Walk-On Part

Writing a novel is a process of discovery. It can be intensely frustrating as you try to make headway through landscapes that are, at first, little more than shadows in fog, but it's also intensely rewarding, and full of unexpected surprises, as the world gains shape and focus and internal coherence, and the characters begin to take control of their lives.

When I wrote the last sentence of the Confluence trilogy, I knew far more about its hero, Yama, than when I had begun. After all, we'd walked a long way together, sometimes down paths that had been previously mapped out, sometimes along unplanned diversions and into unknown territory. He's an orphan who wants to escape the petty clerkship his adopted father expects him to take up; wants to find his real family and where he came from; wants to become a hero without any clear idea of the cost. And he does become the hero of his story, as he was always intended to be, but he is not its only hero.

A little more than halfway through the first book, he encounters Pandaras, a pot boy in an inn who warns him of a plot against his life, and helps him escape. Beyond a few lessons in the iniquity and history of the city in which Yama had lost himself, that was about all the use I had for this minor character. But Pandaras had other ideas. He appointed himself Yama's squire, followed him through the gates of the Memory of the Palace of the People, the administrative heart of the great bureaucracy that rules the world, and accompanied him on a voyage down the length of the world's great river. By the third book, Yama and Pandaras have become separated, and the narrative alternates between them as Pandaras searches for his master, and finds him, and loses him again.

None of this was planned from the outset. But just as Pandaras made himself indispensable to Yama, drawing on the skills learned from various relatives in various trades (unlike Yama, he has an extensive family), so he also made himself indispensable to the narrative. Yama is not a high-born hero. He does not serve the masters of his world. He doesn't even want to become one of its masters. He is instead a hero of the ordinary people of the world, the hoi polloi of which Pandaras is an exemplar.* The people who are, as he puts it, the strength of the city.

Yama is a hero to Pandaras, and by serving him Pandaras also becomes a hero: he endures and must overcome his own hardships and perils, and suffers his own grievous wounds. He was the character I'd been looking for without knowing it, until he turned to Yama in that candlelit room in the inn, in his clean, much darned shirt and a pair of breeches, small and unremarkable, and warned him that he was in trouble, and advised him how to get out of it. In novels, as in life, we should always pay attention to people like him.

(*He's also, a point I forgot to make before posting this, a counterpoint to Yama's predestined exceptionalism.)

Something Coming Through Coming Through

I've just finished the last draft of Something Coming Through, my next novel. And by finished, I mean that it still needs to be read through before it's sent off to my editors at Gollancz, and then it has to be edited, copy-edited and proofed before it's published. And then I'll read it through again, to check for stray typos which can be corrected in the paperback edition. There's always something that slips through: in 1984: Selected Letters, Samuel R Delany describes to one correspondent the work of correcting the 17th reprint of his bestselling novel Dhalgren, and the errors he decided to let go.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The story's done; what's left are steps in a production process that turns thought into print.

Something Coming Through is set in my Jackaroo universe, first explored in several short stories.  Trickster aliens have gifted the ailing contemporary human civilisation with 15 worlds orbiting various red dwarf stars and the means to reach them. In London, Chloe Millar is searching for a troubled young man who is compulsively drawing pictures of a landscape on Mangala, one of the Jackaroo's gift worlds. On Mangala, an investigator and his novice partner become embroiled in a murder involving an ancient alien artifact. And as Chloe's search and the murder investigation draw together, it become apparent that the Jackaroo's concept of help is stranger than anyone could guess...

Fantastic Art

'There has always been fantastic art. Particularly in times of internal and external upheaval. Fantastic art has always taken up a position between the world of ideas and the real world. It reflects the tension between the two, the degree and nature of their non-congruence.'

         Hanna Höch, 1946

Collaborating With Myself

I'm not one of those writers who can produce a detailed plan of a novel and then fill it out, chapter by chapter. I usually know the beginning and the end of a novel before I begin, and a few places along the way that contain crucial turns of plot, but it's mostly a process of discovery. I know where I'm going but I don't know how I'm going to get there until I set out; as I learn more about my characters, they refuse many of the clever bits of plotting I've dreamed up, turn out to have their own ideas about what to do. After sprinting through a first draft, with its many diversions from the path I intended, there are several revisionary drafts where darlings are slaughtered, the narrative is deepened and reconciled with the story, continuity glitches are fixed, and the prose is tightened and polished. Each new stage is a collaboration with the last. I'm at the final stage in that process with Something Coming Through; this time last year, I was revisiting the three novels of the Confluence trilogy, working in collaboration with my younger self from 17, 18 years past.

