The Wrap

The scan scarcely does justice to Sidonie Beresford-Browne's use of shimmering metallic colours, but here it is - the cover for The Quiet War.

Adding Up

Ian Fleming claimed to write the James Bond novels at the rate of 2000 words per day. 1000 in the morning, followed by lunch and a swim; 1000 in the afternoon, and then cocktails and the company of beautiful women. It took him six weeks of this regime to finish a novel. Nice work if you can get it.

I started the ongoing project on January 3 this year, and finished the first draft on May 20. At twenty weeks, it doesn’t seem to measure up to Fleming’s Stakhanovite rate of production - even though the ongoing is somewhat over 170000 words long, while the Bond novels, at 2000 words a day for six weeks, stack up at an economical 84000 words, I seem to have been overdoing it on the lunch and swimming and cocktails and company of beautiful women bit. In fact, I was hitting Fleming’s rate, at minimum, each week. It’s just that I had other stuff to do - such as dealing with the edit and rewrite of The Quiet War, and then its copy edit. That’s five weeks out of the schedule right there. A fair number of weekends were taken up with finishing a novella, and writing an essay, too. And at the beginning, despite a fair amount of forward planning and making detailed background notes, I managed to make my usual false start, discovering after a few weeks and some 70000 words that I wasn’t heading in the right direction or moving at the right speed. D’oh! Well, nothing for it but to start over, and hope that some of the stuff can be reused (which about half of it was, in the end).

Writing seems to me to consist of a) blundering about in the wrong direction, b) finding the right direction and hitting the groove and getting on with it, and c) rewriting. Ah, rewriting! How I love rewriting! After all, the first draft proves that the project has a beginning and an end. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out all the middle stuff, and making sense of notes like this (and this is one of the more intelligible ones): [need to cut this up into at least two chapters and in second sharpen tension between Ghosts and others, more on unbound nanotech and also make the attack and the death of Colonel Neves much sharper].

But first I have to finish writing a talk I’m giving at the Norwegian Festival of Literature . . .

Last Things

(Warning: contains major spoilers of well-known novels you should have read.)

I’m so close to the end of the first draft on the ongoing that I can taste it. And of course I am preoccupied with the all important last sentences. What scene or reverie will foreshadow them? What will they convey? How will they be shaped?

SF and fantasy novels not only have to provide an ending for their characters; they also have to give an idea of how the world in which they are set has been changed, and whether it will carry on changing, and in which direction. This means that endings are sometimes two-staged affairs, as in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, where the affairs of the world are set in order before we follow the major protagonists to their last farewell, and ordinary life closes over the ones who are left behind in the world. The ending of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has the same pattern: the world changes, and we see the protagonist, Case, settle into that changed world, and his changed life, and the last few sentences make an elegiac farewell to his erstwhile companions.

Elegiac farewells are common in SF and fantasy, especially when they end trilogies or longer series that are increasingly common to the form. It is a letting go not just of the characters, but the world they have saved, or created, or changed. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, the last volume of his trilogy about terraforming Mars and creating a new social order, we slip quietly from the new Mars and the presence of the woman who opposed terraforming throughout, and in her despair at the changes put herself in the way of death many times, until now, at the very end, she finds a way of accepting the world, and life: ‘ . . . She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand towards her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.’

There are at least two other main classes of SF and fantasy novel endings. The first is like a trap springing shut. The world has changed (or it has failed to change), and ending shows the protagonists caught in that change, or in their failure. George Orwell’s 1984 has a classic dystopian ending, in which after all his trials and tribulations of the hero has failed to escape - or rather, he has escaped by turning his struggle against the system against himself and from defeat plucked a pyrrhic victory, an ironic reversal in a novel in which the meaning of language has been famously reversed to suit its rulers: ‘Two gin-scented tears trickle down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’

There’s a similar kind of ending in Orwell’s Animal Farm, where a revolution has been absorbed into the socioeconomic frame it sought to overthrow. The last sentence has transcended the book: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

But this kind of ending isn’t always unhappy. Sometimes the trap springs shut on a moment of happiness, or at least, on tranquillity, or the reassertion of order. In Philip K. Dick’s Martian Timeslip, for instance, the threat of chaos had been averted and decency and goodness are shown to have triumphed in this quiet moment: ‘In the darkness of the Martian night [Silvia’s] husband and father-in-law searched for Erna Steiner; their light flashed here and there, and their voices could be heard, businesslike and competent and patient.’

