There Are Doors (11)

Edna Sharrow slurs and sidles along the streets like a leaf blown by the fumy slipstream of the endless traffic, through crowds of foreigners. Many of them humpbacked with rucksacks. Many coloured. As if her dear England has fallen to a foreign power while she slept in her lair. She’s hungry again, eyes children as she drifts past. Babies. Flinches from a dog that explodes into rage.

She drifts east, towards her enemy’s compass point of splintered black light. Remembering a girl. An ordinary girl telling her that Mr Carlyle wasn’t in. Telling her to go away. Sending her away. But that must be a story Edna is telling herself to cover up the hole in her memory. For a mere slip of girl could not have any power over one such as she. No, she has been tricked by her enemy, and he will pay for that, and for everything else.

When she can no further she passes through a gate into a small park and curls up under a laurel bush. She dreams of ranging through the dark clothed in the sinew and hot stink of a fox, and wakes choking on a mouthful of bloody pigeon feathers. And rises, renewed. Today she will have her revenge.

Part 1 2 3

How Not To Write A Short Story

1) Get drunk first.*

2) Spend three hours every day in front of the mirror intoning your mantra: ‘I am bottling the lightning. James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield are ants in my afterbirth.’

3) You can never do too much research.

4) Try to work out what magazine editors want before you start to write. Study the stories they publish very carefully. Work out their average word count. Work out average sentence and paragraph lengths. Which words appear most? Which appear least? Or not at all?

5) Choose a room in your house for a study. Better still, build a custom-designed shed in your garden. Insulate it, install mains electricity, decorate it in a soothing but stimulating shade of green. Choose the perfect desk and chair. Spend several weeks in stationers and art supply shops choosing the best brands of paper, pens, pencils, notebooks etc. Buy a top-of-the-line laptop and an industrial laser printer. Build bookshelves and fill them with dictionaries, encyclopaedias, how-to-write manuals, Strunk & White, Partridge’s Usage and Abusage, The Writers’ & Artist’s Yearbook, Brewer’s Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature etc etc. Read everything from cover to cover. Maybe you should paint the walls a perky but soothing shade of blue instead. Or go on a writing course...

6) It’s important to get the first page absolutely right. Don’t be afraid to rewrite it 1000 times. Did I say page? I meant sentence.

7) spelyn n punctooashun r killin creativitey man dnt b a sheap

8) You can never spend too much time on the internet mongboards, dissing published writers. The fuckers.

9) Get a bad crack addiction. When you clean up you’ll have a ton of killer material.

10) Get a life instead, and enjoy it to the full.**

*Warning: may actually work. But not for everyone.
**Recommended.

It's A Smallish World

Last week I picked up an out-of-print novel by Paul Watkins (Archangel) in the local charity shop. It reminded me of what a good and interesting writer he is, so I did the Google thing and the Amazon thing to check out what he’d been doing lately. And for a moment it seemed that his latest novel is called The Quiet War. Except that it isn’t a novel, and it’s by a different Paul Watkins.

Sometimes it seems that the universe is trying to send you a message, but you can never be quite sure what it is or whether it really is for you.

Unfinished

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, my mind unstringing itself, I’ll get ideas about the next day’s work. Solutions to seemingly intractable problems about character or plot. Last night, though, I had a dream about a short story. It was printed on a wraparound for the review section of the Saturday edition of the Guardian newspaper. Black letters on white paper. Twenty-four point type. About two hundred words a page, four pages. No title, just a name - not mine, someone I know - at the head of each page.

It was an SF story about two omniscient post-Singularity AIs passing through a black hole into the universe next door. Where the black hole was a white fountain, kick-starting creation. The pair of AIs as gods, shaping their new universe. And the smallest of the pair, quicker-witted but less powerful than his companion, saying at every significant tick in the universe’s evolution: ‘Dude, this is so like last time.’

I woke up before I finished reading it, so I don’t know how it ends. I wonder if the author does. Maybe he’ll read this and get in touch, Experiment In Time style.

There Are Doors (10)

It’s Richard’s house in the little square mews in Notting Hill. Was once Richard’s house. For of course Richard is long dead. Edna Sharrow is not so mad that she does not know that.

Poor charming courtly Richard and his coterie. She remembers the delightful evening when the Leader held court here. A splendid man, holding all of them in thrall. As powerful in his way as Edna, then just a smidgeon over sixty and sitting neat and tidy as a closed clasp knife in a corner of the room. The Leader so tall and handsome, and his beautiful wife, and his wife’s mad daughter, who whispered to Edna, I know you.

But why is she here now? She had been at the door of her enemy. His house in Princelet Street, shuttered and quiet. And here she is without any memory of transition, like finding herself on the wrong page of her own story.

Something bad happened, she thinks, and in her panic she fled and came here, looking for help. But Richard hung himself in his prison cell on the day when he and all the rest of the world learned that the Fuhrer had committed suicide, and time has taken care of all his friends.

For the first time since breaking her long seclusion and stepping out into the world Edna feels afraid.

Part 1 2

A Good Deed In A Naughty World

I've just discovered that the online magazine Fanzine has published a short story by Scott Bradfield. I've been a big fan every since I read some of his early short stories in Interzone, back in the Paleolithic: smartly-written absurdist parables, goofy and sweet, but always with a sting in the tale. Kind of like the films of Preston Sturges. He hasn't published much recently, but there's a collection of good stuff still in print - Hot Animal Love. And it's well worth trying to track down a copy of his novel Animal Planet, too.

Seen From A 274 Bus

Like an intruder from a world designed by Tim Burton, a black carriage with glass sides and giant plumes of black feathers rising from the corners, coal-black horses, coachmen all in black, and inside, a Goth bride. A sight to gladden any heart, seen at the edge of Camden, naturally.

There Are Doors (9)

Here’s the place where she met her nemesis on a snowy night in February 1939, after the debacle at the Bank of England.

The two men bursting in while she and Kurt were loading the barge. Brave, beautiful, blond Kurt running at them with a boathook and Detective Sergeant Flowers shooting Kurt with his service revolver and Kurt’s brains and blood jumping from his shattered head. And Mr Carlyle, that sly old fraud, whipping Edna’s servants from her and scattering them into nothing at all in the cold black air.

Edna had the presence of mind to jump into the water and release her hold on the fire imp, and the barge had gone up in clap of white flame. She remembers seeing it burning through blowing snow when she’d surfaced a hundred yards away. Remembers that she flagged down a taxi outside the London Hospital later that night. Remembers the look of surprise and regret on the face of the cabbie in the moment of his death.

An hour later she was at the safe house in Tooting. The next day she was in France.

Standing on the canal towpath in plain daylight, Edna Sharrow can feel her old enemy to the east. Like a splinter of black light in the corner of her eye. Still in that house in Spitalfields no doubt. He was a creature of habit then, and she’s certain that he won’t have changed very much. Goody.

Part 1

The Power Of Names

Blood Kisses

To town yesterday, to a screening at Frightfest of Let The Right One In, the film version of the bestselling Swedish vampire novel, adapted for the screen by its author, John Ajivide Lindqvist. Set in a bleak, wintery working class suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it features a very creep pedophile turned ineffectual serial killer in the Renfield role, and some excellent twists to cannonical vampire lore (including the best cats v. vampire bit I've ever seen, vampiric addiction to puzzles, and as far as I know the first demonstration of what happens when a vampire steps over a threshold uninvited), but at its heart is the affecting portrait of the developing relationship between a bullied twelve-year-old boy, and a vampire girl who has been twelve for a very long time. Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson turn in astonishing performances as the friends sharing a very dark secret, and director Tomas Alfredsson provides some lovely atmospheric moments, and by framing the more gruesome moments through windows, half-open doors, or in the distance, never tips the delicate romance into outright horror. Watch out for it in spring next year.

