Science Friction

Peter Hollo asks which edition of Nature features the discission on biology and SF. It’s the July 5 edition, with a retro-pulp cover, and also includes an excellent article by Gary Wolfe about how SF has dealt with the ‘many worlds’ of quantum mechanics, a short story by Richard A Lovett and articles and Saturn’s eccentric little moon Hyperion (which I won’t be visiting in the ongoing novel) and a mystery about Mars’s so-called warm and wet period. They’re spoiling us.

I wasn’t going to mention the recent little spat about mainstream writers ‘borrowing’ SF tropes, kicked off by Jason Sanford’s article, ‘Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool: The US literary Establishment’s Need-Hate Relationship with Speculative Fiction’, published in the New York Review of Science Fiction. The affair was even summarised in the Guardian’s From the Blogs feature - yes, in a mainstream newspaper. Gosh. Matthew Cheney wrote an acerbic deconstruction, Sanford replied, and off it went. Anyway, the Nature discussion did get sidetracked on definitions of SF, and then I came across something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons:

‘[Science fiction} writers are joiners. They are a lodge. If they didn’t enjoy having a gang of their own so much, there would be no such category as science fiction. They love to stay up all night, arguing the question, "What is science fiction?" One might as usefully inquire, "What are the Elks? And what is the Order of the Evening Star?"’

And then this bunch of mainstream writers turns up at the party unannounced, and they don’t even have the decency to bring their own bottle...

How To Save Science

Make lab coats sexy.

(you'll need to page down to find it)

The Nature of the Beast

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a conversation with three other science-fiction writers - Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski and Peter Watts - about biology and science fiction. A transcript of the four-way interview, mediated by the irrepressible Oliver Morton, has been published in the latest edition of Nature and it’s available online, but unfortunately you’ll need a subscription to access the article and the cartoon illo (in which I appear to be Paul Merton imitating Commander Kang).

Our favourite moments in biological sf? Ken’s can be found in James Blish’s ‘Sunken Universe’ (aka ‘Surface Tension’); Joan’s in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos; Peter’s in Alice Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’; and mine in Greg Bear’s Blood Music...

Louder Than Bombs

The members of Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only heavy-metal band, are now refugees living in Syria. Suroosh Alvi has made a film about them.

Harder Than The Rest

The Die Hard series of movies is one of my guilty pleasures. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: big, noisy, escapist, and defiantly old-school extravanganzas. So I was happy to be able to sneak into a preview screening of the fourth and latest (courtesy of my critic pal, Kim Newman), albeit with a little foreboding. For after demolishing an office block in the first movie, an airport in the second, and large chunks of New York City in the third, how would the fourth in the series up the ante without becoming ridiculously overblown? How would the format adapt to its cyber-age plot (this isn’t Die Hard 4 or IV, after all, but Die Hard 4.0) without compromising its wild-west action formula of guns, fists, and brute cunning? And could Bruce Willis (the same age as me), still cut the mustard?

Well, as John McClane, Bruce still looks the part in a ripped and bloody vest, and his shaven head adds to his aura of Rushmore-like granite resolve. The story, involving a cyber-villain threatening the entire United States, and a series of chases that rip up large parts of the eastern seaboard, is driven along with enough action and kinetic velocity to stop you wondering about its implausibility. The bad guy, played by Timothy Olyphant (the sheriff in Deadwood), is utterly humourless, like all cyber-villains. There’s an awful lot of typing by the bad guys and the hacker sidekick McClane picks up, but it doesn’t slow up the action too much. There’s car v. helicopter fu, car in an elevator shaft fu, truck fu, jet fighter fu, and fisticuffs versus kung fu fu. At two and a half hours, the movie is about half an hour too long, I think it was a mistake to open up the cat-and-mouse format and stage the set-piece finale in the great outdoors, and in a series predicated on real action there’s rather too much CGI, and McClane is now about as hard to kill as a Terminator. But if you’re looking for a good dumb, noisy action movie, you can do far worse than this.

