Chronocules

Phil asks some questions about The Quiet War:

i've read six short stories in the sequence, Second Skin, Sea Changes.., Reef, The Passenger, Dead Men Walking and Making History. are there others that i may have missed? are you planning on gathering them all in a short story collection? i noted a reference to Greater Brazil in one of them which would tie the sequence in with 400 Billion Stars and your earlier novels although i can't work out the chronology.

The stories published so far are, in order of first publication:
‘Second Skin’ (1997)
‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ (1998)
‘The Gardens of Saturn’ (1998)
‘Reef’ (2000)
‘Making History’ (2000)
‘The Passenger’ (2002)
‘The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (2002)
‘Dead Men Walking’ (2006)

Another story, ‘Incomers’, is due to be published in April this year, in an anthology of stories for teenage readers, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan. So far, there are no plans to collect them together, I’m afraid. And apart from sharing a country called Greater Brazil, neither the stories nor the novels have anything to do with my earlier future history.

Although it’s possible to fit these stories into a rough chronological order -- ‘Making History’ is somewhere near the beginning of things and ‘Reef’ and ‘Second Skin’ are towards the end -- I wasn’t cunning or foresighted enough to work up a proper future history from the start. That’s why, when I started working on the background for The Quiet War and Outer Dark, I realised that I wanted to take things in a slightly different direction. (If I was cleverer than I am I wouldn't make my life so complicated.)

So the stories should be considered as a loosely affiliated set of fictions in their own right, rather than spinoffs, sidebars, or episodes waiting to be stitched together in some kind of fix-up. Although the novels share some of the background and history (and even characters) of the stories, the novels start from a slightly different place, in a slightly different timeline. And it’s my hope that the novels will benefit from the recent avalanche of new information about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn from Galileo and Cassini probes. I couldn’t have done this without them, not to mention Pioneer 11, and the two Voyagers, and of course the teams of scientists and technicians who designed and flew them, and gave form and names to the fantastic diversity of moonscapes they discovered.

Aspire

After I delivered the edited MSS of The Quiet War to Gollancz, I visited the row of little secondhand bookshops in nearby Cecil Court. It’s one of the few streets in London that still maintains the tradition of harbouring the workplaces of various representives of a trade cheek by jowl, and thus, for a bibliophile, it’s horribly full of temptation. Too much temptation: I came away with a first edition of William Golding’s The Spire.

I already have a paperback edition, signed by Golding just after he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published his penultimate novel The Paper Men. He rarely did signings, and I had to queue for a fair while in Blackwells (on Broad Street, Oxford, just around the corner where I worked in those days) before I got my turn with him. A novice to book signings, having already bought The Paper Men in hardback, I purchased a couple of paperbacks at the till beforehand as the price of admission, and also had him sign my first of The Scorpion God, one of the first hardback books I ever bought, (at a much reduced price, in Bristol, a couple of years after it was published). I’ve been a fan of his work since school. Unlike many schoolchildren of my generation - I did the sciences instead of English Literature - I wasn’t taught The Lord of the Flies as a set book, but I read it anyway, and then read everything else of his that I could find. But despite his early popularity, and the Nobel Prize, he seems to have fallen out of fashion after his death; this and his early and enormous success with his first novel means that first editions of his novels (apart from The Lord of the Flies) are fairly plentiful and therefore fairly affordable.

One reason for his unfashionability may be that he never wrote the same book twice, thus resisting easy academic explication. And he is also, it has to be said, something of an old-fashioned writer, not only in his thorough grounding in the classics, but in his assumption of a God-like but detached, forensic point of view. Thus, he never explains or enters the minds or emotional states of his characters, except when the novel is narrated in the first person (and even though his ‘Tarpaulin’ trilogy is written in the first-person, it is in the form of a journal kept to flatter and impress the narrator’s rich and powerful uncle, so we’re kept at one remove from his real thoughts and feelings). Instead, emotion is conveyed only by its physical manifestation; yet this forensic detachment, married with limpid yet incredibly precise prose, conveys very clearly great emotions in a manner that’s both ironic and sympathetic, and on occasion tremendously moving: in The Inheritors, the discovery by the Neanderthal Lok of the bones of his murdered child is, for me, one of the most heartbreaking passages in English literature. It’s the evocative power of his extraordinarily concise, clear-eyed and accurate descriptive prose that first hooked me, and still enthralls me. All of which is a small part of the explanation of why the epigraph of The Quiet War is from Golding’s Free Fall: ‘The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.’ For the rest, you’ll have to read the book.

