Rip It Up And Start Again

So critic Paul Kincaid took on a commission to write a review of this year's crop of best SF&F anthologies, and was dismayed by what he saw.  And after his review began to cause a bit of a stir, he amplified his thoughts in an interview, published in two parts.  It's all good, useful stuff.  Paul Kincaid is sincere, insightful, and very careful about articulating exactly what he means.  He's very careful, for instance, to point out that he doesn't think that SF is a dying genre.  But he does think that it is exhausted.  That it has reached a point of crisis.  That it has lost confidence in the future - or in presenting comprehensible futures.  Undermined by the feeling that 'the present [is] changing too rapidly for us to keep up with', it has reeled backwards, producing thinly-imagined futures based on unexamined second-hand furniture lifted from older sf.  Stories in which most of the sf tropes are mere decoration that if stripped out wouldn't much change the plots, and most of the science is based more on magical thinking than on actual cutting-edge research.

Like every genre, sf has always mined its past, of course, but Kincaid senses something new: a lack of passion.  A lack of edge.  Of danger.

Way back when, when I was writing Eternal Light, when the whole 'Radical Hard SF' and 'New Space Opera' thing was kicking off, I was part of a bunch of writers who, along with Interzone editor David Pringle, felt something similar.  If you were going to reuse the old tropes, we thought back then, you shouldn't take them at face value.  You should strip out their guts and rebuild them from the ground up.  You should weld in the new biology, the new physics, the new cosmology.  Punk it up.  I still think that.  The internet makes it much easier to keep up with what science is doing now (twenty years ago, I was working in a university, so unlike many of my contemporaries, I had a whole library of scientific literature to draw on; now, much of that stuff is just a few keystrokes away).  Ditto cutting-edge fashion, architecture, information technology . . .  The future is unfolding all around you, right here in the happening world of the present.

But as Kincaid points out, the present isn't a comfortable place, right now.  Which is perhaps why too many sf writers recoil from it, into cosy futures from days past.  And there's a professionalism in the genre now that wasn't much in evidence twenty years ago; perhaps people aren't inclined to take risks that might affect their brand.  It's certainly harder to publish a different kind of novel, every time, than it once was.  And let's face it, twenty years on, it's possible that I've become part of the problem.  I'm not sure what my 'brand' is, let alone how to nuture it, but it's possible, yes, that I've grown lazy and complacent.  That's why critics like Paul Kincaid are useful - to ask hard questions, to point out uncomfortable truths.  That's why we should take them seriously.  That's why, if they point out a problem, we shouldn't react defensively, but try to figure out how to solve it.  How to do better, next time.

All I know is that I wrote The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun because I was excited by images of the real landscapes of real moons captured by actual robot spacecraft, and wondered what it would be like live out there, and walk across those craters, those wrinkle ridges, and how it would change the people who did.  I wrote In The Mouth of the Whale because I wanted to mash the ur-trope of interstellar travel and colonisation with riffs on posthuman transcendentalism into an extended metaphor about death and rebirth.  And one of the seeds of Evening's Empires was a reaction to the ongoing denial of science in favour of the kind of magical thinking that has people reject vaccines for homeopathic pills.  'In good times magicians are laughed at,' Fritz Leiber wrote in his short story, 'Poor Superman'.  'They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.'

Which is kind of where we came in.

Buy These Books Or The Blog Gets It*

Two new books.  On the left, the mass-market paperback of In The Mouth Of The Whale.  Which is not a sequel to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but shares the same future history, and conflates the childhood of a character from those novels, the gene wizard Sri Hong Owen, with what happens to her when she arrives, after a long and difficult voyage, at the star Fomalhaut.  It is published on October 11th.
 
On the right, the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, which is, most definitely, the sequel to Zombie Apocalypse!  In the first novel, a zombie plague spreads after the tomb of an eighteenth century architect, Thomas Moreby, is disturbed; in the second, the human resistance begins to organise itself against the plans of Moreby and his undead army.  It's published on October 4th in the UK, and November 1st in the US; the table of contents can be found here.

*Not really. But it would nice if you did.

