware that his entire professional reputation was on the line at this point - so I can't imagine he must have felt terribly happy when Stephen Greif started expressing his discontent with Travis.
 
Greif has always come across to me as one of those extremely practical and down-to-earth actors who would never dream of complaining unless they believe they have just and ample cause.  When they do make their thoughts clear, it is because they want to put in the very best job they possibly can and need to know how the difficulties that stand in the way of this could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

To sum up his dispute with the Commander in a nutshell, he thought Travis had very quickly turned into a morose, obsessional, one-dimensional cipher, who badly needed broadening out and humanising as soon as possible.

He had rapidly become bored with portraying the character and he felt sure the audience would soon get fed up with watching him too.   

Luckily Chris Boucher turned out to be a dab hand with the dialogue - and much of the Commander's subsequent savage line in wit can ultimately be traced back to him.  It is indeed a great shame that Stephen Greif didn't stick around in the end to get the benefit of it.  (Still would have loved to have seen what he would have made of Trial.  Regret to say that I don't feel the same way about Hostage, though.)

Now, as both an excellent actor and fully paid-up member of Mensa, Stephen Greif was doubtless quite right in his assessment of the situation.

Problem is, I suspect he ended up greatly over-estimating both the emotional needs and the critical abilities of many members of the audience.

Despite the constant whinges from certain sections of the viewership that television has slowly and irrecoverably been going down the tubes since at least 1960, it seems abundantly clear from the fond, rosy-hued reminiscences that they share in various forums that many fans have been pretty satisfied at some fundamental level with whichever shows that they personally happen to follow.

If the example of Algernon Fraser the mad scientist from The Floating Island Of Madness is to be believed, more than a little of this satisfaction must come from the fulfillment of audience expectations.

Despite the fact that many critics and academics saw the success of Blake's Seven to lie in its portrayal of a flawed, dysfunctional future society and its various citizens in very grimy shades of grey, more than a few viewers don't seem to have regarded it in the same light.

This is abundantly revealed in some of the fan fiction that has been produced about the series.

Because Roj Blake is firmly seen as a 'goodie' by certain viewers, his point of view is often accepted without question by them - even when there are serious grounds for taking what he says with a massive great pinch of salt (at the very least).

One of the classic examples of this occurs when he states that Commander Travis has 'no friends'.
 
If you look at this statement properly, it is more than a little obvious that Blake probably doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about.

First of all, exactly how well does he really know Travis?

How many times has he met him?

When they met, what did they say to each other?  And why?

Unless there is something major that Blake isn't telling his new crew (and by implication, us in the audience too) - then it is very likely that Blake has only met Travis a few times at most, and quite possibly only on the one occasion when he shot him. 

Travis, if you will recall, had been ordered to arrest Blake and the other dissidents.  However, it all rapidly spiralled into an extremely nasty, bloody disaster for both sides.

The Commander will have started off by announcing something along the lines of: "Put your hands up.  You're all under arrest."

At this stage, Blake is rather unlikely to ask him to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of tea and a slice of ginger cake.

Although there appears to be some dispute about what was then said by whom to whom and why, I think we would still be fairly safe in assuming that a squadron of extremely aggressive and determined troopers attempting to arrest a bunch of very frightened and pissed-off protestors are not going to be in the right frame of mind to get to know very much about each other's lives and priorities.

The strong implication would therefore have to be that Blake then read up about Travis in some sort of report or other afterwards.  If it was a media report, then the question has to be asked - would any Federation journalist really be able to include the fact that Travis has no friends in their report, without it being cut or censored in some way?  (Knowing the way that our own media tends to report incidents analagous to this one, I can't see how the hell it would be relevant to the story anyway.)  If it was written by some dissident reporter, then I'd be extremely interested to know what their source for this information was.

Or perhaps Blake was simply listening to rumour and hearsay, circulating on both sides.

We simply don't know.

In any case, it is impossible for the new crew of the Liberator to go and check out the background to this story - and I would reckon that Blake is fully aware of this.

Remember, Blake is an experienced revolutionary/terrorist (delete as personally applicable) leader with an agenda as long as your bloody arm.

Now that Travis is on his trail, Blake realises that he has no real chance of beating the Commander without the help and support of his new comrades in need.  Therefore, he must rally them to his defence as quickly as possible.

