Meanwhile, On Mars

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Malin Space Science Systems

Taken by Curiosity Mars Rover's Right Mastcam, May 3, 2014. More here.

Reality Closing In

Last year, NASA scientists used a 3-D printer and panoramic images taken by the Opportunity Mars rover to reconstruct a plastic model of the largest meteorite ever found on Mars.

Eleven years ago, a similar reconstruction featured in my short story about a Mars-themed amusement park, 'Under Mars', published in Peter Crowther's Mars-themed anthology Mars Probes, and republished in my collection Little Machines. Getting harder to keep up.

They walk through a crystal gateway into the next slice of the park's pie. Red rocks and red sand dunes saddle away into the trompe l'oeil distance of a painted backscene. Signs point towards the Viking landing site, the secret flying saucer factory, the Mars landing simulation, the life on Mars display.

"It works in here," Homer says, tapping his head. "Focus makes the impossible real. It suspends disbelief. It makes fake reality as real as you and me. I was plugged into one of the NASA rovers, Buzz, travelling through Nirgal Vallis. I was on Mars."

"You're on Mars right now," Buzz says, turning in a circle with his arms out, taking in the red sand (dyed Florida beach sand fixed into shape with resin), the pockmarked red rocks (each hand-carved from Arizona sandstone), the red crags (ditto).

"I never did try it in the park," Homer says, "but I'm told it works just as well here as with VR."

"You're serious about this stuff, aren't you?"

"It's the real deal. When we're done with this little job we'll try it out. You and me, what do you say?"

"I'd say you've done so much of this stuff you don't know what's real or not any more. Hey! Quit it!"

Because Homer has grabbed Buzz's arm, is steering him off the main path.

"I want to show you something," Homer says.

Buzz pulls free. "Man, what's wrong with you?"

"It won't take but ten minutes," Homer says stubbornly.

Buzz knows better to argue. It's always been this way: Homer making up his mind, and Buzz going along with it. Homer is the go-getter, the man with the plan; Buzz is the sidekick.

The path winds between bigger and bigger rocks, dives into an artfully simulated crevice in the arc of a crater's rampart wall. The room beyond is low ceilinged, red lit, and, apart from a bored docent lounging in the far corner, completely deserted. Tall glass cylinders are scattered across the black rubber floor, and Homer walks straight across the room to the largest, in which a red lump of rock half a metre high sits on a black display stand.

"There," Homer says. "That there is real."

"Come on, Homer. It's just plastic. A model."

"I know that. I'm not fried. But it exists. It's sitting on Mars right this moment, in one of the canyons in Deuteronilus Mensea. A robot took twenty-eight days to scan that rock right there on Mars, and a laser stereolithograph used the information to build it up out of polymer. Look at it, Buzz. It's a fossilized stromatolite, just like the ones found in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks on Earth, which in turn are just like living stromatolites found in certain shallow bays of the Australian coast. See the striations, like pages in a book? Each one is a layer of sediment trapped and stabilized by a year's-worth of growth of mat-forming microorganisms. There was life on Mars, once upon a time. This is the hard evidence."

Giving It All Away

As a bit of promotion for the paperback of Evening's Empires, Tom Hunter has interviewed me for London Calling magazine. If you're located in the UK, you might want to click over even if you're not interested in my blether, because there's a link at the end to a competition with a set of my books as a prize, as well as the chance to download, absolutely free, the ebook collection Stories from the Quiet War. Unfortunately, the offer isn't available to those outside the UK (although I guess that if you know how to spoof your location, you could grab the ebook . . .).

Define 'Define'

The problem I have with this series on literary definitions, and Anita Mason's article in particular, is not the clickbait idea (and perfect example of circular logic) that genre fiction somehow lacks one or more of the essential qualities that elevate literary fiction above all other categories. Or even that literary fiction is the center from which all else radiates (and if it is, it must have sunk there, displacing everything that came before it, because literary fiction, like science fiction, is an invention of the twentieth century). No, what's problematical is the idea that there are boundaries between different types of fiction that exactly map onto the narrow range of publishing categories defined by labels on bookshop shelves.

Those labels can be a useful guide to browsing customers, but as taxonomy not so much. There are too many exceptions to pat definitions like Mason's. As far as I'm concerned, there are no boundaries. Everything's a continuum. Or maybe a series of strange-attractor vortices in n-dimension space. Who knows? Who cares? That last, perhaps, being a more important question than how to fit divots of the vast, wild landscape of fiction into a numbered series of sterile pigeonholes.

Afresh

A little over twenty years ago, on April 5th 1994, Channel 4 broadcast the last interview given by the playwright and novelist Dennis Potter, then in the terminal stage of pancreatic cancer. He famously described how the immediate prospect of death heightened his awareness of the world:

'At this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west, early. . .  Last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both much more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know . . . The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.'

Anyone rudely confronted by their own mortality can attest to the absolute truth of this. Three years ago I was finishing a long course of chemotherapy, unsure whether or not I would survive, and the blossom then was, yes, whiter and frothier and blossomier than any blossom there ever had been. It wasn't the immediacy of childlike wonder, or the ecstatic visions of William Blake, or the intensity celebrated by the Romantic Poets. It was the understanding that there was only the moment of seeing, and the nowness of that moment. Of seeing the world as it was, not as you expected it to be be. Seeing it afresh.

