There Are Doors (5)

Aside from the bicycle lock sleeved in blue plastic, this gate could happily feature in a corner of a Piranesi print of antique ruins. It was once the entrance to the now-defunct Tower Theatre, next door to Canonbury Tower, a tall and brick-built Tudor tower built during the reign of Henry VII for William Bolton, Prior of St Bartholomew. Sir Francis Bacon once lived there (and died after catching a chill while experimenting with preserving chickens by stuffing them with snow), as did playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Washington Irving. It now houses the Masonic Research Centre.

Perchance

At the Wellcome Museum’s exhibition on sleep and dreaming, this quote by Hugo Gernsback: ‘Anyone who has a dream should see a doctor.’ Also a cover from one of Mr Gernsback’s magazines showing an editor inside a kind of giant, electrified bed-spring supposed to banish sleep, so that the editor could work on even more inspiring magazines 24/7. In the permanent exhibition, Darwin’s walking stick, topped with a miniature carved skull with emerald eyes, no doubt capable of shooting out evo-devo rays should any henchmen of the Bishop of Oxford menace him.

There Are Doors (4)

One of the butcher shops in the General Market Building at the Farringdon Road end of Smithfield Market, part of the new market built by Horace Jones in 1851-66. It has been empty for several years as conservationists and developers argue about its fate; in three months, the planning authorities will decide if it will be redeveloped, or demolished and replaced by the usual steel and glass office block. Meanwhile, it moulders on, as if in a post-apocalytic city whose inhabitants have long deserted it.

Space Cowboy

One of the muscians covered by Tony Russell’s most excellent Country Music Originals, The Legends and the Lost, is a cowboy singer with the splendid name of Jules Verne Allen. He was born in 1883, so it’s quite possible that his parents were fans of Verne; the novels for which Verne is remembered today were all published before 1880. For the life of me, I can’t think of anyone else named after a writer of science fiction or scientific romance; after characters, yes (there must be plenty of forty-year-olds whose hippy parents named them Bilbo or Gandalf), but writers?

In Living Colour

This extract from James Woods’ forthcoming book, grandly titled How Fiction Works, probably isn’t especially useful to budding writers who puzzle over how to make their characters seem, if not real, then at least vivid. But he’s especially good on why Dickens’s characters seem real even though they shouldn’t, provides some useful taxonomy, and vents the following pithy denunciation which chimes very loudly with some concerns of my own:

Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with’, or didn’t think any of the characters grow.’

Now I think book clubs - and anything else that encourages people to not only read books they might not otherwise read but also discuss them - are the most marvellous things. But there’s a definite danger, when not thinking deeply enough about your engagement with a novel, of falling into the procrustean mode of Hollywood script reports, and Woods nails it.

As far as I’m concerned, physical description is the least useful way of realising character (usefully, I can discard every novel that begins with the hero looking into a mirror and meditating on her appearance, saving much time for more engaging stuff). What characters say and what they do and how they react to other people are far more useful than physical appearance, and so are their qualities -- their virtues and vices and all the rest. If it’s shorthand you need to ‘get in’ a character, then forget hair and eye colour. Are they forthright or reticent? Optimistic or glum? Thoughtful or careless? And if you want to create two memorable characters in one stroke, then play two opposites against each other in a double act: Holmes v. Watson; Don Quixote v. Sancho Panza; Morecombe v. Wise. It isn’t rocket science; it’s alchemy.
Meanwhile, I have to dive back into the final polish of The Quiet War, not to mention the first draft of Outer Dark...

Face-Off

The internet may be more science-fictional than we think, and possibly not in a good way.

There Are Doors (3)

On the west side of Rose Alley in Southwark, formerly the site of the first of the Bankside theatres (The Rose, built in 1586-7), is one of the last Victorian buildings that hasn’t yet been replaced by characterless modern offices - although given the cry of defiance and despair painted across its wall, it won’t be long. Appropriately for the location, the unassuming entrance is decorated with a frieze of Tudor roses.

That Was Then; This Is Now

I made a microscopic contribution to this roundup of the best genre titles of 2007 and preview of what’s coming this year, assembled by Robert Thompson.

Credo

I spent much of the year past working on The Quiet War, a space opera novel set on and around the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I’ve just finished the first thirty pages of a similar project, Outer Dark, which moves the history begun in The Quiet War forward across some twenty-odd years. In the past couple of years, while I’ve been planning and writing The Quiet War, I’ve noticed during that time that a certain small-c conservative chill has crept across the SF field. The Mundane SF movement is one obvious symptom, but there are many others, adding up to a kind of retreat from SF’s usual concerns (most notably, as far as I’m concerned, a cynicism about the likelihood of colonisation or even human exploration of the Moon and other planets), and a crisis in self-confidence about the genre’s best-known tropes.

