A Haunting We Will Go

So I met up with indefatigable editor Stephen Jones and several other local bookish characters for pre-Christmas drinks, and he pressed into my hand a volume of one of his latest books, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, an anthology of new and reprinted ghost stories. It features numerous luminaries of the horror field, including Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Lisa Tuttle, and also includes a rewritten version of one of my early short stories, 'Inheritance' - my ninth published story, in fact, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1988. I'm best known for my science fiction, but I've been a fan of horror stories from way back, turned on by Universal and Hammer films, the Mayflower horror anthologies, the Pan Books of Horror Stories, and the stories of M.R. James. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while the rest of the family were at Midnight Mass, I was frightened half to death by Jonathan Miller's famous TV adaptation of James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad'.  Lonely beaches never seemed the same afterwards. And now one of my stories is between the same covers as one of the master's, 'A Warning to the Curious'. How cool.

Also cool - my novella, 'The Choice' has been selected by Rich Horton for his Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 Edition. Table of contents here.

Don't Call Me Sherly

Long ago, during a class that introduced me and a bunch of my 11-year-old peers to the school library (where I soon discovered a complete set of H.G. Wells' work, but that's another story), our English teacher asked a question: 'Where does Sherlock Holmes live?' My hand wasn't the only one to shoot up, and I forget who gave the correct answer. But I do remember that as far as our teacher was concerned it was the wrong answer. 'You see, boys, Sherlock Holmes was never alive. So he could not have lived anywhere.' I've never forgiven him for trying to turn the treasure house of the library into a mausoleum.

He picked on Sherlock Holmes because Holmes is one of the most famous fictional characters in fiction, who had one of the most famous addresses in literature: one of us was bound to know the answer (you know it, of course). Sherlock Holmes is so famous that you don't have to have read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories, or to have seen any of the numerous films in which Holmes has appeared (more than any other fictional character), to know several singular facts about him. I first encountered him in an anthology of the original stories, in a limp-covered volume dating from the 1920s; I've just encountered him again in a preview of his latest film incarnation, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Oh dear.

It's the sequel to director Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film, which turned Holmes into an action hero in a lightly steam-punked Victorian London, and featured rapid-fire comic banter between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Watson (Jude Law) and elaborate bullet- and explosion-ridden set pieces punctuated by sequences of slow motion, time-slicing, and other techniques Ritchie previously deployed on his gangster films. I thought it was rather good fun.  Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is more of the same, but ups the stakes by introducing Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), whose fiendish plans soon puts a crimp in Doctor Watson's honeymoon.

The plot is very loosely based on 'The Final Problem', the story in which Conan Doyle tried to kill off his most famous creation. It kicks off with an explosion in Strasbourg and an encounter between Holmes, Irene Adler, the femme fatale who helped him in his previous adventure, and a fistful of goons, and barely pauses for breath in a headlong dash that involves gypsies, anarchists, a chase across Europe, and diplomatic skulduggery. It's not a bad film, as noisy spectacles go. Its varied locations are packed with period detail, Downey turns in another fine comic performance, Law's Watson is an able foil to Holmes' quick-fire eccentricities, and the postmortem reveals of how the great detective foresaw and confounded the knavish tricks of his enemies are as clever as in the first film.

But it isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't add anything new to the canon, and it doesn't quite know what to do with most of the supporting characters. Although Mycroft Holmes is drolly played by Stephen Fry, the script doesn't do much to show that he's Holmes' smarter, older brother, except to call him Sherly. I would have liked to have seen more of Simza Heron (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy), the gypsy whose brother has been caught up in Moriarty's plans. Rapace's performance is lit by smouldering intelligence, but like the other women in the film she takes second place to the bromance between Holmes and Watson, whose sparring banter is sharp and lively at its best, and as camp as a pantomine dame at its worst (the film's humour is laid on with a broad brush: the only thing funnier than a man in a dress is a middle-aged man clad only in his dignity).


