A Real Big Robot

The guys who built this have clearly seen the Terminator movies...

That Was The Week That Was...

In which I finished a short story, wrote a very rough draft of another that I’m not going to call 'Big Space Robot', wrote an introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s short story collection, went to the Clarke Awards and cheered Geoff Ryman’s win for his very fine novel, Air, indulged in silliness with booksellers courtesy of one of my publishers and received two advance copies of the handsome paperback of Mind’s Eye from the other. Oh, and signed a contract for a Dutch edition of Mind’s Eye, and for a three book deal...

Not that I’m asking for indulgence for not having added anything here in the past few days, you understand.

Bears Find MacDonald's

This item in last week’s New Scientist about ‘evolution operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with ‘evolutionary illusions’’ has been bugging me. It’s not just that it sometimes uses ‘evolution’ when it means ‘selection’ (selection is what operates on individuals, as in selection for an Olympics team; if it operates on enough individuals with enough consistency over enough time, so that those individuals with one genetically determined quality produce more offspring that other individuals of the same species, then evolution kicks in . . . but that doesn’t seem to be going on in the examples quoted). Or that at least one example, of sea turtles fatally mistaking city lights for the gleam of moon- or star light on the ocean, doesn’t have any evolutionary content; so far, we don’t have any evidence that those foolish turtles are evolving to live on land, although to be fair perhaps turtles that use other cues than light to navigate them towards the moon-dappled sea may survive more often, and thus the sea turtle species evolves). It’s also because it assumes that the urban environment is a novel niche, which it may not always be (squirrels occupy parks and gardens with trees - what’s novel about that?), and it doesn’t address the question of why some species live in cities and some don’t, perhaps because it raises the spectre of ‘preadaptation’, or colonisation of empty niches. After all, if you plant some trees in a city, don’t be surprised if species associated with trees turn up. And it makes no mention of the one species on which urban living may consistently operate at an evolutionary level: human beings.

On the other hand, the analyses of the effects of urban living on animal behaviour are fascinating, and the scientists quoted in the article are quite right to be excited: they seem to have found an empty research niche to colonise, and one which seems to be tremendously productive. Already, more than fifty per cent of human beings alive today live in cities, and cities are using up more and more of the countryside around them, not only as sites for buildings and roads, but also for industrialised agricultural production and leisure. In Britain, there are now very few areas which are in their original ‘natural’ state; almost all British fauna and flora have already adapted, and perhaps evolved, to cope with human intrusion, or are surviving in shrinking island niches.

Indulging a Meme

It’s my birthday today (‘Happy birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me,’ yadda yadda), so it’s the day to indulge the blog birthday meme.

Three cute things that happened on this day . . .
This is about as close as I can get to ‘cute’: today is World Book Day - I like the idea of a rose being given away with every book purchased. Also on this day: in 1896, motion pictures premiered at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, New York; in 1838, Brunel’s steamship the Great Western docked in New York after a record-breaking voyage across the Atlantic.

Two birthdays . . .
J.M.W. Turner, and Shirley Temple Black (by coincidence, when she was a child, my mother was a fan of Shirley Temple, and I still have a promotional booklet celebrating the eighth birthday of the winsome moppet).

One death . . .
William Shakespeare (it was also his birthday).
Now if you’ll excuse me, there are candles to blow out on a cake.

The Three Ages of Mars

Scientists mapping mineral deposits have concluded that Mars went through three distinct eras: about half a billion years of being warm and wet, followed by a 600 million year period of intense vulcanism, and then three and a half billion years of dry deep-freeze. Was the first era long enough for life to have arisen?

Wild Flavour

I’ve just started in on Karl Taro Greenfield’s China Syndrome, an account of the events surrounding the SARS epidemic of 2003. Not only is it a great account of the detective work that identified the causative agent (albeit slightly wonky on a few of the technical details - he doesn’t quite get how electron microscopes work, for instance), but it’s told from the Chinese perspective, and he has an amazing range of contacts. And framing the story is a wonderful perspective on the explosive free-for-all growth of the Pearl River Delta, the first of China’s Special Economic Zones in the Era of Wild Flavour, that’s as crammed with pumped-up weirdness as any science fiction novel.

