True Grit

I guess I should mention this little pearl from the wonderfully passionate Lou Anders, in part grown around a bit of grit I sent to Meme Therapy in answer to a question they asked. Ian McDonald has some good things to say too, especially about Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s unfocused idea that SF is too serious, should get back to the kind of entertainment you find in tie-ins and Star Wars, and Lou Anders follows up here.

Onward

The proofs of Players are finally back with the publishers, margins red-inked with the thorny squiggles used for marking up copy for composition, fixed now in its final form.

While I’ve been reading my book backwards and forwards very very slowly, the Ig-Nobel prizes have been awarded (my favourite is the investigation into why dry spaghetti strands usually break into more than two pieces when flexed, something that briefly engaged the late great Richard Feynman), the Mars rover Opportunity reached Victoria crater, which is where it will probably spent the rest of its unexpectedly long life (Opportunity and Spirit were expected to remain functional for only 90 Martian days; so far they’ve spent an amazing 970 Martian days exploring the surface), and Yahoo is collecting stories and pictures which it plans to laser into space and also archive in a digital time capsule.

Kinetica

Dancing robots? Right this way.

The Kids Are Alright

Philip Reeve’s A Darkling Plain, the final volume of a quartet of children’s science fiction novels set in mobile cities that tour a post-apocalypse landscape, has just won the 2006 Guardian’s children’s fiction prize. An interview with him was published in Saturday’s Guardian review section, and very enjoyable it is too. Although the interviewer, Julia Ecclestone, can’t help noting that it reads more like an alternative history than science fiction", as if, y’know, it would be really embarrassing to think that an honest to God SF novel ever won a literary prize, so let’s pretend that it isn’t really SF at all. And as if no alternative history was ever SF.

Anyway, Reeve’s quartet, begun with Mortal Engines, which he describes as the kind of "’big and rambling book’ he would have enjoyed as a teenager" sounds like the pure quill to me. And I bet that I would have loved to have come across it back when I was a teenager, and reading anything that was even remotely associated with the special spine-tingling mind-expanding strangeness I had discovered in SF - adult SF, that is, for there was precious little children’s SF back then. What happens, I wonder, to all the fans of Reeve’s novels (and to fans of all the other SF and fantasy children’s novels) when they grow a little older? Do they move away from SF and fantasy, and if so, why? And why do so many people stop reading as they grow up? Are SF and fantasy publishers trying to capture the attention of this large and avid audience? And have SF conventions any ideas about attracting younger readers? It seems to me that the average age of convention-goers increases at a rate of about a year per year, which given my advanced years is a bit worrying. If the genre is to stay vital, it needs to find answers to these questions.

Players - 12

Jerry Hill said, ‘Here’s how I see it, Joe. I’ll lay it out for you, and any time you think I got something wrong, you just jump right in and tell me. Okay? Way I see it, you’re driving along, and you see this pretty young girl standing by the side of the road, holding out her thumb, looking for a lift. She’s wearing nothing but a flimsy dress and she’s a young, good-looking girl, you can see the shape of her body through that thin material. So you do what any red-blooded man would do. You stop your truck and you tell her to hop in. So far, you haven’t done anything wrong, but now she’s sitting right beside you in that thin dress, you can smell her, and she smells so good you want to eat her up. You live by yourself out in the country, I bet a week might go by without you talking to anyone, much less a delectable peachy-fresh girl like this. She got into your truck of her own accord, in that thin little dress, she’s talking away, maybe she’s leaning at the window letting the wind blow her hair back and you can smell her and you want her. You ache for her, don’t you? Any man would, right?’

Watching this on the little TV, Summer realized that Jerry Hill wasn’t interested in getting Kronenwetter to confirm or deny the story. No, the son of a bitch was making sure that he got his version of events on record.

Look at him now, smiling up at the camera, saying, ‘So you make a move. And then she’s screaming, and you panic and somehow or other you knock her out. And when you’ve done that, you’ve crossed the line. And crossing the line frees you up. You can do anything you like. So you take her back to your cabin -- or no, maybe first of all you pull off the road and drag her out of the truck into the ditch and you have her right there, don’t you, Joe? Because you can’t wait. Because she’s so young and fresh.

‘And afterward, you know you can’t let her go,’ Jerry Hill said, his voice getting louder. ‘So you take her back to your cabin, you drag her down into your cellar. You rip off that thin little dress and those black panties, and you chain her up. You keep her down there, naked and chained like an animal. We know you did, Joe, because we found the leg-irons you used. And you know what? Those leg-irons have her blood on them. The very same blood we found on her dress and on her panties.’

Kronenwetter shook his head violently, hair whipping from side to side, his teeth bared in a
grimace, his eyes squeezed shut.

The noise he made was shrill and raw, like razor-wire ripped from his throat.

Summer felt as if someone had dropped an ice cube down her back. One of the detectives said, ‘Jesus.’

On the TV, Denise Childers said, ‘Maybe we should take a break.’

Jerry Hill caught hold of a handful of Kronenwetter’s hair, winding it around his fist, pulling back the big man’s head, leaning down to speak in his ear. ‘You picked up that little girl from the side of the road. You kidnapped her and you held her prisoner and you raped her. How many times? Five? Ten? Twenty? You did all that, and then she got away and what did you do? Nothing. Because you just didn’t care. Because you thought you were so fucking powerful there was no way you would get caught. Or wait, maybe you wanted to get caught. Is that it? Is that why you left her dress and her driver’s licence and her library card and her panties down there in your cellar? Is that why you left the fucking leg-irons there? Is that why you’re blubbering now, you piece of shit?’

Kronenwetter’s mouth worked inside his beard and he gave a wordless cry, so loud that everyone around Summer jumped. On the TV, Jerry Hill had let go of Kronenwetter’s hair, and the man was shaking his head, shouting.

‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It was the monster!’

Whoops Apocalypse

I’ve been back from two weeks of desperate fun in New York and adventures in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts for a few days, but almost all of that time has been taken up with checking the proofs of Players and trying to comb out as many goofs, inconsistencies, spelling mistakes, word-processing errors (a whole bestiary of horrors made possible by sloppy cutting-and-pasting and on-the-spot editing) and syntactical errors as possible. Amazing what survives four drafts, editing, and copy-editing...

Arriving in the post while I was away were copies of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu, both with embossed jackets sans dustjackets. Is this a new trend for literary fantasy?

Limited

It turns out that Players will have a limited hardback edition as well as the trade paperback edition that, hopefully, will be all over the bookshops in February. The hardback is for the library trade, but I may be able to persuade a friendly specialist bookseller to order up a few.

Meanwhile, unless I stumble across an internet café in the New England woods, I’m out of here for a while...

Players - 11

Jerry Hill took his time on the drive back to the Justice Building. Keeping well under the speed limit, stopping at intersections to let other vehicles go through ahead of him, stopping at a drive-through coffee shop and spending five minutes bantering with the waitress before placing his order. He told Summer that Cedar Falls was a fine little town -- if she was considering staying overnight he could show her a barbecue place that served the best steak in the county, plus he knew of a motel he could recommend. It was basic but comfortable, and cops got a discount there, if she knew what he meant.

Treating her to his shit-eating grin, relaxed and confident, an alpha male on his home turf. She wondered how many women he’d managed to talk into taking a room at this motel of his. She saw him turning up an hour or so after she’d checked in, saw him standing in the doorway with a bottle of something or other and a couple of glasses, saying he thought she might want some company . . . And told him she planned to be back in Portland by the evening.

‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ Jerry Hill said. ‘I’m gonna need to talk to Randy again.’

‘I’ve already told you everything I know,’ Randy Farrell said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Jerry Hill said. His beeper went off and he checked it and put on a little speed, sounding his horn as he sped through an intersection, saying, ‘Unless you want to leave Randy behind, Detective Ziegler, it very much looks like you might not be getting back to Portland tonight. Think about that motel, why don’t you? I’ll be happy to fix you up.’

‘I bet this is a fun town,’ Summer said, ‘but I really do have to get back to Portland. I think we should ask your partner if she thinks it’s necessary to talk with Mr Farrell again.’

‘She’s welcome to sit in on the conversation. You too,’ Jerry Hill said, swinging his big pickup into the parking lot behind the Justice Building. Saying with mock innocence, ‘Oh my, what do we have here?’

A TV van was parked among the black and white cruisers and civilian vehicles, and there was a small commotion at the rear entrance of the building. Two deputies were arguing with a smartly dressed woman and a man with a video camera up on his shoulder, while two more deputies helped a big shaggy-haired man in shackles and an orange jumpsuit clamber out of the back of a cruiser. Summer realized that the prisoner must be Joseph Kronenwetter, and turned in her seat to tell Randy Farrell to stay right where he was. But he was already clawing at the handle of his door, and Jerry Hill caught Summer’s arm when she reached for him, saying, ‘Let the poor guy have some fun.’

‘Get your hands off me,’ Summer said, and jumped down and chased Randy Farrell across the parking lot.

He was running flat out. When one of the deputies, a woman, got in his way and tried to grab hold of him, they whirled around in an awkward tangle. He smacked her in the eye with an elbow, she lost her footing and sat down hard, and he dodged around her, throwing wild punches and kicks at the prisoner, yelling that he was going to kill the fucking son of a bitch. Then Summer slammed into him and drove him against the side of the cruiser, grabbing hold of one of his wrists and wrenching it up behind his back, pinning him there while a burly deputy handcuffed him and two more deputies hustled the prisoner away, the reporter shouting questions, and the video camera sucking it all in.