But sometimes the end of the novel is not The End at all. It’s a slingshot, a sudden revelation that the business of change has not ended, or has only just begun. If Neuromancer ends in an elegiac farewell, the last novel in the loose trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ends in a slingshot that propels the protagonists into an alien cyberspace that has meshed with ours. One of the most famous slingshot endings (not just because it helps resolve the enigmatic ending of the film) is that of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the Starchild dispatches missiles aimed at him:
‘ . . . he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
‘But he would think of something.’

Clarke liked slingshot endings, or sudden reversals. At the end of Rendezvous With Rama, as the eponymous alien spaceship powers out of the Solar System, the novel ends with this last thought (Clarke’s italics): ‘The Ramans do everything in threes.’

The ending of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz famously showed that its ending was merely the beginning of a new turn in its epicycles of history (note the spare prose, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road): ‘A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.’

How will the ongoing project of mine end? That would be telling. You’ll have to read the rest of it first.

From I, Robot to iRobot

As Justina Robson pointed out on a recent panel about near future SF, things like this are all very well but most of them don't clean in the corners properly because they are designed by men. There's a woman on the team behind this, so maybe it does better.

I see from the new issue of Interzone that my big space robot story, 'Little Lost Robot', is now a coming attraction...

Incoming

The blurb for The Quiet War:

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.

On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition.

The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it’s too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war . . .

From the prison cities of Earth to the scrupulously realised landscapes of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, The Quiet War’s exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?

When We Were Cool

There’s long been a close and sometimes fruitful relationship between science fiction and the music of popular beat combos. In a recent article (in the Guardian, but not on-line as far as I know), Jon Savage provides a useful corrective to the motion that SF-influenced is dominated by heavy metal and prog rock bands (with David Bowie as a glam outlier to the latter): Joy Division and a host of 1970s punk and post-punk bands were informed and influenced by SF of the period, available in cheap paperback editions along with all kinds of pulp fiction and experimental and fringe literature. Savage also highlights the importance of independent bookshops as beacons of the offbeat; in the case of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, these included shops run by David Britton and Mike Butterworth, such as House on the Borderland and Orbit: vital beacons of alt. culture.My favourite song of the period remains The Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’, but it wouldn’t take much thought to work up a top twenty . . .

Currently reading: Titan Unveiled by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, not only full of insights about Saturn’s largest moon, but also a great account of the science and engineering that underpinned the Cassini mission and transformed Titan ‘from an object of speculation to a planetary world with its own set of processes and observable effects.’ And makes me want to write a bunch of stories set there as soon as possible.

Slip Sliding Away

A few days ago, the Guardian published a big page 3 article about a proposed NASA mission to a tiny Earth-crossing asteroid (here’s the original proposal, which I think firms up an idea that has been floating about for a while). Obviously, NASA needs new, eye-catching missions for its so-new-it-isn’t-yet-built next-generation spaceship, and this isn’t a bad one. Some useful science might even be involved, although a swarm of tiny robots might be much better at manoeuvring around a flying mountain than human beings. But I can’t help thinking that if astronauts are going to catch a ride on an asteroid, it shouldn’t be back to Earth, but up up and away....

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to work out if I can incorporate as a plot point in the next novel the mind-boggling notion that the entire surface of Titan might be slowly rotating on top of an ocean of ammonia/water, pushed by winds. Are there tectonic plates, as in Earth? Are there huge titanquakes? Do strings of volcanoes form as the surface migrates above hotspots, as in Hawaii? Will sat-nav work? Hmmm...

Some Wit, Little Irony

Into town for the general press preview of Iron Man. Directed by John Favreau, the action is as hard-edged as the new incarnation of the Bond series, and while there’s the expected ton of CGI, there’s also room for some smart dialogue and good performances. Most notably that of Robert Downey, Jr, who carries the movie with his charmingly charismatic take on Tony Stark, effortlessly shading from wisecracking irresponsible playboy to wisecracking tortured genius. Gwyneth Paltrow does her nuanced best with the two-dimensional character of his PA, ‘Pepper’ Potts, while Jeff Bridges amply fills the Gene Hackman role as bald, cigar-chewing, jovially menacing father-figure.

