A Very British History

Further to my recent post about alt.space.hist, I've posted my story A Very British History at the other place.

The Dangercon

Here’s the programme for a small one-day not entirely serious fundraising convention - Plotka.con.pi The Dangercon - at which I’m appearing, along with Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and many others, on 27 May.

What’s it for? James Bacon, the organiser, writes:
This will be a one-day mini-con in aid of the League of Fan Funds, the Trans Atlantic part of which I am administrating. As you may know its an altruistic fund, sending a European delegate over to the World Science Fiction Convention in the states. The event is timed to coincide with the close of voting in the 2006 race for the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), giving attendees in the UK a last opportunity to vote as well as hearing the winner announced on the night.

PROGRAMME
12.00 Subverting sex roles in Dangermouse Fandom
13.00 Virtual Guide to a Literary Brentford by Lee Justice and Graham Hill
14.30 ConFounding Tales presents "Death in the Air" The Spine-Chilling tale of the Heisenburg Disaster...
Simon McRory, Dougs Spencer
16:00 Alternative Londons, with Kim Newman, Paul McAuley and Paul Cornell
17.30 Comics one should read, but not by Alan Moore
Jim de Liscard
19.00 Year of the Teledu Fanny Family Fortune Ashes.
20.30 The influences on The Doctor as a character.
Paul Cornell, Kim Newman and Paul McAuley.
(voting will close at 9pm)
22.00 Fan Fund Auction, which will break for the announcement of the TAFF winner.

Alternative Programme, on the roof.
14:00 How to Kung Fu with instructor Jess Bennett.
17:00 D.I.Y. Artist Trading Cards with Flick.

VENUE
Plokta.con. pi: The Dangercon on Saturday 27 May 2006.
12 noon to 12 midnight in The Horseshoe Inn, 26 Melior Street, London SE1 3QP.

The Way It Wasn't

Ellen points me towards another alt.space.hist movie. It looks good. If only I had broadband (do you really think that this writing malarky pays enough for me to afford all mod cons?). I’m sure there must be more out there, and I don’t mean Capricorn One.

I love this stuff. It not only allows you to wallow in nostalgia, but also puts history back on the right track. I’ve even made a tiny contribution of my own, in the form of the short story ‘A Very British History.’

Apostrophe Apocalypse

Never mind red spots. Today I have been mostly taking out commas.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be mostly putting them back in.

Later on, I’ll be heading into town, to see the more-famous-than-me SF writer Stephen Baxter. I want to give him a DVD copy of a marvellous Russian faux documentary, The First on the Moon. It’s a very clever and enthralling mashup of existing and faked material that creates a Secret History of the Soviet manned Lunar program, with a lovely, poignant coda. Given Mr Baxter’s interest in alternate space programs, I’ll be intrigued to see what he makes of it. The DVD was passed on to me by Kim Newman, who was given it at a film festival, and as far as I know, the film hasn’t had a theatrical release in the UK or the US, although it was shown at the recent SF film festival here in London. But if you do get a chance to see it, don’t miss it.

A Little Spot Of Red

This week I received the edit of my crime novel Players (Simon & Schuster are publishing it in February 2007), and I’ve been busy ever since correcting the embarrassing errors in continuity and consistency that my aimiable but eagle-eyed editor has spotted, and also giving the text what I call its final polish.

Now you may think that when I or any other author submits an MSS it should be letter perfect. In my case, if only. As far as I’m concerned, writing a novel is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge - no sooner have you finished, than you spot loose rivets, the odd patch of rust... But this polishing business isn’t only about correcting bloopers. I’ll be doing that in earnest after the copy editor gets through with it. It’s also something like what used to go on in the Royal Academy in the nineteenth century, during the Varnishing Days set aside for Academicians to make the final touches to their exhibits, toning down or heightening completed works before they were displayed in the public arena of the Exhibition room. John Gage gives a marvellous account of an instance of Turner’s competitive fine-tuning of his painting Helveotslyuys, which was shown with Constable’s Opening of Waterloo Bridge:

[Turner’s work was] a grey picture, beautiful but true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable’s ‘Waterloo’ seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while [Constable] was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the ‘Waterloo’ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. [C.R. Leslie] came into the room just as Turner left. ‘He has been here,’ Constable said, ‘and fired a gun.’ . . . The great man did not come again into the room for a day and a half; and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.

That’s what I’m trying to do (but much more modestly) right now.

That Hugo Thing

Last year in Glasgow, at Interaction, the World Science Fiction Convention, Kim Newman and I introduced and hosted the Hugo Award ceremony. And hey, our little double-act received a nomination for the Hugo for best short dramatic presentation:

Battlestar Galactica: "Pegasus" (NBC Universal/British Sky Broadcasting; Directed by Michael Rymer; Written by Anne Cofell Saunders)
Doctor Who: "The Empty Child" & "The Doctor Dances" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by James Hawes; Written by Steven Moffat)
Doctor Who: "Dalek" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by Joe Ahearne; Written by Robert Shearman)
Doctor Who: "Father's Day" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by Joe Ahearne; Written by Paul Cornell)
Jack-Jack Attack (Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation; Written & Directed by Brad Bird)
Lucas Back in Anger (Reductio Ad Absurdum Productions; Directed by Phil Raines; Written by Phil Raines and Ian Sorensen)
Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony (Opening Speech and Framing Device; Written and performed by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman; Directed by Mike & Debby Moir)

If, for whatever reason, you’re interested in seeing what we got up to, the organisers of Interaction have made a video of the introductory speech available at the convention’s web site. You can even compare it with the script.

