Progress

Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you. Sometimes the story in your head spins straight out onto the page with rapt unhurried ease; more often, it stalls, refuses to wear the shape you planned for it, insists on a different direction, a new angle of attack. The story I first thought would be called ‘Oz‘ but now will probably be called ‘A Brief Guide to Other Histories’ has been like that. At first I thought I could get away with telling it in the second person singular, in the breathless rush of the present tense. I got all the way to the end of a first draft, but it wasn’t the story I wanted. So I started over, first person narration this time, telling the tale about someone’s encounter with his doppleganger at one remove. It’s work, but it’s also pleasure, too, when, as Angela Carter put it, ‘sign and sense fuse.’ But even after that happens, more work is needed . . .

Regents Canal, King's Cross

Fairyland Redux

The new edition of Fairyland is published today.

When I was writing it, way back in 1994, I wanted to produce a vivid and crammed portrait of a near future in which biotechnology was the principle agent of change, but not the only agent of change. I used the present tense to make it seem as immediate as possible. I set it in London, Paris and Albania because at that time most of the future seemed to be occupied by America and Americans. I wrote it from the point of view of people at the edge of a conspiracy to effect a liberating transformation, who see and understand only parts of the story in which they are caught. I had tremendous fun writing it, and after it was published it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and that gave me the final push to quit my job and start writing full time. So I’m extraordinarily pleased that Alex Sharkey, Morag Gray, Milena, First Rays of the New Rising Sun, and company have been given a new lease of life.

Time For Crime

The new Crime Time site is now up and running: a free online version of the magazine stuffed full of articles and reviews about crime fiction and movies...

First Class

Some of Paul Di Filippo's mail art.

The Zeppelin Building

Fairyland

I recently received my author’s copies of the reprint of Fairyland, part of Gollancz’s Modern Classics series - I’m afraid that the cover picture on Amazon doesn’t do justice to its lovely holographic sheen...

From the first chapter, which kicks off in the restored Great Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station:

Gilbert Scott's great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby. He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it onto his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach. A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast forward. There's a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella. It's monsoon weather.

Mr Brooks

Out for some time in the States, about to be realeased here, the serial killer genre gets a (slightly) new twist with Kevin Kostner as Mr Brooks, a mild-mannered businessman who is using the Twelve Step programme to try to give up his addiction to murder. Haunted and continually tempted by his alter ego, Marshall, a fine portrait of sinister and supernaturally smart hunger by William Hurt, Brooks, a.k.a. the Thumbprint Killer, steps into a world of trouble when he gives in to temptation for one last time. His double murder is witnessed by a nerdish amateur photographer (Dane Cook), who blackmails Brooks into initiating him into the murder club. So far so good. Dane Cook’s sweaty nervousness nicely ratchets up the unpredictability and Kostner (always at his best when he dons a bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses) and Hurt are a great double act; there’s a very fine moment when, after half an hour of bickering, they both laugh at the same time at the same nasty little idea, and you realise just how indivisible they really are.

Trouble is, the movie can’t resist piling on the issues. The policewoman hunting the Thumbprint Killer, played by Demi Moore, is not only a millionairess, she’s not only being taken to the cleaners by her soon-to-be-divorced husband and his rapacious lawyer, but she’s also being pursued by another serial killer who’s just escaped from prison and wants revenge. I half-expected her to be suffering from some kind of rare terminal illness, too. And Mr Brooks’s daughter hasn’t dropped out of college because she may or may not be pregnant: she’s inherited her father’s addiction, and has just botched her first effort. All of this is more or less skilfully resolved into a clever and neatly packaged ending, but it’s at the expense of proper development of the three-cornered relationship between Mr Brooks, Marshall, and the wannabe.

Demi Moore as usual sticks her chin in the air too much but wrings a few good moments from for her overblown character - but we’re also treated to the usual gratuitous scene of her exercising with grim determination (we got the message after G.I. Jane, Demi: give it a rest). Portland, Oregon, provides a fairly anonymous setting. Three out of five stars - partly in the hope that this will get Hurt much more work.

No End To 'Em

Jeremy Lassen asked if I’d mention that Nightshade Press is having a clearout sale. I will. They are. And because this blog is operated on the principle of unbiased coverage beholden with no special bias towards anyone in particular (except to me), I’ll also mention that Small Beer Press, Earthling, and PS Publishing also produce some pretty good books.

End of Round Two

I’m sure you’re all be thrilled to know that I’ve finished the second draft of the first Quiet War novel. Okay, well, I’m thrilled. And exhausted. Something like thirty thousand words were cut, this time around (and a few new ones added), and now the baggy monster has a definite shape and intent. It still doesn’t have a title, but that will come along. (I did think of calling this one War, and the next, Peace, but only, I swear, for a moment.)

I should take a break. But I have an introduction to write, and a short story that’s banging on the inside of my head, demanding to be let out.

I have managed to do a bit of reading. Michael Chabon’s fine The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and then, because I liked that one so much, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Connelly’s The Overlook. Adam Roberts’s Land of the Headless. Al Reynolds’s The Prefect. Rajiv Chandraskaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections. And Endless Things, the fourth and last part of John Crowley’s patient chronicle of becoming and unbecoming.

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 . . .