First Class

Some of Paul Di Filippo's mail art.

The Zeppelin Building

Fairyland

I recently received my author’s copies of the reprint of Fairyland, part of Gollancz’s Modern Classics series - I’m afraid that the cover picture on Amazon doesn’t do justice to its lovely holographic sheen...

From the first chapter, which kicks off in the restored Great Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station:

Gilbert Scott's great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby. He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it onto his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach. A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast forward. There's a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella. It's monsoon weather.

Mr Brooks

Out for some time in the States, about to be realeased here, the serial killer genre gets a (slightly) new twist with Kevin Kostner as Mr Brooks, a mild-mannered businessman who is using the Twelve Step programme to try to give up his addiction to murder. Haunted and continually tempted by his alter ego, Marshall, a fine portrait of sinister and supernaturally smart hunger by William Hurt, Brooks, a.k.a. the Thumbprint Killer, steps into a world of trouble when he gives in to temptation for one last time. His double murder is witnessed by a nerdish amateur photographer (Dane Cook), who blackmails Brooks into initiating him into the murder club. So far so good. Dane Cook’s sweaty nervousness nicely ratchets up the unpredictability and Kostner (always at his best when he dons a bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses) and Hurt are a great double act; there’s a very fine moment when, after half an hour of bickering, they both laugh at the same time at the same nasty little idea, and you realise just how indivisible they really are.

Trouble is, the movie can’t resist piling on the issues. The policewoman hunting the Thumbprint Killer, played by Demi Moore, is not only a millionairess, she’s not only being taken to the cleaners by her soon-to-be-divorced husband and his rapacious lawyer, but she’s also being pursued by another serial killer who’s just escaped from prison and wants revenge. I half-expected her to be suffering from some kind of rare terminal illness, too. And Mr Brooks’s daughter hasn’t dropped out of college because she may or may not be pregnant: she’s inherited her father’s addiction, and has just botched her first effort. All of this is more or less skilfully resolved into a clever and neatly packaged ending, but it’s at the expense of proper development of the three-cornered relationship between Mr Brooks, Marshall, and the wannabe.

Demi Moore as usual sticks her chin in the air too much but wrings a few good moments from for her overblown character - but we’re also treated to the usual gratuitous scene of her exercising with grim determination (we got the message after G.I. Jane, Demi: give it a rest). Portland, Oregon, provides a fairly anonymous setting. Three out of five stars - partly in the hope that this will get Hurt much more work.

No End To 'Em

Jeremy Lassen asked if I’d mention that Nightshade Press is having a clearout sale. I will. They are. And because this blog is operated on the principle of unbiased coverage beholden with no special bias towards anyone in particular (except to me), I’ll also mention that Small Beer Press, Earthling, and PS Publishing also produce some pretty good books.

End of Round Two

I’m sure you’re all be thrilled to know that I’ve finished the second draft of the first Quiet War novel. Okay, well, I’m thrilled. And exhausted. Something like thirty thousand words were cut, this time around (and a few new ones added), and now the baggy monster has a definite shape and intent. It still doesn’t have a title, but that will come along. (I did think of calling this one War, and the next, Peace, but only, I swear, for a moment.)

I should take a break. But I have an introduction to write, and a short story that’s banging on the inside of my head, demanding to be let out.

I have managed to do a bit of reading. Michael Chabon’s fine The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and then, because I liked that one so much, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Connelly’s The Overlook. Adam Roberts’s Land of the Headless. Al Reynolds’s The Prefect. Rajiv Chandraskaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections. And Endless Things, the fourth and last part of John Crowley’s patient chronicle of becoming and unbecoming.

Science Friction

Peter Hollo asks which edition of Nature features the discission on biology and SF. It’s the July 5 edition, with a retro-pulp cover, and also includes an excellent article by Gary Wolfe about how SF has dealt with the ‘many worlds’ of quantum mechanics, a short story by Richard A Lovett and articles and Saturn’s eccentric little moon Hyperion (which I won’t be visiting in the ongoing novel) and a mystery about Mars’s so-called warm and wet period. They’re spoiling us.

I wasn’t going to mention the recent little spat about mainstream writers ‘borrowing’ SF tropes, kicked off by Jason Sanford’s article, ‘Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool: The US literary Establishment’s Need-Hate Relationship with Speculative Fiction’, published in the New York Review of Science Fiction. The affair was even summarised in the Guardian’s From the Blogs feature - yes, in a mainstream newspaper. Gosh. Matthew Cheney wrote an acerbic deconstruction, Sanford replied, and off it went. Anyway, the Nature discussion did get sidetracked on definitions of SF, and then I came across something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons:

‘[Science fiction} writers are joiners. They are a lodge. If they didn’t enjoy having a gang of their own so much, there would be no such category as science fiction. They love to stay up all night, arguing the question, "What is science fiction?" One might as usefully inquire, "What are the Elks? And what is the Order of the Evening Star?"’

And then this bunch of mainstream writers turns up at the party unannounced, and they don’t even have the decency to bring their own bottle...

How To Save Science

Make lab coats sexy.

(you'll need to page down to find it)

The Nature of the Beast

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a conversation with three other science-fiction writers - Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski and Peter Watts - about biology and science fiction. A transcript of the four-way interview, mediated by the irrepressible Oliver Morton, has been published in the latest edition of Nature and it’s available online, but unfortunately you’ll need a subscription to access the article and the cartoon illo (in which I appear to be Paul Merton imitating Commander Kang).

Our favourite moments in biological sf? Ken’s can be found in James Blish’s ‘Sunken Universe’ (aka ‘Surface Tension’); Joan’s in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos; Peter’s in Alice Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’; and mine in Greg Bear’s Blood Music...