As I was saying . . .

If only I was one of those writers who produce a book every two years - or even less frequently. Right now, I’d be celebrating the publication of Players by taking an extended holiday after having been wafted round an extensive signing tour. Or something. Instead, I’m caught up in a first draft hurtling towards its conclusion, and I’ve just received the copy-edited manuscript of Cowboy Angels, which I have to get back to the publishers so they can get bound proofs ready for the London Book Fair, in the middle of the next month. Busy, busy, busy . . .

On Tuesday, I went up to Leicester to debate with the inestimable Ian Watson whether or not we’re headed for a utopian or dystopian future, in front of a ferociously intelligent and well-informed audience. I travelled by train out of St Pancras, the first time I’ve been there in a few years. In November, it will open fully as the new Eurostar terminal, and from the Midland Mainline platforms you can get a wonderful view of William Henry Barlow’s trainshed roof, the ironwork painted sky blue and the glass sparklingly clean. This, and the huge engineering works to create a new line to the Channel Tunnel, has been progressing more or less invisibly under Londoner’s feet, and is right on schedule. I’m looking forward to being able to take a fifteen minute stroll from my home down to St Pancras where I can catch a train and be whisked to Paris is less than two hours. Now that’s progress.

Just out this week is Future Weapons of War, an anthology edited by Joe Haldeman and Martin Greenburg which features a story of mine. It’s published by Baen Books, famous for their military SF; I haven’t yet seen a copy, but I would guess that the likes of Greg Benford and Kristine Kathryn Rusch may have come up with some neat twists on the eponymous theme.
My story, ‘Rocket Boy’, starts like this:

Rocket Boy lived under the knot of ferroconcrete ribbons where the road from the spaceport joined the beltway that girdled the city. He’d made a kind of nest in a high ledge beneath the slope of an on-ramp, and although traffic rumbled overhead day and night, it was as cozy and safe as anywhere on the street because it could be reached only by squeezing through a kind of picket fence of squat, close-set columns. Even so, Rocket Boy clutched a knife improvised from the neck of a broken bottle while he slept in his nest of packing excelsior, charity blankets and cardboard. The first lesson he’d learned on the street was that you needed to carry a weapon with you at all times.

Ancient History

This year is the 25th anniversary of Interzone, Britain’s only science fiction magazine. Its present publisher, Andy Cox, asked a bunch of writers for a paragraph about their involvment with Interzone over the years. Here’s my answer.

Summer 1987, Brighton, the World Science Fiction Convention. I'm a new
author with a couple of short stories to my name and a forthcoming novel
that only Malcolm Edwards and I know about. Malcolm is an editor with
Gollancz, Gollancz is hosting the pre-Hugo Award party, and my
unpublished novel gets me a ticket. In the press, a dapper young gent
squints at my name badge. 'Paul McAuley? I thought "King of the Hill"
was pretty good.' 'King of the Hill' was the second story of mine that
Interzone published; that was how I met Kim Newman.* What did
Interzone do for me? It plugged me into the science fiction community,
gentle reader, and turned me on. It was no small thing.

*I like to think that Kim said 'pretty good', but it's possible that he
may have said 'interesting' instead. Kim spent his childhood in
Somerset and that's where 'King of the Hill' is set, so whether or not
he thought it any good, he would have found it of interest.

Cracking It

I was trying to understand timelike curves in Einsteinian spacetime today (the things you need to know to write a novel - there’s a cult whose leader believes he is getting messages from his future self from a planet around another star, which means that faster-than-light travel will soon be invented). And while reading about it in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality (Chapter 17), I had a sudden lovely little moment of epiphany where the whole thing became utterly transparent. This isn’t exactly world-shattering stuff, and had a lot more to do with Penrose’s lucid explication than my intelligence, as I've always found physics non-intuitive, but like Proust’s madeleine dipped in lime tea, this mental state brought back a few moments from my career in science when I suddenly understood how something worked, and knew that I knew something that no one else in the world knew.

Advertisment For Myself

Players is published today. Here’s what it’s about, according to the blurb on the back:

A teenage girl found naked and fatally injured in mountain forest two hundred miles from her home.

The mutilated corpse of a young man in the Nevada desert, his heart and eyes removed.
The post-apocalyptic world of a role-playing computer game - and the murderous spee of a psychopathic killer driven by delusions of superhuman supremancy.

And rookie detective Summer Ziegler, pitched headlong into her first major case. But even as she tries to unpick the killer’s twisted logic, he lures her into a cat-and-mouse game with a spectacular climax of his own devising . . .

