Chasing Perfection

I’m coming up to the final stretch of copy-editing work on Players. After that, the manuscript will be checked over at the publishers, and then it will go off to the printers. When I get a set of proofs, I’ll have a last chance to correct infelicities, repeated words, howlers and simple spelling mistakes before the book goes into production. Almost inevitably, some mistake or other will get through; you can chase perfection as long as you like, in the company of your editor, sub-editor, copy-editor, friends . . . but it's like Zeno's paradox. You can only approach the target in ever smaller increments, you can never reach it.

You might think that poets have it easier - their books, after all, usually contain far fewer words than the average short story, let alone a novel. But as Don Paterson notes in a day-in-the-life article in the Weekend Guardian, they have to watch out for a special horror - inadvertent acrostics formed by the first letters of succeeding lines. On the other hand, he’s able to read his poems line by line backwards to ferret out glitches; just try doing that with a novel. I dare you.

Caveat Emptor

These people claim to have one of the guitars once owned by legendary Blues singer Robert Johnson (thanks to Steve Baxter for the tip, and Jack Womack for the link). Frankly, I think they need to provide little more provenance than ‘it looks like the one in the photograph’ before they get their $6000000.

The Butterflies of Memory

Just received my copies of Ian Watson’s terrific short-story collection, The Butterflies of Memory.

My introduction begins like this:

If you’re of the opinion that science fiction is above all else a literature of ideas, then Ian Watson is your man, and this collection, which contains more than enough ideas to set up a couple of lesser writers for life is very definitely your cup of meat. Of course, ideas aren’t everything. For one thing, apart from a few incredibly rare once-in-a lifetime, fifty-carat, career-defining originals, ideas are as cheap and ubiquitous as advertising. Ideas, good or bad, are the human animal’s speciality. Day in, day out, we see clouds and think them very like whales. We put together two and two and make five. And even if you do have an idea that’s both brilliant and original, in the end it’s what you do with it that counts, and that’s where qualities like hard work, talent, and that indefinable but instantly recognisable quality, voice, come into play.

Ian Watson knows all about this, of course. Check out ‘How to be a Fictionaut’, which not only has a lot of fun with the myth of ideas and originality, but also pushes the notion of the anxiety of influence about as far as it will go.

This isn’t to say that the ideas on display here aren’t witty, outrageous, daft, unsettling and plainly fantastic, because quite frankly that’s exactly what they are. But more importantly, they have also been woven into stories by a writer who not only possesses a restless and capacious imagination, but also knows exactly what to do with his ideas, and has an enviable talent for stretching them in unexpected ways, testing them to destruction, or using them to smash open accepted notions about the way the world works.

I Don't Just Make It All Up, You Know

In her New Scientist cover story about hypervelocity stars, Maggie McKee reveals where I got one of my ideas for Eternal Light. (You have to be a subscriber to view the article. Or you buy a copy of the magazine.)

Superman Redux

So I didn’t get around to reviewing Superman Returns, but Roz Kaveney did, generating much comment.

English Summertime

Out to a favourite pub for Sunday lunch, and then a slow walk back home, along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. I used to walk along the canal regularly when I lived nearby, and in my ten years in London, I’ve seen its dilapilated Victorian brick factory and warehouse buildings be replaced by smart but mostly soulless apartment buildings right on the water. One of these, the Gainsborough Buildings, on the site on what was once a film studio (where Alfred Hitchcock worked, before he left for Hollywood), made an appearance at the beginning of Whole Wide World. It had not yet been built when I began the novel; now, it is a small, exclusive city-state in the badlands of Hackney - ordinary citizens can’t even walk or drive past them, because the council has obligingly blocked off the road. There are many more blocks like this along the canal, now, and more to come. The neglected and overgrown dereliction of the old buildings gave the feeling of how London might be if it had been abandoned to nature; a long, narrow mixture of wilderness and industrial heritage running through North London and the East End. Now, it’s more like a tawdry imitation of the sets of Blade Runner, with badly designed yuppie hutches elbowing each other for a stretch of coveted waterside real estate. A taste of things to come, as the marshlands and playing fields along the River Lea disappear under the Olympic developments.

But if you could ignore the serried windows of the apartment blocks, there are still barges puttering along the canal and houseboats moored up alongside the towpath; and the hot sun beat gold highlights from the water, the weeds were all in ragged bloom, and the hot dust of the towpath was as silky as talcum powder underfoot: summertime, in England.

