In Living Colour

This extract from James Woods’ forthcoming book, grandly titled How Fiction Works, probably isn’t especially useful to budding writers who puzzle over how to make their characters seem, if not real, then at least vivid. But he’s especially good on why Dickens’s characters seem real even though they shouldn’t, provides some useful taxonomy, and vents the following pithy denunciation which chimes very loudly with some concerns of my own:

Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with’, or didn’t think any of the characters grow.’

Now I think book clubs - and anything else that encourages people to not only read books they might not otherwise read but also discuss them - are the most marvellous things. But there’s a definite danger, when not thinking deeply enough about your engagement with a novel, of falling into the procrustean mode of Hollywood script reports, and Woods nails it.

As far as I’m concerned, physical description is the least useful way of realising character (usefully, I can discard every novel that begins with the hero looking into a mirror and meditating on her appearance, saving much time for more engaging stuff). What characters say and what they do and how they react to other people are far more useful than physical appearance, and so are their qualities -- their virtues and vices and all the rest. If it’s shorthand you need to ‘get in’ a character, then forget hair and eye colour. Are they forthright or reticent? Optimistic or glum? Thoughtful or careless? And if you want to create two memorable characters in one stroke, then play two opposites against each other in a double act: Holmes v. Watson; Don Quixote v. Sancho Panza; Morecombe v. Wise. It isn’t rocket science; it’s alchemy.
Meanwhile, I have to dive back into the final polish of The Quiet War, not to mention the first draft of Outer Dark...

Face-Off

The internet may be more science-fictional than we think, and possibly not in a good way.

There Are Doors (3)

On the west side of Rose Alley in Southwark, formerly the site of the first of the Bankside theatres (The Rose, built in 1586-7), is one of the last Victorian buildings that hasn’t yet been replaced by characterless modern offices - although given the cry of defiance and despair painted across its wall, it won’t be long. Appropriately for the location, the unassuming entrance is decorated with a frieze of Tudor roses.

That Was Then; This Is Now

I made a microscopic contribution to this roundup of the best genre titles of 2007 and preview of what’s coming this year, assembled by Robert Thompson.

Credo

I spent much of the year past working on The Quiet War, a space opera novel set on and around the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I’ve just finished the first thirty pages of a similar project, Outer Dark, which moves the history begun in The Quiet War forward across some twenty-odd years. In the past couple of years, while I’ve been planning and writing The Quiet War, I’ve noticed during that time that a certain small-c conservative chill has crept across the SF field. The Mundane SF movement is one obvious symptom, but there are many others, adding up to a kind of retreat from SF’s usual concerns (most notably, as far as I’m concerned, a cynicism about the likelihood of colonisation or even human exploration of the Moon and other planets), and a crisis in self-confidence about the genre’s best-known tropes.

Has SF lost its grip on the future? Is so-called mainstream fiction making better use of SF’s tropes? Should SF be exclusively concerned with ‘reality’ and ‘realistic’ extrapolations - things that are possible from our point of view here in the last quarter of the first decade of the twenty-first century? As far as I’m concerned, maybe, no, and definitely not. I’m not against near-future ‘realistic’ SF (hell, I’ve written plenty), or the idea of Mundane SF per se, and I’m looking forward to the Mundane SF edition of Interzone guest-edited by Geoff Ryman. But I do have severe doubts about its claim that it is The Only Way Forward, and all other forms of SF are irrelevant, foolish or even dangerous.

Here are a few principles that have informed the construction of The Quiet War and Outer Dark:

1) SF’s principal strength is not realism; it’s one part internal consistency, two parts imagination, and three parts self-belief.
2) SF isn’t only about known knowns and known unknowns; it’s also about unknown knowns. Given that two hundred years ago most people in Europe were peasants relying on human and animal muscle power to get their work done, why do many SF writers insist that in two hundred years technology will not be radically different from present technology? Let’s face it, who in the SF field fifty years ago saw cell phones coming? Or the PC and the Internet?
3) The future will almost certainly not be dominated by the USA and freemarket capitalism.
4) Self-interest is a poor driver in any society, yet it’s the only motivating force for characters in too many recent SF novels
5) It’s possible to imagine SF heroes other than freebooting entrepreneurs. I mean, the dot.com boom is so over.
6) It’s possible to imagine a society where science is the dominant driving force of the economy and science and the arts are the main occupations of the population.
7) What will really happen if our children are smarter and kinder than us?
8) True AI is less likely than a manned landing on Mars.
9) Most moons in the Solar System are made of water-ice; with a little power, you have all the water and oxygen you need.
10) We know a lot more about closed-system ecosystems than we did in the 1970s, when O’Neill colonies were first proposed. And we have better vision of the architecture and material science of the future, too
11) Colonisation of space will not be driven by self-interest or the profit-motive.
12) History teaches us that history doesn’t teach us anything. Laboured comparisons between the present and past events are pointless. The future will have its own agenda.

There Are Doors (2)

Space alongside Fenchurch station ripe for renovation, with signage surviving from the 1930s, just before the station was rebuilt. It isn’t difficult to imagine passing through this door into a wooden-floored office where clerks with rolled shirtsleeves caught up by bands sit at desks writing in leather-bound ledgers, or pipe-smoking draughtsmen work at drafting tables, and in the deep cutting beyond the windows small black steam engines puff into the station alongside underground trains in the old maroon livery. Note the apt name of the estate agents dealing with the sale of this railside property: Brunel Estates.

There Are Doors (1)

The doors to the post room of St Bartholomews Hospital, to the south of the southern edge of Smithfield Market, have not yet fallen to the vast work of renovation as the National Health Service institution is converted into a trust. Lacking a kickplate, and seemingly last painted somewhere between Lady Chatterley and the Beatles’ first LP, the doors show the wear and tear of a generation or two of laden couriers who’ve used their boots to kick them open.

It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It

I’ve just learned that two of my novels, The Secret of Life, and Whole Wide World, have been made available for download to those whizzy new kindle devices from amazon.com. I’d rather that they were also available as actual printed-on-dead-wood books, which are still holding their own against all comers, but there you go.

Apart from these electronic reissues, in this year Fairyland was given a new lease of life by Gollancz, I published two new novels, Players and Cowboy Angels, and delivered a third, The Quiet War. I had just two short stories published, but wrote four more; hopefully, these and two or three others should be published in 2008.

I seemed to read more non-fiction than fiction this year, but among the novels I especially enjoyed were The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon, Spook Country by William Gibson, Brasyl by Ian McDonald, The Land of the Headless by Adam Roberts, and Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe. Most of the stand-out non-fiction I read seems to be historical, including Buda’s Wagon - A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston, The Lodger - Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl, and On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein. Schultz and Peanuts by David Michaelis is not only an exemplarary biography but also an acute dissection of the entanglement between art and the everyday life of the artist.

I spent most of 2007 in front of a computer screen; outside, the world has become a more precarious place than when 2006 rolled over. So be careful out there, and have the best 2008 you can.

Gamma Minus

Over at the Carpetbagger blog, Steve Benan reports that President George Bush’s policy on stem cell research may have been shaped by a misreading of Huxley’s Brave New World (link via Jack Womack).

The Refuge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7151190.stm

(I couldn't resist - read (sadly out-of-print) The Secret Of Life to find out why.)

Just When You Think You're Out...

Sandy Auden very kindly tells me that uksfbooknews has posted a Q&A about Cowboy Angels.

Ghost Of A Christmas Present

When I was a kid, I didn’t have enough money to buy new books on anything like a regular basis, so I bought comics instead. I was a devotee of TV21, with its strip versions of Gerry Anderson’s oeuvre and the back story of the Daleks (but not Doctor Who, who was licensed elsewhere), and of Marvel Comics - Iron Man, Thor, and the Fantastic Four (not because I preferred Marvel to DC, but because Marvel comics were what my local newsagents had on their spinner racks). But before that, I was a regular reader of The Victor. I no longer have copies of any of the comics I bought, but I still have the annual pictured above, a Christmas present from 1966.