When I was finishing the first novel, Child of the River, and was working on the first drafts of the second and third, I'd recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Fairyland, had just quit my job, and had moved to London. The second and third weren't triggered by the first. I'd already planned to resign from my job as a lecturer at St Andrews University before I won the award, and because I'd only moved to Scotland to work there and had no ties, I'd also decided to move on.  So through the summer of 1996 I worked on the books in a spare bedroom of a house I didn't own, and spent most of my spare time looking for a permanent home. Like Yama, the hero of the trilogy, I had given up everything I knew for an uncertain future and had moved from a small town to a capital city; as I sweated in the summer heat, he travelled further and further downriver through tropical landscapes towards the waist of his world.

The three novels, published in 1996, 1997 and 1998, were caught up in corporate takeovers in the UK and the US; when Gollancz agreed to republish them in a fat omnibus, the original files used to set the books were long gone. So I resurrected my old WordPerfect 5.0 files and read through them, and then went over them again to remove a few niggling inconsistencies in the narrative and to give the prose a further polish. My younger self didn't need my help move a story through its twists and turns. He'd learnt from Robert Louis Stevenson how landscape can shape and reveal the actions of the characters, and to keep action scenes short and sharp.  He'd crammed plenty of eyekicks and estrangement into the narrative.  And Yama's story, his discovery of the costs and obligations of escaping from his mundane fate and becoming a hero, and the sacrifices he must make to find a way of saving his world, was fixed by the course of the river he follows.

So in its omnibus incarnation, the story and almost all of the narrative of the trilogy remains the same. Revision was mostly a question of tightening the focus of sentences and paragraphs, and sharpening certain passages. My younger self loved adjectives far more than I do, and tended to force-weld sentences together (like this one). Some of the dialogue was a little forced, too; sometimes it strained for profundity. I've tried to cut that away without losing any of the meaning. In short, if Yama's story reads a little more easily in places, I hope I've stayed as true as possible to the intentions of that younger self as he wrote himself into his new life.

Shortlisted

Evening's Empires has made the shortlist for Best Novel of 2013 in the British Science Fiction Association Awards. A hugely unexpected and very pleasing tick mark. Many thanks to all who nominated my book, and congratulations to all the other nominees - it's an intimidating list:

• God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Del Rey)
• Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
• Evening's Empires by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
• Ack-Ack Macaque by Gareth L. Powell (Solaris)
• The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

The full list of nominees for all BSFA Awards is here. Winners will be decided in a balloted vote by members of the BSFA and attendees at the Satellite 4 convention, Glasgow, in April.

Genre Trap

Outwith the many parallels between the actual Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s and elements of the story and mise en scene of Inside Llewyn Davis, the latest film by the Coen Brothers provides a useful lesson in the trap of genre. The eponymous hero is a musician in the pure folk revival tradition, playing old songs and murder ballads with no little skill and intensity, but failing to find a way to advance his career.  He's just released a solo album after his singing partner committed suicide, but can't prise any royalties out of his manager and fails an audition at a prestigious venue after a sisyphean journey to Chicago. He's lost the thread of his life and his artistry.  At one point he notices a toilet graffito: What are you doing? What he isn't doing is creating anything new, apart from a few licks in a work-for-hire novelty record (and he signs away his rights for a quick buck). He isn't breaking out of the narrowing trap of genre, where you can get by with the old tropes and tricks even if you don't believe in them any more. He's waiting, in the brutal winter of 1961, for a thaw that comes (too late, for him) with the arrival of Bob Dylan and his magpie incorporation of the old lines and myths and figures into vivid new structures that speak to the present, not to the past. Take the old and make it new and make it sing again, and break on through to the other side.

Names In The Sky

On Twitter, following up from this, Adam Roberts asked 'How many named stars are there in the sky? As few as 70?'