The film's big problem is that in hindsight, once the dazzle and noise of the action sequences has died down, the logic of its narrative falls apart. To be fair, it's a problem common to most action films, and to quite a few genre novels, too (writers: if you rely on big set pieces to keep the narrative flowing, you're in trouble - especially if your biggest and noisiest set piece takes place in the middle of the story rather than towards the end). More fatally, for this particular action film, the menace and significance of its villain diminishes as the film progresses, and Moriarty's fiendish plan is the stuff of a thousand action movies in which the villain promotes war for fun and/or profit - Mission Impossible IV uses the same old tired trope. Here's a bit of useful advice for budding evil masterminds: if your brilliant scheme involves starting a war somewhere, it probably isn't that brilliant, and will inevitably be thwarted at the last moment. Throw a couple of henchmen in the shark pool, relax with a martini salted with orphans' tears, and think of something else.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available on the web site. Haven't started yet? Here's Chapter 1.

This is the last chapter I'll post this side of the New Year. I'll put up three more early in January, taking us to the end of the first part of the novel.

Currently listening to: 'Don't Grieve After Me', Ernest Phelps
Currently reading: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Currently writing: a short story, very slowly

Through The Past, Darkly

When it grows dark, as it does early in the afternoon, now, the details of the slice of London visible through the window of my office diminish to the spur of a cul-de-sac and a shadowy rise of land flecked with lights, and I'm reminded of looking out of the window of the attic bedroom I once shared with my brother. When I was a teenager and it became too noisy, downstairs, I would retreat to the attic and work on some piece of tyro fiction (all long lost, like the cottage), pecking at a typewriter perched on a scrap of wood laid across my knees, my shins burning in front of the one-bar electric fire, my fingers freezing.

There wasn't a house directly opposite, as there is now, but there was a warehouse looming at the far left-hand edge of the gardens shared by the four cottages of which ours was the third, and there was a railway beyond, as there is here, although the railway of the lost past was not in a cutting but was somewhat elevated, a branch-line station closed just a few years before. And then the breast of the steep slope up towards Selsley village, whose lights twinkled in the night just as the lights of Highgate twinkle now, just a handful, mostly hidden by winter-bare trees.

I finished a draft of the next novel a couple of weeks ago and will return to it at the beginning of the New Year, knowing at last the shape its narrative makes from beginning to end. I was thinking about a couple of short stories - the one I should write, the one that wants to be written right away - when the past ambushed me. I've been living here ten years, and it has only just occurred to me how familiar the view is, on a winter's night.

Like In the Mouth of the Whale, the new novel shares the same future history of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and is set some 1500 years after the events in those two novels. But while In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the atmosphere of a gas giant and in an archipelago of worldlets orbiting Fomalhaut, the new novel starts some fifty years later, in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. And although its story riffs off an event foreshadowed at the end of In the Mouth of the Whale, you don't need to have read one to enjoy the other, much as you don't need to have read the first two novels to enjoy In the Mouth of the Whale. It's called Evening's Empires, by the way. Among other things, it's about the persistence of the past.

In The Mouth Of The Whale - Chapter 8

You can now read Chapter 8 of my forthcoming novel In The Mouth Of The Whale, over at the blog. Or you can start from the beginning.

Currently listening to: James McMurtry, 'See The Elephant'
Currently reading: Ghetto at the Center of the World, Gordon Mathews
Currently writing: I'm taking a short break...

More Ebookery - Special Promotional Prices

I'm pleased to announce that I have published a new e-book. Stories From The Quiet War is a collection of five 'Quiet War' stories, including a previously unpublished novella, available only as an e-publication at the special price of just £0.86, or $1.34. I've also lowered the price of my short story collection, Little Machines, to just £1.71, or $2.67. Prices are good until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale. The cover of Stories From The Quiet War is, like those of my other two e-books, by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Introduction To Stories From The Quiet War

One of the stories collected [in Stories From The Quiet War], ‘Second Skin’, was the first short story I wrote in what would become the Quiet War sequence. Written way back in 1996 and published a year later, it contains several of the signature tropes of the sequence – the setting on an obscure little moon of one of the outer planets in the aftermath of a war between Earth and outer system colonists, vacuum organisms, the pursuit of the gene wizard Avernus, weaponised biotech, huge construction projects built by robots, and so on.