Buy a copy or two, and keep my sponsors happy. Why, I might even be able to afford to keep posting stuff here. American readers might like to note that at present there are no plans for a U.S. edition, so amazon.co.uk is your friend.

Here Come The Suits

One character in Players scrapes a living by winning virtual weapons and treasures in online Massively Multiplayer games and auctioning them off via eBay. Another runs a business that uses teenage labour to set up virtual characters and do all the boring, repetitive labour of providing them with skill-sets and attributes before selling them to cash-rich, time-poor players who can’t be bothered to do the work for themselves. Luckily, I decided to set the novel in the present of its composition, 2006, rather than in the near future; a week before its publication, eBay announced that it is banning the sale of virtual objects, currency, and characters on its site.

This throws a hefty spanner into the burgeoning virtual economy based on trading of objects and money that exist only in digital form, and undercuts the long-established assumption that this real-money trading is an established part of online gaming. In fact, most companies that run online games prohibit RMT in their terms of service, and eBay seems to be not only clamping down on an area where fraud is rampant, but also anticipating legal arguments about intellectual property rights (it’s still allowing auctions of Second Life property, because Second Life’s publisher, Linden Lab, encourages players to trade goods), as well as the interest by some governments in regulating and taxing RMT. With Sony Online setting up its own 'Station Exchange' service and the rise of third-party trading sites like IGE, it looks like the Wild West days of online gaming’s virtual economy may be coming to an end. The cutting edge of the electronic frontier gets civilized faster than Deadwood: one moment it’s all wild-cat prospectors and gun-slingers; the next it’s banks, mining companies and the feds. Any day now, I expect the Mob to move in.

Altered Ego

According to this, I’m really Stanislav Lem (link via boingboing). Which is nice. After all, it’s about the only way I’m ever going to get within punting distance of a Nobel Prize.

A Little Light Research

I've posted on the website a brief piece about a trip to Oregon to do some background research for Players.

In the Pines

A couple of the reasons for setting Players in Oregon were the extensive forests along the coast, and the wonderful idiosyncrasy of a significant proportion of the people living there. Where else would you find someone turning an airliner into a home, in the middle of the woods?

The Blues

Actually, you'd get a better idea of the cover of Cowboy Angels if Blogger for some reason didn't include red in its palette when reproducing uploaded pictures. Which is a pity, as the dominate tone of the cover is, er, red. Hopefully, this is the last recursive post I make for some time, but if anyone happens to know how to post pictures that end up looking like the originals...

First Sighting

This is the cover rough for Cowboy Angels, which is slowly moving into production. I may be biased, but I think it very fine. The discrete open door (which you may have a hard time seeing in this low rez post) is highly significant, by the way.

The Sorrows of Young Hannibal

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising, which gives us the origin myth of his most famous creation, Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter, displays Harris’s flair for concise narration and grand Guignol effects (as well as his weakness for tagging Hannibal’s victims with physically or morally repulsive characters, and his obvious dislike of the human herd), but it never quite lays to rest the feeling that it’s a franchise cash-in. After all, it is no more than an elaboration of a few pages of flashback in its predecessor, Hannibal, and a flashback that itself seemed pretty unnecessary, given that it attempted to explain the motivation of a monster who boasted to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, ‘Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.’

The movie version of the novel shares this problem of redundancy, but like the novel it’s by no means as bad as it could have been. Apart from some necessary elisions and compressions, it sticks fairly close to the novel - not much of a surprise, given that Harris wrote the screenplay. In 1944, Hannibal Lecter’s family hide in the summer lodge when the Russian advance sweeps through their Lithuanian estate. His mother and father and their servants are killed in a firefight between a Russian tank and a Nazi Stuka; then a band of ragged looters take over the lodge and kill and eat his little sister, Mischa. Hannibal escapes, and after eight years flees a Soviet orphanage, and makes his way across Europe to France and his only surviving relative, the Japanese widow of his uncle. Plagued by nightmare flashbacks, he exacts a horrible revenge on a butcher who insults his aunt, and becomes a medical student and hones the skills he requires to track down the war criminals who murdered his sister.

