Beyond Coffee

In the commentary section of the science journal, Nature, a group of academics go cyberpunk, and call for serious consideration of the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to make students smarter:

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

After the Cold War, the IQ race ...

Updike On Mars

Via io9, John Updike's National Geographic article on Mars. With plenty of fine photos. (But why didn't they ask Kim Stanley Robinson?)

PS the photo of the sunset was, as mentioned here before, taken on my 50th birthday. It's the background picture on my computer.

Cold Is The New Hot

In other news, Cassini scientists believe that Titan may have active cryovolcanoes spewing a mix of water ammonia and methane. (I took a punt on depicting one of these in The Quiet War, so I'm biased towards hoping it's true.) So in addition to two moons with subsurface oceans (Europa and Enceladus), and two moons with icy geysers (Enceladus and Triton), there may be at least two moons with active volcanoes. What next?

Jigsaw Moon

More evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus harbours a subsurface ocean. Cassini imaging scientists have shown that the surface around the tiger stripe cracks at the little moon's south pole, the source of its icy jets, shows signs of changes over time:

The tiger stripes are analogous to the mid-ocean ridges on Earth's seafloor where volcanic material wells up and creates new crust. Using Cassini-based digital maps of the moon's south polar region, Helfenstein reconstructed a possible history of the tiger stripes by working backward in time and progressively snipping away older and older sections of the map, each time finding that the remaining sections fit together like puzzle pieces.

In other words, the surface there is pretty much like the surface of Europa, also suspected of possessing a subsurface ocean of liquid water. And where there's liquid water, of course, there could be life - and when the Cassini probe dived through the jets on one of its close flybys, it discovered a mix of organic molecules similar to those found in comets. So it looks like all the ingredients for life are there, in the little moon's warm soupy subsurface ocean. But as to whether there are any soup dragons . . .

EDIT - it's also possible that Europa's ocean may be much warmer than previously thought.

Who Killed Teddy Bear

A little belatedly, let me tell you about the strange little film, Who Killed Teddy Bear, I went to see on Wednesday in a screening theatre in Soho (publicity for the Region 2 DVD that slated for release in January). At the time of its release, in 1965, the British Board of Film Censors refused to certify it, which meant that it couldn’t be shown in British cinemas. One of the people who was working for the BBFC at the time was at the screening and told me before the film started that I would see exactly why it couldn't be cut for release - and he was right.

The story is pretty simple. Lawrence (Sal Mineo), a loner who looks after his brain-damaged sister and works as a bus-boy in a night club, has a crush on dolly-bird DJ Norah (Juliet Prowse). Norah is being spied on by a neighbour who pesters her with increasingly obscene phone calls, confides her troubles to her sympathetic boss (Elaine Strich), who urges her to report it to the police, and the case attracts the attention of Detective Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who is obsessed with the perversions and psychology of stalkers.

It's not so much images and scenes or dialog that would have appalled back then, although there is plenty of risky business - the flourish of a switchblade by a dissatisfied customer at the night club, the various scenes of Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse in their undies and closeups of Mineo working out in the gym in an attempt to get rid of his troubling lust (this was, by the way, a doomed attempt to persuade viewers that Mineo was a red-blooded American heterosexual), the lesbian pass made by Elaine Stritch, slow pans across literature on sexual perversions on Madden’s desk and scenes on 8th Avenue showing the wares in a dirty bookshop window and the posters of a grindhouse, and so on - but beyond all that the entire film is saturated with suppressed sexuality. There's the Tennesee Williams style relationship between Lawrence and his sister, who was brain-damaged after falling down the stairs when she glimpsed Lawrence having sex with an older woman; Madden’s obsession with sexual deviants (as one of his colleagues put it, after Madden calls sex perverts animals: 'We're all animals Dave. But there's a line, and you've crossed it.'), which spills over into his private life in disturbing ways: the banter between him and Norah is uncomfortable in all kinds of ways, and a nicely-judged cut between a shot of Madden listening to tapes of women describing their experiences of being stalked to a shot of his daughter hearing it through her bedroom door (was James Ellroy riffing on this on Blood On The Moon?). As for the story, it’s split between Lawrence, Norah, and Madden, but only one the narrative lines reaches any kind of climax. But in a way, story doesn't matter here. Subtext and theme are dominant; story just gets us from point to point. And the main reason why the film couldn't be rated is not just all the cheescake and deviancy - it's that it attempts to condemn the deviancy while subjecting it to loving, lingering closeups. Nevertheless, it’s a highly interesting film, not only as a document of its time, but also as a prime example of American primitive cinema in the great tradition of New York independent film-making. It was directed by Joseph Cates, who helped create the $64000 Question quiz show, went on to produce a slew of TV specials, including most of those starring Johnny Cash, and was father of Pheobe Cates, who featured in a famous WKTB-style voyeur scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Small coincidence: I recently reviewed another New York independent film, Blast of Silence, also themed around repression. I’ll post that here after it has been published.

Watching The Skies

Human migration patterns.

Year's End, Already

You can, if you want to, check out some of my best-of-the-year picks. Unlike most of the other people who responded, I didn't give any shout-outs to fiction, simply because I haven't read enough. I'm trying to remedy that now. Any suggestions?

