Road to the Stars

Last Friday, the day of the launch of the last space shuttle, and the end until who knows when of the United State’s capability to send human beings into space, I went the British Film Intitute to watch a marvellous old Russian film about space travel, Pavel Klushantsev’s Road to the Stars -- shown with a documentary, The Star Dreamer, that provided useful historical context and a nice overview of Klushantsev’s career.

Klushantsev began to make Road to the Stars in 1954. He’d started his career in a Leningrad studio making documentaries, and The Road to the Stars begins in straight-forward documentary style, with a dramatised biography of the father of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and a sequence on early experiments in rocketry that establishes the basic physics of spaceflight. Then, without changing style (or the portentious narrator), the film jumps into the future. Ingenious special effects, with meticulously detailed models and sets, and realistic depictions of cosmonauts manoeuvring in free fall (amongst other tricks, Klushantsev shot actors hung on wires from below, and used a revolving set), are deployed to show the launch of the first three cosmonauts into space, the construction and operation of a space station in low Earth orbit, mapping the Moon’s surface by a robotic surveyor, and the first manned flight to the Moon. Some of the scenes allegedly influenced Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Just before Road to the Stars was finished, in 1957, Sputnik 1 went into orbit. The Russian authorities insisted that Klushantsev insert material about Earth’s first artificial moon, and gave his film a wide release. Space was the next big thing; the Soviet red star was in the ascendent; Road to the Stars was, as far as the authorities were concerned, a prime piece of propaganda. More than a million people saw it in Russia; it was screened in twenty- two other countries. Segments shown by Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news allegedly galvanised the American participants in the space race. Road to the Stars seemed like a blueprint for the Soviet conquest of space: space travel as an inevitable step in the evolution of Russia’s socialistic scientific utopia, proceeding by logical steps to the Moon, with journeys to other planets soon to follow.

It’s a future we didn’t get, of course. America won the race to the Moon; Nixon cancelled a programme to build rockets that would send astronauts to Mars; after the last Apollo mission, no human being has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Klushantsev went on to make a full-length feature film about the first expedition to Venus, Planet of the Storms, that showcased more marvellous special effects, but ran into trouble when a commissar objected to the tears of a female cosmonaut (‘No Soviet cosmonaut would cry’). His film was given a restricted release; the script for the next, about a race to the Moon involving Russian, American and German spacecraft that ended in peace and harmony, was rejected. He made further documentary-style films about space travel (scenes from one about Mars, with giant animated flowers and a dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit, look wonderful) but retired a disappointed man, more or less forgotten until American special-effects artist Robert Skotak tracked him down, just before his death in 1999.

Unsurprisingly, some of scenes in the film seem quaint (nothing dates like the future), but it’s infused with warmth and charm, and its cheery optimism about the benefits of space exploration and colonisation outshines the occasional passages of naked propaganda. At the end of Road to the Stars, two cosmonauts descend a spacecraft’s ladder to the Moon’s surface. There’s a close-up of the first tentative step, and the bootprint it leaves.

But there’s no solemnity; no tick-box of tasks to be performed. The cosmonauts dance out across the surface, and when they see the Earth floating above the Moon’s mountains, they embrace each other with glee, overwhelmed with amazement and happiness at being on the Moon. It’s a wonderfully touching moment, reminding us that although robot spacecraft have and still are sending back amazing pictures and reams of data, the old-fashioned notion of human exploration, while perhaps foolishly and unrealistically romantic, still stirs emotions no robot can reach.

 (You can watch the whole film, without subtitles, here.)

J.G. Ballard's House

...is for sale.

Free Entry to British Library Event

I'm appearing on a panel at the British Library Tuesday 12th July, talking with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt and Kim Newman (and a virtual Margaret Atwood) about our favourite items in the Out of the World exhibition.

I have not one but two free entries up for grabs. If you want to come along, email me at PJCMcAuley at gmail dot com and I'll add your name to the list on the door.  First to email wins!

EDIT: They're gone!

The Secret of My Success

Harold Pinter on his plays, 1963 (pinched from Dangerous Minds):

I’m not a theorist. I’m not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that’s all. That’s the sum of it.
I’ve had two full-length plays produced in London. The first ran a week, and the second ran a year. Of course, there are differences between the two plays. In The Birthday Party I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In The Caretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead. So that instead of, say, “Look, dash, who, dash, I, dash, dash, dash,” the text would read, “Look, dot, dot, dot, who, dot, dot, dot, I, dot, dot, dot, dot.” So it’s possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes, and that’s why The Caretaker had a longer run than The Birthday Party. The fact that in neither case could you hear the dots and dashes in performance is beside the point. You can’t fool the critics for long. They can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither.

