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Nov
19
Twilight Zone and Finnish Mythology – new fiction from Writers Bloc
Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 19th November 2006 by Sandy Auden
Writers Bloc, the Edinburgh spoken-word group, is launching two signed, limited-edition chapbooks - The Terminal Zone by Andrew J Wilson - a play about Rod Serling, originally staged over a decade ago - and Tales of Birth and Death by Hannu Rajaniemi - three new short stories about old Finnish gods erupting into the contemporary world.
The Terminal Zone was written by Andrew J Wilson with a very specific market in mind. "I wanted to try my hand at a play and I live in Edinburgh, so it seemed obvious that I should write something that could be performed at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival - so I did!
"Actually, The Terminal Zone, performed in 1993 and 1994, was a lot closer to the spirit of the Fringe than much of what gets staged these days: I wrote the play for a company (Thirteen O'Clock Productions) that was formed by friends who wanted to do something a little different - specifically, a piece of speculative theatre, to coin a genre. These days, the whole shooting match of the Fringe is too damn expensive to take that kind of risk unless you've got very deep pockets.
"There is another aspect of the original productions that make them a part of history now - the Scottish smoking ban. Since this was a play about Rod Serling and his TV persona, both actors smoked throughout the performance, but you can't do that now. Well, you could, but it would have to be 'special effect' cigs. No bad thing for the actors, I suppose, but believe me, the thundercloud of blue smoke that accumulated over the stage during the course of the play was a marvel of SFX in itself!
"Anyway, The Terminal Zone was a success at the fringe, by which I mean that we broke even... Trust me, that's almost unheard of.
"A few years later it was accepted for a US anthology called Great Plays of Dark Fantasy and Horror (one of a series of three, also including Great Plays of Mystery and Suspense and Great Plays of Science Fiction), so I was pretty chuffed ... until the publishers cancelled the whole bloody project.
"All of which is really intended to demonstrate that the chapbook printing is not a vanity publication. Actually, I didn't propose the idea to the Writers' Bloc collective, it was that Gavin Inglis, so it was.
"With regard to the text, I suppose what I was really trying to do was write a Twilight Zone episode all of my very own. It was never going to happen in reality, of course, but the postmodern twist of putting Rod Serling under his own fantastical magnifying glass was the next best thing. One challenge was capturing his voice, but I used Serling quotes - sometimes only a phrase, sometimes more (the Twilight Zone pitch is there in its entirety) - to ground my own attempt at ventriloquism.
"What The Terminal Zone is and always will be is a typical piece of minimalist Fringe theatre: it was driven by the words and the performances because there were very few other resources available. I'm still rather amazed that it worked at all, especially since I was using live theatre to talk about television, but words are words, and under the limelight, the audience believed in two different actors being aspects of the same person."
In Hannu Rajaniemi's Words of Birth and Death, three ancient gods emerge from their slumber and force present-day Finns to face their darkest fears.
"Finns are a contradictory people," said Rajaniemi. "A young nation, we have created one of the most successful welfare states in the world and live surrounded by beautiful, unspoiled nature. Yet we have one of the highest suicide rates in the world: there is an undercurrent of darkness in the Finnish psyche that echoes the seemingly endless Northern winter.
"And - as Johanna Sinisalo mentions in her introduction in the chapbook - in spite of our technological prowess and secular nature, few other Western nations are so close to their native mythologies as the Finns. If you listen carefully enough, there are deep, old voices singing underneath the cheerful Nokia ringtones."
The chapbooks are professionally printed, square-bound booklets with colour covers. The editions are limited to 250 signed and numbered copies.
Chek out the Writers Bloc website for more details.
Source: Andrew J Wilson and Hannu Rajaniemi
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Tagged With: Andrew-J-Wilson | book news | fantasy | film and tv | Finland | Hannu-Rajaniemi | indie press | interview | Rod-Serling | short fiction | Twilight-Zone | Writers-Bloc
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[...] I had a proud moment some weeks ago when my chapbook (Words of Birth and Death, published by Bloc Press) was launched at the Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair, together with Andrew Wilson’s The Terminal Zone and a new issue of Naked Punch Review edited by Jacopo Moroni. And now UK SF Book News has a nice promotional piece on the two books. [...]