Oliver Postgate, RIP

I was saddened to hear of the death of Oliver Postgate and touched by the (well-deserved) extent of the coverage. With artist and puppeteer Peter Firmin, he created several of the most memorable and best-loved children’s TV programme, including Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and, best of all as far as I am concerned, The Clangers. These pink mice-like creatures, voiced by Swannee whistle, inhabited a small blue planet, burrowing into its crust through craters (covered with dustbin lids to protect them from meteorite strikes), subsisting on blue string pudding and soup produced at the moon’s core under the supervision of the Soup Dragon, and forming an inclusive community with variouswaifs and strays, including the Iron Chicken, mischievous froglets, animate musical notes, and a sentient cloud. Postgate was a gentle but principled subversive, and a marvellous storyteller:

... because we didn't have the money for elaborate equipment we had to rely on the basic hand-writing of animation, laboriously pushing along cardboard characters with a pin. Thus we were thrown back on the real staple of television: telling and showing a good story, carefully thought out and delivered in the right order for stacking in the viewer's mind. Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn't matter. The viewers didn't notice because they were enjoying the stories.

(More here)

The Clangers was a fine science-fictional ecological fable, conveying its message without ever becoming preachy. Many of its stories featured disruptions to the delicate ecology of the Clangers’ little world that were healed by cooperation and application of some common sense, and it used in its opening sequence the iconic picture of Earth’s lonely blue island of life, taken from the Apollo 8 command module as it orbited the Moon.

Readers from outside the United Kingdom who want to know more can find examples of his work here (including a clip from a Doctor Who episode in which the Master, the Doctor’s nemesis, appreciates the Clangers).

With Extra Ink

From our sponsors: may I point you towards Cold Tonnage, currently stocking signed hardbacks of The Quiet War.

More Nostalgia

This time, somewhat closer to the present, an online museum of sleeves for five and a quarter inch computer discs (hey, remember inches?).

Those Things That Come In Threes

After visiting the Cold War exhibition at the V&A, I've been fighting my way through Resistance: The Fall of Man, very much alt. Cold War SF. And I've just spotted this, posted on Bruce Sterling's blog: atompunk. (Ian McDonald and I were talking about Cold War SF as an alternative to steampunk at the Gollancz party a few months back; it must be in the air, like strontium-90 when I was but a baby).

Just in: cool Soviet Cold War snowmobiles via io9.

Not Yet Past

Visiting the Cold War Modern, Design 1945 - 1970 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, I was struck by not only how very much superior it was to the frankly thin and poorly thought-out Dan Dare exhibition at the Science Museum, but also by how much of the themes and tropes and obsessions of current SF were on display. Space travel obviously (opposing screens pitted 2001: A Space Odyssey against Solaris; and for those interested in the alternate history of the space race, there was on display a prototype of the Soviet Kretchet lunar excursion suit, which is plainly only a couple of evolutionary steps from the lobster suits of 1950s SF magazine covers), but also virtual reality, cyborgs, the rise of the machines, technology-driven utopianism, the fragility of this island Earth, and so on and so on. As far as mainstream SF, the past isn't yet past, as they say. Is this because the seeds of the one true future really were sown back then, between the end of World War Two and the beginning of glam rock, or because SF hasn't yet acknowledged that the stuff of its dreams is rooted in the anxieties of the great and dangerous rivalry between the world's two superpowers?

Earth Is An Alien Planet

Compilation of brief videos of an eerie and presently unclassified type of deep-sea squid.

Link via Pharyngula.

Beneluxcon

Last weekend I was one of the Guests of Honour at Beneluxcon 2008, a small, friendly SF convention. Beneluxcons are jointly run by the Belgian club, SFAN, and the Dutch NCSF(Nederlands Contactcentrum voor Sf); this year, it was the turn of the Dutch to host it, in Eindhoven. It was chaired with commendable calm and efficiency by Heidi van der Vloet; everyone seemed to know everyone else; the atmosphere was intensely relaxed. I shared GoH duties with Dutch writer Edith Eri Louw, and my schedule was fairly light: a couple of panels and a Guest of Honour speech (apologies once again to my audience for getting too excited by images of the moons of Saturn and speaking too quickly). I also discovered the delights of cinnamon-flavoured chocolate - a Dutch Christmas thing - and learned about Sinterklaas and his deeply disturbing helpers, in more ways than one, Zwarte Pieten, high cultural weirdness that hasn't yet been steamrollered by global capitalism.

Eindhoven is a metropolitan sprawl of former villages and a small town where throughways and parkways and ring roads tangle amongst a patchwork of obsessively neat Dutch suburbia and clumps and clusters of big office buildings and towers and high-tech plants - it’s the home of electronics manufacturer Philips. Some older buildings have survived modern redevelopment and bombing during the Second World War, such as this barn:


And just around the corner from the hotel was the Van Abbesmuseum, with an extension by Abel Cahen abutting the River Dommel:


I liked this old-fashioned garage too - signs like these would be collectors’ items in the UK:

There Are Doors (14)

Eindhoven, Holland.

More From Mars - Glaciers!

Glaciers have been spotted on Mars before, but these, perched on the edge of the Hellas Basin, buried under rocky rubble, which is why they haven't evaporated, are huge - the second-largest known source of water on Mars after the polar caps:

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick. And there are many more. In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars."

Alternate History

The Soviet space shuttle.

The Goldilocks Factor

More good news from space. Planets that sit in the 'not-too-hot not--too-cold' zones around other stars may be more common than we believed. Although Mars is the joker in the pack here - it sits inside the outer edge the Sun's habitable zone, but can't support life in its current state. Which makes it all the more urgent to find out if some kind of life emerged there in its early history, and what went wrong.