Where I'm At...

...rather than 'where I've been', because I've been right here, behind the curtain, spending most of my time dealing with the editing stage of In the Mouth of The Whale.  Right now, I have the whole thing in my head and can spin it around like a CAD/CAM model and examine its threads and connections, its components and framework from any angle.  That won't last, but it has allowed me to know which changes were highly local, and which struck echoes and required secondary changes in various parts of the text.  But now it's done, and the amended MS has been sent back, and I think that, if nothing else, I've pinned down the first word: When.

Meanwhile, I'm rereading a couple of novels for a panel at the British Library on July 12th, in which I'll be discussing favourites from the rather good Out of This World exhibition, along with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt, Kim Newman, and the virtual Margaret Atwood.

Oh, and I've finished and sold a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.  It should be in the January 2012 issue.

Meanwhile, below the cut in the last post, Boogeyman259 asks, 'Could you please send me your origional notes about remote sensing from Cowboy Angels.'  Afraid I can't, Boogeyman, since I didn't make extensive notes about something mentioned only in passing.  And anyway, gee, I hardly know you, and you don't give me any clue about why you want to know this stuff, or why you can't find it out for yourself.  But you did say 'please' (I'm not being sarcastic; too many people demanding something or other don't), so I'm happy to tell you that the CIA were certainly into remote viewing once they realised what their Soviet counterparts were up to, in the psychic line.  There are passages about it, and the rather eccentric cast of characters involved in it, in Jeffrey T. Richelson's The Wizards of Langley, and there's at least one whole book about it, too: Jim Schnabel's Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. I bet there's all kinds of stuff about this on the WWW, too, but I'm not going to look it up.  It's probably at least as reliable as your average novelist: we do tend to make things up for a living, or at least bend and twist stubborn facts to more convenient shapes.  In this case, though, I didn't have to make it up; in fact, the truth is (more than usual) a lot weirder than fiction.

The Idiot's Tale

‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day to day living that wears you out.’ – Anton Chekhov

The relevance to the thinness of a certain mode of science fiction and fantasy, which advances narratives by a series of crises and cliffhangers, should be obvious.

Something For The Weekend

Just put up on amazon in the UK and the US, the Kindle edition my short-story collection Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback.  Cover by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Monsters! Alien invasions! Lost Worlds! Mad Scientists! Secret Histories!

In the seventeen stories collected here, multiple award-winning author Paul McAuley takes a fresh look at staple themes spanning science fiction, horror, and alternate history. A hero who once helped repel an alien invasion, ruined by self-doubt after his bruising experiences in the eye of the media, must try to save the world all over again. Best-selling author Philip K. Dick confronts Richard Nixon and a conspiracy that has taken control of America. A book dealer discovers strange and dangerous rivals on the far side of the internet. A science-fiction fan explains why he became a serial killer. And in 'Cross Roads Blues', the course of American history hangs on the decision of an itinerant musician.

Our Fictionless Futures

Last week, my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, asked a question on Twitter: ‘Can anyone think of an SFnal future that has an explicit reference in it to that future's own SF?’ A few of us responded, mostly referencing alternate history novels nested within alternate history novels; it was Malcolm Edwards who pointed out that Vernor Vinge’s Tatja Grimm’s World featured a mobile publishing house that, as it turned from producing fantasy to science fiction, helped to bootstrap its own civilisation. Tatja Grimm’s World was first published in 1969. More than forty years later, examples of science fiction in fictional futures are still rare.

As Walter John Williams pointed out in his blog, just a month earlier, ‘For almost the entire history of science fiction, the one thing you would never find in a science fiction novel was, well, science fiction. Every person in a science fiction story behaved as if science fiction itself was never invented.’ There are a fair few depictions of science-fiction novelists in science fiction set in the present: Kurt Vonnegut’s recurring character, the hack SF author Kilgore Trout, is probably the best known example; in Barry Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, an SF author finds himself in his imaginary future; an SF author tours and escapes Hell in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno; a failed SF author, after surviving burial by remaindered copies of his novel during an earthquake, helps save a remnant of humanity in the disasterous disaster flick 2012 (although more by his driving skills than any deep knowledge of SF tropes); the hero of Walter John William’s cyber-thrillers This Is Not A Game and Deep State is not only a former SF writer but also an RPG gamer. And so on.