Statues In Science Fiction #1

'His favorite was the gigantic killer-eagle landing in the middle of the monoliths in the memorial for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed in World War II. The largest eagle, probably, in all Manhattan. His talons ripped apart what was surely the largest artichoke.'

'Angouleme', Thomas M. Disch

The Matter of the Dead

So I've just put together and published in a Kindle package two more short stories from my back list.  Both feature Mr Carlyle, an eccentric freelance investigator who knows, as he would put it, a great deal about the matter of the dead.  In the first, 'Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple', he has just arrived in London, meets Isambard Kingdom Brunel at a seance, and in short order becomes involved in the plot of a necromancer, Dr Pretorius, and a curse as old as the city itself.  In the second, 'Bone Orchards', he's still working in London more than 150 years later, and a chance encounter at Abney Park cemetery leads him into an investigation into a tragic murder that occurred during World War 2.

Although I'm best known as a science-fiction writer, I'm a long-time fan of horror films and fiction, especially ghost stories (one of the first stories I published, 'Inheritance', is an homage to the M.R. James school of  ghost stories).  I've written five stories about Mr Carlyle, and the psychogeography of London.  Preparing these two stories for republication reminded me all over again of how much fun they are to write, and that so far I've neglected his adventures through Queen Victoria's reign, and most of the Twentieth Century - his role in bringing Cleopatra's Needle to London, the affair of the Zeppelin spy, his involvement with the Secret Intelligence Service and the Special Operations Executive . . .  I really should do something about that.

Meanwhile, perhaps you would like to buy the UK or US Kindle editions, or to sample this little story, told by one of Mr Carlyle's old enemies.

Quintet

Fans of the late Robert Altman's films - I'm one of them - must contend with the uneveness of his career. He made some truly great films - McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts - some interesting failures - The Wedding, Popeye - and a few real dogs - Prêt-à-Porter, Beyond Therapy, and Quintet.  I've been somewhat obsessed with tracking down the latter: like The Keep, it's a genre film by a major director that has more or less disappeared from view, possibly the least-watched of all of Altman's films.  There was a video, but no American or UK DVD release; I finally got hold of it on an Italian DVD.  And I really wanted to like it, if only because its freight of bad reviews were catnip to my contrarianism.  But, oh dear.

It's Altman's second science-fiction effort.  His first, Countdown (1968), is a technothriller about a desperate race to beat the Russians to the Moon that went out of date (or became alternate history) a year after it was released.  Quintet (1979), set in a frozen city in a world overcome by a new ice age, is the real far-future post-apocalyptic deal.  And while it really isn't a good film - laborious and pretentious, devoid of any real passion or suspense - it is interesting.

Essex (Paul Newman), a seal hunter who's run out of seals to hunt, returns to the city of his birth, where the last human survivors pass what's left of their time play endless tournaments of the eponymous board game while dogs gnaw at disregarded frozen corpses.  Essex is accompanied by a young pregnant woman, Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), who is carrying the first human child in a generation, but Quintet isn't in any way as hopeful as Children of Men.  Shortly after Essex is reunited with his brother, Vivia and everyone else in the brother's apartment is killed by a bomb, and Essex becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy of players who are acting out quintet's killing strategies for real.  Although this is almost immediately apparent to the audience, Essex takes a very long time to catch on, clumping glumly through half-ruined rooms and corridors while a fine international cast of visibly chilled actors (Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Vittorio Gassman) spout philosophical cliches about the meaning of life and death.

Mostly filmed in the site of Montreal's 1967 World's Fair, in midwinter, it is authentically frozen, and despite a vaseline effect presumably meant to suggest that the lens is iced up, there are some lovely passages: a tracking shot that follows Essex and Vivia slogging across the white page of the tundra, past a train half-buried in snow drifts; an overhead shot showing Essex launching Vivia's corpse on a river choked with ice floes.  The medieval furs and caps of the costumes hint at the genre paintings of Bruegel the Elder; the set-dressing nicely suggests a technologically-advanced future regressing to barbarism (although the whole canine corpse-eating thing is more than a bit overplayed; pretty soon, predicting when the five Rottweillers will next turn up becomes risibly easy). The problem is that nothing much happens, and much of what does happen is either not very interesting; like the game of quintet, whose five-sided gaming tables represent stages in life from birth to death, the slight story is overburdened with symbology and fatalistic nihilism.

