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 When I began my brief career as a university lecturer, there were slightly more women than men amongst the life science students. Yet the majority of postgraduates working towards their Ph.Ds were men, and of the seven lecturers in the School of Plant Sciences where I worked, only one was a woman. Hope Jahren's memoir Lab Girl is, amongst other things, a clear-sighted polemic, based her own personal experiences, about that imbalance, and the barriers and prejudices women scientists must overcome. She describes her rural Minnesotan childhood and her early interest in science, how she learned to perform lab work, and her struggle to establish a research career and her own laboratory, aided and abetted by her partner in research, Bill, whose passions and eccentricities match her own. Punctuated by lovely little essays on the life of plants, those strange machines that from sunlight, water and air create the energy that fuels life on Earth, it's a terrific exploration of the culture and practice of science, and a fierce, candid and funny account of a scientist's life.

Midnight Special

The first science-fiction film from writer/director Jeff Nichols begins, as a declaration of intent, with a scene that only partially reveals its truth. Two men, Roy (Michael Shannon, who also starred in Nichols's Take Shelter) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are watching TV in a motel room whose windows have been sealed with cardboard. The TV news reports the kidnap of a young boy, Alton Meyer; Roy is the chief suspect; Alton (Jaedon Lieberher) is in the room, reading a comic under a sheet and wearing headphones and blue goggles. The kidnap isn't a kidnap at all: Roy is Alton's biological father, and has rescued his son from a cult led by Alton's adoptive father, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard, flintily uncompromising). Just after Meyer orders a follower, Doak (Bill Camp) to get the boy back by any means necessary, the cult's premises are raided by the FBI. They want the boy too.

A thriller involving car chases and shoot-outs in Louisiana back roads, motels and gas stations slowly mutates into something stranger and never quite fully explained; Nicholls backfills the story via hints and terse asides. One of the comics Alton reads is a Superman adventure, and like Superman he possesses powers fueled by the light of the sun -- he can intercept radio signals, including those deeply encrypted by the secret services, and his eyes emit rays of powerful white light that can be destructive but can also beguile (which is how Lucas, in a moment glancingly referred to rather than shown, was recruited). Unlike Superman, though, Alton has little control over his abilities, hence the cardboard-covered windows and the twilight vampiric existence of the fugitives.

The paranormal is anchored by the gritty naturalism of its Southern flatland milieu and by very human concerns: the joys, sacrifices and responsibilities of parenthood, and the nature of belief. Belief, here, is more important than understanding. Faith trumps mere facts. Roy, formerly a member of the cult, and wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst, who comes into her own in the final scenes) have resolved to take back their son and help him reach a place that's special for for reasons only Alton knows. Meyer and the members of his cult believe that Alton is a messiah prophesying the end times, and although Meyer is quickly sidelined, Doak and his sidekick continue to doggedly track the fugitives, possessed by grim faith ('What do I know of these things?' former electrician Doak wails at one point). The FBI believes that Alton is a threat to national security. And Alton believes that he will find enlightenment at the end of the journey, but the exact nature of that enlightenment isn't fully explained until the very end.

Roy's conviction in the necessity of what he must do appears as resolute and unchangeable as Calvin Meyer's belief in the apocalypse; his face is shuttered by a granite-jawed impassivity that only occasionally allows a glimpse of his very human self-doubt and the anguish of his parental dilemma. Lucas, Roy's childhood friend, has a more conventional character arc, an ordinary man caught up in the extraordinary, a disciple who learns to believe and in doing so achieves a state of grace. Likewise, Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) a young NSA agent affiliated to the FBI, comes to true understanding of Alton's powers. As does, in the unhurried unfolding of the story, Alton himself, becoming ever more remote, ever more certain that he is not as divine as Calvin Meyer believes, but is not quite human either. The film withholds its key revelation until the last scene, an apparition that raises more questions about Alton's origin, and the nature of our reality, than it answers. Although it's a vision that's both unexpected and vividly rendered, it seems somewhat mundane, especially to those familiar with the memes of science fiction, a stab at transcendent wonder that doesn't quite convince. Fortunately, there's much else in this elliptical, enigmatic parable that does shine with an authentic light of otherworldly strangeness.