Players - 10

The morgue was in an annexe behind the medical centre, connected to the main building by a short corridor with wide double doors at each end. In Portland, relatives and friends identified bodies at one remove, via a TV screen. In Cedar Falls they did it the old-fashioned way, in a small white-tiled room with the body lying on a gurney and covered from head to feet in a stiff blue sheet. When the attendant folded back the top portion of the sheet from the dead face, Randy Farrell said at once, ‘That’s her.’

Summer recognized Edie Collier too, remembered driving past Meier and Frank in her cruiser and spotting the department store’s detective, an ex-cop by the name of Tom McMahon, chasing the girl through crowds of Christmas shoppers. Summer had cut in front of her at an intersection, had been handcuffing her when Tom McMahon had come puffing up. In a drab little office in the basement of the store, Edie Collier had watched with calm indifference as Summer went through her shoulder bag; Summer remembered finding a paperback of Billy Collins’s Nine Horses among the usual debris, the pages much underlined and annotated, remembered asking Edie Collier if she was a poetry fan, trying to make some contact. But the girl had barely shrugged, her gaze as luminously untroubled as a Madonna’s when Tom McMahon had told her that the store would be pressing charges. In court, she’d pled guilty with the same serenity, lost in some private world while the judge told her that her priors and the fact that she’d been arrested for shoplifting while on probation for the same offence suggested to him that she should spend Christmas in jail -- it would be her chance to think about the course her life was taking and get straightened out.

Randy Farrell, sitting right behind his stepdaughter in the courtroom, had leaned forward to whisper something to her before she was led away; she’d smiled and touched his hand as if to reassure him that she would be all right. Now he brushed back stray strands of hair from her dead face, and with the tender gesture of a parent tucking in a sleeping child adjusted the sheet to hide the beginnings of the crudely stitched Y-shaped autopsy incision. There was a rose tattooed on the ball of her right shoulder, a banner lettered Billy in Gothic script curled around its stem.

After five years of policing the streets of Portland, Summer had developed calluses on her soul; most of the time, she did her work with the tough-minded pragmatism of a doctor triaging battlefield casualties. She had good days, she had bad days, and while she hoped the good outweighed the bad, she’d learned that keeping a tally brought nothing but grief, and she tried her best not to bring home what she saw on the streets. But she’d also learned that some cases hooked the heart. Edie Collier, raised in a chaotic household with a violent drunk for a mother and a stepfather in and out of jail, was exactly the type who would end up as a victim on a mortuary gurney; Summer had encountered dozens like her down and out on the streets of Portland. But now, looking at the girl’s dead face, turned a delicate shade of green by the fluorescent light of the viewing room, Summer felt a hook dig deep, and knew that this was one of the cases she would never forget.

‘You have to see this.’ Jerry Hill lifted up the other end of the sheet, exposing the dead girl’s legs to mid-thigh, and pointed to the two parallel welts above the knuckle of her right ankle. ‘This is how we figured out she’d been chained up someplace.’

Size Isn't Everything

A couple of weeks after the reclassification of Pluto, there’s a new twist in the debate about planetary taxonomy. A team of researchers have discovered that a red dwarf star has a companion body with just twelve times the mass of Jupiter, but orbiting so far out that it almost certainly didn’t form by accretion within its primary’s circumstellar disk, like a planet, but by collapse of clouds of hydrogen gas, like a star. It’s a zoo out there.

Players - 9

Denise Childers was patient and meticulous, drawing out Randy Farrell on every point, making notes in a rounded hand. Summer prompted him to tell the story about how he had spotted Edie and her boyfriend in the shopping mall. Jerry Hill, leaning by the door with his arms folded across his chest, watched impassively. It took half an hour. At last Denise Childers closed her notebook and thanked Randy Farrell again, told him that the information he had given would greatly help the investigation.

She added casually, ‘By the way, is the name Joseph Kronenwetter familiar to you?’

‘Is he the guy that killed Edie?’

‘Have you ever heard the name before?’

Randy Farrell shook his head.

‘Did Edie ever mention it to you?’

Randy Farrell shook his head again. ‘She never mentioned this place, either. I don’t know what she was doing here.’

‘That’s something we’d very much like to find out too,’ Denise Childers said.

From his sentry position by the door, Jerry Hill said that he would take Summer and Randy Farrell to the hospital, get the chore of identifying the body out of the way. That was the word he used: chore. When Denise Childers gave him a sharp look, he said amiably, ‘You go ahead and write this up. I promise to take good care of them.’

As he drove Randy Farrell and Summer through the town in his cherry-red Dodge Ramcharger, Jerry Hill explained that Denise Childers was a good detective who liked to do things by the book, but sometimes the book got in the way of ordinary human decency. He, on the other hand, didn’t have a problem with letting them know about the latest developments in the case; in fact, he said, he considered it to be his Christian duty to enlighten them.

‘Denise spotted what she thought were marks made by some kind of shackle on one of the girl’s legs. When the ME confirmed her guess, all of a sudden we were looking at a potential kidnap/homicide. We started canvassing the area yesterday afternoon, and that’s when I had my lucky break,’ Jerry Hill said, smiling at Summer.

Randy Farrell said, ‘You found this guy. Kronenwetter.’

‘It’s better than that,’ Jerry Hill said. ‘Yesterday evening, I paid him a visit to ask him the questions we were asking everyone in the area. Mr Kronenwetter is known to us from various incidents involving trespass and poaching, and he’s done jail for assaulting a police officer. When I banged on the door of his shack, you can bet I had my pistol drawn and a couple of deputies at my back. The guy comes out reeking of whiskey, he’s shouting all kinds of wild nonsense, and he has a handgun stuck down the front of his pants. I arrested him for threatening a police officer, brought him in, booked him. When he went up before the judge for arraignment this morning, he was sent to the county jail for psychiatric evaluation, and around the same time we get a phone call telling us to take a look in his cellar. Which is where we found a set of leg-irons, the girl’s driver’s licence, her social security and library cards, her dress, and panties with blood on them that we’re gonna send off to Eugene for DNA typing.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Randy Farrell said.

Summer, riding shotgun beside Jerry Hill, turned to Randy Farrell and said, ‘Are you all right hearing this?’

Randy Farrell ignored her, asked Jerry Hill who had made the phone call that fingered this creep, he’d like to shake their hand.

‘Some guy who didn’t leave his name,’ Jerry Hill said. ‘We figure a neighbour. Joe Kronenwetter pissed off just about everyone unfortunate enough to live close by him. We went straight to the county jail and explained to him exactly how much trouble he was in, asked him if he had anything to say for himself. He didn’t say a word, just kept shaking his head and moaning. He wouldn’t even talk to the public defender. We left him there to be evaluated by the shrink, and to think about just how much trouble he’s in. When the District Attorney has finished the paperwork we’ll bring him in and charge him and go around it again.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Randy Farrell said again.

‘Don’t you worry, Randy, even if he keeps up the crazy-man act we have enough to put him away for a very long time.’ Jerry Hill aimed his grin at Summer. ‘So tell me, detective, you ever get this much excitement up in Portland?’

On Infodumping

Anonymous asks (regarding my post about novels as a vehicle for learning about stuff):

Why a minimum of infodumping? The infodumping is often quite enjoyable. (And on rare occasions from writers we won't name, the best part).

Well, liking most infodumps is certainly nothing to be ashamed - so unless you’re a character from an Italo Calvino novel, Anonymous, you don’t need to hide behind a pseudonym.

The only kind of infodump that’s rightly despised is the infamous dialogue form (‘As you know, Professor,’ a character will begin, and then tell the Professor what they both know). Other than that, the three main types of infodump that I recognise are all perfectly fine. There’s the catch-up or historical infodump, which summarises compresses events outside the main narrative (It was ten years before she saw her husband again - a time of immense change...). There’s the interiorised travelogue, which uses the character’s response to events or landscape to smuggle in information. And there’s the straight-no chaser unabashed infodump - a sentence, a paragraph, a page, that nakedly and often rhapsodically explains something.

I’ve used all three kinds of infodump in just about every novel I’ve written, and don’t intend to stop now, but I’m going to have to show some restraint this time around, for otherwise the whole damned book will be a kind of prose-poem landscape rapture about Saturn’s moons. And while they are as wonderful and wild and strange than anything ever imagined, I want to bring them to life by having my characters inhabit them, and then there’s the small matter of this big sprawling plot I have to fit in...

Farewell...

...Smart-1.

Players - 8

Cedar Falls was a sprawling town cut east to west by the Umpqua River and north to south by the cantilevered lanes of the I-5. Summer Ziegler followed the long curve of the freeway exit down to a four-lane boulevard lined with motels and gas stations, drove across a concrete bridge that spanned the sluggish river, and bumped over a single-track railroad that ran along the western edge of the town centre. The train station had been converted to a bank. There were several blocks of shops and restaurants and small businesses; houses straggled up the steep side of the river valley towards a bare crest crowned by radio, TV and microwave antennae.

The Macabee County Sheriff’s office occupied two floors of the town’s Justice Building, a four-storey slab of concrete and tinted glass that shared a block with the Macabee County Juvenile Correctional Facility, the city hall, and an imposing Greek Revival courthouse. The detectives’ bullpen was on the third floor, a long room cluttered with pairs of back-to-back desks and rows of filing cabinets. On one side, offices, interview rooms and holding cells; on the other, tall windows and a nice view across the town towards the river. This was where Summer Ziegler and Randy Farrell met Denise Childers, the detective in charge of the investigation into Edie Collier’s death. Denise Childers introduced them to her partner, Jerry Hill, told Randy Farrell that she was very sorry for his loss, and started to explain that although the Sheriff’s office in Macabee County didn’t have the resources of a big city like Portland, on the whole they managed pretty well.