This Is This

There’s a lot to argue with in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, including his dismissal of the importance of story (contrary to the dust jacket puff he isn’t at all interested in the ‘machinery of storytelling’, whatever that is), and his rather fussy obsession with hierarchies. But there’s a lot of good things too, notably his sustained meditations on the many ways by which character can be conveyed, and his acute sentence-by-sentence anatomisation of judiciously selected passages of prose. And then there’s this:

. . . A convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference . . . but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude. And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage.

Which seems to me to cut straight through the heart of the Gordian knot into which science fiction has currently tied itself, in fits of embarrassment, over ‘relevance’ and ‘probability.’

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

I spent a fair portion of Saturday printing off the edited and rewritten version of The Quiet War. Now it will go off to the copy editor, who’ll scrutinise it for every kind of goof and mark it up, and then I’ll get a final chance to fix the prose before it gets set. This morning, frosty and crystalline, a fine long walk along Regent’s Canal and hooking through Camden to Regent’s Park. Where snowdrops and daffodils are in bloom together, a very odd sight to someone used to gradation of the seasons. When I started this blog, two years ago, I noted in early April that my neighbour’s magnolia tree was just coming into bloom; this year, about six weeks earlier, it’s not that far off. It’s like being caught in one of those scenes in the old movies, where calendar pages flip by to signify passing time, except they’re blowing past all at once, as the whole wide world teeters on its axis . . .

There Are Doors (5)

Aside from the bicycle lock sleeved in blue plastic, this gate could happily feature in a corner of a Piranesi print of antique ruins. It was once the entrance to the now-defunct Tower Theatre, next door to Canonbury Tower, a tall and brick-built Tudor tower built during the reign of Henry VII for William Bolton, Prior of St Bartholomew. Sir Francis Bacon once lived there (and died after catching a chill while experimenting with preserving chickens by stuffing them with snow), as did playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Washington Irving. It now houses the Masonic Research Centre.

Perchance

At the Wellcome Museum’s exhibition on sleep and dreaming, this quote by Hugo Gernsback: ‘Anyone who has a dream should see a doctor.’ Also a cover from one of Mr Gernsback’s magazines showing an editor inside a kind of giant, electrified bed-spring supposed to banish sleep, so that the editor could work on even more inspiring magazines 24/7. In the permanent exhibition, Darwin’s walking stick, topped with a miniature carved skull with emerald eyes, no doubt capable of shooting out evo-devo rays should any henchmen of the Bishop of Oxford menace him.

There Are Doors (4)

One of the butcher shops in the General Market Building at the Farringdon Road end of Smithfield Market, part of the new market built by Horace Jones in 1851-66. It has been empty for several years as conservationists and developers argue about its fate; in three months, the planning authorities will decide if it will be redeveloped, or demolished and replaced by the usual steel and glass office block. Meanwhile, it moulders on, as if in a post-apocalytic city whose inhabitants have long deserted it.

Space Cowboy

One of the muscians covered by Tony Russell’s most excellent Country Music Originals, The Legends and the Lost, is a cowboy singer with the splendid name of Jules Verne Allen. He was born in 1883, so it’s quite possible that his parents were fans of Verne; the novels for which Verne is remembered today were all published before 1880. For the life of me, I can’t think of anyone else named after a writer of science fiction or scientific romance; after characters, yes (there must be plenty of forty-year-olds whose hippy parents named them Bilbo or Gandalf), but writers?