‘Space,’ according to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘is Big.  Really Big.’

These were probably some of the earliest words I remember from my childhood.  My father used to be a publisher, and growing up the sound of Douglas Adams’s work would drift round the house along with the smell of bacon and the sound of frying in the morning.  Sometimes the man himself would come round for dinner, since he shared not only the same sense of humour as my father, but also the same shirt and shoe size which led for a brotherhood known only to large men – and I’d hide and cower at the end of the room, too intimidated to say anything to this man who’s mind was clearly big enough to almost begin to grasp the bigness of the universe, blow it up and then boil it right back down to a slice of angel cake.

The truth of the matter is, physics has always been a little scary.  I love it, and studied it at school in my own slightly-incompetent way.  (I was a history student taking physics A-Level with a cry of ‘hell, it’ll shake things up at a bit!’)  The first rather depressing thing about physics is that the more you study it, the more you realise everything you know is lies.  Gravity on the earth’s surface, when you’re fifteen years old, is a good old ten newtons of attractive force.  By the time you’re seventeen, it’s 9.81 metres per second squared of acceleration on a kilo of mass, and about three days after your eighteenth birthday, as if you’re suddenly being let into a big secret, your teacher turns round and whispers that actually, damned if anyone really knows what the hell gravity even is.  Good, old-fashioned protons and neutrons suddenly begin to acquire not merely magnetic charge and a bit of a mass, but also elusive qualities such as flavour and strangeness as you break them down into smaller and smaller parts and before you know it, electrons are photons and photons are both waves and particles and the gold leaf went down instead of up and all things considered, it’s probably time for a bit of a lie-down. (more…)

So, two of my all-time favourite fictional characters aren’t actually in books, but on screen. And they were both created by Joss Whedon. I’m talking Spike, aka William the Bloody (Awful Poet), and Wesley Wyndham-Price.

On the surface you might not think they have anything in common. Spike burst into Sunnydale as an unrepentant villain, while Wesley minced his way in as the replacement Watcher for Giles, emphatically a white hat. But as the series, and their characters, evolved, as they transitioned from the world of Buffy to the world of Angel, both characters became more and more nuanced, less and less one-note. More complicated. More ambiguous. And as the lines blurred, so did their allure increase. Spike started doing good, but not always for the right reasons.  Or for pure, unselfish reasons. And Wesley shed his goody two-shoes persona to reveal a man far darker and more damaged than any of us had ever suspected.

But what they also had in common was, at the heart, enough self-knowledge to know they wanted better, they could do better, they needed better. And that struggle became integral to their journey through Whedon’s fictional worlds.

A few months ago, for various reasons, I started watching The Vampire Diaries. And it wasn’t too long before I found myself actively engaged in Damon’s story. Yes, Damon, the bad boy older brother who’d promised to wreak revenge on his younger brother for forcing him into vampirehood, and who delighted in causing misery and mayhem. The other brother? Stefan? The handsome central love interest, hero to the heroine, steadfast and loyal and honourable and good?

Yeah. Meh.

Damon is twisted, he’s complicated, he’s damaged and he’s dangerous. Which means, for me, he is infinitely more intriguing. He fascinates because of his flaws and scars, not despite them. It’s his moral ambiguity that immediately sparks my interest. Every day, he struggles. And in the struggle lies the story.

When it comes to fiction, the morally ambiguous anti-hero  – at least for me – is vastly superior to the straight arrow good guy or gal.

The question is, of course, why? Surely we should be most attracted to the stalwart and shiny, morally unambiguous, never tarnished  hero?  And maybe we are, in real life. Or tell ourselves we are, anyway. (more…)