Inside, we were still fighting not only World War II, but World War I as well (in those days, when post-colonialism was beginning to bite deep into the British psyche, we clung as tightly to those victories, as we still cling to our World Cup victory that year). There were knock-off versions of Tarzan (‘Morgan the Mighty’) and James Bond (‘The Wonder Man’, more like the Man in Black in those Milk Tray advertisments than Bond, to be honest), and a Western strip, ‘The Town Tamers’, led by Dusty Fogg. My favourite, though, was ‘Tough of the Track’, in which working class hero Alf Tupper regularly beat toffs on the athletic field after a hard week of heavy welding, and on a diet of fish and chip suppers:

Each day Alf worked in the scaling yard, and each evening he trained. At night he slept in a tool shed on the recreation ground, unknown to the groundsman...

Things were different then, all right.

Apart from some minor cosmetic work, Unlikely Worlds will be taking a break over Christmas. Happy holidays to one and all - and happy 90th birthday to Sir Arthur.

Listening to: Songs of Survival - Traditional Music of Georgia
Reading: The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard; Nonviolence, Mark Kurlansky

Furnished Early In Books

In her Nobel lecture, Doris Lessing makes some fine and moving points about the hunger and necessity for literature in Africa, but is less convincing in her argument that the internet is diverting young people in the West from books. There have, let’s face it, always been distractions and alternatives to the solitary pleasure of immersion in a good book; Facebook and all the other time-wasting fads that pass through the internet like flu in a turkey farm are merely the latest. And given that they get a bare minimum of advertising and media exposure in comparison to films, video games, music and TV, books are probably punching above their weight.

Lessing also suggests that writers come from homes furnished with an abundance of books. Well, I don’t know about that, but most writers definitely seem to have caught the reading bug early, were voracious readers as children, and are voracious readers still. In my case, we didn’t have that many books in our damp little cottage. Maybe thirty or forty. I still remember some of them, because I read and reread them so often. On the Beach. The Cruel Sea. The Battle of the River Plate. What Katie Did. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The Three Musketeers. My grandmother, who lived next door, had about twice that number, mainly faded and dusty Everyman editions (and most of those copies of Shakespeare’s plays) picked up as part of the mixed lots she liked to bid for in auctions. She had a big pile of copies of Reader’s Digest, too; part of being ill, when I was a child, in addition to a bottle of Lucozade and a new comic, was reading four or five Reader’s Digests a day, something that furnished me a fairly eccentric and eclectic view of the world. So I definitely had a serious reading habit, and because we didn’t own many books, and because I couldn’t afford to buy many, either, it was the public library, and the library of the grammar school, that kept it satisfied. Addicts find their fix where they can; back then, before I could afford the hard stuff, even the back of a cereal packet would do.

Away from the distraction of blogging, I seem to have worked out how to finish my big space robot story, started this summer but left fallow because I couldn’t work out what the twist was and where it bit. Sometimes these things come in a glad rush; all too often actual work is involved.

'Rats of the System' in Romanian

Când îl descoperise racheta de vânatoare, Carter Cho tocmai încerca sa camufleze modulul spaÛial.

ReuÕise sa scape de pe ce mai ramasese din nucleul cometei distruse, sapase o groapa potrivita cu flacarile produse de ambalarea motorului Õi îngramadise micuÛa dar rezistenta nava ina untru, apoi îÕi închise eremtic costumul spaÛial Õi se caÛara afara din cockpit ...

That’s the Romanian version of the begining of my short story ‘Rats of the System’ which has just been published in the December isssue of Sci-Fi magazi. (Thanks to Catalin Moraru.)

Roll Up, Roll Up!

Ellen Datlow has just send me this retrotastic Barnum and Bailey style cover for her upcoming anthology (I know the title implies that it’s Del Rey’s, God bless ‘em all, but it wouldn’t have happened without Ellen). It includes a novelette (20,000 words: that’s a novelette, right? I’m a bit vague about the taxonomy) that Kim Newman and I wrote together. And 15 other original stories selected by one of the finest editors in the field. Here’s the list of contents. Pretty damn good, huh?

Introduction Ellen Datlow
The Elephant Ironclads Jason Stoddard
Ardent Clouds Lucy Sussex
Gather Christopher Rowe
Sonny Liston Takes the Fall Elizabeth Bear
North American Lake Monsters Nathan Ballingrud
All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World Carol Emshwiller
Special Economics Maureen McHugh
Aka Saint Marks Place Richard Bowes
The Goosle Margo Lanagan
Shira Lavie Tidhar
The Passion of Azazel Barry N. Malzberg
The Lagerstätte Laird Barron
Gladiolus Exposed Anna Tambour
Daltharee Jeffrey Ford
Jimmy Pat Cadigan
Prisoners of the Action Paul McAuley and Kim Newman

Pure Pulp

Another of my Woolworths finds, and one of my first encounters with raw, primeval space opera. Published in 1968, the stories date from a decade earlier; my favourite is still Edmond Hamilton’s ‘The Starcombers’, which has all the tropes (vagabond starsailors attempting to make a living in a state of pure and untrammelled capitalism, ancient alien artifacts, a ferociously strange niche in a dying world) of the pure quill. The Easy Eye gimmick is long-forgotten; it does actually work, but large type means more pages than usual, which probably wasn’t a great economic model in the cutthroat world of pulp publishing.

I can’t now remember if I bought more short story collections than novels because I preferred collections, or if there were fewer novels on offer. Long exposure to the publishing industry suggests the latter.

The House On Amherst Avenue

Rick McGrath's search for J.G. Ballard’s childhood home in Shanghai.

You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here...

When I was a teenager, living in a small town and too impoverished to buy new books, my only source of SF apart from the local library was the dump bin of the local Woolworths, which contained a headily promiscuous mix of all kinds of imported and startlingly cheap US paperbacks. That’s where I picked up The Asylum World, mesmerized by the disturbingly psychotic cover. John Jakes is best known as the author of bestselling Bicentennial series, about American history seen through the lens of a single family, but before that success he wrote scads of fantasy and SF, including this swift, bleak satire. Published in 1969, it describes the travails of a delegation of Martian colonists on a diplomatic visit to Earth. Jakes is very good at the violent seediness of a New York turned into an insane asylum, which wasn’t much different from the contemporary actuality. He’s pretty good on the laviscious corruption of Earth’s politicians, too; the president is an idiot puppet of his Secretary. Sound familiar?

Mastermind Of Horror

Published in 1965, this collection is Fontana paperback’s second attempt to reinvent H.G. Wells as a horror writer; the first was The Valley of Spiders. Mind you, with ‘The Cone’ they definitely had a point:

He clung, crying, to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone . . . A rush of suffocating gas whooped up at him and when the momentary red had passed . . . there was a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, clutching and fumbling at the chain - and writhing in agony . . .

This vividly nasty little squib about revenge and a blast furnace really spooked me when I first encountered it, age 11, in one of the green-backed volumes of the Everyman edition of Wells’s work. Not only because Wells describes the torment of the furnace owner’s rival with an almost indecent relish, but also because I happened to live next door to a small iron foundry, and never again could look at its smelter with the same innocence.

More Free Stuff

I’ve just put up my short story ‘Interstitial’ on the web site. It’s an end-of-the-world story that takes off from the theory that life had survived at least one bottleneck caused by a runaway effect that created a snowball Earth and ends in the kind of conflict between the military and scientists that powered most 1950's sci-fi movies, with a tip of the hat to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Imagine it in scratchy black-and-white, with John Agar playing the hero.

I’ve just finished and sold the zombie story (they’re not really zombies; they’re Boltzmann brains). It’s presently called ‘The Thought War’, but that might get changed by the time it appears (in Postscripts next year, if everything goes to plan). Right now, I’m working on/playing with a couple of others that I set aside in the summer so that I could make the final push on The Quiet War. My version of a holiday.

It’s A Small World But I Wouldn’t Want To Paint It

I feel exceptionally dense: until I saw a trailer for a BBC documentary last night it never before occurred to me that Mark Everett, aka E of Eels, who has written several of my most favourite songs, ever, is the son of Hugh Everett III, who fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-four, devised the many-worlds theory. Checking through my Eels CDs I find that the drawing on the inner back face of the jewel case of Electro-shock Blues is from Hugh Everett III’s school biology textbook. It shows a boy crying over split milk. In another universe, of course, the milk is unspilt. In another universe, Hugh Everett III received a full measure of the recognition he deserved for his ideas while he was yet alive. We can’t get there from here, but we know, now, that it’s almost certainly true.

As well as feeling dense, I also feel a little guilty, because there is only an oblique reference to Hugh Everett III in Cowboy Angels; in the timeline buried inside the story it was necessary for someone to come up with the idea earlier.