But in the futures it has made its own, SF itself appears to have died out. Worse, the novel itself appears to have died out, too. There are poets (Rydra Wong in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17; the Kid in Dahlgren); musicians (the touring orchestra in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness; the discorporating singers in Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song; any number of revived/cloned rock stars); painters (the evolving robot artist in Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Zima Blue’); and sculptors (J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’), but precious few far-future novelists. The only one I can call to mind is Katin Crawford, the moon-fixated perpetual student in Delany’s Nova, who wants to revive the lost art of the novel and after endless false starts finds his subject matter in the adventure on which he embarks, and writes the novel you, the reader, hold in your hand (although doesn’t that make it a memoir?). I’m sure there are other examples, but on the whole, writers of fiction about the future don’t believe that written fiction will survive into the future, even as eBooks. In The Quiet War, I hinted that novels had been rolled up into immersive role-playing sagas, but even RPGs and their descendants may have a limited shelf-life: Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, features an obscure cult that’s preserved otherwise forgotten archaic computer games. It seems that as far as SF writers are concerned, the future is inimical to fiction of any kind ...

Starships

I've been thinking about Luca Zanier's fantastic series of photographs of places of power ever since I came across them, via Mrs Deane. With their hyperrealistic lighting and perfectly framed compositions, they look like outtakes from unmade or unknown Kubrick movies.  They also look like, I've just realised, starship control rooms.

Changing course in a starship would be a rare, momentous, and potentially catastrophic action.  Everyone aboard would participate - if only to watch.  There would be no need for panels with buttons and blinking lights.  The 23rd Century equivalent of iPads would take care of that. But one thing Star Trek definitely got right: you'd need a space where people could gather to discuss what to do, and to watch the biggest and best HDTV screen you could buy.  Of course, any reality-based starship design would probably be a compact tincan stuffed with AI, genetic codes, and templates for machines that could build machines that could build habitats and creches (or bigger, better AIs).  But in an ideal imaginary case, there'd be something this:

A Sense Of Yearning For A Future That We All Knew Would Never Come To Pass

My interest in pop music came late in my teenage years, long after I began to devour every SF novel I could find. We had more books than singles or LPs in the house: the singles were my sisters, the LPs my mother’s small collection of film soundtracks. My grandmother, who lived next door in the 1930s, had an old windup 78 player set in a cabinet, with one of those recurved horns that acted as a loudspeaker. There was Top of the Pops, which everyone seemed to watch in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the enforced jolliness and restricted playlist of Radio 1, and the pirate radio stations my sister chased across the dial of our radiogram, and that was about it until one day in 1972 I bought my first LP: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders for Mars (I still have it). It was SF; it was a concept album with a proper narrative arc; I played it to death.

I’m still a fan of Bowie. Bowie in his 70's pomp, at least. And every since Jack Womack pointed me to it, I’ve been following the track by track story of his career on the blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. It recently reached one of my all-time favourite Bowie songs, “Heroes”, anatomising both the song and the circumstances of its creation in wonderfully acute detail. Even if you’re not especially interested in “Heroes”, or David Bowie, it’s worth reading for its insights into the creative process. Here’s the important stuff that’s often left out of creative writing courses. Starting from scraps of discarded material. Pulling the structure together using a mixture of technique and improvisation and use of found material. Finishing it in a final burst of inspiration (or desperation). All of this at least as important as any planning; all of it following instinct rather than agreement on what's allowable.  Sure, studio recording is a collaborative effort, but Bowie is at the centre, and very often, especially during the Long March of writing a novel, even before your editor becomes involved, isn't writing is a collaboration - a dialogue with your past selves?

Robert Johnson

 

Today marks the centenary of the birth of the great, late bluesman, Robert Johnson.  Or at least, the best guess of when his birthday was, for his life is poorly documented, like those of many African-Americans born in segregated Mississippi, and it is also overshadowed by myth. Thanks to Mack MacCormick and other researchers, we know that Johnson's family was split up when his father had to flee a lynch mob after becoming embroiled in a property dispute with white landowners. After his mother died when he was still young, Johnson left his wife and the child he fathered with another woman, and became one of the many musicians wandering the high roads, low roads, and railroads of 1930s America.  Early in his career, he latched onto Son House, who recalled that Johnson was an awful guitar player who disappeared for a short spell and returned as a fully-fledged musician, so starting the legend that he'd learned his licks from the devil, either at first-hand, or via one of his tutors, Ike Zimmerman.  Johnson died at the age of 27, from drinking poisoned whiskey supplied by a jealous husband, and soon after cutting 41 tracks that were reissued on two LPS by Columbia Records during the folk music revival of the early 1960s.  He died in relative obscurity (even the site of his grave is disputed), and he had little influence on his contemporaries.  But via those two Columbia Records LPs, his guitar playing and singing influenced many British musicians, including Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, and their music fed back into the US music scene.  Johnson is renowned as an innovator and early pioneer of rock and roll.  A 2CD compilation, The Complete Recordings, was issued in 1990, won a Grammy; four of his songs are included in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame; The Complete Recordings has been deposited in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