If Altman intended to make a pseudo-philosophical mashup of Zardoz and Last Year in Marienbad, then he definitely succeeded.  What he failed to do was avoid the principle weakness of weak or bad science fiction: explaining idea and themes in lumpy As-you-know-Bob monologues rather than scattering hints throughout the development of narrative and story.  Altman's strength was making the films he wanted to make - films only he could have made - rather than pandering to commercial concerns.  But it also led him, on occasion, into making films than almost no one else wanted to watch.  If nothing else, Quintet is a useful lesson in the perils of artistic indulgence.

Ave Aqua Vale

The whole floor of Mendeleev crater had fractured into blocks in the biggest quake ever recorded on the Moon, and lava had flooded up through dykes emplaced between the blocks. Lava vented from dykes beyond the crater rim, too, and flowed a long way, forming a new mare. Other vents appeared, setting off secondary quakes and long rock slides. The Moon shivered and shook uneasily, as if awakening from a long sleep.

Small teams were sent out to collect the old Rangers, Lunas, Surveyors, Lunokhods and descent stages of Apollo LEMs from the first wave of lunar exploration. Mike and I went out for a last time, to Mare Tranquillitatis, to the site of the first manned lunar landing.

When a permanent scientific presence had first been established on the Moon, there had been considerable debate about what to do with the sites of the Apollo landings and the various old robot probes and other debris scattered across the surface. There had been a serious proposal to dome the Apollo 11 site to protect it from damage by micrometeorites and to stop people swiping souvenirs, but even without protection it would last for millions of years, everyone on the Moon was tagged with global positioning sensors, so no one could go anywhere near it without being logged, and in the end the site had been left open.

We arrived a few hours after dawn. A big squat carrier rocket had gone ahead, landing two kilometres to the north, and the robots were already waiting. There were four of us: a historian from the Museum of Air and Space in Washington, a photographer, and Mike and me. As we loped forward, an automatic beacon on the common band warned us that we were trespassing on a UN heritage site, reciting the relevant penalties and repeating itself until the historian found it and turned it off. The angular platform of the lunar module’s descent stage sat at an angle; one of its spidery legs had collapsed after a recent quake focused near new volcanic cones to the south-east. It had been scorched by the rocket of the ascent stage, and the gold foil which had wrapped it was torn and tattered, white paint beneath turned tan by exposure to the sun’s raw ultraviolet. We lifted everything, working inwards toward the ascent stage: the Passive Seismometer and the Laser Ranging Retro reflector; the flag, its ordinary, wire-stiffened fabric faded and fragile; an assortment of discarded geology tools; human waste and food containers and wipes and other litter in crumbling jettison bags; the plaque with a message from a long-dead president. Before the descent stage was lifted away, a robot sawed away a chunk of dirt beside its ladder, the spot where the first human footprint had been made on the Moon. There was some dispute about which print was actually the first, so two square metres were carefully lifted. And at last the descent stage was carried off to the cargo rocket, and there was only a litter of cleated footprints left, our own overlaying Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s.

It was time to go.

From 'How We Lost The Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen'

Nostalgia For The Future

In the 1960s, we were too impatient to wait for the future.  We had to have it now.  The Americans and the Russians were racing to the Moon.  In Britain, we had TSR-2 and Concorde, and in TV ads men in white coats sold us washing powder and alien robots sold us powdered instant mashed potato.  Even ice lollies were space-age ice lollies.  Not only was the Zoom lolly shaped like a rocket ship, with three differently-coloured stages, in 1963 or thereabouts a space-age card was secreted between lolly and wrapper.  I was just getting into science fiction, and was an avid follower of both the space race and Fireball XL5: I had to have a complete set of those cards.  It was one of the first of many obsessions.  I had little pocket money, and there are only so many ice-creams you can eat even when you're eight or nine, but I hit on a cunning plan.  We lived close to the village shop, and one day I noticed that someone had discarded not only a Zoom wrapper in the bin outside, but also the free space-age card.  After that, I checked that bin every day, braving angry wasps to peel open sugar-sticky wrappers in search of those precious cards.  I never did get the full set, but I sent away for the free album and carefully glued my collection inside.  It vanished long ago, and the row of cottage where I lived and that village shop have vanished too.  The future isn't what it once was, but what is?