Presently rereading: Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. Presently playing: Blinking Lights and other revelations, Eels.

Free Stuff Free

I’ve put up some more free stuff over on the web site: appreciations of Kim Newman and Michael Marshall Smith, the introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s Zima Blue, and reviews of DVD box sets of Budgie and The Beiderbecke Trilogy. I’m also, slowly, making content on the site available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons licence.

Vast Saharas

And not made of sand either, of course, this being Titan's sand dune seas.

I'm moving further out for the next novel, but I'm still obsessed with Saturn and its exotic entourage.

Entrained

I’ve been working on a short story, and finding yet again that I’m not particularly bicameral; I find it hard to conjure up even the briefest blog entry after working on fiction. The external life of a writer, writing, isn’t especially exciting, alas; perhaps that’s why most fictional representations of writers are about writers not being able to write. Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes A Novel (collected in Amphigorey) is one of the best and funniest depictions I know of the actual process.

Saturday, I walked down to St Pancras Station to check out the new Eurostar terminus. Another favourite walk, in the gloaming along Regents’ canal towards Camden, turning off at St Pancras Old Church (the story starts off in the churchyard, with the appearance of what appears to be a zombie), and sneaking into the station around the back. The place is quite as full as one of W.R. Frith’s paintings; the statue of Sir John Betjeman (who campaigned against the station’s demolition) is delightful; the long sleek trains look quite at home. The champagne bar that dominated the PR turns out not to be a vast length of darkly polished wood lit by low hung lamps and attended by louche customers and waiters in black waistcoats and white aprons, but a series of booths strung alongside platform 1, with a kind of hut affair at the entrance and no doubt featuring the longest walk to a restroom in the history of any bar since the advent of indoor plumbing. And unfortunately, the buffer end of the station is dominated by a thirty-foot staue of a man and a woman falling into an embrace. Titled The Meeting Place, this monstrous piece of committee-art is a bad mistake, I think. And since it is situated under a huge and beautiful period clock, it's a) superfluous and b) in the way. Also, as the couple are dressed in contemporary clothes, it will look tremendously dated in, oh, ten years or less.

But these are minor quibbles. The restoration of the station and its overarching roof is a triumph, and my neighbours have already taken one of the first trains to France and report that it’s as quick and smooth as any on the Continent. No more waiting outside Waterloo for the 1650 to Penge to clear the junction: I can now walk to a station in twenty minutes, and be in Paris inside three hours.

Presently reading: Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road.

Oh Yeah

The other thing I did on Monday, apart from watch Beowulf and see a big plume of smoke over London that briefly woke the poison spider meme that lurks in the basements of our brains, post 9/11, was send of the manuscript of The Quiet War to my editor at Gollancz. Which is no longer quite the ceremony it once was, involving a hot laser printer, a ream and a bit of paper, a large envelope, parcel tape, and a wait at the post office. Instead you just press this button, and off it goes into the ether.

The Quiet War came out at more or less 170,000 words, a tad over the estimate of 150,000 made before I wrote the first word. I cut something like 50,000 words along the way, so I think they are the right 170,000 words, more or less. It would be easy (and fantastically lazy and indulgent) to make it twice the length, with no change in plot or incident. But it wouldn’t do the book much good. I like to write long and cut back, which isn’t the most efficient way of writing perhaps, but lets me see what works, and what is necessary.

It’s loosely based on the background and back story a sequence of stories I wrote over the past ten years, although I’ve made some pretty drastic changes; necessary changes, as the sequence emerged piecemeal rather than being thoroughly planned. So it’s a second draft of a future history, about the way in which history works through human lives, and how human lives and human ideas work on history. It follows five main characters through a tight tangle of storylines that all resolve in a conflict that slowly and inevitably develops into war, through design and circumstance. A collision between stasis and evolution, between a conservative elite that’s consolidated power after catastrophe, and a new generation hungry for change, even though it can’t quite define to itself what that change is going to be. There are spaceships and space battles, chases and alarms, vacuum organisms, floating gardens in Saturn, gene wizards, spies, and extraordinary ordinary people, cities and oases scattered across the very real icescapes of half a dozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn (I owe a vast debt to the robot probes Galileo and Cassini, not to mention the Huygens lander)... In short, it’s a kind of space opera.

I should of course be pressing on with the next novel, and I am beginning to make notes on the notes I wrote at various intervals in the past year or so, but having worked with furious concentration for about eight months, with just a couple of weeks off here and there, I’m unwinding a little. Stepping back, to make the next great leap. Maybe I’ll scratch the itch of this short story that’s been bugging me. And in any case, I’m hardly finished with The Quiet War; there’ll be an edit to deal with, by and by, and a concentrated spot of polishing, the copy edit... I definitely need a rest.

Celeb spot: Gilbert & George piss-elegant in camelhair coats, Commercial Street, Spitalfields. Not entirely unexpected as they live around the corner, but it still evoked a tiny frisson.
Current listening: Songs of Defiance, Music of Chechnya and the North Caucasus, compiled by Michael Church, and Oddities and Marvels of the Human Voice, compiled by Jack Womack. Current reading: E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome To Hard Times.

Space Truckin'

I like to think that Jules Verne would be pleased by this highly practical spacecraft.

Beowulf In The Valley Of The Uncanny

Out to the IMAX cinema in Waterloo with Mr Kim Newman to see the 3D version of Beowulf. Given I’m not big on heroic fantasy and think The Vikings was about as good a film as it was possible to make about sword-swinging looting and pillaging Danes, I was pleasantly surprised. The script nicely compresses the poem into classic Hollywood three-act format and adds a couple of neat plot twists, and the story, in which the hero takes on a monster, the monster’s mother and a dragon (not to mention a bunch of sea serpents), is perfect subject matter for the technique of using digitally-enhanced live action within a computer-rendered setting, previously deployed by director Robert Zemeckis in Polar Express. Digital animation means that anything is possible except, because of the Uncanny Valley effect, entirely believable scenes in which the actors do nothing but talk to each other, and so the first half, where most of the exposition lies, is sometimes a bit laboured and reminiscent of cut-scenes in computer games (even if they are the most exquisitely detailed cut-scenes you’ve ever experienced). It doesn’t help that Ray Winstone, otherwise fine as the misguided hero, occasionally lapses into broad Cockernee (‘I have come to kill a Monstah!’), and the scene where he gets naked before his fight with Grendel is distractingly reminiscent of the opening of Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me. But once the story gets going and hurtles towards its tragic-heroic conclusion it grips more firmly. There are stunning coupes de theatre, including a wonderful reverse tracking shot through a dark and wintery wood, dynamic action scenes, and the best goddamn dragon I’ve ever seen: once it roars into action the film literally takes off. If you’re going to see it, though, be good to your inner 13-year-old kid and make sure you catch it in IMAX 3D; I don’t think that it will quite work in any other format.

Coming out of the cinema, heading over Waterloo Bridge, there was a vast plume of smoke rising to the east and unpacking above the Thames and South London; just for a moment, Kim and I wondered if This Was It again; nope, just a very big fire at a disused bus garage in the Olympic site in Hackney: bonfire of the vanities.

One Hundred Futures

In the post today, a copy of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 of short short stories first published in Nature. You can read my contribution, ‘Meat’, here.

In The Cut

Yesterday, visited the Tate Modern to see Doris Salcedo’s installation. One of my favourite walks, through Islington and down St John Street past Smithfield, Little Britain, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and across the Thames on the wobbly bridge. Like a descent back through the centuries, from Islington’s nineteenth century suburb and Georgian squares, down to the twelfth century when Smithfield was ‘Smoothfield’, where horses were sold, and St
Bartholomew’s Hospital was founded, and on to the timeless river.

Salcedo’s installation is a riverine crack that runs down the floor of the huge Turbine
Hall. Impressive in execution, cunningly made so that the bottom can’t be seen, but dwarfed by its surroundings, and rather too obviously a construct, with its new wire grid and fresh concrete. The barabarian in me thought that it might be imporoved by jets of vapour spouting at unpredictable intervals, and perhaps some Lovecraftian tentacles grabbing at art-lovers, who seemed unsure how to react, mostly getting photographed straddling it, or dipping the tip of their shoe into the narrow void. No one fell in while I was there.

Cyberyarn

'A stitch, in essence, is a pixel.'