Jerry Hill said, ‘What Denise is trying to tell you is that we turned this case from an accidental death to a kidnap/homicide and brought in the doer, all inside of twenty-four hours.’

Summer said, ‘Wait a minute. Someone kidnapped Edie Collier?’

Randy Farrell said, ‘You know who this guy is? You arrested him?’

He spoke so loudly that a woman working at a nearby photocopier turned to look at him.

‘Hold on there, Mr Farrell,’ Denise Childers said, shooting an annoyed look at Jerry Hill. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

‘If you arrested some creep for this, I think I have the right to know about it,’ Randy Farrell said.

‘All I can tell you is that we’ve arrested a man, but we haven’t charged him yet,’ Denise Childers said.

She was slightly built and in her early forties, wearing blue jeans and a suede jacket, shoulder-length auburne hair clipped back from her pale face. It was the kind of face, Summer thought, that looked out at you from Depression-era photographs of migrant workers, from earlier photographs of pioneer families posed in the doorways of their sod cabins. Careworn but tough. Determined and forthright.

Jerry Hill said, ‘The guy we like for this is a local boy. I arrested him yesterday over another matter, and this morning we came across some stuff that ties him to Edie Collier.’

A burly man in his forties, with a cap of dry blond hair and the hectic complexion of a dedicated drinker, Jerry Hill was wearing blue jeans too, with a blue short-sleeved shirt, and a burgundy-knit tie spotted with old grease stains. A Sig-Sauer .38 rode on his right hip. Summer felt overdressed in her grey pants suit, and her good black purse slung over her shoulder.

Randy Farrell said, ‘What kind of stuff?’

Denise Childers said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Farrell, but we can’t go into that at this stage.’

Jerry Hill said, ‘We haven’t questioned him yet, which is why Denise is being so cautious, but believe you me, he’s square in the frame. He’s going down.’

Randy Farrell was bewildered and angry. Blood flushed his sallow cheeks at the hinges of his jaw. He said, ‘You knew that Edie was killed, you found the fucker that did it, and you didn’t tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now, aren’t I? And watch your language, sport,’ Jerry Hill said, smiling at Summer. ‘There are ladies present.’

‘How did you expect him to react?’ Summer said.

She’d taken an instant dislike to Denise Childers’s partner. Jerry Hill appeared to be the perfect example of the kind of macho old-school cop who made a lot of noise about having no time for political correctness or snotty-nosed college kids who believed they were better than police who’d learned their trade on the street, the kind who made sure that suspects banged their heads when they were put in the back of a car, who believed it was a fine joke to ask a female colleague how they were hanging.

Denise Childers said, ‘It was my call, Mr Farrell. I thought it would be better to speak to you about this in person. We’re just as anxious as you are to get at the truth, and I promise you that we are going to do our best by Edie. That’s why we’d appreciate it if we could talk to you about her.’

Jerry Hill said, ‘Just a little Q&A. A man like you, I’m sure you know the drill.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Randy Farrell said bitterly. ‘I know the drill.’

Summer said, ‘Remember that you’re here for Edie, Mr Farrell.’

Randy Farrell turned on her. ‘You knew that all along that she’d been murdered, didn’t you?’
‘I know as much about this as you.’

Summer had offered to help the investigation into Edie Collier’s death when she had talked to Denise Childers on the phone last night, suggested that she could try to track down the girl’s boyfriend, ask him what he thought she might have been doing in Cedar Falls. She’d been hoping that she could turn Ryland Nelsen’s errand into something meaty, something that would prove to the other detectives in the Robbery Unit that she had the right stuff, prove that she could do her job without someone looking over her shoulder, give her career a nice push. But that was blown out of the water now.

Learning The World

In another of his short essays about the novel, John Sutherland meditates on the role of the novel as a vehicle for instruction and ‘clueing-up’ in the ways of the world. He’s pretty sympathetic to science fiction, pointing out that it ‘has done as much for the factual scientific education of the average reader as all the educational reforms introduced since CP Snow’s 1959 polemic The Two Cultures lamented his fellow Britons’ epidemic ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics.’ And while I at first bridled at Sutherland’s suggestion that because a high proportion of Americans believe in X-File alien probings (how quickly SF authors get tired of being asked about UFOs), SF may have been responsible for ‘dumbing down the citizenry’, on reflection, he has a good point; after all, although SF writers aren’t responsible for the finer flights of fancy of flying saucer afficiendos, they did after all invent and propogate tropes about aliens and alien invasions. And worse than flying saucer fever, SF has produced a clutch of post-catastrophe novels that mendaciously suggest that plague, nuclear war or asteroid impact may be a beneficial winnowing of the dumb and undeserving, and that clever and resourceful people will flourish and bring in a Utopia. As if. (On the plus side, SF in the 1950s and 1960s definitely boosted interest in space travel; many people working for NASA were hooked by SF at an impressionable age.)

Whether or not novels instruct and enlighten the reader and make her a ‘better, or at least, better informed’ citizen (a lovely notion), they certainly allow the authors to indulge in their interests and obsessions. I had a lot of fun researching paleolithic art and theories of consciousness for Mind’s Eye, and delving into police procedures and the economies of massively multiplayer online role-playing games for Players. And right now I’m deeply immersed in the landscapes of Saturn’s moons, trying to figure out how to convey their strange and wonderful beauty with a minimum of infodumping.

Players - 7

Carl Kelley braced Pat Metcalf Wednesday lunchtime, when the security company manager arrived at the estate for his weekly inspection. Walking straight up to him, saying, ‘I want a word.’

'Make it quick. I’m running late.’

They were standing beside Metcalf’s black Range Rover in the parking lot by the gatehouse, with a view down the valley to the tall narrow vee of the dam and the lake spread behind it, the ruins of the old lodge and holiday cabins on one side, forest on the other. It was a warm, sunny day. A hawk was circling in the stark blue sky.

Carl said, ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I found one of your guys in the mansion last night, wandering around the trophy room.’

‘Yeah, Frank Wilson told me about that,’ Metcalf said. ‘He also told me you threatened him.’

‘He was pricing Mr Merrit’s possessions like an auctioneer. What are you going to do about it?’

‘He found the door open and checked it out. Why should I do anything?’

Pat Metcalf was a heavy-set man with an untidy mop of hair dyed blond, wearing a sport jacket over a white shirt and bolo tie. He’d been a senior detective in LAPD’s Vice Unit until he ended up on the wrong side of an assault charge after beating up a working girl and putting her in a coma because she wouldn’t give him a freebie. That had been ten years ago, but he still possessed a cop’s bullish arrogance and made it clear that he considered Carl to be some kind of untrustworthy freeloading lowlife. Saying in passing, ‘I’ve got your number, buddy.’ Or, ‘Don’t think I don’t know.’ Or, ‘You and me, anywhere, any time.’ Eye-fucking him with belligerent contempt. Daring him to try something.

Metcalf was giving Carl that look now. Carl gave it right back, saying, ‘Did you know that Frank Wilson has done time? I don’t suppose you do, or you wouldn’t have hired him.’

‘I interview a guy for a job, I can’t ask him was he ever arrested. That’s a straight violation of Federal law -- invasion of privacy. I can’t ask him if he’s ever been a mental patient either, or if he’s gay or has HIV.’

‘Frank Wilson is sporting a prison tattoo on his hand. He was definitely convicted for something,’ Carl said.

‘So?’

‘So that story about finding the door open was a load of bullshit.’

‘I told you, the guy got lost.’

‘Which reminds me of the other thing that bothers me. Here’s a bloke wandering around the trophy room, claiming to have wandered in through an open door. But why was the door open in the first place?’

‘Maybe there’s a problem with your system. If I were you, I’d get it fixed,’ Metcalf said, and made a move to go past Carl.

Carl said, ‘Either the system was broken, or Mr Frank Wilson got hold of a bracelet that allowed him entry into a part of the mansion where he had no business being. Maybe I should look into that.’

‘What do you want me to do? Fire his ass?’

‘That’s what I’d do.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t have to find halfway decent guards who’ll take wages that’re less than they can earn flipping burgers. And you know what? I’d rather employ someone who’s done jail than some crazy queer dripping with the virus.’

‘If all your employees are like him, maybe we’d better find another security company.’

‘If you’re not happy with the service my company provides, why don’t you raise the matter with Mr Merrit? Oh, but I bet you already ran to him with your paranoid little story, and he told you to forget about it. Is that why you’re sore?’

‘I’m pissed off because there’s been a breach in security and you aren’t taking it seriously.’

‘There hasn’t been any breach in security,’ Metcalf said with exaggerated patience, ‘so quit bothering me with this weak shit about conspiracy to rob or whatever. Stick to your own job, whatever the fuck it is, and keep your nose out of my business.’

Carl let the man walk past, then said to his back, ‘Who mentioned anything about a conspiracy?’

Unsurprisingly...

...Kim Newman and I didn’t win a Hugo for our little performance piece at last year’s Hugo award ceremony in Glasgow, but at least we lost out to one of the best episodes from the terrific first series Doctor Who; it’s been a while since a British TV show has been nominated for, let alone won, a Hugo, and the revived Doctor Who has been British TV at its best. Good to see, too, that Robert Charles Wilson won a Hugo for his novel Spin - a well-deserved tick mark for a fine, thoughtful and imaginative writer.