Wall Of The Ancestors

Found on a walk, somewhat inelegantly positioned at the Thameside edge of Aragon Tower, Pepys Estate, Deptford: sculptor Martin Bond's Wall of the Ancestors. Faces include those of Grinling Gibbons, Queen Elizabeth I, Tsar Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano, and Sir Frances Drake, all past residents of the area now occupied by the Pepys Estate (Pepys worked nearby, at the original Trinity House). I like the Bridget Riley-style trompe l'oeil underneath it, too.

Aragon Tower was sold by the Borough of Lewisham to developers and the proceeds used to refurbish and regenerate the rest of the Pepys Estate. Residents in the tower, mostly council tenants, were moved out and the flats were transformed into upmarket duplexes and sold on the open market. An early example of the kind of displacement now common everywhere in London. Wrong kind of faces, maybe.

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I wonder, is it a coincidence that computers achieved their dominance at just the moment that life on earth became so cataclysmically imperilled? I wonder if that was a driver, if part of the urge to escape feeling, to plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention, comes from the anxiety that we will one day be the last ones left, the last species surviving on this multifarious, flowered planet, drifting through empty space. That's the nightmare, isn't it, to be abandoned in perpetuity? Robinson Crusoe on his island, Frankenstein's monster disappearing on to the ice, Solaris, Gravity, Alien, a weeping Will Smith in I am Legend wandering the desolate, unpeopled, post-plague city of New York, begging a mannequin in an abandoned video store to please say hello to me, please say hello to me: all these horror stories revolve around the terror of solitude without the prospect of cure, loneliness without the hope of alleviation or redemption.

Olivia Laing: The Lonely City

Slime Planet

From Into Everywhere:

It had no name, only a number assigned by a rip-and-run survey team before the rise and fall of the two empires, and it was old, about twice the age of Earth. The tectonic plates of its lithosphere had set in place after its outer core had cooled and solidified; any mountains it might once have possessed had long ago weathered to dust; after its magnetosphere had decayed most of its original atmosphere had been blown away by the solar wind of its star. It had been cold and virtually airless when the so-called Old Old Ones, said by some to have been the first of the Jackaroo’s clients, said by others to have been the Jackaroo’s precursors, had arrived, thickening its atmosphere and rebooting its hydrological cycle by bombarding the vast ice-cap on the dark side with comets diverted from the red dwarf’s threadbare Oort cloud. Now the slime planet was cloaked in a reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and ammonia, and a shallow sea turbid with ferrous iron spread across its substellar hemisphere, broken by a single sodden land-mass near the terminator between light and darkness. Enormous rafts of sticky foam generated by blooms of photosynthetic bacteria floated everywhere on the sea, and colonies of stromatolites grew in a few muddy bays on the sunward edge of the lone continent.

Those colonies were what had brought Tony Okoye and the crew of wizards here, in a three-way partnership with the broker on Dry Salvages who had purchased the old survey team’s report. Unprepossessing mounds like melted candle stumps, built from layers of sediments and bacterial filaments and slime, the stromatolites contained nodes of archival genetic material and communicated with each other via a wide-bandwidth transmission system constructed from arrays of microscopic magnetic crystals. The chief wizard, Fred Firat, believed that they were the remnants of a planetary intelligence, a noosphere woven from algorithms that were the common ancestors of the various species found in active artefacts left by the Elder Cultures. A root kit or Rosetta stone that would unlock all kinds of secrets, including the causes of sleepy sickness, Smythe’s Syndrome, counting disorder, and other meme plagues.

Fred Firat had the grandstanding rhetoric and unblinking gaze of someone who carried the fire of true crazed genius, and like all the best salesmen, prophets and charlatans he was his first and best convert to his cause. He was convinced that the scant data buried in the records of that old expedition pointed towards something of fundamental importance, had sold the idea to Ayo and Aunty Jael during a virtuoso performance via q-phone. Which was how Tony had found himself embarked on what might be the biggest score of his freebooter career.

Disruption

A couple of decades ago, back when I was a scientist as well as a science-fiction writer, I worked on plant-animal symbioses. My lab spirit animal was the humble green hydra, a freshwater relative of jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Green hydra are relatively easy to grow. So long as they are fed and kept at a constant temperature, they reproduce, like the one in the picture below, by budding off copies of themselves. You can quite quickly fill glass trays with thousands of cloned hydra derived from a single parent.