Only Correct

Here’s a picture of the corner of my office where I’m currently working in the copy-edited manuscript of Players. It has already been subjected to my editor’s scrutiny, of course, but having taken her comments to heart and made the appropriate modifications, the manuscript is back again. This time just about every page contains corrections and suggestions for micro-improvements; it’s time to rethink every line all over again. More importantly, it has been marked up for the typesetter with time-honoured hierogylphic instructions, and you realize that the novel that has been a more-or-less private conversation with yourself for the past year or so has begun its journey towards the bookshops.

I once visited Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass; the view from the study, down to the Charles river, is preserved for the nation. Maybe poets need to look out of windows; most writers I know face away from potential distraction, like so many penitents.

Superman v. The Planet Of Slums

I was lucky enough to attend a preview of Superman Returns yesterday; I may write a short review at some point, but meanwhile I’ll content myself with saying that I do believe it’s going to be a good old-fashioned summer blockbuster. Haven’t had one of those in a while.

I’ve also just finished Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. Sometime this year, for the first time in human history, the number of people living in cities will outnumber the rural population. And one billion people will be living in slums circling the cities of the South. Planet of Slums describes the evolution of the megaslums and the rise of an urban population that is completely disconnected from ordinary economics and politics. As with all of Davis's books (which include the classic City Of Quartz, one of the best books about Los Angeles ever written), it’s packed with vivid summaries and extrapolations of current trends backed with trenchant argument, imagining a future in which the enclaves of the rich make war against the squatters and outcasts that inhabit vast squalid termitaries of the displaced and dispossessed.

Secret Doors

I promise not to put too many pictures up here, but I thought I should at least have a go at linking one or two. This is from my research files for Cowboy Angels. It’s the route that field agents use to reach the gate between their reality and ours, located on the 49th Street side of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The two doors open onto a stairway and a freight elevator that give access to a loading platform in Grand Central Station that fell into disuse after the station’s own power plant was demolished following a switch to ConEd as a source of electricity. There’s an unconfirmed story that President Roosevelt, in his specially adapted automobile, was whisked from train to street via the freight elevator when he visited New York.

If you’re wondering about the low resolution, it was taken with my thumb-sized Philips wearable digital camera.

More Dick

Joshua Glenn has a thoughtful piece on the film of A Scanner Darkly and director Richard Linklater over on Slate.

On The D.

Yesterday to a preview of A Scanner Darkly in a plush screening theatre in Warner Brother’s London headquarters. Director and screenwriter Richard Linklater is clearly a fan of Philip K. Dick’s work; his adaptation of Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about an undercover cop falling apart under the insiduous influence of the brain-killing drug Substance D, is, some necessary compression apart, faithful to both the text and the melancholy spirit of the novel. It was shot as a live action film and rotoscoped by computer animation to provide a graphic novel look that works pretty well; it’s hard, really, to see how the scramble suit effects could have been done so effectively otherwise. Hallucinatory weirdness is kept to the minimum, although there’s some very subtle distortion here and there, especially towards the end. Given that the story is largely plot-free and packs a lot of dialog, it does sag a little in places, but does its best by Dick's intricate drug-fueled paranoid riffs, is seasoned with some lovely touches of black humour, and the diminuendo ending, containing just a flicker of hope, is faithful to that of novel. Fans of Dick’s work will almost certainly love it, but I fear that its bleak, amorphous plot will have limited appeal to the general public. Keanu Reeves as undercover narc Bob Arctor is basically Keanu Reeves; Robert Downey Jr is a tour de force as the manically unpleasant James Barris; Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder turn in solid performances, and Rory Cochrane is going to hate being called the new Jack Black.

Forbidden Planets

I’ve just received the proofs for my story, ‘Dust’, one of a round dozen collected in the anthology Forbidden Planets. Others are by Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Scott Edelman, Matthew Hughes, Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds, Chris Roberson, and Adam Roberts. Edited by Peter Crowther, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Stephen Baxter, it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the classic movie.

Another story, ‘Winning Peace’, the one I was writing in April, set in the same future history as ‘Dust’, will appear in Gardner Dozois’s and Jonathan Strahan’s The New Space Opera.
Back now to reading Cowboy Angels (for the first time in three years) and making notes for the many tweaks needed to bring it up to speed.

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.