I was more or less unable to write then, but something of that immediacy is what all fiction writers aspire to, of course. To make the world new; to see it afresh. To find the detail that makes a particular moment spark in the reader's mind. In genre fiction, by definition mostly furnished secondhand, it's especially important to make things new. To see them again as they really are. That spaceship. That world. That fat orange sun fixed just above the flat horizon. Those ruins. That clear-eyed person, her giant shadow preceding her as she picks her way through tumbled stones, seeing them as they really are, in that moment of discovery.

Book Birthday

Out today: the UK paperback of Evening's Empires. It's the fourth novel to be set in the Quiet War universe, but you don't need to have read the others (although I hope you will): its story is self-contained. If you'd like an introduction to my Quiet War stuff, there's Life After Wartime, a low-price Kindle ebook collection of short fiction that also contains the first chapter of Evening's Empires.

'The Quiet War was one of the best books McAuley has written, and Evening's Empires makes an excellent companion to it.  These are books that, if there is any justice, will shape the stories we tell about our solar system for many years to come.' Interzone

'McAuley's work has many sweet spots, and this book is smack in the middle of a big one.' Locus

'The whole thing is wrapped in a melange of weird cultures and mind-boggling tech and steeped in a thoughtful and intelligent vision of the future, but, unlike some of his peers, McAuley delivers a tight-knit, propulsive storyline too. Grown-up SF that still manages to pack a punch.' Starburst

' Evening's Empires is a great addition to the 'Quiet War' sequence to date and a rollicking adventure that would very much appeal to readers of Alistair Reynolds and Iain Banks.' Concatenation

'Evening's Empires is everything you could possibly want from a science fiction novel, from the grand visions to the plausibility to the engaging story this book hits all the right notes.' SF Book Reviews

Here We Go

I'm supposed to be doing a chapter-by-chapter outline of the new novel, but over the past week I have written three and a bit chapters instead. So much for discipline. I hoped to prove that I could map out new territory and pick my route before setting off, but as usual I'm discovering where I need to go by going there, at the rate of roughly 1500 words a day. Every writer has their own walking pace; this appears to be mine. Meanwhile, the cow parsley is frothing in unattended corners of the parks and graveyards of North London, and the horse chestnuts are candling. Spring is moving in the air, and in the earth below*, and in what I hope will be another book, better than the last. Always hope for a new and better destination, when you set out.

*Wind in the Willows

Down To A Sunless Sea

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

From Evening's Empires:

Escorted by the assassin and her sisters, Hari passed through an airlock into a short tunnel lined with stained white ceramic, where hidden machines blitzed him with microwaves, neutrino beams, and X-rays. He was forced to surrender his book, felt a small surge of relief when it was returned to him after it had been interrogated inside a virtual space as ancient as the tunnel’s security protocols. It was the only thing he’d brought with him. He’d left everything of his old life behind, but he hadn’t been able to abandon or give away the book, and not just because it was a memento of the dead man who had saved his life, or because it had smuggled the copies of the eidolon and the djinn aboard Pabuji’s Gift. He had carried it through adventures and hardships; its stories had amused and amazed and informed him; he was bonded to it by something stronger than sentiment or gratitude. And he hoped that some trace of the djinn might still be hidden inside it; it was a faint and foolish hope, but he needed all the help he could get.

With two of the assassins in front of him and two behind, he descended a ramp that spiralled down a vertical shaft. A small zoo of machines squatted in alcoves and niches cut into the raw, rough ice of the shaft’s wall.  Most were dead, mantled with frost, but a few reached out with brief whispers of microwaves and a man-shaped bot stepped forward to watch the little procession go past, its eyes burning red in the chilly shadows of its crypt.

A string of lamps hung down the centre of the shaft, and presently Hari saw that their little lights were reflected on a black circle below.

Water. The still surface of the buried sea.

Three streamlined scooters were moored at the bottom of the ramp. Hari climbed aboard one behind one of the assassins, as he’d once ridden behind Riyya, and the scooters drove down a long tunnel and at last emerged into a limitless cavern. An icy overhead stretched away in every direction, lit by chains of floating lamps. Swales and humps like inverted hills, fins, long gashes fringed with stalactites dozens of metres long. Grids of illuminated rafts hung all around, dangling streamers of red and brown weed. In the far distance, a chain of fat spheres dwindled into the deep dark.

Hari felt a flutter of relief. As he’d guessed, as he’d hoped, Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters hadn’t entirely thrown off their human instincts. They lived close to the overhead of their pocket sea. They were vulnerable. And because they hadn’t shut down his p-suit’s deep radar, he could see the floor more than two kilometres below, could glimpse immense bulkheads, walls, curving away, delimiting a chamber was less than five kilometres across. He supposed that it had been sealed off from the rest of the subsurface ocean so that it could be warmed and oxygenated. A small, vulnerable bubble habitat.