It’s a handsomely staged period movie, with good direction by Peter Webber (who previously helmed Girl With A Pearl Earring), and despite a variety of Mittle-European accents the actors acquit themselves well. Gong Li brings a watchful stillness and quiet resolve to the part of Lady Murasaki, Hannibal’s aunt (although one wonders why a Japanese actress wasn’t given the role); Rhys Ifans plays Gaspar, the leader of the war criminals, with eye-rolling relish; and Gaspard Ulliel is a striking and devilishly gleeful young Hannibal. What the movie lacks, as does the novel, is a suitable antagonist for Hannibal to measure himself against. In The Silence of the Lambs he played cat-and-mouse games with Clarice Starling and in Hannibal he was chased not only by Starling but also by a venial Italian police inspector and his only surviving victim. In Hannibal Rising, Lady Murasaki does little more than fret over Hannibal’s monstrous descent, the French detective who investigates his trail of murders, Inspector Popil (played by The Wire’s Dominic West), is an incidental nuisance issuing impotent warnings, and until the final reel Gaspar is mostly offstage.

All that’s left is a series of increasingly gruesome set-piece variations on the theme of decapitation as Hannibal slashes through the ranks of the war criminals until he reaches their leader. There’s some small tension when Gaspar kidnaps Lady Murasaka, but it’s too little, too late. And although the movie tries to make something of the possibility that Hannibal can make a Faustian choice between good and evil, there’s little to be wrung from it because we already know what Hannibal will choose, and in any case Inspector Popil, echoing Red Dragon’s Will Graham, tells us that the human part of Hannibal died in the forest during World War Two, giving birth to the monster. And despite Ulliel’s hypnotic performance, it’s hard to muster sympathy for Hannibal’s devil, which makes his revenge all the more unpalatable.

Coming Attractions

The paperback was never quite out of print, but I’m pleased to announce that Gollancz will be republishing Fairyland in their new Modern Classics series, along with Stephen Baxter’s Evolution, Greg Bear’s Blood Music, Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, Christopher Priest’s The Seperation, Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space, and Dan Simmons’s Hyperion. All with neat, graphic-design covers, coming to a bookshop or online merchant near you in August.

Meanwhile, I’ve been told that Players will feature in a front-of-store promotion in Waterstone’s next month. This is Good Stuff, as an awful lot of foot traffic (ie potential book purchasers) doesn’t make it past the barricade of front tables with their come-hither special offers, 3 for 2 stickers, and velcro filaments that attach to you while the book squawks buy me or my pet dog will die in the plaintive voice of a big-eyed starving orphan...

My Generation

So I’m listening to the latest Ray Lamontagne CD, Till The Sun Turns Black, and I’m thinking, Oh boy, what a great collection of 1970s albums he must have. And then I realise that it’s probably his father’s collection.

Stuff like this can make a man feel his years.

It’s a great CD, by the way.

Lake Deja Vu

The lead article in this week’s Nature, summarised on JPL’s site, confirms previous reports that there are presently lakes of what is presumably liquid methane and ethane on Titan. There are all kinds of lakes in all kinds of places, it seems. Some have been compared to flooded volcanic calderas, like Crater Lake in Oregon, which I visited a couple of years ago while doing research for Players, much of which is set in the forests of the southwest of that state; here’s a low rez photo to prove it. The island in the lake is called Wizard Island, and it’s another, smaller volcano inside the much larger one. With its panoramas of volcanic cones, and pumice fields, it’s a truly alien landscape for the British visitor; how strange and wonderful that it may be replicated in different materials on Titan, where a couple of my characters will shortly be playing a desperate game of hide and seek...

Dead Tyrant Storage

Last week, Richard Dawkins gave a refreshingly different reason why Saddam Hussein shouldn’t have been hung. His mention of using a time machine to retrieve Hitler for psychological study rang a very faint bell - didn’t someone write a short story on this theme?

In other news, ‘Dead Men Walking’ has been picked up by David Hartwell for his Best SF anthology. Gosh.

Elsewhere

As threatened, I’ve posted the first two and a half chapters of Players on my much neglected web site.

Out There

From the good people who are swinging Cassini around the Saturn system, some choice images of moons seen previously, but never in such detail, and moons never before seen too. Glorious.

The Dreamer Awakes

The day after New Year’s Day, London is almost back to normal. On Christmas Day itself, G. and I walked down through Clerkenwell to the Thames, and at times were quite alone on streets where the only movement was litter blowing in the wind and pigeons pecking after it. All the buildings shuttered, asleep with that peculiar suspended stillness that’s so different to the quiet of the countryside, all except for St Paul’s Cathedral, lighted and open, getting ready for the Eucharist service, the sound of its bells floating after us as we crossed the footbridge to the South Bank. In the week between Christmas and New Year, many parts of the city were still so deserted they might have been sets from a movie depicting the aftermath of some depopulating disaster; but now everyone is back, and the city is awake again.

In the post today, the first of the year, a contract from Gardner Dozois, who wants to include my story ‘Dead Men Walking in his Year’s Best annual collection. Which is as good a start to the year as any.