What I Did On My Holidays

Nothing much gets done in the publishing business, in August.  Editors and agents are out of town; authors who still retain any shred of common sense should take some time off too.  The populations of towns in the industrial heartlands used to relocate en mass to slightly sunnier, coastal towns for their summer holidays.  In Scotland, cities still have trades fortnights, when tradespeople all go on holiday at the same time.  August is the publishing industry's trade holiday.  Try to take time off in any other month, and a massive, and massively urgent, copy edit of that novel you submitted several months ago is liable to turn up just as you're packing your bags.

I clearly don't have any common sense.  I've just delivered a novel, but instead of relocating, I've stayed in town.  London in August is half-deserted.  Families have loaded up their people carriers and 4x4s and vanished beyond the M25, or entrained through the Channel Tunnel for France and Italy, Spain and Portugal.  Away from the centre of town, streets have the somnolent, dust-blown air of an earlier, car-free decade.  You can hear birdsong.  Nothing much moves.  Even the Olympics hasn't really disturbed the tranquillity.  It's my favourite time of year.

And besides I've been working.  Editing a collection of short stories for publication next year, and preparing for Kindle, with my co-author Kim Newman, our post-alien invasion novella, Prisoners of the Action. The terrific cover is by award-winning artist and make-up maven Dave Elsey, and for those of you who aren't on holiday, it's available now.

Coming Soon

(Illustration by Dave Elsey)

Housekeeping

Karyl drove ever westward, crossing the long trough of Palatine Linea and the southernmost edge of the bright frosts flung across half Dione’s globe in wispy swirling patterns by explosive venting from deep fractures, created when ammonia-water melted by residual heat in the lithosphere had intruded on pockets of methane and nitrogen clatherates. After ten days or so, he stopped at the garden habitat of the Fifer-Targ clan and was woken in the middle of the night: the ships of the Brazilian and European joint expedition were on the move, breaking orbit around Mimas and heading out for different moons. Members of the clan were packing and rounding up livestock, following a plan they’d worked up for just this eventuality, preparing to leave their big, tented habitat for shelters. They refused Karyl’s offer of help, so he wished them luck and left them to it and drove off. It was night out on the surface, too. The habitat had been built in short string of low craters created when several vent pits had collapsed, with all the lights switched on inside, its domes shone like a string of glass beads in the black moonscape under Saturn and the swathes of fixed stars, a target that dwindled behind Karyl and quickly sank below the horizon.

He picked his way across the moonscape by the mellow light of Saturnshine. He had suppressed the urge to call Dana and ask if she was all right. Maybe later he’d call her mother, who had been somewhat sympathetic to him. Right now, he needed to work out what he was going to do. He avoided roads and cut directly north-east, towards the southern end of Latium Chasma. One of his caches was tucked into the east wall of the chasma; he could pitch camp there and find out what was happening and figure things out. Wait things out for four or five weeks if he had to, or load up with supplies and follow the chasma’s long straight trough north, into the fractured labyrinth of Tibur Chasmata, where there were any number of hiding places.

(From 'Karyl's War'.)

An extract from a Quiet War story that's only available in an ebook, Stories From the Quiet War, at a price that wouldn't buy you a small (sorry, regular) coffee in Starbucks.

I've been making some minor adjustments to the three ebooks I've published (the other two are a novelette, City of the Dead, and a collection, Little Machines), so they'll play nicely (I hope) with the new generation of Kindles. A few minor typos and transcription errors have also been excised.  Housekeeping tasks that make me appreciate the support of a publisher - I'd rather be writing than coding HTML, and trying to figure out why table of contents tags are stable on one platform but not on another.  But Kim Newman and I are planning to release another Kindle single soon - our novella 'Prisoners of the Action', which appeared in print some years ago in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow. The links are to the US editions, by the way; the UK editions can be found in the list of ebooks to the right.

