"Supersense" and "The Colours of Thought"

[lethargic_man]

In 1988 I was sufficiently impressed on watching the BBC series Supersense, about the ways in which the senses of other animals exceed our own, that it stayed in my mind for many years afterwards.

In 2003, seeing the book of the series in the library, I got it out and was impressed all over again.

Earlier this year, I bought myself the DVD of the series... and was less impressed. At first I thought it must be because it was telling me material that's no longer new to me, but going back over my mail archive it looks like there's a lot more in the book than there was in the series. The series, for example, does not mention such fascinating facts as that spiders raster scan with their main eyes, moving the retina back and forth (apparently the resulting image is about six times worse than ours and competes with the vision of some vertebrates). Or that flying foxes have got corrugated retinas to increase their depth of focus, or that diving birds have extra muscles, allowing them to drastically alter the shape of their lenses and even squeeze the lens through the iris (!), giving them an accommodation of 50 dioptres (as against 14 dioptres for humans—and 1 dioptre for presbyopics). Maybe I ought to get myself the book of the series too. (Or maybe not: I've just found the two thousand words of notes I took on the book at the time.)

Anyhow, one thing that watching the series brought home to me was how much of an influence it was on my abortive undersea aliens dawn-of-civilisation whodunnit novel The Colours of Thought. Watching the series made me regret not finishing the novel, particularly since I am very pleased with the final draft of the first chapter, which is my best attempt at conveying a truly non-human point-of-view character (and turning the penultimate draft from normal narrative into alien PoV was the hardest piece of writing I have ever done).

Then about a week or two later, I read The Hound of the Baskervilles (which I had previously not read, not having read any Sherlock Holmes until I was in my thirties), followed by The Valley of Fear (the two being packaged in the same physical volume); and that had the same effect.

When I finished The Valley of Fear last night, I was beginning to wonder if they were going to make me pick up my pen put hands to keyboard and resume work on The Colours of Thought after all... but I doubt now that's going to happen. I've finished reading the Sherlock Holmes, and have moved onto another book, and I've finished watching Supersense, and it would take quite a while to go through my notes and bring myself back up to speed on all I'd need to have at my fingertips to resume work on the novel, and I still don't have the foggiest how to pull a whodunnit off.

But maybe I should start the refamiliarisation, and maybe once its finished read some more Sherlock Holmes (or other detective or crime fiction), and see if it is enough to kick-start me.

Sure, if I want to be a masochist, and throw loads of my Copious Free Time™ into a project I don't know if I can finish, and which will probably be unpublishable anyway (due to its unfashionable expected length, and how the narrative style will not be particularly easy to read for the length of a novel). :-(

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

There's a chance the Supersense book's text has been updated since the original TV series was made -- it is after all over twenty years old. Biology and the study of sense organs has made a lot of advances in the interim.

[grumpyolddog.livejournal.com]

I can tell you what bits of life are a bugger when you see in mostly monochrome :(

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I've no idea how to do a whodunnit either, but things I don't know how to do always intrigue me. It doesn't take long before I start coming up with theories, and then, of course, they need to be verified... What was that Copious Free Time thing again?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I read crime novel after crime novel hoping I would absorb it through osmosis, and I didn't. ("Whodunnit" is probably here a misnomer; "crime novel" would be more appropriate, but even that's misleading. Plot workings that may work in a modern crime novel may not be appropriate for a Stone Age village society, where there's no such thing as a policeman.

(In any case, the murder story is only the surface-level plot; what the novel is about, on a deeper level, is how a civilisation could bootstrap underwater without access to fire, inspired by a discussion of this subject (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec.arts.sf.science/browse_thread/thread/7b58694487725c43/6bc457e2eb041b4d?hl=en&q=%22Primitive+Science%22+group%3Arec.arts.sf.science&lnk=ol&) on rec.arts.sf.science in 2000.)

(Hmm, I'm increasingly beginning to think I need a writing icon, despite ostensibly having given up writing... Done!)

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Thinking about our senses compared to other animals ours are pretty rubbish. We often develope eye side problems like short-sighted or long-sighted as well which makes us even more disabled. I have never heard of such problems in the natural animal world. Only domesticated get disabled through diseases and lack of care. I guess it is our fault because we bred them like that.

I have read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in school. I cannot remember details. It was shorten as well for silly German students as we were at that time. I don't think very much of shortened versions. The best parts are just taken out. I saw a film of that book much later. It was not like the book.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Thinking about our senses compared to other animals ours are pretty rubbish. We often develope eye side problems like short-sighted or long-sighted as well which makes us even more disabled. I have never heard of such problems in the natural animal world. Only domesticated get disabled through diseases and lack of care. I guess it is our fault because we bred them like that.

You never hear of wild animals with short-sightedness or long-sightedness, because those that have sufficiently bad sight not to be able to spot predators or prey don't survive—they get eaten, or starve, respectively. It's only domesticated animals and humans, which can get taken care of, which survive with defects. For example, according to Wikipedia domestic cats live 12–14 years, but wild cats have a median age of only 4.7 years (with a range from 0–10).

Make no doubt about it: life in nature is nasty, brutish and short.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Our domesticated cats get cat flu and flees if they don't get vaccination. There are diseases that only domesticated animals get. Cats in the wilderness don't even need vaccination. It is true that any disabled animal will starve or get eaten. Only the toughest survive and live shorter in general because they get injured in a fight or get eaten.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Our domesticated cats get cat flu and flees if they don't get vaccination. There are diseases that only domesticated animals get. Cats in the wilderness don't even need vaccination.

I don't know about that (though a look at Wikipedia does say cat fleas are a problem for domesticated cats, without mentioning wild ones). There are plenty of diseases wild animals get, though; for example rabies, or canine distemper, which massacred the North Sea seal population in the late 1980s.

[liv]

I think if you have the desire to write you should write, but if you start hating it again you should stop. I have a suspicion that you'll have more fun writing novels than short stories, and you're no longer approaching the market as a completely new author; with one and a half short stories published, it occurs to me that you have done your time writing at a length that doesn't suit you. I wouldn't worry about whether the projected length is "fashionable"; with the best will in the world, fashions change faster than you write.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

and you're no longer approaching the market as a completely new author

Though since I haven't been practising, I'm sure I'll have forgotten loads and be if not back at square one, then at least part of the way...