Recently read: Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, in which a perfect novella of lost innocence strains to escape an overblown blockbuster; Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News, third in her series of 'literary' crime novels, with a slightly fumbled crux but a very finely sustained tone of dark humour, a plot that effortlessly glides on a slick of coincidences, and in the character of sixteen-year-old Reggie a wonderful example of the gritty girl detective; and Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, a terrific portrait of 1960s America, and a rigorous explication of how Nixon poisoned American politics for two generations (not for nothing is our strand of history, in Cowboy Angels, called the Nixon sheaf).

Write Stuff

Anyone who's new to the game of submitting fiction to the markets would be well advised to check Ellen Datlow's little rant about her pet peeves concerning submissions. Ellen is one of the best editors in the business and reads a lot of manuscripts for her anthology projects. Heed her wise words (there's lots of good stuff in the comments, too).

Goofs like these aren't just found in submissions by new writers by the way. My partner is an editor at a large publishing house in the UK. You'd be surprised - or maybe you wouldn't - at the number of Big Name authors who submit manuscripts printed in single-spaced ten point type, or with virtually no margins, or (and this is amazingly common) with dropped lines separating paragraphs, and no indentations. Maybe the latter is something they learned as journalists, but when it comes to making a book out of the manuscript, it means that someone has to insert hundreds of proof marks in correction.

In the UK, the Writers' and Artists Yearbook, updated annually, has all kinds of useful information for published and would-be writers, but oddly enough has nothing at all about the important matter of formatting your precious submission. So take Ellen's comments to heart, and if you're sending out short stories do check out magazines' submission requirements. And don't turn page 3 upside down, clip pages 4 & 5 together, or leave a hair between pages 6 & 7 to test whether or not your submission gets read that far. Editors know all those tricks, too.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and do good.

I've just passed the Xeno's paradox stage of the second draft of the ongoing, if you're interested. All the stuff I neglected to include first time around is in, more or less. Now all I have to do is go over the last three chapters, and then write the real ending (the last few books, out of what I hope is practicality rather than superstition or laziness, I haven't tried to get it absolutely or even approximately right until this stage, when I know exactly what the secret of the book really is).

New Free Stuff

I've added a new short story, A Brief Guide To Other Histories, to the fiction archive. First published in Postscripts #15, it shares the same multiverse as Cowboy Angels.

Coming soon: the first chapter of The Quiet War.

Gosh Wow

After reading this, I'm (a) even more pleased that Gollancz had the foresight to bring out a new paperback edition of Fairyland and b) flattered to be in such prestigious company.

There Are Doors (8)

Edna Sharrow, a short story by Paul McAuley

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler’s bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She’s been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall.

A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She’d forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she’ll be ready to go back into the world.

Coincidentally

The hero of Whole Wide World works for the T12, the Metropolitan Police’s computer crimes unit. Alongside people like this gentleman, explaining in today’s Guardian about the persistence of information and why, when you dispose of a computer, you should always remove the hard disc first. Unless you aren't bothered about some stranger finding out about your interest in extreme knitting, Enid Blyton first editions, and ant sex, of course.

Reality, Can’t Keep Up With Part 39

At the beginning of this century I started work on a thriller set a little way in the future. A terrorist attack had damaged the country’s electronic infrastructure. The police and security services had gained all kinds of new powers. Surveillance was omnipresent. Titled Whole Wide World, it was published in the UK in September 2001.

One of my little flights of fancy was that the government would require all ISPs to keep long-term records of emails sent and websites visited by their customers. But it was a step beyond plausibility to imagine that the government would want to keep a central database of that data. No matter how it was ringfenced, sooner or later someone would hack it. Surely, no one would be so stupid, even in fiction.

Until now, that is. Despite serious problems with every large-scale government IT project, and a series of embarrassing security violations, including leaving laptops packed with sensitive data on trains and losing CD-ROMs of tax databases, the Home Office has the brass neck to suggest that it can be safely entrusted with logs of the telephone and internet usage of every one of its citizens. But wait: there’s more. Local government, the health service, and hundreds of public bodies will be able to access this data at will. And investigators across the European Community will be able to use it too.

There’s no doubt that this kind of data can be useful in investigations of terrorism and crime. But in the topsy-turvy world of the government , the only way to protect us from terrorism is to treat everybody as a potential terrorist. While in the real world, the bad guys can use disposable pay-as-you-go mobile phones, temporary, anonymous email addresses, forwarding services, and many other tricks to prevent anyone tracking what they’re up to. And pulling the internet records of a suicide bomber after the fact may not be much use to anyone.

You really can’t make it up. And to think that there are still people who believe that governments can maintain massive cover-ups about black-op conspiracies ...

'I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Mr de Mille.'

Now that Cassini has finished its four-year mission, the people flying it can start to take some interesting risks. Like flying it to within 50 kilometres of the surface of Enceladus, right above the region that's jetting fountains of water vapour. And next time they're getting even closer.

The Secret History Of America, Part XXIV

How David Lynch and Robert Ivers met Devo, an extract from Josh Frank's In Heaven Everything Is Fine, that describes one moment from a time when it was still possible for there to be forgotten moments in pop culture.

Your Daily Moment Of Orwell

Believe it or not, before blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all those other Interweb distractions, people would actually commit to paper observations and notes on their daily lives. Some of them were even published as books - yup, just like blogs. The Orwell Prize, in association with the Orwell Trust, is putting up the entries from George Orwell's diary as blog entries, sixty years after they were first made, starting today. It's not the first time this kind of thing has been done (there's a Samuel Pepys blog , for instance), but it's still a cool idea. Who wouldn't want to know what one of the most foremost essayists and novelists in the twentieth century was up to as world war loomed?

The first entry is about a snake.

Future Now

It's become a cliche to moan about the lack of aircars in the past's future, which happens to the present we inhabit. This cliche-busting aircraft, straight out of a classic 1970s Chris Foss cover, is a design by Aurora Flight Sciences for a solar-powered modular vehicle that will fly in the stratosphere for over five years, 'for surveillance and reconnaissance, communications relay and environmental monitoring with the potential for roles in global climate change' (from Gizmag via Bruce Sterling).

Scribble Scribble Scribble

I'm flat out exhausted. Completely tapped. Wasted.

It's been a bit of a week, workwise, in other words. But I've come to the end of proofreading The Quiet War, and I've entered all the changes and corrections into the electronic master file of the manuscript (not all writers do this, but I like to keep a copy that's as close as possible to the finished book). Now all I have to do is type up a list of all the changes so that the hero editor, who has to insert them in the proofs that will be sent back to the printers, can understand all the tweaks I've made. I regret to say I had a couple of second thoughts on some changes, and this is where I discovered that the ecologically-friendly water-based Tippex I use isn't compatible with the ecologically-friendly water-based ink of my red pen, resulting in little pink puddles. Oh dear. Amazing that book production still has its Victorian moments, involving actual handwriting...

Oh, I also have to incorporate changes suggested by my volunteer proofreader, who will read the damn fat thing to check for things that I might have missed. I'm too close to the work to spot every little error, especially the repetition of certain words in closely adjacent sentences and paragraphs (a good reason to keep modifiers to the minimum, this).

Meanwhile, I've managed to maintain steady progress, at ten pages a day, on the second draft of the ongoing. This involves a lot of red ink too, as I like to scribble all kinds of changes and crossings-out and cryptic notes and rewordings on printed-out pages before typing them into the electronic manuscript. What with this, and the changes to proofs, I'm on my second red pen of the week (Pentel with a 0.7mm tip and liquid gel ink). And I'm back at Neptune, in a funky little habitat orbiting the irregular little moon Neso, and pretty soon I'll be on the Moon, Earth's moon, and then back to Earth for all kinds of serious fun.