Next On Mars

NASA has announced four possible landing sites for the next Mars rover mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. It's all about clay.

Fried/Buzzed

Finishing a novel leaves you with something like jetlag. You think you're functioning normally, but your IQ and attention span are seriously out of whack. You go to make a cup of tea, put the cat in the kettle, throw the water out the door, and when you've sorted out that confusion, discover you've made a tasty beverage with a stock cube. Fish stock. Or as Edward Gorey has it in his wonderful The Unstrung Harp, or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel:

The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more. He wanders through the house, leaving doors open and empty tea-cups on the floor. From time to time the thought occurs to him that he really ought to go out and dress, and he gets up several minutes later, only to sit down again in the first chair he comes to. The better part of a week will have elapsed before he has recovered enough to do anything more helpful.

After finishing and sending off Gardens of the Sun, I had a week much like that, and then, at the beginning of this month, in muscular commercial author fashion, started on my next project. Alas, I'm not much cop as a muscular commercial author. A few weeks later I find I've written some 20,000 words, which is the length of the piece I promised to deliver, but they're the wrong words in the wrong order, or the right words in the wrong order, or the right words in the right order in the wrong place. And after going nowhere very much the feeble rivulet of plot kind of runs out into the sands of ennui . . . But! This morning I realised what needed to be done, and went for a long walk to work out the finer points, came back and typed up a page of notes and reordered the salvagable bits and pieces and made notes for what's needed to link them together. Of course, now I'm about to fly off to a convention in Holland, but I reckon (if I'm not whistling in the dark) that I have sort of cracked it. All I need to so is write the damned thing, but that's the easy part. I hope.

Via John Joseph Adams at the Fantasy and Science Fiction site, this little test to find out which SF author you are. I'm Octavia Butler, which makes a weird kind of sense.

Edna Sharrow

I recently blogged a six-part illustrated short story, Edna Sharrow, here. I've now archived the story on the web site, under a Creative Commons license. You can find it by clicking the Fiction Archive link and scrolling down to the list of short stories. Or go straight to the first part. Enjoy!

Getting It Right

Hilary Mantell on the problems of word-processing fiction:

I remember how my first published book came together, back in the prehistoric typewriter age; I wrote it in longhand, typed it, then typed it again. This now seems both hideously laborious and pathetically inadequate. Now I pick away endlessly, balancing and rebalancing a paragraph, tuning and retuning it, trying to find some hidden note within it - and worry, a little, whether I'm privileging style over content, and all this tinkering is a substitute for fresh thought.

I haven't written anything of any length in longhand since school - for one thing my handwriting is appalling - but I did type my first novel out, three times (and because I'm not a touch typist I had retype a fair number of pages, because they had too many errors). So I migrated to word processing as soon as I could (1988, I believe: WordPerfect 4.2 on a two-disk system, one with the operating system, the other where you saved the text, because this was before hard drives were readily available on PCs; as it was the beast cost a cool £1000, and the printer another £1000, and this when the first and last new car I bought cost only twice as much).

But I do recognise the urge to endlessly fiddle with sentences and paragraphs and scenes, and often wonder if the thought processes used during composition of something using word-processing are more skittish and much shallower than when I used a typewriter. The work habit was certainly different back in those hunt-and-peck days. I would write three pages and if the last line of the third page of ended in the middle of a sentence I'd write the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and type it up when beginning the next day. Now, of course, I aim to breast the tape of at least five pages a day, or 2000 words, when producing a first draft, not including all the fiddling and revision that happens before I get up steam. A more organic process than the mechanically linear three-pages-a-day routine, maybe, but as Mantell points out, perhaps a more neurotic one, too.

More from Mantell here...

Good News From Outer Space

These two photographs were taken by a small impactor just before it hit the lunar surface, apparently near Shackleton Crater at the south pole, after it was released by the Indian probe Chansrayaan 1 (via the Indian Space Research Organisation). That's a big first for India's space industry.

In other news, the Mars Rover Spirit has survived a bad dust storm and is up and running again. (Remember Spirit and Opportunity? They've been roaming the surface of Mars for four years now, long beyond the official date for the end of operation.)

More Gosh Wow

We knew exoplanets were out there, because of the slight variations in the brightness and orbital velocity of the stars they orbit. And in 2005 astronomers imaged a planet orbiting a brown dwarf star - a very young and hot Jupiter class planet) although it probably didn't form in the same way as the planets in the Solar System. And now, two seperate studies have imaged four exoplanets around two more stars. This is truly amazing stuff - real science fiction headline stuff. The first images were obtained by a team using the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. They blocked out the light of the target star, a massive young star named HR 8799, and were able to image in infra red three planets (the picture shows two of them; all are super-Jupiters) - the first pictures of another planetary system.


And a second team, using the Hubble telescope, have tracked another planet in the dust ring surrounding Fomalhaut (above), a massive star just twenty-five light years from Earth. The planet is about the size of Jupiter, and orbits a long way out, with a period of more than eight hundred years.

Now, none of these planets can support life (or at least life as we know it). HR 8799 is a young star and its planets are young too, just sixty million years old, still glowing with the heat of their formation (which makes them easier to spot). The planet around Fomalhaut is a little older, but still much younger than the Earth and the other planets around the Sun, and because Fomalhaut is a massive star it will burn through its hydrogen in just a billion years. But still.

