La Guerre Tranquille

Before I completely forget (I'm insanely busy, trying to nail down the third draft of the ongoing, which is past the midpoint now, thanks), here's the fine cover of the French edition of The Quiet War, the second Sparth cover for the same novel (see also the US edition). Lucky or what? It was published on Friday; my French publisher handed me a copy the day before, at the Gollancz party. Poking around on the French Amazon site, I found that the mass-market paperback edition of Glyphes (aka Mind's Eye) was released last month. The cover for that is pretty good too; it refers to the family history which gets Alfie Flowers in a lot of trouble.

More Product

The guy in the picture is Stephen Jones, editor extraordinaire, and the poster he's holding is for his latest book, a mosaic novel by various hands (including Pat Cadigan, Michael Marshall Smith, Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Jay Russell, Kim Newman, and, er, me) in various modes that documents the onset and consequences of, yes, a zombie apocalypse. Different, quirky, fun, and out now.

An Interesting Question...

... asked on episode 19 of the Coode Street podcast. Why have none of the authors associated with Radical Hard SF won a Hugo?

Housekeeping

I've just spent a couple of hours tidying up my website, which hasn't been touched since Gardens of the Sun was first published last year; it suffered from inattention after I started blogging, just as the blogging has suffered ever since I started tweeting. Haven't done anything fancy, just cleared out some crufty links and extraneous material. Still have to fix a few links here and there. What it really needs is a complete redesign. I set it up way, way back in 1995 (or was it 1994?) using basic HTML coding, and haven't really done anything to it since. Now it's really showing its age. Am wondering whether to find someone who can do a nice clean simple design, or leave it as a repository for stories and other stuff I've released into the wild. After the advent of social media, do people even look at author's websites any more?

Notes From The Anthropocene

As global warming melts the Siberian permafrost, mammoth ivory becomes increasingly fashionable:

With an estimated 150m corpses under the permafrost, stocks are unlikely to run out soon, and thanks to global warming (every cloud . . .) they are becoming increasingly easy to reach. Meanwhile, a report in the Pachyderm journal offers the ringing endorsement that mammoth ivory could "reduce demand for elephant ivory from Africa. Probably."

The old-school energy industry wants to capitalise on the opening of the Northwest Passage by building nuclear-powered icebreakers that could transport cargoes of liquified natural gas through Arctic ice. What could possibly go wrong?

Autopia experiences its hottest day on record.

Muscle To The Monorail

At first glance, this Google-sponsored project to develop a muscle-powered monorail system, based on a New Zealand amusement-park ride, looks like a silly parody of the worst kind of kooky Kalifornian keep-fit utopianism. As an article in Wired points out, it doesn't seem to do anything that bicycles can't do better, and besides, ugh, public transport.

It's certainly not anything like the kind of futuristic transport systems we were promised back in the 1960s, when the last hurrah of Gernsbackian ideology promised all kinds of amazing machines powered by electricity too cheap to be worth metering. But the future isn't what it used to be - it's gnarlier, more diverse, extremely uneven. In the age of post-peak oil, this kind of low-impact technology is beginning to seem more plausible than, say, nuclear-powered supersonic stratosphere cruisers. And even if it doesn't find any application in the regreened cities of Earth, I reckon it would be ideal for tootling around the forest canopy of a domed moon colony - far better than the usual golf carts, although it would be a challenge to stage a pod-based chase scene.

Book Marks

We didn't have many books in the house where I grew up, and because I couldn't afford to buy enough paperbacks to feed my science-fiction habit, most of my reading material came from the local library. It was modern, well-lighted, and amply stocked; when I had exhausted its science-fiction collection, I moved on to what we inside the genre call mainstream novels (starting, as I recall, with John Updike's Rabbit Redux, which hooked me because of the odd and arresting title, and the fact that it began on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing). And it was amongst the mainstream novels that I first encountered tracks of the library-book annotators: readers who couldn't keep their thoughts to themselves, victims of a kind of literary Tourette's syndrome that compelled them to underscore words, sentences, and whole paragraphs, and sprinkle the margins with pointless exclamation marks and remarks.

It always annoyed me; always struck me as a pernicious form of vandalism. I valued books because they were an important part of my life and I possessed so few of my own. And besides, why should I care what strangers thought about the books I'd chosen to read? Their jotted egoblurts annoyingly snagged my attention, and were never interesting, polarised between so true! and utter rubbish! Accumulating my own library, it never occurred to me to jot my own thoughts in the books I owned. Even when I had a regular gig reviewing for Interzone magazine, I wrote notes on sheets of scrap paper as I went along, keyed to page and line, rather than scribble in the margins of review copies. So reading this excellent article about author's libraries and the value of annotation, has given me pause for thought. Can it be true that all this time I've been denying posterity the opportunity to peer into my thoughts? Why, I haven't even signed any of the copies of my own books that I keep on my ego shelves . . .