Back To The Future

I rewatched Children of Men the other day and enjoyed it as much if not more (because I could pay more attention to the scrupulous texture) the second time around. One of my movies of the decade, so far. In one of the extras, the philosopher/critic Savoj Zizek (who is always good value) commented that what was happening in the background of the movie was more important than what was foregrounded. I think that’s true for all good science fiction.

From The Tightrope

Richard Ford, one of the modern masters of the short story gives a masterclass:

Great stories are congeries of plan, vigour, will and application, but also of luck and error and intuition and even, God knows, sudden inspiration, for all of which there is no key, and in the midst of which things often just happen - a fact that should make us like stories even better for their life-mimicking knack of seeming to come out of nowhere, thereby fortifying our faith in art and life’s mystery.

Do Tell

I now have the power to scan - and here's the cover rough for the mass market paperback of Players, which my publishers reckon is solidly commercial (and who am I to argue?). There's a crossbow in it, but it's also about MMOPRGs. And hubris.

Reading: Dylan's Chronicles (soundtrack:The Bootleg Series Volume 1). Rereading: Alastair Reynolds's Absolution Gap.

Peace Breaks Out

I’ve just finished the final draft of The Quiet War, and must now contemplate the next, which is presently called Outer Dark. But now I have to go off and write an introduction to a collection of stories about AI...

Elsewhere, Paul Kincaid is pleased by the health of the short story market, Jeff Vandemeer is unimpressed by mere comptence. And Mark Lawson, post-Booker Prize, feels that authors can choose between ‘the smooth and brightly lit genre path that winds through entertainment, optimism and simplicity’ to ‘adulation, mansions and fame’ (yeah: right), or the ‘dark and densely tangled’ path of yer actual literature, which leads to ‘bleakness, experiment and sentiments which many will consider unspeakable or unreadable’. No wonder the poor dears of the literary field need champagne-fuelled award parties to cheer them up. They really do suffer for their art, you know.

The Actual

I’ve been so busy with the ongoing that I quite forgot to mention the 30th anniversary of the end of Cowboy Angels, but here’s a photograph of one of the featured events from that crucial day; of course, you’ll have to read the novel to find out how it fits in.

And here’s something completely different - the graphics and onboard sounds of the tracking instruments of the Cassini-Huygen’s probe during its descent to the surface of Titan. Which is where my head is currently at.

Credo

James Wood, in a review of Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, published in The New Yorker:

Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction was a rival life, a ‘counterlife’, to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real.

Eye Spy

Watching you, watching me.

Weather Report

It’s winter, in the northern hemisphere of Titan. The temperature is a frosty minus 180 degrees Centigrade, and methane/ethane rain is gently falling and filling the lakes.

Information Wants To Be Free

This week I've mostly been blowing things up on Dione. But I have posted a couple of new extracts of Cowboy Angels over on the website - you can now read the prologue and first three chapters for free.

Currently listening to: Closer, Joy Division; The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, Bob Dylan; Icky Thump, The White Stripes.

The Hot Breath of the Future

Uh-oh.

The Chill Hand of Mortality

In an interview published in The New Yorker, part of the publicity for his new novel Exit Ghost, Philip Roth says this:

. . . at this stage of the game I’d much rather spend my reading time - as I have been doing - revisiting, for the last time around, other writers, like Conrad and Hemingway and Faulkner and Turgenev.

So now, in addition to books (some as yet unwritten) I haven’t yet read, books I don’t ever want to or need to read, and books I’ve read but won’t ever read again, I have to look forward to a time when I have to concentrate on books I really must reread, one last time, before it’s too late. At least, if I’m carried off in the middle of rereading one of my favourites, I won’t have to worry about never knowing how it ends.

In the same issue, Louis Menand beautifully evokes that old, still-potent romance:

. . . I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Before The Fall

While researching Cowboy Angels, I spent a lot of time figuring out what Manhattan might have looked like before it was settled by any humans. Eric Sanderson's project came a little too late, and would have saved me a lot of trouble...

(Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Rorschach Moon

Iapetus close-up.

Heads or Tails

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which attempted to apply quantum mechanical equations to both the subatomic world and the macroscopic world we ordinarily inhabit. It’s long been accepted that subatomic particles like electrons or photons exist as both wave and particle until collapsed when an observer makes a measurement; Everett’s proposal that hawks, handsaws, and human beings also exist in a multitude of simultaneous states - parallel worlds - has been much more contentious. But now, at a meeting at Oxford University, reported in the latest issue of New Scientist (you need to be a subscriber to read the full report, but Peter Byrne has blogged the meeting for Scientific American), David Deutsch and his colleagues claim that ‘key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel worlds’. Or to put it another way, if they’re right - and it’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence - every time we make a decision, the universe really does split into two parallel branches. Coin-tossing may never be the same again.

Desperate Fun...

...was had by all at a small party to wet the head of Cowboy Angels, in the Phoenix Artist Club. Copies should now be out in the wild; head straight past the 3 for 2 tables to the shelves towards the back of the bookshop, where authors are democratically ranked in alphabetical order.

London's New Forbidden Zone...

...has a very long, very blue boundary.

Seriously Weird

Among the science-fictional paradigms named in the mundane SF crowd’s fatwah are time-travel and parallel universes. David Toomey’s The New Time Travellers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics is a superb examination of ideas that are gaining serious scientific attention, including the possibility that time travel and the multiple worlds theory are two sides of the same coin. The kind of stuff, in fact, that helped me put in some solid foundations to the multiverse of Cowboy Angels.

Brautigan

For some reason, my local library, in the 1970s, had all of Brautigan's novels. And I read them all. So when I read this, I found the secondhand copy of Trout Fishing In America I bought in Vancouver, and read:

I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.

Zapped

The images from Cassini's flyby of Iapetus that I was very much looking forward to closely analysing (trans: ripping off) has been delayed by a galactic cosmic ray hit that tripped a solid state power switch and sent the spacecraft into safe mode. What could be more science-fictional?

Borderline Anxiety (2)

Whenever mainstream or literary fiction dares to trespass on territory that science fiction considers its own, reaction from within the field ranges from the kind of hooting animosity displayed by apemen contesting ownership of a waterhole in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, through serene indifference, to the craven capitulation of The Simpsons' news anchor, Kent Brockman: ‘I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords . . .’

Paul Kincaid’s recent column in Bookslut is, unfortunately, a pretty good example of Brockmanism. After discussing use of a medical procedure as a plot device in Graham Swift’s novel Tomorrow, Kincaid, previously the administrator of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, goes on to imply that literary fiction may be doing a better job of portraying real science and real scientists than science fiction. While science was once ‘one of the things that cut science fiction off from the rest of literature,’ he says, now it’s ‘ordinary and about something.’ Further, now that ‘the transcendence, the wonder that were handy terms when talking about big concept sf have been taken seriously and science fiction has become almost an ecstatic experience . . . perhaps it’s a good thing that the mainstream has discovered the scientist -- because science fiction seems to have lost him.’

The insect overlords have taken up SF’s most treasured theme! Surrender at once! Round up the usual suspects and set them to work in the underground sugar caves of our new masters!

Well, it’s certainly true that literary fiction is paying more attention to science these days. And the idea that, as science becomes normalised and incorporated into the tropes of literary fiction, so SF has retreated into a kind of mystic ecstasy, is an interesting one. Unfortunately, it’s completely false. And Kincaid’s attempts to justify it don’t hold water for a second.

In discussing literary novels that feature scientists, Kincaid ranges over the past sixty-fifty years (it should be noted that he mistakenly attributes authorship of his earliest example, The Small Back Room (1942), to Nevil Shute; in fact, it was written by Nigel Balchin, and Balchin’s scientist hero was no boffin or administrator, remote from ordinary human experience, but a genuinely tortured soul). Yet after claiming that ‘we seem to be seeing fewer and fewer scientists in science fiction’, and telling us that SF is disappearing up its own transcendental fundament, Kincaid gives only one supposed example of this trend, M. Rickert’s Map of Dreams (2006). I confess that I haven’t yet read it. But I have Googled it. It’s a fantasy novella. It’s clearly labelled as a fantasy novella, and is published in a small press collection of fantasy stories. Its time-travel may well be achieved through what Kincaid describes as ‘a mixture of amateurism and mysticism’, but it can’t typify his claim that SF is retreating from realism for the simple reason that it isn’t SF.