Reading Matters

Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard).  First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.

Giant Steps Are What We Take

It's forty-three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, but their footprints are still preserved in the lunar dust.  In High-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter their tracks around the Lunar Module and the science packages they deployed show up as dark trails in the Lunar soil.  With no wind or water to erode them, they'll last a long time, but not forever.  Bombardment by micrometeorites will erode them at a rate of about a millimetre per million years; eventually, after ten to a hundred million years, they'll be ground down into the surrounding soil.  Space archaeologists are already making plans to preserve them.

In his terrific new book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane describes walking alongside 5000 year old human footprints preserved in silt in Morecombe Bay.  Volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, preserved the footprints of Australopithecus afarensis individuals some 3.6 million years ago (there's a nice diorama of this in the New York Museum of Natural History).  There are many trackways of dinosaurs much older, including 250 million year old prints left by a cat-sized dinosauromorph, an early ancestor of dinosaurs, preserved in what was once the mud of the floodplain of a large meandering river.  And the oldest known animal tracks are around 585 million years old, created by a tiny, unknown, soft-bodied creature that's left no other trace.  We humans have some way to go to match that record.

Evening's Empires

So I've been working on this novel, Evening's Empires, for the past 18 months, and I've just finished the final version.  Or at least, the version that's sent to my editor (squirted down the tubes of the internet, rather than rehearsing the old rituals of realising that I'd run out of paper and/or laser-printer toner).  After this, there will be the editor's comments to deal with (and, usually, another so-called polishing draft), and then the copy-edit, the proofs . . .  But the part where I spend a long time alone in a room, trying to work out what my characters are doing, and why, is over.  For this one, at least.

It's the fourth novel in the Quiet War series, and the last for a while.  There are still stories to be told, I think, about the Black Fleet, the empire of the Trues, and ordinary life in the long golden age of the Great Expansion, but for now it's time for something else.

A few alternative titles:

Hari's Game
Kabadiwallah
The Last Voyage of Pabuji's Gift
Forgotten Things
Bring Me the Head of Dr Gagarian
These Ruins Are Inhabited
When the Saints
Human History

This Thing's The Play . . .

. . . that I wrote, with Anne Billson, Sean Hogan, Maureen McHugh, Stephen Volk, and ringmaster Kim Newman, who provided the frame and linkage for the five stories in the portmanteau piece.  It's enormous fun to be part of this project; we've just done the read-through with a great bunch of actors, and now it's time to fine-tune for rehearsals.  A very different experience from the usual sit-alone-in-a-room-in-front-of-a-screen stuff.

The Hallowe'en Sessions's run is 29 October - 3 November at the Leicester Square Theatre, London.  Tickets £15 full price, £12 concessions, available for booking now.  Here's the blurb:

A group of mental patients gather for a therapy session to each recount the terrifying events that caused them to lose their minds. But is their mysterious therapist all she appears to be, and will her course of treatment prove to be kill or cure?

Cigarette Burns and an award-winning team of horror/fantasy creators join forces to bring you a nightmarish evening filled with primal screams. Writers Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Moriarty – The Hound of the D’Urbervilles), Stephen Volk (The Awakening, Ghost Watch), Anne Billson (Suckers, Stiff Lips) Paul McAuley (Fairyland, The Quiet War trilogy), Maura McHugh (Jennifer Wilde, Róisín Dubh) and director Sean Hogan (The Devil’s Business, Little Deaths) take you on a head trip through the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where no one – least of all the audience – escapes with their nerves or sanity intact…

Easy Travel To Other Worlds

Just received in the post, my contributor's copy of John Joseph Adams' anthology Other Worlds Than These, a collection of tales of travels to and from other histories and alternate realities.  It reprints my story, 'A Brief Guide To Other Histories', which shares the various interconnected histories of my novel Cowboy Angels.  You can find out more about the anthology here, and more about my story in a brief interview, one of seventeen between the editor and contributors.