So It's Come To This...

In lieu of actual thought, most of which is being used on work right now, here are a few of my current favourite things:

Oobject asks ‘Bladerunner - so where are we now? Particularly where are all the artsy animated building facades?’
(Answer - not many of them are in the USA.)

As others see us: The Asylum’s take on Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, just reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. A typically great Penguin cover, by the way.

Iain Sinclair reports on the Olympic site in East London for BBC Radio 4 - with slide show!

And finally, some old tech via the rather wonderful Hey Okay.

Hear This

Recently received, and now available for purchase from Infinivox, a 3 CD collection of unabridged readings of 'Mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction':

'Last Contact' by Stephen Baxter
'The Something-Dreaming Game' by Elizabeth Bear
'Grandma' by Carol Emshwiller
'Lambing Season' by Molly Gloss
'None So Blind' by Joe Haldeman
'Kin' by Bruce McAllister
'Gene Wars' by Paul J McAuley
'Bright Red Star' by Bud Sparhawk
'Far As You Can Go' by Greg van Eekhout

Editor Allan Kaster tells me that he's podcasting some of the stories; you can find them by poking around in his blog ('Kin' is up right now).

Life's A Beach

It’s fun, if a bit dizzying, trying to write a novel that’s partly set on various moons of Saturn while all kinds of new discoveries are beamed back by Cassini. The latest confirms what we more or less knew - that the flat, radar-reflective bodies at Titan’s poles were almost certainly lakes of liquid ethane and methane - but it’s a most excellent discovery nonetheless. Especially as evaporation of the lake during summer at Titan’s south pole has created a beach. Hmmm....

Googled

So there I was, walking along a street in my neighbourhood, minding my own business, when a black Opel Vectra with a tall camera-laden pole sticking up from its roof went past: one of the infamous camera cars that Google is presently using, somewhat controversially, to photograph streets in major cities in Europe for Google Earth. After a brief moment of existential confusion, I remembered that I was carrying my little digital camera - but I was too late. The all-seeing eye had moved on. I had missed my chance to photograph Google photographing me. Other people have been more successful, and those scamps at the Register have made a neat mashup of Google Maps and sightings of their cars - including one getting a parking ticket.

Assuming Google uses the footage they shot today, if you check out in the near future Thornhill Road, London, N1, I’m the harrassed-looking middle-aged guy in the blue shirt and dark glasses.

If you want an alternative to Google Earth, by the way, try this wiki.

Light Of Other Days

From the family archives, here’s a photograph of the aquatic dodgems in Hotham Park, Bognor Regis. That’s my uncle nearest the camera, with an unidentified friend at the helm. They’re about to be rammed, in slow motion, by the boat coming in on the left. Note the lack of safety straps, life jackets or any other kind of protection apart from the rubber bumper wrapped round the coffin-like hulls of the doughty little motorboats. We were a tougher lot, back then.

The photograph was obviously taken from another boat, with a tilt that gives it a lovely sense of dynamic motion. Looking at it, I have a sense memory of a rainbow sheen on soupy green water, the tang of the blue haze of burnt petrol that hung over the little lake, and the frustrating lag between turning the steering wheel and winning any change in direction - a fine practical lesson in Newton's laws of motion.

90% Perspiration

My family weren’t so poor that we had to eat cold gravel of a morning, but we certainly couldn’t afford to have a summer holiday every year. And when we did go on holiday, it was to stay with our great-aunt, who ran a boarding house in Bognor Regis (a semi-detached Edwardian villa at 25 Canada Grove, it’s now part of a residential care home, so it goes). British readers will know that Bognor has a certain reputation, courtesy of a century of day-trippers, Butlins, and King George V’s infamous death-bed comment. He’d already been to Bognor to recover from a serious illness in the bracing sea air, and was grateful enough to allow it to add ‘Regis’ to its name. But when he fell ill for the final time, and one of his doctors expressed the hope that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor again, he raised himself up and pronounced the phrase that’s stuck to the town ever since: ‘Bugger Bognor.’

But in the 1960s I could find little to fault. There was the promenade, and the sandy beaches, with little tidepools full of mysterious life. There was the pier, not then truncated by a storm, complete with theatre, candy-floss stalls, and a slot-machine arcade that featured a laughing sailor that scared the bejeesus out of me. There was the boating pond for toy boats, and there was Hotham Park, which had one of the smallest zoos in the world (I seem to remember the most exotic animal was a porcupine), a Crazy Golf course, the other boating pond equipped with motor boats got up as dodgem cars, and later on, an extensive miniature railway. There was also a pretty good library, one of the first in Britain to boast a computerised catalogue, where one thundery August I read something like fifty UFO books.

Those were the days.

Although I liked Bognor well enough, I never really caught the holiday habit. When I was at university, I worked in the summer to stay solvent, didn’t have time for a holiday while working for my Ph.D, and then treated trips to academic conferences as holidays (don’t feel sorry for me; one year I visited South Carolina and Hawaii, stopping off at Los Angeles in between, and returning via the WorldCon in Chicago).

All of which is preamble to the fact that this year, it doesn’t look like I’ll have time for a holiday, what with being halfway through the second draft of the ongoing, which is due to be delivered in October, not to mention expecting at any moment the proofs of The Quiet War. Hey, but it’s still the best job in the world . . .

PS Unlikely Worlds Trufact: James Joyce got married to Nora Barnacle in Bognor.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

In the latest Guardian book review pages, Alastair Campbell, former Commissar of Communication for Tony Blair, seems to think that book reviews shouldn’t be about the book you’re reviewing, but about what the book has to do with you. Reviewing Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Campbell writes:

I did have a plan to run 50 miles on my 50th birthday last year but a cycling injury to my calf - like Murakami, I also do triathlon - grounded me. Now, also like him, my running is accompanied by constant worries about aging, reflected in ever slower times.

He is in a different class to me, as runner and novelist, and throughout he gives the sense that he cannot be one without being the other. He has done 25 marathons and written 11 novels. I have done one marathon and written two novels . . .

And so, and so on, in a clumsy and mix of competitive envy and vain-glorious boasting. Pooter lives.

Meanwhile, in the same pages, M. John Harrison shows you how it’s done, framing the territory the book in question appears to inhabit, before getting under its hood and finding out what it’s really made of:

The post-disaster story has a deep ambivalence about the worth of that which has been lost. Its traditional purpose is to defamiliarise the world we know, and express our two worst fears: that the built environment will collapse, leaving us without material support; or - worse - that it won’t, saddling us in perpetuity with everything we hate about it, from office work to shampoo ads. Its purpose is to deliver a little frisson. So it’s clear from the off, then, that Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work, though it appears to take place in the same querulous psychic space as, say, I am Legend or Survivors, isn’t a post-disaster story at all.

I confess to having a blind spot for Julian Barnes’s novels, but his introduction to a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters is very fine indeed, from the opening self-deprecatory anecdote about his first encounter with Fitzgerald, to his sharp observations of how novels and novelists work, and the special qualities of Fitzgerald’s writing:

Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when the material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

And:

[Fitzgerald] didn’t like to offend: on one occasion she went to vote, and as she left the polling station, ‘to my disgust the Conservative lady outside snatched away my card, saying - I’m only taking ours, dear - I didn’t like to say I was Liberal for fear of hurting her feelings - she had put a nice green hat on and everything - I often see her in church.’

That ‘nice green hat’ is a pure writer’s touch...

I have to say that I think the condescending ‘dear’ is a nicely vivid stab at fixing a character, too. And thanks to Harrison and Barnes, I have more books to add to my reading list . . .