And even if Rickert’s novella was SF, it doesn’t take much thought to come up with a hefty list of SF novels from the past decade, much less the past sixty-five years, that have dealt with science and scientists in a serious, realistic, and sympathetic manner. Here are a few, more or less off the top of my head: Stephen Baxter’s Moonseed; Greg Bear’s Vitals; Gregory Benford’s Cosm, Eater, and The Martian Race; Greg Egan’s Teranesia and Schild’s Ladder; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica, and his climate change trilogy; Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. As I have no shame, I’ll also mention my own The Secret Of Life and White Devils. I’m sure that you can think of many more, but I hope this little list is enough to convince you that SF has neither ‘lost’ the scientist, nor its interest in rigorous, serious, and thrillingly speculative explorations of the outer reaches of science and technology. Of course, some SF does have a problem with keeping abreast of science’s rapidly advancing cutting edge, but I think I’ll reserve that topic for another time.

Robots Survive Dust Storm, Prepare To Conquer

They're alive!

Product

I’ve just received advance copies of the hardback and trade paperback editions of Cowboy Angels. As usual, I can’t quite bring myself to open them just yet, but they look lovely.

I’ve posted another extract from Cowboy Angels, the fourth, on the web site.

Borderline Anxiety (1)

Despite New Wave fantasies about reinsertition of science fiction into the so-called mainstream of literary fiction after the collapse of the Gernsbackian hegemony, or attempts by postmodernists to erase the hierarchy of high/low culture, the distinction between genre and mainstream is ineradicable. Science fiction, like crime, horror, or romance fiction, is distinguished by an internalised dialogue based on development and variation of unique tropes. This genre gestalt implies a border: an inside and an outside. Writers working inside a genre border must always be aware of their relationship with their chosen genre and with the mainstream outside the border. But mainstream writers are untroubled by this Janus-like duality unless they find it necessary to make use of genre tropes. Even then, if they are secure in their reputation, mainstream writers don’t need to excuse this borrowing. They might even admit an admiration for the genre to which they’re indebted. But because reputation is an important part of their self-worth, and because they’re hyperaware of status, most mainstream writers, like Jeanette Winterson (for instance), feel that they must deny that they writing science fiction when they are writing science fiction. They feel that they must neutralise the ant-pong of genre with disinfecting hyperbole. They must declare that they ‘hate science fiction.’ It’s ridiculous, of course. Hypocritical. But it usually works because journalists are usually too lazy to question it. When Jeanette Winterson declared to Liz Else and Eleanor Harris of the New Scientist that ‘I hate science fiction’, the two intrepid interviewers accepted it without demur. Would they have remained silent if Winterson had said ‘I hate scientists’, or ‘I hate Ian McEwan’?

Fortress America

Via Dan Froomkin's essential White House Watch:

Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base -- an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq -- and Iraqis -- at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as " Camp Cupcake," for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like."

More Stuff

I’ve added a third section of Cowboy Angels (the last of the prologue) to the website. More will be put up at random intervals until publication day, September 20th. Meanwhile, as the hinge of the year swings close on summer, I’m starting in on the final revision of the ongoing.

Currently reading: Spook Country, William Gibson.
Currently listening to: Stanley Brothers, Earliest Recordings. Altogether now: 'I'm just a roaming rambler, I'm always on the roam...'

Placating the Border Cops

I’m not certain that Jeanette Winterson’s flat disclaimer, ‘I hate science fiction,’ (see Without Prejudice) was generated by real hatred and loathing of the genre. More likely, it was a reflexive blurt driven by anxiety. Winterson is an author with impeccable literary establishment qualifications. And part of belonging to the ‘literary’ establishment is the need to maintain a strong and impermeable barrier between ‘literary’ and genre fiction, between so-called high and low art, between ‘proper’ fiction and despised, degenerate pulp. So although Winterson has felt it necessary, for the purposes of her novel, to borrow from science-fiction’s toolbox of tropes, tricks, and imagery, she has to make it clear that she is in no way tainted by or sympathetic to science fiction. Saying ‘I hate science fiction’ is not only like displaying a properly stamped passport to a border cop, proof to the cultural critics that she belongs on what she perceives to be the right side of the barrier; it’s also a powerful disinfectant spray that cleanses the taint of genre from borrowings smuggled out of the forbidden zone.

It occurs to me that the champions of so-called mundane science fiction may be displaying the same anxiety about genre taint as Winterson and other literary novelists who have borrowed from science fiction. The mundane movement, rejecting ‘myths’ such as aliens, faster-than-light travel, parallel worlds, time travel, and so on, declares strict adherence to mimesis and realistic speculation about known scientific truths. They aren’t the first science-fiction writers to attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest of the genre - Heinlein, for instance, attempted to erect a wall between real science fiction and mere fantasy by declaring that fantasy is ‘any story based on violation of a scientific fact’ - and I doubt that they’ll be the last. But like all the rest they are doomed to failure not only because their internal borders are artificial and impossible to police, but also because they are attempting to argue a case for legitimacy before a court that cares not a jot for the differences they are attempting to define.

From Fairyland

‘... You should be interested in fembots, Alex. They do what your viruses do, only it's purer, very intense and very precise. I made the first strain. It gives you a vision of the Madonna -- the Mother of God, not the pop star. I let it loose, and the hackers took over. There are fifty-eight strains I know of, now, all developed inside a year. Some reveal Elvis Presley or Princess Di, others God Herself in clouds of glory, or LGM.’

‘LGM?’

Alex is thinking of the white room -- she zapped him for sure. His brain crawls under his skull.

Milena is eager to explain. ‘Little Green Men. You know, like flying saucers. Right brain visions. There's one strain, the Streiber, that gives you a complete abduction experience, even with fuzzy false memories of rape. It's amazing what you can pack down inside a bunch of metal-doped superconducting buckyballs.’

Housekeeping

I’ve regrouted the web site, and added another short extract from Cowboy Angels.

Infinity And Beyond

Set up when the interweb was mostly fields brimming with golden idealism, infinityplus was one of first sites for free fiction and reviews and is still one of the best (more than 2 million words of free fiction), going static after ten years hard work by its publisher and editor, Keith Brooke.

For its tenth anniversary:
* Cross Roads Blues by Paul McAuley [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Inheritance by Paul McAuley [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R/revised]
* Paul McAuley interviewed by Stuart Carter [non-fiction, 25-Aug-07, 1W]
* Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese by Nicola Griffith [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Freezing Geezers by Kit Reed [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* The Edge of Nowhere by James Patrick Kelly [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Distant Galaxies Colliding by Gareth L Powell [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Three Days in a Border Town by Jeff VanderMeer [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Tall Tales on the Iron Horse by Colin P Davies [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* What's Up Tiger Lily? a novelette by Paul Di Filippo [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* And in the end... a last word from Keith Brooke

Whack-A-Mole Spooks And Butt-Kickin’ Bravos

Trashotron’s take on Cowboy Angels.

Without Prejudice

The latest issue of New Scientist contains an interview with Jeanette Winterson. As is all too often the case with ‘literary’ novelists who commit science fiction, she wants to make it clear that what she has written isn’t in any way SF:

Q: What do you think about novelists and science?
A: I hate science fiction . . .
Q: What’s your next book about?
A: . . . A girl builds a multi-gendered robot, which then kills her parents because it sees them mistreat her, so they both go on the run.

Actually, it’s slightly unfair to stitch her up by ellipsis. Her full answer to the question about novelists and science was this:

A: I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Crace or Margaret Atwood, are great. They take on science because it’s crucial to our world, and they use language to give energy to ideas. Others just borrow science and it ends up like the emperor’s new clothes, with no understanding of the material. But you shouldn’t fake it because science is too important, it’s the basis for our lives. I expect a lot more science in fiction because science is so rich.

Which is exactly what the best science fiction novels and stories, and ‘literary’ novels dealing with science, are all about. What a pity that Winterson had to spoil some common sense with a crass disclaimer.

More Advertisments For Myself.

I’ve put up an extract from Cowboy Angels (publication date, 29 days and counting) over on my website, adding to the free stuff already there.