It's a good question. Even the largest star catalogues list only around a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way, but there are only a few hundred stars with proper names. Stars in constellations have Bayer designations - α Cephei, β Cephei and so on - and often have proper names that reflect their position in the constellation.  α Cephei is known by the Arabic name Alderamin, the right arm, and by the Chinese name Tian Gou wu, the Fifth Star of Celestial Hook. And then there are the bright stars, like Sirius or Procyon, or unusual stars like Barnard's Star or Luyten's Star (both red dwarf stars with large proper motions), or Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. Names that sound like names, rather than a catalogue number such as, say, BD+20°2465.

Actually, I have a fondness for BD+20°2465. It's a red dwarf star that's also known as AD Leonis (which sounds like the name of a character in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story), just sixteen light years away. It was the star of the fictional planet on which I set my first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars. Even a string of numbers and letters can grow familiar. Can seem like a name, a tag for something known and understood, a local habitation.

On the Twitter thread, Winchell Chung reminded us of this great quote from James Blish's Earthman Come Home:

The entire pack of cities, decelerating heavily now, was entering the 'local group' - an arbitrary sphere with a radius of fifty light years, with Earth's sun at its centre.  This was the galaxy's centre of population still, despite the outward movement which had taken place for the past centuries, and the challenges which were now ringing around the heads of the Okies were like voices from history:  40 Eridani, Procyon, Kruger 60, Sirius, 61 Cyni, Altair, BD+4°4048, Wolf 359, Alpha Centauri . . . To hear occasionally from Earth was no novelty, but these challenges were almost like being hailed by ancient Greece, or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Links 11/01/14

'Fish that appear drab to human eyes may see each other decked in brilliant greens, reds and oranges, say scientists who have found the first evidence of widespread biofluorescence in the animals.'

 'In spite of its need for moisturizing, the fish has essentially forsaken the sea and spends its entire life on land.'

Fish eats bird.

'Lauren Palladino of Vanderbilt University and her colleagues have now discovered an entirely new class of hypervelocity stars, and they behave quite differently. These 20 newly discovered stars are about the same size as our Sun, so they're relatively small. And surprisingly, none of them appear to come from the galactic core.'

 'There's a new kind of planet to add to Kepler's cornucopia of alien worlds, and you won't findit in Earth's own solar system.Ground-based follow-up observations of planets found by NASA's Kepler spacecraft revealthe masses and densities of 16 new planets ranging between one and four times the size ofEarth. Many of the newfound orbs, described here today (Jan. 6) at a meeting of the AmericanAstronomical Society, have a rocky core surrounded by a puffed-up envelope of gas, whichscientists are calling "sub-Neptunes" or "mini-Neptunes."'

Astronomers say that they have discovered the first example of a long-sought cosmic oddity: a bloated, dying star with a surprise in its core — an ultradense neutron star.

Portrait of a star about to go supernova.

 'Striking new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope capture, for the first time, the remains of a recent supernova brimming with freshly formed dust. If enough of this dust makes the perilous transition into interstellar space, it could explain how many galaxies acquired their dusty, dusky appearance.'

 Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Siana and A. Alavi (University of California, Riverside)

The Hubble Telescope has imaged 58 young, small galaxies, part of a vast sea of faint galaxies that existed more than 10 billion years ago, during the heyday of star birth.

Things I Found On Google Street View #1

The house formerly owned by J.G. Ballard.

Relative Dimensions In Space

                                      Composite by Tom Buckley-Houston

This image of the Moon and the Andromeda galaxy in Earth's night sky (made from an original photo of the Moon taken by Stephen Rahm, and an ultraviolet image from NASA's GALEX mission) was all over the internet last week. It shows how big the Andromeda galaxy would seem if the entire span of its spiral arms was bright enough to see with the naked eye (usually only the core is visible without augmentation). The Andromeda galaxy is 140,000 light years across, but it's 2.5 million light year away. The Moon is just 3400 kilometres in diameter, but it is of course much closer - a little over 360,000 kilometres away at perigee, or 1.282 light seconds. A nice illustration of relative distance and size.