Dude, Where's My Human-Powered Ornithopter?

Right here. Leonardo would be thrilled. Pasquale would be appalled.

Teleportation

My latest time-sink on the internet is Joe McMichael's Globe Genie. It's a clever and simple idea: click on the shuffle button, and it transports you to one of the millions of locations stored in Google Earth. While jumping around the USA, wondering if I'll come across a road I've driven down, it occurred to me that its randomness is a story generator. Where are those people going? Who lives in that house? What's he building, in there? You're on an empty road in Gilt Edge, Tennessee. Why? And happens next? What links Jumonville Road, Hopwood, PA and Los Robles Boulevard, Sacramento, CA? Also, why do so many people own RVs?

The Return Of The Living Dead

Just received in the post, my author's copy of John Joseph Adams's anthology The Living Dead 2. Includes my invasion-of-the-Boltzmann-Brain-zombies story 'The Thought War' and forty-three (yes, forty-three) other tales of the undead dead. Check it out!

Plumbing

Now I'm working on the third draft of the ongoing, I have to keep in mind the cardinal rule of world-building: details are useful only if they have some kind of interaction or intersection with the protagonist, which is to say, something to do with the narrative. In science fiction novels, as in fantasy and historical fiction, nothing should be taken for granted, of course. Otherwise the novel will suffer from the flattening effect of genre: of sharing too much stock furniture with other, similar fictions. So there’s a temptation to tip in explanations for everything, to show that you’ve built your world from the ground up. But good world building always implies more than’s on the page. You want to make your protagonist's world as vivid as possible, to highlight all that's strange and unique; but you don't want to bury the story in endless detail and explanation. So unless it's something the protagonist notices, something he has to deal with, something he wants or needs or something that can help him get what he needs, and so on, it's extraneous. It's plumbing. You know it’s there, but unless it goes wrong you don’t need to worry about it.

Maps For New Territory

As far as I'm concerned there are two ways of writing a short story. First, there's the epiphanic, where more or less the whole package arrives in your head and is unpacked by writing it down. It doesn't happen often, but I'm always thrilled when it does. 'Little Lost Robot' and 'The Thought War' happened like that. The second is much more like work. I start with an idea, usually a character and a situation, an opening scene, and proceed from there. It's like exploring new territory without a map. You stumble into cul-de-sacs and pitfalls, and waste time picking up nuggets that turn out to be iron pyrites instead of the motherlode, but you travel on in the hope of finding a fabulous view or something rare and unexpected around the next corner. And sometimes scenes or ideas you discard become the seeds for a second story. What started out as exploration becomes cartography.

That's how the Quiet War series of stories evolved, and eventually turned into two novels (with a third on the way, but it's bad luck to talk about that right now). If I were brighter and more organised, novels and stories would have dovetailed neatly together. As it was, the stories turned out to be trial runs for the novels. Maybe I'll do better next time, with what some have started calling the Jackaroo stories, in which an alien species makes contact with the people of Earth after a short sharp global conflict, and hand them the keys to a bunch of planetary systems orbiting red dwarf stars and linked by wormholes. What does humanity do with this gift? What does the gift do to humanity? And what's the catch?

So far, there are just six stories.* But I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to get down and deal with the big picture.

*‘Dust’, Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
 ‘Making Peace’, The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
 ‘Adventure’, Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
'City of the Dead' Postscripts, 2008
 ‘Crimes and Glory’, Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011

EDIT: Of the above stories, only 'Crimes and Glory' is available online, here. Of the Quiet War stories, 'Reef' was available via my author's page at the Orion site, but was lost after a redesign; you might be able to find it using the wayback machine or similar. I'm thinking of putting up one on my web site's fiction archive. Any preferences?
EDIT 2: I totally forgot to include 'City of the Dead'. Corrected now. I'd like to think it's because I'm hip-deep in a third draft, but really it's down to stupidity. Thanks to Miles for pointing out the error!

Quiet War Stories

Ram Gowda emailed to ask if I had a list of stories related to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. I thought I'd put it up here rather than on the increasingly out-of-date website, which badly needs a major overhaul. I set it up in the mid-1990s, using a basic HTML scripting programme, and it is really showing its age; must get around to making it look twenty-first century when I'm less distracted. Or pay someone to do it for me. Meanwhile, here are the stories, with the usual caveat that they were published piecemeal over a decade, and represent the first iteration of the Quiet War universe. Portions of several of them have been folded into Gardens of the Sun, in highly modified forms.

'Second Skin' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1997
'Sea Change, With Monsters' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1998
'The Gardens of Saturn' Interzone, 1998
'Reef' Sky Life, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace, 2000
'Making History' PS Publishing, 2000
'The Passenger' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
‘Dead Men Walking’ Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2006
‘Incomers’ The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008

More Best

Just received my author's copies of Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, so here's a bit of pimpage for it. Thirty-one stories, including one by me, 'Crimes and Glory', pretty good for under a tenner.