Meanwhile, the last draft of Evening's Empires (or at least, the last before it's fired off to its editor) moves on, from Tannhauser Gate to a wheel habitat at the outer edge of the Saturn System.

And here's something randomly lovely: a flash choir in New York's Times Square, singing a new composition by Philip Glass (who provided much of the soundtrack for Evening's Empires) in honour of his 75th birthday.

Above Us Only Sky

McLean Fahnestock made 'Grand Finale', a compilation of all 135 shuttle launches, almost a year ago; it was a finalist in the Remix category of the 2012 Vimeo video awards. It's a celebration of the visceral power of rocket technology, but it's also a requiem. Watch right until the end. This is how tragedy enters global awareness: a babbling chorus gradually falling away until only a single voice is left.

Escape Routes

[My story, 'The Choice' won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short story.  I couldn't attend the award ceremony in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, kindly delivered this acceptance speech for me.]

When I was a teenager, living at the edge of a small town in the Cotswolds, England, I was a ferocious reader.  And what I mostly read was science fiction.  I read everything I could find in the public library, and in the library of my school (which possessed, for instance, a complete set of the works of H.G. Wells).  And I spent a significant fraction of my pocket money on paperbacks, new and old.  I hunted down caches of SF paperbacks in the backs of bookshops, on spinners in newsagent shops, in church sales.  And every week I scoured the trays of cheap, imported paperbacks and magazines that the local Woolworths set out on one of its counters.

I still have a few of those Woolworths books.  John Jakes’ The Asylum World.  Clifford Simak’s All The Traps of Earth.  And Theodore Sturgeon’s A Way Home, a Pyramid paperback edition of a short-story collection first published in the year that I was born, 1955, reprinted several times over the next decade.

The edition I have is the fourth printing, with the historically significant date July 1969.  I suppose I bought it a year or two later.  When I was 15, or 16.  In 1970, or 1971.  I’d read a lot of science fiction by then.  I was, by then, deep into the New Wave - Michael Moorcock and Joanna Russ, Tom Disch and Samuel R Delany, Keith Roberts and M John Harrison.  But I knew and loved Sturgeon’s work, and knew he was one of the authors on whose shoulders the New Wave guys were standing.  And one of those stories in the collection, the title story, spoke to me in the way that short stories can sometimes speak to us.  I felt a jolt of recognition, as I read it.  A thump in the secret chambers of my heart.

It wasn’t just that the protagonist was a young kid named Paul, although I was still young enough for that to seem significant.  And it wasn’t just that Paul, Paul Roundenbush, lived in a small town - in the Midwest, yes, and smaller and sleepier than my home town, but still. No, what really spoke to me was that, like me, Paul wanted to escape.

The story opens like this:
‘When Paul ran away from home, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway.’

I wanted to leave home, too.  I was 15, or maybe 16.  Old enough to realise how small my home town was, to have some idea of the world beyond it.  Like Paul Roundenbush I was a smart, strange, dreamy kid.  A loner.  And like a lot of smart, dreamy, lonely kids who feel out of place in the place they grew up in, I read a lot of science fiction.  I’m sure that some of you feel a little jolt of recognition at this point.

In ‘A Way Home’, Paul, Paul Roundenbush, meets, or rather dreams of meeting, three possible future selves.  They’re exactly the kind of men a lonely kid eager to escape his small town would dream of becoming.  A millionaire with a glamourous wife and an expensive car and a glove box full of chocolate-covered cherries.  A hobo who lives outside the law and has travelled the whole wide world.  And an air ace exactly like a hero from a pulp story.

I never ran away, and neither does Paul Roundenbush, in the end, but with typically tender precision Sturgeon exactly nails the longing, the oceanic transcendental longing, of wanting to be somewhere else that almost all kids feel, at some point.  That I felt, very strongly, then, in 1970 or 1971, in that small Cotswolds town, when I found the Pyramid paperback edition of A Way Home in the Woolworths tray, under a slew of Spicy Detective Story magazines and remaindered hardbacks.

