From My Red Left Hand

I'm pleased that most commentators took my previous post in the satirical spirit in which it was intended.  It's true, as Ilya2 remarked that you can find no (or hardly any) SF novels written after the 1980s entirely constructed from cliches, but plenty of movies (movie directors and producers are always about thirty years behind the bleeding edge of written SF, perhaps because they are inspired by the SF they read in their childhoods). But as others point out, these kind of cliches do keep recurring.  The problem with cliches is they're strange attractors.  They're the first thing you think of when constructing a scene or a scenario. They're seductively simple to use. The trick is to turn them upside down and take them apart and put them back together in a new an interesting way. Make it bigger and noiser. Go back to the reality, instead of a blurred fourth-generation photocopy.  Or do something else instead. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to construct similar very short novels out cliches mined from fantasy, horror, literary and other genres. Or as per Lois Ava-Matthew's suggestion, to extend this one into a trilogy.

Onwards. Two of my horror short stories have been taken up for reprint inside a week.  One, 'Inheritance', was my ninth published story, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction no less; it will appear in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, edited by Stephen Jones, and will be published by Ulysses Press in the autumn. The other, 'Take Me To the River', will appear in New Cthulu: The Recent Weird; edited by Paula Guran, it's due to be published by Prime Books in November.

I've always loved the horror genre; in the my formative years in the 1960s and early1970s, I read every one of Herbert van Thal's anthologies, tried to catch every Hammer film that appeared on TV, and was so thoroughly chilled by Jonathan Miller's TV adaptation of M.R. James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' that I chased down everything by James that I could find. Writing horror stories isn't merely an homage to these primal influences; it's also a kind of left-handed exercise that allows me to flex a different set of writing muscles.  Most especially, it allows me to write something contemporary, and to draw on stuff from my life 'Take Me To The River', for instance, is set in Bristol - where I lived for seven years - during the long, hot summer of 1976, and recasts some of my experiences of the free festival scene.

Oh yes, here's the list of contributors to Paula Guran's anthology.  I hope old H.P. would approve:

The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman's Other Model (1929), Caitlín Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R'lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Miéville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb

How To Write A Generic SF Novel

Your hero must be likeable and sympathetic at all times. Like James Bond in the Roger Moore era, he’s quick with a quip, and is unruffled by any situation. No amount of exposure to suffering or slaughter should alter your hero in any significant way, although he is allowed to shed the odd manly tear or to express cold steely determination to do something about the death of a loved one. This makes him even more sympathetic. But all trauma is temporary; showing genuine emotion is difficult, and can hold up the plot. A secret past is always good -- you don’t have to deal with the parents. No bad deed goes unpunished; no good deed goes unrewarded; anyone who disagrees with your hero must suffer for it. Everyone’s behaviour has a rational explanation -- Freud is useful in this respect. No one refuses to get with the plot. Everyone acts their part, and is in character all the time. All problems are solvable. Traditionally, SF heroes solved problems by application of intelligence and scientific knowledge. These days, you can substitute lasers or AK-47s for scientific knowledge. Or swords. The equivalent of the internet or mobile phones are used only when the hero needs to find something out. Usually someone else does the actual typing. Don’t include any science that might frighten the readers.  Anything found in SF written before the 1980s is usually okay. Nanotechnology is basically magic. So is genetic engineering. Also quantum mechanics. Virtual reality is more or less the same as a video game. Planets can be treated as a single country, with uniform climate and culture, and no more than three unique features that distinguish them from Earth. Always include some non-Americans for local colour; like the Irish steerage passengers in Titanic (the movie), they're cheerful, deferential, and possess a quaint and lively culture. Also include either a kickass woman who can do the unacceptable things that would make your hero unlikeable, or a wise old soothsaying woman who speaks in parables and knows things that can’t be found on the internet. See also: sidekick comedy robot. Infodumps can put off readers. Have your characters tell each other about their situation instead. Bars are good places to do this. Bars are also great places to meet people. Unlike airport bars, spaceport bars are packed with colourful characters who all know each other. Aliens can usually be found in the corners of spaceport bars, or in a mysterious rundown quarter of the city attached to the spaceport. They’re basically cats.  Or turtles. Or some other pet animal. They often lack a sense of humour, which puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with humans. Interstellar merchants can be found in another corner of the bar, trading in spices, exotic liquors, and rare elements. No matter how technologically advanced your future society might be, its sociology and economics are basically those of the seventeenth century.  Also its battle tactics. All spaceships are big. Very big. Except the one owned by the kickass woman. And they never run out of fuel, power, breathable air, potable water, food, or reaction mass. Despite possession of gigantic highly-advanced starships, wars are usually won by your hero and a few good marines. Death is optional. At the end, everything is as it was before, except your hero is richer, more powerful, and married to the right woman, who is never the kickass woman.
There’s your story.
Goodnight, children.