Has SF lost its grip on the future? Is so-called mainstream fiction making better use of SF’s tropes? Should SF be exclusively concerned with ‘reality’ and ‘realistic’ extrapolations - things that are possible from our point of view here in the last quarter of the first decade of the twenty-first century? As far as I’m concerned, maybe, no, and definitely not. I’m not against near-future ‘realistic’ SF (hell, I’ve written plenty), or the idea of Mundane SF per se, and I’m looking forward to the Mundane SF edition of Interzone guest-edited by Geoff Ryman. But I do have severe doubts about its claim that it is The Only Way Forward, and all other forms of SF are irrelevant, foolish or even dangerous.

Here are a few principles that have informed the construction of The Quiet War and Outer Dark:

1) SF’s principal strength is not realism; it’s one part internal consistency, two parts imagination, and three parts self-belief.
2) SF isn’t only about known knowns and known unknowns; it’s also about unknown knowns. Given that two hundred years ago most people in Europe were peasants relying on human and animal muscle power to get their work done, why do many SF writers insist that in two hundred years technology will not be radically different from present technology? Let’s face it, who in the SF field fifty years ago saw cell phones coming? Or the PC and the Internet?
3) The future will almost certainly not be dominated by the USA and freemarket capitalism.
4) Self-interest is a poor driver in any society, yet it’s the only motivating force for characters in too many recent SF novels
5) It’s possible to imagine SF heroes other than freebooting entrepreneurs. I mean, the dot.com boom is so over.
6) It’s possible to imagine a society where science is the dominant driving force of the economy and science and the arts are the main occupations of the population.
7) What will really happen if our children are smarter and kinder than us?
8) True AI is less likely than a manned landing on Mars.
9) Most moons in the Solar System are made of water-ice; with a little power, you have all the water and oxygen you need.
10) We know a lot more about closed-system ecosystems than we did in the 1970s, when O’Neill colonies were first proposed. And we have better vision of the architecture and material science of the future, too
11) Colonisation of space will not be driven by self-interest or the profit-motive.
12) History teaches us that history doesn’t teach us anything. Laboured comparisons between the present and past events are pointless. The future will have its own agenda.

There Are Doors (2)

Space alongside Fenchurch station ripe for renovation, with signage surviving from the 1930s, just before the station was rebuilt. It isn’t difficult to imagine passing through this door into a wooden-floored office where clerks with rolled shirtsleeves caught up by bands sit at desks writing in leather-bound ledgers, or pipe-smoking draughtsmen work at drafting tables, and in the deep cutting beyond the windows small black steam engines puff into the station alongside underground trains in the old maroon livery. Note the apt name of the estate agents dealing with the sale of this railside property: Brunel Estates.

There Are Doors (1)

The doors to the post room of St Bartholomews Hospital, to the south of the southern edge of Smithfield Market, have not yet fallen to the vast work of renovation as the National Health Service institution is converted into a trust. Lacking a kickplate, and seemingly last painted somewhere between Lady Chatterley and the Beatles’ first LP, the doors show the wear and tear of a generation or two of laden couriers who’ve used their boots to kick them open.

It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It

I’ve just learned that two of my novels, The Secret of Life, and Whole Wide World, have been made available for download to those whizzy new kindle devices from amazon.com. I’d rather that they were also available as actual printed-on-dead-wood books, which are still holding their own against all comers, but there you go.

Apart from these electronic reissues, in this year Fairyland was given a new lease of life by Gollancz, I published two new novels, Players and Cowboy Angels, and delivered a third, The Quiet War. I had just two short stories published, but wrote four more; hopefully, these and two or three others should be published in 2008.

I seemed to read more non-fiction than fiction this year, but among the novels I especially enjoyed were The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon, Spook Country by William Gibson, Brasyl by Ian McDonald, The Land of the Headless by Adam Roberts, and Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe. Most of the stand-out non-fiction I read seems to be historical, including Buda’s Wagon - A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston, The Lodger - Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl, and On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein. Schultz and Peanuts by David Michaelis is not only an exemplarary biography but also an acute dissection of the entanglement between art and the everyday life of the artist.

I spent most of 2007 in front of a computer screen; outside, the world has become a more precarious place than when 2006 rolled over. So be careful out there, and have the best 2008 you can.

Gamma Minus

Over at the Carpetbagger blog, Steve Benan reports that President George Bush’s policy on stem cell research may have been shaped by a misreading of Huxley’s Brave New World (link via Jack Womack).