James Who?

Kim Newman reviews a Filipino mashup of Batman and Bond.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Porte

There are fewer windows than it seems in the trumpe l’oeil frontage of Pollack’s Toy Museum on Scala Street, not far from Newman Passage. You can read more about it in Peter Ashley’s London Peculiars, a great compendium of photographs and prose about ‘curiosities in a capital city.’ Pollack’s Toy Museum, maintaining the tradition of the toy theatre, belongs to the class of little magic shops, old-fashioned one-off emporia that give cities and towns a touch of wonderful, unexpected eccentricity. A couple of other personal favourites are the Algerian Coffee Shop and Gerry’s Wines and Spirits, both on Old Compton Street. Any other suggestions?

A Little Light Research

As everyone knows, you can’t trust everything on the Internet. But it does hold all kinds of treasures for the working author in need of a quick fact fix. Like fabulous pictures. And maps of other worlds. My latest discovery is this neat little solar system clock that shows the positions of the planets at any given time. Forward the outer planet view to 2225 AD to find out what my characters have to deal with in the ongoing (it’s an applet, so if you want to check it out you’ll need Java).

Now some people might think that making sure that all the planets are lined up in their correct position is taking research a little too far. Especially as my characters are buzzing about the Solar System on ships powered by fusion motors that haven’t yet been invented. Could it be that I’m taking this hard SF lark a mite too seriously?

Well, maybe. But the fusion motor is a convention -- shorthand for some kind of advanced space technology if not yet realisable is at least possible. And it doesn’t mean that my characters are able to buzz about at impossible speeds, so that means that not only does the Solar System still seem like a big, roomy place, but the relative position of the planets they’re travelling between is important. And since that’s important to my characters, it means it’s important for me to try to get it right, or at least to hint at the problems this may causes interplanetary travellers every now and then. Besides, while I’m not above stretching the odd fact or two if they get in the way of the story, in this case the relative positions of the planets have helped me to focus on the direction of the narrative. Sometimes this research lark pays off.

I was going to write something about The Dark Knight, but work intervened over the weekend, and it seems a bit pointless to contribute to the deluge of opinion and comment and sheer hype on the net and elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I liked it a lot, and it certainly delivers the film we were promised at the end of Batman Begins, when the Batman turns over a card to reveal it’s the joker. It isn’t the best film every made, and it certainly isn’t as good as Godfather 2, but it’s a fine large-scale Hollywood action film, although very dark and very grim, but hey, in these times maybe we get the Hollywood action films we deserve. Christopher Nolan has done a great job in bringing the franchise bang up to date, dropping the gothic noir in favour of a technothriller sheen. The bank robbery in the opening five minutes is a worthy homage to Michael Mann, the master of technothriller films: William Fitchner, who plays the shotgun-toting bank manager, played crooked financier Roger Van Zant in Michael Mann’s Heat. Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is full of malign energy, twisting like a snake on a punji stick, winning the iconic moment competition when, dressed as a nurse, he walks away from an exploding hospital. Christian Bale is forced to act with nothing much more than his chin when he’s in Batman gear, but he’s grimly elegant as Bruce Wayne, and does a great bit of truck fu. Forget the critical gabble about how the film repositions our ideas of heroes and heroism; although it does attempt to say something about how far you can go when trying to protect citizens without losing sight of what you’re protecting in the first place, it fudges the issue with a get-out clause that may work as a plot twist, but doesn’t hold water in the real world. And besides, the kinetics of action films means that it’s impossible to maintain any kind of serious dialogue or examination about any kind of issue. And this is a seriously kinetic bit of film-making: if it’s spectacle you want, it definitely delivers.

There Are Doors (7)

Located in Newman Passage, a narrow dogleg between Newman Street and Rathbone Street in Fitzrovia, this door has been much spruced up since a prostitute led Carl Boehm’s murderous photographer through it at the beginning of Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom.

It leads now into the Newman Arms pub, which connects us back to the previous entry in this erratic little series, for during the war George Orwell used to drink here while working for the BBC. Back then, the pub didn’t have a spirits license so it served only beer; Orwell used it as the model for the pub in 1984 where Winston Smith tries and fails to learn about life before the Revolution from an old prole. And as mentioned before, my friend Kim Newman’s grandmother typed up the manuscript of 1984 . . .

Spectacle In Search Of A Story

Down into London town (where developers seems intent on narrowing every pavement to half its normal size, leading to Bladerunner-style pedestrian jams) to see a preview of Hellboy II The Golden Army. Which, as long as you accept it for what it is, is a decent enough couple of hours entertainment. What it is, of course, is a comic book film with great art design, some decent acting, and an exiguous find-the-coupons plot. Or rather, plot coupon: namely the third portion of a crown that, when reassembled, enables the wearer to command an army of indestructible soldiers created on the order of an Elf king in the long ago, and which an Elf prince now wants to control so that he can get his revenge on the perfidious human race who’ve destroyed his forests. Or something along those lines. The supernatural equivalent of the FBI - the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense - gets wind of the prince’s plot when an auction house is overrun by ravenous tooth fairies when it puts one of the parts of the crown under the hammer, and Hellboy steps in to clean up the mess.


Ron Perlman is once again perfectly fine as an ordinary working schmoe who just happens to be the red-skinned spawn of the Devil with an indestructible stone fist, and is ably supported by pyrokinetic girlfriend (Selma Blair), newtboy with a brain the size of a planet (Doug Jones, replacing David Hyde-Pierce) and their hapless boss (the great Jeffrey Tambor, twitchily anxious to do right by his superiors). There's also Teutonic smoke-in-a-suit new guy Johann Krauss, basically a couple of actors taking turns in a steampunk diving suit, voiced by Seth McFarlane. Director Guillermo del Torro and his design team create a couple of zoos’ worth of weird creatures, notably in a densely populated Goblin Market. There’s also a very fine sequence right at the beginning that uses puppets to set up the plot, framed as a bedtime story read to a young Hellboy by John Hurt, briefly returning as his kindly mentor.

So far, so good. But between the noisy and nicely choreographed action sequences there’s not much story, and the narration proceeds by a series of awkward jerks. Since there’s only one plot coupon to be scooped up by the prince, the second act is padded out with a couple of romance sub-plots that don’t quite dovetail with the rest of the movie, there are an awful lot of plot holes and seen-it-coming-in-the-first-reel twists, the usual ordinary people don’t understand superheroes schtick, and the dreaded golden army don’t really get to show its stuff. But it does the business, there are touches of fin de siecle sadness that play nicely against Hellboy’s truculent, wisecracking noir hero, and it’s crammed with del Torro’s trademark weirdness. Now here’s a director who’d be a perfect fit to direct a film version of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. Now there's a story.

Tomorrow: The Dark Knight.

True Names

I'm now pretty sure that the title of the ongoing project, which is kinda sorta a sequel to The Quiet War, is The Gardens of the Sun. Of course, my publishers may well disagree, for all kinds of appropriate reasons, but as far as I'm concerned that's its true name, just as the true name of Cowboy Angels is Look For America. Like most writers, I feel that names have secret powers.

Night of the Lepus

More animal bioterror. I wonder if the crazed rabbit was in contact with the kamikaze ducks...

Rabbit contaminated water supply
Pitsford reservoir
Water supplies were declared safe on 4 July

A rabbit has been named as the cause of a sickness bug which was found in water supplies in Northamptonshire.

Customers in 100,000 homes were told by Anglian Water to boil tap water for up to 10 days after the Cryptosporidium outbreak on 25 June.

The firm said a rabbit gaining access to the treatment process led to the bug at Pitsford Treatment works.