I wasn’t at Anaheim, and thanks to the time difference between the UK and California, I slept through the award ceremony. But I’ve been to enough of the things to know how it goes. The only sensible and sane reaction to having your work put on the short list for an award is to think how nice to be noticed, but of course I won’t win, not when when I’m up against relentless self-promotor X, the tremendously popular Y, or the unfairly talented Z. But if you attend the ceremony, you can’t help feeling, as the moment approaches, that perhaps you really do have a chance of winning - why else would you have put yourself through all this? Not that you tell anyone that you fancy your chances of course, knowing full well that hubris is a lightning conductor for fate, but despite the fact that the sensible part of your brain continues to list the cold hard reasons why you aren’t going to win, your serene self-belief continues to persist right up to the moment that the grinning envelope-opener announces that the award has gone to someone else. In fact, for a split-second, as X, Y, or Z leaps up and lopes for the stage, you exist in a parallel universe where you have won, but then applause for the winner collapses that still-born reality, and it’s time to congratulate the winner and find a stiff consolatory drink to calm your nerves. Having spared myself that ordeal, all I have to do is thank everyone who nominated and voted for us.

Exterminate!

Spare cash burning a hole in your pocket? Why not bid on this home-made robot with more than a passing resemblance to the croak-voiced enemies of Doctor Who?

Point And Click

Suggest a target for the Mars Orbiter Camera on board Mars Global Surveyor.


And here’s one of my favourite of all of the pictures beamed back from the still-functioning pair of Mars rovers. Not only because it was taken on my birthday last year, but also because sunset on Mars really makes you realise that it’s so very different from Earth.

(Note - the direct link to the picture turned out to be broken, but you can get to it via the NASA homepage by clicking on Larger Image.)

Players - 6

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

‘Have you remembered anything more about him?’

Before driving to the Farrells’ house Summer had phoned around Portland’s five precincts in case Edie Collier’s boyfriend had reported her missing, but she’d had no luck.

Randy Farrell said, ‘I saw them together once, by accident. I was on the floor above them in the Lloyd Center, looking to buy something for Lucinda’s birthday. I saw Edie with some young guy outside the multiplex there.’

‘Did you get a good look at him?’

‘When I spotted them, like I said, I was on the floor above. By the time I had ridden down on the escalator, they’d split. Went to see a movie, I guess.’ Randy Farrell was quiet for a moment. Summer glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He was looking at something inside his head and the corners of his mouth were turned down. Saying at last, ‘I just realized that was the last time I saw her.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two weeks ago to the day. I got Lucinda a crystal dolphin. She loves shit like that. Edie didn’t even send a card, I’m sorry to say.’

‘That was the only time you saw Edie’s boyfriend?’

‘If the guy she was with was her boyfriend, yeah.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I didn’t really get to look at him.’

‘Well, was he white or black?’

‘White.’

‘How old would you say?’

‘I guess about Edie’s age. Maybe a little older, it’s hard to say.’

‘Edie was eighteen.’

‘Nineteen next month.’

‘So this boyfriend, Billy no-last-name, was eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Maybe a little older. I didn’t get a real good look.’

‘How tall was he?’

‘I was pretty far away.’

‘Taller than Edie? Shorter?’

‘Maybe a head taller. He had black hair, too, shoulder length.’

‘What he was wearing?’

‘Jeans, I think. Blue jeans. And a big plaid shirt, some kids wear them like a coat over their T-shirt? Like that. And he had a briefcase too. Apart from that, he looked like any of those kids who hang around Pioneer Square.’

‘What kind of briefcase?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it metal or leather?’

Randy Farrell thought for a moment. ‘I guess it was more like one of those cases you carry those small computers in. You know, with a shoulder strap.’

‘A laptop computer case.’

‘I guess.’

‘Did you get a look at his face?’

‘I only saw him from behind.’

‘Shoulder-length black hair, blue jeans, a plaid shirt. And a computer case.’ It wasn’t much, but it was something. There couldn’t be too many street kids who lugged around a laptop computer - or, at least, its case.

Randy Farrell said, ‘Edie told me they were in love. She showed me this cheap ring he bought her. Way she talked you could see she thought he was Mr Wonderful, but don’t you guys say that in a murder case the first suspect is the one nearest the victim?’

‘I don’t have an opinion one way or another, Mr Farrell. It isn’t my case.’

Snakes On A Plane

Kim Newman has to see it on the day of release because there are no press shows; how could I resist the invitation to tag along? Along with the usual ads and trailers the presage the main feature, there’s one of those short films for Orange mobiles in which a star makes a pitch that’s derided by a committee of movie execs interested only in product placement. This time the star is Steven Seagal, and the piece is snappily directed and packed with sharp one-liners and neat parodies on action movie tropes. In short, it’s everything that the main feature aspires to be. The set-up is famously simple. Brutal Hawaiian gangster Eddie Kim wants to get rid of a witness (Wolf Creek’s Nathan Phillips) to his slaying of a public defender, and arranges for a big crate full of venomous snakes and equipped with a timer release to be placed on the 747 in which the witness, under the protection of Samuel L. Jackson’s FBI agent, is flying to Los Angeles. The snakes are released and people start dying as the 747 lumbers into a tropical storm. The mayhem on the plane is fine, there are some good jokes and shocks, air stewardess Julianna Margulies is a nice foil to Samuel L. Jackson’s cool, and of course there’s the famous line added after the webstorm of publicity. But the movie can’t make up its mind whether it’s a spam-in-a-cabin slasher or an Airplane!, the snakes, mostly very obviously CGI’d, are a pretty monotonous multi-headed enemy that doesn’t do much but snap and lunge, a promising sub-plot with a rogue snake farmer is dismissed too quickly, and the action sags for about twenty minutes before picking up for a slum-dunk ending. Snakes On A Plane doesn’t live up to its hype (what movie could?), but it could have been a lot worse than it is, and at ninety minutes it definitely doesn't outstay its welcome.

Here's Kim's pithier review.

Players - 5

It was a straight shot down the I-5, through the Willamette Valley to the beginning of Oregon’s banana belt. It started to rain soon after they set out, but forty miles south of Portland the sun broke through, lighting up a ragged chasm in the clouds, probing farmland on either side of the freeway with slanting fingers of light. Randy Farrell spent the first part of the trip zoned out in the back seat of the Police Bureau Taurus, waking only when Summer turned off the I-5 at Springfield for a pit stop at a Wendy’s. After picking over his plain burger and fries, he disappeared into the men’s room. Ten minutes later, Summer went to look for him and found him out back by a Dumpster, sucking on the last half-inch of a tightly rolled joint.

‘I’m licensed to use it,’ he said, giving her a defiant look. ‘It helps control the nausea I get after I eat. You don’t believe me, I have a registration card my doctor gave me.’

‘I don’t need to see your card, Mr Farrell. I’ll wait by the car until you’ve finished, but don’t be too long.’

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

The Hearts of Conspiracy Theorists Everywhere Quicken

According to Sky News, NASA has lost the original footage of man's first steps on the moon.

Playlist

After seeing the picture of my office that I posted here, Fred Kiesche asked me about the CDs lined up above my computer - what are they, and do I listen to them while I work? Mostly, like the fat wedge of Steely Dan, they’re the overspill from the groaning shelves downstairs in the living room, leavened with a bunch of recent arrivals - stuff by The Handsome Family, Richmond Fontaine, Drive-By Truckers, Ali Farka Toure, Roy Harper, Lokua Kanza, reggae compilations... Pretty mainstream stuff, really (the racks of 1920s and 1930s American music are all downstairs).

I don’t listen to much music when I’m doing the first draft, but having familiar stuff on random play on the computer helps rhythm and flow of the endless redrafting (it has to be familiar stuff, so it works mostly on my back brain). The older I get, the less distraction I can tolerate.

Some of my novels have a soundtrack; some don’t. Players doesn’t, because I think that using musical preferences as a short-hand for characterization in thrillers is a bit of a tired cliche - and too often it’s a form of showing-off by the author too.* I suspect that if Summer Ziegler listens to anything, it would be jazz-lite solo singer stuff; she certainly doesn’t slump down in an easy chair at the end of the day and sip bonded bourbon while listening to Dock Boggs.

*I know, I know: I'm guilty of it in Whole Wide World, but the punk thing is supposed to be part of John's voice rather than a quirky character tic. Honest.

On the other hand, Cowboy Angels, which was partly inspired by the idea of the lost, weird America Greil Marcus wrote about in Lost Republic does have a soundtrack. Here it is (the songs on it are either name-checked or hinted at in the text, and appear in narrative order):

Man Gave Names To All The Animals - Bob Dylan
Hook And Line - Hatton Brothers
Acony Bell - Gillian Welch
Kentucky Avenue - Tom Waits
Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention
Wolf Among Wolves - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
America - Simon & Garfunkel
Romance in Durango - Bob Dylan
Cold Cold Cold - The Handsome Family
Lost in the Flood - Bruce Springsteen
I See A Darkness - Johnny Cash
Slow Train Coming - Bob Dylan
I Dream A Highway - Gillian Welch
Train Song - Tom Waits

The McLuhan Test

Professor John Sutherland, in an article in the Guardian Review, passes on Marshall McLuhan’s simple but sage advice on how to decide whether or not a novel is worth buying. All you have to do is open the book at page 69 and read it; if you like that page, you’ll like the book.