Another Day, Another Interview

This one, over at the SFX blog, is short and sweet, answering some good questions from Tom Hunter on Fairyland, eBooks and more.  Completely forgot to mention that I have a self-published eBook out, the novelete City of the Dead. Or that I'm planning to republish my short story collection, Little Machines (originally a limited edition hardback from PS Publishing), some time in summer.  So now I've mentioned them here.

Supermoon/Magnolia/London

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (10)

In the middle of one of my favourite films, Wim Wender's Paris, Texas, the central character, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), has a strange encounter on a freeway overpass. Travis, who's been missing for four years, has been brought to Los Angeles by his brother Walt after wandering into a bar in the Texas badlands and collapsing. He slowly recovers his memory and is reintroduced to his young son, Hunter, who has been raised by Walt and his wife. When Travis decides that he has to find his estranged wife, he and Hunter leave together on a road trip back to Texas. The encounter happens just before they start off, during one of Travis's long, lonely walks:



It's as if Paris, Texas briefly intersects with another film - an SF disaster epic in which the unheeded warnings of a crazy man turn out to be prophetic. And yet it also fits in with the outsider view of America - the emptiness of its landscapes; the unceasing rush of its roads; the everyday surreality - that's so beautifully captured by Wenders and his cinematographer, Robbie Mueller. In that context, the idea of meeting a raggedy prophet of a science-fictional disaster is no stranger than, say, the shot in which the camera pans to reveal two giant dinosaurs in the parking lot of a truck stop in San Bernadino.

Interview

New French magazine Yggdrasil recently interviewed me about The Quiet War for its forthcoming first issue. Here's the English version, by kind permission of editor Jean-Francois Micard, who asked the questions:

Yggdrasil: The Quiet War is a space opera situated in the near future and in our solar system. Was it important for you to stay close to the predictable reality?
Paul McAuley: It was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality. I don’t believe that SF is in the prediction business. Instead, it should be exploring the vast range of possibilities that open up from signs and wonders in the present. As far as The Quiet War is concerned, I felt that it was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality for two reasons. First, the novel was inspired in part by the images of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn sent back by the Viking 1 and 2, Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. By the tremendous variety of the landscapes of the moons, by the deep and strange histories implied by their forms, and by their sheer unexpected strangeness. By the subsurface ocean of Europa, the sulphur volcanoes of Io, the geysers of Enceladus, the vast equatorial mountain range of Iapetus, the lakes and dunes and cryovolcanoes of Titan, and much more. Second, I like to have a link between the present we all share and the futures of my various novels. It’s important to me - if not to the reader - to know how we might get from here to there.

In this future, the world supremacy switched to Brazil, which gave you an alternate point of view about the world. Do you think that after decades of European / US-led SF, the time is right for an SF that explores other areas of the world, like in The Quiet War, or Brazil or River of Gods from Ian McDonald for instance?
Futures in which Anglocentric late-stage capitalism are by no means the only possible futures. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. My first three novels shared a future history in which another version of a Greater Brazil became the dominant political force on Earth. But yes, the time is definitely right, now. The Cold War ended two decades ago. America is still the only world superpower, but China and India are catching up fast.  And who knows how the democratic revolutions in the Middle East might revitalise Arabic culture?