Why I Write Short Stories

It isn’t for the money. You can’t make a living from writing science-fiction short stories. As John Scalzi recently pointed out, rates when Robert Heinlein started out, back in the 1940s, were much higher than they are now. Although you can earn much more in some markets outside the genre, the average in the SF field seems to be around four to eight cents (two to four pence) a word. This isn’t the fault of the markets; magazines are selling fewer copies than in SF’s Golden Age, and rates reflect that. But it means that if I write and sell a 3000 word short story, I can expect to be paid around 120 pounds sterling if I luck out on the high rate. If it was the best kind of short story, the kind that writes itself, it might have taken me three days to finish. That’s forty pounds a day, which isn’t bad, but isn't exactly in the comfort zone either. I’d be earning over 14,000 pounds a year if I could turn out and sell a story every three days, but of course, that's not really possible - I’d have to finish and sell 120 stories a year. There’s some extra money to factor in, of course, if I can resell published stories to collections, my own or reprint anthologies. One of my short stories has been reprinted more than ten times, earning far more than its original fee. But as far as I’m concerned, novels are where the real money is (which isn’t why I write them, or not entirely).

When I started out, I wrote and sold a bunch of short stories before I wrote and sold my first novel. It was the traditional route to becoming a professional SF writer. Things are a bit different now. It’s no longer necessary to make a name for yourself in the short story markets before writing and selling your novel; instead, it’s essential that you get a good, smart, hungry agent who can push your portion and outline. And there are certainly plenty of younger writers, especially those working in the heroic fantasy field, who started their careers as novelists and have never written a short story in their life. But almost all the writers of my generation here in Britain started out by publishing short stories (the only exception I can think of is Gwyneth Jones). I’m pretty sure it’s the same in the States. So, my first short stories were not only provided invaluable writing experience; they were also in part advertisements for myself.

And perhaps that’s a small part of the reason for continuing to write short stories, but it’s by no means the main reason. Now, I do it because I like to mess around with ideas - not just the ideas that form the story’s backbone, but with ideas about structure and form, voice and pace. It’s a form of play. I can also use short stories to explore and elaborate worlds that I may use in novels, or uncover corners of the world of a novel I’ve just written. The Quiet War stories are a good example of that. Over the past decade, I’ve written stories that I’m now mining, mostly indirectly, for material to supply two big novels. Right now, I’m working on a couple of stories about a shabby little interstellar empire, set in the very near future. And I have to admit that I still enjoy the tremendous satisfaction of working quickly and in a small compass, taking one idea and pushing it as far as it will go, or knocking two ideas together to see what will happen, or creating a moment that illuminates an entire life. If things go right, I have a finished piece in a few days. I tell you, it’s as bad as crack cocaine. Plus, when things go right, I get paid for it, too. It beats working for a living.

Never Mind the Width...

From a recent interview with Norman Mailer: ‘With a novel you have to be good for months at a time. With a short story you only have to be good for a week.’

If it wasn’t for nicely impish allusion to writing as an alternative to hellraising and carousing - as a form of distraction - this would of course be little more than a pretty obvious truism. Novels are longer: therefore they take longer to write, epic marathons to the brief sprints of short stories. But there’s a little more to it than that, of course. Writing a novel is a sustained act of imagination, sure, but as well as simple linear quantitative measurements there are crucial qualitative differences between writing a novel and writing a short story, too. For one thing, the imaginative act of writing a short story is more focused and sustained than that of writing a novel. Everything counts in a short story. A novel is roomy, able to contain all kinds of digressions and expansiveness. Short stories are what they are, no more, no less. And the best kind of short story (as mentioned a couple of entries ago) appears all at once, in the round: subject, theme, narrative and voice all in place, gliding out on its own melting. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t happen too often. But after I’ve trashed my way to the conclusion of a first draft, I usually know what’s gone wrong, what needs to be taken out and what is missing, and after that I have the whole thing in my head, like a three-dimensional model that can examined from any angle. All that remains to be done is pruning and polishing and tightening.

This happens with novels too, but at a much later stage, and it’s less global, more mechanical - it’s the point where I really have to get down to knitting everything together, when I know, for instance, that taking out a bit of exposition on page 23 will affect the long-delayed meeting of two characters on page 412. Novels by their very nature are imperfect. There’s always minor compromise somewhere in the structure, a few factual errors or contradictions, and in genre novels particularly there are sentences and paragraphs that exist only as bridges or exposition or explanation. Bits of plumbing or bracing left exposed. No matter how much you prune and compress, it’s impossible to submerge all information beneath the surface of the narrative.

But short stories, because they are shorter pieces of prose (although their narratives may encompass entire lifetimes), hold out the possibility of perfection. Maybe that’s why I haven’t given up on them, even though the economics of the short story market means that they are, for professional writers, luxury goods. The possibility of perfection. The satisfaction of fully realising an idea in just a few days, from first light to Fall. The knowledge that if you fail, it is not an important failure.

At St Pancras Old Church

According to the inestimable The London Encylopaedia it was at Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s grave in July 1814 that her daughter, Mary, and the poet Shelley confessed their love for each other. In that same year, they eloped to the continent, and in 1816, at a lakeside house near Geneva, Mary began to write Frankenstein, or The New Prometheus, whose hero infuses life into a monstrous being created from graveyard revenants.

Progress

Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you. Sometimes the story in your head spins straight out onto the page with rapt unhurried ease; more often, it stalls, refuses to wear the shape you planned for it, insists on a different direction, a new angle of attack. The story I first thought would be called ‘Oz‘ but now will probably be called ‘A Brief Guide to Other Histories’ has been like that. At first I thought I could get away with telling it in the second person singular, in the breathless rush of the present tense. I got all the way to the end of a first draft, but it wasn’t the story I wanted. So I started over, first person narration this time, telling the tale about someone’s encounter with his doppleganger at one remove. It’s work, but it’s also pleasure, too, when, as Angela Carter put it, ‘sign and sense fuse.’ But even after that happens, more work is needed . . .

Regents Canal, King's Cross

Fairyland Redux

The new edition of Fairyland is published today.

When I was writing it, way back in 1994, I wanted to produce a vivid and crammed portrait of a near future in which biotechnology was the principle agent of change, but not the only agent of change. I used the present tense to make it seem as immediate as possible. I set it in London, Paris and Albania because at that time most of the future seemed to be occupied by America and Americans. I wrote it from the point of view of people at the edge of a conspiracy to effect a liberating transformation, who see and understand only parts of the story in which they are caught. I had tremendous fun writing it, and after it was published it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and that gave me the final push to quit my job and start writing full time. So I’m extraordinarily pleased that Alex Sharkey, Morag Gray, Milena, First Rays of the New Rising Sun, and company have been given a new lease of life.

Time For Crime

The new Crime Time site is now up and running: a free online version of the magazine stuffed full of articles and reviews about crime fiction and movies...

First Class

Some of Paul Di Filippo's mail art.

The Zeppelin Building

Fairyland

I recently received my author’s copies of the reprint of Fairyland, part of Gollancz’s Modern Classics series - I’m afraid that the cover picture on Amazon doesn’t do justice to its lovely holographic sheen...

From the first chapter, which kicks off in the restored Great Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station:

Gilbert Scott's great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby. He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it onto his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach. A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast forward. There's a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella. It's monsoon weather.

Mr Brooks

Out for some time in the States, about to be realeased here, the serial killer genre gets a (slightly) new twist with Kevin Kostner as Mr Brooks, a mild-mannered businessman who is using the Twelve Step programme to try to give up his addiction to murder. Haunted and continually tempted by his alter ego, Marshall, a fine portrait of sinister and supernaturally smart hunger by William Hurt, Brooks, a.k.a. the Thumbprint Killer, steps into a world of trouble when he gives in to temptation for one last time. His double murder is witnessed by a nerdish amateur photographer (Dane Cook), who blackmails Brooks into initiating him into the murder club. So far so good. Dane Cook’s sweaty nervousness nicely ratchets up the unpredictability and Kostner (always at his best when he dons a bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses) and Hurt are a great double act; there’s a very fine moment when, after half an hour of bickering, they both laugh at the same time at the same nasty little idea, and you realise just how indivisible they really are.

Trouble is, the movie can’t resist piling on the issues. The policewoman hunting the Thumbprint Killer, played by Demi Moore, is not only a millionairess, she’s not only being taken to the cleaners by her soon-to-be-divorced husband and his rapacious lawyer, but she’s also being pursued by another serial killer who’s just escaped from prison and wants revenge. I half-expected her to be suffering from some kind of rare terminal illness, too. And Mr Brooks’s daughter hasn’t dropped out of college because she may or may not be pregnant: she’s inherited her father’s addiction, and has just botched her first effort. All of this is more or less skilfully resolved into a clever and neatly packaged ending, but it’s at the expense of proper development of the three-cornered relationship between Mr Brooks, Marshall, and the wannabe.