Like certain of their marine relatives, green hydra possess a population of symbiotic algae: an average of twenty or so green single-celled Chlorella lodged in vacuoles inside each of the digestive cells of the hydra's endoderm, like individually-wrapped apples in supermarket baskets. The Chlorella release to their host about half of the carbon they fix by photosynthesis, in the form of the simple sugar maltose; the hydra supplies nitrogen and phosphate. But as far as the hydra is concerned, it is not an obligate relationship. If you expose green hydra to intense light in the presence of the herbicide DCMU, which specifically disrupts the chain of reactions by which photosynthesis converts light energy to chemical energy, the Chlorella cells are internally poisoned and, dead or dying, are expelled by their hosts. The hydra are, to use the term coined by the inventor of this method, bleached. Turned into algae-free albinos that provide useful controls for experiment that probe the symbiotic relationship.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. Currently, reef corals in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere around the world are bleaching. Spitting out symbiotic algae (brown zooxanthellae rather than green Chlorella) whose photosynthetic capabilities have been adversely affected by a rise in sea temperature above the normal seasonal maximum. It's the third mass global bleaching event in less than two decades (the first, the first ever, was observed in 1998; the second in 2010). Unlike green hydra in the laboratory, reef corals need their symbionts to survive. Some corals can recover,  reacquiring zooxanthellae from the environment or from remnant populations in their tissues. The rest die. In the areas of the Great Barrier Reef affected by this bleaching event, about 50% of the reef corals are expected to be lost.

It's a signal event in global warming. It shows us that the effects of human activity can reach inside the cells of reef corals, reach into the chloroplasts of their symbiotic algae, and disrupt their normal activity. A vast uncontrolled experiment, with no planning or endpoint, in the only biosphere we possess; the biosphere we must also inhabit. There are no controls.

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Selections of Charles Dickens's journalism, part of background research for a thing I'm working on as a break from the novel I'm supposed to be writing. I love the moments when he turns his acute perception on himself, like this, from the end of 'Gone Astray', an essay about a child's eye view of the terrors and wonders of London's densely populated maze:

The venerable man took me to the nearest watch-house; -- I say he took me, but in fact I took him, for when I think of us in the rain, I recollect that we must have made a composition, like a vignette of Infancy leading Age. He had a dreadful cough, and was obliged to lean against a wall, whenever it came on. We got at last to the watch-house, a warm and drowsy sort of place embellished with great-coats and rattles hanging up. When a paralytic messenger had been sent to make inquiries about me, I fell asleep by the fire, and awoke no more until my eyes opened on my father's face. This is literally and exactly how I went astray. They used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am an odd man, perhaps.

Incidentally, has anyone ever analysed the influence of Dickens on Gene Wolfe, with especial reference to Severain's voice in The Book of the New Sun?

Drowned Worlds

Very pleased to be part of this -- an original anthology of stories about the Anthropocene, where we all live now. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it's due to be published on July 12. Jonathan has some more information about it, including the table of contents, over on his blog. My story, 'Elves of Antarctica', set on the Antarctic Peninsula, is a kind of prehistory of the novel I'm presently writing.

O Superman

There may be one or two minor spoilers ahead.


By now we know what to expect from a Zack Snyder film, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the first in a projected series of films about the superhero team that's been a staple of DC comics since 1960, doesn't disappoint. Stylised bouts of ultraviolence disrupted by slow- and fast-motion; fantastically detailed fan-pleasing set pieces; carefully composed shots rendered in the dark tones, high contrast and shadows of comic-book noir: all are present and correct. Characterisation, narrative logic and light and shade, not so much.

Still, although it's clearly less important than the apocalyptic action, there is a kind of through-line to the story of this long dark noisy film. The boss fight between Superman and General Zod that wrecks much of Metropolis towards the end of Man of Steel is shown again, this time from the point of view of Bruce Wayne. The skyscraper offices of Wayne Enterprises are demolished and many of his employees are killed; he wants to avenge them. Meanwhile, the government is trying to undermine Superman's reputation because they fear he is uncontrollable, and Lex Luthor, who bamboozles the government into giving him access to Zod's wrecked spaceship and Kryptonite technology, wants to get rid of him too. But first, he wants Superman to deal with Batman, who is causing all kinds of trouble for Luthor's criminal empire. Or maybe Luthor just wants to see a good fight -- played by with jittery malice by Jesse Eisenberg, he's given to fractured, inarticulate monologues that suggest he doesn't know himself.