My own small tribute is a story I published early in my career, and republished in revised form in Little Machines.  It imagines a time-travelling historian becoming embedded the story he's been sent to research, and creating an alternate world in which Robert Johnson died just before his music was properly recognised in a concert in New York City: an unkinder world which is our own.  Here's the beginning:

The first time Turner heard Robert Johnson play was to a vast crowd in Washington, D.C., December 5th 1945, the night the desegregation bill went through, and just three weeks before Johnson was assassinated. The second time was on what was supposed to be a routine archive trip, June 3rd 1937, a jook joint just outside the little Mississippi town of Tallula, and it was something else.

Afterwards, Turner hung around outside, an anonymous still point in the crowd that, slow as molasses, dispersed into the hot dark night. The music still thrilled in his blood. Songs he’d had known only as ghosts in the crackle of a few badly worn 78s or no more than titles in charred files from the fire-bombed office of an obscure record company had one after the other ripped through the heat and noise of the crowded jook joint, so much sound from one man and one guitar, driving the whoops and pounding feet of the dancers, that Turner doubted his state-of-the-art Soviet recorder had been able to capture one tenth of the reality.

Turner had once played a little guitar himself, enough to know that what the old bluesmen said about Robert Johnson was true. Even before the New York concerts, the years in prison on a trumped-up murder charge, his letters and his protest songs, the Freedom Marches and he Segregation Riots, near-canonization after his assassination, he had been the best of them all. The hard little capsule planted under the skin beneath Turner’s collarbone, where the grain of Americium hung suspended in its Oppenheimer pinch, tingled. He should have cut out and closed the Loop when Robert Johnson had finished his set. Get in, do the job, get out. Don't give the paradoxes any chance. But Turner had heard raw truths in Johnson's songs; for the first time since he'd been brought home after the Peace Corps had been disbanded, he felt alive again. Before he closed the Loop, he wanted to meet the man whose music had cut him deep.

The sandy yard and dark road in front of the jook joint were empty now; only Turner and three men sitting on the sagging porch were left. The men, all in various degrees of drunkenness, were passing around a chipped enamel jug in the yellow light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, talking in low voices and glancing sidelong at the stranger in the dark suit it hung oddly around Turner, and the suspenders which held up the trousers were gouging his clean white shirt (soaked in sweat), and polished two-tone shoes (which pinched like hell). He strolled over to them, casual as he could, wondering if one of them was the man whose recollections about Robert Johnson, told to a field researcher in some twenty years time, had brought him here. His pulse in his throat, his mouth dry, he asked where Robert Johnson was.

One of them said, "He out back somewhere."

Another added, "With a woman. Comes to women, Bobby Johnson's like a snake in a henhouse."

The third wanted to know who was asking. Turner gave his cover story of being a talent scout, named a large New York record company. It was sort of true.

The man, burly and barechested under bib overalls, fixed a mean look on Turner. "Never heard of no gentleman of colour working for no record company before."

"Bobby Johnson, he already done got himself a deal," the first man said. He was the oldest of the three, his face a map of wrinkles like drying mud, his eyeballs yellow as ivory,his nappy hair salt and pepper. He peered at Turner and said, "You got yourself seventy-five, Mr New York, you can walk into Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow and buy a record of his ‘Terraplane Blues’."

The second man, skinny and mournful, said, "I heard he been on the radio in Detroit, singin spirituals. Shit, he been round this country a couple three times now."

"Race records are a big thing in New York," Turner said, already in deeper than he'd intended.   "That’s why we’re very interested in Robert Johnson."

"What they know bout the blues in New York?" the old man said. "You go tell your boss that down here is the rightful home of the blues, no place else. Why, I play harmonica myself. I get the blues real bad sometimes."

The mournful man said, "Bobby Johnson, he got 'em worse of all."

"He got a mojo hand, no mistake," the old man said, and drank from the enamel jug and smacked his lips.