The eponymous artificial world of my Confluence trilogy orbits a black hole where most of the Large Magellanic Cloud used to be. The LMC is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, some 163,000 light years from Earth. It's about a tenth of the size of the Andromeda galaxy, but because it is much closer it seems much larger. In Earth's sky the Andromeda galaxy is about 3 angular degrees across (there are, of course, 360 degrees of sky), about six times the size of the Moon. The LMC is about ten degrees across, and the Andromeda Galaxy is about the same size of our Milky Way galaxy, that is, roughly ten times the size of the LMC. So if you stood on Confluence and looked back at the Milky Way on a dark night, it would be about 100 angular degrees across, filling almost a third of the sky. Imagine the sight:

Framed on one side by the bluff on which the Aedile’s house stood, and by the chimneys of the paeonin mill on the other, the triple-armed pinwheel of the galaxy stood beyond the edge of the world.  It was so big that when Yama looked at one edge he could not see the other.  The Arm of the Warrior rose high above the arch of the Arm of the Hunter; the Arm of the Archer curved in the opposite direction, below the edge of the world, and would not be seen again until next winter.  The structure known as the Blue Diadem, that Yama knew from his readings of the Puranas was a cloud of fifty thousand blue-white stars each forty times the mass of the sun of Confluence, was a brilliant pinprick of light beyond the frayed point of the outflung Arm of the Hunter, like a drop of water flicked from a finger.  Smaller star clusters made long chains of concentrated light through the milky haze of the galactic arms.  There were lines and threads and globes and clouds of stars, all fading into a misty radiance notched by dark lanes that barred the arms at regular intervals.  The core, bisected by the horizon, was knitted from thin shells of stars in tidy orbits concentrically packed around the great globular clusters of the heart stars, like layers of glittering tissue wrapped around a heap of jewels.  Confronted with this ancient grandeur, Yama felt that his fate was as insignificant as that of any of the mosquitoes which danced before his face.

Antarctica Starts Here

Just arrived in the post, a handsome hardback edition of The Year's Best SF 18, an anthology edited by David Hartwell. Twenty-eight stories selected from 2012's harvest, including one of mine, 'Antarctica Starts Here.' As always, a nice tick mark.

Stories sometimes arrive unexpectedly; sometimes they are the confluence of several sources. This one came out of my interest in life in Antarctica, the multinational bazaar of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions, and speculation about climate change and exploring what might happen if civilisation moves in on Antarctica. But the story is really about a couple of restless tourist guides, Dan and Krish. Dan is an old-fashioned romantic with a deep admiration for the early Antarctic explorers; Krish is a pragmatic who has adapted to the new reality of the slowly thawing southern continent; a discovery in the new landscapes of the Antarctic Peninsula underscores their differences and puts their friendship to the test.

It begins like this:

We were coming back from a hiking trip in the Rouen Mountains with five Hyundai executives and their gear in the back of the tilt-wing when I glimpsed a flash of reflected sunlight in the landscape. An ice-blink where there was no ice. Dan had spotted it, too. Before I could say anything, the tilt-wing was banking sharply and Dan was saying over the internal comms, ‘A momentary diversion to check out a place of interest, ladies and gentlemen.’

RIP 2013

After the global celebrations of an arbitrary point in the planet's orbit, a solipsistic entry about 2013 and me.

The big news as far as I'm concerned is that it's another year in which I didn't die of cancer. After being diagnosed with and being treated for cancer in 2010 I remain in remission.  Three years on, after it didn't look like I'd outlive Margaret Thatcher, I'm grateful that I'm still here, still able to work, and still being published.

I'm able to write this because of the intervention of the National Health Service, which was there when I needed it and provided - is still providing - care that's free at the point of demand. But for how much longer? Margaret Thatcher began to privatise public utilities and sell off public housing; her successor, John Major, privatised the railway system; the present government shows every sign of wanting to break up the NHS and privatise the profitable bits. And in 2013 it revealed that the so-called austerity measures that have impoverished the poor and disabled and disadvantaged are driven not so much by contingency but by ideology. When the present financial crisis ends, the government plans to continue to cut back public services and sell off the commons to multinational companies that offshore profits. Meanwhile, across the world, the richest 1% continues to accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest of us. The neofeudal society that backgrounded my Quiet War novels seems closer than ever.