One thing puzzled me. There were free Snickers bars at the screening, the hacker sidekick had a bit about how hungry he was, and later opened a glove compartment to reveal a Snickers bar. But he didn’t eat it. Was it cut by the BBFC because it was too blatant an instance of product placement?

Holy Smoke

Smoke is the essential publication for anyone who loves London, and everyone into loving irreverence and weird truths: check it out here.

No End To Books

Hartwell and Kramer’s Best SF anthology is out now, and Dozois’s Best SF will be out early next month; both contain my short story ‘Rats of the System’. And the US edition of Dozois and Strahan’s New Space Opera, with my story ‘Winning Peace’ glimmering amongst a glittering host of talent, has also just hit the shops.

All of which reminds me that I should get started on my doppelganger story, ‘Oz’; especially as the title and ending came to me one recent sleepless night, in that nice, sly way the good stuff has of sneaking up on you.

Free At Last! Good God Almighty Free At Last!

The proofs for Cowboy Angels are done at last - read twice by me, and once by one of the people to whom the novel is dedicated. Amazing what slips through after several drafts, editing, copy-editing etc. Thankfully, most of the corrections are of the word processing-error class - extra words or missing words from inaccurate microtonal cut and paste operations. Weird line break errors. Inverted commas that have inverted the wrong way around. This kind of stuff didn't happen with my first typewritten typescript, reset by an actual human being.

Separated the pages with red ink from those untouched, wrote up a set of notes on the more complicated changes, stuck notes and red-inked pages in a padded envelope and rode the tube into town and Orion towers, where I dropped them off. As it was sunny, I walked back home, crossing the river, passing the South Bank complex (on the little beach by the Thames there, roughly where Frenzy started, a couple of people where building an ambitious sandcastle), crossing the wobbly bridge and sneaking back through Smithfield.

Thinking about not much at all after thinking about too much, pretty concentratedly. The header by the way, is MLK's, and features in the book. Might be slightly misquoted here but I can't be bothered to check. Don't have to do that for a bit, now: just make stuff up for the second draft on the ongoing.

Meanwhile, I live in hope that bound proofs might turn up, although they are already two months overdue. I have no idea why. And in three months and a few days, the thing itself should be published. I hope. In the thickening modern world, much of what was once simple and linear now becomes an infinitely sub-divided Xeno's paradox... At least summer sun in city is still uncomplicated.

Not Drowning, Mostly

I haven’t gone away: I’m dealing with proofs for Cowboy Angels, my last chance to make sure everything is shipshape and Bristol-fashion, and trying to push forward the second draft of the next.

Meanwhile, here’s an interview with me in French and English, and a review of Glyphes, the French edition of Mind’s Eye. And here’s the new Steampunk magazine (link via BoingBoing and Warren Ellis), a set of mindblowing images from Cassini’s first two years around Saturn, and news of the coolest brown dwarf yet found, with the mass of just ten Jupiters and a temperature of 430 degrees Centigrade - the surface of Venus is hotter. Oh, and it seems to be just fifty light years away. As I suggested in Four Hundred Billion Stars, brown dwarfs are everywhere.

The Fat Lady Sings

A copy of the Australian edition of The New Space Opera, Strahan & Dozois, eds, thumps down on my doorstep . Big and bristling with wonders: 18 stories, 7 by the Britpack.

Also reached the end of the red ink marathon on the first draft of the latest, which looks like it's going to be a shelf-bender . . .

Mars Now

We’re definitely living in the future now: a garden designed as a rest area for astronauts on Mars has won best garden in the Chelsea Flower Show. And at about the same time, that brave little shopping cart, Spirit, has discovered a patch of silica-rich soil that provides further evidence of Mars’s wet past. More than ever, I want NASA, or the Chinese, or quite frankly anybody, to get a manned expedition together as soon as possible. The Mars Rovers and satellites have done and are continuing to do a fantastic job, but the only way to properly search for fossils on Mars is to send a geologist or paleontologist there and let them loose on the most likely bits of landscape. And as Mars is mapped in finer and finer detail, and as the rovers continue to probe the rocks and dirt, it seems more and more likely that some traces of past life will be found.

