Collected Fictions, Vol. 3 Book

For the last year or so, I've been working at a film studios.

As I wander around the site, what I find most fascinating is not star-spotting (they tend to be shielded from prying eyes anyway) but the many and varied pre-production activities needed to make the magic of cinema a reality: building sets and props; puppet-people in motion-capture suits; food carts for the crews; the whir of industrial generators; cabling for light and sound; the making of costumes, weapons and jewellery. Real, tangible crafts, performed by and for living, breathing people.

Reading Borges' multi-layerd and ambiguous blending of truth and imagination has made me consider what is real, and what is fiction in new ways.

At the studios, there are sets within sets, to tell stories within stories, as well as different versions of the same story.

First, there was a traditional fairytale, then Uncle Walt's team made a blockbuster animation of it, and now they're making a live action version.

That in itself prompts philosophical musings, but there's more to it than that.

Even this "real" version of the story is illusory. The huge and impressive sets are made of cheap timber, plaster, plastic and polystyrene; their beauty is skin deep, and best viewed from a distance.

Blue and green-screen are used for backgrounds and special effects. Maybe audiences will think the sets are CGI as well, so why have builders, carpenters, and sculptors been toiling for months to create the ephemeral palaces of dreams? Would such a misapprehension diminish or enhance the importance of their work? (This question becomes more personal: I write help and user guides for software; if no one reads what I write, is my effort worthless, my job pointless?)

In a few months, the sets will be dismantled, props and costumes repurposed or thrown away. But an impression will live on in the digital realm and people's memories.

Ephemeral - or not?
Real - or not?


Last month, I touched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She's real.



The publications in this volume of Collected Fictions are reviewed individually:

• 1935, A Universal History of Iniquity 3* - plain, macho stories

Then a group of philosophical, mind-warping stories:

• 1941, The Garden of Forking Paths 6*, which includes:
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 6*
The Library of Babel 6*

• 1944, Artifices 6*

• 1949, The Aleph 6*

• 1960, Dreamtigers (aka The Maker) 5*, which includes
1969, In Praise of Darkness 6*

• 1970, Brodie's Report 4* - back to plainer, more realistic stories, but some have a deeper, more ambiguous aspect

• 1975, The Book of Sand 6* - another switch: back to the style I like best. It includes
The Congress 5*

• 1983, Shakespeare's Memory 6* - the master's final four stories are a triumph.