Roll Up, Roll Up!

Ellen Datlow has just send me this retrotastic Barnum and Bailey style cover for her upcoming anthology (I know the title implies that it’s Del Rey’s, God bless ‘em all, but it wouldn’t have happened without Ellen). It includes a novelette (20,000 words: that’s a novelette, right? I’m a bit vague about the taxonomy) that Kim Newman and I wrote together. And 15 other original stories selected by one of the finest editors in the field. Here’s the list of contents. Pretty damn good, huh?

Introduction Ellen Datlow
The Elephant Ironclads Jason Stoddard
Ardent Clouds Lucy Sussex
Gather Christopher Rowe
Sonny Liston Takes the Fall Elizabeth Bear
North American Lake Monsters Nathan Ballingrud
All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World Carol Emshwiller
Special Economics Maureen McHugh
Aka Saint Marks Place Richard Bowes
The Goosle Margo Lanagan
Shira Lavie Tidhar
The Passion of Azazel Barry N. Malzberg
The Lagerstätte Laird Barron
Gladiolus Exposed Anna Tambour
Daltharee Jeffrey Ford
Jimmy Pat Cadigan
Prisoners of the Action Paul McAuley and Kim Newman

Pure Pulp

Another of my Woolworths finds, and one of my first encounters with raw, primeval space opera. Published in 1968, the stories date from a decade earlier; my favourite is still Edmond Hamilton’s ‘The Starcombers’, which has all the tropes (vagabond starsailors attempting to make a living in a state of pure and untrammelled capitalism, ancient alien artifacts, a ferociously strange niche in a dying world) of the pure quill. The Easy Eye gimmick is long-forgotten; it does actually work, but large type means more pages than usual, which probably wasn’t a great economic model in the cutthroat world of pulp publishing.

I can’t now remember if I bought more short story collections than novels because I preferred collections, or if there were fewer novels on offer. Long exposure to the publishing industry suggests the latter.

The House On Amherst Avenue

Rick McGrath's search for J.G. Ballard’s childhood home in Shanghai.

You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here...

When I was a teenager, living in a small town and too impoverished to buy new books, my only source of SF apart from the local library was the dump bin of the local Woolworths, which contained a headily promiscuous mix of all kinds of imported and startlingly cheap US paperbacks. That’s where I picked up The Asylum World, mesmerized by the disturbingly psychotic cover. John Jakes is best known as the author of bestselling Bicentennial series, about American history seen through the lens of a single family, but before that success he wrote scads of fantasy and SF, including this swift, bleak satire. Published in 1969, it describes the travails of a delegation of Martian colonists on a diplomatic visit to Earth. Jakes is very good at the violent seediness of a New York turned into an insane asylum, which wasn’t much different from the contemporary actuality. He’s pretty good on the laviscious corruption of Earth’s politicians, too; the president is an idiot puppet of his Secretary. Sound familiar?

Mastermind Of Horror

Published in 1965, this collection is Fontana paperback’s second attempt to reinvent H.G. Wells as a horror writer; the first was The Valley of Spiders. Mind you, with ‘The Cone’ they definitely had a point:

He clung, crying, to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone . . . A rush of suffocating gas whooped up at him and when the momentary red had passed . . . there was a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, clutching and fumbling at the chain - and writhing in agony . . .

This vividly nasty little squib about revenge and a blast furnace really spooked me when I first encountered it, age 11, in one of the green-backed volumes of the Everyman edition of Wells’s work. Not only because Wells describes the torment of the furnace owner’s rival with an almost indecent relish, but also because I happened to live next door to a small iron foundry, and never again could look at its smelter with the same innocence.

More Free Stuff

I’ve just put up my short story ‘Interstitial’ on the web site. It’s an end-of-the-world story that takes off from the theory that life had survived at least one bottleneck caused by a runaway effect that created a snowball Earth and ends in the kind of conflict between the military and scientists that powered most 1950's sci-fi movies, with a tip of the hat to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Imagine it in scratchy black-and-white, with John Agar playing the hero.