End Times

I think the extract above should be the last I’ll post here. By now, if you’ve been reading these snippets, you’ve met all the principal characters in Players, progressing much further will give away too much of the rest of the plot, and in any case the novel will be published in February if you want to find out what happens next (it’s not too early to preorder). I’ll probably put up a couple of complete chapters on my web site, though. Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last day of 2006 reading through and printing out the manuscript for the edited version of Cowboy Angels; it’s sitting by my elbow on the desk, cooling from the laser printer, as I type this. And I have to get back to the new novel, too. Busy, busy, busy . . . I’m not quite up to the standards of Anthony Trollope, who would upon completing the last lines of a novel immediately begin the first lines of the next, so as not to waste a minute of the time he alloted himself each day for composition before going off to his work at the post office (I can’t help wondering how completely he made the switch from novelist to civil servant each day, especially as he insisted that authors must live with their characters ‘in the full reality of established intimacy’). No, I’m a little more indolent. Before I head out to the Moon, and the moons of Saturn, and renew my acquaintance with Macy Minnot, Cash Baker, Sri Hong-Owen and all the rest, I’m taking tomorrow off. Happy New Year.

Players - 22

Although he still hadn’t reached the save point in the ruins of downtown Los Angeles, Daryl was feeling pleased with himself. He’d closed out bids on three items he was selling on eBay, drawn from the store of gadgets, maps, and other valuables he’d acquired during Seeker8's adventures in Trans, and the deals had fattened his PayPal account by just over four hundred dollars. Even better, his partner, Ratking, finally had reached out to him, explaining that he’d had to attend to some urgent business out in the world, but now he could devote his attention to the final stage of the treasure hunt.

> I’ve developed a new strategy. I can’t come with you, but I’ll be watching over you. I’ll be your guardian angel.

> Lay it on me, Daryl typed.

They were instant messaging, East Coast to West Coast and back again. It was one in the morning in Brooklyn, just after Daryl’s latest attempt to get Seeker8 to the save point had failed.

> I purchased a hack that lets me watch anyone in the game. I’ve become a point of view, pilgrim. I’m the eagle that dwells on the rock. Wherever you go, I’ll be right there with you. I’ll be the voice in the burning bush. I’ll speak to you out of the whirlwind.

Daryl, reading this, hunched over the glowing screen in his hot dark cell in Brooklyn’s unsleeping anthill, wondered what had happened to his partner while he’d been out of the loop. Previously, Ratking’s messages had been terse and clipped, pure business and always straight to the point, but now he was on fire with self-importance and a Biblical fervour.

After a moment’s thought, popping gum with machine-gun rapidity, Daryl rattled out his reply:
> I’d rather you were watching my back, helping me knock down the warewolves.

Strictly speaking, Seeker8 had been taken down by tar babies this time, but it had been a pack of warewolves that had driven him into the broken channel of the Los Angeles River, with its smoking cinder cones, fields of congealed lava, and asphalt pits from which dozens of tar babies had clambered, lumbering stiff-legged towards him from every direction like giant teddy bears dipped in sump oil, eyes glowing red, stubby arms spread wide. He’d killed thirty or forty with incendiary bullets and grenades before he’d been caught from behind in an unbreakable embrace and carried off and drowned in a deep pool of oily water. The night before that, warewolves had chased him howling through the ruins, playing with him, nipping at his heels, harrying him with balletic coordination until they’d finally closed in and taken him down.

Each attempt to reach the next save point had been harder than the last. It wasn’t just that the warewolves were making things difficult. The game itself constantly evolved as players roamed across it and interacted with each other, finding treasures, trading secrets and weapons, making alliances, building or destroying fiefdoms. The game learned from players’ moves, adjusted itself to their strategies, messed up their plans by throwing storms and earthquakes, bandits and monsters into their paths. Daryl had been worrying that he had reached a no-win stalemate, reloading time and time again to try to make progress from a hopeless position, but now his partner was back with the promise of fresh information and this weird new mystical slant. Telling Daryl now:

> The eagle dwells and abides on the crag of the rock, and the strong place. That’s me.

Daryl massaged his forehead with one hand, and with the forefinger of the other hit the Caps Lock key and pecked ?

> Read the Book of Job, pilgrim. Meanwhile, you need to reach that save point. Let me make some suggestions.

Ratking might have started to have sound like the preacher at the church Daryl’s mother attended each and every Sunday, but his advice was as detailed and sensible as ever. After some back and forth, he told Daryl to wait until tomorrow evening before he tried to move on.

> I’ll be watching then. And when you reach the next save point, we’ll work out what to do next.