Watching You, Watching Me

Is it wrong to think that the implications of this item from The Observer:

Theme park visitors will soon be able to opt for electronic tags which let security cameras record a personalised DVD memento of their day out. Entrants to Alton Towers in Staffordshire will be offered wrist bands containing tiny Radio Frequency Identification chips that will allow them to be watched as they used the park and filmed on rides.

are more than a little sinister?

Caught in the Draft

I’m now on the third draft of the short story, and I’ve learned that the narrator knew that his brother was dead before the story begins, that he retrieves the astrophysicist’s body from its lonely orbit around the brown dwarf, and that the alien, All This Useless Beauty, tells the navy garrison about the narrator’s attempt to escape because, for reasons of its own, it wants his story to be more exciting.

‘Draft’ is a very flexible concept in the age of the infinitely malleable word-processed document, but I still write most stories and novels more or less as I did when I used a typewriter: each draft is printed out and marked up with corrections and notes, which form the basis of changes made to the next draft. But unlike my typewritten manuscripts, a considerable amount of redrafting happens on screen, as sentences grow or shrink, move from one place to another or vanish altogether, and I no longer have to retype pages that have more than three mistakes on them, dab on blobs of correction fluid, or make up sandwiches using carbon paper for the final draft.

You Can’t Make It Up

Further to yesterday’s entry, I’ve just finished James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love, a dense and chewy novel that thoroughly deserves all the plaudits it has garnered. An interview with the author which first appeared in the online magazine Three Monkeys is appended to the end of the paperback, and contains this observation:

I don’t believe in the idea of completely fictional worlds. You can never separate made-up milieux from the words you use to describe them, words which will, unavoidably, resonate in the readers’ heads with the not-made up milieux they have experienced. I read a lot of science-fiction in my early teens and I recognised all the worlds there, every one.

This is something that every reader and writer of science fiction knows, of course, but it’s rare to see it stated by someone from outside the genre. Indeed, science fiction is often attacked by those who have not read it for being entirely made up - an accusation that’s increasingly used by lazy commentators on all works of fiction that are not obviously rooted in the direct experiences of their authors.

On lacking an angle

The paperback of my novel Mind’s Eye is due out in June. As usual, a couple of months before the great day, my agent asked my publishers what might be happening on the marketing and publicity front. As it happens my publishers have some good news about a couple of promotions by big booksellers, and promise to do their very best to get some exposure in the round-up review columns of newspapers and magazines. So all is cool; unless your books regularly hit the upper reaches of the bestselling charts, you can’t expect a paperback edition to set the world on fire. But part of one sentence in their response to my agent’s routine query did catch my attention. It’s this: ‘there’s no real feature angle regarding Paul’s own experience to exploit re this book.’

Now, I’m not about to diss my publishers or publicist. Far from it. It’s a routine response that reflects an admirable realism about the media climate in which they have to operate. And it’s that climate that I want to discuss.

Y’see, as far as the British mainstream media is concerned, it isn’t enough for you to be a novelist who just happens to have had a novel published. Yawn. Big deal. Happens all the time, and novels aren’t, well, y’know, sexy or immediate, are they? And that’s why no journalist wants to talk to a novelist unless either he or she has incorporated some raw and bleedingly obvious chunk of their own life in their novel, or unless he or she is notorious for some reason that has nothing to do with the book they happen to have written. Far easier, after all, to sell an interview with someone notorious or famous, (and do the research via the clippings library and Google), than an overview of somebody’s writing career (and read the bloody books). And so most of the novels that win the attention of the Sunday supplements, glossy magazines, and TV and radio are: (1) those (almost always written by journalists) that lightly fictionalise some current ‘issue’; (2) those in which, as in the self-help positive-thinking psychotherapy industry, the author works through a trauma in his or her own life; and (3) those which are part of a package of products exploiting the brand of someone famous for something other than writing books.

This isn’t, I say again, the fault of the publishers, who can no more influence the media than they can the weather, or the buying policy of big-chain booksellers. No, it’s the fault of a muddy collusion between a facile, money-driven PR industry and lazy journalists and commissioning editors, and it’s why all too many high profile novels are little different from misery memoirs and the ghostwritten ‘autobiographies’ of celebrities who have ‘triumphed’ over what others might think are the usual traumas of childhood, and why the articles about their authors always tread over the same already well-trodden ground.