I’ve just finished and sold the zombie story (they’re not really zombies; they’re Boltzmann brains). It’s presently called ‘The Thought War’, but that might get changed by the time it appears (in Postscripts next year, if everything goes to plan). Right now, I’m working on/playing with a couple of others that I set aside in the summer so that I could make the final push on The Quiet War. My version of a holiday.

It’s A Small World But I Wouldn’t Want To Paint It

I feel exceptionally dense: until I saw a trailer for a BBC documentary last night it never before occurred to me that Mark Everett, aka E of Eels, who has written several of my most favourite songs, ever, is the son of Hugh Everett III, who fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-four, devised the many-worlds theory. Checking through my Eels CDs I find that the drawing on the inner back face of the jewel case of Electro-shock Blues is from Hugh Everett III’s school biology textbook. It shows a boy crying over split milk. In another universe, of course, the milk is unspilt. In another universe, Hugh Everett III received a full measure of the recognition he deserved for his ideas while he was yet alive. We can’t get there from here, but we know, now, that it’s almost certainly true.

As well as feeling dense, I also feel a little guilty, because there is only an oblique reference to Hugh Everett III in Cowboy Angels; in the timeline buried inside the story it was necessary for someone to come up with the idea earlier.

Presently rereading: Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. Presently playing: Blinking Lights and other revelations, Eels.

Free Stuff Free

I’ve put up some more free stuff over on the web site: appreciations of Kim Newman and Michael Marshall Smith, the introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s Zima Blue, and reviews of DVD box sets of Budgie and The Beiderbecke Trilogy. I’m also, slowly, making content on the site available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons licence.

Vast Saharas

And not made of sand either, of course, this being Titan's sand dune seas.

I'm moving further out for the next novel, but I'm still obsessed with Saturn and its exotic entourage.

Entrained

I’ve been working on a short story, and finding yet again that I’m not particularly bicameral; I find it hard to conjure up even the briefest blog entry after working on fiction. The external life of a writer, writing, isn’t especially exciting, alas; perhaps that’s why most fictional representations of writers are about writers not being able to write. Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes A Novel (collected in Amphigorey) is one of the best and funniest depictions I know of the actual process.

Saturday, I walked down to St Pancras Station to check out the new Eurostar terminus. Another favourite walk, in the gloaming along Regents’ canal towards Camden, turning off at St Pancras Old Church (the story starts off in the churchyard, with the appearance of what appears to be a zombie), and sneaking into the station around the back. The place is quite as full as one of W.R. Frith’s paintings; the statue of Sir John Betjeman (who campaigned against the station’s demolition) is delightful; the long sleek trains look quite at home. The champagne bar that dominated the PR turns out not to be a vast length of darkly polished wood lit by low hung lamps and attended by louche customers and waiters in black waistcoats and white aprons, but a series of booths strung alongside platform 1, with a kind of hut affair at the entrance and no doubt featuring the longest walk to a restroom in the history of any bar since the advent of indoor plumbing. And unfortunately, the buffer end of the station is dominated by a thirty-foot staue of a man and a woman falling into an embrace. Titled The Meeting Place, this monstrous piece of committee-art is a bad mistake, I think. And since it is situated under a huge and beautiful period clock, it's a) superfluous and b) in the way. Also, as the couple are dressed in contemporary clothes, it will look tremendously dated in, oh, ten years or less.

But these are minor quibbles. The restoration of the station and its overarching roof is a triumph, and my neighbours have already taken one of the first trains to France and report that it’s as quick and smooth as any on the Continent. No more waiting outside Waterloo for the 1650 to Penge to clear the junction: I can now walk to a station in twenty minutes, and be in Paris inside three hours.

Presently reading: Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road.