I’ve been scrawling red ink all over the first draft of the next novel, pruning back stuff that’s far too lush, taking out things that have no business being there, and finding places where scenes are missing. Soon, I’ll have to start making good these IOUs to myself. I did find time to read Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man. Great in parts, good in others, but didn't quite pull together: the bits from a terrorist's point of view seemed invented rather than felt, for instance, and those three shortish passages didn't quite add anything much, except one good transition at the end. But DeLillo is very good on dealing with the multiple psychic traumas of 9/11 without specifically explaining or signposting, and that was where I felt the novel really took off, especially in a couple of sequences in Las Vegas. As a break from red ink and wincing, I watched 28 Weeks Later, which I can’t really recommend (as Professor Frink would say, first there’s the biting, then the running and the screaming and the biting and the running), and Zodiac, which I can recommend, unreservedly. Up there with The Lives Of Others as my film of the year, for what it’s worth.

M.I.C.K.E.Y.H.A.M.A.S.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2075845,00.html

'Rocket Boy'

I’ve put up the full text of my short story ‘Rocket Boy’ over at my web site.

It first appeared in the anthology Future Weapons of War, published in February, although I've yet to see a copy. Has anyone spotted one in the wild? Perhaps the publishers are too busy counting their money to send out contributors’ copies. Or perhaps my copy has been intercepted by Homeland Security on its way out of the US; even now some apparatchik might be puzzling his way through the stories, looking for sentences that might possibly give comfort to the Axis of Evil.

More Greene

Just off Essex Road in Islington is one of those increasingly rare all-purpose junk shops: dusty and distressed furniture, foxed mirrors, worm-eaten gilt picture frames, chipped shepherdess figurines, rusted Oxo tins . . . And books too, of course. There’s always a rack of them set up outside, and on Sunday I bought a couple of Penguin paperbacks for less than the price of a pint of beer. A post-war Mr Polly, the spine a little chipped but the red cover still bright, and a slightly waterstained edition of two of Graham Greene’s stories made into films, ‘The Third Man’, and ‘The Fallen Idol’.

Rereading ‘The Fallen Idol’, I was struck afresh by the vivid precision and precise concision of its structure and imagery, and the brilliant conceit of using a seven-year-old boy as the viewpoint in a story about an adulterous affair involving the boy’s parents’ butler. The boy is damaged for life by what happens, but it’s the butler’s wife comes of worst, in all senses. It’s necessary for the story that she be unsympathetic, of course - as far as the boy is concerned, she’s a figure of unwelcome authority that spoils his fantasies, a nightmare intruder who at one point is described as a witch. And because she is such an unsympathetic character, we are able to feel sympathy for the butler, betrayed by the boy’s innocence. Yet I can’t help wondering about how different the story might be if the child left in the care of the butler and his wife had been a little girl; how she might have colluded with the cheated wife instead of the cheating husband, and how she might have been ruined in quite a different way.

Version Francais

Here’s the cover of the French edition of Mind’s Eye, published at the end of last month. It couldn’t be called Mind’s Eye in France because there’s already a novel by that name, but my indefatigable and microscopically attentive translator, Bernard Sigaud, came up with Glyphes, which is equally good if not better.

Nova's Night

To the Arthur C. Clarke awards last night, held in the Apollo cinema at the beginning of the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival. The underground foyer was noisy and crowded, and there was the usual DJ playing the usual 120 bpm racket, but there are quiet places with actual seats, and it’s definitely A Good Thing that the British SF clan has an annual gathering like this. And amongst the usual suspects there’s always the chance of an unexpected meeting. A couple of years ago it was Fred Pohl (who is rumoured to be collaborating with Clarke on a novel) and Betty Hull; this year it was Kit and Joe Reed.