So far we've tallied about 300 exoplanets. Now we've seen five of them directly. It isn't a stretch to imagine that we'll soon have an image of a planet orbiting in a star in the zone where liquid water - and life - can exist. And then, like Macy Minnot, in The Quiet War, who spends some time with a crew who are observing an Earth-like planet, we may for the first time see a pale blue dot like our own, with clouds and oceans and continents. Such times we live in. Such times.

UPDATE: This is a pretty good article on the search for Earth-like exoplanets.

Dude, Where's My Flying Car?

Here, sometime soon. Maybe.

This Just In

I'm pleased to announce that Pyr has bought The Quiet War for publication in the US. Hero editor Lou Anders tells me that it will probably hit the shops in September or October 2009.

I'm also pleased to announce that I'll be one of the guests of honour at NewCon 5 in Northampton, 26-27 2009, appearing with Pat Cadigan and Paul Cornell.

Gosh.

History Not Quite Repeating Itself

In the comments section of the previous post, Petey writes: ‘I've been meaning to ask you what the full list of Quiet War universe stories is.’

Glad you asked! There are ten of them, and here are their titles and where and when they first appeared.

‘Second Skin’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1997)
‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1998)
‘The Gardens of Saturn' (Interzone, 1998)
‘Reef’ (Sky Life ed Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski Harcourt Brace, 2000)
‘Making History’ (PS Publishing, 2000)
‘The Passenger’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 2002)
‘The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (Asimov's Science Fiction,2002)
Dead Men Walking’(Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2006)
‘Incomers’ (The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008)

So I’ve been working on this for about a dozen years now. Good grief. How times flies when you’re having fun.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it’s worth pointing out again: the history and universe of the Quiet War in the stories is not exactly congruent with the history and universe in The Quiet War. By the time I got around to thinking very hard about the novels, I realised that it would be very difficult toreconcile events and situations and backgrounds in a bunch of disparate stories written in fits and starts over a decade. Also, Cassini had started beaming back hundreds of detailed pictures and reams of information about Saturn and its moons that, while it didn’t exactly invalidate the stories, inspired a new take on them. (One reason I took so long to get around to writing the novels was because I wanted to find out what Cassini discovered, and I’m glad I did.) So I rewrote history in The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun, and although parts of the latter are based on heavily modified characters and situations that first appeared in a few of the stories, the events in the stories and the events in the novels are from closely related but different alternate histories.

[Addendum: two idiotic howlers. Thanks to a spot by Peter Holo, I corrected the title of 'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' (not Augustin Malarte, as my mind keeps insisting), and when I cut and pasted the list I wrongly included 'The Secret of My Success', which isn't part of the Quiet War canon. Clearly, I need a longer holiday.]

Gosh Wow

An awesomely (and I rarely use this word) beautiful short film about the Cassini space mission.

Remembrance

Members of my family on my mother's side fought in Palestine in the First World War. They were from Suffolk, and after their regiment was incorporated into the 74th (Yeomanry) Division they fought with Lawrence of Arabia, and eventually liberated Jerusalem. One of them - I think it was my grandfather, but like many he never spoke of his war-time experiences - took photographs that my grandmother kept all her life.

A knocked-out tank, probably a casualty of the Third Battle of Gaza.

A truck carrying all kinds of junk. Is that part of an artillery piece?

Men waiting to cross a waterway - note the pith helmets.

Possibly The Germans

From a review of Radio On I've just written for Crime Time:


When I first saw it, in Bristol’s Arnolfini on its release in 1980, its atmosphere seemed to be exactly congruent with the times; emerging afterwards, it was suprising to discover that the world yet retained some colour.

Is there a word for the psychological colouration that we retain and apply to the happening world after seeing a film?

Bringing It All Back Home

'The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.' Frank Rich (via Daily Kos)

Deflector Shield

Here's a handy gadget that all spaceships will need: 'a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle' to deflect those pesky high-energy ions from solar flares that make manned spaceflights so hazardous. Invented by British scientists, who no doubt are now devising away to use the energy of cosmic rays to make tea.

A False Dichotomy

Following up from my post about the congruity between the Romantics and Science Fiction, I came across a review of Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science in today's Observer:

What's crucial is that in those days, society saw no gulf between the artist and the scientist. This point is important one. It makes it clear that CP Snow's assertion - that society is split into two basic irreconcilable cultures, science and the arts - lacks any pedigree and is, indeed, most likely a false dichotomy. As Holmes makes clear, 200 years ago, poets, writers and scientist shared a common vision of Nature. There is no reason why they should not do so again.

Well, yes.

Hmmm

Here’s something I came across today:

‘Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience (the "egotistical sublime"), together with the sense of the infinite and the transcendental. Socially, it championed progressive causes, though when these were concentrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook.’

Not an attempt at defining science fiction, but a quote from the entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature on the Romantic Movement. But the congruity seems pretty close to me.

Apocalypse Fashion

The way things are going, here in knife-ridden London, I expect to see these on the streets by spring.

Why I Have Been Quiet Lately

I've just sent the mss of GARDENS OF THE SUN to my agent and editor.

Because they deserve to suffer too.

