Random Items From The Library #4

Esta Fue Tu Vida, Jack T. Chick 1973.  Found on sidewalk, Santa Fe NM.

A Brief History Of Far Future Fiction

Future time far outruns time past. The universe exploded out of the Big Bang a mere 13.8 billion years ago, but its last end, when even black holes have evaporated, all matter has disintegrated into fundamental particles and everything everywhere is at a uniform temperature approaching absolute zero, is reckoned to be 10¹⁰⁰ years down the road. Since any substantial voyage into that vast ocean of time will leave the present far below the horizon, it isn't surprising that most science fiction is content to kick about in the shallows. To stick within hailing distance of the reassuringly familiar shore of now and tell stories that are recognisably rooted in the present. Even so, a small but significant body of fiction attempts to find human meaning in the long evening of the universe, and tell cogent stories about distant futures when almost everything that can happen has already happened long ago.

In H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, the famous forerunner of forays into the far future, the conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks a mere 800,000 years or so distant from the Time Traveller's present is an amuse bouche for the final vision of a haunted beach on a dying Earth under the fading ember of the sun, thirty million years in the future. The idea of a dying sun and the end of all life on Earth was fixed in the Victorian mind; according to the dominant theory of solar physics developed by Hermann von Helmholtz and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), the source of the sun's thermal energy was gravitational contraction, which would be exhausted within a mere hundred million years. As Wells explained in a lecture given in 1902, a few years after publication of The Time Machine, 'there is reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must radiate itself towards extinction and that this earth of ours ... will be dead and frozen, and all that has lived upon it will be frozen and done with.'

Eleven years later, when gravitational contraction was supplanted by theories that radiation was the sun's heat source, Wells added a footnote to that lecture, saying that 'the discovery of radio-activity has changed all this.' But while we know now that the sun will not leave the main sequence and bloat into a red giant for 4 - 5 billion years, the idea that its life-giving heat and light will be extinguished within the span of the human species has long persisted in science fiction, allied with visions of entropic decay and reversal or corruption of evolution. In William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, the sun has gone out, nightmare monsters prowl the Earth, and the last of humanity has taken refuge in a fortress keep. Humankind is saved from heat death when the dying sun is reignited in Clark Ashton Smith's story 'Phoenix', while time travellers from the present rescue the remnants of mankind from extinction in Raymond Z. Gallun's 'When Earth is Old' and John W. Campbell's 'Twilight'. And at the end of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun its hero and unreliable narrator sets out to rekindle ancient Urth's dying sun.

A few fictions attempt to give a human perspective to histories of cosmic scope. Thanks to time dilation at near lightspeed, the crew of a damaged starship witness and survive the collapse of the universe and its rebirth in Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. In Stephen Baxter's Timelike Infinity, the second novel of his ambitious Zeelee sequence, the physicist Michael Poole is hurtled into the far future and translated into a discorporate observer wandering a dying universe littered with relics of war; a conscious echo, perhaps, of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, in which the nameless narrator swoons into the night sky from a contemporary hillside, witnesses to a 100 billion year history of intelligent life, and encounters the universe's creator, the titular and rather grumpy Star Maker.

Such cosmic perspectives are rare. For the most part, the entropic decay of the universe is figured in the long evening shadows and ambiences of exhaustion and ennui that haunt stories set on dying earths, or expressed as the decadent decline of empires and human endeavour, as in Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, Jack Vance's Dying Earth sequence, M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories and novels, and Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time trilogy. Gods behave like spoiled children; magic either supplants science or becomes indistinguishable from it; every possible story has been told and retold; and the world threatens to end, like the universe, not with a bang but a whimper.

My new novel, War of the Maps, mixes up the entropic, cosmic and decadent flavours of far future fiction. Its world is the whimsical creation of minor-league posthuman godlings: an enormous sphere wrapped around the white dwarf remnant of Earth's sun and inhabited by the descendants of human playthings. An abandoned toy that's slowly coming apart under a sky figured with the aftermath of the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy. All of which is the background for the old, old story of a lone hero intent on bringing his nemesis to account, and a journey towards the battlefront of a transformative alien invasion.

The hero's search for relevance in an artificial world whose maps are littered with the signifiers from five billion years of human history turns out to be very much like writing late-stage science fiction. Both are haunted by monsters and archetypes from older stories, and try to find fresh meaning in shopworn tropes passed down through the generations. At the far end of the far future is the end of the Earth and the sun, the end of history, the end, in the end, of everything. But here and now there is not yet, I hope, an end to new stories about it.

Random Items From The Library #3

High Rise, J.G. Ballard Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. First Edition.

It's Free!

Need something to read while self-isolating? Following the example of Tade Thompson, Adrian Tchiakovsky, Emma Newman and others -- there's a good set of links via the BSFA -- the Kindle ebook of my collection A Very British History will be free to download in the UK and internationally from today through Friday.

Some of my stories are also freely available on the internet:

A brand new story, 'Robot and Girl With Flowers' in the online anthology Avatars. 

A random selection on my aging website.