Like any effective leader, Blake has learnt over the years that appealing to the basic human emotions is a dead cert when trying to convince people of your views.

Therefore, he will probably want to spin a story that subtly, but powerfully, reminds his listeners that they are all in danger.  They are all in this predicament together.

Because he already suspects that Avon and Jenna are in two minds about whether to stay, Blake really needs to pull the stops out at this point.

So he emphasises that Travis threatens not just Blake - but every single one of them there and then.

The classic technique used in these sort of situations is to demonise your enemy.

Thus Travis becomes (in Blake's account, anyway) the cold, ruthless, remorseless psychopath that he has remained in the minds of many over the past three decades.

Now, to be fair to both Avon and Jenna, I think they are quite probably aware that there may be some wide, even gaping holes in Blake's account.  But they know only too well from previous experience that the Federation is not going to all this time and trouble unless it is totally serious about eliminating them.

This means that, whatever the precise truth of Blake's tale, it is cast-iron certain that Commander Travis is a.) a nasty bastard and b.) he means business.

At the same time, to be equally fair to Terry Nation, he very likely wanted the viewers at home to identify with the very different personal dilemmas being experienced by Blake, Avon and Jenna during this particular episode - and to ask themselves some tough, hard questions about what THEY would do if they found themselves in such a situation.
 
However, both classic narrative and psychological theory would have none of this ambiguity.

According to them, there is nothing the average human being hates and detests more than uncertainty.

Archetypes provide you with islands of safety that you can cling to when buffetted hither and thither in the storms of chaos that constitute modern life.

The first thing you need to do when flung into a narrative of any sort is find someone to identify with.

Blake demands that we take him as our protagonist, our friend, our comrade, our hero, our rock.  Anyone who opposes him must surely be our enemy too.

Okay, that's the theory.

But if you adhere to it too closely, then life dies.

And as Stephen Greif pointed out, you can end up with some seriously tedious telly.

Another vital point that many of these traditional archetype lovers completely miss when they blithely label Travis a psychopath is the basic reason behind the existence of armies in the first place.

As the great quote from General Patton? [let me check this and I'll get back to you] puts it, no good general wants to die for his country.  Instead, the purpose of combat is to make the other bastard die for his.
 
The Federation Space Force will thus have been designed to be as effective as possible.

A key way to ensure peak operational efficiency must be to attract the right type of recruits.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was a Federation recruiting officer interviewing the teenage Travis and asking him to explain just why he wanted to join up, I personally don't think I'd be terribly impressed if he admitted straight out that he was an aggressive little fuckwit that really fancied the idea of shooting as many people as possible in a total orgy of ultra-violence while wearing a pair of seriously cool shit-kicker boots.

Granted, Travis is a pretty intelligent, astute bloke, whatever else you may happen to think about him, so presumably he would have known better than to come out with a suicidly stupid statement like that, even if he did secretly believe it.

However, ever since the dawn of history, armies have known only too well that some of the people that attempt to join up end up being far more of a liability than an asset.  Because the consequences of untrammelled recruitment can be catastrophic, it makes perfect sense that the Federation Space Force would do everything in its power to make sure that only suitable recruits got through the door in the first place.

So presumably Travis and all the other applicants must have been put through their paces with a punishing battery of searching psychological and emotional assessment exercises.  If they wanted to go straight in for the fast-track officer training, then the tests must have been even more stringent.

We would have to assume then, that he must have passed all the exams with flying colours and managed to convince the recruitment assessors that he was a good bet for future officer training.

Once safely in and having passed the basic induction process, Travis seems to have done pretty well for himself.

Not only has he managed to get promoted to a high rank fairly quickly, but he has also received advanced training in some extremely specialised and dangerous disciplines and carried out a range of highly sensitive assignments.

Because he hasn't got chucked out on his bum +/demoted by now, the likelihood is that, on the whole, he must be putting in a satisfactory performance at work (assuming we discount the entire Zircaster can of worms for the moment).

So if the Federation Space Force apparently don't have grounds for diagnosing Travis as a psychopath, then what the hell else could be wrong with him?

The obvious answer - and one that would be of particular resonance to today's audience, particularly in the aftermath of two Gulf Wars and the dreadful debacle continuing on in Afghanistan - is that he is suffering from some sort of emotional injury that has either been caused by combat conditions or made worse by them.