The movie does a fair job of filling a summer-blockbuster shaped hole, and the first act, apart from shifting the venue from Vietnam to Afghanistan, sticks pretty closely to the origin story published in Tales of Suspense 39 way back in 1962. (I picked up Iron Man’s story a little later, along with Thor and the Fantastic Four, not really out of choice, I have to admit: the spinner in my local newsagent stocked Marvel rather than DC comic books.) Problem is, the origin story - warlord kidnaps American armaments genius, forces him to create a copy of his superduper new missile system in a cave, and is surprised when he creates an invincible suit of armour instead - is pure hokum. And while the warlord may be leader of a multinational terrorist group, he's still a cliche of oriental fiendishness (he's also a diluted version of Iron Man's original nemesis, the Mandarin), To be fair, the script makes some attempt to deal with the paradox at its heart - Tony Stark responds to a brutal lesson in blowback from his own arms company by building a more powerful weapon, in an era where we've had ample real-life lessons that no amount of high-tech can give our military adventures happy endings - but in the end it simply sidesteps it, and delivers an entertaining but pretty predictable WWW-style slug-fest. Still, after the very noisy denoument, the movie doesn’t entirely waste the saving graces of its sly wit and Robert Downey, Jr's mischievousness: there’s a neat parting shot that slings us straight towards part two of the franchise.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I do. It’s goes past my office while I scroll down, scroll down, scrowl down, making corrections suggested by my copy editor to the manuscript of The Quiet War. For after the editing and the rewriting, comes the nitty-gritty word-by-word sentence-by-sentence analysis of the text for bloopers both factual and grammatical, repetition, inconsistency, repetition, general stupidity and much else. I’m lucky. I have a fine copy editor with a magpie memory (which means that he can remind me that I used the neologism ice-rock throughout, except for the one time I used icerock), a thorough working knowledge of usuage and abusage of written English, and a pretty good sensitivity for register - the difference in voice between scenes that have different emotional contexts, or between viewpoints. He’s also incredibly clear on what he thinks should (ought?) to be changed, so it wasn’t much of a hardship, no really it wasn’t, to spend the weekend wincingly going through the marked-up manuscript, and then making the appropriate changes to the electronic file. Now I have to read it through again, s*l*o*w*l*y, and then it goes back to the publishers, who will send it to the typesetters to be set in book form. And then it comes back to me again, one last time, so that I can check for any bloopers that skated past, or somehow introduced themselves. Amazingly, there will still be some mistake lurking in the final text, which I will be able to find by the simple method of opening the finished book at a random page and letting my eye fall on a random line.

Somehow, I managed to spend a lovely afternoon, the sunniest and warmest so far this year, in a pub and walking on Hampstead Heath, discovering that the ideal accessory for someone who needs to meet other people is a ten-week-old toy poodle (not mine: my friends’).

I also finished a kind of autobiographical essay for the Postscripts magazine in which I’m the featured author. It’s called How Was The Future For You? and starts like this:

In July, 1969, it seemed to me that the road to the future was as straight as a monorail line, as predictable as an eclipse. Harold ‘white heat of technology’ Wilson was prime minister. The long years of austerity that had followed the Second World War were slipping into history; London was swinging like a pendulum do. The British prototype of Concorde frequently overflew my school, piloted by the inimitable Brian Trubshaw. Nuclear power promised unlimited electricity too cheap to be worth metering. A hovercraft service linked Dover and Calais. The first decimal coins were being struck in the Mint, replacements for the half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, thrupenny bits, and copper pennies, halfpennies and farthings of the l.s.d. system inherited from the Romans.

I was fourteen. I read science fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else, and watched every episode of Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Thunderbirds Are Go. I’d switched allegiance from the Victor, a comic that endlessly refought the First and Second World Wars, to TV 21, which promoted a future full of big machines and bigger explosions. My mind had been expanded by 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (setting aside the stuff about monoliths) laid out the game plan for the thirty years: shuttles owned by Pan-Am; wheel-shaped space stations in Earth orbit; giant Lunar cities; expeditions to the outer planets; brilliant, almost human computers; quietly competent scientist heroes. And now, July 16 1969, in the lunch hour of one of the last days of the summer term, I was sitting in warm sunshine on a grass bank of the school playground with several friends, listening to a transistor radio tuned to a live broadcast from Cape Kennedy, Florida, USA, the launch of Apollo 11. The future would never again be so hopeful, so full of promise.

But in the blue and sunny expanse of the sky which the Apollo astronauts left behind on their way to the Moon, a small cloud about the size of a man’s hand was beginning to drift towards the sun.