The civil war in Syria, the NSA's hydra-headed snooping, extreme weather events and the ongoing sixth extinction ... Life in the early Anthropocene isn't getting any easier. But hey, there were some good stories of human resilience and generosity, too. An astronaut aboard the International Space Agency had a hit with an old David Bowie song. The Curiosity rover discovered that Mars once harboured conditions suitable for life as we know it; the Hubble telescope captured evidence that Jupiter's moon Europa is blasting plumes of water ice into space, hinting at the vast ocean beneath its icy shell; the Voyager 1 spacecraft reached interstellar space; the Chinese space agency delivered a lander and a rover to the surface of the Moon. The things we can do.

Apart from trips to Italy, where I was one of the guests of honour at DEEPCON 15, and to the Celsius 232 SF & Fantasy Festival in Avilés, Spain, I mostly hunkered down in my office and wrote. PS Publishing produced a collection of stories, A Very British History, from the past twenty-five years or so of my career. There's also a signed, slipcased limited edition with extra stories and artwork. Both are fine fat handsome books. In the early part of the year, I worked on revisions of three previously produced novels, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars, that form the Confluence trilogy. Copy editing and proof reading have been done; the rebooted trilogy will be published in an omnibus volume with two associated stories in February 2014. I also completed the last novel in the Quiet War sequence, Evening's Empires, which was published in September, and self-published a collection of previously published Quiet War stories and some new vignettes as a Kindle ebook, Life After Wartime. It's a nice way of giving new life to stories, this self-publishing business, and kind of fun, even though the learning curve is pretty steep. I'm planning to republish at least one novel as an ebook next year, but first need to find someone to do the heavy lifting of coding and publishing ebook on platforms other than Kindle.
 
I wrote a couple of short stories, too. One will be published in Old Venus, an anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin; the other is my contribution to the third in a series of portmanteau books about a global zombie war, edited by Stephen Jones. Oh, and my short story 'Transitional Forms' was published in the anthology Twelve Tomorrows, a special edition of MIT Technology Review.

I started developing the Quiet War sequence with a short story, 'Second Skin', which appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction way back in 1997. It's been a long road to Evening's Empires, and now it's time to take a new direction. Well, newish. This year, I signed a new contract with Gollancz for two novels that share the setting I've begun to explore with several short stories in the Jackaroo series, about the effect on humanity of the arrival of playfully enigmatic aliens. I'm presently scribbling revisions on the penultimate chapters of the first novel, Something Coming Through. I'll finish it early next year, and then get straight down to writing the second, Into Everywhere.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions. As usual, I hope to read more books, and find ways of improving my own work. As usual, I'll probably fail at the latter, but hopefully I'll fail in interesting ways.

Happy New Year!

Ancient & Modern

So I was asked to recommend two science-fiction stories for National Short Story Day, one classic (published before 1960) and one modern. Here are my choices:

In the 1950s James Blish wrote a short series of stories, collected in The Seedling Stars, about what he called pantropy – radically engineering humans to enable them to live on alien worlds. ‘Surface Tension’ is the best of these, a classic tale of human grit and ingenuity, and an epic journey between two puddles. Offspring of the crew of a crashed spaceship have been shrunk to the size of protists so that they can survive in the ponds and lakes of the single muddy landmass of a water planet. Blish expertly describes a fierce microscopic world and the engineering feat of constructing a wooden spaceship that enables the colonists to pierce the surface tension of the sky of their little world, and the story contains one of the finest evocations of science fiction’s sense of wonder when the tiny astronauts first glimpse the night sky: ‘Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope towards the drying rivulet.’

Kelly Link is one of the best writers in contemporary science fiction and fantasy, blending tropes from a variety of genres into fresh and vivid fantastikas. In ‘Two Houses’ (2012), first published in an anthology celebrating the work of Ray Bradbury, the twelve passengers on a starship that has lost its sister ship to a cosmic accident are awakened from suspended animation to celebrate a birthday. They tell each other ghost stories, which the ship illustrates with virtual reality projections, and as the boundary between reality and fiction breaks down a very human story of loss slowly emerges. A beautifully mysterious story within a story.

The full list can be found here. Turns out that all the writers asked to contribute were men; it would be very interesting to repeat the exercise with the choices of women writers. What are your favourites?

Links 21/12/13

'The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.'