Is it really science fiction, ‘A Way Home’?  It was first published in a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and Sturgeon was best known as a science-fiction writer.  But because almost everything happens in Paul’s imagination, because its movement is small and close and personal, it reads as a straight literary story.  Maybe it bounced from Colliers before finding a home in Amazing.  Or from the Saturday Evening Post.  But its theme is the theme of many science fiction stories.  A yearning to move out, always further out.  To become more than you are.  And also the flipside of that yearning: the return home after long voyages to strange harbours, and knowing yourself, and where you came from, for the first time.  As in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, for instance.  Or James Blish’s short story ‘Watershed’. And many others.

I’ve published eighteen novels and more than eighty stories, and I know that it’s a theme that I’ve returned to over and again.  It is, definitely, the theme of ‘The Choice’.  Its young protagonist, Lucas, doesn’t want to leave home, does all he can to stay, until circumstances force him to make a hard decision.  But I think that it shares, absolutely, the same concerns, the same movements of the human heart, as ‘A Way Home’.

And for that reason, beyond all the usual reasons, I’m amazingly proud and happy that ‘The Choice’ has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  I would like to thank Sheila Williams and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for publishing it, and the award’s judges for choosing it.  And most of all I would like to thank Theodore Sturgeon, for his stories, for showing me how.

Militarisation

Occasionally, one of my short stories is reprinted in an anthology.  Here are the the latest two, both with a common theme.  War & Space: Recent Combat, which reprints 'Rats of the System'.  And SF Wars, which reprints 'Winning Peace'.

Oh, that perennial topic of SF, war.  War as a condition of being human.  Or of being intelligent.  War as a plot device - a quick and dirty way of putting everything to hazard.  Wars asserting human territoriality in a universe that frankly doesn't care - turning the entire solar system, or the entire galaxy, into a battlefield (now there's hubris).  Wars fought on the assumption that western capitalism is the best and only model for civilisation that we have.  Wars refighting Vietnam on bug planets.  The twentieth century stamping its combat boot into the face of humanity, forever.  It's heartening that a fair few of the stories in these collections argue against these assumptions, or don't take them at face value.

 I seem to have been writing a fair bit about war, recently.  Or rather, about failed attempts to avoid war, and about the aftermath of war.  Readers of The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In The Mouth of the Whale will know that I'm not especially interested in generals and admirals, and the tactics of epic space battles.  'Rats of the System' is a quick little story about two mismatched people trying to escape an implacable pursuer; 'Winning Peace' is about two former enemies finding a common cause.  And right now, I'm finishing a novel in a post-war, posthuman future without a space battle or space marine in sight.  Heading out of the world-city Ophir to the semiautonomous free zone of Tannhauser Gate.

Local Colour

I've reached that stage, in the final push to finish Evening's Empires, where in addition to cutting cutting cutting I have to keep going into the office to jot down sentences that have to be inserted somewhere:

Most of her family were traders from Ceres and most of them were still there, she said, selling biologics to each other.  'My mother brought back dogs.  Do you know dogs?'

Caviar

I'm very pleased to announce that my story, 'The Choice', has won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  Congratulations to Charlie Jane Anders, and to Ken Liu, whose stories 'Six Days, Three Months', and 'The Paper Menagerie', won second and third place.  The winners are selected each year by a jury of experts, from stories nominated by a wide range of reviewers, serious readers, and editors.  I'm thrilled that they've chosen my story this year.

I won't be able to go to the award ceremony, over in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, which published 'The Choice', will accept on my behalf.  I've been to Lawrence once before, way back in the twentieth century, when Fairyland won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.  It's a pretty intense experience.  As well as the award ceremony, there's a short-story workshop, panels, and a visit to the University of Kansas's huge science-fiction library (enlarged since my visit by, amongst other things, Sturgeon's manuscripts and books).  Fred Pohl, who's a jury member, and his wife, Betty Anne Hull, gave me a lift back to the airport.  As we drove through endless fields of Kansas corn, I got Fred to sing a verse of 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'' - you know, the one about corn being as high as an elephant's eye.  Science fiction takes you to places stranger than you can imagine.

If you're interested, you can read part of 'The Choice' for free, here.  It's available in various Best SF collections, too, and will be including in an upcoming audio-book anthology.