In that spirit, here’s page 69 from the paperback edition of Mind’s Eye. I hope you like it. (More extracts from Players are in the pipeline, by the way, but I can't guarantee which will contain the material that will appear on page 69 of the finished book. )

5.

Harriet’s instructions took her to the edge of the London A-Z, to Enfield and a small café in the middle of a short row of shops hunched in the thunder and diesel wind of the A10's busy dual carriageway. Her handler, Jack Nicholl, had arranged the meeting with an MI5 agent, Susan Blackmore, and an informer in the Kurdish community. ‘She’ll be very protective of the guy,’ Jack Nicholl had said. ‘If anything looks funny to her, she’ll blow the meet and I won’t be able to fix you up with another. So be cool, and do everything she asks.’

Harriet allowed Susan Blackmore to pat her down in the café’s toilet. The MI5 agent searched Harriet’s handbag and confiscated her mobile phone for the duration.

‘If I see any sign that my man is going to be followed, I’ll call this off at once,’ she said.
‘I understand.’

‘And I’ll also call it off if I think someone is eavesdropping, using a video camera, or taking photographs.’

‘You don’t have to worry -- ’

‘And I will sit in while you talk with him. That’s not negotiable.’

‘Of course.’

Harriet bought two coffees and followed Susan Blackmore to a table outside the café. The MI5 agent was in her late twenties, only a year or two older than Harriet. She wore her mouse-brown hair in a ponytail pulled back

That Was Then, This Is Now

In these troubled times, when even toothpaste is a suspect substance, it’s far harder to practice do-it-your-self rocketry. How innocent we were, back then, in the Cold War, how innocent.

Rocket Boy

A little while after my tunnelling exploits, I discovered chemistry. One of my chemistry teachers had worked in an explosives research laboratory during the Second World War, and showed us how to make thermite, what happened when you dropped potassium metal into water, and why it isn’t a good idea to hit lead azide with a hammer. And in those days (back when there was still a space race), you could go to a chemist’s shop and buy strips of magnesium, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, aluminium powder, both kinds of iron oxide . . .

And then there was the mix of a certain weedkiller (now outlawed) and sugar that formed a junior but potent version of thermite. With a length of guttering as a Fireball XL5 style launch pad, lightly modified plastic bottles, and my weedkiller/sugar mix, I was in the rocket business. Some of the rocket bottles flew a surprising distance; one certainly surprised me by shooting about a hundred feet into the air in a graceful arc that carried it over the brook into a trash pile in the yard of the blast furnace. Like Wernher von Braun, I had aimed for the stars, but hit a civilian target instead. Luckily the small fire that the burning rocket bottle started went out before I had to wade across the brook to deal with it. Even more luckily, I still have all my fingers and thumbs; the only souvenir of my rocketry experiments is a small oval scar at the base of my right thumb.

Talk Is Free

I had to turn off comments for a while because a spambot fell in love with this blog. I think it has gone somewhere else now, so comments are back on. If you're interested, that is.

Dig This

The story of the tunnelling exploits of the Hackney Mole reminds me of my brief childhood career of making trenches and tunnels that invariably collapsed after only a couple of feet. Although I was inspired by stories of British soldiers digging their way out of German prisoner-of-war camps, I failed to pay sufficient attention to the technical details of props and linings. Besides, it was easier to carve mazes out of the abundant stands of stinging nettles that grew under the apple and pear trees of our little orchard, or to build camps from sticks and willow branches on the tiny island in the wide shallow pond at the bottom of the disused lock.

I grew up in the third of a row of four Elizabethan cottages in the little community of Dudbridge, a couple of miles from the Cotswold town of Stroud. To the front we had a view of a factory; to one side was the factory’s sports ground and to the other, across a brook, a small blast furnace; and at the rear was the pond where the brook ran into the old disused canal, and the prospect of countryside beyond. The cottages were each no more than three rooms stacked one on the other with a kitchen and bathroom tacked onto the back, but the acre of gardens behind them were a generous playground, and at a very early age I was allowed to roam farther afield, and expend my considerable energy in the tracks and hollows and abandoned quarries of Selsley Common.

Children are natural guerrillas, and the many of the books I read as a child - Just William books, the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons, Wind in the Willows, and Lord of the Flies - acknowledged this. I hope there are equivalent adventures in contemporary children’s books, but the few I have read were either examples of urban realism dealing with ‘issues’, or full-blown fantasy. Are there any that treat children as creatures whose natural behaviour is much more like that of Ratty and Mole and Badger (there is no better example of a den than Badger’s home in the Wild Wood) than the contemporary idea of children as miniature, unfallen, unformed adults?

Going Underground

I moved to London ten years ago, and very nearly bought a ground-floor flat opposite a derelict house that was owned by the famous Hackney Mole. Oddly, the estate agent didn’t mention at the time that with only a little excavation I could have had access to the Mole’s underground empire.

Players 3

On the way to confront his boss, to find out just how badly the man had screwed up while he’d been away, Carl Kelley came across one of the security guards in the trophy room. The guy had no right or reason to be there. A computerized system allowed or denied residents, guests, visitors and employees access to different parts of the mansion’s towers and outbuildings according to codes in the electronic bracelets everyone had to wear. The security guards who manned the main gate and patrolled the perimeter of the estate were allowed into the gatehouse, the kitchens and the staff dining room, that was it, but here was the new guy who’d started work just last week, Frank Wilson, wandering around a room reserved only for those with the highest privilege rating.

The trophy room took up much of the ground floor of the main tower: adobe walls hung with the heads of cougars and antelope and pronghorn deer; leather armchairs, low tables and zebra-skin rugs scattered around the central open-hearth fireplace, with its platform of rough stone and its copper hood that was as big as the vent of a Moon rocket. Carl stood just beyond the open door, a wiry middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and black cargo pants, an athletic bag slung over one shoulder. The security guard, Wilson, was bending to look at things in low alcoves, leaning close to things on shelves, turning now as Carl walked across the room towards him

‘This is some place, huh?’ Wilson said, with a quick, false smile.

‘I hope you didn’t touch anything,’ Carl said. ‘It takes for ever to reset the system.’

Each collectable and piece of art was tagged with an RFID chip, a little printed circuit that sent out a coded signal when pulsed with a specific radio frequency. It was possible to bring up a virtual schematic of any room in the mansion and see the pieces standing in place like chess pieces on a board. If anything was moved by so much as an inch, its icon would turn red and started blinking; if it was carried off, the computer would lock down doors and trigger the alarms.

‘I was just looking, is all,’ Wilson said. He was a good six inches taller than Carl, and wore a light blue shirt with black epaulettes that matched his pants. A nightstick, a radio and a five-cell flashlight were hooked to his belt.

Carl said, giving it right back to him, ‘Did you see anything that took your fancy?’

‘I bet you’re wondering how I got in here. What happened, I was checking the lights along the driveway,’ Wilson said. He pulled a voltage tester from the back pocket of his pants and showed it to Carl. A pair of eights was tattooed on the knuckles of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. ‘Maybe you noticed some of them haven’t been coming on when they should. Anyhow, I saw the main door was open, I thought I should check it out, and I found the door to this room open too.’

Carl said, ‘It’s a funny thing, but the main door wasn’t open just now.’

‘I guess I must have shut it when I came in,’ Wilson said.

The man was still smiling, but something had hardened in his gaze. It took Carl back to the army, and to the orphanage before that. Two guys sizing each other up, neither ready to back down.

He said, ‘That door won’t open for anyone who isn’t supposed to be here. I got to be somewhere, but first I’ll have to let you out.’

He let Frank Wilson walk ahead of him, across the trophy room and through the doorway into the double-height foyer beyond, the man looking left and right, checking out the stuff in glass-fronted steel cabinets, in niches cut into the pink adobe. Pieces of Japanese armour mixed up with scratch-built fantasy pieces. Cases of knives and knuckledusters. Human skulls modified with sagittal crests, fangs, bony spines or frills. Stairs curved to the left and right, and high above hung a kind of chandelier of welded steel and a couple of dozen TVs, old-fashioned cathode-ray tubes without casings, circuit boards and bundles of wires open to the air, the TVs facing in different directions, showing different scenes from Trans, the computer game that had paid for all this.

Wilson said, ‘He sure has a lot of stuff. Like a museum, uh?’

‘This is my favourite piece,’ Carl said, stepping over to a niche under the sweep of the left-hand staircase, where a ceremonial sword rested on two pieces of black oak, its curved blade pulled halfway out of its red lacquered scabbard, a red tassel hanging at the end of its pommel. ‘It’s Korean, three centuries old.’

‘It’s nice,’ Wilson said without any enthusiasm, clearly wanting to get out of there now.

Carl said, ‘They used it for executions. I tried it out myself once, on a dog. Sliced through the neck-bones like they were butter.’

