Kensington Market Solstice Festival 2022: A Photoessay

Kensington Market is a district in Toronto, adjacent to Chinatown, with a multicultural population, a lot of artists and artist-adjacent people, secondhand shops, imported food stores, and exciting graffiti. Around this time of year, they do a solstice festival and parade which incorporates elements of Indigenous, African, European and neopagan solstice traditions, to reflect the cultural makeup of the area. This year I went along and took pictures, including anatomically correct crow wings, stilt-walking torch bearers, powwow dancers in jingle dresses and flaming clarinets. Yes, flaming clarinets.

The Starlost bonus “episode”: Ben Bova’s The Starcrossed

In the interests of completism, and possibly masochism, I decided it might be worth reading and reviewing Ben Bova’s novel The Starcrossed. This book always comes up when The Starlost is discussed because, as the title suggests, it’s based, albeit loosely, on Bova’s time as technical advisor on the series.

The novel is set at some unstated time in the relatively near future: there are rejuvenation techniques, 3D holographic televisions, and legal marijuana, although pollution and climate change are getting worse (in a near-the-knuckle satire, the city of Los Angeles has taken to dyeing the smog pretty colours and perfuming it to make it more attractive). A television company, hearing of a revolutionary new 3D production technique, decides to make use of it with a blockbuster space opera written by Ron Gabriel, a popular SF writer, which is a sort of mashup between the concept of The Starlost, and Romeo and Juliet (two lovers from feuding clans of space-faring merchants run away together, fleeing from planet to planet with their families in pursuit).

Hijinks inevitably ensue as the production is moved to Canada to save costs: the Canadian production team prove to be hopeless incompetents, a Neanderthal hockey star is cast as the male lead to improve local ratings, the scripts are sourced from a high-school writing competition (something which I’ve heard asserted about the actual Starlost, but I wonder if it isn’t something that Bova made up which bled out into popular perception). Eventually it becomes apparent that the production company is just using the production as a cover for embezzling investor funds, and it all goes, well, south. Bova does, however, give his series the happy ending that The Starlost never had, perhaps a bit of wish-fulfilment, and incidentally invents the deepfake in the process.

Reasonably accurate cover art– most editions are just generic spacescapes.

As a satire of 1970s TV production it’s, well, okay I guess. The portrayal of the Canadian TV industry as small-scale and incompetent seems a bit ironic in hindsight, but then, at the time of The Starlost, it was. The parade of evil Hollywood executives, profiteers, drug-addled directors, prurient censors and ageing stars is entertaining, though not terribly original, and the SF elements are fairly slight but used to good satirical effect.

It doesn’t really provide much insight into The Starlost, however, mostly reading like the author’s rant against television production more generally. Some of it’s plainly not true: For instance a scene where model designers are shown as having no understanding of design or physics, which is certainly not the case for The Starlost‘s actual model team. Although Robin Ward might not be the greatest actor in the world, he’s certainly not a belligerent thug along the lines of “Francois Dulac”, the hockey player in The Starlost, Gay Rowan isn’t an ageing star rejuvenating herself to stay current, and the series never recruited any brilliant but drug-addicted Hollywood directors. Ron Gabriel, the Harlan Ellison-alike character, rings true as an antagonistic figure, but Ellison walked out on the series much faster than his fictional equivalent did. Beyond that the Canadians of the early 1970s were small-scale operators with a lot of anti-American chauvinism, I can’t really see much of the actual production experience in it at all.

Generally, then, I’d say it’s an interesting coda, but not one which really explains much about what actually happened to turn The Starlost from a good idea into the mess it became.

LEXX 3.07: Tunnels

Kai is stuck in Hogtown, a city of tedious bureaucrats and insurance claims people, and before you can say, “isn’t Hogtown one of the less flattering nicknames for Toronto?”, the rest of us have noted that LEXX is one of the three pieces of filmed theatre for which Nova Scotia is famous (the other two, if you’re interested, are Trailer Park Boys and Hobo With A Shotgun, both of which, incidentally, feature Brian “Stanley Tweedle” Downey), so yes, this is undoubtedly a swipe at the city Canadians love to hate.

Meanwhile Xev, Stan and Prince escape K-Town through the eponymous tunnels, ducking madly sadistic ballerinas and transvestites (stay classy, LEXX: it really was not a simpler time).

A pretty boring episode, so I’lll just say that Prince is shaping up to be a really good character, who I’m never sure whether I want to love or hate.

Homecoming week

One night in the summer of 1994, around 3 AM, I woke up to the sound of a key in the lock of the door of my room.

This was when I was working for a Public Sector Organisation. It was headquartered in a town that had a Budapest-like divide between the wealthier and poorer sections. My main concern at the time was rent, so naturally I was living in the latter. But I also wasn’t unaware of the risks that would come with that.

However, there was also a nursing college in that part of town. Which had a residence, and which also happily rented out rooms to non-nurses if they had some available. A friend who also worked for Public Sector Organisation had stayed there the previous summer, so it came recommended. It seemed like the perfect solution: community, solidarity in numbers, the presence of other people working in the Public Sector who were new in town. And a security guard on reception.

