New Free Stuff

I've added a new short story, A Brief Guide To Other Histories, to the fiction archive. First published in Postscripts #15, it shares the same multiverse as Cowboy Angels.

Coming soon: the first chapter of The Quiet War.

Gosh Wow

After reading this, I'm (a) even more pleased that Gollancz had the foresight to bring out a new paperback edition of Fairyland and b) flattered to be in such prestigious company.

There Are Doors (8)

Edna Sharrow, a short story by Paul McAuley

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler’s bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She’s been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall.

A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She’d forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she’ll be ready to go back into the world.

Coincidentally

The hero of Whole Wide World works for the T12, the Metropolitan Police’s computer crimes unit. Alongside people like this gentleman, explaining in today’s Guardian about the persistence of information and why, when you dispose of a computer, you should always remove the hard disc first. Unless you aren't bothered about some stranger finding out about your interest in extreme knitting, Enid Blyton first editions, and ant sex, of course.

Reality, Can’t Keep Up With Part 39

At the beginning of this century I started work on a thriller set a little way in the future. A terrorist attack had damaged the country’s electronic infrastructure. The police and security services had gained all kinds of new powers. Surveillance was omnipresent. Titled Whole Wide World, it was published in the UK in September 2001.

One of my little flights of fancy was that the government would require all ISPs to keep long-term records of emails sent and websites visited by their customers. But it was a step beyond plausibility to imagine that the government would want to keep a central database of that data. No matter how it was ringfenced, sooner or later someone would hack it. Surely, no one would be so stupid, even in fiction.

Until now, that is. Despite serious problems with every large-scale government IT project, and a series of embarrassing security violations, including leaving laptops packed with sensitive data on trains and losing CD-ROMs of tax databases, the Home Office has the brass neck to suggest that it can be safely entrusted with logs of the telephone and internet usage of every one of its citizens. But wait: there’s more. Local government, the health service, and hundreds of public bodies will be able to access this data at will. And investigators across the European Community will be able to use it too.

There’s no doubt that this kind of data can be useful in investigations of terrorism and crime. But in the topsy-turvy world of the government , the only way to protect us from terrorism is to treat everybody as a potential terrorist. While in the real world, the bad guys can use disposable pay-as-you-go mobile phones, temporary, anonymous email addresses, forwarding services, and many other tricks to prevent anyone tracking what they’re up to. And pulling the internet records of a suicide bomber after the fact may not be much use to anyone.

You really can’t make it up. And to think that there are still people who believe that governments can maintain massive cover-ups about black-op conspiracies ...

'I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Mr de Mille.'

Now that Cassini has finished its four-year mission, the people flying it can start to take some interesting risks. Like flying it to within 50 kilometres of the surface of Enceladus, right above the region that's jetting fountains of water vapour. And next time they're getting even closer.

The Secret History Of America, Part XXIV

How David Lynch and Robert Ivers met Devo, an extract from Josh Frank's In Heaven Everything Is Fine, that describes one moment from a time when it was still possible for there to be forgotten moments in pop culture.

Your Daily Moment Of Orwell

Believe it or not, before blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all those other Interweb distractions, people would actually commit to paper observations and notes on their daily lives. Some of them were even published as books - yup, just like blogs. The Orwell Prize, in association with the Orwell Trust, is putting up the entries from George Orwell's diary as blog entries, sixty years after they were first made, starting today. It's not the first time this kind of thing has been done (there's a Samuel Pepys blog , for instance), but it's still a cool idea. Who wouldn't want to know what one of the most foremost essayists and novelists in the twentieth century was up to as world war loomed?

The first entry is about a snake.

Future Now

It's become a cliche to moan about the lack of aircars in the past's future, which happens to the present we inhabit. This cliche-busting aircraft, straight out of a classic 1970s Chris Foss cover, is a design by Aurora Flight Sciences for a solar-powered modular vehicle that will fly in the stratosphere for over five years, 'for surveillance and reconnaissance, communications relay and environmental monitoring with the potential for roles in global climate change' (from Gizmag via Bruce Sterling).

Scribble Scribble Scribble

I'm flat out exhausted. Completely tapped. Wasted.