In the stories, the war was pretty conventional, triggered by a failed attempt by colonists to free themselves from the control of powerful interests on Earth. The novels reworked that history, turning the ancestors of the inhabitants of the outer system into refugees whose growing ambitions to spread out through the Solar System and push human evolution forward threatened a fragile peace between themselves and the political powers on Earth. But the novels shared with the short stories my interest in how the large movements of history affect the lives of those caught up in them (and vice versa), and my fascination with the fantastically varied landscapes of the moons of the outer planets. That fascination was first sparked by the images captured by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking spacecraft as they sped through the systems of the outer planets. Here were sulphur volcanoes, icy landscapes cratered by ancient bombardments, a moon with bright and dark hemispheres, a moon whose jigsaw surface might hide a vast ocean of liquid water, shepherd moons embedded within a vast ring system, and so on, and so on. The kind of exoticism that science-fiction writers traditionally mapped on to planets of far stars, right on our doorstep. The Galileo and Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sharpened those images and revealed fresh wonders – the geysers of little Enceladus, the rivers and lakes of Titan. Here were real places, named, mapped in detail. All I had to do was insert figures in those landscapes. But how did they live there? How did living there affect them? What were their dreams, their ambitions?

I wrote nine ‘Quiet War’ stories over a period of about ten years, extending the history of the war, and exploring various locations on and inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually took the plunge and wrote a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.The first was about the causes of the war and the long build-up to final act of violence; the second was about the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished. Gardens of the Sun, set like the stories in the aftermath of the war, borrowed from several of them heavily modified settings and characters. The four stories republished here weren’t reworked into Gardens of the Sun, but the previously unpublished story, ‘Karyl’s War’, is a modification of an unused opening sequence of the novel and, like the novel, it contains rewritten passages from an earlier story (‘The Passenger’). It was intended to give a new perspective on the quick and violent conclusion to the long game of the Quiet War, but in the end I didn’t use it because I decided that I didn’t need to introduce a new character; the five main characters of The Quiet War were perfectly able to carry the various strands of the narrative forward. The Quiet War sequence has now been extended 1500 years into its future. A new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, is a self-contained story set at the edge of the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut, where one of the characters from The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun arrives in the middle of a war over control of the star’s single gas giant planet. There’s a big dumb object floating in atmosphere of that gas giant, probing for signs of life. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of an ancient cult. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution, and an exploration of the costs of longevity . . .

‘Second Skin’ and the other stories collected here are where all this began. The first steps on a long exploration of strange worlds, and the people who live there.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 7

So I've now posted Chapter 7 of In The Mouth Of The Whale. We're a little under one fifth of the way through the novel. If you want to start from the beginning, Chapter 1 is over here. In other news, I'm pleased to say that my story 'The Choice' has been selected by Allan Kaster for Audiotext's The Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 4 and by Gardner Dozois for his The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.

Currently listening to: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 'I Call Upon The Author To Explain'
Currently reading: Edmund Stump's The Roof At The Bottom Of The World
Currently writing: an introduction to Stories From The Quiet War

Ebookery

I'm collating a collection of 'Quiet War' stories for publication as an ebook. Titles will include 'Making History', 'Incomers', 'Second Skin', 'Reef' and 'Karyl's War'. The first four are reprints; the fifth is the alternate beginning of Gardens of the Sun previously trailed here, rewritten to form a self-contained novella.  So, five stories, more than 70,000 words, price just £0.86, or $0.99 until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale.

The cover, by the way,  is by Michael Marshall Smith.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of In The Mouth Of The Whale now up at the web site, for your reading pleasure. If you haven't started yet, Chapter 1 is this way.

Currently listening to: Johnny Cash, 'Hard Times (Come Again No More)'
Currently reading: Karin Fossum's Broken
Currently Writing: Notes for short stories

Startling Stories of Super Science

The scientist's beautiful daughter. The crackpot inventor (see also: Here's one I made earlier). Science mostly proceeds by saltatory leaps (see also: Evolution). It came to me in a dream. It was like a bolt of lightning (see also: I work best when my life is in danger). We scientists are above your petty emotions. There's nothing algebra can't prove. Young scientists are always right; old scientists are almost always wrong (see also: What did Einstein ever do for us?). Argument by analogy. Argument by syllogistic fallacy. Argument in the pub (see also: Repeat what you just said). You can go directly from hypothesis to prototype. Scientists are in it for the money. Some ideas will be discovered only once in human history (see also: Mine! All mine!). Only my unique skills will make this experiment work (see also: magic). Important ideas are always accepted straight away.  The importance of an hypothesis is inversely proportional to the number of experiments needed to test it. A car battery, a glass tube and the guts of an old radio: we're good to go. The element or biological derivative that's key to the existence of a star-spanning Empire is invariably found on just one planet (see also: unique chemical elements). Genes are basically Lego. Genetic mutation is always expressed via morphological change. The aliens did it.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of In The Mouth Of The Whale is now up on the web site.  If you want to start from the beginning, here's the link to Chapter 1.