Your work as a whole goes through a lot of settings, from space opera to techno-thriller, or even noir steampunk. Is it necessary for you to move through genres like this rather than settle in one and develop from there?
It’s necessary for me to write the book I want to write next. Commercially, it might have been better for my career if I had expanded the star-spanning space-opera future of my first three novels, but instead I wrote a novel about Mars, and then an alternate history involving Leonardo da Vinci. Because I’ve been interested in Mars for as long as I can remember (one of the first SF novels I ever read was HG Wells’ War of the Worlds); because I wanted to write a novel about Renaissance Florence. At one point I was pushed towards techno- thrillers, but the kind of techno-thriller I wrote were, typically for an SF writer, pro-science rather than Awful Warnings. I’m also an avid reader of crime novels, and when I was given the opportunity to write a crime novel I seized it. One day I’d like to write another. Meanwhile, I’m having a lot of fun with my new space opera future history.

You work for years as a scientist, and The Quiet War is full of very precise scientific details. Is it important for you to have this amount of accurate details?
Because I know a little about scientists and scientific culture, I try to get that right - especially as there aren’t that many novels about science, and scientists, even in SF, and it’s a big and important area of human endeavour. And because many of my SF novels are about how humans find ways of living in new landscapes, I like to get those details right, when the landscapes are real. I wanted, in The Quiet War, to get as close as possible to standing on the surface of Dione, or tramping through a riverine canyon on Titan. I wanted the experience in close up: what things look like, the way hills and craters were shaped, and so on. Along with travel writing, science fiction and fantasy are the last refuge of the pastoral.

Do you keep up to date personally with new scientific discoveries and theories?
I try. All SF writers should try keep up to date with that kind of thing, shouldn’t they? I follow developments in fields I am interested in, and I am also a big believer in serendipity - in the happy accident, in stumbling over something that fits into the narrative I happen to be constructing. The internet is very useful in that regard.

Sri Hong Owen and Averne are called (in French) sorcières génétiques. Do you think that, ultimately, science is akin to magic / witchcraft?
Not at all.  The whole point of scientific experiments is that they can, in theory, be replicated by anyone. That’s why scientific papers can be dull and baffling to the layreader - they contain all kinds of detail required to make such replication possible. Science allows industrialisation and mass production because it defines predictable cause and effect based on shared observations and experiments. Magic on the other hand is personal. Every operator has different skills not shared by others, and every operation is as unique as a handwritten book.

Contrary to what a lot of people believe, you prove here than each moon has its own characteristics, and influence its settlers. When many writers just invent new world, do you take more pleasure in building them around accountable facts?
It’s much more satisfying, for me, to have a map. No matter how sketchy. The map does not of course contain every detail. It is not the territory it represents. But it provides a framework within which the imagination can work. Without that framework, when anything is possible, and while you might say that the imagination should be free to create anything it wants, if anything is possible then nothing is of any real value.

The Quiet War is about a war that doesn't have the fury of 'traditional' wars, it's mainly about micro-actions like sabotage and bacteria. Do you feel the wars of the future will have that dimension?
They’re already growing in that direction. 9/11. The stuxnet worm attacking the software that controls Iranian nuclear facilities. Drones. The idea of netwar - conflicts that are not controlled from the top down, like conventional armies, but are organised in all-channel networks.

It's not really a war in the traditional sense about territories and resources, but more about what kind of future wants humanity. It's also an exploration of different social/political/philosophical systems, Earth being settled in an ecological conservatism when the extraterrestrial colonies evolved into various social systems. Which one is your favourite?
The idea of city states in which every citizen has a share in the commons, and can influence the direction and development of their society by earning social value through good works is to me very appealing. And so is the idea that in the near future the human race will face up to what it has done to the Earth, and start to make amends. But in The Quiet War, the green movement has been hijacked by nondemocratic cabals and turned into an ideology that excuses all kinds of repression, so it wouldn’t be a very comfortable place to live. Although readers of both novels will find that things do change . . .