It's been a bit of a week, workwise, in other words. But I've come to the end of proofreading The Quiet War, and I've entered all the changes and corrections into the electronic master file of the manuscript (not all writers do this, but I like to keep a copy that's as close as possible to the finished book). Now all I have to do is type up a list of all the changes so that the hero editor, who has to insert them in the proofs that will be sent back to the printers, can understand all the tweaks I've made. I regret to say I had a couple of second thoughts on some changes, and this is where I discovered that the ecologically-friendly water-based Tippex I use isn't compatible with the ecologically-friendly water-based ink of my red pen, resulting in little pink puddles. Oh dear. Amazing that book production still has its Victorian moments, involving actual handwriting...

Oh, I also have to incorporate changes suggested by my volunteer proofreader, who will read the damn fat thing to check for things that I might have missed. I'm too close to the work to spot every little error, especially the repetition of certain words in closely adjacent sentences and paragraphs (a good reason to keep modifiers to the minimum, this).

Meanwhile, I've managed to maintain steady progress, at ten pages a day, on the second draft of the ongoing. This involves a lot of red ink too, as I like to scribble all kinds of changes and crossings-out and cryptic notes and rewordings on printed-out pages before typing them into the electronic manuscript. What with this, and the changes to proofs, I'm on my second red pen of the week (Pentel with a 0.7mm tip and liquid gel ink). And I'm back at Neptune, in a funky little habitat orbiting the irregular little moon Neso, and pretty soon I'll be on the Moon, Earth's moon, and then back to Earth for all kinds of serious fun.

So It's Come To This...

In lieu of actual thought, most of which is being used on work right now, here are a few of my current favourite things:

Oobject asks ‘Bladerunner - so where are we now? Particularly where are all the artsy animated building facades?’
(Answer - not many of them are in the USA.)

As others see us: The Asylum’s take on Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, just reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. A typically great Penguin cover, by the way.

Iain Sinclair reports on the Olympic site in East London for BBC Radio 4 - with slide show!

And finally, some old tech via the rather wonderful Hey Okay.

Hear This

Recently received, and now available for purchase from Infinivox, a 3 CD collection of unabridged readings of 'Mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction':

'Last Contact' by Stephen Baxter
'The Something-Dreaming Game' by Elizabeth Bear
'Grandma' by Carol Emshwiller
'Lambing Season' by Molly Gloss
'None So Blind' by Joe Haldeman
'Kin' by Bruce McAllister
'Gene Wars' by Paul J McAuley
'Bright Red Star' by Bud Sparhawk
'Far As You Can Go' by Greg van Eekhout

Editor Allan Kaster tells me that he's podcasting some of the stories; you can find them by poking around in his blog ('Kin' is up right now).

Life's A Beach

It’s fun, if a bit dizzying, trying to write a novel that’s partly set on various moons of Saturn while all kinds of new discoveries are beamed back by Cassini. The latest confirms what we more or less knew - that the flat, radar-reflective bodies at Titan’s poles were almost certainly lakes of liquid ethane and methane - but it’s a most excellent discovery nonetheless. Especially as evaporation of the lake during summer at Titan’s south pole has created a beach. Hmmm....

Googled

So there I was, walking along a street in my neighbourhood, minding my own business, when a black Opel Vectra with a tall camera-laden pole sticking up from its roof went past: one of the infamous camera cars that Google is presently using, somewhat controversially, to photograph streets in major cities in Europe for Google Earth. After a brief moment of existential confusion, I remembered that I was carrying my little digital camera - but I was too late. The all-seeing eye had moved on. I had missed my chance to photograph Google photographing me. Other people have been more successful, and those scamps at the Register have made a neat mashup of Google Maps and sightings of their cars - including one getting a parking ticket.

Assuming Google uses the footage they shot today, if you check out in the near future Thornhill Road, London, N1, I’m the harrassed-looking middle-aged guy in the blue shirt and dark glasses.

If you want an alternative to Google Earth, by the way, try this wiki.

Light Of Other Days

From the family archives, here’s a photograph of the aquatic dodgems in Hotham Park, Bognor Regis. That’s my uncle nearest the camera, with an unidentified friend at the helm. They’re about to be rammed, in slow motion, by the boat coming in on the left. Note the lack of safety straps, life jackets or any other kind of protection apart from the rubber bumper wrapped round the coffin-like hulls of the doughty little motorboats. We were a tougher lot, back then.