Demi Moore as usual sticks her chin in the air too much but wrings a few good moments from for her overblown character - but we’re also treated to the usual gratuitous scene of her exercising with grim determination (we got the message after G.I. Jane, Demi: give it a rest). Portland, Oregon, provides a fairly anonymous setting. Three out of five stars - partly in the hope that this will get Hurt much more work.

No End To 'Em

Jeremy Lassen asked if I’d mention that Nightshade Press is having a clearout sale. I will. They are. And because this blog is operated on the principle of unbiased coverage beholden with no special bias towards anyone in particular (except to me), I’ll also mention that Small Beer Press, Earthling, and PS Publishing also produce some pretty good books.

End of Round Two

I’m sure you’re all be thrilled to know that I’ve finished the second draft of the first Quiet War novel. Okay, well, I’m thrilled. And exhausted. Something like thirty thousand words were cut, this time around (and a few new ones added), and now the baggy monster has a definite shape and intent. It still doesn’t have a title, but that will come along. (I did think of calling this one War, and the next, Peace, but only, I swear, for a moment.)

I should take a break. But I have an introduction to write, and a short story that’s banging on the inside of my head, demanding to be let out.

I have managed to do a bit of reading. Michael Chabon’s fine The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and then, because I liked that one so much, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Connelly’s The Overlook. Adam Roberts’s Land of the Headless. Al Reynolds’s The Prefect. Rajiv Chandraskaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections. And Endless Things, the fourth and last part of John Crowley’s patient chronicle of becoming and unbecoming.

Science Friction

Peter Hollo asks which edition of Nature features the discission on biology and SF. It’s the July 5 edition, with a retro-pulp cover, and also includes an excellent article by Gary Wolfe about how SF has dealt with the ‘many worlds’ of quantum mechanics, a short story by Richard A Lovett and articles and Saturn’s eccentric little moon Hyperion (which I won’t be visiting in the ongoing novel) and a mystery about Mars’s so-called warm and wet period. They’re spoiling us.

I wasn’t going to mention the recent little spat about mainstream writers ‘borrowing’ SF tropes, kicked off by Jason Sanford’s article, ‘Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool: The US literary Establishment’s Need-Hate Relationship with Speculative Fiction’, published in the New York Review of Science Fiction. The affair was even summarised in the Guardian’s From the Blogs feature - yes, in a mainstream newspaper. Gosh. Matthew Cheney wrote an acerbic deconstruction, Sanford replied, and off it went. Anyway, the Nature discussion did get sidetracked on definitions of SF, and then I came across something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons:

‘[Science fiction} writers are joiners. They are a lodge. If they didn’t enjoy having a gang of their own so much, there would be no such category as science fiction. They love to stay up all night, arguing the question, "What is science fiction?" One might as usefully inquire, "What are the Elks? And what is the Order of the Evening Star?"’

And then this bunch of mainstream writers turns up at the party unannounced, and they don’t even have the decency to bring their own bottle...

How To Save Science

Make lab coats sexy.

(you'll need to page down to find it)

The Nature of the Beast

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a conversation with three other science-fiction writers - Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski and Peter Watts - about biology and science fiction. A transcript of the four-way interview, mediated by the irrepressible Oliver Morton, has been published in the latest edition of Nature and it’s available online, but unfortunately you’ll need a subscription to access the article and the cartoon illo (in which I appear to be Paul Merton imitating Commander Kang).

Our favourite moments in biological sf? Ken’s can be found in James Blish’s ‘Sunken Universe’ (aka ‘Surface Tension’); Joan’s in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos; Peter’s in Alice Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’; and mine in Greg Bear’s Blood Music...

Louder Than Bombs

The members of Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only heavy-metal band, are now refugees living in Syria. Suroosh Alvi has made a film about them.

Harder Than The Rest

The Die Hard series of movies is one of my guilty pleasures. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: big, noisy, escapist, and defiantly old-school extravanganzas. So I was happy to be able to sneak into a preview screening of the fourth and latest (courtesy of my critic pal, Kim Newman), albeit with a little foreboding. For after demolishing an office block in the first movie, an airport in the second, and large chunks of New York City in the third, how would the fourth in the series up the ante without becoming ridiculously overblown? How would the format adapt to its cyber-age plot (this isn’t Die Hard 4 or IV, after all, but Die Hard 4.0) without compromising its wild-west action formula of guns, fists, and brute cunning? And could Bruce Willis (the same age as me), still cut the mustard?

Well, as John McClane, Bruce still looks the part in a ripped and bloody vest, and his shaven head adds to his aura of Rushmore-like granite resolve. The story, involving a cyber-villain threatening the entire United States, and a series of chases that rip up large parts of the eastern seaboard, is driven along with enough action and kinetic velocity to stop you wondering about its implausibility. The bad guy, played by Timothy Olyphant (the sheriff in Deadwood), is utterly humourless, like all cyber-villains. There’s an awful lot of typing by the bad guys and the hacker sidekick McClane picks up, but it doesn’t slow up the action too much. There’s car v. helicopter fu, car in an elevator shaft fu, truck fu, jet fighter fu, and fisticuffs versus kung fu fu. At two and a half hours, the movie is about half an hour too long, I think it was a mistake to open up the cat-and-mouse format and stage the set-piece finale in the great outdoors, and in a series predicated on real action there’s rather too much CGI, and McClane is now about as hard to kill as a Terminator. But if you’re looking for a good dumb, noisy action movie, you can do far worse than this.

One thing puzzled me. There were free Snickers bars at the screening, the hacker sidekick had a bit about how hungry he was, and later opened a glove compartment to reveal a Snickers bar. But he didn’t eat it. Was it cut by the BBFC because it was too blatant an instance of product placement?

Holy Smoke

Smoke is the essential publication for anyone who loves London, and everyone into loving irreverence and weird truths: check it out here.

No End To Books

Hartwell and Kramer’s Best SF anthology is out now, and Dozois’s Best SF will be out early next month; both contain my short story ‘Rats of the System’. And the US edition of Dozois and Strahan’s New Space Opera, with my story ‘Winning Peace’ glimmering amongst a glittering host of talent, has also just hit the shops.

All of which reminds me that I should get started on my doppelganger story, ‘Oz’; especially as the title and ending came to me one recent sleepless night, in that nice, sly way the good stuff has of sneaking up on you.

Free At Last! Good God Almighty Free At Last!

The proofs for Cowboy Angels are done at last - read twice by me, and once by one of the people to whom the novel is dedicated. Amazing what slips through after several drafts, editing, copy-editing etc. Thankfully, most of the corrections are of the word processing-error class - extra words or missing words from inaccurate microtonal cut and paste operations. Weird line break errors. Inverted commas that have inverted the wrong way around. This kind of stuff didn't happen with my first typewritten typescript, reset by an actual human being.

Separated the pages with red ink from those untouched, wrote up a set of notes on the more complicated changes, stuck notes and red-inked pages in a padded envelope and rode the tube into town and Orion towers, where I dropped them off. As it was sunny, I walked back home, crossing the river, passing the South Bank complex (on the little beach by the Thames there, roughly where Frenzy started, a couple of people where building an ambitious sandcastle), crossing the wobbly bridge and sneaking back through Smithfield.

Thinking about not much at all after thinking about too much, pretty concentratedly. The header by the way, is MLK's, and features in the book. Might be slightly misquoted here but I can't be bothered to check. Don't have to do that for a bit, now: just make stuff up for the second draft on the ongoing.

Meanwhile, I live in hope that bound proofs might turn up, although they are already two months overdue. I have no idea why. And in three months and a few days, the thing itself should be published. I hope. In the thickening modern world, much of what was once simple and linear now becomes an infinitely sub-divided Xeno's paradox... At least summer sun in city is still uncomplicated.

Not Drowning, Mostly

I haven’t gone away: I’m dealing with proofs for Cowboy Angels, my last chance to make sure everything is shipshape and Bristol-fashion, and trying to push forward the second draft of the next.