In other news, my novelette 'The Choice' will appear in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6.  He's posted the table of contents on his blog; it includes stories by Stephen Baxter, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Geoff Ryman, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . .  Looking forward to reading all of it.

Currently listening to: The Handsome Family, 'Flapping Your Broken Wings'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders
Currently writing: The epilogue to the next novel; a story for a new project.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 4

I've just posted Chapter 4 of my forthcoming novel to the web site  If you're late to the game,why not catch up with Chapters 1, 2 and 3 first?  Special bonus: a podcast of my short story 'Little Lost Robot.'

Currently listening to: Leon Redbone's 'Mr. Jelly Roll Baker'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders.
Currently writing: the long epilogue of the next novel.

Hugo

The conjunction of 'family-friendly' and '3-D' is not auspicious, even if the film in question is directed by Martin Scorsese. But from the first shot, a kind of reverse of the famous flying scene in Peter Pan, with the viewpoint swooping over the crowded and crooked roofs of a snowy, early 1930s Paris, ducking under the eaves of the arched roof of a train terminus, and closing in on the eye of a boy peering through a chink in a clock face at the bustling life from which he, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, is excluded, Hugo establishes itself as a triumphant and lovingly crafted work imbued with Scorsese's passion for film and film history.

The boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), is an orphan.  After his clockmaker father (Jude Law) died in a fire, Hugo fell into the care of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), and after his uncle disappeared he continued the work of maintaining the many clocks in the station.  He lives in the wainscot world of the station's clock towers and hidden passages, snatching food from stalls and shops because he can't cash his uncle's salary cheques, avoiding the attention of the station's inspector, played by Sasha Baron Cohen as if Peter Cook was impersonating the child-snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Hugo's only link with his dead father is a complex automaton found in disrepair in a museum storeroom.  Hugo has been stealing the cogs and ratchets he needs to bring the automaton back to life from the station's toy shop; the irascible owner, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), catches him red-handed and confiscates his precious notebook containing vital sketches and plans, and the clockwork of the plot is set in motion.

Hugo enlists the help of Papa George's goddaughter, Isabelle (Cloe Grace Moretz) to retrieve the notebook; Isabelle is more than willing because she wants a real-life version of the adventures in the books she loves. When he discovers that she wears around her neck the heart-shaped key that's necessary to make the automaton work, Hugo is finally able to set the machine in motion.  It draws a picture of an iconic moment in an old film Hugo's father described to him, and the pair become detectives into the life of Papa Georges.  And it's here, as they delve into cinema history, that the film really comes to life. Moments from the great silent films spin around them; a film historian recalls a visit to the studio of a pioneering film maker, whose methods and techniques are recreated in loving detail (with a entirely apt cameo by Scorsese).  The film maker is Papa Georges, of course, who has renounced his past after he was forced to sell his celluloid archive to a chemical firm, which melted them down to make moulded heels for women's shoes; the two children conspire to bring about his return to the public eye, a task that's complicated, as you might expect (but not exactly as you might expect) by the attentions of the station's inspector.

Adapted from Brian Selznick's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it's the kind of old-fashioned tale in which clues are found in libraries, the mission is not to save the world but to bring the past back to life, and the only villain is time. Its CGI and 3-D effects serve the story and contribute to the intricately furnished station set rather than punctuate the narrative with crude thrusts of shock and awe.  There's plenty of steam, there are dizzy plunges and pursuits through the cogs and escarpments of huge clocks, and there's also the automaton. Does Hugo's fantastical embroidery of a real-life story (because the story of the film pioneer who disappeared, and (like many of his 'lost' films) was found again, is true) contain enough steampunk flourishes to win it a Hugo?

Lynn Margulis

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as a scientist and university lecturer.  Most of my research investigated the symbiotic relationships between animals and single-celled algae: how the sizes of populations of algae within animal cells were regulated, movement of photosynthetically-fixed carbon from algae to host animal, movement of ammonium and amino acids from host animal to algae, and so on.  My chief research organism was green hydra, a common freshwater polyp that conveniently reproduces asexually by budding off new animals, so that uniform cloned populations can be grown in the laboratory (the image at the head of this piece is of a single green hydra digestive cell, with its population of symbiotic Chlorella algae clustered at the base of the cell), but I also worked on sea anemones and reef-forming corals.