Maybe, like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Luthor is into chaos, but at least the Joker had a coherent ideology. And while the Joker reveled in his villainy, Luthor seems to find it a burden. One of the film's problems is that no one seems to be having much fun. Poor Superman: only his mother and Lois Lane have faith in his innate goodness. And Batman's pursuit of vengeance is similarly joyless. In the Christopher Nolan films, Bruce Wayne was driven, but he had fun playing the recklessly flamboyant billionaire. Here, he's just driven, drowning the sorrow of a joyless one-night pick-up by chugging a bottle of vintage wine. All is grim and dark and gritty. There are explicit visual references to 9/11, and as in the aftermath of 9/11, the end justifies the means, from torture to pre-emptive assassination, the government is militarised, and there is much talk of vengeance, but no sign of forgiveness. Batman has reverted to his early, gangster-slaying incarnation, torturing criminals for information and branding them so that they'll be killed in jail by the other inmates. Despite the explicit code embedded in his origins, Superman (is that a bird about to crash into that building? is it a plane? no, it's . . .) continues to kill. If we get the superheroes we deserve, then the superheroes we get here mean that we're in deep trouble.

That's not the only problem. Motivation and characterisation are mostly realised through flashbacks,  dreams, and terse statements of intent. There's much exposition via computer files, including teasing glimpses of the Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. Superman's dead human dad shows up in a dream to give a pep-talk, because (I guess) the dead Kryptonian dad of a previous incarnation showed up as a hologram in Superman Returns. There's a dream sequence in which Superman commands stormtroopers whose uniforms are emblazoned with his sigil: a foreshadowing of a possible future storyline that will puzzle anyone who has only a glancing knowledge of the mythos.

It isn't an entirely terrible film. The fights are nicely choreographed, and there are some lovely moments of eye-candy (not a few borrowed from Miller's The Dark Knight Returns). Both Henry Cavill (Superman) and Ben Affleck (Batman) are excellent (Affleck's chin is definitive). Amy Adams does her best as the sparky girl reporter who keeps needing to be rescued. Laurence Fishburne continues to bring gravitas to Perry White. The acid quips of Jeremy Irons' Alfred are rare glimpses of humour. And Gal Gadot is a wonderful Wonder Woman, but doesn't have much to do until the final showdown, when her crooked grin suggested that she actually enjoys being a superhero facing up to a desperate fight to the finish with a super foe.

Such a shame, then, that the film too often strains for profundity it doesn't deserve, and its muddled, ponderous story hinges on the bathos of a stupid coincidence. Its relentlessly nihilistic grim one-note tone also threatens to taint the upcoming films in the League of Justice universe, whose inception, here, is almost an afterthought to the gladiatorial excesses. So far, Marvel's Avengers won't be quaking in their boots.

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Gaia Vince: Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

Adapting to the Anthropocene will be as challenging as colonising Mars, so we'll need all the ingenuity we can muster.

First Lines

From the upcoming novel and four stories due to be published this or next year.


There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. 
Into Everywhere


The origin story we like to tell ourselves is that our little town was founded by a grumpy loner name of Joe Gordon, who one day quite early in the settlement of First Foot parked his RV at the spot where one of the ceramic roads left by an unknown long-lost Elder Culture cut across the new two-lane blacktop between Port of Plenty and the open-cast iron mine at Red Rocks. 
'Something Happened Here, But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was.' (Tor.com, 2016)


On the sixth day of every month Fernanda Wright negotiates the rings of security around the Stratford tesseract and lays a flower at the tomb of her undead husband. 
'Rats Dream of the Future' (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2016.) 


Mike Torres saw his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. 
'Elves of Antarctica' (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris, 2016.)


It really did look like Mars. 
'Life Signs' (For an as yet unannounced anthology.)

Tomb Taxonomy

From Into Everywhere:

Most of the tombs were small, and most had collapsed or been buried by wind-blown sand that over thousands of years had cemented into friable rock. In certain places, tombs had been built on older tombs, creating tells ten or twenty strata deep. Many were empty, but fragments of Elder Culture technology, usually sympathy stones or the mica chips that contained the entangled pairs of electrons that underpinned q-phone technology, could be found in some, and tesserae were embedded in the walls of others. No one knew if the tesserae had been created by the Ghostkeepers, or if the Ghostkeepers had excavated them from ruins left by other Elder Cultures and used them as decoration or markers for reproductive fitness. Almost all of them were inert and of only archaeological interest; those that still generated active eidolons were highly prized.