'Something Happened Here But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was', a Jackaroo story published by Tor.com (which of course has a huge number of fine stories by diverse hands).

Clarkesworld magazine has an original story and two reprints -- and there are audio versions too:
'The Fixer', about a colony ship's solution to survival of its human cargo.
'Reef', and 'Dead Man Walking', both Quiet War stories.

And over on the mothballed Infinity Plus site, '17'.
 
Any others I've forgotten? Drop a link in the comments.


N.B. IstvánB has alerted me to this useful list:
https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Paul%20J._McAuley.html

PSA

There's been a glitch in making the ebook of War of the Maps available in the US. Gollancz's digital detectives have now worked out what has gone wrong, and the ebook should be available on all platforms from March 25th. Apologies for any inconvenience.

It's Alive

Publication day for War of the Maps in the UK.

And like all other books whose publication has been caught up in the ongoing circumstances, it is a very muted affair -- out in the world, at least. Various appearances linked with publication have been cancelled; Amazon will not reorder any more books once its current stock is exhausted, as it wants to concentrate on essential supplies. And I understand why many readers may be reluctant to go and buy it in a bookshop: I am currently self-isolating, and hope that all of you are staying as safe as you can.

But the ebook is available to download, both here in the UK and in the US (once a glitch that has prevented the ebook showing on Amazon.com has been fixed, that is). And there are places where you can buy the physical book online other than Amazon.

Wordery is currently offering War of the Maps at a steep discount, with free postage.

The Book Depository is offering a 20% discount, and free postage anywhere in the world.

Forbidden Planet has an online shop; you can find War of the Maps here.

In Scotland, there's SFF specialist Transreal Fiction, offering free home delivery in and around Edinburgh.

Blackwell's, Foyles and Waterstones are also selling it online. Blackwell's and Foyles offer free postage, and in the Blackwell's online store the book is currently discounted to £11.75.

You could order it from your favourite independent bookshop. If they don't have it in stock they can order it for you. Many offer free postage or free local delivery. Hive will make a small donation to your local bookshop with every purchase, but it's best to buy directly. Here are a few good independent booksellers in London:
Big Green Bookshop
Bookseller Crow
Burley Fisher Books

Finally, the UK ebook is available from Google Play. 

If you have a recommendation, let me know. I'll add it to the list.

And do think of supporting other books caught up in these difficult times. For instance Aliette De Bodard's House of Sundering Flames, Chris Humphreys' Smoke in the Glass, and Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night, all three also published by Gollancz today.

Best Of The Best New Horror

Sometimes I write horror stories. One, a precursor to my alternate Rennaisance  novel Pasquale's Angel, is included in The Best of Best New Horror, Volume 1, edited by Stephen Jones, and available for order from PS Publishing right now.

Here's the TOC:

• Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction: Bettering the Best — RAMSEY CAMPBELL
• No Sharks in the Med [1989] — BRIAN LUMLEY
• The Man Who Drew Cats [1990] — MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
• The Same in any Language 1991] — RAMSEY CAMPBELL
• Norman Wisdom and the Angel of Death [1992] — CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
• Mefisto in Onyx [1993] — HARLAN ELLISON®
• The Temptation of Dr. Stein [1994] — PAUL J. McAULEY
• Queen of Knives [1995]— NEIL GAIMAN
• The Break [1996] — TERRY LAMSLEY
• Emptiness Spoke Eloquent [1997] — CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
• Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff [1998] — PETER STRAUB
• Index to the First Ten Years of Best New Horror
      I: Index by Contributor
      II: Index by Title
      III: Contents of Previous Omnibus Editions

Avatars

Up now and free to read and download as a .pdf or ebook: Avatars Inc, an anthology of 24 hopeful stories about some of the ways that telepresence avatars could enhance human lives. Accidentally but hugely topical in this time of plague and self-isolation.

Including my story 'Robot and Girl With Flowers'*, and others by Madeine Ashby, Julie Novakova, Aliette De Bodard, Charles Yu, Dr. Harry Kloor, K. Chess, Jeffrey Ford, Mere Fenn Wolfmoor, JY Yang, Tade Thompson, Pat Cadigan, Tom Seterlitsch, Ken Liu, Julianna Baggott, Robert Reed, Indrapranit Das, Johanna Sinisalo, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Nino Cipri, Kelly Robson, James S. A Corey, Sarah Pinsker, SL Huang.

Available as a .pdf or ebook download here.







*Yes, an homage to Brian Aldiss's classic Robot and Girl With Flowers'

Random Items From The Library #2

Bad Moon Rising, An Anthology of Political Foreboding, edited by Thomas M. Disch Harper & Row, New York, 1973. First Edition.

In The Beginning

The inception of War of the Maps was, okay, its world. Specifically, as mentioned in an earlier post, an odd kind of star-wrapping Dyson sphere. But that was only the seed. An unsprouted potential. The real beginning of the story was a character and a situation. Everything followed from that. The complications of the narrative; the unfolding of the character's world, and what he found in it. I had a beginning, and an idea about an ending, but the protagonist's path through the world was mapped by his needs, desires and beliefs, and his interactions with other characters.