'“This discovery not only confirms the existence of Neanderthal burials in Western Europe, but also reveals a relatively sophisticated cognitive capacity to produce them,” explains William Rendu, the study’s lead author.'

 'An analysis of a Neanderthal's fossilised hyoid bone - a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck - suggests the species had the ability to speak. This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human's. But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.'

Christmas Cafes, by Alan Powdrill.

Christmas ornaments carved into skulls.

'Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon:'

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

Circulating Library

So posting shelfies is a thing now, and here's one of mine. It shows part of my collection of hardbacks and, to the far right and on the floor underneath the bottom shelf, some of my own books, as well as a run of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and about two metres of paperback anthologies.

There are other shelves, of course. The bookcase at the right of the photo mostly contains books about science fiction. In the office, there are also six shelves of double-stacked fiction paperbacks, a couple of shelves of science books and a shelf of oversized books. Not to mention three shelves of books about London, New York and Los Angeles. And then there are the books on the floor of the office, and the rest of the fiction paperbacks in a built-in bookcase on the landing, and the bookshelves in the living room where, amongst others, the graphic novels and books about music and films reside.

But any picture that somehow managed to include all the books in the house (including those in the kitchen, which aren't all cook books, and the various caches of books in the bedroom) would only be a snapshot of single moment in a dynamic ecology. Like universes, book collections expand, contract, or (like mine) achieve a kind of equilibrium.

Books arrive at a slower rate than when I used to regularly review for Interzone (one American publisher used to send me a mailsack stuffed with books every other month), but still they come. At first, they lodge on top of a blanket chest in the office (which also, now I think of it, contains some books on biology left over from my academic career), or on top of the bookcase in the photo. Some are read in the office; others flow downstairs to be read. And then they either leave the house for a charity shop or the tender mercy of a book dealer, or return to the top of the bookcase, where a couple of stacks await proper shelving. Anything that makes the shelves must first dislodge something already there; because there's no room for extra books, there has to be a strict one-in-one-out policy. Once there, they might last five or ten years before I decide that I'm never going to get around to rereading (or re-reading) them and weed them out, or they might become part of the permanent collection. The books that I know I can't ever bear to part with. The sedimentary bedrock whose deepest layer is almost fifty years old now. Sooner or later, all book collectors become librarians of their own lives.

Cry Uncle!

I first discovered J.P. Martin's Uncle books in the late 1960s, in my local library. I was an introverted teenager with a bad reading habit (I spent one rainy fortnight in Bognor Regis reading through about six feet of UFO books in the library - there must have been some serious UFO watchers, in Bognor). I had read everything on the science fiction shelves, and had begun to mine the rest of the adult fiction stacks, picking up whatever hooked my interest, from Beryl Bainbridge and John Updike to Angela Carter and Richard Brautigan. And these odd books with an elephant in a purple dressing-gown on the cover, apparently written for children but shelved with Thomas Mann and Carson McCullers.

Maybe a librarian decided that they were too subversive for children; or (I hope) maybe she thought that adults shouldn't miss out on the fun, and ordered two sets. But by whatever means, it was my great good luck that they ended up there, for here was an antic world that fully engaged the imagination, a kind of cross between Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, and The Goon Show.

Based on stories that J.P.Martin, a Methodist minister, originally told to his children, the Uncle books describe the adventures of their eponymous hero, an immensely rich elephant who lives in a vast and rambling castle, Homestead, whose secrets and geography are unknown even to him:

...try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea of it. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and garden among them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

Many dwarfs live in the top storeys. They pay rent to Uncle every Saturday. It's only a farthing a week, but it mounts up when there are thousands of dwarfs.

A slingshot from Homestead's moat is a shantytown, Badfort, where Uncle's rivals guzzle Black Tom and constantly plot his downfall and humiliation. There's also a vast department store close by (possibly modelled on London's lost bazaar, Gamages), where everything is fantastically cheap, and a rival store where the unwary pay equally fantastic high prices. In this pocket universe of vivid contrasts, Uncle is a kind of benevolent dictator who isn't quite as bright as he likes to think he is (despite his BA). He's also something of a snob, but he engages the reader's sympathy because his considerable dignity and boldness is undercut by unexpected reversals and undeserved pratfalls and humiliations during his wars of attrition with his rivals in the shanty town of Badfort. It's a comedy of embarrassment and exasperation akin to Laurel and Hardy.