Quantum Of Solace

Down into town yesterday to see the press showing (the first in the world - hey) of the new Bond, courtesy of Mr Kim Newman. Security as usual for these kind of things just below the level needed to get into the MI6 building: gone are the days when you wandered into some basement screening room in Soho, sans credentials, and munched on free crisps and drank free white wine the distributor had laid on in the hope that some kind of print publicity might be generated from the crowd of slightly shabby black-clad cineastes. It's an industrial process now, and the precautions are in place to keep out the pirates. Or so we're told.

The film kicks off in the middle of a car chase and doesn't much slow down or pause for breath for the next hour and three-quarters. Bond is still mourning Vespa, the girl he loved and who betrayed him in Casino Royale, but he's hardened and no longer the callow ingenue. Just as well, as he has a lot of ground to cover, and much action to survive: as far as I could tell, he sat down about twice and never slept (even on a trans-Atlantic red-eye he spent the entire flight standing at the bar in First Class, sipping martini cocktails). The action ranges across Europe, to Haiti and Bolivia, replete with car chases, boat chases, plane chases, and a lot of free running across rooftops, the stunts all good, and never marred by obvious CGI. As well as the traditional transcontinental locations and supersmart Wallpaper* hotels, there's the usual high tech trickery, this time involving turning mobile phones into tracking devices, and a briefing using a smart desktop, and Bond gets to sleep with a girl with the requisite kooky name (that's revealed only at the very end, one of the many nice touches in this smart production) and hook up with a tough and smart girl (Olga Kurylenko) whose personal mission parallels his; in one of the few quiet, human moments in the movie, he instructs her on how to make sure she doesn't mess up the kill she has to make. The plot is, of course, preposterous, but the story keeps everything moving so quickly it doesn't much matter. Speed, not thought, is the essence of these things.

French star Mathieu Amalric very good as the popeyed, snaggletoothed yet corrosively charming villain, part of a secret international organisation corrupting third-world countries for profit. Judi Dench is as usual very fine as M, and Daniel Craig, thoroughly inhabiting the part, has refined his blue-eyed Mr Death stare so it can now burn through a couple of inches of steel. His Bond is tougher than ever, and with little time to waste on quips or hanging about in night clubs or casinos, and has to be restrained from killing just about anyone who gets in his way. In short, this is a smart, tough Bond working in an Age of Terror where no motives are pure. Only a few people get out alive; no one gets out unscarred.

The Quiet War, Chapter 9

Sri Hong-Owen and her eldest son, Alder, travelled to Callisto in a small freighter, the Luís Inácio da Silva, that had been fitted with a prototype of the new fusion motor. It cut the record for transit between Earth and Jupiter by two-thirds, a fine demonstration of the Peixoto family’s technological prowess, and an important contribution to their elaborate and extensive sales pitch to the Callistans. Sri had a packed schedule: touring farms and factories and laboratories, meeting with the Callistan Senate and leading citizens of Rainbow Bridge, taking part in a ceremony to mark the first stage of the quickening of the biome’s lake, and so on and so forth. And she wanted to meet the gene wizard Avernus, too. First of all, though, she needed to straighten out the tangled business of the failed attempt at sabotage, the murder of Ursula Freye, and the defection of Macy Minnot, so she made room in her schedule for a meeting with the junior diplomat who seemed to be in the middle of it all.
READ MORE...

OMG Hoxton Hipsters Discover Steampunk

And of course they have a shop. And of course it's owned by the son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (the cultural signifiers are so self-engulfing they look like a Klein bottle trying to swallow a Mobeius strip).

Publication Day

Although it's been on the shelves of Forbidden Planet and available from Amazon for a couple of days now, this is the official publication day of The Quiet War. I'll put up one last free chapter tomorrow, and if you scoot over to my author's page on the Orion site, you'll find a .pdf of an old school Quiet War story, 'Reef', free to download, as well as links to Amazon so you can, if you wish, buy the book. And if you want a first edition hardback, you'll have to be quick: as with so many books these days, the hardback printing run was fairly small (or 'exclusive' as they say in ad land).

Barrington Bayley

Just learnt that British SF's dark star died two days ago. A very fine writer whose work was playfully serious and packed with ideas and an anarchic surrealism that was both mordant and biting witty. He was often called an 'SF writer's SF writer' - much admired, but never achieving the kind of fame enjoyed by people with a quarter of his talent. He was also a consummate professional. Kim Newman and I published one of his short stories, 'Don't Leave Me', in our anthology In Dreams. A wonderful satire on the excesses of academic scholarship, it required extensive quotes from the eponymous track that was the subject of dissection by far-future scholars. Kim and I thought it word-perfect wonderful, but with some trepidation raised with Barry one possible difficulty - he would need to obtain copyright clearance. Barry assured us that it was no problem, and within a couple of weeks had sorted it out, paying for clearance to quote selected lyrics out of his own pocket. As we wrote in our introduction:

'We're particularly pleased to present one of his stories here, because, with novels such as The Zen Gun and The Rod of Light, he is a link between the fine old days of New Worlds' trippy gedanken experiments in literary speculative fiction and the ideological gurus of the current radical SF fringe.'

Ave.

The Nature Of The Catastrophe

Down to the Tate Modern to see the new work for the Turbine Hall - Dominique Gonazalez-Foerster’s TH.2058. The conceit is that it’s fifty years in the future; a strange and continuous rain has caused sculptures in public spaces to swell and grow, so they’ve been brought indoors; and human refugees seeking shelter from the rain sleep amongst them on ranks of bunk beds, entertained by a mashup of old sci-fi films, and SF novels and other admonitory texts about the future.