This year’s winner, the twenty-first, was M. John Harrison for Nova Swing. A popular win for a novel I think I need to read again to understand why I liked it so much, the first time around. In his brief acceptance speech, MJH noted that Clarke had written a couple of the best SF novels of the past century, and that to his eleven-year-old self Clarke had seemed like a god. If not a god, Clarke was certainly an avatar of SF’s Golden Age to my eighteen-year-old self when I saw him speak at Bristol University in a large lecture theatre filled to overflowing. And for what’s it’s worth, I think Childhood’s End and The City and the Stars are still capable of evoking the fabled sense of wonder.

After the ceremony, I went to dinner with the Adam Roberts and the Gollancz editorial team. MJH turned up a little later, having been feted with champagne by his agent. Amongst other things, we got to talking about the recent news that the function of a small part of a mouse brain has been simulated on a supercomputer; one of the editors chided us when we agreed that as far as we were concerned it wasn’t good fictional material. But this is an age of wonders after all, and there’s simply too much good stuff around - in this week’s New Scientist, for instance, there’s a report that there may be something to cold fusion after all (something Clarke has long championed, against the grain of scientific consensus), an item about gestural language in chimpanzees, a note about a planet-spotting telescope that’s proving to be 10 times more sensitive than expected, sensitive enough to spot Earth-sized planets, another note about drug-induced retrieval of ‘lost’ long-term memories . . . Besides, all novelists must have a good filter: the ability to select the pertinent fact or image and ruthlessly discard everything else is as essential as ruthless self-criticism, or the discipline of solitude, or Graham Greene’s infamous splinter of ice in the heart. ‘Discrimination in one’s words is certainly required,’ Greene wrote in A Sort Of Life, ‘ but not love of one’s words - that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to the excesses of Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell . . .’ Nova Swing, like all of MJH’s novels and stories, is a lapidary exemplar of this discrimination.

After this excitement, anyhow, it’s back to the second draft of the ongoing, and the necessary hard work to make lucid Macy Minnot’s entanglement in the plots and counterplots of people more powerful and dangerous than her.

What It's Not

Over at Lou Ander’s blog, there’s some lively discussion about whether the reaction to Kurt Vonnegut's death and Ray Bradbury’s Pulitzer Prize are signs that science fiction is about to get its long-overdue rehabilitation. Amongst other things, he mentions the pretzel logic deployed by one of Battlestar Galactica’s executive producers to distance the series from genre antpong*:

'It's fleshed-out reality,' explains executive producer Ronald D. Moore in the sci-fi mag SFX. 'It's not in the science-fiction genre.'

Too true. Because as far as SF is concerned, ‘fleshing-out’ reality doesn’t go far enough. SF is about leading reality into really bad habits. It’s about giving reality a shot of something dark and nasty that turns its tiny little mind upside down and inside out. It’s about setting fire to the audience’s preconceptions and burying the ashes six feet deep under the foundations of something new and strange and utterly wonderful. Just to begin with, you understand. After that, it lights out for the Territory, ahead of the rest. That’s when the real fun starts.

So if rehabilitation means that SF is taken seriously for what it is, and we no longer have to listen to people who disrespect it out of reflex snobbery, then I’m all for it. Just as long as it doesn’t mean that SF has to become all respectable and sivilised, and has to start behaving itself as far as reality is concerned.


*Coined by John Clute. I wish I could remember where.

I've Got Your Dilithium Right Here

Remember those crystal-filled caves that featured as alien planet backdrops in so many SF movies and serials in the 1960s and 70s? Here’s the real deal.

Double Vision

After reading this, I rubbed my eyes and wondered if the author had seen an advance copy of Cowboy Angels. He even has the obligatory reference to Pottersville.

Gosh Wow

The discovery of an Earth-like planet in the life-zone of another star, just twenty light years away, considerably bumps up the probability of extra-terrestrial life. Although since the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star once every twenty-seven days, it’s not going to be life as we know it . . . but we knew that anyway. 2007 may look nothing like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but what the heck: we’re living in a golden age of space science.