My previous novel, Austral, elaborated itself in the same way; so is the (as yet untitled) fable of the post-Anthropocene I'm presently working on. I had problems with the beginnings of both: in Austral, failing to understand that the protagonist should be in narrator; in the current work, starting it in the wrong place. As far as I'm concerned, the trick isn't building the world or charting the topography of the narrative before beginning; it's finding the character's voice, and the right situation. But War of the Maps was one of those lucky books where I had the character and the situation right at the beginning, and with only a few wrong turns the rest (to borrow an image from Robert Frost), like a piece of ice on a hot stove, flowed with its own melting.

Random Items From The Library #1

 Planets in a bottle.

Hint

Epigraph of War of the Maps:

I have noticed from the study of maps
The more outlying the island –
The further out it is in the remote ocean –
The stronger the force that pulls us towards it.
David Greig, Outlying Islands

Noted

War of the Maps, along with novels and collections by Elizabeth Bear, James Bradley, William Gibson, N.K. Jemison, M. John Harrison, Lavie Tidhar, and many others, is one of the books that Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan are looking forward to this year. Here's a link to their podcast, and a complete list of their most anticipated titles.

Frost

Skim ice on a puddle, photographed on Hampstead Heath this morning. Which was the first properly frosty morning of this otherwise temperate and often rather wet New Year, here in London. We should enjoy these traditional winter days while we can, I suppose. The last decade was the warmest on record, and the past five years were the hottest in the 170-year series dating back to 1850. Which might explain why crocuses and miniature narcissi are already abloom, in my garden.

Rembrandt's Window

The current exhibition of Rembrandt's paintings and etchings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shows off his mastery of light and shadow to great effect, but it was a tiny self-portrait at the very end which caught my attention. One of many in which Rembrandt tried out techniques using the closest model to hand, in this example he leans in to the reflection he's capturing on the etching's copper plate, and a trick of perspective makes it seem that, instead of looking at the picture from the outside, we are somehow on the inside, looking out at the artist looking in, and the whole of the gone C17 world is going about its business beyond the borders of that little window.

Hampstead Heath, July To December

Snapshots from Sunday walks in the grassland and woods of Hampstead Heath, from the second half of the year. First six months here.

July

August

September

October

November

December

War Of The Maps

I've just sent the amended copy-edit of War of the Maps back to the publishers; the next stage will be combing through the proofs, and after that it will become the actual object. As the cover suggests, it's set square in prime science fiction territory: the very far future, after the Andromeda galaxy has collided with the Milky Way, and the Sun has evolved into a white dwarf. But as Adam Roberts pointed out in a recent essay, 'SF worldbuilding is part of the system of a science fiction text; but the point of SF is not its system.' Worldbuilding aside (and if you want to know a little about that, here's a link to the research paper that set me to thinking about the world of War of the Maps), what is this novel about? I'll skip the recent trend for reducing novels to bullet-point lists of fashionable tropes, and mention instead the novel's themes: the limits of heroism and how heroes are defined by the villains they pursue, and the razor-edge boundary between duty and obsession. This particular pursuit drives our hero to leave behind everything he knows and takes him into the heart of a war against a transformative alien invasion. That's all I can tell you about right now, except that the UK publication date is March 19th 2020. And if you like the sound of it, you can already preorder it here.

Something I'm In

The Apollo moon landings turned out to be the beginning of the end of the first space race, not the end of the beginning, and for a while, they were also an end to stories set on the Moon. But after a couple of decades absent actual science, science fiction began to reclaim our sister world, and this anthology, edited by Neil Clarke and published a week before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, collects a nice variety of those post-Apollo lunar stories.



Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Bagatelle by John Varley
• The Eve of the Last Apollo by Carter Scholz
• The Lunatics by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick
• A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis
• Waging Good by Robert Reed
• How We Lost the Moon by Paul McAuley
• People Came From Earth by Stephen Baxter
• Ashes and Tombstones by Brian Stableford
• Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s by Adam Troy Castro
• Stories for Men by John Kessel
• The Clear Blue Seas of Luna by Gregory Benford
• You Will Go to the Moon by William Preston
• SeniorSource by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• The Economy of Vacuum by Sarah Thomas
• The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt
• Fly Me to the Moon by Marianne J. Dyson
• Tyche and the Ants by Hannu Rajaniemi
• The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Michael Alexander and K.C. Ball
• The Fifth Dragon by Ian McDonald
• Let Baser Things Devise by Berrien C. Henderson
• The Moon is Not a Battlefield by Indrapramit Das
• Every Hour of Light and Dark by Nancy Kress
• In Event of Moon Disaster by Rich Larson

In The Woods

Podcast: What If...

I was recently a guest on What The If ..., the high-octane, cheerfully irreverent speculative science podcast run by documentary filmmaker Philip Shane and scientist and author Matt Stanley. They let me play around with a question related to War of the Maps: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun? Check it out here.