Meanwhile, here’s an interview with me in French and English, and a review of Glyphes, the French edition of Mind’s Eye. And here’s the new Steampunk magazine (link via BoingBoing and Warren Ellis), a set of mindblowing images from Cassini’s first two years around Saturn, and news of the coolest brown dwarf yet found, with the mass of just ten Jupiters and a temperature of 430 degrees Centigrade - the surface of Venus is hotter. Oh, and it seems to be just fifty light years away. As I suggested in Four Hundred Billion Stars, brown dwarfs are everywhere.

The Fat Lady Sings

A copy of the Australian edition of The New Space Opera, Strahan & Dozois, eds, thumps down on my doorstep . Big and bristling with wonders: 18 stories, 7 by the Britpack.

Also reached the end of the red ink marathon on the first draft of the latest, which looks like it's going to be a shelf-bender . . .

Mars Now

We’re definitely living in the future now: a garden designed as a rest area for astronauts on Mars has won best garden in the Chelsea Flower Show. And at about the same time, that brave little shopping cart, Spirit, has discovered a patch of silica-rich soil that provides further evidence of Mars’s wet past. More than ever, I want NASA, or the Chinese, or quite frankly anybody, to get a manned expedition together as soon as possible. The Mars Rovers and satellites have done and are continuing to do a fantastic job, but the only way to properly search for fossils on Mars is to send a geologist or paleontologist there and let them loose on the most likely bits of landscape. And as Mars is mapped in finer and finer detail, and as the rovers continue to probe the rocks and dirt, it seems more and more likely that some traces of past life will be found.

I’ve been scrawling red ink all over the first draft of the next novel, pruning back stuff that’s far too lush, taking out things that have no business being there, and finding places where scenes are missing. Soon, I’ll have to start making good these IOUs to myself. I did find time to read Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man. Great in parts, good in others, but didn't quite pull together: the bits from a terrorist's point of view seemed invented rather than felt, for instance, and those three shortish passages didn't quite add anything much, except one good transition at the end. But DeLillo is very good on dealing with the multiple psychic traumas of 9/11 without specifically explaining or signposting, and that was where I felt the novel really took off, especially in a couple of sequences in Las Vegas. As a break from red ink and wincing, I watched 28 Weeks Later, which I can’t really recommend (as Professor Frink would say, first there’s the biting, then the running and the screaming and the biting and the running), and Zodiac, which I can recommend, unreservedly. Up there with The Lives Of Others as my film of the year, for what it’s worth.

M.I.C.K.E.Y.H.A.M.A.S.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2075845,00.html

'Rocket Boy'

I’ve put up the full text of my short story ‘Rocket Boy’ over at my web site.

It first appeared in the anthology Future Weapons of War, published in February, although I've yet to see a copy. Has anyone spotted one in the wild? Perhaps the publishers are too busy counting their money to send out contributors’ copies. Or perhaps my copy has been intercepted by Homeland Security on its way out of the US; even now some apparatchik might be puzzling his way through the stories, looking for sentences that might possibly give comfort to the Axis of Evil.

More Greene

Just off Essex Road in Islington is one of those increasingly rare all-purpose junk shops: dusty and distressed furniture, foxed mirrors, worm-eaten gilt picture frames, chipped shepherdess figurines, rusted Oxo tins . . . And books too, of course. There’s always a rack of them set up outside, and on Sunday I bought a couple of Penguin paperbacks for less than the price of a pint of beer. A post-war Mr Polly, the spine a little chipped but the red cover still bright, and a slightly waterstained edition of two of Graham Greene’s stories made into films, ‘The Third Man’, and ‘The Fallen Idol’.

Rereading ‘The Fallen Idol’, I was struck afresh by the vivid precision and precise concision of its structure and imagery, and the brilliant conceit of using a seven-year-old boy as the viewpoint in a story about an adulterous affair involving the boy’s parents’ butler. The boy is damaged for life by what happens, but it’s the butler’s wife comes of worst, in all senses. It’s necessary for the story that she be unsympathetic, of course - as far as the boy is concerned, she’s a figure of unwelcome authority that spoils his fantasies, a nightmare intruder who at one point is described as a witch. And because she is such an unsympathetic character, we are able to feel sympathy for the butler, betrayed by the boy’s innocence. Yet I can’t help wondering about how different the story might be if the child left in the care of the butler and his wife had been a little girl; how she might have colluded with the cheated wife instead of the cheating husband, and how she might have been ruined in quite a different way.

Version Francais

Here’s the cover of the French edition of Mind’s Eye, published at the end of last month. It couldn’t be called Mind’s Eye in France because there’s already a novel by that name, but my indefatigable and microscopically attentive translator, Bernard Sigaud, came up with Glyphes, which is equally good if not better.

Nova's Night

To the Arthur C. Clarke awards last night, held in the Apollo cinema at the beginning of the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival. The underground foyer was noisy and crowded, and there was the usual DJ playing the usual 120 bpm racket, but there are quiet places with actual seats, and it’s definitely A Good Thing that the British SF clan has an annual gathering like this. And amongst the usual suspects there’s always the chance of an unexpected meeting. A couple of years ago it was Fred Pohl (who is rumoured to be collaborating with Clarke on a novel) and Betty Hull; this year it was Kit and Joe Reed.

This year’s winner, the twenty-first, was M. John Harrison for Nova Swing. A popular win for a novel I think I need to read again to understand why I liked it so much, the first time around. In his brief acceptance speech, MJH noted that Clarke had written a couple of the best SF novels of the past century, and that to his eleven-year-old self Clarke had seemed like a god. If not a god, Clarke was certainly an avatar of SF’s Golden Age to my eighteen-year-old self when I saw him speak at Bristol University in a large lecture theatre filled to overflowing. And for what’s it’s worth, I think Childhood’s End and The City and the Stars are still capable of evoking the fabled sense of wonder.

After the ceremony, I went to dinner with the Adam Roberts and the Gollancz editorial team. MJH turned up a little later, having been feted with champagne by his agent. Amongst other things, we got to talking about the recent news that the function of a small part of a mouse brain has been simulated on a supercomputer; one of the editors chided us when we agreed that as far as we were concerned it wasn’t good fictional material. But this is an age of wonders after all, and there’s simply too much good stuff around - in this week’s New Scientist, for instance, there’s a report that there may be something to cold fusion after all (something Clarke has long championed, against the grain of scientific consensus), an item about gestural language in chimpanzees, a note about a planet-spotting telescope that’s proving to be 10 times more sensitive than expected, sensitive enough to spot Earth-sized planets, another note about drug-induced retrieval of ‘lost’ long-term memories . . . Besides, all novelists must have a good filter: the ability to select the pertinent fact or image and ruthlessly discard everything else is as essential as ruthless self-criticism, or the discipline of solitude, or Graham Greene’s infamous splinter of ice in the heart. ‘Discrimination in one’s words is certainly required,’ Greene wrote in A Sort Of Life, ‘ but not love of one’s words - that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to the excesses of Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell . . .’ Nova Swing, like all of MJH’s novels and stories, is a lapidary exemplar of this discrimination.

After this excitement, anyhow, it’s back to the second draft of the ongoing, and the necessary hard work to make lucid Macy Minnot’s entanglement in the plots and counterplots of people more powerful and dangerous than her.

What It's Not

Over at Lou Ander’s blog, there’s some lively discussion about whether the reaction to Kurt Vonnegut's death and Ray Bradbury’s Pulitzer Prize are signs that science fiction is about to get its long-overdue rehabilitation. Amongst other things, he mentions the pretzel logic deployed by one of Battlestar Galactica’s executive producers to distance the series from genre antpong*:

'It's fleshed-out reality,' explains executive producer Ronald D. Moore in the sci-fi mag SFX. 'It's not in the science-fiction genre.'

Too true. Because as far as SF is concerned, ‘fleshing-out’ reality doesn’t go far enough. SF is about leading reality into really bad habits. It’s about giving reality a shot of something dark and nasty that turns its tiny little mind upside down and inside out. It’s about setting fire to the audience’s preconceptions and burying the ashes six feet deep under the foundations of something new and strange and utterly wonderful. Just to begin with, you understand. After that, it lights out for the Territory, ahead of the rest. That’s when the real fun starts.

So if rehabilitation means that SF is taken seriously for what it is, and we no longer have to listen to people who disrespect it out of reflex snobbery, then I’m all for it. Just as long as it doesn’t mean that SF has to become all respectable and sivilised, and has to start behaving itself as far as reality is concerned.


*Coined by John Clute. I wish I could remember where.