Shortly

I’ve just received the proofs of my short story ‘Adventure’, which will be published in Lou Ander’s Fast Forward 2, coming realsoonnow. As previously mentioned, I have a short story (well, half a short story, strictly speaking, as I wrote it with Kim Newman) in the recently published The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow. And tomorrow is the publication day of The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan*, which includes another of my short stories.

And that, as they used to say in TV ads for 50 piece kitchen-knife sets, isn’t all. The Big Space Robot story, cheekily called ‘Little Lost Robot’, has been accepted for publication by Interzone. And this summer Postscripts magazine will be publishing an all-SF edition to coincide with the World SF Convention at Denver, and as I’m the featured author, it will include no less than four of my stories. One, ‘Looking For Van Gogh At The End Of The World’ is a reprint - although it’s the first time it will appear in print in English. The other three, ‘The Thought War’, ‘A Brief Guide to Other Histories’ (which shares the setting of Cowboy Angels), and ‘City of the Dead’, are originals. There’ll be an extract from The Quiet War, too.

Admittedly, the stories in the SRB of SFF and The Starry Rift were written a couple of years ago, but in between working on drafts of The Quiet War, and starting the first draft of the next novel, I seem to have found the time to finish five new stories in the past eight months: a fairly intensive burst of productivity as far as I’m concerned. But now I have to get back to the novel in hand. Two-thirds of the first draft are done, and it’s just beginning, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, to ride on its own melting (to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost).

*Jonathan has not only set up a website full of information about the book, but he also offers readers a chance to win copies of the book by entering a simple competition.

Very Big And Very Very Far Away

The newsblog sfsignal runs a Mind Meld feature in which SF authors pontificate about various topics. #16 is about space opera.

Currently reading: Sputnik Caledonia, by Andrew Crumey
Currently listening to: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Here Comes Everything

In 2004, I had the privilege of being invited to take part in a workshop about the design of an online Encyclopedia of Life, which would catalogue essential details of the1.8 million known species of animals, plants, fungi, algae, protists, bacteria and viruses. Scientists, computer mavens and a couple of SF people (myself and the august John Clute, who is a trustee of the Telluride Institute, which organised the workshop -- he can be seen kneeling at the right of the group in the photograph above, taken with my trusty keyring camera), spent a pretty intense time in the little town of Telluride, Colorada, discussing what needs an Encyclopedia of Life could satisfy, and attempting to design a useful template for its pages. Much more work has been done since by a small army of unpaid volunteers, and now a site housing the first 30,000 pages has gone live. Although I made but a microscopic contribution, I feel immeasurably thrilled that it’s up and running.

Oh My God! It's Full Of Cards!

Long before the internet, Paul Otlet planned a world library based on index cards. The remains of his Mundaneum, which he and Le Corbusier proposed to house in a vast ziggurat, are documented here (link via New Scientist).

Small Earthquake

I’ll be doing to the following panels at Eastercon:

Friday 21st
15.00-16.00 ‘Don’t Give Up The Day Job’

Sunday 23rd
15.30-16.30 ‘Writing The Near Future’

17.00-18.00 ‘Gollancz authors’ signing session’

If you’re going to be there, don’t forget about the little competition...

In other news, Albino Hernadez Penton tells me that his Spanish translation of ‘Rocket Boy’ has just been published in the Peruvian magazine Alfa Eriidiani 2DA Epoca (warning: fairly major download).

Bad Science

I’ve been watching with increasing inattention the BBC’s thriller series, The Last Enemy, which not only made a hash of the very interesting topics of universal surveillance and misuse of biotechnology, but had a clunking plot that advanced mostly by someone abducting the hapless hero and then telling him what was going on. But although I was almost horizontal with boredom by the end of the last episode, I was amused to see the appearance of the good old B-movie trope that any scientist can solve any puzzle by use of a microscope. In this case one scientist was peering down the eyepieces of optical microscopes of decreasing value and power at least three times, the last a student lab microscope that didn’t even have any illumination, stuck on a corner of a bench between a centrifuge and some kind of spectrometer. Now, microscopes can be very useful and powerful instruments -- I used to work with one in the 1980s that cost more than my house. But they are by no means universal tools, and although cytology (the study of cellular structure) is still very important - especially in pathology - since the advent of molecular biology it’s no longer the prime way by which we understand the internal workings of the cell. And much cytology is not done with optical microscopes, and even the most powerful electron microscope wouldn’t tell you how a mysterious virus could affect people of Arabic descent, but not white Europeans. Tsk.

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.