Like all tomb raiders, Lisa and Willie had eked out a living from sales of mundane finds while dreaming of discovering the kind of jackpot that would kickstart a new industry or technology and make them so rich that they would never have to work again. They sifted through the middens of abandoned hive-rat nests – the fierce little creatures dug deep and sometimes brought up artefacts. They found their way into intact chambers where eidolons might kindle from shadows and lamplight. When everything else failed, they sank shafts into the mounds of collapsed tombs. Willie disliked digging. Not just because it was hard work, although that was a consideration, but because it disturbed what he called ‘the flow’.

The City of the Dead was a sargasso of history, according to him, with strange tides and currents, backwaters and eddies. Everything flowing into everything else.
 
If they found no intact tombs or abandoned nests, Willie preferred to dowse rather than dig. He would wander over the parched landscape with two lengths of copper wire bent into a pair of L-rods, delicately pinching the short arms between thumbs and forefingers and narrowly watching the quiver and dip of the long arms. Circling a spot when the rods began to twitch, insisting that Lisa start digging if they violently see-sawed.
 
Willie’s dowsing had a surprisingly good hit rate – slightly better than chance, according to Lisa’s Chi-squared tests – but he preferred spelunking, and so did Lisa. Finding their way into spaces untouched for thousands of years, where the psychic traces of the creatures that had built them yet remained. She remembered spiral tombs augered into the earth. She remembered labyrinths of broken stone. She remembered one huge, cool, bottle- shaped chamber lit by a shaft of sunlight from a high crevice. As Willie had climbed down the swaying rope ladder, orange fronds clumped in the splash of sunlight on the floor had suddenly broken up and scurried off in every direction, seeking the safety of shadows. A kind of colonial beetle-thing, it turned out, with symbiotic plants growing on its shells. Lisa remembered another chamber, this one long and low, where eidolons had exploded around them like bats: after they’d sold the tesserae that generated them, she and Willie had lived high on the hog for two months.
 
She remembered the time the truck’s LEAF battery had run out of charge at the western edge of the City of the Dead, a long way from the nearest settlement, with the eroded range of mountains that marked the edge of the Badlands shimmering at the horizon. Willie had pulled his trail bike from the load bed and roared off with the battery strapped behind him. He’d said that he’d be directly back, but a day passed, and another, and there was no sign of him and Lisa couldn’t pick up a phone signal. She discovered that she didn’t mind being stranded. She had plenty of food, enough water to last a couple of weeks. She slept in the back of the truck’s crew cab during the day and watched the starry sky at night. Dissolved into the antique silence of the desert. Looking back, she’d never been happier.
 
On the fourth day a hot wind out the south blew white sand from the crests of sand dunes. The sky grew milky and the sun faded to a dull smear and the horizon closed in. The truck’s door seals couldn’t keep out the dust and Lisa had to tie a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. Everything was covered with a fine white bloom. Her eyes itched madly.

Willie drove out of the tail end of the storm towards sunset. He’d been caught up in a business deal, he said, but it hadn’t panned out. Lisa didn’t bother to ask. It might have been a lead on Elder Culture ruins or a poker game, a girl or a spell in jail. In the morning they mounted the recharged LEAF battery and drove to Joe’s Corner and bought water and food and went on.
 
Those were the days of their lives until they finally hit their jackpot. Until the Bad Trip.

Into The Wild

Into Everywhere now available as an ebook in the US. I think that it's the first time one of my titles has been available over there before being released over here. So make the most of it, US readers.

Publication date in the UK for the ebook, audiobook and dead tree version is April 21st

High-Rise

'I'm a fast learner,' Dr Robert Laing soothingly tells an obstreperous neighbour who accuses him of a minor breach of rubbish-chute etiquette. Laing (imbued by Tom Hiddleston with cool semi-detached superiority) has just moved into a flat on the 25th floor of a new high-rise, midway between the lower levels inhabited by ordinary middle-class families and the heaven of the penthouses of the rich, including Anthony Royal, the architect who designed the building. Soon, he will need to deploy all of his charm and adaptability to survive the apocalyptic transformations of this vertical microcosm of society.

J.G. Ballard's experimental collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), was the template for a loose thematic trilogy of novels that explored the effects of technology and the urban environment on human sexuality and psychology. Rather than resisting change or attempting to impose order on chaos, Ballard's characters embrace the freedom to explore and act out new states of being, from fetishism of cars and car accidents in Crash (1973) to the ways in which the liminal urban space of Concrete Island (1974) and the brutalist architecture of the self-contained tower of High-Rise (1975) translate into psychological states and human narratives.