The Happening World

Foul play or kamikaze attempt to create world's lamest metaphor?

Okay, I admit it: I've gone slightly stir crazy, stuck in front of a screen attempting to hack my way into the second draft of the ongoing and generally behaving like one of its characters, holed up in a refuge in a hostile environment. But I think I have the first part nailed, and the sun appears to be shining outside . . .

Yes, But What Are They Saying About Us?

From Science Daily:

When it comes to cellular communication networks, a primitive single-celled microbe that answers to the name of Monosiga brevicollis has a leg up on animals composed of billions of cells. It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered...

...With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear? "We don't have a clue!" says Manning, "but this discovery is the first step in finding out."

'More elaborate and diverse than any multicellular organism' including us, I guess. Hmm, maybe Greg Bear's idea that prokaryotes are the secret rulers of Earth (in Vitals) isn't so far-out after all...

Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

‘. . . there are moments when a soul released from its cave of flesh will speed towards a mortal mind as it lies entranced in sleep, will curl across its surface, frothing, like waves across a beach, touching its tenderest parts and causing dreams to rise from its depths, like the bubbles of burrowing clams. And we awake, knowing we have been touched by something beautiful,whose beauty we shall never understand, knowing only that we have been witnesses to its inexpressible passing. We call her name, if we can remember it, and ask her to remain a moment longer, only a moment. But already she is gone.’

The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch 1940 - 2008

There are tributes from people who knew him here, here, and here. Go read his books, and his stories. Read The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song. Read the stories collected in Getting Into Death and Fundamental Disch. He was a damn fine writer. He was one of the writers who meant a lot to me when I was a lonely teenage sci-fi geek in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Update: Daily Kos has posted a fine memorial essay.

Evolution Strikes Back

A little while back, I mentioned Carl Zimmer's marvelous book, Microcosm, which uses research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli to illuminate every aspect of the new biology. One chapter was given over to discussion of the work of the team led by Dr Richard Lenski. One of Lenski's papers, showing evolution of a new trait by E. coli (the ability to grow on citrate) in laboratory conditions, attracted the attention of Richard Schlafly, the right-wing Christian activist who runs Conservapedia. Schlafly demanded Lenski's data, resulting in the following illuminating exchange, documented on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site, in which a closed mind meets a surgical strike.

(Link via Roz Kaveny and John Crowley.)

(By the way, it's instructive to follow the open-minded scientists link on Conservapedia's page about Lenski. Hmm. I thought those guys didn't like to be called Creationists any more, preferring the less contentious 'supporters of intelligent design'.)

Spaced

Out today, issue 217 of Interzone, which includes my story 'Little Lost Robot' (aka the big space robot story) as well as stories by Karen Fishler, Paul Tremblay, MK Hobson, Suzanne Palmer and Jason Sandford.

I was going to write something about WALL-E, which I saw last Sunday, but a bit of Googling will reveal a myriad indepth reviews. So I’ll just say that the first forty minutes is one of the best bits of SF cinema I’ve ever seen. The candy-coloured satire of the second half is less successful (and contains a gaping plot hole) but the odd-couple romance between the infinitely curious and engaging WALL-E and the advanced probe EVE carries the day, with a definitive Tinkerbell moment that had the small children in the audience gripped. Increasingly, SFX-rich movies seem pointlessly noisy and frenetic*; WALL-E shows how the same tools can be used in a rich and painterly fashion.

*mind you, the first five minutes of the new Batman movie look great.

Current reading: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

And Junot Diaz has an excellent take on the sandbox game where I’m spending rather too much time shooting cops, mafia hoods and flying rats.

Relocation, Relocation

Stick a dome over this proposed design for a sustainable hotel in Shanghai and imagine it in a crater on Dione or Iapetus...

Shake And Bake

First wet chemistry results from the Phoenix Lander shows that Martian soil is highly alkaline, and definitely interacted with liquid water at some point. The water isn't a surprise, but the alkalinity is - a lot of people thought that Martian soil would be highly acidic and, without being extensively modified, inimicable to plant life. Instead, according to the lead chemist, in one of those quotes that the media loves, you might be able to grow asparagus in it. Yeah, but think of the shipping cost and the carbon footprint.

(Lunar soil, by the way, is suitable for marigolds.)

Lost In Space

Some saint has posted the BBC4 adaptation of Ballard's 'The Enormous Room' on YouTube. Catch it while you can!

(Link via Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits.)

With A Small Flourish Of Trumpets...

PS Publishing has just posted the table of contents for issue #15 of Postscripts magazine:

. . .the biggest issue yet of PS Publishing's award-winning short fiction magazine. Not only that, the entire issue will focus on the science fiction genre, with a positively stellar list of contributing authors and work . . .

The usual 'I'm not worthy' disclaimers apply, of course.

Evolution Now

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, public reading of short papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at a meeting of the Linnean Society launched the idea of evolution by natural selection on the world.

If you want a primer on how far biology has come since then, you can do no better than read Carl Zimmer’s elegant, lucid and vividly written Microcosm, which uses a century of research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli, found in the lower intestine of every human being, to illuminate our understanding of metabolic control, horizontal and vertical gene transference, evolution, the social life of bacteria, the origin of life, arguments against creationism, the ethical and practical problems faced by genetic engineering and synthetic biology, panspermia, and much more. One of the best and most thought-provoking science books I’ve read for a long time.

Following a discussion about the similarities between the evolution and organisation of metabolic networks of E. coli and the growth of man-made networks like the Internet, Zimmer concludes:

At the Dover intelligent design trial, creationists revealed a fondness for analogies to technology. If something in E. coli or some other organism looks like a machine, then it must have been designed intelligently. Yet the term intelligent design is ultimately an unjustified pat on the back. The fact that E. coli and a man-made network show some striking similarities does not mean that E. coli was produced by intelligent design. It actually means that human design is a lot less intelligent than we like to think. Instead of some grand, forward-thinking vision, we create some of our greatest inventions through slow, myopic tinkering.

Slow, myopic tinkering: hmmm, more or less exactly the way I work.

Proof Positive

On Friday, I received a copy of the bound proofs of The Quiet War, well on its way towards becoming an actual book. Here it is, sitting on top of the printed MSS of the first draft of the ongoing. As for that, I've read the draft and made notes on structural changes that need to be made to make the narrative coherent - moving chapters around, deleting material that doesn't move the story forward and noting where there are gaps and inconsistencies that need to be fixed. Next, I'll be working through the text line by line. Some people can do all their drafting directly on screen; I need to make marks on paper, to create a physical history of first and second thoughts which I then transfer to a new draft. Perhaps it's a hangover from my first stories and novels, which were composed on a typewriter. The fact that you had to retype a page if you had second thoughts really concentrated the mind, back then.

But before I get into all that, I'll have to deal with page proofs of The Quiet War, correcting goofs that made it through the various drafts and the editing and copy-editing process, combing out typos and making other last-chance fixes before it goes back to the printers for production in time for publication in October. As in farming, every stage of book production has its season...

Natural Art

Particles + gravity + time = beauty

Commercial Break, Encore

Recently received: the French edition of The Secret of Life, transformed, by the alchemy of translation, into Une Invasion Martienne. You can read an online interview about the book, conducted by Eric Holstein, here.

Elsewhere, you can watch Tom Waits’s press conference about his tour, or listen to the world’s oldest known recordings of computer music, made in 1951. No, it isn’t ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...’ But it's pretty close.

Commercial Update

I've just been told by my hero editor that Gollancz has decided to reprint the Future Classics edition of Fairyland, and hang the expenses. I'm mightily pleased, needless to say.

Elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair memorialises what's being lost around the London Olympic site.