The Refuge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7151190.stm

(I couldn't resist - read (sadly out-of-print) The Secret Of Life to find out why.)

Just When You Think You're Out...

Sandy Auden very kindly tells me that uksfbooknews has posted a Q&A about Cowboy Angels.

Ghost Of A Christmas Present

When I was a kid, I didn’t have enough money to buy new books on anything like a regular basis, so I bought comics instead. I was a devotee of TV21, with its strip versions of Gerry Anderson’s oeuvre and the back story of the Daleks (but not Doctor Who, who was licensed elsewhere), and of Marvel Comics - Iron Man, Thor, and the Fantastic Four (not because I preferred Marvel to DC, but because Marvel comics were what my local newsagents had on their spinner racks). But before that, I was a regular reader of The Victor. I no longer have copies of any of the comics I bought, but I still have the annual pictured above, a Christmas present from 1966.

Inside, we were still fighting not only World War II, but World War I as well (in those days, when post-colonialism was beginning to bite deep into the British psyche, we clung as tightly to those victories, as we still cling to our World Cup victory that year). There were knock-off versions of Tarzan (‘Morgan the Mighty’) and James Bond (‘The Wonder Man’, more like the Man in Black in those Milk Tray advertisments than Bond, to be honest), and a Western strip, ‘The Town Tamers’, led by Dusty Fogg. My favourite, though, was ‘Tough of the Track’, in which working class hero Alf Tupper regularly beat toffs on the athletic field after a hard week of heavy welding, and on a diet of fish and chip suppers:

Each day Alf worked in the scaling yard, and each evening he trained. At night he slept in a tool shed on the recreation ground, unknown to the groundsman...

Things were different then, all right.

Apart from some minor cosmetic work, Unlikely Worlds will be taking a break over Christmas. Happy holidays to one and all - and happy 90th birthday to Sir Arthur.

Listening to: Songs of Survival - Traditional Music of Georgia
Reading: The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard; Nonviolence, Mark Kurlansky

Furnished Early In Books

In her Nobel lecture, Doris Lessing makes some fine and moving points about the hunger and necessity for literature in Africa, but is less convincing in her argument that the internet is diverting young people in the West from books. There have, let’s face it, always been distractions and alternatives to the solitary pleasure of immersion in a good book; Facebook and all the other time-wasting fads that pass through the internet like flu in a turkey farm are merely the latest. And given that they get a bare minimum of advertising and media exposure in comparison to films, video games, music and TV, books are probably punching above their weight.

Lessing also suggests that writers come from homes furnished with an abundance of books. Well, I don’t know about that, but most writers definitely seem to have caught the reading bug early, were voracious readers as children, and are voracious readers still. In my case, we didn’t have that many books in our damp little cottage. Maybe thirty or forty. I still remember some of them, because I read and reread them so often. On the Beach. The Cruel Sea. The Battle of the River Plate. What Katie Did. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The Three Musketeers. My grandmother, who lived next door, had about twice that number, mainly faded and dusty Everyman editions (and most of those copies of Shakespeare’s plays) picked up as part of the mixed lots she liked to bid for in auctions. She had a big pile of copies of Reader’s Digest, too; part of being ill, when I was a child, in addition to a bottle of Lucozade and a new comic, was reading four or five Reader’s Digests a day, something that furnished me a fairly eccentric and eclectic view of the world. So I definitely had a serious reading habit, and because we didn’t own many books, and because I couldn’t afford to buy many, either, it was the public library, and the library of the grammar school, that kept it satisfied. Addicts find their fix where they can; back then, before I could afford the hard stuff, even the back of a cereal packet would do.

Away from the distraction of blogging, I seem to have worked out how to finish my big space robot story, started this summer but left fallow because I couldn’t work out what the twist was and where it bit. Sometimes these things come in a glad rush; all too often actual work is involved.

'Rats of the System' in Romanian

Când îl descoperise racheta de vânatoare, Carter Cho tocmai încerca sa camufleze modulul spaÛial.

ReuÕise sa scape de pe ce mai ramasese din nucleul cometei distruse, sapase o groapa potrivita cu flacarile produse de ambalarea motorului Õi îngramadise micuÛa dar rezistenta nava ina untru, apoi îÕi închise eremtic costumul spaÛial Õi se caÛara afara din cockpit ...

That’s the Romanian version of the begining of my short story ‘Rats of the System’ which has just been published in the December isssue of Sci-Fi magazi. (Thanks to Catalin Moraru.)

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.