The Turbine Hall is a challenging space. The cleverly enlarged sculptures, in particular replicas of a Louise Bourgeois spider and a bright red Alexander Calder piece, lend structure to fill its stark volume, looming over the bunk beds, which are both domestic in scale and, in their repetition, industrial/commercial, like a supermarket storage area emptied by looters. As a narrative framework in which the audience can wander, and invent their own stories, it works well enough - the schoolchildren visiting it were definitely energised by it - but the concept itself seemed somewhat thin and sketchy. Why does the rain make the sculptures grow? Why do they increase in scale and kept their exact form - why don’t they swell or mutate? Where is the human detritus we associate with vast disasters, or the intricate detailing of fully worked futures, as in Children of Men?


Outside, walking west along the river, I saw a maintenance platform beside Blackfriars Bridge -like an amphibious refuge in some global flood, full of human clutter and detail, and life. It’s the last that was missing from the antiseptic tableau in the Turbine Hall. Still, even if it didn't fully engage me, I enjoyed witnessing the intrusion of a possible future into this public space, if only because I have a professional interest how it will stimulate discussion of SF tropes.

Also seen: copies of The Quiet War in the wild - in Forbidden Planet. Reader, I signed them.

The Quiet War, Chapter 8

Macy rode a tram into Rainbow Bridge, got on another tram and rode across the city, and took the escalator down into the free zone, floating on a mixture of anger and anxiety. As she moved through shadows and neon glow towards the bar, Jack Frost, passing people dressed for every kind of carnival, a tall figure wrapped in a red cloak and wearing a fox mask stepped out of a passageway and caught her arm and said, ‘She isn’t there.’
READ MORE...

The Creaking Hinges Of The World

Coming to the end of the ongoing, I'm able to slack off this weekend, for the first time in over a month. More work yet to be done, but the end is in sight. Here in London we've enjoyed beautiful autumn weather, warm temperatures and clear blue skies, and leaves tumbling down on mild breezes. Out and about on Friday evening, in my home patch, where many City workers live, restaurants and pubs were packed with suits charged with the desperate exuberance of soldiers back from the front. On Saturday, a ramble around Hampstead Heath, the breeze so slight only one person was attempting to put up a kite on Parliament Hill, and then down the hill to Camden, and Marine Ices (best ice cream in London). And today the local park was crowded with people, some shirtless, enjoying the sunshine, as people did in in the glorious August of 1914, before everything changed.

Autumn is my favourite season. You can feel the hinges of the world begin to turn, as the year winds up. Everything is changing; everything seems charged with potential. Especially now, when, thanks to the suits and the quants, the great engine of hypercapitalism has blown its valves and pistons, and everything is up in the air, and every kind of future is at hazard. Crisis frees the mind from habit. What better time to be a science fiction writer?

The Quiet War, Chapter 7

Macy immersed herself in her work, staying in her lab as much as possible so that she wouldn’t run into either Ursula Freye or Speller Twain, and tried to forget about what had happened. Tried to forget that Speller Twain could come back at any time and do whatever he wanted to her. Ursula Freye was protected by her consanguinity, but the security chief had demonstrated that Macy was just a grunt whose life and career were at the mercy of the whims of her superiors.
READ MORE...

Home Alone

From the New Scientist:

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

Not only does this radically increase the odds for finding other life on the planets and moons of the Solar System, and elsewhere, but the solitary ecosystem of this little critter, which goes by the name of Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, is powered by radioactivity. Oh, and it's named after a Jules Verne novel.

They're no sand worms, and writing rip-roaring space operas about little colonies of bacteria that uses the radioactive decay of uranium to extract carbon and nitrogen from rocks isn't going to be easy, but the idea that life is tough and finds a niche definitely chimes with SF's defiant romance with the universe.

The Quiet War, Chapter 6

It was all nonsense, Macy thought as she rode the tram through the night-time city back to the biome. She was angry and anxious and scared, and now that the ordeal was over, anger was winning out. It was all nonsense. All of it. There was no conspiracy. Manny Vargo had died because of some awful but unambiguous medical accident. There were a thousand reasons why his slate could have gone missing, from bureaucratic error to simple theft. And Ursula Freye had taken those two completely unrelated facts, her lover’s death and the missing slate, and had forced a connection, and had kept adding other connections, selecting what suited her and rejecting anything contradictory until she’d caged herself in a paranoid fantasy.

And she wants to put me in that cage, Macy thought. She and her fox-faced friend. Speller Twain and that devious little creep Loc Ifrahim. They all want to use me in this joint fantasy of theirs.
READ MORE...

Dig It

It's a wet and miserable day outside, but this - a bunch of white English people performing the theme song of Shaft on ukuleles - cheered me up immensely.

More Dead Wood Promo

Fast Forward 2, an unthemed anthology of original shories, including one of mine, is out now. And there's free stuff on the interweb to promote it: editor Lou Anders' introduction, and 'Catherine Drew', Paul Cornell's dashing tale of derring-do in a Solar System dominated by the British Empire.

In other news, there's an early review of The Quiet War in the Guardian, Eternal Light is due to be republished in April 2009, as part of Gollancz's classic space opera series, and some of my other novels are slated for publication in uniform paperback editions later in the year. Hey.