I'm reminded of this by news of the death of Professor Lynn Margulis, who was one of the prominent workers in the symbiosis field.  She was a friend and research associate of my Ph.D supervisor, Professor Sir David Smith, and I met her not only when she visited his labs, but at conferences in the UK and abroad.  She was always a whirlwind of energy, promoting her ideas and probing everyone else's with intense acuity.  She had forged a career at a time when women were in a minority in the sciences, and for years championed the highly unfashionable idea that mitochondria (the energy-generating organelles found in almost every cell of eukaryotic organisms) and plant chloroplasts (the organelles where photosynthesis takes place) had once been independent organisms that had established a symbiotic relationship with the ancestors of animals and of plants.  This theory of symbiogenesis had been first advanced by K. S. Mereschkovsky and Ivan Wallin in the 1920s, but had passed into obscurity.  Lynn Margulis dusted it down and supported it with evidence that pointed to the residual bacterial characteristics of the two types of organelles, and their possession of small amounts of DNA.  That the symbiotic origin of both mitochondria and chloroplasts is now widely accepted is due almost entirely to Lynn Margulis's dogged and tireless work.


She advanced the idea that flagellae in animal cells were the remnants of bacterial symbionts with rather less success (one problem is that the whip-like flagellae don't possess any DNA), and her efforts to expand the idea that the central driver of evolution was symbiotic acquisition of new DNA rather than mutation of nuclear DNA likewise has not meet with much success.  But she was also an early promotor of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, published papers in the then unfashionable field of exobiology, and her symbiogenesis theory is a cornerstone of the idea that symbiosis and other forms of cooperation have made important contributions to the evolution of life on Earth. I admired her hugely. Ava atque vale.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available here.  The previous two chapters are here, and here. The next chapter will be posted on Friday 25th November.

An Analogy

Came to me while I was watching Hearts of Darkness. At its best, science fiction's portrayal of the future is similar to the portrayal of the Viet Nam war in Apocalypse Now.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 2

Here's the second chapter of my new novel, In The Mouth Of The Whale.  (The first chapter is here.)  No spoilers here, for those who might want until the novel is released into the wild in January.

Currently listening to: Peg Leg Howell: 'Low Down Rounder Blues'
Currently reading: Don Delillo: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Currently writing: the last chapters of the second draft of the fourth Quiet War novel

Endorsing The Future

This dates from the early 1980s, I think, back when hand-held computers you could program in  BASIC were cutting edge. One small measure of how important Isaac Asimov was, as a cultural figure: he wasn't just the default face of American science fiction; he was also the default face of popular science writing. Now, as the newspapers and TV news keep reminding us, everything is like science fiction, so science-fiction writers are no longer needed to explain how amazing some bit of technological kit is, because we've come to expect the amazing. Now, we have hand-held computers with full-colour touch screens, wireless connectivity to the whole wide world, memories equivalent to the content of the Library of Congress, and magical AI assistants. And everyone takes them for granted. And it's kind of cool, because it means we really are living in the future.  But what would be truly amazing, these days?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 1

My new novel, In The Mouth of the Whale, is scheduled to be published in January next year. Following a long tradition, I'll be posting serial extracts every Monday and Friday from now until publication day.  Here's the beginning of the first chapter:

When the Child was a child, a sturdy toddler not quite two years old, she and her mother moved to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the north-west corner of the Peixoto family’s territory in Greater Brazil.  It was an old place, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an old garrison town on the Rio Negro, serving an army base and a depot for workers in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps.  Civilians, mostly descendants of Indians and early settlers, lived in a skewed grid of apartment blocks and bungalows beneath the green breast of the Fortaleza hill.  Senior army officers, supervisors, and government officials rented villas along the Praia Grande, where in the dry season between September and January a beach appeared at the edge of the river.  There was an airfield and a solar farm to the north, two schools, a hotel and half a dozen bars, a scruffy futbol pitch, a big church built in the brutalist style of the mid-twenty- first century, and a hospital, where the Child’s mother, Maria Hong-Owen, had taken up the position of resident surgeon.

Read more here.