Island In Space

Out beyond the orbit of Mars, on its way to rendezvous with comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ESA's Rosseta spacecraft has just flown past asteroid Steins. Here's a brief movie of the encounter. We've grown so used to seeing scenes like this in SF movies that it takes a small effort of imagination to kindle our sense of wonder and remember that this is the real deal: real rock, real spacecraft.

Is it just me, or does it look like there's a face carved on the back side of the asteroid as it dwindles into the outer dark?

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Edna Sharrow slurs and sidles along the streets like a leaf blown by the fumy slipstream of the endless traffic, through crowds of foreigners. Many of them humpbacked with rucksacks. Many coloured. As if her dear England has fallen to a foreign power while she slept in her lair. She’s hungry again, eyes children as she drifts past. Babies. Flinches from a dog that explodes into rage.

She drifts east, towards her enemy’s compass point of splintered black light. Remembering a girl. An ordinary girl telling her that Mr Carlyle wasn’t in. Telling her to go away. Sending her away. But that must be a story Edna is telling herself to cover up the hole in her memory. For a mere slip of girl could not have any power over one such as she. No, she has been tricked by her enemy, and he will pay for that, and for everything else.

When she can no further she passes through a gate into a small park and curls up under a laurel bush. She dreams of ranging through the dark clothed in the sinew and hot stink of a fox, and wakes choking on a mouthful of bloody pigeon feathers. And rises, renewed. Today she will have her revenge.

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How Not To Write A Short Story

1) Get drunk first.*

2) Spend three hours every day in front of the mirror intoning your mantra: ‘I am bottling the lightning. James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield are ants in my afterbirth.’

3) You can never do too much research.

4) Try to work out what magazine editors want before you start to write. Study the stories they publish very carefully. Work out their average word count. Work out average sentence and paragraph lengths. Which words appear most? Which appear least? Or not at all?

5) Choose a room in your house for a study. Better still, build a custom-designed shed in your garden. Insulate it, install mains electricity, decorate it in a soothing but stimulating shade of green. Choose the perfect desk and chair. Spend several weeks in stationers and art supply shops choosing the best brands of paper, pens, pencils, notebooks etc. Buy a top-of-the-line laptop and an industrial laser printer. Build bookshelves and fill them with dictionaries, encyclopaedias, how-to-write manuals, Strunk & White, Partridge’s Usage and Abusage, The Writers’ & Artist’s Yearbook, Brewer’s Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature etc etc. Read everything from cover to cover. Maybe you should paint the walls a perky but soothing shade of blue instead. Or go on a writing course...

6) It’s important to get the first page absolutely right. Don’t be afraid to rewrite it 1000 times. Did I say page? I meant sentence.

7) spelyn n punctooashun r killin creativitey man dnt b a sheap

8) You can never spend too much time on the internet mongboards, dissing published writers. The fuckers.

9) Get a bad crack addiction. When you clean up you’ll have a ton of killer material.

10) Get a life instead, and enjoy it to the full.**

*Warning: may actually work. But not for everyone.
**Recommended.

It's A Smallish World

Last week I picked up an out-of-print novel by Paul Watkins (Archangel) in the local charity shop. It reminded me of what a good and interesting writer he is, so I did the Google thing and the Amazon thing to check out what he’d been doing lately. And for a moment it seemed that his latest novel is called The Quiet War. Except that it isn’t a novel, and it’s by a different Paul Watkins.

Sometimes it seems that the universe is trying to send you a message, but you can never be quite sure what it is or whether it really is for you.

Unfinished

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, my mind unstringing itself, I’ll get ideas about the next day’s work. Solutions to seemingly intractable problems about character or plot. Last night, though, I had a dream about a short story. It was printed on a wraparound for the review section of the Saturday edition of the Guardian newspaper. Black letters on white paper. Twenty-four point type. About two hundred words a page, four pages. No title, just a name - not mine, someone I know - at the head of each page.

It was an SF story about two omniscient post-Singularity AIs passing through a black hole into the universe next door. Where the black hole was a white fountain, kick-starting creation. The pair of AIs as gods, shaping their new universe. And the smallest of the pair, quicker-witted but less powerful than his companion, saying at every significant tick in the universe’s evolution: ‘Dude, this is so like last time.’

I woke up before I finished reading it, so I don’t know how it ends. I wonder if the author does. Maybe he’ll read this and get in touch, Experiment In Time style.

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It’s Richard’s house in the little square mews in Notting Hill. Was once Richard’s house. For of course Richard is long dead. Edna Sharrow is not so mad that she does not know that.

Poor charming courtly Richard and his coterie. She remembers the delightful evening when the Leader held court here. A splendid man, holding all of them in thrall. As powerful in his way as Edna, then just a smidgeon over sixty and sitting neat and tidy as a closed clasp knife in a corner of the room. The Leader so tall and handsome, and his beautiful wife, and his wife’s mad daughter, who whispered to Edna, I know you.

But why is she here now? She had been at the door of her enemy. His house in Princelet Street, shuttered and quiet. And here she is without any memory of transition, like finding herself on the wrong page of her own story.