Commercial Break

Cowboy Angels has just been published in paperback, retaining the lovely and evocative cover of the trade paperback/hardback. The publishing group (Hachette Livre UK) that owns the imprint that publishes my stuff (Gollancz) is currently in dispute with amazon.co.uk because the latter want to keep an even higher percentage of the retail price. I’m on the side of my publisher on this one: all publishers have already shaved their margins to the bone, major retailers like Amazon already get more than 50% of the retail price, and cutting the percentage the publishers make on the sale of each book even further would ultimately cut the diversity of titles they could publish. Amazon has been removing sales buttons from some Hachette titles and ‘delinking’ some titles from features like ‘Perfect Partner’ but so far Cowboy Angels hasn’t been affected by these strong-arm tactics. Like many authors I use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com by default to point you to where you can buy my stuff online, but there are plenty of other places, such as the Guardian shop (the Guardian just gave the paperback a nice capsule review).

Over at Locus, Graham Sleight reviews all eight titles of Gollancz’s ‘Future Classics’ series, including Fairyland. That particular edition has gone out of print and because the lovely, prizewinning covers are very expensive to produce, none of the titles in the series will be reprinted. Which nicely but unfortunately illustrates my point about publishers’ margins . . . Although Fairyland is no longer available at Amazon, some bookshops still have a few copies, and I hope to have some good news about a new edition soon.

Rock And Roll

I’m old enough to remember when the physics of 2-D chunks of space junk colliding and splitting into smaller fragments in the primeval video game Asteroids seemed genuinely cutting edge. Now, it seems that something like that may be occurring in Saturn’s F-Ring, whose rapid changes may be created by colliding chunks of rock. Yet again, you just can’t make it up.

Talking of old video games, I highly recommend Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong, a classic new kid/old gunslinger contest involving Donkey Kong and the Screen of Death.

It Isn't Easy Being Green

Down through the early morning heat into the centre of London to see a preview of The Incredible Hulk. More of a correction to rather than a sequel of Ang Lee’s outing with the angry green giant, the second of Marvel Studio’s productions isn’t actively bad, but it’s a disappointing follow-up to the flawed but feisty Iron Man. Still, it starts out well. The creation myth that occupied much of Ang Lee’s movie is recapitulated under the opening credits, efficiently showing how a laboratory accident cursed nuclear physicist Bruce Banner with a monstrous alter ego, the Hulk. The story opens with Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, hiding out from General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, who considers him property of the US Army, attempting to learn how to control the anger and stress levels that cause him to transform into the Hulk if they rise to high, and making a connection with the mysterious Mr Blue, who promises a cure. After evading an attempt to snatch him, Banner ends up back in America, on the run with former sweetheart Dr Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), heading to New York and a rendezvous with Mr Blue, who turns out to be cell biologist Professor Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake). Meanwhile, an experienced soldier (Tim Roth) detailed to capture Bruce Banner is first treated with Super Soldier serum, and when that doesn’t satisfy his thirst for power forces Professor Sterns to give him the full Hulk treatment . . .

Like its protagonist, the movie is divided into two, and the preliminary hide-and-seek between the US Army and Bruce Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro is a lot more exciting and engaging than the blockbuster CGI fest of the second half. A bigger problem is that the human characters aren’t much more appealing than the CGI creatures. Throughout, Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner much as he played ‘John Smith’ at the beginning of Fight Club: mousily quiet and severely repressed. It’s a good take on Banner’s predicament and works well in the opening sequence, but doesn’t develop into anything interesting and lacks Fight Club’s knowing irony. Partly, this is because the nature of the beast means that the lead actor always disappears when the action starts, but in between CGI rampages Banner remains an enigma, and although he’s a scientist, he shows little interest in what it means or feels like to become the Hulk; although Betsy Ross’s new flame is psychiatrist Leonard (who in the comic books was briefly Banner’s psychiatrist, before a dose of Hulk serum transformed him into Doc Samson), the movie misses the chance of a meaningful conversation between him and Banner.

Some nice moments hint at the bones of a better film underlying the blockbuster flab: Banner and Betsy Ross start to make love but can’t follow through because Banner’s arousal might trigger the Hulk; a brief, punchy scene ends with Betsy Ross letting rip at a crazy New York taxi driver, something Banner can’t allow himself to do; a Beauty and the Beast idyll between Betsy Ross and the Hulk references both Frankenstein and King Kong. But these are few and far between, and although there are enough nods to the myth to satisfy fans, and director Louis Leterrier (who scored a hit with The Transporter) gives the action scenes a gritty and visceral feel, especially in a chase through the alleys and rooftops of the favelas, the plot, like one of the episodes of the '70s TV series, doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Instead, a couple of moments that have nothing to do with the movie’s story, including a brief walk-on by another Marvel character, aim us towards the next in the series. Let’s hope it’s a lot meatier than this.

Ice Station Phoenix

The Mars lander Phoenix has touched down successfully at Mars’s north pole; first images are being posted at its official site. My first reaction to the panoramic photograph and close-ups, for what it's worth: ice-wedge polygons at every scale, water-ice right under that dusty surface.

And in another part of the Solar System, Cassini has imaged evidence of tectonic activity on Titan. A few years ago we didn’t know if Titan was covered in methane oceans or, if there were landforms, what they looked like. Now it is becoming a place with its own dynamic geography: chaotic hilly terrain, rivers and lakes, fault scarps, seas of dunes, volcanos ...

Meanwhile, I’m off to Norway, land of the squiggly bits. The usual spotty service will resume early in June.

The Wrap

The scan scarcely does justice to Sidonie Beresford-Browne's use of shimmering metallic colours, but here it is - the cover for The Quiet War.

Adding Up

Ian Fleming claimed to write the James Bond novels at the rate of 2000 words per day. 1000 in the morning, followed by lunch and a swim; 1000 in the afternoon, and then cocktails and the company of beautiful women. It took him six weeks of this regime to finish a novel. Nice work if you can get it.

I started the ongoing project on January 3 this year, and finished the first draft on May 20. At twenty weeks, it doesn’t seem to measure up to Fleming’s Stakhanovite rate of production - even though the ongoing is somewhat over 170000 words long, while the Bond novels, at 2000 words a day for six weeks, stack up at an economical 84000 words, I seem to have been overdoing it on the lunch and swimming and cocktails and company of beautiful women bit. In fact, I was hitting Fleming’s rate, at minimum, each week. It’s just that I had other stuff to do - such as dealing with the edit and rewrite of The Quiet War, and then its copy edit. That’s five weeks out of the schedule right there. A fair number of weekends were taken up with finishing a novella, and writing an essay, too. And at the beginning, despite a fair amount of forward planning and making detailed background notes, I managed to make my usual false start, discovering after a few weeks and some 70000 words that I wasn’t heading in the right direction or moving at the right speed. D’oh! Well, nothing for it but to start over, and hope that some of the stuff can be reused (which about half of it was, in the end).

Writing seems to me to consist of a) blundering about in the wrong direction, b) finding the right direction and hitting the groove and getting on with it, and c) rewriting. Ah, rewriting! How I love rewriting! After all, the first draft proves that the project has a beginning and an end. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out all the middle stuff, and making sense of notes like this (and this is one of the more intelligible ones): [need to cut this up into at least two chapters and in second sharpen tension between Ghosts and others, more on unbound nanotech and also make the attack and the death of Colonel Neves much sharper].

But first I have to finish writing a talk I’m giving at the Norwegian Festival of Literature . . .

Last Things

(Warning: contains major spoilers of well-known novels you should have read.)

I’m so close to the end of the first draft on the ongoing that I can taste it. And of course I am preoccupied with the all important last sentences. What scene or reverie will foreshadow them? What will they convey? How will they be shaped?