In High-Rise, petty resentments and suburban hedonism are amplified by the claustrophobic architecture; as the veneer of civilisation cracks open, the inhabitants revert to savage tribalism and are gripped by a mass psychosis that traps them inside the building that has been designed to satisfy their every need. Directed by Ben Wheatley from a screenplay by Amy Jump, the film follows the novel's narrative arc pretty faithfully, beginning with the infamous scene where Laing sits on the terrace of his flat, roasting the leg of an Alsatian, and then looping back to Laing's arrival, and his introduction to the hedonistic lifestyle of the high-rise's middle floors by his upstairs neighbour Charlotte Mieville (played by Sienna Miller with a nicely judged mix of boldness and vulnerability). Charlotte also introduces Laing to Royal (Jeremy Irons as a limping acidulous demigod dressed in Bond-villain white) and Richard Wilder (Luke Evans in thuggish proletarian denim), a TV documentary maker who lives on the ground floor with his children and heavily pregnant wife. As the building's lifts and utilities begin to break down and social divisions -- defined by money rather than class -- fuel violent strife between floors, Wilder's increasingly brutish resentment drives his obsessive attempts to ascend to the top floor and confront the building's creator, a counterpoint to the descent of the rest of the inhabitants into apocalyptic warfare.

While David Cronenberg's film of Crash (1996) displaced the novel's setting from the 1970s to contemporaneous Canada while accurately replicating Ballard's cool, martian gaze, High-Rise makes the 1970s London setting of the novel a central feature of its aesthetic. There are slow pans across supermarket shelves packed with color-coded blocks of packaging; ranks of immaculate period cars stretch away in a vast parking lot; the apartments are nicely detailed, from the brass-and-glass furniture and orange and brown wallpaper of the lower floors to the wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting and modular sofas of Royal's penthouse. The opulent interiors contrast with the brutal concrete exterior, bracingly framed against the sky and increasingly, as anarchy grips and the inhabitants party until dawn, depicted in the magic hour when the nuclear fire of level sunlight burns through the windows of its apartments.

Rather than attempting to impose a conventional plot on Ballard's clinical anatomisation of collapse and transfiguration, Wheatley uses montage and images shattered by a child's kaleidoscope to fast-forward the disintegration and mounting insanity to its violent conclusion. A man leaps from a high balcony and smashes, in exquisite slow-motion, into the bonnet of a parked car; in the  supermarket, peaches grow coats of mould; barricades block corridors and staircases; black binbags stuffed with rubbish bulge from rubbish chutes and clutter even the penthouses. The violent excesses of this gorgeously shot period dystopia are guyed by the kind of absurdism Wheatley has deployed in earlier films, notably Kill List and Sightseers. It's mostly a good match for Ballard's deadpan parodic humour, but is sometimes a little too broad: Laing's obstreperous neighbour and a cantankerous caretaker are little more than grotesque caricatures; a scene in which Laing turns up in a suit to a penthouse costume party and is roundly mocked by Royal's neglected, imperious wife (Keeley Hawes) and her acolytes veers towards sitcom farce; a roving gang armed with a BAFTA trophy is perhaps an in-joke too far.

Ballard's novels are powerful and disturbing because they mirror our own lives with far more closely than we'd like to admit -- their portraits of collapse and wild abandon are only a few degrees from what we call normality -- but comedy redefines normality by violently distorting it. Fortunately, such lapses in tone are rare. High-Rise is a gloriously subversive slice of anarchy, a mix of arthouse and grindhouse that, like the novel, relishes its remorseless deconstruction of what we like to think of as immutable human behaviour.

Getting There From Here

When I delivered the manuscript of Something Coming Through, my editor asked several times when it was set. In which year? How far from now? Ten years? Twenty? There are aliens, and half the story takes place on another planet, amongst ruins left by alien cultures, so it was obvious -- wasn't it? -- that it had to be set in the future. Here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, no one has yet set foot on another planet, and human exploration of the Moon is receding into history. Apart from fantasies of dreaming yourself to Mars or revisionist histories in which the Space Age didn't die with the Cold War, the future is the only place where easy travel to other planets is possible.