The first Uncle book I read, Uncle and the Treacle Trouble, was the fourth in the series; I immediately doubled back and read the other three, captivated by the surreal deadpan humour and the richness of Martin's imagined world, full of unmapped mysteries and underpinned by a zany logic. Somehow (probably because I left for university) I missed the last in the series, Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown, and while I kept an eye out for secondhand volumes they seemed to never turn up, and now first editions go for impressively high prices. The Uncle books are scarce, and there are a lot of Uncle fans, including a good number in the SF/F field. Although the first two books were recently reissued by the New York Review of Books in nice hardbacks, the others have long been out of print.

But now, at last, I have all six Uncle books inside the covers of a lovingly-produced omnibus, complete with Sir Quentin Blake's evocative ink-spattered illustrations, and with an introductory essay by James Martin Currey, J.P.Martin's grandson, essays by distinguished fans, and much else. The omnibus is the work of Marcus Gipps (disclosure: he's one of my editors at Gollancz), who funded publication with a Kickstarter campaign that was fully funded within four hours. The original plan was to produce 200 copies; in the end, 750 books have been printed for supporters, and another 750 are available in shops and online. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm about to dive back into Homeward's endless summer...

Links 14/12/13

On this day China's Chang'e Lunar Lander successfully touched down on the Moon at 13:11:18.695 GMT (8:11:18.695 EST). It's the first spacecraft to land on the Moon in 37 years. Here's an animation based on images taken by its landing camera during descent.

'NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.'

 'A new analysis of data from NASA's Galileo mission has revealed clay-type minerals at the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa that appear to have been delivered by a spectacular collision with an asteroid or comet. This is the first time such minerals have been detected on Europa's surface. The types of space rocks that deliver such minerals typically also often carry organic materials.'

'Cassini's recent close flybys are bringing into sharper focus a region in Titan's northern hemisphere that sparkles with almost all of the moon's seas and lakes. Scientists working with the spacecraft's radar instrument have put together the most detailed multi-image mosaic of that region to date. The image includes all the seas and most of the major lakes. Some of the flybys tracked over areas that previously were seen at a different angle, so researchers have been able to create a flyover of the area around Titan's largest and second largest seas, known as Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare, respectively, and some of the nearby lakes.' 



'The Curiosity mission has achieved another milestone as scientists have determined that the rocks inside Gale Crater that were analyzed by the rover are very old – even on geologic time scales, but were exposed very recently. The achievement of utilizing in-situ age-dating methods using radiogenic and cosmogenic noble gases marks a first in planetary exploration.' 

Visit National Parks on other worlds.

Cold War Christmas Cards from the USSR.

Five Billion Years Of Solitude

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

On clear summer nights when I was quite young, I used to like to sit out on the lawn in an old chair and look up at the stars. There wasn't much light pollution back then, at the edge of the Cotswolds, so the sky was full of stars. And I'd wonder, as so many do, if a world much like Earth might be orbiting them, and if a boy much like me might be looking up at its night sky, and the insignificant star that was the Sun.

The profound question of whether we are alone in the Universe - if Earth and humankind are unique, or if there are many Earth-like worlds harbouring other forms of intelligent life - is the topic of Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude. 4.6 billion years after it was formed, Earth sits at the centre of a small expanding sphere of radio noise that might be detected by other civilisations, and astronomers have begun to catalogue a vast variety of exoplanets. Could any of them harbour life? What would it look like if they did? And is there anyone else out there, as lonely as we are?

Billings frames the history of the search for extrasolar planets and plans to search for Earth-like worlds within biographical portraits of planet hunters, from Frank Drake to rising star Sara Seager, who plans to use relatively cheap nanosatellites to monitor single stars for signs of transiting planets. I would have preferred a little more science rather than noveletish descriptions of what Billings's interviewees happened to be doing and wearing when he met them, and because all of them are American the work of astronomers from other countries is somewhat scanted. Michel Mayer, who led the team which discovered the first exoplanet, is given only a passing mention; the work of the HARPS project, a collaboration between a Swiss team led by Mayer and the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile, is presented in terms of competition with an American team rather than in its own right.