Science Fantastique

It’s Saturday morning, the forecast rain hasn’t yet materialised, so G. and I decide to go into town to see the giant rocket ship that’s crashed a test-tube’s throw from the headquarters of the Royal Society. It’s big all right, like a Land-of-the-Giants streamlined beer barrel with a red-lensed porthole; when we get there, a work crew and a crane are busy removing it from the hole it made in the road. An onlooker tells us that the giant elephant is just across the Mall, and so it is, towering above a happily bemused crowd. Attendants are decking it out in oriental cloths, and the giant girl-child (who clambered out of the rocket ship yesterday) is slowly making her way towards it.

All of which is part of a very wonderful four-day spectacle that has taken over streets and public places in central London, and liberated the imaginations of the city’s workers and visitors. Created by the French theatre company Royal de Luxe, it was first staged in Nantes to mark the centenary of Jules Verne’s death, and while it’s clear that the French know a thing or two about the honourable and ancient tradition of civic street theatre, I think Londoners should rise to this challenge. After all, we have ten years to work out how to stage scenes from War of the Worlds in time for the 150th anniversary of H.G. Wells’s birth.

Beach Not Sea

We used to think that there were canals on Mars. We used to think that Venus was covered in jungle on which rain never ceased falling. We used to think that Titan was covered in oceans of ethane. As usual, the truth is so much more wonderful: familiar and utterly strange and with its own compelling logic.

I've Got Your Quote Right Here

Sandwiched between title and text, an epigraph provides a clue to the theme of a story, chapter, or novel; that is, the unifying idea or collision of ideas that binds the whole thing together. Choosing the right epigraph is a tricky business whose success relies as much on serendipity as it does on native cunning. It’s not just a question of finding an apposite and pithy quote. If you adorn your beloved work of art with an epigraph that reeks of pretension, wilful obscurity or banality, you’ve handicapped it before it’s out of the gate. Avoiding the Bible, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets is a good start (yes, that means you, Robert Heinlein), but the whole business is so fraught with peril that it’s surprising that any writers ever bother. We’re just natural risk-takers, I guess. Or rotten show-offs.

For there are surprisingly few authors who haven’t succumbed to temptation. A quick, dirty, and completely non-scientific trawl through my library revealed that only J.G. Ballard and Pat Cadigan seem to be wholly innocent. It also showed me just how many SF and fantasy authors get around the problem of finding exactly the right bon mot by the simple method of making one up instead. Tim Powers used a quote the fictional poet William Ashbless to provide both an epigraph and title for On Stranger Tides; Greg Egan has used poetry attributed to fictional characters as epigraphs to Permutation City and Distress. Other writers cunningly use fictional quotes as both epigraphs and infodumps; Isaac Asimov quoted extensively from the 116th Edition of Encyclopaedia Galactica in his Foundation novels; in Dune, Frank Herbert borrowed from, amongst others, The Manual of Maud’Dib, A Child’s History of Maud’Dib, and Maud’Dib’s Favorite Recipes for Dip (I may have made one of these up). Stephen Baxter’s use of epigraphs from the works of Hama Druz in Exultant continue this fine and thrifty tradition.

As for me, I have not one but two epigraphs for Cowboy Angels:

‘We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: "Damn, we’re Americans."’
Lieutenant-General Jay Garner

‘We blew it.’
Wyatt, Easy Rider

Shameless Self-Promotion

Maybe I should say something about the contract I just signed. It’s with Gollancz, it’s for three novels, and one of them has been written, while the other two are at the golden vapourware stage. The one that has been written (but not finished, as it is currently being parsed by my eagle-eyed editor, and I have some ideas about what needs to be changed, too), was once called Look For America, but is now Cowboy Angels. Five points if you know which the two songs, one by Bob Dylan and the other by Gram Parsons, I stole that from. It’s had an interesting history, mostly due to publishing nonsense I don’t want to go into (at least, not yet). I wrote it directly after I finished White Devils, starting early in 2003 and turning it in early in spring 2004, which is where it languished until I resold it to Gollancz. It’s currently scheduled to come out in August 2007, an incubation period more like that of a literary novel than a genre novel that’s a cross between 24 and Doctor Who (or The Man From U.N.C.L.E and The Time Tunnel for you older readers). It’s about a retired CIA agent brought back into service to track down an old friend who has started murdered different versions of the same woman. For this CIA isn’t our CIA; it’s based in an alternate version of America that calls itself the Real, in which a method of travelling between alternate histories (Turing gates) was invented in the late 1960s. The Real has been interfering with other Americas and imposing its own version of democracy on them ever since, until the adventures in other Americas, and the CIA’s budget, were scaled down after Jimmy Carter was elected President. But as our hero tracks his old friend through different versions of America, he stumbles on a plot to reverse peacenik Carter’s policy . . .

Well, it’s pretty clear where in the happening world my inspiration for this came from. And I hope to turn the delay in publication to my advantage by stirring in a few glancing references to the Real’s versions of Things You Just Can’t Make Up that have since popped up in our own America’s adventures. Because I’m still just as angry about the whole sorry shooting match in Iraq and Britain’s shameful role in it as when it kicked off, I think I still have a good sharp edge, and I also think I have a much better perspective on it, too.

As for the other two novels, they both share the settings of my ‘Quiet War’ stories. One will be about the Quiet War itself; the other about the aftermath. At the moment they’re a growing pile of notes and a number of attempts at a first sentence, so I better not say any more. Since I’m hopeless at multitasking, I won’t be making a formal start until the edit of Cowboy Angels is out of the way; and there’s also another novel that needs some work, too, but more about that some other time.

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.