Take Me To The River

The omnibus edition of the revised Confluence trilogy is published today as a trade paperback and  ebook editions in all formats. A fat doorstopper of a package of 994 pages containing three novels - Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars - and two associated short stories, 'Recording Angel' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties.' It's taken a few years and some hard work to get it back into print, so I'm thrilled that it's now been released back into the wild.

The story of a boy and his river, here's the moment when its hero reaches the capital city of his world:

At first the houses were no more than empty tombs with narrow windows chipped into their carved walls and smoke-holes cut into their roofs, improvised villages strung along the terraces at the old edge of the Great River.  The people who lived there were very tall and very thin, with small heads and long, glossy black hair, and skin the colour of rust. They went about naked. The chests of the men were welted with spiral patterns of scars; the women stiffened their hair with red clay. They hunted lizards and snakes and coneys,collected the juicy young pads of prickly pear and dug for tuberous roots in the dry tableland above the cliffs, picked samphire and watercress in the marshes by the margin of the river, and waded out into the river’s shallows and cast circular nets to catch fish, which they smoked on racks above fires built of creosote bush and pine chips. They were cheerful and hospitable, and gave food freely to Yama and Prefect Corin when they halted at noon.

Then there were proper houses amongst the tombs, straggling up steep, narrow streets, painted yellow or blue or pink, with little gardens planted out on their flat roofs.  Shanty villages were built on stilts over the mudbanks and silty channels left by the river’s retreat, and beyond these, sometimes less than half a league from the road, sometimes two or three leagues distant, was the river, and docks constructed from floating pontoons and the cut-down hulls of old ships and barges, and a constant traffic of cockleshell sailboats and barges, sleek fore-and-aft rigged cutters and three-masted xebecs hugging the shore. Along the old river road, street merchants sold fresh fish and oysters and mussels from tanks, and freshly steamed lobsters and spiny crabs, samphire and lotus roots and water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and little red bananas and several kinds of kelp, milk from tethered goats, spices, pickled walnuts, fresh fruit and grass juice, ice, jewellery made of polished shells, black seed pearls, caged birds, bolts of brightly patterned cloths, sandals made from the worn rubber tread of steam wagon tyres, cheap plastic toys, cassette recordings of popular ballads or prayers, and a thousand other things. The stalls and booths of the merchants formed a kind of ribbon market strung along the dusty shoulder of the old road, noisy with the cries of hawkers and music from cassette recorders and itinerant musicians, and the buzz of commerce as people bargained and gossiped and argued. When a warship went past, a league beyond the crowded tarpaper roofs of the shanty villages and the cranes of the docks, everyone stopped to watch it. As if in salute, it raised the red and gold blades of its triple-banked oars and fired a charge of white smoke from a cannon, and everyone along the old road cheered.

That was when Yama realised that he could see, for the first time, the farside shore of the Great River: a dark irregular line of houses and docks. The river was deep and swift here, stained brown along the shore and dark blue further out. He had reached Ys and had not known it until now. The city had crept up on him like an army in the night, the inhabited tombs like scouts, the streets of painted houses and the tumbledown shanty villages like the first ranks of foot soldiers. It was as if, after the fiasco of the attempted rescue of the palmers, he had suddenly woken from a long sleep.

Figures In A Landscape

Here's a good lesson in writing from Graham Greene's A Sort of Life:

Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn't be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm - little else. Perhaps I should have turned to Stevenson to learn my lesson: 'It came all of a sudden when it did, with a rush of feet and a roar, and then a shout from Alan, and the sound of blows and someone crying as if hurt. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw Mr Shaun in the doorway crossing blades with Alan.'