Each of the colonies are, in essence, an utopia. Is it harder to write about utopias rather than dystopias?
It’s much harder to write about uptopias because it’s hard to make them nteresting. If a place is perfect, and everyone is happy, what happens? Ordinary everyday human dramas, of course, and these are fine and enduring subjects for the novelist, but perfect utopias are fixed places. Nothing changes. Novels about them too often lapse into long descriptions of the plumbing system, and guided tours of the munipal steam creche and the balloon works. Fortunately, the cities and settlements of The Quiet War’s outer system are flawed utopias. They are tested by pressures from within and without, and the drama in the two novels is derived from how they resist those pressures, how they fail, how they adapt.

You began the novel as several short stories in that universe, do you plan to expand it beyond The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun? With other novels? Short stories?
I’ve just finished a novel called In The Mouth of the Whale, that extends the history of The Quiet War and the Gardens of the Sun across a leap of some twelve hundred years, and looks towards the history of the human species way beyond that. It’s set in the dust ring of Fomalhaut, and the atmosphere of a gas giant that’s believed to orbit that star. And right now I’m working on a novel set at about the same time as In The Mouth of the Whale, but in the Solar System.

Fairyland

The Grand Staircase of the St Pancras Midland Grand Hotel, which is about to open after years of renovation.  I have a tender spot for the place: it was the setting for the opening of my novel Fairyland, and very early on its hapless hero sweeps down this very staircase:

Gilbert Scott's great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby.  He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it onto his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach.  A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast-forward.  There's a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella.  It's monsoon weather.

Fairyland was published sixteen years ago, while the hotel was still more or less a wreck (a great collection of pre-renovation photographs can be found here, showing what it looked like when I visited it, during a Christmas Art Fair, about a decade ago).  Fifteen years ago, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award - the first but by no means the last Clarke Award success for my publisher, Gollancz.  To celebrate the anniversary, and the e-publication of various of my backlist titles, including Fairyland, there's a bit of promotion going on at their site right now, complete with a competition.  Adam Roberts has put up a generous and long review of Fairyland (first published in a book about Clarke Award winners) on his blog, and there'll be other stuff turning up here and there too, including a special Gollancz newsletter, and some kind of competition for free books right here on the blog, towards the end of this week.

Reference

Via Talking Points Memo I came across a report of some crass eugenic-speak from a recently-elected New Hampshire State Representative, coupled with an unfortunate reference to a late SF author:

A 91-year-old freshman state representative has angered a Dover Community Partners staffer for his comments he doesn't support state funding for "the crazy people" who should be sent to "Siberia."...

Martin Harty of Barrington made the comments to Sharon Omand, a program manager at Community Partners, which provides behavioral health and developmental services for Strafford County. Omand had called Harty and other legislators to discuss measures in the proposed House Republican state budget that would make significant cuts to mental health services.

Omand told Foster's that Harty told her he disagreed with her about the need for funds for mental health services and he believed in eugenics.

"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," he told her.

Where does he get his ideas?

Explaining his thoughts, Harty said one of his main concerns is population explosion, and he is wary of funding a social issue that can't really be helped...

Harty referenced science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and his stories about a pending population explosion as someone whose messages he is "in tune with."

When I sent the link to a few usual suspects, Eileen Gunn pointed out that Harty was most likely channelling Cyril Kornbluth's satirical short story 'The Marching Morons', in which the US has become populated by lowbrows kept content by shoddy consumer goods and pointless jobs. In fact, Harty's idea about sending inverts Kornbluth's scenario: in 'The Marching Morons', the high-IQ elite have set up an Arctic retreat from the stresses of trying to run the US. As for Harty's claim of 'being in tune with' Asimov's messages about the population explosion, I really don't think so. Asimov, ever the rationalist, believed that the solution to over-population lay in promoting voluntary contraception, encouraging homosexuality, and world government. Not, I think, the typical views of a Republican - even of the New Hampshire variety.

