Stalking Alfie

All novelists worth their salt must work their way under the skin and into the minds of their characters; it’s a necessary step on the way to thoroughly inhabiting the novel’s world. Some try to create a character by listing his likes and dislikes, by asking how he behaves while eating with a group of people, how he reacts to rain or sun, how he reacts to someone much poorer than him, or to someone much richer? And so on, and so forth. One is reminded of the attempts of phenomenologists to describe and catalogue their sensory experiences - the relationships between ideas in their minds and the things in the world that they represent. Others, especially comic novelists, borrow extensively from people around them, exaggerating and mixing traits from a variety of acquaintances. My approach is probably the most common, and is much less systematic. It’s rather like stalking a bird through a dense forest. I know that it’s small and brown, and sometimes I can hear its song, but I need to see it entire, just for a moment, before I can know what it is.

In Mind’s Eye, I had the name of the main character from the first. (Names have a talismanic importance - they must strike the right chord in the memory.) Alfie Flowers: a sturdy London name. I knew that Alfie lived in London, and I knew a good deal of his family’s history, and knew that he suffered from an atypical form of epilepsy - it’s a necessary part of the story - and that this made him cautious, made him look at the world at a slant in case it surprised him in the wrong way. After a false start involving trading old Airfix kits on eBay, I knew what he did for a living too: he was a street photographer, following in the footsteps of his missing father, a 1960s hip fashion photographer turned war documentarist.

It took a little while longer to find out where he lived. I find that walking helps to loosen knotted thoughts and joggle ideas together; I walk a lot, when I’m writing the first draft of a novel. On my way back from a long ramble one day, about a hundred yards from my home, I realized that I standing across the street from where Alfie Flowers lived: a narrow plot of land beside the North London railway, with a small, old bus garage and a couple of caravans. He lived in one of those caravans, and had his darkroom in the other. In summer, he ate his meals outside, at a picnic table. And so on.

But I didn’t see him clearly until he was returning home on a crowded train:

Alfie slumped in his corner, a large, somewhat shapeless man, like a bear that hadn’t been properly licked into shape by its mother, his blond hair a disarrayed halo, wearing a red check shirt and baggy black elephant cords, his bag clutched to his belly, his big feet in strap sandals. He had prehensile toes, long and double-jointed, thatched at their second joints with pads of dark hair.

At last, I was on the inside.

Sidewise Award Nominations

This year's Sidewise Award nominations have been announced. The award, which has been been presented since 1995, recognizes excellence in alternate history.

Long Form:
Ian R. MacLeod, The Summer Isles (Aio Publishing)
Sophia McDougall, Romanitas (Orion)
Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor)

Short Form
William Barton, "Harvest Moon" (Asimov's September 2005)
A.M. Dellamonica, "The Illuminated Heretic" (Alternate Generals III, edited by Harry Turtledove, Baen April 2005)
Kim Newman & Paul J. McAuley, "Prix Victor Hugo Script"
Jason Stoddard, "Panacea" (SciFiction, September 14, 2005)
Lois Tilton, "Pericles the Tyrant" (Asimov's, October-November 2005)

It’s rather cool to find our little jape up there with stories published in traditional venues.

A Perfect Storm

Wildly extrapolating from a tax case involving Richard Mabley and Judy Finnegan (the insipid British version of Oprah), The Sunday Times claimed that television ‘personalities’, footballers, and authors would no longer be able to claim the fees charged by their agents against tax. Even worse, this ruling would be applied retrospectively; everyone would not only have to pay back money claimed against tax this year, but for the six years previously.

Now, most authors have agents who take from between 10 and 20% of their clients’ earnings as fees. And most authors aren't exactly rolling in money; the average income of a freelance author in Britain is around £7000. Paying back money legitimately claimed against tax would be crippling. Naturally, this wild rumour-mongering agitated a lot of people and led the Society of Authors to send out an email reassuring anxious authors that they almost certainly wouldn’t be liable to pay back thousand of pounds (or millions of pounds in the case of mega-bestsellers like J.K. Rowling).

The Sunday Times’ story was in fact nonsense, as the British tax authorities were quick to point out. And now the case has just been settled in Richard and Judy’s favour. They can claim their agent’s fees against tax because they are, after all, entertainers; it seems that it was a good thing that Richard imitated Ali G. on breakfast TV.