But if you take the future seriously, it has to be seriously different from the present. And that's a problem if you want to explore the ways in which the weirdness of life on other planets can warp and twist your characters: it can be difficult to foreground alien weirdness if the background is equally estranging, equally unfamiliar. That's why 2001: A Space Odyssey uses the trademarks of familiar companies, a space station interior that resembles an airport lounge (the Djinn chairs were a contemporary 1960s design), a dull corporate meeting, and banter about the authenticity of chicken sandwiches to undercut the future shock implicit in a journey to the Moon. The domestication of the future heightens the reveal of the monolith in its moon-pit because it is an alien irruption into a setting rendered as banally as the present, rather than being just another strange artifact in an unfamiliar landscape littered with dozens of equally strange artifacts. Likewise, Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye use the familiar cliche of a space navy that resembles the Royal Navy to throw the weirdness of its aliens into stark relief.

But too often the deployment of a historical paradigm to furnish the setting of a space opera or planetary adventure -- the Roman Empire, the Wild West, India during the British Raj, so forth -- is either a lazy default or a comforting simplification. A nostalgic reinterpretation of a Golden Age that never was. A historical espirit d'escalier (all those endless replays of the Vietnam War...). And too often domestication of the future not only strips out its inherent strangeness, but also elides the strangeness and strange complications of the present; too often, futures are less futuristic than the here and now.

In an essay about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris, Philip Lopate points out that in shots of freeways the director 'disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb when the estranging future has already arrived?' Likewise, Something Coming Through isn't set in any specific future, with a clearly defined path that leads back to the here of now, but in a free-floating present that's no more than a slightly heightened version of the actual present, where we all live. I didn't want the weirdness of a fictional future to be a distraction from the weirdness I wanted to write about. I wasn't interested in the descriptions of voyages and vessels which often take up a large part of science fiction novels about other planets. I wasn't interested in the how and the why of travel to other planets; I was interested what happened to the voyagers after the end of the voyage. Better, I thought, for this little fairy tale about gifts that aren't what they seem to start where we are now, in a familiar place inhabited by people like us, with concerns and histories and desires and failings like ours. The alien worlds and the aliens, living and dead, were estrangement enough.

Something I Did Earlier

Heads-up for German readers: Heyne have just released ebook editions five of my novels -- Vierhundreit Millarden Sterne (Four Hundred Billion Stars), Verborgene Harmonien (Secret Harmonies), Ewigen Licht (Eternal Light), Rotor Staub (Red Dust), and Feenland (Fairyland). Heyne have grouped the first three in 'The Alien Cycle' as they are all set in the same future history, but they are essentially stand-alones. And Secret Harmonies is, for various reasons, out of print in the UK, the US and elsewhere, so if you can read German, here's your chance.

Elsewhere, you can read my short story 'Transitional Forms' for free, courtesy of Lightspeed Magazine, and off to the right are, as always, links to Kindle ebooks of other short stories and short story collections. Sometime in the next few months, I'll be adding to that ebook list A Very British History, a collection of stories from the first 25 years of my career. A few print copies are still available from PS Publishing, if that's your preference.

Scribble Scribble Scribble

Very pleased to announce that I have just signed a contract with Gollancz for two new novels -- as always, a commitment that's both exciting and daunting. Both are stand-alones, which is to say neither is the first volume of a trilogy, a future history, or a series. Both are science fiction.

I've just completed the second draft of the first novel. Or is it a lightly-revised first draft, with some sections that have been rewritten three or four times? Word processing is seamless and fluid, but it can sometimes be a little too fluid. That's why I like to print out at least one draft, and amend and correct it with a red pen, line by line, page by page. It's a habit that goes back to the distant time in the previous century when I typed my first short stories and my first novel on a typewriter. I like to think, perhaps erroneously, that it gives the whole a certain coherence.

I don't want to say anything more about it at this stage. Partly out of superstition; partly because the novel is still evolving. I'm still at the discovery stage. I'm still being surprised. But I do know that part of it is set in the places shown on the map below -- shown as they are now, that is, not as they might be, in the novel's imaginary somewhen.