Question - I have a vague memory, exclusive of title and author, of a short story in which criminals were sent to a walled territory to do as they would. Anyone know anything about this? Or of any SF scenario, apart from HG Wells' 'The Country of the Blind' or John  Varley's 'The Persistence of Vision' where the differently-abled have either volunteered for, or have been driven into, exile?

In The Mouth Of The Whale

My agent has just delivered the manuscript of my next novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, to Gollancz, so I thought I'd put up an extract:

It began like every other day. Ori climbed into her immersion chair and plugged into her bot, trundled it out onto the skin of the Whale, and helped her crew shepherd a pair of probes from their garage to the staging post. Fuelling and charging them, running final checks before they set off on their long journey down the cable. Important, demanding, finicky work, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The staging post was near the base of the Whale’s vertical cylinder, at the lip of the conical end cap that tapered to the cable’s insertion point. Immediately above, a marshalling yard spread like ivy around a tree trunk, bustling with purposeful movement. At the upper end, hoppers stuffed with a variety of raw construction materials scooted down rack and pinion tracks towards tipplers that seized and lifted them up and turned them upside down and mated their hatches with the hatches of bulbous freight cars. The hoppers shed their cargo with quick peristaltic shudders, were swung right side up and set down on return tracks on the far side of the tipplers, and zipped back to the refinery. Further down the yard, loaded freight cars assembled themselves into long strings that trundled away along one of the four parallel magrails that crossed the inverted hill of the end cap and converged on the cable, the strings rolling over flying bridges at the insertion point and gathering speed as they descended the cable towards the deck of fluffy white ammonia clouds that sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon, passing strings of empty cars climbing in the opposite direction.  More here...

Learning To Love The Alien

It's one of the chief signifiers of science fiction, the other, the alien, but in literary sf at least, it's a signifier that's fallen out of favour. There are still plenty of aliens in turning up in TV and film sf, and some even escape the cliches of messiah, seemingly unstoppable menace (until they catch a cold or get 419'd), or comedy sidekick.  But in literary sf, at least on this side of the Atlantic, where we don't have a tradition of military sf and the need for ravening hordes of easy targets, not so much. Oh, there have been a few, of course. Even some good ones, such as the bleakly inimical gene machines in Peter Watts' Blindsight, or the cruel and elegantly wasted aristocrats in Gwyneth Jones's Spirit. But on the whole, they've fallen out of fashion. My first three novels are a case in point. In Four Hundred Billion Stars, aliens were a tangible presence; a puzzle to be confronted and solved. In Secret Harmonies (aka Of The Fall, in the US), they were admonitory presences that may or may not have been intelligent, and died if human beings hung around them for too long. And in Eternal Light, they'd quit the universe, become as untouchable and about as understandable as angels.

After that, I more or less gave up on the alien business for the next fifteen years, but now I'm giving it serious thought again. It started with a short story, 'Dust', and grew from there into what's more of a scenario than any kind of future history. Just suppose we get one of the things we always thought we'd get in the future, back when the future was still a good place to be travelling towards. Suppose we get easy travel to other planets, right now. Suppose it's a gift from aliens who want to give us a helping hand. It isn't much of a gift - a few cold and dusty and barely habitable planets littered with ancient and mostly useless artifacts, but hey. What do we do with it? How would it change us? Would it change us?

I've been writing a few stories to explore the edges of this frame, but now I'm beginning to think that, after the next novel, I need to go a bit deeper. I need to take a good look at those aliens. What do they want? What are they? Not monsters from our ids, or distorted reflections of ourselves (or of our pets), that's for sure. Maybe in the end they're what they've always been - an articulation of the inhumanness of the universe. Or maybe they are their own selves, just as we are. I think it might be fun to find out.