Crystal Palace And Me

My visit to the dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park wasn't my first encounter with Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. When I was born, my family lived in a cottage rented from Sir John Stanley Marling, 4th Baronet of Stanley Park and Sedbury Park. To mark the event, he gave my mother ten shillings, to invest on my behalf. Even in Stroud, which in the mid-1950s was still coming to terms with the twentieth century, acts of noblesse oblige like this weren't exactly usual. But Sir John came from a old family, with deep roots in the area.

They made their fortune in wool, the main industry in that part of the Cotswolds for several centuries. His great-grandfather, Sir Samuel Marling, the first Baronet, was one of the people responsible for founding the grammar school, Marling School, I later attended. Before that, I was at Selsley Primary School, which was associated with the church Sir Samuel built for the village, next door to the family seat. Most of the church's stained class was by William Morris & Co; it was Morris's first real commission, with contributions from Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and George Campfield. And in the field behind the church was a lone pillar; made of Cornish granite, it was bought by Sir Samuel Marling at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, where he had a display of his woollen cloth.

Those Victorians had a long reach . . .

The Terrible Lizards Of Penge

Last Saturday I travelled along the new East London overground line from Dalston to Crystal Palace Park, in the unglamorous South London suburb of Penge, to see some famous dinosaurs. The park was constructed to provide a permanent site for Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, which for six months housed the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The board of directors wanted to include a feature 'containing a collection of full-sized models of the Animals and plants of certain geological periods', including the first life-sized representations of newly-discovered dinosaurs. They got their wish, and it is a monument not only to Victorian science, but also to a famous scientific feud.


The board of directors first asked Dr Hilary Mantell, who had discovered and named the second known species of dinosaur, Iguanodon, and had amassed a huge collection of fossils, to supervise construction of the models. But Mantell, after suffering years of pain from a serious injury to his back, was dying. He declined the honour, and it passed to his great rival, Professor Richard Owen. Owen was a formidably talented and ambitious anatomist, and by all accounts an implacably ruthless and dislikeable man.

Although Mantell had championed the idea of a group of ancient, large, reptile-like animals, it was Owen who had recognised their defining characteristic - fused sacral vertebrae which allowed the huge animals to move about on land - and named them: dinosaur, from deinos 'terrible' and sauros 'lizard'. But this wasn't enough for Owen, who despite his formidable talent appears to have suffered from a gigantic inferiority complex. He'd spent years attempting to destroy Mantell's reputation, rubbishing his scientific papers, and trying unsuccessfully to prevent the Royal Society from awarding him the prestigious Royal Medal (there's a wonderful description of their feud in Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters: Owen as a mustachio-twirling monster of ego, Mantell as a romantic hero beset by impossible odds). But now Owen had triumphed: his enemy's fatal weakness had given him a wonderful opportunity to present his ideas for public consumption. Mantell died before the park was completed, and his twisted lower spine ended up as a gruesome trophy in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, where Owen had the position of Hunterian Professor. You couldn't make it up.

And so, with the help of the director of the fossil department at Crystal Palace, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen set to immortalising his ideas about dinosaur anatomy in cast iron and concrete. Unfortunately, many of those ideas were completely wrong. To be fair to Owen, he was making guesses from a small and incomplete selection of fossils. But he also believed that any progression in animal evolution was due to divine laws set in place by God the Creator, argued that all animals were variations on an ideal type, and refused to countenance any evidence that he might be wrong. So while Mantell had come to believe from his examination of later fossil finds that Iguanodon had shortened forelimbs and could stand upright to browse on tree branches, in agreement with modern interpretations, Owen depicted Iguanodon and several other dinosaur species as clumsy, dog-like quadrapeds (both he and Mantell mistook Iguanodon's hooked thumb for a horn). Before the turn of the century, a more enlightened scientific community regarded the models as a horrible embarrassment. Today, they look positively antediluvian: quaint relics of a more primitive era of science; props from some sci-fi adventure quota quickie.


Still, other models, such as those of plesiosaurs and several species of early mammals, were more accurate, and in its day the park was a roaring success, and helped drive the mania for dinosaurs that persists to this day. Owen went on to found the Natural History Museum, and to suffer from a severe reversal in his reputation when he clashed with Thomas Huxley and other supporters of evolution by natural selection. The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936; Owens' and Hawkin's models, recently restored, are still imposing and fascinating. If you get the chance, they're well worth a visit.

I've Got Your Uncanny Valley, Right Here

Penance

It's Friday, so hey, have a free short story. Three hundred words, including a nod to one of James Blish's pantropy stories. It was originally published in New Scientist last year, in a science-fiction special section edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. Somewhere inside it, maybe, is the seed for a novel.