But these are minor quibbles. Billings expertly anatomises the difficulties in detecting the faint jitters in the motion of stars or the minute dimming in their luminosity that signals the presence of exoplanets, evokes the teeming variety of exoplanets so far discovered and the problems astronomers hunting for Earth-sized exoplanets must overcome.  He's very good, too, on the labyrinthine politics of NASA which have stalled the Terrestrial Planet Finder project, and the ongoing problems with the vastly expensive James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble. And his entanglement of the lives of the planet hunters with their work reminds us that their discoveries provide us with new and humbling perspectives on our place in the universe and the evanescence of our tenancy on this planet.

The universe is vast, and old. Billings uses the stump of a redwood tree in Frank Drake's backyard to provide a lovely and sobering lesson about deep time. Growth rings show that the tree was more than 2000 years old. During that time

'the Sun had scarcely budged in its 250-million-year orbit about the galactic center, and, considering its life span of billions of years, hadn't aged a day. Since their formation 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and its planets have made perhaps eighteen galactic orbits - our solar system is eighteen "galactic years" old. When it was seventeen, redwood trees did not yet exist on Earth. When it was sixteen, simple organisms were taking their first tentative excursions from the sea to colonise the land. In fact, fossil evidence testified that for about fifteen of its eighteen galactic years, our planet had played host to little more than unicellular microbes and multicellular bacterial colonies, and was utterly devoid of anything so complicated as grass, trees, or animals, let alone beings capable of solving differential equations, building rockets, painting landscapes, writing symphonies, or feeling love.'

The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made less only twenty years ago. Although more than a thousand have been discovered since then, it's a microscopic sample of the trillions believed to exist in our galaxy. A few are Earth-sized, but none found so far are known to be Earth-like, and we're still a long way from discovering evidence for life on another world, let alone any intelligent beings that might also be searching for traces of other life in the immense sea of stars. 'We're the product of millions of years of evolution,' Sara Seager says, 'but we don't have any time to waste.'

alt.shuttle

NASA's space shuttle programme was started when the Cold War began to grow hot: the first flights took place in the era of Cruise missiles, Protect and Survive, the doctrine of a winnable nuclear war uncovered by Robert Sheer's With Enough Shovels, The Day After, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes'. The Soviet authorities realised that the shuttle had serious military uses, and decided to start their own programme. The spacecraft in the image above, Buran, is the only Soviet shuttle to have reached orbit. Launched in November 1988, it was unmanned, completed two orbits of the Earth, and landed under automatic guidance. There's more information about it here and here.

Within a year, history had overtaken the Buran programme. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the authorities realised that their space shuttle was an expensive dead end which could no longer be justified, and shut it down (the USA took somewhat longer to come to the same conclusion). Four shuttles were under construction at the time. One, nicknamed Ptichka (Little Bird), is stored in the Baikonur Cosmodrome alongside a non-flying prototype; another, Baikal, is parked on an airfield; the other two have been partially or completely dismantled. Two  prototypes are on public display: one in Gorky Park, Moscow; the other in the Technik Museum Speyer, Germany.

As for Buran, the only Soviet shuttle to have orbited the Earth, it was destroyed when the roof of the hangar in which it is was being stored at Baikonur collapsed. An ignominious end to the avatar of an alternate history which might have intensified the cold war in low Earth orbit, or which might have seen two kinds of space shuttles servicing the International Space Station, but which otherwise, let's face it, probably wouldn't have been very different to our own history.

Links 07/12/13

As the TV schedules fill up with seasonal specials, end-of-year best of's, and blockbuster films you've either avoided or already seen, here are a few episodes from Out of the Unknown, a fantastic series of SF plays the BBC screened in four series between 1965 and 1971. Helmed by Irene Shubik, many were adapted from original stories by leading US and UK authors of the day. Although most were wiped when the precious videotape on which they were recorded was reused, around twenty survive. So far, no one has released on official DVD collection, although bootlegs exist. And there's also YouTube:

Thirteen to Centaurus, by J.G. Ballard




The Machine Stops, by E.M.Forster




 
Tunnel Under The World, by Frederik Pohl




Some Lapse Of Time, by John Brunner




 No Place Like Earth, by John Wyndham