"They say ol Legba gave the boy a lesson in the blues, in exchange for his soul," the mournful man said, and there was a hush as if an angel had passed overhead.

The old man took another drink and said, "Well I don't know if that be true, but I do know one time Bobby Johnson couldn't play a lick to save himself. I got the story straight from Son House. Bobby Johnson, he could play harmonica right enough, but he was always fixin after playin gitar. Hung out every joint and dance and country picnic there was, pesterin the players to give him a chance, but he was so bad it wasn't even funny. Anyway, he went away maybe a year, and I don't know if he went to the crossroads with Legba or not, but Son House told me when he came back he was carryin a gitar, and asked for a spot like old times. Well, Son was about ready to take a break, and told Bobby Johnson to go ahead and got himself outside before the boy began. But that time it was all changed. That time, he tol me, the music he heard Bobby Johnson make put the hair on his head to standin."

It had the air of a story told many times. There was a silence, and then the mournful man said, "He near to burnt down the place tonight, and that's the truth."

The old man said, "Son House tol me Bobby Johnson tol him a man called Ike Zimmerman taught him how to play, but what truth's in that I don't rightly know."

Turner, whose first name was Isaac, felt an airy thrill.

The burly man in the bib coveralls hauled himself to his feet, using as a support one of the posts that propped up the corrugated tin roof that sloped above the porch. He pointed at Turner and said, "You fools tell this stranger whatever’s on your minds, an you don’t know who he is."

"He tol you he scouting talent, Jake," the old man said. He told Turner, "You come on down to Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow, Mister New York, I show you stuff on the harmonica you ain’t never before heard."

"He ain’t no scout," the burly man said. "He got the look of the law about him."

He came down the steps towards Turner, a mean glint in his eyes.

"I’m just passing through," Turner said, and raised his hand to his chest, ready to collapse the Oppenheimer Pinch if he had to.

"Don’t pull no gun on me," the burly man said, half-angry, half-fearful, and swung clumsily at Turner and turned halfway around at sat down with comic suddeness.

The door of the jook joint opened. Yellow light fell across the yard. A slightly-built man in a chalk-stripe suit stepped out, a guitar slung across his back, a fedora tilted on his head. It was Robert Johnson. He looked directly at Turner and said, "Why, Isaac. You come back. I always wondered if you would."

Coming Soon

 Coming to Kindle next month...

Table of Contents:

The Two Dicks
Residuals
17
All Tomorrow's Parties
Interstial
How We Lost the Moon,
   A True Story by Frank W. Allen
Under Mars
Danger: Hard Hack Area
The Madness of Crowds
The Secret of My Success
The Proxy
I Spy
The Rift
Alien TV
Before The Flood
A Very British History
Cross Roads Blues

EDIT: Every eBook needs a good cover.  This one is by Michael Marshall Smith

How It Works For Me

Story develops from character and situation.  Narrative and theme develops from story.

Clickety-Clack

I was chatting with Jon Courtenay-Grimwood last night, after the Clarke Awards, and we got onto the topic of switching from typewriters to word processing, and how it changed our work habits.  Amongst other things, we both retyped final draft pages if we made more than five mistakes when using a typewriter, and we both wrote to the end of the page at the end of a work session; if this meant stopping in the middle of a sentence, then we wrote the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and the next day inserted a fresh sheet of paper in the machine and carried on from there.  I doubt that anyone, now, reaches their self-assigned word (rather than page) count and stops dead in the middle of a sentence.  You just keep going, chasing that blinking cursor across the screen.  And if you're in the middle of a particular juicy and exciting scene or section, there's a temptation to keep going until the end - which means that the next day you have to cold-start the next scene from the very beginning, and risk getting blocked.  Always leave something you want to write for the next day.

I have a small nostalgia for the steady clickety-clack* of the keys imprinting thoughts onto paper letter by letter, but none at all for the messy task of ribbon-changing, of having to stop to disentangle keys that jammed together because I was typing too fast, or of waiting for a streak of Tip-Ex to dry.  And I never was (nor am I yet) a touch-typist.  As soon as personal computers became affordable, I bought one, learned how to use WordPerfect 4.2, and never looked back.