His escorts drove him to a pod hung from a smooth bulge of ice where small schools of fish flickered amongst a fuzzy turf of red weed and clusters of fleshy flowers pulsing on bony stalks. They pushed him through the entrance, a moon pool at the base where external hydrostatic pressure was balanced by internal atmospheric pressure, and sealed him in. It was spherical, the pod, chilly and damp, divided into three levels by mesh platforms. In the lowest level, a teardrop-shaped cleaning bot that had clearly gone insane was slowly working its way around the rim of moon pool, following a shallow, circular groove it had carved into the floor. It might have been working there for centuries.

There was no link Hari could latch on to, through either his bios or the suit comms. He couldn’t open any windows in the pale walls.

He wondered if the Saints had managed to intercept Pabuji’s Gift. The manikins controlled by the eidolon and the copy of the djinn should be enough to hold them off, but even if they gained control of the ship it didn’t matter. By now, its course had been set and its motor had been shut down. If the Saints tried to take control, if they tried to restart the motor, they’d trigger his little surprise; if they didn’t, it would activate itself in a little under seven hours. Meanwhile, there was nothing Hari could do until Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters decided to talk to him.

He had a long wait. He couldn’t detect any toxins or contaminants in the pod’s atmosphere – a standard nitrox mix – but he kept his p-suit sealed. He watched the clock he’d set up in his visor display tick down, tried not to think about the potential flaws in his plan. Such as it was. He mostly sat still, trying to seem calmer than he felt.

The insane cleaning bot completed a painfully slow circuit, began another. At last, with three hours remaining on the countdown, a patch in the opaque wall cleared. He ankled towards it, felt a flutter of relief when he looked out and saw a little cluster of faint shapes rising through the black water. Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters were coming for him.

Paperback published on April 10th

100,000 Stars

Here's a neat little demonstration of our insignificance. Move the slider on the right to zoom out from the sun and through the solar system. past the nearest, named stars and the next 100,000 stars, onwards to the edge of the Milky Way. Or click on the button on the upper left to get a tour and some context.

Räzboiul Liniştit

Out around about now in hardback, Räzboiul Liniştit, the Romanian edition of The Quiet War, translated by Nicu Gesce (who kindly sent me the image of the cover). Pleased to see that the publishers have gone with Sparth's cover illustration, first used in the US Pyr edition.

As it says in the blurb:

In secolul al XXIII-lea, Pământul, distrus de schimbările climatice provocate de poluare, este condus de câteva familii puternice şi de aşa-numiţii „sfinţi verzi” ai acestora. Milioane de oameni lucrează la reconstrucţia ecosistemelor devastate. Alţii au preferat să plece pe sateliţii lui Jupiter şi Saturn, unde au creat o varietate de habitate,protejate de atmosferele inospitaliere cu ajutorul unor vaste corturi sau ascunse sub scoarţa aştrilor respectivi. Aici şi-au dat frâu liber imaginaţiei şi au pus în practică până şi cele mai fanteziste teorii ale geneticii.

Însă pacea fragilă dintre Pământ şi colonii este ameninţată de ambiţia „exteriorilor” de a se răspândi prin întreg Sistemul Solar şi de a grăbi evoluţia umanităţii... 

Evening's Empires In Paperback

Something that never gets old: the arrival of a box of author's copies. In this case, the paperback edition of Evening's Empires, due to hit the shops and big box warehouses on April 10th. Hey.

Scribble Scribble Scribble

In the comments to my last post, I was asked about stories about the Jackaroo, those helpful aliens who gift humanity with a bunch of marginal worlds littered with ruins left by previous client races.  There aren't that many:

‘Dust', first appeared in Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
‘Winning Peace’, first appeared in The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
‘Adventure’, first appeared in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
‘City of the Dead’, first appeared in Postscripts, 2008
‘Crimes and Glory’, first appeared in Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2011
‘Bruce Springsteen’, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2012
‘The Man’, first appeared in Arc Infinity Spring 2012

'Crimes and Glory' is over at the Subterranean site (although perhaps for not much longer), and you can buy a Kindle version of 'City of the Dead' for a few pennies or cents.

Meanwhile, and this is one of the reasons posting has been so sparse here lately, I've just turned in the first of two Jackaroo novels to my editor at Gollancz.  It's called Something Coming Through and is currently scheduled for publication in the UK in February 2015.  I've also been working on a BFI Classics book on Terry Gilliam's fabulous dystopian comedy Brazil, which will be published (I think) in September, as part of the BFI's SF season.  There's just a week to go before the deadline, and I still have to revise the conclusion and introduction and organise the footnotes. More later.

On Mars On Mars On Mars

One of the lovely things about NASA is that you can poke around the raw images taken by their robot explorers. The image above was taken by the mastcam of the Curiosity Mars rover on the February 23rd. It shows layered rocks weathering out amongst flows of sand in the foreground, the long arc of a ridge with low hills beyond, and in the background, hazed by the dusty atmosphere, the flank of Mt. Sharp, Curiosity's ultimate destination (the original is here - click to embiggen).  It's a composition as beautiful as a Chesley Bonestell painting, lacking only a couple of astronauts hunting for fossils in some long-dry stream bed. You want to walk out into it, kicking rocks as you go.

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