SF and fantasy novels not only have to provide an ending for their characters; they also have to give an idea of how the world in which they are set has been changed, and whether it will carry on changing, and in which direction. This means that endings are sometimes two-staged affairs, as in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, where the affairs of the world are set in order before we follow the major protagonists to their last farewell, and ordinary life closes over the ones who are left behind in the world. The ending of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has the same pattern: the world changes, and we see the protagonist, Case, settle into that changed world, and his changed life, and the last few sentences make an elegiac farewell to his erstwhile companions.

Elegiac farewells are common in SF and fantasy, especially when they end trilogies or longer series that are increasingly common to the form. It is a letting go not just of the characters, but the world they have saved, or created, or changed. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, the last volume of his trilogy about terraforming Mars and creating a new social order, we slip quietly from the new Mars and the presence of the woman who opposed terraforming throughout, and in her despair at the changes put herself in the way of death many times, until now, at the very end, she finds a way of accepting the world, and life: ‘ . . . She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand towards her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.’

There are at least two other main classes of SF and fantasy novel endings. The first is like a trap springing shut. The world has changed (or it has failed to change), and ending shows the protagonists caught in that change, or in their failure. George Orwell’s 1984 has a classic dystopian ending, in which after all his trials and tribulations of the hero has failed to escape - or rather, he has escaped by turning his struggle against the system against himself and from defeat plucked a pyrrhic victory, an ironic reversal in a novel in which the meaning of language has been famously reversed to suit its rulers: ‘Two gin-scented tears trickle down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’

There’s a similar kind of ending in Orwell’s Animal Farm, where a revolution has been absorbed into the socioeconomic frame it sought to overthrow. The last sentence has transcended the book: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

But this kind of ending isn’t always unhappy. Sometimes the trap springs shut on a moment of happiness, or at least, on tranquillity, or the reassertion of order. In Philip K. Dick’s Martian Timeslip, for instance, the threat of chaos had been averted and decency and goodness are shown to have triumphed in this quiet moment: ‘In the darkness of the Martian night [Silvia’s] husband and father-in-law searched for Erna Steiner; their light flashed here and there, and their voices could be heard, businesslike and competent and patient.’

But sometimes the end of the novel is not The End at all. It’s a slingshot, a sudden revelation that the business of change has not ended, or has only just begun. If Neuromancer ends in an elegiac farewell, the last novel in the loose trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ends in a slingshot that propels the protagonists into an alien cyberspace that has meshed with ours. One of the most famous slingshot endings (not just because it helps resolve the enigmatic ending of the film) is that of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the Starchild dispatches missiles aimed at him:
‘ . . . he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
‘But he would think of something.’

Clarke liked slingshot endings, or sudden reversals. At the end of Rendezvous With Rama, as the eponymous alien spaceship powers out of the Solar System, the novel ends with this last thought (Clarke’s italics): ‘The Ramans do everything in threes.’

The ending of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz famously showed that its ending was merely the beginning of a new turn in its epicycles of history (note the spare prose, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road): ‘A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.’

How will the ongoing project of mine end? That would be telling. You’ll have to read the rest of it first.

From I, Robot to iRobot

As Justina Robson pointed out on a recent panel about near future SF, things like this are all very well but most of them don't clean in the corners properly because they are designed by men. There's a woman on the team behind this, so maybe it does better.

I see from the new issue of Interzone that my big space robot story, 'Little Lost Robot', is now a coming attraction...

Incoming

The blurb for The Quiet War:

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.

On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition.

The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it’s too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war . . .

From the prison cities of Earth to the scrupulously realised landscapes of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, The Quiet War’s exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?

When We Were Cool

There’s long been a close and sometimes fruitful relationship between science fiction and the music of popular beat combos. In a recent article (in the Guardian, but not on-line as far as I know), Jon Savage provides a useful corrective to the motion that SF-influenced is dominated by heavy metal and prog rock bands (with David Bowie as a glam outlier to the latter): Joy Division and a host of 1970s punk and post-punk bands were informed and influenced by SF of the period, available in cheap paperback editions along with all kinds of pulp fiction and experimental and fringe literature. Savage also highlights the importance of independent bookshops as beacons of the offbeat; in the case of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, these included shops run by David Britton and Mike Butterworth, such as House on the Borderland and Orbit: vital beacons of alt. culture.My favourite song of the period remains The Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’, but it wouldn’t take much thought to work up a top twenty . . .

Currently reading: Titan Unveiled by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, not only full of insights about Saturn’s largest moon, but also a great account of the science and engineering that underpinned the Cassini mission and transformed Titan ‘from an object of speculation to a planetary world with its own set of processes and observable effects.’ And makes me want to write a bunch of stories set there as soon as possible.

Slip Sliding Away

A few days ago, the Guardian published a big page 3 article about a proposed NASA mission to a tiny Earth-crossing asteroid (here’s the original proposal, which I think firms up an idea that has been floating about for a while). Obviously, NASA needs new, eye-catching missions for its so-new-it-isn’t-yet-built next-generation spaceship, and this isn’t a bad one. Some useful science might even be involved, although a swarm of tiny robots might be much better at manoeuvring around a flying mountain than human beings. But I can’t help thinking that if astronauts are going to catch a ride on an asteroid, it shouldn’t be back to Earth, but up up and away....

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to work out if I can incorporate as a plot point in the next novel the mind-boggling notion that the entire surface of Titan might be slowly rotating on top of an ocean of ammonia/water, pushed by winds. Are there tectonic plates, as in Earth? Are there huge titanquakes? Do strings of volcanoes form as the surface migrates above hotspots, as in Hawaii? Will sat-nav work? Hmmm...

Some Wit, Little Irony

Into town for the general press preview of Iron Man. Directed by John Favreau, the action is as hard-edged as the new incarnation of the Bond series, and while there’s the expected ton of CGI, there’s also room for some smart dialogue and good performances. Most notably that of Robert Downey, Jr, who carries the movie with his charmingly charismatic take on Tony Stark, effortlessly shading from wisecracking irresponsible playboy to wisecracking tortured genius. Gwyneth Paltrow does her nuanced best with the two-dimensional character of his PA, ‘Pepper’ Potts, while Jeff Bridges amply fills the Gene Hackman role as bald, cigar-chewing, jovially menacing father-figure.

The movie does a fair job of filling a summer-blockbuster shaped hole, and the first act, apart from shifting the venue from Vietnam to Afghanistan, sticks pretty closely to the origin story published in Tales of Suspense 39 way back in 1962. (I picked up Iron Man’s story a little later, along with Thor and the Fantastic Four, not really out of choice, I have to admit: the spinner in my local newsagent stocked Marvel rather than DC comic books.) Problem is, the origin story - warlord kidnaps American armaments genius, forces him to create a copy of his superduper new missile system in a cave, and is surprised when he creates an invincible suit of armour instead - is pure hokum. And while the warlord may be leader of a multinational terrorist group, he's still a cliche of oriental fiendishness (he's also a diluted version of Iron Man's original nemesis, the Mandarin), To be fair, the script makes some attempt to deal with the paradox at its heart - Tony Stark responds to a brutal lesson in blowback from his own arms company by building a more powerful weapon, in an era where we've had ample real-life lessons that no amount of high-tech can give our military adventures happy endings - but in the end it simply sidesteps it, and delivers an entertaining but pretty predictable WWW-style slug-fest. Still, after the very noisy denoument, the movie doesn’t entirely waste the saving graces of its sly wit and Robert Downey, Jr's mischievousness: there’s a neat parting shot that slings us straight towards part two of the franchise.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I do. It’s goes past my office while I scroll down, scroll down, scrowl down, making corrections suggested by my copy editor to the manuscript of The Quiet War. For after the editing and the rewriting, comes the nitty-gritty word-by-word sentence-by-sentence analysis of the text for bloopers both factual and grammatical, repetition, inconsistency, repetition, general stupidity and much else. I’m lucky. I have a fine copy editor with a magpie memory (which means that he can remind me that I used the neologism ice-rock throughout, except for the one time I used icerock), a thorough working knowledge of usuage and abusage of written English, and a pretty good sensitivity for register - the difference in voice between scenes that have different emotional contexts, or between viewpoints. He’s also incredibly clear on what he thinks should (ought?) to be changed, so it wasn’t much of a hardship, no really it wasn’t, to spend the weekend wincingly going through the marked-up manuscript, and then making the appropriate changes to the electronic file. Now I have to read it through again, s*l*o*w*l*y, and then it goes back to the publishers, who will send it to the typesetters to be set in book form. And then it comes back to me again, one last time, so that I can check for any bloopers that skated past, or somehow introduced themselves. Amazingly, there will still be some mistake lurking in the final text, which I will be able to find by the simple method of opening the finished book at a random page and letting my eye fall on a random line.