The photograph was obviously taken from another boat, with a tilt that gives it a lovely sense of dynamic motion. Looking at it, I have a sense memory of a rainbow sheen on soupy green water, the tang of the blue haze of burnt petrol that hung over the little lake, and the frustrating lag between turning the steering wheel and winning any change in direction - a fine practical lesson in Newton's laws of motion.

90% Perspiration

My family weren’t so poor that we had to eat cold gravel of a morning, but we certainly couldn’t afford to have a summer holiday every year. And when we did go on holiday, it was to stay with our great-aunt, who ran a boarding house in Bognor Regis (a semi-detached Edwardian villa at 25 Canada Grove, it’s now part of a residential care home, so it goes). British readers will know that Bognor has a certain reputation, courtesy of a century of day-trippers, Butlins, and King George V’s infamous death-bed comment. He’d already been to Bognor to recover from a serious illness in the bracing sea air, and was grateful enough to allow it to add ‘Regis’ to its name. But when he fell ill for the final time, and one of his doctors expressed the hope that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor again, he raised himself up and pronounced the phrase that’s stuck to the town ever since: ‘Bugger Bognor.’

But in the 1960s I could find little to fault. There was the promenade, and the sandy beaches, with little tidepools full of mysterious life. There was the pier, not then truncated by a storm, complete with theatre, candy-floss stalls, and a slot-machine arcade that featured a laughing sailor that scared the bejeesus out of me. There was the boating pond for toy boats, and there was Hotham Park, which had one of the smallest zoos in the world (I seem to remember the most exotic animal was a porcupine), a Crazy Golf course, the other boating pond equipped with motor boats got up as dodgem cars, and later on, an extensive miniature railway. There was also a pretty good library, one of the first in Britain to boast a computerised catalogue, where one thundery August I read something like fifty UFO books.

Those were the days.

Although I liked Bognor well enough, I never really caught the holiday habit. When I was at university, I worked in the summer to stay solvent, didn’t have time for a holiday while working for my Ph.D, and then treated trips to academic conferences as holidays (don’t feel sorry for me; one year I visited South Carolina and Hawaii, stopping off at Los Angeles in between, and returning via the WorldCon in Chicago).

All of which is preamble to the fact that this year, it doesn’t look like I’ll have time for a holiday, what with being halfway through the second draft of the ongoing, which is due to be delivered in October, not to mention expecting at any moment the proofs of The Quiet War. Hey, but it’s still the best job in the world . . .

PS Unlikely Worlds Trufact: James Joyce got married to Nora Barnacle in Bognor.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

In the latest Guardian book review pages, Alastair Campbell, former Commissar of Communication for Tony Blair, seems to think that book reviews shouldn’t be about the book you’re reviewing, but about what the book has to do with you. Reviewing Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Campbell writes:

I did have a plan to run 50 miles on my 50th birthday last year but a cycling injury to my calf - like Murakami, I also do triathlon - grounded me. Now, also like him, my running is accompanied by constant worries about aging, reflected in ever slower times.

He is in a different class to me, as runner and novelist, and throughout he gives the sense that he cannot be one without being the other. He has done 25 marathons and written 11 novels. I have done one marathon and written two novels . . .

And so, and so on, in a clumsy and mix of competitive envy and vain-glorious boasting. Pooter lives.

Meanwhile, in the same pages, M. John Harrison shows you how it’s done, framing the territory the book in question appears to inhabit, before getting under its hood and finding out what it’s really made of:

The post-disaster story has a deep ambivalence about the worth of that which has been lost. Its traditional purpose is to defamiliarise the world we know, and express our two worst fears: that the built environment will collapse, leaving us without material support; or - worse - that it won’t, saddling us in perpetuity with everything we hate about it, from office work to shampoo ads. Its purpose is to deliver a little frisson. So it’s clear from the off, then, that Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work, though it appears to take place in the same querulous psychic space as, say, I am Legend or Survivors, isn’t a post-disaster story at all.