There's another useful lesson in Kidnapped (from which Greene so approvingly quotes) - the way in which, as Margot Livesey puts it, Stevenson describes 'landscapes that both shape and reveal the actions of the characters.' This isn't about the way in which landscapes can reflect emotional weather or moral character. That can be useful, no doubt - especially in science fiction and fantasy, outwith the constraint of depicting real landscapes.  But it can tend towards the pathetic fallacy: goodness inhabiting lovely woods of silver-leafed trees and evil lurking in lands ruined by dark satanic mills; the functional logic of future cities depicted by clean white towers linked by monorails. But I mean instead the ways in which characters can be shaped by the landscapes of their childhood, and how their responses to new landscapes can reveal their strengths and weaknesses.

To give a trivial example of the former, Yama, the main protagonist of the Confluence trilogy, is raised in a semi-military household sited in a vast and ancient necropolis. He values order and hierarchy, nurtures an ambition to become a soldier, and is steeped (more than he realises) in casual, everyday encounters with the past. All of this affects his ideas about the wider world, and influences his plans and the way he attempts to overcome the obstacles he encounters. The shape of his travels down the length of his world was already laid down in the bone-white paths between the tombs where he played as a child.

As for how landscape can reveal character, there's nothing better than those chapters of Kidnapped in which David Balfour and his friend Alan Breck (who crossed blades with Mr Shaun in the passage quoted by Greene) tramp across the heather of the Scottish Highlands after escaping a shipwreck. Stevenson's evocation of the spare, bleak nature of the landscape is masterly, as is his exploration of the different reactions of David, a Lowland Scot pitched headlong into this alien territory, and Alan, who was raised there. The hardships they endure expose their differences and test them to breaking point; yet each has qualities the other needs to survive their adventures.

Confluence is structured as the long journey of a young man searching for the truth of his life: who he is; where he came from; where he's going. Yama travels from his childhood home to the capital, and then doubles back and heads downriver towards the world's end. All the while I kept in mind lessons learned from Stevenson's use of landscape and character, especially in the passages in which Yama's self-appointed squire, Pandaras, searches for his master and helps him reach what they mistakenly believe will be the end of their journey. And I also kept in mind the plain fact that even the most hostile landscape is indifferent to human suffering. Surviving it is a hard test, but surviving the people encountered in it is even harder.

Water, Everywhere

Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; globe illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (©); Adam Nieman.

Earth is the blue planet. Two-thirds of its surface covered in oceans; its skies are swathed in cloud. And here in England, right now, it seems most of the air is water falling steadily from the sky. But how much water is there, compared to the mass of the Earth? The graphic, borrowed from the US Geological Survey, shows it's not as much as you might think. The largest blue sphere is the water in Earth's oceans; the smaller sphere to the right is the total amount of freshwater (in the ground, in lakes, rivers and swamps); the tiny sphere below that is the amount in rivers in lakes - the fresh water that's readily available.

There's also a hidden ocean in the upper mantle, in pores of clays and other minerals, and water in the rocks deep in the lower mantle, maybe all the way to the earth's core. No one knows for sure, but best estimates are around two oceans worth - which means the total amount of water on and in the planet is around 0.1% of its mass. It isn't much, compared to icy moons like Jupiter's Europa, or Saturn's Enceladus. But maybe just enough to allow civilisations like ours evolve. Because if the water content of the Earth was just 1% of its mass, rather than 0.1%, it would be a water world, completely covered in deep ocean.

Water worlds may be very common. Three quarters of the catalogue of discoveries made by the Kepler space telescope are mini-Neptunes: planets up to ten times the mass of the Earth, but with low density, suggesting that they possess thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere. Those close enough to their stars may have lost most of their original atmosphere, blown away on the stellar wind, leaving behind rocky cores completely enveloped in liquid water.

Although life might thrive on many of them, it is unlikely than any world that lacks dry land could harbour an advanced technological civilisation like our own - how could you smelt metals, or build a computer underwater? So while the equivalent of dolphins of intelligent squid may evolve on these planet-wide oceans, they probably wouldn't be able to develop ways of escaping their planet, or communicating with us. Another factor contributing to the Great Silence, perhaps. As the people of Somerset and the Thames Valley know, you can definitely have too much of a good thing.

Obligatory Shot Of The Product In A Box

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...