Meanwhile, just to remind you, you can find one of those stories in my new ebook, City of the Dead.

Debatable Zones

As an exercise, the reader might like to substitute 'science fiction' and 'sf writers' for 'poetry' and 'poets' in the following:

The edgelands are a complex landscape, a debatable zone, constantly reinventing themselves as economic and social tides come in and out. Of course, the idea of edgelands does not just refer to parts of the physical landscape. It's a rich term for poetry, too, and can maybe break down other dualities. Poets have always been attracted to the overlooked, the telling details, the captured moment. And the moment is important here, too. If parts of remote rural Britain feel timeless (though this feeling is, of course, illusory) then the edgelands feel anything but. Revisit an edgelands site you haven't seen for six months, and likely as not there will be a Victorian factory knocked down, a business park newly built, a section of waste ground cleared and landscaped, a re-war warehouse abandoned and open to the elements [or a Zeppelin factory swarming with zombies - PM]. Such are the constantly shifting sands of edgelands that any writing about these landscapes is a snapshot.  There is no definitive description of the edgelands of Swindon, or Wolverhampton, only an attempt to celebrate and evoke them at one particular time.

Edgelands: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Books Do Furnish A Room

Rereading

So SFSignal asked me: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

My answer below; answers from other people here.

Any book worth its salt should be able to withstand a second reading, but there are some that excite and move me at every reencounter. Here are a few:

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. A man finds himself stranded on a traffic island after a car crash. At first he can’t escape. And then he doesn’t want to. A powerful, deceptively simple updating of the Robinson Crusoe story.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. A man comes to a wounded American city, leaves as a hero-poet. After the fall of New Orleans, it’s more relevant than ever.

Libra by Don DeLillo. Oswald as tragic hero.

Neuromancer by William Gibson.  Still fresh and startlingly original, despite a thousand imitators.

The Inheritors by William Golding. Neanderthals encounter modern humans, with fatal results. All of Golding is worth reading and rereading, but this is my favourite.

Climbers by M. John Harrison. A beautifully written, intricately structured memoir/novel about memory, obsession, and the unrelenting reality of the world.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Diagrammatic, yes, but the sections set on Anarres are truly powerful and moving, and it’s one of the few SF novels to attempt to portray a genuinely original society from the inside.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. America primeval.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. Alyx, a barbarian kidnapped by the future, leads a gang of squabbling tourists across an alien wilderness. Alyx is the template for every wisecracking kickass heroine in cyberpunk, the new space opera and much else, but she’s the original and best, tough and funny and tender and wise.

Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. The detailed life and times of Updike’s American Everyman are, like America itself, inexhaustible.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. A marvellously eccentric fantasy about King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Matter of Britain that begins as a juvenile comedy and ends in tragedy and renewal. The death of Beaumont gets me every time. And no one does infodumps like White, who seems to know everything about Medieval Britain, which he remakes into a world that never was but should have been.


Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. The fall of America, as told to her diary by a young girl. The best, and chronologically the first, of Womack’s Ambient sequence.

So, which books do you recommend?

City of the Dead

Just up on amazon in both the UK and the US, at as reasonable a price I could manage, the Kindle ebook edition of a recent science-fiction novelette, City of the Dead. My first but by no means last venture in e-publishing.  Cover by Michael Marshall Smith; no DRM. Enjoy!

Imagination

Reality

Reminder #2

Along with fellow guests of honour Juliet McKenna and Kari Sperring, I'll be at the small but perfectly formed one-day convention Picocon this Saturday.  If you see me, say hello.

Slowly working on the new novel, meanwhile, and thinking about a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', that jumped into my head the other day.  In the way they do, sometimes.

Reminder #1

...that with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod I'll be speaking and taking part in a roundtable discussion at the LSE Thursday 17th. It's a free event (but you need to book tickets) organised by the Department of International Relations as part of the university's Space for Thought Literary Festival.