The Quiet War, Chapter 5

Two days later Macy rode a tram to the free zone at the northern edge of Rainbow Bridge. She’d visited the city twice before, but each time it had been to attend official functions -- a kind of reception where she and the rest of the crew had been exhibited like exotic animals, and a theatre piece involving musicians, dancers, tableaux and projections in what had been billed as an interpretation of universal creation myths. Macy had recognised a couple of fragments from Genesis, but the symbolism of most of the performance had been impenetrable, the music had sounded like a train-wreck, and she’d had a hard time staying awake. So despite her forebodings about the enterprise, she felt an exhilarating mix of anticipation and liberation as she rode through the city on her own.
READ MORE...

The Quiet War, Chapter 4(ii)

It was going to be difficult. Not just because of Emmanuel Vargo’s death, although that was bad enough, but also because Euclides Peixoto had taken over the day-to-day running of the construction crew. And although he was good at making speeches and flattering diplomats and representatives of Callisto’s government, Euclides Peixoto knew nothing about ecosystem engineering and had never shown any interest in the design of the biome or in the training of the crew. That hadn’t prevented him from telling Emmanuel Vargo how to do his job on more than one occasion. His ignorance about ecosystem engineering was perfectly matched by his lack of talent in people management, and like many men born into privilege and protected by that same privilege from the consequences of failure, he had no time for the advice of people he believed to be his inferiors.
READ MORE...

Scenery

When you're flying from moon to moon in the Saturn System you're never short of beautiful views.

The Quiet War, Chapter 4(i)

Much later, Macy Minnot would come to believe that Emmanuel Vargo had been the first casualty of the war. But when she first heard about the ecosystem engineer’s death she thought that it was nothing more sinister than bad luck. A freak medical mishap. An accident.

Like Macy and the rest of the construction crew, Emmanuel Vargo spent the twelve-week voyage from Earth to Jupiter in the deep sleep of artificial hibernation, drugged and chilled and consuming a minimal amount of oxygen and water while the Brazilian cargo ship fell through eight hundred million kilometres of sunlit black vacuum. He was still asleep when the ship went into orbit around Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons, and first-class passengers and hibernation coffins and cargo pods were offloaded onto a tug that descended to the port, a cluttered slab cantilevered above a dusty plain west of the city of Rainbow Bridge. The tug touched down on a scorched landing apron with the lumbering delicacy of a hippopotamus attempting ballet. A mobile crane unlatched from the tug’s cargo frame the truck-sized pod that contained the hibernation coffins and transported it to a pressurised hangar where the coffins were extracted one by one and loaded onto flatbed carts that trundled through subsurface tunnels to the medical facility at the edge of the port. That was where Emmanuel Vargo began to wake, and that was where he died.
READ MORE...

Welcome To The Future

You come boiling off the flight from hell, two hours delayed out of Heathrow, another hour stacked over O'Hare, some rugrat kicking the back of your seat throughout, and a fat drunk snoring on your shoulder. You're anxious to make your connection with a domestic flight, but first you have to pass through this:

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror. MORE AFTER THE JUMP:

Have a nice day...

The Quiet War, Chapter 3

It was the most important funeral to have been held in Brasília for more than twenty years. The avenues around the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida were clogged with limousines and flitters. Drivers and security details eyed each other with professional interest. Drones wove amongst treetops. Helicopters beat wide circles under the hot blue sky. Wolves prowled the long park, Eixo Monumental, and half the city was paralysed by interlocking rings of security.
READ MORE...

Born Under A Wandering Star

It seems out that the sun may have wandered far from where it was first formed. So in one sense we're all hobos.

For some reason, thinking of SF novels about the hobo life, I forgot all about James Blish's Cities In Flight series, which describes an interstellar civilisation in which cities use antigravity motors to wrench themselves free from Earth and soar through the Galaxy, looking for work. Which was pretty dumb of me, especially as I provided a blurb for the SF Masterworks edition: 'An outrageous imaginative coup . . . Crammed with high adventure yet illuminated by a searching intelligence, this four-part epic completely reinvented the traditions of space opera'.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Byte?

One of many sites with advice for would-be professional indigents. Apparently panhandling is now a career-path.

Don't confuse panhandlers with hobos by the way. Hobos have their own code, and their own handchalked version of email. Not to mention their own national convention.

(Many writers are fascinated by tramps and hobos, possibly because most have a lurking dread about ending up on the streets. This is one of my favourite novels about falling from the world above into the world below. There are of course many others, although I'm hard-pressed to think of an SF example. Maybe William Gibson's Virtual Light fits the bill, although its protagonists really inhabit a kind of pirate utopia.)

The Quiet War, Chapter 2

Cash Baker was just twenty-six, with eight years’ service in the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, when he was selected for the J-2 singleship test programme. From inauspiciously ordinary origins in a hardscrabble city in the badlands of East Texas he’d risen through the ranks with astonishing speed. Luckily, he’d received as good an education as anyone in his neck of the woods could reasonably expect, and one of his teachers had spotted his preternatural mathematical ability and given him extra tutoring and steered him towards the Air Defence Force. He scraped into the top percentile in the induction tests, was streamed straight into basic pilot-training at the academy in Monterrey, and a year later, on a hot, thundery day in August, marched at the head of the graduation parade for the class of 2210. He started out flying fat-bellied Tapir-L4s on supply missions to remote camps of the Wreckers Corps east of the Great Lakes, was quickly promoted to the combat wing of the 114th Squadron, flying fast, deadly little Raptors, and distinguished himself in a string of air-support missions during the campaign fought by General Arvam Peixoto’s Third Division, clearing bandit settlements in and around the ruins of Chicago.
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The Quiet War, Chapter 1