Players 2

Before driving over to the Southeast Precinct, Summer had checked out Edie’s stepfather, Randy Farrell, on the computer, and confirmed her suspicion that he had a record. White male, black hair, brown eyes. Five foot seven, one hundred forty pounds -- not a big guy, but he had thirty pounds and a couple of inches on her. His D.O.B. made him fifty-four years old. No scars or other identifying marks, no FBI number . . . Most of his crimes were minor -- housebreaking, receiving or attempting to sell stolen goods -- and he’d been given plenty of second chances or through plea agreements had received probation instead of jail time, which made Summer suspect that he was some detective’s confidential informant. But he’d served time in the gladiatorial arena of state prison at Salem after having been convicted of conspiracy to rob, and with no less than three charges of assault to his name it looked as if he was quick to use his fists. She remembered that he’d sat right behind his stepdaughter in the courtroom, arms folded across the front of his denim jacket, hair lacquered back from his temples, sucking on a permanently sour expression; remembered how he’d bulled up to her in the busy corridor outside the courtroom after Edie Collier had been sentenced, asking her how she liked sending a young girl to jail, turning on his heel and stomping off after she’d advised him to take it up with the judge. Randy Farrell’s wife, Edie Collier’s mother, had a record of violence, too: threatening behaviour and several charges of assault, including one on a high-school teacher that had gotten her a year’s probation, plus one charge of public drunkenness and three DUIs; her driver’s licence had been suspended after the last, two months ago.

Anticipating trouble, Summer was happy to have Laura at her back as she walked up to the bungalow. It was dusk now. Lights were burning in a couple of the bungalow’s windows, but Summer had to lean on the doorbell for more than a minute before she saw movement behind the three stepped panes of frosted glass in the front door. When it opened, Summer straightened her back and held up her badge, saw from the corner of her eye Laura move her right hand towards the Glock holstered on her hip. But the man who stood in the doorway was a skinny scarecrow, barefoot in a dressing gown that hung open over a T-shirt and boxer shorts, his face sallow and sunken and sporting the makings of a black eye. It took Summer a long moment to recognize in this ruin the man she’d faced down outside the courtroom just six months ago.

He stared at Summer without seeming to recognize her, stared at Laura, and said, ‘Whatever you’re selling, I don’t need it.’

Summer asked if she could speak with his wife.

‘What kind of trouble has she gotten herself into now?’

‘She isn’t in any trouble that I know of, Mr Farrell. Could you have her come to the door?’

‘Lucinda ain’t in any fit state to talk to the police. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’
‘It’s about her daughter, Mr Farrell. If she can’t come to the door, you should let us in. We need to talk with her.’

The man’s attitude, a junkyard dog defending its turf, evaporated. ‘This is about Edie? What happened? Is she hurt, in hospital somewhere?’

‘Let us in, Mr Farrell. We need to talk to your wife.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Randy Farrell said, and closed his eyes for a moment.

Laura said, ‘We don’t want to talk about this out here, Mr Farrell, in full view of your neighbours, and I’m sure you don’t want to either. So why don’t we go inside?’

‘I guess,’ Randy Farrell said, standing aside. ‘But I should warn you, Lucinda’s more than half in the bag, and she ain’t taking prisoners.’

Summer and Laura followed him down a narrow hall stacked with cardboard cartons. The air was hot and close, and stank of cigarette smoke and greasy cooking.

‘In there,’ Randy Farrell said, with a wave of a hand towards an archway filled with the flicker of TV light.

Lucinda Farrell slumped on a plastic-covered couch, a blown-up bear of a woman in a pink sweatshirt and grey sweatpants, clutching a tall glass half-full of icecubes to her bosom as she watched Oprah on the big TV across the room. A fifth of vodka, a gallon jug of orange juice, a washing-up bowl heaped with popcorn, and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs crowded a bamboo coffee table. When Summer stepped into the room, Lucinda Farrell looked at her and said with shrill but forceful scorn that cut through the laughter and applause of Oprah’s audience, ‘I got nothing to say to any cops, so why don’t the both of you march straight on out of here.’

Randy Farrell said from the archway, ‘Take it easy, why don’t you? They got something to tell you. About Edie.’

‘Edie? Fuck her. Fuck you too, for letting in these fuckers.’

Summer switched on the ceiling lights and in the sudden glare crossed the room and punched off the TV and took a position directly in front of the woman on the couch. Laura was standing just inside the archway, ready to block Randy Farrell if he tried to cause trouble. Summer said, ‘How about we start over, Mrs Farrell?’

The woman stared at Summer. Bleached hair dry as straw stuck out around her pugnacious face. ‘My daughter ran out on me four months back. Anything she did, it isn’t my problem, she’s over eighteen now. So how about you say what you got to say and get out.’

Summer waited a beat, making it clear that she was doing this in her own time. ‘Mrs Farrell, your daughter was found badly injured this morning, in woods near a town by the name of Cedar Falls. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that she died on the way to hospital.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Randy Farrell said softly.

Lucinda Farrell leaned forwards and with the frowning concentration of a small child sloshed a good three fingers of vodka into her glass. She added a splash of orange juice, sucked down half the drink, and said to no one in particular, ‘So that’s that.’

‘Mrs Farrell, the Sheriff’s office in Cedar Falls would like you to make a formal identification -- ’

The woman flapped a hand. ‘She was dead to me when she left this house. I told her so, she said she didn’t give a fuck, and she hasn’t been back since. So why should I give a fuck now?’

‘You need to do the right thing by your daughter,’ Summer said.

‘I already done all I could by her,’ Lucinda Farrell said flatly, and drained the rest of her drink.

Summer tried to talk her around, but the woman retreated into stubborn silence, clutching her glass in her swollen paws and glaring at a spot somewhere beyond Summer’s left shoulder. At last, Summer said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about this again.’

‘Switch on the fucking TV on your way out. I wanna see Oprah ask Demi Moore about her toyboy.’

Summer ignored her request, and in the hallway asked Randy Farrell if Edie’s biological father lived in Portland.

‘He died in a car accident way before I met Lucinda. Edie kept his name, but if she has a father -- Jesus, had one -- it would be me.’

Summer said, ‘I’ll have to come back tomorrow, Mr Farrell. I have to talk to your wife again.’

‘Won’t do any good.’

‘The local police need her to ID her daughter. It’s a formality, but it has to be done before they can release the body. And at some point your wife will have to think about funeral arrangements.’

Randy Farrell shook his head. ‘Lucinda meant what she said about Edie being dead to her. She never once tried to find her after she ran off, never once visited her when she was in jail . . . ’

‘Talk to her, Mr Farrell. Tell her that she needs to do the right thing by Edie. I’ll come by
tomorrow morning, talk to her again.’

‘She sets her mind to something, that’s it. Edie was the same way.’ Randy Farrell looked at Summer and said, ‘How she ended up, out there in the woods. You have any idea how she got there?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Farrell. It isn’t my case.’

Before setting out for the Southeast Precinct, Summer had called the Cedar Falls Sheriff’s office and talked briefly with Denise Childers, the detective in charge of the case. The woman had been friendly enough, but hadn’t given anything away.

Randy Farrell said, ‘She didn’t have any reason to leave Portland I knew of. You should ask her boyfriend what she was doing out there.’

When Summer had been given this job, she’d believed that she wouldn’t get much out of it. If she messed up, she would confirm Ryland Nelsen’s unvoiced suspicion that she was a hotshot promoted beyond her experience and capability. And if she did okay she’d probably be landed with every next-of-kin notification the Robbery Unit had to deal with: it was the kind of dirty, thankless task that male cops liked to pass on to their female colleagues because, according to them, women had better people skills. Now, though, she felt a twinge of interest and said, ‘Do you have a name and address for this boyfriend?’

Randy Farrell stared past her for a moment, then said, ‘I think it was Billy something.’

‘Do you have a last name? An address?’

Randy Farrell shook his head. ‘I never met the guy, and I only talked to Edie one time after she took up with him. She told me she and him were living out of his van. I wasn’t too happy, hearing that, but she said she was doing fine.’

‘When did she leave home?’

‘First week in February, just after her birthday. She and her mother had a big bust-up.’

‘And she ran off to be with her boyfriend?’

Randy Farrell shrugged.

‘How long had she known him?’

‘Let’s put it this way, I’d never heard of him before she ran off.’

‘Does he have a job?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘They were living in his van. Where did they park at night?’

‘Somewhere over near the airport I think.’

Laura said, ‘I’ll ask the guys in the Northeast Precinct to keep a look out. Mr Farrell, do you know if they had a regular spot where they parked at night? Up in Piedmont, maybe? Maywood Park?’

‘Somewhere near the airport, that’s all I know.’

‘How about you tell me something about this van,’ Laura said. ‘Make, colour -- anything at all.’
‘Like I said, I never met him, and I never saw his van either.’

Summer said, ‘Take your time, Mr Farrell. Anything you can remember could be a big help.’

‘I remember that she was happy, when I saw her. She had plans, she was thinking of going back to school . . . What will happen to her if no one looks after her? To her body, I mean?’

Summer said, ‘If no one claims her, the state will serve as sponsor.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. And the state will bury her in a cardboard coffin without a marker. She doesn’t deserve that.’ Randy Farrell paused, then told Summer, ‘I know who you are. You’re the one arrested Edie just before Christmas. You were in uniform then, but I don’t forget a face. Listen, it’s okay, I’m not blaming you for what happened to her, but how about cutting me a break?’

‘If you want to help Edie, Mr Farrell, you should persuade your wife to go make the ID.’

‘You need someone to make the ID? How about you take me to Cedar Falls,’ Randy Farrell said.

‘I’ll take care of whatever arrangements need to be made, too. I have money.’

‘Perhaps I should come by tomorrow and talk to your wife again.’

‘It won’t make no difference. But I want to do right by Edie, even if Lucinda doesn’t.’

Summer saw that the man was genuinely upset. ‘I’ll tell the police in Cedar Falls about your offer, Mr Farrell. That’s the best I can do right now.’