Penance

It’s December. Midsummer. The sun barely dipping below the horizon at midnight, and like everyone else Rongomaiwhe Namakin has white-nights fever, cat-napping, staying up around the clock. There’s so much to do! A dragon-sized machine is laying freshly made topsoil along the Tuvula river, and Rongomaiwhe and her crew are planting a strip forest of Dahurian larch and dwarf willow. And when they aren’t working, they hike up the river or across wet black rock fields. White mountains float against the pure blue sky. A wild rugged land still mostly untouched. A kingdom of snow and rock and wind.

Rongomaiwhe’s great-grandparents were early victims of global warming. When its Pacific islands were swamped by rising sea levels, their nation sold its carbon credits and moved to a refuge in New Zealand, which escaped much of the consequences of violent climate change. A succession of canny leaders preserved tribal unity and invested heavily inecological engineering. Rongomaiwhe’s parents helped to quicken a new ecosystem on Howe Island after shifts in ocean currents increased the average temperature by a full ten degrees. Now Rongomaiwhe is part of a rainbow coalition of the young and willing, taking on the challenge of greening the shores of the thawing Antarctic Peninsula.

She knows how lucky she is. More than half the Earth’s population huddle in slums along the new coastlines, permanently unemployed, forcibly sterilised, subsisting on dole yeast. And she is making a new world, and planning to start a family when she and her fiancé marry this winter. That’s why, once a week, she does penance. Plugs into the remote working network, flows into a robot thousands of kilometres away, in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Brings the machine online and gets to work, planting a windbreak of tweaked yuccas for what will be an oasis, with the vast, level desert of Kansas stretched all around.

Martian Ice

A meteorite hits the ejecta apron of a crater high in the Northern Martian hemisphere and opens a small blue eye of ice. It happened some time between April 2004 and January 2010, the dates when two different robot spacecraft photographed the same spot.

Splice

I was pleasantly surprised by this small-budget but intellectually ambitious bioshock film. Directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), who also co-wrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant, it's a variation on the Frankenstein mythos that combines an exploration of a skewed form of parenthood with human reactions to the uncanny valley. The plot, in brief: Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrian Brody) are romantically entangled partners who run a bioscience lab owned by a large pharmaceutical company. After creating fairly simple multicellular artificial organisms, they want to step up their research into genetic recombination by using human genes, but the parent company wants them to isolate the genes for a potent protein produced by their organisms. Faced with loss of independence, they go ahead with the experiment anyway, and create a fast-growing neotenous organism that develops from something like a naked kiwi to a female humanoid creature, Dren. As both Elsa and Clive form strong emotional bonds with their strange step-daughter, their company supervisor begins to suspect that they're hiding a secret, and Dren continues to change in unexpected ways . . .

Okay, set out as baldly as that, it doesn't seem any different from a couple of dozen things-we-weren't-meant-to-know horror stories. But the basic scaffolding of the plot exfoliates in all kinds of interesting, unexpected, and genuinely unsettling ways, and its ideas are nicely undercut by a knowing humour: this is a serious film that doesn't take itself too seriously. Both Elsa and Clive both have complicated reactions to their creation, oscillating between hubris, fear, and fatal attraction, exposing emotional weakenesses in themselves and their relationship; Elsa in particular has problems coming to terms with her creation, thanks to a childhood crippled by an uncaring mother. Her developing attachment to Dren is creepily ambiguous, and there's some good satire on the problems of parenthood as Dren races through all the stages of childhood and adolescence to a seriously problematic maturity.

The science behind Dren's creation contains a fair measure of handwavium, but Elsa and Clive are portrayed as scientists driven by ambition and inquisitiveness rather than haphazard craziness, and their lab has a cluttered authenticity. It's nice to see researchers using mini-centrifuges, Eppendorf pipettes, and gel electrophoresis rather than simply peering down microscopes: someone has obviously done a bit of homework. I liked the alarmingly temperamental plumbing of the artificial womb, too. Best of all is the design of Dren. Played at maturity by Delphine Chaneac with an eerie physicality that complements Greg Nicotero's and Howard Bergera's seamless mix of makeup, prostheses and digital manipulation, she's a genuinely weird and beautiful chimera, and some of the best scenes in the film explore her volatile mix of fear, vulnerability, frustration and outbursts of wild exuberance.

So, while the story may be familiar, Natali's angle of attack is refreshingly different, his low-key direction mostly eschews sensationalism yet delivers some nice shocks, and the intelligent script is complemented by some fine acting. And although the last act devolves towards creature-feature frights and alarms, it's just about redeemed by a final scene that has a chillingly spare ambiguity. Like Dren, it's a hybrid whose beauty is more than the sum of its parts.