Who didn’t work nights.

So I sat up in bed saying something that probably sounded like “whazzafluck?” Heart pounding, trying to cope with the fact that, despite all my security precautions, someone, someone who was not authorised to do so, was not even breaking into my room, but was actually. Coming. In. With. A. Key.

The door swung open, to reveal, not burglars, rapists or emergency services personnel, but two girls in their late teens.

The first one looked me straight in the bleary eyes and said, cheerfully, “Oh, hello. I didn’t realised they’d rented the room out again. Mind if I show my friend around?”

And then, while I sat there in bed trying to figure it out, she literally gave her friend a tour. It wasn’t a big room, so the tour was along the lines of, “this is the bed, and this is the cupboard, and this is the bookshelf, and this is the window and this is the desk…”

She then smiled, said goodbye, and walked out, closing the door behind her.

The next day the security guard was very apologetic, swearing blind that he hadn’t know she’d kept a copy of the key (I believed him, but not so sure I believed the building manager’s similar denial), and agreeing both to move me to a different room as soon as possible, and to keep my laptop in the combination-locked secure room until that could happen (1990s laptops being expensive and huge).

The story, as much as I could tell, was that she was a local girl who had run away from a bad home situation and used the nursing residence as a sort of halfway stop between getting away from her family and actually getting out of town. She’d just moved out one day, presumably having found a way to do just that.

So that explained the surreal reunion tour. With a biography like that one, the desk, the cupboard, and the bookshelf– your own desk, cupboard and bookshelf– do rather become very significant things.

And if somebody who’d lived in my house back in the day came by and wanted to visit, I’d be happy to let them in to relive the old memories.

Not, however, normally at 3 AM!

Life Lessons from a Tour Guide

If you had to ask me what has been the most useful job for me in terms of skills learned, I’d have to say the two summers I spent working as a tour guide at a (Victorian military) living history museum. Here’s what you learn from a job like that:

How to compartmentalise. Because if you’ve got back-to-back tours, you can’t be thinking about everything that went wrong on Tour One while you’re leading Tour Two.

How to deal with difficult people. Because if a guest is angry, or upset, or determined to ruin the fun for the rest of the tour, or coming out with an appalling remark about those members of the historical interpretation staff who aren’t white or male (those were rare, but they happened), you have to be able to respond calmly and cheerfully, but very firmly.

How to deal with difficult people (schoolchild edition). After a few tours I figured out that the trick is, identify the attention-seeking ones and make sure they’re getting attention. It can even be seemingly negative attention: they’re the ones who will actually love it if you “pick on” them to help demonstrate something, or make them stand in the corner of the Victorian schoolroom when running a pretend lesson, or similar, and the shyer members of the class get to giggle with relief that it’s not them.

How to deliver information in 45-60 minutes to a group of people of varying skills, knowledge levels, English levels and boredom. There’s a surprising amount of overlap between tour guiding and university lecturing.

How to deal with the unexpected. For instance: in one of the museum rooms, the German-speaking guides were encouraged to point out a picture of Prince Albert, ask if anyone knew who he was, and prompt them by saying he was the most famous German in the British Empire. Usually German-language tours didn’t know (one student suggested “Bismark?” which wasn’t a bad guess), but then came the tour who all chanted out his name, birthplace, pedigree and life history in unison. Turned out they were from Saxe-Coburg.

How to improvise. If you’re all set to take a tour into the soldiers’ living quarters, and one of the senior staff brushes by and whispers to you that you can’t do that bit because a schoolchild on the previous tour has vomited onto one of the beds, you’ve got to turn round without a blink and say, “I’m sorry, we can’t go into the living quarters, Sergeant Smith’s wife is having a baby, so let’s go visit the underground fortifications instead.”

How people deal with frame breaches. If a tourist happened to accidentally venture into one of the backstage areas (the office, the staffroom, or God forbid the locker rooms), they would inevitably make exactly the same joke about “the old Victorian computer system [refrigerator, hair dryer, whatever]” and wander out again. After a while I began to find the fact that they all used the same script rather interesting: I suspect that if they’d done the same at an amusement park, they’d just have said, “oh sorry”, but when you’re dressed up and performing, there needs to be that little extra layer of joking to make it right.

How to find fun. One of the best pieces of advice the guiding manual gave was to make sure you’re enjoying the tour yourself: if you’re not having fun, neither will the guests. So you have to get creative. Give different pieces of information in different ways. Develop narratives. Do improv drama with other staff members. At one point I wound up giving an impromptu chorus of Pirate Jenny’s song from The Threepenny Opera (long story, but it made sense in context). But it’s definitely true of just about everything that you need to find the fun in it– and that you can always find some way of locating, deriving or creating the fun.

Driving Ambition: Chapter One

Just thought I’d mention that my first novel, Driving Ambition, a tale of murder, labour relations, and self-driving cars, has had its launch event at Can-Con.

Here is a video of me reading the first chapter…

Britons: I’ll be interviewed live at the BSFA meeting on 24 October, and will bring copies for sale. Canadians: There are copies available at Can-Con. Everyone: I’ll be posting an ordering link as soon as I have one.