But listen - here’s a secret. All novels embody in some form or another the author’s experience. That’s why there are no novels written by babies. It isn’t because babies can’t write (celebrity novelists can’t write either - that’s why they have people who do it for them); it’s because babies don’t have any experience. They don’t have anything to write about.

It’s quite true that there’s no feature angle regarding my own ‘experience’ to ‘exploit’ re Mind’s Eye. Nevertheless, Mind’s Eye does contain a good deal of my own experience - my own life. To take something bleedingly obvious: the hero of the book, Alfie Flowers, lives around the corner from where I live. He slouches around the same streets, wears the same kind of black leather jacket, is a regular in the same pub, and talks to the same kinds of people as I do. Not only that, but like me his grandparents loomed large in his childhood, and he was close only to one parent (his mother died when he was very young; my father was never much around when I was a kid, and he eventually divorced my mother). But Alfie Flowers isn’t me, of course. He isn’t the author. He’s this other character, Alfie Flowers, who insists on having his own hang-ups and his own agenda . . .

Wait a minute - I’ve just realised something. The fact that I don’t have an angle is all Alfie’s fault.

Can We Rebuild You?

Philip K. Dick's head is missing.

Cinema Macabre

Just received my contributor’s copies of the rather beautiful Cinema Macabre. Edited by the indefatigable Mark Morris, who asked fifty practitioners of the genre to contribute an essay on their favourite horror movie, it features terrific artwork by J.K. Potter and an introduction by Jonathan Ross. Buy it to find out what Simon Pegg has to say about Dawn of the Dead, why Michael Marshall Smith has that insidious music from Halloween as his ringtone, why China Mieville can just about forgive Russell Mulcahy for that infamous video of Duran Duran prancing around on a yacht, and why Kim Newman thinks Let’s Scare Jessica To Death deserves a place in his all-time top ten.

I chose Videodrome, by the way.

Ubiquitous dwarfs

Just finished the first draft of a short story which, although it needs several more passes through the word processor, now has a beginning, middle, and end. Part of the action takes place around a brown dwarf; while doing a spot of research last week I found a report about a brown dwarf that has only just been discovered on our doorstep, relatively speaking. This one is 12.7 light years from the Sun; the nearest orbits Epsilon Indi, just 11.8 light years away.

I have a soft spot for these odd little critters, which are formed in the same way as stars but are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion. They featured in my first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, published way back in 1988, when brown dwarfs were still a theoretical concept. And now it seems they may be as numerous as ordinary stars, and because they’re heated by nothing more than gravitational contraction and the odd spot of deuterium fusion, the coolest brown dwarfs have water and methane in their atmospheres -- and the possibility of some form of life. But that’s another story.

Green thoughts

I write for a living. That means that I spend quite a bit of my day sitting in front of a computer screen, either typing, or thinking about what I’m going to be typing next. The computer sits in the corner of an L-shaped desk in one corner of my office, so that I’m facing away from the window, which in any case usually has the curtain drawn across it. The idea is that I’m not tempted to idle away my hours gazing out at the view across the North London rooftops towards the tree line of Highgate. To freely quote Joe Lansdale: the only way to get the job done is to sit your ass down in front of the typewriter and write.

When things are going well, that’s what I do. More often, that’s what I do in between spells of some kind of displacement behaviour -- picking up books and reading a couple of sentences and putting them down, or making coffee, or, when it’s not raining too hard, pottering in the garden.

The last activity is actually useful. When you’re stuck, or you’re not quite sure where to take something, it’s a good idea to go do something else for a while. Walking is good; so is tidying the garden. Both options are much more attractive than they were last week. Then, we were at the end of a long cold dry spell. Now, with the suddeness of the kind of good old-fashioned spring we can’t take for granted any more, it’s warmer and damper. My clematis has burst into a cloud of pale, waxy, scented flowers, lilies of the valley have thrust up fat red spears, and the neighbour’s magnolia tree has grown tall pale candles from what were tightly packed buds only a few days ago. And I can stand on the top of the helical iron staircase that leads down into our garden (we live in the top two floors of an early Victorian house) and sip coffee and listen to the birds defining their territories and think green thoughts, before climbing back up to the screen in the corner and writing this.