Somehow, I managed to spend a lovely afternoon, the sunniest and warmest so far this year, in a pub and walking on Hampstead Heath, discovering that the ideal accessory for someone who needs to meet other people is a ten-week-old toy poodle (not mine: my friends’).

I also finished a kind of autobiographical essay for the Postscripts magazine in which I’m the featured author. It’s called How Was The Future For You? and starts like this:

In July, 1969, it seemed to me that the road to the future was as straight as a monorail line, as predictable as an eclipse. Harold ‘white heat of technology’ Wilson was prime minister. The long years of austerity that had followed the Second World War were slipping into history; London was swinging like a pendulum do. The British prototype of Concorde frequently overflew my school, piloted by the inimitable Brian Trubshaw. Nuclear power promised unlimited electricity too cheap to be worth metering. A hovercraft service linked Dover and Calais. The first decimal coins were being struck in the Mint, replacements for the half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, thrupenny bits, and copper pennies, halfpennies and farthings of the l.s.d. system inherited from the Romans.

I was fourteen. I read science fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else, and watched every episode of Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Thunderbirds Are Go. I’d switched allegiance from the Victor, a comic that endlessly refought the First and Second World Wars, to TV 21, which promoted a future full of big machines and bigger explosions. My mind had been expanded by 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (setting aside the stuff about monoliths) laid out the game plan for the thirty years: shuttles owned by Pan-Am; wheel-shaped space stations in Earth orbit; giant Lunar cities; expeditions to the outer planets; brilliant, almost human computers; quietly competent scientist heroes. And now, July 16 1969, in the lunch hour of one of the last days of the summer term, I was sitting in warm sunshine on a grass bank of the school playground with several friends, listening to a transistor radio tuned to a live broadcast from Cape Kennedy, Florida, USA, the launch of Apollo 11. The future would never again be so hopeful, so full of promise.

But in the blue and sunny expanse of the sky which the Apollo astronauts left behind on their way to the Moon, a small cloud about the size of a man’s hand was beginning to drift towards the sun.

Shortly

I’ve just received the proofs of my short story ‘Adventure’, which will be published in Lou Ander’s Fast Forward 2, coming realsoonnow. As previously mentioned, I have a short story (well, half a short story, strictly speaking, as I wrote it with Kim Newman) in the recently published The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow. And tomorrow is the publication day of The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan*, which includes another of my short stories.

And that, as they used to say in TV ads for 50 piece kitchen-knife sets, isn’t all. The Big Space Robot story, cheekily called ‘Little Lost Robot’, has been accepted for publication by Interzone. And this summer Postscripts magazine will be publishing an all-SF edition to coincide with the World SF Convention at Denver, and as I’m the featured author, it will include no less than four of my stories. One, ‘Looking For Van Gogh At The End Of The World’ is a reprint - although it’s the first time it will appear in print in English. The other three, ‘The Thought War’, ‘A Brief Guide to Other Histories’ (which shares the setting of Cowboy Angels), and ‘City of the Dead’, are originals. There’ll be an extract from The Quiet War, too.

Admittedly, the stories in the SRB of SFF and The Starry Rift were written a couple of years ago, but in between working on drafts of The Quiet War, and starting the first draft of the next novel, I seem to have found the time to finish five new stories in the past eight months: a fairly intensive burst of productivity as far as I’m concerned. But now I have to get back to the novel in hand. Two-thirds of the first draft are done, and it’s just beginning, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, to ride on its own melting (to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost).

*Jonathan has not only set up a website full of information about the book, but he also offers readers a chance to win copies of the book by entering a simple competition.

Very Big And Very Very Far Away

The newsblog sfsignal runs a Mind Meld feature in which SF authors pontificate about various topics. #16 is about space opera.

Currently reading: Sputnik Caledonia, by Andrew Crumey
Currently listening to: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Here Comes Everything

In 2004, I had the privilege of being invited to take part in a workshop about the design of an online Encyclopedia of Life, which would catalogue essential details of the1.8 million known species of animals, plants, fungi, algae, protists, bacteria and viruses. Scientists, computer mavens and a couple of SF people (myself and the august John Clute, who is a trustee of the Telluride Institute, which organised the workshop -- he can be seen kneeling at the right of the group in the photograph above, taken with my trusty keyring camera), spent a pretty intense time in the little town of Telluride, Colorada, discussing what needs an Encyclopedia of Life could satisfy, and attempting to design a useful template for its pages. Much more work has been done since by a small army of unpaid volunteers, and now a site housing the first 30,000 pages has gone live. Although I made but a microscopic contribution, I feel immeasurably thrilled that it’s up and running.

Oh My God! It's Full Of Cards!

Long before the internet, Paul Otlet planned a world library based on index cards. The remains of his Mundaneum, which he and Le Corbusier proposed to house in a vast ziggurat, are documented here (link via New Scientist).

Small Earthquake

I’ll be doing to the following panels at Eastercon:

Friday 21st
15.00-16.00 ‘Don’t Give Up The Day Job’

Sunday 23rd
15.30-16.30 ‘Writing The Near Future’

17.00-18.00 ‘Gollancz authors’ signing session’

If you’re going to be there, don’t forget about the little competition...

In other news, Albino Hernadez Penton tells me that his Spanish translation of ‘Rocket Boy’ has just been published in the Peruvian magazine Alfa Eriidiani 2DA Epoca (warning: fairly major download).

Bad Science

I’ve been watching with increasing inattention the BBC’s thriller series, The Last Enemy, which not only made a hash of the very interesting topics of universal surveillance and misuse of biotechnology, but had a clunking plot that advanced mostly by someone abducting the hapless hero and then telling him what was going on. But although I was almost horizontal with boredom by the end of the last episode, I was amused to see the appearance of the good old B-movie trope that any scientist can solve any puzzle by use of a microscope. In this case one scientist was peering down the eyepieces of optical microscopes of decreasing value and power at least three times, the last a student lab microscope that didn’t even have any illumination, stuck on a corner of a bench between a centrifuge and some kind of spectrometer. Now, microscopes can be very useful and powerful instruments -- I used to work with one in the 1980s that cost more than my house. But they are by no means universal tools, and although cytology (the study of cellular structure) is still very important - especially in pathology - since the advent of molecular biology it’s no longer the prime way by which we understand the internal workings of the cell. And much cytology is not done with optical microscopes, and even the most powerful electron microscope wouldn’t tell you how a mysterious virus could affect people of Arabic descent, but not white Europeans. Tsk.

Ringworlds

We all know that Saturn has rings. Now there's evidence that one of its moons may have rings too.