I confess to having a blind spot for Julian Barnes’s novels, but his introduction to a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters is very fine indeed, from the opening self-deprecatory anecdote about his first encounter with Fitzgerald, to his sharp observations of how novels and novelists work, and the special qualities of Fitzgerald’s writing:

Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when the material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

And:

[Fitzgerald] didn’t like to offend: on one occasion she went to vote, and as she left the polling station, ‘to my disgust the Conservative lady outside snatched away my card, saying - I’m only taking ours, dear - I didn’t like to say I was Liberal for fear of hurting her feelings - she had put a nice green hat on and everything - I often see her in church.’

That ‘nice green hat’ is a pure writer’s touch...

I have to say that I think the condescending ‘dear’ is a nicely vivid stab at fixing a character, too. And thanks to Harrison and Barnes, I have more books to add to my reading list . . .

James Who?

Kim Newman reviews a Filipino mashup of Batman and Bond.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Porte

There are fewer windows than it seems in the trumpe l’oeil frontage of Pollack’s Toy Museum on Scala Street, not far from Newman Passage. You can read more about it in Peter Ashley’s London Peculiars, a great compendium of photographs and prose about ‘curiosities in a capital city.’ Pollack’s Toy Museum, maintaining the tradition of the toy theatre, belongs to the class of little magic shops, old-fashioned one-off emporia that give cities and towns a touch of wonderful, unexpected eccentricity. A couple of other personal favourites are the Algerian Coffee Shop and Gerry’s Wines and Spirits, both on Old Compton Street. Any other suggestions?

A Little Light Research

As everyone knows, you can’t trust everything on the Internet. But it does hold all kinds of treasures for the working author in need of a quick fact fix. Like fabulous pictures. And maps of other worlds. My latest discovery is this neat little solar system clock that shows the positions of the planets at any given time. Forward the outer planet view to 2225 AD to find out what my characters have to deal with in the ongoing (it’s an applet, so if you want to check it out you’ll need Java).

Now some people might think that making sure that all the planets are lined up in their correct position is taking research a little too far. Especially as my characters are buzzing about the Solar System on ships powered by fusion motors that haven’t yet been invented. Could it be that I’m taking this hard SF lark a mite too seriously?

Well, maybe. But the fusion motor is a convention -- shorthand for some kind of advanced space technology if not yet realisable is at least possible. And it doesn’t mean that my characters are able to buzz about at impossible speeds, so that means that not only does the Solar System still seem like a big, roomy place, but the relative position of the planets they’re travelling between is important. And since that’s important to my characters, it means it’s important for me to try to get it right, or at least to hint at the problems this may causes interplanetary travellers every now and then. Besides, while I’m not above stretching the odd fact or two if they get in the way of the story, in this case the relative positions of the planets have helped me to focus on the direction of the narrative. Sometimes this research lark pays off.

I was going to write something about The Dark Knight, but work intervened over the weekend, and it seems a bit pointless to contribute to the deluge of opinion and comment and sheer hype on the net and elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I liked it a lot, and it certainly delivers the film we were promised at the end of Batman Begins, when the Batman turns over a card to reveal it’s the joker. It isn’t the best film every made, and it certainly isn’t as good as Godfather 2, but it’s a fine large-scale Hollywood action film, although very dark and very grim, but hey, in these times maybe we get the Hollywood action films we deserve. Christopher Nolan has done a great job in bringing the franchise bang up to date, dropping the gothic noir in favour of a technothriller sheen. The bank robbery in the opening five minutes is a worthy homage to Michael Mann, the master of technothriller films: William Fitchner, who plays the shotgun-toting bank manager, played crooked financier Roger Van Zant in Michael Mann’s Heat. Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is full of malign energy, twisting like a snake on a punji stick, winning the iconic moment competition when, dressed as a nurse, he walks away from an exploding hospital. Christian Bale is forced to act with nothing much more than his chin when he’s in Batman gear, but he’s grimly elegant as Bruce Wayne, and does a great bit of truck fu. Forget the critical gabble about how the film repositions our ideas of heroes and heroism; although it does attempt to say something about how far you can go when trying to protect citizens without losing sight of what you’re protecting in the first place, it fudges the issue with a get-out clause that may work as a plot twist, but doesn’t hold water in the real world. And besides, the kinetics of action films means that it’s impossible to maintain any kind of serious dialogue or examination about any kind of issue. And this is a seriously kinetic bit of film-making: if it’s spectacle you want, it definitely delivers.