15 January 2017
I spoke to Sydney in order to elicit his own views on the use of the “Tipping point” in the Jeff Hawke stories as discussed in the post of 20th November 2016. He made the interesting observation that this concept really only came into play when both he and Willie Patterson worked jointly on the stories. Sydney says that his own style , when working alone on the stories , was always one of straightforward narrative development. He also observed that in the only story that Patterson wrote alone , “unquiet island” , that it was also one containing a single unfolding narrative. The occurrence of a “ Tipping point” first occurs in SANCTUARY, which was their first collaboration, where both Chalcedon and the Galactic federation suddenly turn up, and change , what is up till then, a fairly straightforward story about monitoring a Venus probe , into a story of Galactic politics ! It continues in many of the stories in which they subsequently collaborated, and which form, in the eyes of many readers, the Golden Age of Hawke. Sydney thinks that this is no co-incidence. There was, he thinks, a particular chemistry that came into play when they worked together ; the elision of Willie Patterson’s ablility to imagine fantastic plot situations together with his own realistic and technically accurate style of drawing caused those “Tipping point “ situations to come about – the real and familiar world, suddenly tipping into the fantastic.
He speaks very highly of his friend’s story-telling gifts and of his ability to hold dissimilar and opposing storylines in his mind at the same time and to knit them together in surprising ways , to put , what might be described as a sort of cognitive dissonance, to a creative use.
Sydney remembers the works of Arthur Koestler, an influential writer and philosopher in the fifties and sixties, one of whose works ‘ The act of creation” explores the use of cognitive dissonance , in various forms of creative endeavour: scientific discovery, art and humour. Willie Patterson’s creativity fitted very well into that very mould. Skipper Prositt