Oh Yeah

The other thing I did on Monday, apart from watch Beowulf and see a big plume of smoke over London that briefly woke the poison spider meme that lurks in the basements of our brains, post 9/11, was send of the manuscript of The Quiet War to my editor at Gollancz. Which is no longer quite the ceremony it once was, involving a hot laser printer, a ream and a bit of paper, a large envelope, parcel tape, and a wait at the post office. Instead you just press this button, and off it goes into the ether.

The Quiet War came out at more or less 170,000 words, a tad over the estimate of 150,000 made before I wrote the first word. I cut something like 50,000 words along the way, so I think they are the right 170,000 words, more or less. It would be easy (and fantastically lazy and indulgent) to make it twice the length, with no change in plot or incident. But it wouldn’t do the book much good. I like to write long and cut back, which isn’t the most efficient way of writing perhaps, but lets me see what works, and what is necessary.

It’s loosely based on the background and back story a sequence of stories I wrote over the past ten years, although I’ve made some pretty drastic changes; necessary changes, as the sequence emerged piecemeal rather than being thoroughly planned. So it’s a second draft of a future history, about the way in which history works through human lives, and how human lives and human ideas work on history. It follows five main characters through a tight tangle of storylines that all resolve in a conflict that slowly and inevitably develops into war, through design and circumstance. A collision between stasis and evolution, between a conservative elite that’s consolidated power after catastrophe, and a new generation hungry for change, even though it can’t quite define to itself what that change is going to be. There are spaceships and space battles, chases and alarms, vacuum organisms, floating gardens in Saturn, gene wizards, spies, and extraordinary ordinary people, cities and oases scattered across the very real icescapes of half a dozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn (I owe a vast debt to the robot probes Galileo and Cassini, not to mention the Huygens lander)... In short, it’s a kind of space opera.

I should of course be pressing on with the next novel, and I am beginning to make notes on the notes I wrote at various intervals in the past year or so, but having worked with furious concentration for about eight months, with just a couple of weeks off here and there, I’m unwinding a little. Stepping back, to make the next great leap. Maybe I’ll scratch the itch of this short story that’s been bugging me. And in any case, I’m hardly finished with The Quiet War; there’ll be an edit to deal with, by and by, and a concentrated spot of polishing, the copy edit... I definitely need a rest.

Celeb spot: Gilbert & George piss-elegant in camelhair coats, Commercial Street, Spitalfields. Not entirely unexpected as they live around the corner, but it still evoked a tiny frisson.
Current listening: Songs of Defiance, Music of Chechnya and the North Caucasus, compiled by Michael Church, and Oddities and Marvels of the Human Voice, compiled by Jack Womack. Current reading: E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome To Hard Times.

Space Truckin'

I like to think that Jules Verne would be pleased by this highly practical spacecraft.

Beowulf In The Valley Of The Uncanny

Out to the IMAX cinema in Waterloo with Mr Kim Newman to see the 3D version of Beowulf. Given I’m not big on heroic fantasy and think The Vikings was about as good a film as it was possible to make about sword-swinging looting and pillaging Danes, I was pleasantly surprised. The script nicely compresses the poem into classic Hollywood three-act format and adds a couple of neat plot twists, and the story, in which the hero takes on a monster, the monster’s mother and a dragon (not to mention a bunch of sea serpents), is perfect subject matter for the technique of using digitally-enhanced live action within a computer-rendered setting, previously deployed by director Robert Zemeckis in Polar Express. Digital animation means that anything is possible except, because of the Uncanny Valley effect, entirely believable scenes in which the actors do nothing but talk to each other, and so the first half, where most of the exposition lies, is sometimes a bit laboured and reminiscent of cut-scenes in computer games (even if they are the most exquisitely detailed cut-scenes you’ve ever experienced). It doesn’t help that Ray Winstone, otherwise fine as the misguided hero, occasionally lapses into broad Cockernee (‘I have come to kill a Monstah!’), and the scene where he gets naked before his fight with Grendel is distractingly reminiscent of the opening of Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me. But once the story gets going and hurtles towards its tragic-heroic conclusion it grips more firmly. There are stunning coupes de theatre, including a wonderful reverse tracking shot through a dark and wintery wood, dynamic action scenes, and the best goddamn dragon I’ve ever seen: once it roars into action the film literally takes off. If you’re going to see it, though, be good to your inner 13-year-old kid and make sure you catch it in IMAX 3D; I don’t think that it will quite work in any other format.