The mechanical, linear process of typewriting meant that serious revisions were left until the draft was completed.  Now, of course, you can worry away forever at what you've just written, and the changes are writ on water instead of paper.  The process is a lot more playful than it once was, takes place on the screen as well as inside your head, and is kind of . . . indefinite.  When you typed the final word of a manuscript and ripped the paper from the typewriter's platten, there was a real sense of completion, albeit momentary.  For even in the days of typewritten MSS, there was a nagging feeling that there were still changes that needed to be made once the story or novel had made it, after editing, copy-editing and proofing, into print.  That sense is perhaps a little stronger now.  Unless you print it out straight away, there's a temptation to go back time and again to a word-processed document: to tweak and fiddle and adjust this or that sentence, to endlessly fine-tune.  Nothing is ever really finished.  Instead, you have to let it go.


Which brings me to the ongoing novel, which has now about three-quarters finished in first draft, and has reached the point where, rather than start to tie everything up and aim it towards the last sentence (I do know what it is), I have the growing urge to start over, change everything that needs fixing or revision, and cut away all the persiflage.  As usual, I didn't discover the theme of the novel until it had progressed a fair way.  The plot has grown far too complicated, as I followed all kinds of exciting leads.  And just the other day, I realised that I'm missing a whole section that really needs to be included, and not just because it will contain some cool stuff about the fate of Earth, a chiliastic crusade, and involve the hero in some difficult moral decisions.  Well, it can be dropped in later.  Right now, this thing, like a shark, needs to keep moving forward.  That imperative hasn't changed, at least.

*(UPDATE) Of course, the keys really went clack clack clack, but (this isn't an original thought; I can't remember who said it) the human mind imposes a narrative on everything, turning the steady tick tick tick tick of a clock into a time-directional tick tock tick tock.  Does Chinese water torture work because the intervals between drips are just long enough to prevent the subject imposing a tick-tock narrative?  Does the lack of coherent narrative drive us crazy?

(A)temporality

The London Underground is an old system.  Its pioneer and prime mover was born in the eighteenth century.  The system itself was built before the unification of Italy and before the creation of Germany.  Its first travellers wore top hats and frock-coats; there are early photographs of horse-drawn hansom cabs parked outside the underground stations. Oscar Wilde was a commuter on these subterranean trains, travelling from Sloane Square station to his office on Woman's World at the bottom of Ludgate Hill.  Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin could both have used the Underground.  The coffins of William Gladstone and Dr Barnardo were both transported beneath the earth in funereal underground trains.  Jack the Ripper could have travelled on the Underground to Whitechapel: the station was served by the East London Railway.

Peter Ackroyd, London Under

Gollancz SF At Fifty

Victor Gollancz Ltd, founded in 1927, started publishing science fiction and fantasy in 1961.  Many will, like me, remember hunting down Gollancz hardbacks with their distinctive yellow jackets in library SF & Fantasy shelves in the 1970s and 1980s.  The family firm of Gollancz was sold by Victor Gollancz's daughter, Livia, to Houghton Mifflin at the end of the 1980s.  A few years later, Houghton Mifflin sold Gollancz to Cassell, which was bought by Orion in 1998; the Gollancz name lives on as its SF and Fantasy imprint.  And now Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy is having a little contest to celebrate its anniversary. Pick what you consider to be the best title from 25 SF and and 25 fantasy books published by Gollancz, and you might win a subscription to SFX magazine, and a copy of each of the top 10 titles from both lists.  And gosh, my novel Fairyland is up there in the best SF list...

Fairyland was my sixth book with Gollancz.  My first, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published 23 years ago, in, yes, a yellow jacket, when Gollancz was still independent publisher Victor Gollancz.  My editor was Malcolm Edwards, and I still remember our first meeting.  Gollancz was housed in a Georgian building with a tall narrow frontage on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.  (Later, I would discover that the company owned the property backing on to the townhouse, creating a Dickensian maze of offices and corridors and odd spaces that ran through the block (was there a courtyard?  Were there clerks making entries in ledgers with quill pens?) to the next street.)

As I recall on that first visit, the reception wasn't a place to linger.  No comfy sofas, coffee tables, vases of cut flowers. There were piles of books wrapped in brown paper and a couple of motorcycle dispatch riders kicking around the small, dimly lit room.  The receptionist, working behind a counter, directed me upstairs.  All the way up to the top, several floors of winding rickety stairs to a kind of penthouse with a lot of glass looking out over London rooftops, where Malcolm presided with unflappable affability over his first empire.  He moved on just before Gollancz was swallowed by Houghton Mifflin; I stuck it out until just before Cassell, and Gollancz, was bought by Orion, under the direction of . . . Malcolm Edwards.  It's a small world.  Now I'm back with Gollancz, and my old titles have or are coming back into print, and I'm working on my nineteeth novel.  Twenty-three years.  As Matty Ross says towards the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.

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