‘I was like a father to her, you understand? I helped raise her for more than ten years, I want to do right by her now . . . You tell them that. Also, you should explain that I have cancer of the liver and I can’t drive on account of my medication, the side effects. I get these blackouts. So you tell them, if they want someone to ID her, either you take me, or they’ll have to come get me.’

Summer took out one of her cards and handed it to him. ‘If you remember anything you think might be useful, anything at all, give me a call and I’ll pass it on to the detective in charge of the case. But right now, Mr Farrell, maybe you should go look after your wife. I think she’s more shaken up than she lets on.’

Outside, Laura Killinger hitched up her Garrison belt and said, ‘Edie Collier was brought up by those two, and all she had on her sheet was shoplifting? She must have been some kind of saint.’

Players 1

Late Tuesday afternoon, the Robbery Unit of the Portland Police Bureau, Detective Sergeant Ryland Nelsen called Summer Ziegler into his office. He didn’t ask her to sit down, so she stood in front of his desk, straight-backed in a cream blouse and black skirt, waiting for him to finish studying a custody report. She’d dressed for a court appearance that had eaten up most of the day, and she’d been working late, finishing paperwork. She wished now that she’d gone straight home at the end of the shift, because she was dead certain that her boss was about to hand her yet another petty errand.

He took his own sweet time with the report, reading both sides, saying at last, ‘Do you believe in karma, Detective Ziegler?’

‘As in fate?’

‘As in be sure your sins will catch up with you.’

‘I believe it would make our work a lot easier if karma caught up with all the bad guys.’
Ryland Nelsen dropped the report on his desk, leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his grey buzz cut. ‘Cast your mind back to last December. You arrested a young woman name of Edie Collier.’

Summer thought for a moment. ‘She tried to boost a couple of cashmere sweaters from Meier and Frank, the store detective challenged her, she made a run for it. I was cruising the area, helped chase her down. She got thirty days’ county time plus two years’ probation.’

‘She got county time for shoplifting? All my arrests should go up before that judge.’

‘She was already on probation for another shoplifting offence, plus she had a bunch of priors. She pled guilty at arraignment and the judge told her he was going to give her a short, sharp shock, stick her in jail over Christmas in the hope it would straighten her out. But I guess it didn’t.’
Summer also guessed that Edie Collier must have gotten into something much more serious than shoplifting if she had come to the attention of the Robbery Unit, which investigated thefts involving use of a weapon or threats implying the presence of a weapon; mundane property crimes like shoplifting were handled by uniformed police and precinct detectives.

‘I don’t know if it straightened her out or not,’ Ryland Nelsen said. ‘I do know that a couple of fishermen stumbled across her in woods way the hell south of here, near Cedar Falls. Know where it is?’

‘I’ve driven past it.’

‘On the I-5. Me too, but I never stopped. Anyhow, she was badly injured from some kind of fall, and she died before the paramedics could get her to hospital. The local police are treating it as a suspicious death. They identified her from fingerprints and found out that her last known address was in Portland, and their Sheriff put in a call to the Chief’s office, asked if someone in the Bureau could inform Edie Collier’s parents and persuade them to make the trip to Cedar Falls for formal ID and disposition of the body. And, well, the request bounced down the chain of command to the officer who last arrested her.’

‘Me,’ Summer said, with a falling sensation.

‘You,’ Ryland Nelsen said, pointing his forefinger at her and cocking his thumb gunwise. ‘During your time in uniform, were you ever asked to do a next-of-kin notification?’

‘No, sir. We left that kind of thing to detectives.’

‘And just three weeks ago you got your detective’s badge . . . See what I mean about karma?’

Blue World

The films of M. Night Shyamalan more often have their roots in literature rather than in other films. His latest, Lady in the Water, is no exception: like many of the novels of Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle and Jonathan Carroll, its plot turns on the realisation by its hero that he is an archetype inhabiting a mythic story he can survive only by coming to terms with his true nature.

Lady in the Water’s premise, that the root of human sin is due to a break with the wise inhabitants of the Blue World of water, is rather silly and made sillier by a sententious voice-over that explains it, but its story is simple enough. A water nymph named, er, Story (played by the ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard), has been sent to find the writer she’s destined to inspire, so that he can finish the book that will, eventually, save the world (I’m not giving anything away by noting that the world-saving writer is played by none other than the film’s director). She’s helped by Cleveland Heap (Paul Giamatti), who finds her in the swimming pool of the apartment building where he works as superintendent. With the help of Korean student Young-Soon Choi and her mother, Heap must unriddle the bedtime story into which he’s been plunged, and locate the writer and the other people needed to help Story complete her quest and protect her from her enemy, the hyena-like Scrunt that haunts the apartment building’s grounds.

Most of the plot twists are derived either from the deus ex machina rules of Story’s quest, or from cases of mistaken identity as Heap tries to find amongst the apartment building’s tenants those predestined to help Story. And there’s the rub. M. Night Shyamalan’s best films are driven by conflict between vividly-drawn counterpart characters - ghost and ghost-whisperer in The Sixth Sense; hero and villain in Unbreakable. But since a football team of people are needed to protect and help Story, and there are at least two candidates for every place on the team, there are so many named characters packed into the movie’s 90-odd minutes that there’s little space to develop most of them beyond stock types.

The central characters fare little better. After a strong introduction, Story does little but huddle in the shower and refuse to divulge vital information, and even Cleveland Heap fails to stir the audience’s empathy when he finally realises his true nature and comes to terms with the Hero’s Wound that drove him to hide away from the world in a modest job in a modest apartment building. The Scrunt provides several good shock moments, there’s plenty of typically crisp dialogue and clever ideas, and there’s fine comedy relief from Young-Soon’s obtuse mother and an acidulous film critic (a nice cameo by Bob Balaban). But Shyamalan’s failure to develop strong central characters leaves the mechanics of his plot and the paint-by-numbers symbolism of his story overly exposed. For a movie that promises world-changing events, Lady in the Water ultimately feels as hermetic as the bubble of water in a snow-globe.

Where I Get My Ideas From - Part 40581 Of An Endless Series

Down to the West End last night to catch a preview of M. Night Shayamalan’s Lady in the Water (I’ll post a review in a couple of days). Sitting outside the Bar Italia in Soho, we were engaged in conversation by an eccentric fiftysomething fellow in a kilt who was treating his old Italian mother to dinner (she was the very picture of an old Italian mother, complete with cloche hat and shawl, somewhat in her dotage and addressed by her doting son with affectionate exasperation; if you put the pair of them in a novel you’d be accused of stereotyping). In short order, we learned that he was a cellist and had been down to Sussex on some kind of camping holiday (don’t go there) that seemed to have involved country dancing. Then his attention wandered to a young couple sitting down with their baby and after a little to and fro the father (also Italian) brought the baby over so that the old Italian mother could not only admire it, but also give it a wee cuddle - something British parents would almost never do. Meanwhile, the restless and voluble kilt-wearing son had wandered over the café across the road to make more friends. I love this crazy town.

Players: The Cover

Here’s a rough of the cover for Players. I very much like the menacing glow burning through the trees (much of the novel is set in the woods of South-west Oregon, where I spent some time last year; they are both lovely and spooky - especially spooky when there’s a lull in the ambient insect- and bird-song, and you think: bear).

I’ve just finished the copy edit, and now I have to work up notes about the changes I made, and key in all the changes in the hard copy to the electronic version of the text. I’ll start putting up some chunks from it soon.

Chasing Perfection

I’m coming up to the final stretch of copy-editing work on Players. After that, the manuscript will be checked over at the publishers, and then it will go off to the printers. When I get a set of proofs, I’ll have a last chance to correct infelicities, repeated words, howlers and simple spelling mistakes before the book goes into production. Almost inevitably, some mistake or other will get through; you can chase perfection as long as you like, in the company of your editor, sub-editor, copy-editor, friends . . . but it's like Zeno's paradox. You can only approach the target in ever smaller increments, you can never reach it.

You might think that poets have it easier - their books, after all, usually contain far fewer words than the average short story, let alone a novel. But as Don Paterson notes in a day-in-the-life article in the Weekend Guardian, they have to watch out for a special horror - inadvertent acrostics formed by the first letters of succeeding lines. On the other hand, he’s able to read his poems line by line backwards to ferret out glitches; just try doing that with a novel. I dare you.

Caveat Emptor

These people claim to have one of the guitars once owned by legendary Blues singer Robert Johnson (thanks to Steve Baxter for the tip, and Jack Womack for the link). Frankly, I think they need to provide little more provenance than ‘it looks like the one in the photograph’ before they get their $6000000.

The Butterflies of Memory

Just received my copies of Ian Watson’s terrific short-story collection, The Butterflies of Memory.

My introduction begins like this:

If you’re of the opinion that science fiction is above all else a literature of ideas, then Ian Watson is your man, and this collection, which contains more than enough ideas to set up a couple of lesser writers for life is very definitely your cup of meat. Of course, ideas aren’t everything. For one thing, apart from a few incredibly rare once-in-a lifetime, fifty-carat, career-defining originals, ideas are as cheap and ubiquitous as advertising. Ideas, good or bad, are the human animal’s speciality. Day in, day out, we see clouds and think them very like whales. We put together two and two and make five. And even if you do have an idea that’s both brilliant and original, in the end it’s what you do with it that counts, and that’s where qualities like hard work, talent, and that indefinable but instantly recognisable quality, voice, come into play.

Ian Watson knows all about this, of course. Check out ‘How to be a Fictionaut’, which not only has a lot of fun with the myth of ideas and originality, but also pushes the notion of the anxiety of influence about as far as it will go.