Coming out of the cinema, heading over Waterloo Bridge, there was a vast plume of smoke rising to the east and unpacking above the Thames and South London; just for a moment, Kim and I wondered if This Was It again; nope, just a very big fire at a disused bus garage in the Olympic site in Hackney: bonfire of the vanities.

One Hundred Futures

In the post today, a copy of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 of short short stories first published in Nature. You can read my contribution, ‘Meat’, here.

In The Cut

Yesterday, visited the Tate Modern to see Doris Salcedo’s installation. One of my favourite walks, through Islington and down St John Street past Smithfield, Little Britain, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and across the Thames on the wobbly bridge. Like a descent back through the centuries, from Islington’s nineteenth century suburb and Georgian squares, down to the twelfth century when Smithfield was ‘Smoothfield’, where horses were sold, and St
Bartholomew’s Hospital was founded, and on to the timeless river.

Salcedo’s installation is a riverine crack that runs down the floor of the huge Turbine
Hall. Impressive in execution, cunningly made so that the bottom can’t be seen, but dwarfed by its surroundings, and rather too obviously a construct, with its new wire grid and fresh concrete. The barabarian in me thought that it might be imporoved by jets of vapour spouting at unpredictable intervals, and perhaps some Lovecraftian tentacles grabbing at art-lovers, who seemed unsure how to react, mostly getting photographed straddling it, or dipping the tip of their shoe into the narrow void. No one fell in while I was there.

Cyberyarn

'A stitch, in essence, is a pixel.'

Back To The Future

I rewatched Children of Men the other day and enjoyed it as much if not more (because I could pay more attention to the scrupulous texture) the second time around. One of my movies of the decade, so far. In one of the extras, the philosopher/critic Savoj Zizek (who is always good value) commented that what was happening in the background of the movie was more important than what was foregrounded. I think that’s true for all good science fiction.

From The Tightrope

Richard Ford, one of the modern masters of the short story gives a masterclass:

Great stories are congeries of plan, vigour, will and application, but also of luck and error and intuition and even, God knows, sudden inspiration, for all of which there is no key, and in the midst of which things often just happen - a fact that should make us like stories even better for their life-mimicking knack of seeming to come out of nowhere, thereby fortifying our faith in art and life’s mystery.

Do Tell

I now have the power to scan - and here's the cover rough for the mass market paperback of Players, which my publishers reckon is solidly commercial (and who am I to argue?). There's a crossbow in it, but it's also about MMOPRGs. And hubris.

Reading: Dylan's Chronicles (soundtrack:The Bootleg Series Volume 1). Rereading: Alastair Reynolds's Absolution Gap.

Peace Breaks Out

I’ve just finished the final draft of The Quiet War, and must now contemplate the next, which is presently called Outer Dark. But now I have to go off and write an introduction to a collection of stories about AI...

Elsewhere, Paul Kincaid is pleased by the health of the short story market, Jeff Vandemeer is unimpressed by mere comptence. And Mark Lawson, post-Booker Prize, feels that authors can choose between ‘the smooth and brightly lit genre path that winds through entertainment, optimism and simplicity’ to ‘adulation, mansions and fame’ (yeah: right), or the ‘dark and densely tangled’ path of yer actual literature, which leads to ‘bleakness, experiment and sentiments which many will consider unspeakable or unreadable’. No wonder the poor dears of the literary field need champagne-fuelled award parties to cheer them up. They really do suffer for their art, you know.