The Lost Innocence of UFOs

In the 1960s and early 1970s, my family's summer holiday was invariably a week in my mother's home town, Bognor Regis, on the south coast of England, where we stayed at my great-aunt's traditional seaside boarding house. When I reached my teens, the usual attractions of the beach and pier, the small zoo and boating lake, silly golf and slot machine arcades, had begun to pall. In an especially wet August in 1970, mostly trapped indoors and having read the books I'd brought with me, I joined Bognor Regis library and discovered that although its science fiction selection was disappointingly sparse, it had a solid two-shelf collection of UFO books (it also had one of the country's first computerised borrowing systems, with slotted plastic machine-readable tickets). And so, on that rainy holiday, I read my way through the lot.

There was a certain hypnotic fascination in their painstaking, trainspotterish taxonomy of UFO sightings, renderings of encounters with aliens in dull prose clogged with cliches and opaque details that failed to evoke any sense of wonder, and lengthy disquisitions on the fortune-cookie wisdom imparted to the chosen few by beings supposedly wise beyond human understanding. I once interviewed the physicist and author John Barrow, who told me that a common factor of the crank mail he received was that its authors attempted to develop a theory of everything using only schoolbook algebra. Similarly, the authors of those UFO books attempted to reduce the uncaring vastness of the cosmos to a human scale, with narratives in achingly ordinary people were chosen by aliens for revelation or experimentation, and their mundane lives were given as much weight as the descriptions of the aliens and their craft, and medical procedures somewhat less unpleasant than the real thing.

This strain of UFOlogy still persists in corners of the internet where sightings are recorded alongside images of Martian rocks that, because they look a bit like guns or coins or statues of human figures, must actually be guns, coins etc. But the cultural phenomenon of UFOs has not only diminished but mutated into something much less cozy. Stephen Spielberg captured that change in two films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET: The Extraterrestrial, in which alien intrusions into skilfully rendered domesticity are far less threatening than ruthless government agencies bent on preventing the general population from discovering the truth. Since then, UFOs have become associated with suicide cults like Heaven's Gate or the Order of the Solar Temple, and absorbed into the hot stew of millennial, mostly right-wing paranoia which aggressively promotes the belief that almost every aspect of modern life has been infiltrated by government conspiracies invisible to all but the chosen.

In its first incarnation, The X-Files embodied a version of that paranoia, suggesting that a quisling government was conspiring with hostile aliens bent on invading and colonising Earth. The new series, though, suggests that the aliens actually came in peace, and were traduced by a global conspiracy of 'über-violent ultra-fascists' planning to use stolen alien technology to mount an attack on democracy in general and America in particular. That the aliens are as much victims of a conspiracy as the rest of us is, I suppose, a slight improvement. A hopeful readjustment of the reputation of extraterrestrial intelligence. But I still miss the naive hopefulness of those old UFO books, back when aliens came here only to help.

Strange Gifts From The Gods

‘For most consumers—who learn about new technologies only when they brighten the windows of an Apple store or after they’ve already gone viral—it’s easy to imagine that technological progress is indeed dictated by a kind of divine logic; that machines are dropped into our lives on their own accord, like strange gifts from the gods.’
Meghan O’Gieblyn, As a God Might Be –Three Visions of Technological Progress

Among other things, Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere play with the long-established SF trope of ancient alien technologies that disrupt human society, get inside our heads, have agendas of their own. A trope that, like most, is really about our fear of our own future (which is why fictional futures are almost always worse than the actual future when it catches up with the present).

The smarter technology becomes, the more we lose control over it. We are not the customers of social media; we provide the data it sells to advertisers. Most of us no longer programme computers; we buy software and apps approved for use in the operating system’s walled garden. Smart phones contain smart assistants that answer our questions, but they also brick if they’re repaired with unapproved components. An NSA machine learning algorithm extracts profiles of possible terrorists from metadata gathered from mass surveillance of Pakistan’s cell phone networks, random decision forests assign scores, and profiles with the highest scores are forwarded to the CIA or the military as potential targets for drones or death squads -- theoretically, assassinations could be carried out without human intervention. The NSA program that uses that algorithm is called SKYNET.

Truly advanced technologies aspire to the condition of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monoliths. Pursuing cryptic plans of their own, changing and manipulating us in unknown, unpredictable ways. Strange gifts of the gods, indistinguishable from magic. All we can do is hope to appease them by cargo-cult ceremonies that borrow gestures and language from science. Already, many machines in daily use are imprinted with a warning that echoes the curses sometimes set on ancient Egyptian tombs: Warranty Void If Opened.

Something Coming Soon

The future of humanity is haunted. By alien ghosts.

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people.

The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.