Ringworlds

We all know that Saturn has rings. Now there's evidence that one of its moons may have rings too.

Competition

Today is World Book Day in the UK (elsewhere in the world it's celebrated - hooray!- on my birthday), so I thought I'd give away one of my books. And as I will be attending Eastercon in a couple of weeks, I further thought that I would create an opportunity to meet at least one of the people who check in here.

So to win a signed copy of the increasingly hard-to-find hardback of COWBOY ANGELS you have:
(a) to be attending Eastercon
(b) know the answer to the following question: in which Bob Dylan song are cowboy angels mentioned?
(c) No, don't tell me now. Find me at Eastercon. First person to give me the correct answer f2f wins the prize.

Put Out More Flags

The mass-market paperback of Players, my crime novel about role-playing games and a seriously narcissistic wannabe serial killer, is published today. You can buy it here, or in any good bookshop (check the SF section if you can’t find it with the other crime novels). Otherwise, as you were.

There Are Doors (6)

George Orwell lived at 27a Canonbury Square, Islington in 1945, when he was writing 1984, although much of the work on the novel was done in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, Scotland. The entrance to his basement flat wasn’t on the square itself, but through an unassuming gateway around the corner, close to Canonbury Tower.

UnlikelyWorldsfactoid: the grandmother of my friend Kim Newman rented the flat from Orwell while he was on Jura, and as part payment typed up the manuscript of 1984.

Chronocules

Phil asks some questions about The Quiet War:

i've read six short stories in the sequence, Second Skin, Sea Changes.., Reef, The Passenger, Dead Men Walking and Making History. are there others that i may have missed? are you planning on gathering them all in a short story collection? i noted a reference to Greater Brazil in one of them which would tie the sequence in with 400 Billion Stars and your earlier novels although i can't work out the chronology.

The stories published so far are, in order of first publication:
‘Second Skin’ (1997)
‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ (1998)
‘The Gardens of Saturn’ (1998)
‘Reef’ (2000)
‘Making History’ (2000)
‘The Passenger’ (2002)
‘The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (2002)
‘Dead Men Walking’ (2006)

Another story, ‘Incomers’, is due to be published in April this year, in an anthology of stories for teenage readers, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan. So far, there are no plans to collect them together, I’m afraid. And apart from sharing a country called Greater Brazil, neither the stories nor the novels have anything to do with my earlier future history.

Although it’s possible to fit these stories into a rough chronological order -- ‘Making History’ is somewhere near the beginning of things and ‘Reef’ and ‘Second Skin’ are towards the end -- I wasn’t cunning or foresighted enough to work up a proper future history from the start. That’s why, when I started working on the background for The Quiet War and Outer Dark, I realised that I wanted to take things in a slightly different direction. (If I was cleverer than I am I wouldn't make my life so complicated.)

So the stories should be considered as a loosely affiliated set of fictions in their own right, rather than spinoffs, sidebars, or episodes waiting to be stitched together in some kind of fix-up. Although the novels share some of the background and history (and even characters) of the stories, the novels start from a slightly different place, in a slightly different timeline. And it’s my hope that the novels will benefit from the recent avalanche of new information about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn from Galileo and Cassini probes. I couldn’t have done this without them, not to mention Pioneer 11, and the two Voyagers, and of course the teams of scientists and technicians who designed and flew them, and gave form and names to the fantastic diversity of moonscapes they discovered.

Aspire

After I delivered the edited MSS of The Quiet War to Gollancz, I visited the row of little secondhand bookshops in nearby Cecil Court. It’s one of the few streets in London that still maintains the tradition of harbouring the workplaces of various representives of a trade cheek by jowl, and thus, for a bibliophile, it’s horribly full of temptation. Too much temptation: I came away with a first edition of William Golding’s The Spire.

I already have a paperback edition, signed by Golding just after he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published his penultimate novel The Paper Men. He rarely did signings, and I had to queue for a fair while in Blackwells (on Broad Street, Oxford, just around the corner where I worked in those days) before I got my turn with him. A novice to book signings, having already bought The Paper Men in hardback, I purchased a couple of paperbacks at the till beforehand as the price of admission, and also had him sign my first of The Scorpion God, one of the first hardback books I ever bought, (at a much reduced price, in Bristol, a couple of years after it was published). I’ve been a fan of his work since school. Unlike many schoolchildren of my generation - I did the sciences instead of English Literature - I wasn’t taught The Lord of the Flies as a set book, but I read it anyway, and then read everything else of his that I could find. But despite his early popularity, and the Nobel Prize, he seems to have fallen out of fashion after his death; this and his early and enormous success with his first novel means that first editions of his novels (apart from The Lord of the Flies) are fairly plentiful and therefore fairly affordable.

One reason for his unfashionability may be that he never wrote the same book twice, thus resisting easy academic explication. And he is also, it has to be said, something of an old-fashioned writer, not only in his thorough grounding in the classics, but in his assumption of a God-like but detached, forensic point of view. Thus, he never explains or enters the minds or emotional states of his characters, except when the novel is narrated in the first person (and even though his ‘Tarpaulin’ trilogy is written in the first-person, it is in the form of a journal kept to flatter and impress the narrator’s rich and powerful uncle, so we’re kept at one remove from his real thoughts and feelings). Instead, emotion is conveyed only by its physical manifestation; yet this forensic detachment, married with limpid yet incredibly precise prose, conveys very clearly great emotions in a manner that’s both ironic and sympathetic, and on occasion tremendously moving: in The Inheritors, the discovery by the Neanderthal Lok of the bones of his murdered child is, for me, one of the most heartbreaking passages in English literature. It’s the evocative power of his extraordinarily concise, clear-eyed and accurate descriptive prose that first hooked me, and still enthralls me. All of which is a small part of the explanation of why the epigraph of The Quiet War is from Golding’s Free Fall: ‘The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.’ For the rest, you’ll have to read the book.

This Is This

There’s a lot to argue with in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, including his dismissal of the importance of story (contrary to the dust jacket puff he isn’t at all interested in the ‘machinery of storytelling’, whatever that is), and his rather fussy obsession with hierarchies. But there’s a lot of good things too, notably his sustained meditations on the many ways by which character can be conveyed, and his acute sentence-by-sentence anatomisation of judiciously selected passages of prose. And then there’s this:

. . . A convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference . . . but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude. And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage.

Which seems to me to cut straight through the heart of the Gordian knot into which science fiction has currently tied itself, in fits of embarrassment, over ‘relevance’ and ‘probability.’

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

I spent a fair portion of Saturday printing off the edited and rewritten version of The Quiet War. Now it will go off to the copy editor, who’ll scrutinise it for every kind of goof and mark it up, and then I’ll get a final chance to fix the prose before it gets set. This morning, frosty and crystalline, a fine long walk along Regent’s Canal and hooking through Camden to Regent’s Park. Where snowdrops and daffodils are in bloom together, a very odd sight to someone used to gradation of the seasons. When I started this blog, two years ago, I noted in early April that my neighbour’s magnolia tree was just coming into bloom; this year, about six weeks earlier, it’s not that far off. It’s like being caught in one of those scenes in the old movies, where calendar pages flip by to signify passing time, except they’re blowing past all at once, as the whole wide world teeters on its axis . . .

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.