Kraak has got the kind of instinct for survival that makes a kamikaze pilot look like the Green Cross Code man. I don’t know what the terrain is like up there on Zoid, but he finds it pretty difficult to travel over the average living room carpet. No wonder he terrorizes the universe, it must be pretty frightening, having a thousand tons of war robot collapse on top of you and lie there with its little feet pathetically going round and round. You want to commit suicide in sympathy. Oh, and he’s got this other fiendish weapon: his head comes off and rolls under the sofa. Pretty scary, that. We’ve tested him out with other Zoids, and I’m here to tell you that the technology of robot fighting machines, basically, is trying to fall over in front of your opponent and trip him up. It’s a hard job, because the natural instinct of all Zoids is to fall over as soon as you take your hand away.
But even Kraak has problems compared with a robot that was proudly demonstrated to us by the lad next door. A Transformer, I think it was. It isn’t just made of one car or plane, it’s a whole fleet of vehicles which, when disaster threatens, assemble themselves into one great big fighting machine. That’s the theory, anyway. My bet is that at the moment of truth the bloody thing will have to go into battle half-finished because its torso is grounded at Gatwick and its left leg is stuck in a traffic jam outside Luton.
We recently saw Santa Claus: The Movie. Anyone else seen it? Pretty dreadful, the only laugh is where they apparently let the reindeer snort coke in order to get them to fly. No wonder Rudolph had a red nose, he spends half the time with a straw stuck up it.
Anyway, you get to see Santa’s workshop. Just as I thought. Every damn toy is made of wood, painted in garish primary colours. It might have been possible, in fact I suppose it’s probably inevitable, that if you pressed the right switch on the rocking horses and jolly wooden dolls they turned into robots, but I doubt it. I looked very carefully over the whole place and there wasn’t a single plastic extrusion machine. Not a single elf looked as though he knew which end to hold a soldering iron. None of the really traditional kids’ toys were there—no Rambos, no plastic models of the Karate Kid, none of those weird little spelling and writing machines designed to help your child talk like a NASA launch controller with sinus trouble and a mental age of five.
Now, I’ve got a theory to account for this. Basically, it is that Father Christmases are planet specific and we’ve got the wrong one.
I suspect it was the atom bomb tests in the early fifties that warped the, you know, the fabric of time and space and that. Secret tests at the North Pole opened up this, you know, sort of hole between the dimensions, and all the stuff made by our Father Christmas is somehow diverted to Zoid or wherever and we get all the stuff he makes, and since he’s a robot made out of plastic he only makes the things he’s good at.
The people it’s really tough on are the kids on Zoid. They wake up on Christmas morning, unplug themselves from their recharger units, clank to the end of the bed (pausing only to fall over once or twice) playfully zapping one another with their megadeath lasers, look into their portable pedal extremity enclosures, and what do they find? Not the playful, cuddly death-dealing instruments of mayhem that they have been led to expect, but wooden trains, trumpets, rag dolls, and those curly red and white sugar walking sticks that you never see in real life. Toys that don’t need batteries. Toys that you don’t have to put together. Toys with varnish on instead of plastic. Alien toys.
And, because of this amazing two-way time warp thingy, our kids get the rest. Weird plastic masters of the universe which are to the imagination what sandpaper is to a tomato. Alien toys. Maybe it’s being done on purpose, to turn them all into Zoids. Like the song says—you’d better watch out.
I don’t think it will work, though. I took a look into my daughter’s doll’s house. Old Kraak has been hanging out there since his batteries ran out and his megacannons fell off. Mr. T has been there for a couple of years, ever since she found out he could wear Barbie’s clothes, and I see that some plastic cat-woman is living in the bathroom.
I don’t know why, but what I saw in there gave me hope. Kraak was having a tea party with a mechanical dog, two Playpeople, and three dolls. He wasn’t trying to zap anyone. No matter what Santa Claus throws at us, we can beat him.…
And now your mummies and daddies are turning up to take you home; be sure to pick up your balloons and party loot bags, and remember that Father Christmas will soon be along to give presents to all the good boys and girls who’ve won awards.
2001: THE VISION AND THE REALITY
Sunday Times, 24 December 2000
Journalists in the U.K., and in my experience practically everywhere else in the world, find it hard to distinguish between fantasy writers and science fiction writers. I’m down in their contacts book as “guy to talk to about sci-fi.” When possible signs of life were discovered in the famous Martian meteorite ALH84001, I was the person they came to for a comment. Since they had room for a sound bite of about twelve seconds, though, it hardly mattered. Anyone trained as a journalist can be an expert for twelve seconds.
For similar reasons, I was asked to write this. I could polish it up now, all the tech is hugely or subtly out of date, but that’s the trouble with the future. It doesn’t stand still for long enough. Anyway, this is journalism, which doesn’t have to be true forever. It just has to be true until tomorrow morning. But I rather enjoyed writing it.
Dah … DAH … DAAAH! (bing bong bing bong bing bong bing … bong …)
There had never been a science fiction movie like it. Few have approached it since. You couldn’t see the string. Everything looked right. Even the dialogue worked, even though it sounded as though people were softening one another up to sell them life insurance. They didn’t say, “Eat electric death, Emperor Ming!” They said, “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?”
And the science was right. Space wasn’t busy and noisy. It was full of dreadful, suffocating silence, and the sound of a human, breathing.
It was glorious, and we were so enthralled we spent several minutes just watching a spaceship dock with a space station. No explosions, no aliens, no guns at all. Just … grandeur, and technology turned into a ballet.
Sigh.
I remember that spaceship. We had proper spaceships in those days, not like the sort you get now.
Not that we actually get many now, come to think of it. I grew up expecting to see the first man land on the moon. It never occurred to me that I’d see the last one. We thought there’d be a moon base. Then … onward to Mars!