Book Stack

Here are a few of the books I bought in the past couple of weeks (the paperback pile is about twice as high). From the top:

D.G. Compton, Ascendancies and Farewell, Earth's Bliss. Compton is a highly underrated British SF writer, probably best known for The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, which anticipated reality TV and was made into a so-so film, Death Watch, by Bernard Tavernier. Farewell, Earth's Bliss is somewhat atypical - a darkly funny story of redemption set on Mars, used by Earth as a dumping ground for the worst kind of criminal. Ascendancies, like many of Compton's novels, views a near-future society in close-up, through flawed protagonists. Here, a widow and a hapless insurance agent try to out-game each other in a near future transformed by falls of fertilising dust and random disappearances of people via a mysterious process associated with eerie choral music and the scent of roses.

T.M. Disch, The Prisoner. Novelisation of the cult TV series. Disch and The Prisoner are a closer fit than you might at first think.

Stephen Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. Charity shop find, shortlisted for the Clarke Award a couple of years back. Adventures in Un-Space.

Stanislaw Lem, Eden. Secondhand bookshop find. A spaceship crashes on a planet of metaphors.

Jack Womack, Ambient. Womack's first novel, the third, chronologically, in his 'Dryco' series. Uncannily prophetic social satire; opens with one of the best bookshop scenes ever written.

The Ones You Do, Daniel Woodrell. Signed first edition of the third of Woodrell's St Bruno mystery novels (I bought the other two, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, in a sale at the fabulous Powell Books, Portland, Oregon, a few years ago).  Woodrell is one of my favourite writers, a poet of American interstitial lowlife. His second novel, Woe to Live On, was made into a film (Ride With the Devil), as was his last, Winter's Bone.

Making It Personal

Simon asks a question that I think is too good to be left under the fold:

Something has been bothering me for sometime about Sci-Fi and you seem the kinda guy to shed some light on it. How come Sci-Fi writers before recent times never mentioned/envisaged personalised settings in technology (you know - screen savers, font, pictures - things that reflect/feedback ones personality in objects). It seems that even the greatest kept faith with the idea of mass homogenised technologies which were no doubt linked to the ideas of societies and objects in the post industrial age. I mean it would have been nice if Rick Deckard would have played around with the personalized settings of his mood organ? I think personalised settings say a lot about notions of liberty, society and people’s interaction with technology – seems an under explored area (you just gonna tell me that I’ve simply just missed all the right books?!!)

 I have not one but three answers. And a question.

First - and I know I've said it before- science fiction really isn't in the prediction business. What it really does is hold up a distorting mirror to the time in which it is written, and takes current directions and preoccupations and speculates wildly about them. It doesn't predict the future, but a rich variety of possible futures.  Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets it wrong, as in the example at the top of this post - Kelly Freas's terrific painting of a space pirate swarming aboard a rocketship with a slide rule between his teeth.

Second, modern science fiction came of age in the post-war years, when techniques of mass production deployed during the Second World War began to spew all kinds of consumer goods. The growth of the American military-industrial complex in the 1950s and 1960s not only produced the largest and most modern armed force in the world, it also stimulated a huge increase in civilian living standards. SF written at the time reflected that, often in satirical, dehumanised dystopias: Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451; Fredrick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants; much of Philip K Dick's work. Deckard's mood organ doesn't have personalised settings because that's the point: it's a machine for standardising human emotions in a future where the line between real and artificial human beings is confused.

But has any science fiction explored personalisation of technology? You bet. Much of cyberpunk explores the way in which technology can be subverted and repurposed.  'The street,' William Gibson famously wrote in his short story 'Burning Chrome', 'finds its own uses for things.' My question is this: what's the earliest example of personalised technology in science fiction? In the stories in Larry Niven's future history, published in the 1960s and 1970s, asteroid miners personalised their space suits with paintings (much as vans and motorcycles were customised, back then). But there must be earlier examples . . .