Something bad happened, she thinks, and in her panic she fled and came here, looking for help. But Richard hung himself in his prison cell on the day when he and all the rest of the world learned that the Fuhrer had committed suicide, and time has taken care of all his friends.

For the first time since breaking her long seclusion and stepping out into the world Edna feels afraid.

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A Good Deed In A Naughty World

I've just discovered that the online magazine Fanzine has published a short story by Scott Bradfield. I've been a big fan every since I read some of his early short stories in Interzone, back in the Paleolithic: smartly-written absurdist parables, goofy and sweet, but always with a sting in the tale. Kind of like the films of Preston Sturges. He hasn't published much recently, but there's a collection of good stuff still in print - Hot Animal Love. And it's well worth trying to track down a copy of his novel Animal Planet, too.

Seen From A 274 Bus

Like an intruder from a world designed by Tim Burton, a black carriage with glass sides and giant plumes of black feathers rising from the corners, coal-black horses, coachmen all in black, and inside, a Goth bride. A sight to gladden any heart, seen at the edge of Camden, naturally.

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Here’s the place where she met her nemesis on a snowy night in February 1939, after the debacle at the Bank of England.

The two men bursting in while she and Kurt were loading the barge. Brave, beautiful, blond Kurt running at them with a boathook and Detective Sergeant Flowers shooting Kurt with his service revolver and Kurt’s brains and blood jumping from his shattered head. And Mr Carlyle, that sly old fraud, whipping Edna’s servants from her and scattering them into nothing at all in the cold black air.

Edna had the presence of mind to jump into the water and release her hold on the fire imp, and the barge had gone up in clap of white flame. She remembers seeing it burning through blowing snow when she’d surfaced a hundred yards away. Remembers that she flagged down a taxi outside the London Hospital later that night. Remembers the look of surprise and regret on the face of the cabbie in the moment of his death.

An hour later she was at the safe house in Tooting. The next day she was in France.

Standing on the canal towpath in plain daylight, Edna Sharrow can feel her old enemy to the east. Like a splinter of black light in the corner of her eye. Still in that house in Spitalfields no doubt. He was a creature of habit then, and she’s certain that he won’t have changed very much. Goody.

Part 1

The Power Of Names

Blood Kisses

To town yesterday, to a screening at Frightfest of Let The Right One In, the film version of the bestselling Swedish vampire novel, adapted for the screen by its author, John Ajivide Lindqvist. Set in a bleak, wintery working class suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it features a very creep pedophile turned ineffectual serial killer in the Renfield role, and some excellent twists to cannonical vampire lore (including the best cats v. vampire bit I've ever seen, vampiric addiction to puzzles, and as far as I know the first demonstration of what happens when a vampire steps over a threshold uninvited), but at its heart is the affecting portrait of the developing relationship between a bullied twelve-year-old boy, and a vampire girl who has been twelve for a very long time. Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson turn in astonishing performances as the friends sharing a very dark secret, and director Tomas Alfredsson provides some lovely atmospheric moments, and by framing the more gruesome moments through windows, half-open doors, or in the distance, never tips the delicate romance into outright horror. Watch out for it in spring next year.

Recently read: Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, in which a perfect novella of lost innocence strains to escape an overblown blockbuster; Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News, third in her series of 'literary' crime novels, with a slightly fumbled crux but a very finely sustained tone of dark humour, a plot that effortlessly glides on a slick of coincidences, and in the character of sixteen-year-old Reggie a wonderful example of the gritty girl detective; and Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, a terrific portrait of 1960s America, and a rigorous explication of how Nixon poisoned American politics for two generations (not for nothing is our strand of history, in Cowboy Angels, called the Nixon sheaf).

Write Stuff

Anyone who's new to the game of submitting fiction to the markets would be well advised to check Ellen Datlow's little rant about her pet peeves concerning submissions. Ellen is one of the best editors in the business and reads a lot of manuscripts for her anthology projects. Heed her wise words (there's lots of good stuff in the comments, too).

Goofs like these aren't just found in submissions by new writers by the way. My partner is an editor at a large publishing house in the UK. You'd be surprised - or maybe you wouldn't - at the number of Big Name authors who submit manuscripts printed in single-spaced ten point type, or with virtually no margins, or (and this is amazingly common) with dropped lines separating paragraphs, and no indentations. Maybe the latter is something they learned as journalists, but when it comes to making a book out of the manuscript, it means that someone has to insert hundreds of proof marks in correction.

In the UK, the Writers' and Artists Yearbook, updated annually, has all kinds of useful information for published and would-be writers, but oddly enough has nothing at all about the important matter of formatting your precious submission. So take Ellen's comments to heart, and if you're sending out short stories do check out magazines' submission requirements. And don't turn page 3 upside down, clip pages 4 & 5 together, or leave a hair between pages 6 & 7 to test whether or not your submission gets read that far. Editors know all those tricks, too.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and do good.

I've just passed the Xeno's paradox stage of the second draft of the ongoing, if you're interested. All the stuff I neglected to include first time around is in, more or less. Now all I have to do is go over the last three chapters, and then write the real ending (the last few books, out of what I hope is practicality rather than superstition or laziness, I haven't tried to get it absolutely or even approximately right until this stage, when I know exactly what the secret of the book really is).

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.

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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.