In the original series, you'll recall that he ended up suffering appalling injuries during his run-in with Blake.

Now, he does insist to Servalan in Seek-Locate-Destroy that he is not all that bothered by his wounds, particularly now that he has made a full physical recovery (as far as possible) and the army surgeons have done such a great job installing his cyber-replacements.

Sorry, but the next point that has to be made here is that, if we can't believe every word that Blake says to be gospel truth, then there are no grounds for assuming that Travis always states exactly what he really thinks and feels either.

Travis knows only too well that if it wasn't for Servalan offering him a lifeline in the form of the Blake assignment, he would be in deeply serious shit following the Zircaster balls-up.  At best he would be looking at the very real prospect of being dishonorably dismissed from the service.  At worst, he could even be executed.

It is therefore in all his best interests to appear as normal and functional to Servalan as possible.

As the Supreme Commander of the entire force, Servalan is not only a savvy operator generally, but also a consummate politician.  She surely must have heard a great deal about the various forms of psychological injury that soldiers are prone to during the course of her career.  It is very unlikely, therefore, that she truly believes Travis when he assures her that his terrible injuries mean as little to him now as he assures her that they do. 

She knows he is desperate.  Therefore his motivation to succeed is high.

And if he DOES end up failing, then she has got him right by the short and curlies.

Another vital factor to bear in mind is that Servalan is female.

One of the more sympathetic aspects of the Commander's character that we do get to hear about, albeit far too briefly, during series 1 of the original version, is his appreciation for attractive women, like Keira the mutoid pilot used to be before she got converted.

If it is true that Travis is a man who is attracted to women, then naturally he will be extremely concerned to create a good impression upon them.  He will be anxious to convey to his new female boss the idea that he is not only a tough, effective officer, but also a proper successful alpha male.

According to his way of thinking, Servalan will assume that physical appearance doesn't matter as much to a man as it does to a woman - especially not a male officer who knows and accepts that injury is one of the many high prices that soldiers have to pay in combat.

Women give in to their feelings, whilst men don't have any.

Yes, it's a pretty traditional way at looking at the differences between the sexes - but whoever said that the army was the most advanced bastion of society?  Certainly in Britain during the late Seventies, anyway.

Now, I have to be brutally honest and admit that I reckon Travis is talking total and utter crap here.

The injuries he suffered during the fight with Blake were quite utterly appalling.

People with these sort of injuries in everyday life usually need to have further outpatient contact with a doctor over quite a long period.  Even after the articial eye and arm have been installed, the doctor would need to keep ensuring that that the person is continuing to live comfortably and function normally.

It is generally recognised by doctors that these particular type of injuries are likely to cause a person considerable psychological trauma that may take many years - and much anguish - to come to terms with.

I would therefore strongly suspect from the way that Travis behaves, especially in relation to Blake, that he has got a very bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than being a raving psychopath.

Now THERE'S another extremely interesting and important point!

Has anything like this been diagnosed in him - either just after Blake's attack or more recently?

Has any psychological treatment been prescribed or offered?

If not, then why?

It's obvious that Travis is in a pretty bad way in the emotional sense.

If yes, why hasn't it worked?

Or has Travis refused it?

If he refused the treatment, why?

How the hell can you say that something as fundamental as this is of no importance to Travis and his life?  Writers worth their salt knew all about the dramatic potential in circumstances like this during the Seventies, for God's bloody sake!

What about all those war films starring characters like Douglas Bader who suffered terrible injuries, but managed to overcome them to fight again?

The only conclusion that I can come to is that exploring this dramatically very promising issue might have been regarded as putting Travis in serious danger of becoming a bit too sympathetic a character.

And an extremely interesting possibility has just occurred to me for the current audio version of the series.

Giving Travis an eye patch and an artificial arm these days might be regarded as a touch TOO cheesy, tacky and obvious.  Also, you can't see them on the radio - and characters running round describing the Commander's disabilities every five minutes sounds far too reminiscent of The Gun That I Hold In My Right Hand Is Loaded for comfort.

So, what about having Travis escape from his run-in with Blake still physically intact - but his mind is slowly succumbing to post-traumatic stress disorder?