Which leaves me wondering what the scaremongering was all about. Was it the usual excessive fact-free speculation that our press is so fond of these days? Or was it something more sinister? The Sunday Times story suggested that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, wanted to claw back tax from celebrities to help make up a vast deficit in his budget - celebrities are soft targets because they don’t want to make the kind of fuss that would let people know how much they earn. And Gordon Brown is not only in line to become Prime Minister when Tony Blair finally steps down, he’s also believed to be rather more left wing than Blair. Some people aren’t happy about that. Was the whole story whipped up to besmirch the Chancellor’s good name, and lose him the support of a constituency of high-profile, vocal, left-leaning creative types?

If it was, it has succeeded only in whipping up a small but perfect storm of comment. It looks like J.K. Rowling will be writing the introduction to Gordon Brown’s next book after all.

Hothouses For The Imagination

I was an ordinary child in all but one respect - I was able to read around the age of three, a couple of years before I was enrolled in the little Church of England village school in Selsley, at the top of a long steep climb from our cottage (this was Gloucestershire in 1960; although we lived in one of a tumbledown row of four Elizabethan cottages with an iron foundry on one side and the recreation fields of a nearby factory on the other, it was pretty rural). My father was in the navy, and usually away; when I was a teenager, he and my mother divorced, something unusual and peculiarly shaming in England, in the early 1970s. We had little money, and few books. But there was always the library.

When I was quite small, the library was a library van that came by the village school once a week. A little later, I joined the library in Stroud, a lovely, light, modern building. It wasn’t where I first encountered science fiction - one of the few books my family owned was Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - but it was where I began to actively seek it out, working my way through the oeuvres of Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, amongst others. When I moved to the grammar school at age eleven, I discovered a complete set of the Everyman Edition of H.G. Wells in the Junior School Library, and that set the seal. I needed more, the junior section Stroud Library wasn’t enough, and with some special pleading by my mother on my behalf, I was allowed tickets to the adult section a couple of years earlier than the rules allowed. I’m forever grateful to my mother, and to the librarian who waived those rules. I was let loose on a treasure trove, and by the time I was 15 or 16, I had read my way through the essential science fiction classics and the novels and short-story collections of the burgeoning New Wave, and was branching out into the next-door crime shelves (Ed McBain was a particular favourite) and serendipitous discoveries elsewhere. I started reading John Updike, for instance, because I picked up Rabbit, Redux one day, puzzled by the odd title, and discovered that it was set during the summer of the first moon landing, and was written - wow - in the present tense. Thirty years later, I would be told by one American publisher that they couldn’t take White Devils unless it was rendered into ordinary past tense because otherwise no American reader would be able to understand it.

I was a science geek, and didn’t take English at school beyond what were then O-levels. But while my formal education in English ended at the age of 16, there was always the library, a place where I was able to continue my erratic self-education in the art of the fiction, absolutely free, well into my university years and beyond.

Now, libraries aren’t what they were. Too many are closing down because too many local councils see them as easy targets when relatively small savings have to be made. And there are too many demands on them as well; they’re no longer exclusively about the printed word, but must cater to demands for computer access and CD and DVD lending too, all on ever-shrinking budgets. It’s a rotten shame, ably documented in Tim Coates’s blog (thanks to The Grumpy Old Bookman via Maxine at Petrona for the link).

I think of all the kids like me, weird kids, bright kids, enquiring kids, from backgrounds where books don’t furnish a room. What will they do without these marvellous hothouses of the imagination? If not for libraries, I wouldn’t be the semi-respectable tax-paying novelist I am today; and I don’t think that I’m unique amongst writers in owing libraries a massive debt. Not a bad return for what is, really, a public pittance.

Shameless Part Two

If I hadn’t been ‘resting’, I would have noted that David Hartwell’s Best SF 11 was published on May 30. I haven’t seen a copy yet (chiz, chiz) but no doubt it’s crammed with great stories, not to mention my own ‘Rats of the System’.

Shameless Part One

You have to be these days. So, shamelessly, you may be interested to know that Mind’s Eye is out in paperback as of today. You can buy it here at 20% off retail price, and help jack up my pathetic statistics a notch or three.