This isn’t to say that the ideas on display here aren’t witty, outrageous, daft, unsettling and plainly fantastic, because quite frankly that’s exactly what they are. But more importantly, they have also been woven into stories by a writer who not only possesses a restless and capacious imagination, but also knows exactly what to do with his ideas, and has an enviable talent for stretching them in unexpected ways, testing them to destruction, or using them to smash open accepted notions about the way the world works.

I Don't Just Make It All Up, You Know

In her New Scientist cover story about hypervelocity stars, Maggie McKee reveals where I got one of my ideas for Eternal Light. (You have to be a subscriber to view the article. Or you buy a copy of the magazine.)

Superman Redux

So I didn’t get around to reviewing Superman Returns, but Roz Kaveney did, generating much comment.

English Summertime

Out to a favourite pub for Sunday lunch, and then a slow walk back home, along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. I used to walk along the canal regularly when I lived nearby, and in my ten years in London, I’ve seen its dilapilated Victorian brick factory and warehouse buildings be replaced by smart but mostly soulless apartment buildings right on the water. One of these, the Gainsborough Buildings, on the site on what was once a film studio (where Alfred Hitchcock worked, before he left for Hollywood), made an appearance at the beginning of Whole Wide World. It had not yet been built when I began the novel; now, it is a small, exclusive city-state in the badlands of Hackney - ordinary citizens can’t even walk or drive past them, because the council has obligingly blocked off the road. There are many more blocks like this along the canal, now, and more to come. The neglected and overgrown dereliction of the old buildings gave the feeling of how London might be if it had been abandoned to nature; a long, narrow mixture of wilderness and industrial heritage running through North London and the East End. Now, it’s more like a tawdry imitation of the sets of Blade Runner, with badly designed yuppie hutches elbowing each other for a stretch of coveted waterside real estate. A taste of things to come, as the marshlands and playing fields along the River Lea disappear under the Olympic developments.

But if you could ignore the serried windows of the apartment blocks, there are still barges puttering along the canal and houseboats moored up alongside the towpath; and the hot sun beat gold highlights from the water, the weeds were all in ragged bloom, and the hot dust of the towpath was as silky as talcum powder underfoot: summertime, in England.

Only Correct

Here’s a picture of the corner of my office where I’m currently working in the copy-edited manuscript of Players. It has already been subjected to my editor’s scrutiny, of course, but having taken her comments to heart and made the appropriate modifications, the manuscript is back again. This time just about every page contains corrections and suggestions for micro-improvements; it’s time to rethink every line all over again. More importantly, it has been marked up for the typesetter with time-honoured hierogylphic instructions, and you realize that the novel that has been a more-or-less private conversation with yourself for the past year or so has begun its journey towards the bookshops.

I once visited Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass; the view from the study, down to the Charles river, is preserved for the nation. Maybe poets need to look out of windows; most writers I know face away from potential distraction, like so many penitents.

Superman v. The Planet Of Slums

I was lucky enough to attend a preview of Superman Returns yesterday; I may write a short review at some point, but meanwhile I’ll content myself with saying that I do believe it’s going to be a good old-fashioned summer blockbuster. Haven’t had one of those in a while.

I’ve also just finished Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. Sometime this year, for the first time in human history, the number of people living in cities will outnumber the rural population. And one billion people will be living in slums circling the cities of the South. Planet of Slums describes the evolution of the megaslums and the rise of an urban population that is completely disconnected from ordinary economics and politics. As with all of Davis's books (which include the classic City Of Quartz, one of the best books about Los Angeles ever written), it’s packed with vivid summaries and extrapolations of current trends backed with trenchant argument, imagining a future in which the enclaves of the rich make war against the squatters and outcasts that inhabit vast squalid termitaries of the displaced and dispossessed.

Secret Doors

I promise not to put too many pictures up here, but I thought I should at least have a go at linking one or two. This is from my research files for Cowboy Angels. It’s the route that field agents use to reach the gate between their reality and ours, located on the 49th Street side of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The two doors open onto a stairway and a freight elevator that give access to a loading platform in Grand Central Station that fell into disuse after the station’s own power plant was demolished following a switch to ConEd as a source of electricity. There’s an unconfirmed story that President Roosevelt, in his specially adapted automobile, was whisked from train to street via the freight elevator when he visited New York.

If you’re wondering about the low resolution, it was taken with my thumb-sized Philips wearable digital camera.

More Dick

Joshua Glenn has a thoughtful piece on the film of A Scanner Darkly and director Richard Linklater over on Slate.

On The D.

Yesterday to a preview of A Scanner Darkly in a plush screening theatre in Warner Brother’s London headquarters. Director and screenwriter Richard Linklater is clearly a fan of Philip K. Dick’s work; his adaptation of Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about an undercover cop falling apart under the insiduous influence of the brain-killing drug Substance D, is, some necessary compression apart, faithful to both the text and the melancholy spirit of the novel. It was shot as a live action film and rotoscoped by computer animation to provide a graphic novel look that works pretty well; it’s hard, really, to see how the scramble suit effects could have been done so effectively otherwise. Hallucinatory weirdness is kept to the minimum, although there’s some very subtle distortion here and there, especially towards the end. Given that the story is largely plot-free and packs a lot of dialog, it does sag a little in places, but does its best by Dick's intricate drug-fueled paranoid riffs, is seasoned with some lovely touches of black humour, and the diminuendo ending, containing just a flicker of hope, is faithful to that of novel. Fans of Dick’s work will almost certainly love it, but I fear that its bleak, amorphous plot will have limited appeal to the general public. Keanu Reeves as undercover narc Bob Arctor is basically Keanu Reeves; Robert Downey Jr is a tour de force as the manically unpleasant James Barris; Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder turn in solid performances, and Rory Cochrane is going to hate being called the new Jack Black.

Forbidden Planets

I’ve just received the proofs for my story, ‘Dust’, one of a round dozen collected in the anthology Forbidden Planets. Others are by Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Scott Edelman, Matthew Hughes, Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds, Chris Roberson, and Adam Roberts. Edited by Peter Crowther, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Stephen Baxter, it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the classic movie.

Another story, ‘Winning Peace’, the one I was writing in April, set in the same future history as ‘Dust’, will appear in Gardner Dozois’s and Jonathan Strahan’s The New Space Opera.
Back now to reading Cowboy Angels (for the first time in three years) and making notes for the many tweaks needed to bring it up to speed.

Stalking Alfie

All novelists worth their salt must work their way under the skin and into the minds of their characters; it’s a necessary step on the way to thoroughly inhabiting the novel’s world. Some try to create a character by listing his likes and dislikes, by asking how he behaves while eating with a group of people, how he reacts to rain or sun, how he reacts to someone much poorer than him, or to someone much richer? And so on, and so forth. One is reminded of the attempts of phenomenologists to describe and catalogue their sensory experiences - the relationships between ideas in their minds and the things in the world that they represent. Others, especially comic novelists, borrow extensively from people around them, exaggerating and mixing traits from a variety of acquaintances. My approach is probably the most common, and is much less systematic. It’s rather like stalking a bird through a dense forest. I know that it’s small and brown, and sometimes I can hear its song, but I need to see it entire, just for a moment, before I can know what it is.

In Mind’s Eye, I had the name of the main character from the first. (Names have a talismanic importance - they must strike the right chord in the memory.) Alfie Flowers: a sturdy London name. I knew that Alfie lived in London, and I knew a good deal of his family’s history, and knew that he suffered from an atypical form of epilepsy - it’s a necessary part of the story - and that this made him cautious, made him look at the world at a slant in case it surprised him in the wrong way. After a false start involving trading old Airfix kits on eBay, I knew what he did for a living too: he was a street photographer, following in the footsteps of his missing father, a 1960s hip fashion photographer turned war documentarist.

It took a little while longer to find out where he lived. I find that walking helps to loosen knotted thoughts and joggle ideas together; I walk a lot, when I’m writing the first draft of a novel. On my way back from a long ramble one day, about a hundred yards from my home, I realized that I standing across the street from where Alfie Flowers lived: a narrow plot of land beside the North London railway, with a small, old bus garage and a couple of caravans. He lived in one of those caravans, and had his darkroom in the other. In summer, he ate his meals outside, at a picnic table. And so on.

But I didn’t see him clearly until he was returning home on a crowded train:

Alfie slumped in his corner, a large, somewhat shapeless man, like a bear that hadn’t been properly licked into shape by its mother, his blond hair a disarrayed halo, wearing a red check shirt and baggy black elephant cords, his bag clutched to his belly, his big feet in strap sandals. He had prehensile toes, long and double-jointed, thatched at their second joints with pads of dark hair.

At last, I was on the inside.

Sidewise Award Nominations

This year's Sidewise Award nominations have been announced. The award, which has been been presented since 1995, recognizes excellence in alternate history.

Long Form:
Ian R. MacLeod, The Summer Isles (Aio Publishing)
Sophia McDougall, Romanitas (Orion)
Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor)

Short Form
William Barton, "Harvest Moon" (Asimov's September 2005)
A.M. Dellamonica, "The Illuminated Heretic" (Alternate Generals III, edited by Harry Turtledove, Baen April 2005)
Kim Newman & Paul J. McAuley, "Prix Victor Hugo Script"
Jason Stoddard, "Panacea" (SciFiction, September 14, 2005)
Lois Tilton, "Pericles the Tyrant" (Asimov's, October-November 2005)

It’s rather cool to find our little jape up there with stories published in traditional venues.