So It's Come To This (Part 2)

A big thank you to everyone who posted comments on my idiosyncratic list of what I consider to be essential SF works. It's given me a lot of food for thought - I'm certain that a second list, just as good, could be constructed from alternates. And why not? Mine is a fairly personal snapshot, and by no means definitive.

After due consideration, I've decided to add the following titles:

Herland CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN 1914
The Shockwave Rider JOHN BRUNNER 1975

I confess that I haven't read Herland, but it's commonly agreed to be an essential early feminist utopia and fits in with the pedagogic 'themes and echoes' side of the list. A lot of people came out for Brunner, which is pretty heartening considering most of his work is currently OOP. Rather than the people's favourite, Stand on Zanzibar, or Jagged Orbit, which both have considerable merit, I've gone for The Shockwave Rider, which is even more prescient than the first two.

I'll post my list of Fantasy and Horror titles tomorrow.

Upcoming

Pyr's Fall/Winter 2009/2010 season.

PS: Hero editor Lou Anders has just posted the cover of the US edition of The Quiet War over on the Pyr site. Spaceships!

Soyuz: The Next Generation

As the three-man Soyuz spaceship, now more than forty years old, begins to show its age*, there are reports about Russian plans to build a next-generation six-seater spacecraft that could not only reach Earth orbit, but also provide a shuttle service for an as yet golden-vapourware lunar orbit space station. BBC news has a concept picture: it doesn't much resemble the much-touted shuttle look-alike Kliper, but seems to be a rival for NASA's Orion, a mockup of which is just about to begin open-water testing. I hope this is for real - as far as I'm concerned, you can never have too many spaceships.

*A genuine seat-of-the-pants space emergency and it doesn't make the mainstream news? Maybe we're finally beginning to think that space travel is sort of routine . . .

Eternal Return

The new reprint of Eternal Light is published today, along with nine other titles in Gollancz’s space opera promotion.

It was first published in 1991, although I began working on it a couple of years before that - about twenty years ago, in fact. It still means a lot to me. I’d already published two novels and a short-story collection, but Eternal Light was a big step up: far more ambitious and, although nowhere near as long as the 600 page epics routinely turned out these days, fairly hefty for its day. I wrote it under fairly difficult and depressing personal circumstances, and in the middle of the first draft moved from Oxford to St Andrews, Scotland, to take up my first and last proper full-time job. So much of the writing was done in a corner of a dismal university flat, which I shared with a tribe of trilobite-sized silverfish, in the middle of my first Scottish winter, while grappling with teaching and trying to re-establish my research programme. Still, I persevered, typing away on my very first, and fabulously expensive, PC. I was fiercely ambitious, then, and the writing flowed, as Robert Frost put it, on its own melting, propelled by Mahler and Robert Johnson.

I wanted to write a new kind of space opera, punkishly incorporating and reimagining all the tropes from the various kinds of old space opera I’d loved to read as a teenager, starting in excavated ruins on an alien planet with a storm coming on, moving halfway across the galaxy to the supermassive black hole at its heart and stranger regions beyond, and returning to a transfigured Earth. Whether or not I succeeded isn’t for me to say, but rereading the first pages I detect a promising if not altogether refined vigour:

It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes amongst the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core. Or it began long after one Alea family had slaughtered most of the others and forced the rest to flee the core, when a binary star came too close to the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy. Or perhaps it began half a million years after that, when Alea infesting asteroids girdling the red dwarf star BD +20̊ 2465 destroyed a Greater Brazilian flyby drone as it shot through their adopted system. That’s where it began for Dorthy Yoshida, for instance, although it happened a dozen years before she was born . . .

Eternal Light was the first of my novels to be nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it was on the short-list for the BSFA award (it lost both times, hey-ho), and it was my first US hardback. Twenty copies of the British hardback were numbered and signed before publication, although I don’t think they’re worth much more than ordinary signed editions; an unknown number were bound upside-down (again, nothing especially valuable), and there’s a rare alternate dust jacket - I have one, and gave another away in a competition: these may be the only survivors. And now it’s back!

In Perspective

Rooting around in the cellars of the web, I came across these beautiful depictions of the spacecraft that might have been used in the various manned missions to Mars planned over the past 45 years. Of course, the perennial cry of critics has been that missions like these would be fantastically expensive - far too expensive to contemplate doing it in the near future. But let's get those costs into perspective. President Obama has estimated that taxpayers will have to pay in the region of 2.3 trillion dollars to bail out the American banking system. It'll probably be more: this estimate was announced February and if we've learned one thing during the ongoing crisis it's that everything costs way more than any estimate. Even so, that's enough to fully fund five manned missions to Mars, assuming each costs around 450 billion dollars, the high end of estimated costs. Likewise, the cost of bailing out just two UK banks could fund three missions. Seems like a bargain to me.