According to the back cover:

A strange piece of graffiti daubed on the window of a London restaurant is the catalyst that propels Alfie Flowers into an intriguing mystery - and a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse. From the back alleys of London’s street culture to the chaos of post-war Iraq, in his desperate search for the source behind the mysterious symbols, Alfie finds that he in turn is being chased. Someone is determined to do whatever it takes to stop him finding out the truth.

Deep within an ancient network of caves lies a dangerous secret. A secret connected with the disappearance of Alfie’s father some twenty years before. A secret that someone will kill to keep.

According to me, it’s a thriller about a race to capture the secret of mind-altering drugs and neolithic entoptic patterns that starts off on the streets of London and ends deep inside caves in Kurdistan, in which Alfie Flowers discovers just how deeply his family and the mysterious Nomads’ Club were entwined.

Want to know more? Read the first chapter.

Off Duty

Cripes, has it been more than a week since I posted anything here? Well, I have been ‘resting’ after spending the last three weeks polishing Players, which has now been delivered to the publishers. It needed rather more work than I first thought, and as always, at this stage, I was fully immersed in the work. I find that spending as much time as possible working each day is the best way to get the entire book inside your head, so that when you tweak one part you instantly know which other parts will be affected by the change. So when I realized that Carl Kelley would need to tell Dirk Merrit about the plot to rob him, because it gave Carl the perfect excuse to head off to Los Angeles, I also knew that Dirk Merrit would be in on one of the subsequent deaths, and that this would later affect a couple of paragraphs in the closing chapter. And because I had everything in my head, I was also able to work put exactly where I needed to sharpen and underline the motivations and feelings of just-promoted hotshot detective Summer Ziegler, and make sure that her scenes were always from her point of view. I could also see which scenes were too long or too short, and prune out a couple that were actually unnecessary. And I realized too (it’s obvious; I’m stupid) that it really is better, in a murder mystery, to keep chapters short and focussed on one character rather than switch back and forth between parallel scenes.

All of which sounds as if I didn’t really plan this out or think it through before I started writing it, which isn’t quite true. But I tend to be a seat-of-pants writer and like to find out things as I go along, even at this late stage, rather than exhaustively plot and plan everything; it means a lot more work, but I also have a lot of fun exploring alternative plot lines. I’ve thrown out what must amount to about 50% of what ended up in the novel - an opening sequence in which Summer rescues a street kid from a beating, for instance, chapters involving her confidential informant, and scenes set at her deceased father’s half-built house - but I think now that what’s left in is absolutely necessary.

Anyway, it’s a glorious day today, and I’m off to snoop in some of the neighbourhood gardens which are open for charity.

Saving The Stone

From William Gibson, via Jack Womack, this lovely story about how the London Stone, and if legend is to be believed, the metropolis itself, was saved.

Plugging Away

Tardily, via Locus, I see that James Sallis has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times.

Well, it’s about time. I’ve been a fan of Jim Sallis’s writing for years - I still remember being knocked out by the delicate, elliptical evocations of otherness in ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ and ‘Faces, Hands’ back in the late 1960s. He’s edited New Worlds, written a couple of dozen sf stories (collected in Time’s Hammers), still reviews for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but these days he’s best known for his Lew Griffin mysteries, set in New Orleans. Now he’s two books into another mystery series, and from the profile I learnt about a novella, Drive, published by a small press that I immediately ordered from Big South American River. If only I was more on the ball -- I could have bought it in Powells last year, when I was in Oregon doing research.

All Shall Have Prizes

Finalists for the 2005 John W. Campbell Memorial Award:

Baxter, Stephen TRANSCENDENT Gollancz
Cash, Steve THE MEQ Del Rey
Gerrold, David CHILD OF EARTH Benbella
McAuley, Paul MIND'S EYE Simon & Schuster UK
McDevitt, Jack SEEKER Ace
Macleod, Ken LEARNING THE WORLD Tor
Macleod, Ian R. THE SUMMER ISLES Aio Publishing
Marusek, David COUNTING HEADS Tor
Sawyer, Robert J. MINDSCAN Tor
Stross, Charles ACCELERANDO Ace
Traviss, Karen THE WORLD BEFORE Eos
Wilson, Robert Charles SPIN Tor

When The Spam Hits The Fan

‘My Theory of Evolution is that Darwin was Adopted’ is my favourite randomly generated spam header of the year. Pure Monty Python.

Not that I approve of spam, of course, even if it is a good source of names for evil child-eating drug-riddled galactic overlords.

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