Every Monday and Friday until its publication on October 16, I'll post chapters from my new novel, The Quiet War, at the website. Here's the first:

Every day the boys woke when the lights came on at 0600. They showered and dressed, made their beds and policed the dormitory, endured inspection by one of their lectors. Breakfast was a dollop of maize gruel and a thimble of green tea. They ate quickly, each boy facing one of his brothers across the long table, no sound but the scrape of plastic spoons on plastic bowls. There were fourteen of them, tall and pale and slender as skinned saplings. Blue-eyed. Their naked scalps shone in the cold light as they bent over their scant repast. At two thousand six hundred days old they were fully grown but with traces of adolescent awkwardness yet remaining. They wore grey paper shirts and trousers, plastic sandals. Red numbers were printed on their shirts, front and back. The numbers were not sequential because more than half their original complement had been culled during the early stages of the programme. READ MORE...

Dead Wood Promo

I recently put up my short story 'A Brief Guide To Many Histories' on the website; now ManyBooks offer it in all kinds of formats under a Creative Commons license.

It's one of three new stories by me in Postscripts #15, the bumper all-SF issue of the magazine. The vanilla hardcover is already on the market, and Pete Crowther, maven of PS Publishing, tells me that the signed editions will be back from the printer in a week or so. Get 'em while they're hot!

Maybe Not So Smallish

Are the bookshelves of my local charity shop operating some kind of version of Douglas Adams's infinite improbability drive?

Today, I dropped into the shop and picked up a ex-library edition of Tom Disch's poetry collection Burn This. And a couple of hours later I learn, via Ed Champion, about this tribute.

There Are Doors (13)

On the far side of Smithfield Market Edna Sharrow can run no more and in the cool shade of a tree at the boundary of the churchyard turns to confront the girl who has followed her.

The girl is an ordinary girl. Slender. Grainy skin. Pale blue eyes and dirty blond hair scraped back. Dressed in a grey pyjama-like suit zipped up the front. Shoes like small white pillows. An unremarkable child of the stones, except that the black light burns within her.

Edna draws herself up and says that she will deal only with the master, not his familiar.
The girl shakes her head and says, He’s busy elsewhere, but I can help you. What is terrible is that she is not afraid. No, her look is one of pity. She says, I shouldn’t have sent you away. I should have helped you right away. But I was scared. I admit it. It’s my first time.

I don’t need your help, Edna says.

You poor old thing. You don’t know, do you. You don’t know that you’re dead.

And the black light beats around Edna like wings and she is falling away from the world. For a moment she catches hold of the tree and she remembers her mother holding her up in the sharp cold of a long ago Boxing Day, to see the hunt ride by.

Look at the pretty horses, she cries, and her heart leaps with the joy of the long-ago moment of lost innocence, and she falls through the door of the sky.

Part 1 2 3 4 5

Not By Fire

Hey, we’re still here. And my broadband connection has come back. So much for the naysayers who predicted the end of the world when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. I guess they can come down from the mountaintops now, and dispense with the sackcloth and ashes.

Or maybe not, because so far the scientists at CERN are just testing their new toy. They don’t start smashing fundamental particles into each other at tremendous and possibly world-destroying energies (or not) until next month.

(If you want to know what might happen if the naysayers had been right, you might care to check out my short story ‘How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen’. Currently available here or in an audio version, until I get around to coding it I’m afraid. (Don’t worry, it has a happy ending.))

I was pleased by the blanket coverage of actual science in the media, but do find it rather worrying that the only way scientists can get any real attention these days is to be wrongly accused of plotting to blow up the world. If we keep up this inattention it really will be over for us, as a species because we need a whole bunch of cleverness to get us out the mess stupid applications of good ideas have gotten us into.

There Are Doors (12)

The shadowy army Mr Carlyle took from Edna Sharrow were ghostly shells cast off by people during moments of extreme emotion. Knots of terror and fear she’d used to intimidate and frighten and control. So it’s only fair, she thinks, to strip her enemy of his familiars and take from him everything he sheds in his last moments. To make what’s his hers.

She drifts south and east through Clerkenwell towards Smithfield Market. If he’s tracking her, she’ll lose him there, in the echoes of the charnel house it once was. Blindside him.

She’s so occupied with her plans that she doesn’t see the girl until she steps out of the shadow under St John’s Gate, as if from one world to another. Calling to Edna, apologising for sending her away, saying that she should have dealt with her at once.

Edna Sharrow draws on her last reserves, but the girl stands her ground. Black light beats around her, a hearth-heat that withers the laces that bind Edna’s soul, and Edna runs from it in a blind panic towards the sanctuary of the shambles.

Part Part 1 2 3 4

Island In Space

Out beyond the orbit of Mars, on its way to rendezvous with comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ESA's Rosseta spacecraft has just flown past asteroid Steins. Here's a brief movie of the encounter. We've grown so used to seeing scenes like this in SF movies that it takes a small effort of imagination to kindle our sense of wonder and remember that this is the real deal: real rock, real spacecraft.

Is it just me, or does it look like there's a face carved on the back side of the asteroid as it dwindles into the outer dark?

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.