Robert Johnson

 

Today marks the centenary of the birth of the great, late bluesman, Robert Johnson.  Or at least, the best guess of when his birthday was, for his life is poorly documented, like those of many African-Americans born in segregated Mississippi, and it is also overshadowed by myth. Thanks to Mack MacCormick and other researchers, we know that Johnson's family was split up when his father had to flee a lynch mob after becoming embroiled in a property dispute with white landowners. After his mother died when he was still young, Johnson left his wife and the child he fathered with another woman, and became one of the many musicians wandering the high roads, low roads, and railroads of 1930s America.  Early in his career, he latched onto Son House, who recalled that Johnson was an awful guitar player who disappeared for a short spell and returned as a fully-fledged musician, so starting the legend that he'd learned his licks from the devil, either at first-hand, or via one of his tutors, Ike Zimmerman.  Johnson died at the age of 27, from drinking poisoned whiskey supplied by a jealous husband, and soon after cutting 41 tracks that were reissued on two LPS by Columbia Records during the folk music revival of the early 1960s.  He died in relative obscurity (even the site of his grave is disputed), and he had little influence on his contemporaries.  But via those two Columbia Records LPs, his guitar playing and singing influenced many British musicians, including Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, and their music fed back into the US music scene.  Johnson is renowned as an innovator and early pioneer of rock and roll.  A 2CD compilation, The Complete Recordings, was issued in 1990, won a Grammy; four of his songs are included in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame; The Complete Recordings has been deposited in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

My own small tribute is a story I published early in my career, and republished in revised form in Little Machines.  It imagines a time-travelling historian becoming embedded the story he's been sent to research, and creating an alternate world in which Robert Johnson died just before his music was properly recognised in a concert in New York City: an unkinder world which is our own.  Here's the beginning:

The first time Turner heard Robert Johnson play was to a vast crowd in Washington, D.C., December 5th 1945, the night the desegregation bill went through, and just three weeks before Johnson was assassinated. The second time was on what was supposed to be a routine archive trip, June 3rd 1937, a jook joint just outside the little Mississippi town of Tallula, and it was something else.

Afterwards, Turner hung around outside, an anonymous still point in the crowd that, slow as molasses, dispersed into the hot dark night. The music still thrilled in his blood. Songs he’d had known only as ghosts in the crackle of a few badly worn 78s or no more than titles in charred files from the fire-bombed office of an obscure record company had one after the other ripped through the heat and noise of the crowded jook joint, so much sound from one man and one guitar, driving the whoops and pounding feet of the dancers, that Turner doubted his state-of-the-art Soviet recorder had been able to capture one tenth of the reality.

Turner had once played a little guitar himself, enough to know that what the old bluesmen said about Robert Johnson was true. Even before the New York concerts, the years in prison on a trumped-up murder charge, his letters and his protest songs, the Freedom Marches and he Segregation Riots, near-canonization after his assassination, he had been the best of them all. The hard little capsule planted under the skin beneath Turner’s collarbone, where the grain of Americium hung suspended in its Oppenheimer pinch, tingled. He should have cut out and closed the Loop when Robert Johnson had finished his set. Get in, do the job, get out. Don't give the paradoxes any chance. But Turner had heard raw truths in Johnson's songs; for the first time since he'd been brought home after the Peace Corps had been disbanded, he felt alive again. Before he closed the Loop, he wanted to meet the man whose music had cut him deep.

The sandy yard and dark road in front of the jook joint were empty now; only Turner and three men sitting on the sagging porch were left. The men, all in various degrees of drunkenness, were passing around a chipped enamel jug in the yellow light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, talking in low voices and glancing sidelong at the stranger in the dark suit it hung oddly around Turner, and the suspenders which held up the trousers were gouging his clean white shirt (soaked in sweat), and polished two-tone shoes (which pinched like hell). He strolled over to them, casual as he could, wondering if one of them was the man whose recollections about Robert Johnson, told to a field researcher in some twenty years time, had brought him here. His pulse in his throat, his mouth dry, he asked where Robert Johnson was.

One of them said, "He out back somewhere."

Another added, "With a woman. Comes to women, Bobby Johnson's like a snake in a henhouse."

The third wanted to know who was asking. Turner gave his cover story of being a talent scout, named a large New York record company. It was sort of true.

The man, burly and barechested under bib overalls, fixed a mean look on Turner. "Never heard of no gentleman of colour working for no record company before."

"Bobby Johnson, he already done got himself a deal," the first man said. He was the oldest of the three, his face a map of wrinkles like drying mud, his eyeballs yellow as ivory,his nappy hair salt and pepper. He peered at Turner and said, "You got yourself seventy-five, Mr New York, you can walk into Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow and buy a record of his ‘Terraplane Blues’."

The second man, skinny and mournful, said, "I heard he been on the radio in Detroit, singin spirituals. Shit, he been round this country a couple three times now."

"Race records are a big thing in New York," Turner said, already in deeper than he'd intended.   "That’s why we’re very interested in Robert Johnson."

"What they know bout the blues in New York?" the old man said. "You go tell your boss that down here is the rightful home of the blues, no place else. Why, I play harmonica myself. I get the blues real bad sometimes."

The mournful man said, "Bobby Johnson, he got 'em worse of all."

"He got a mojo hand, no mistake," the old man said, and drank from the enamel jug and smacked his lips.

"They say ol Legba gave the boy a lesson in the blues, in exchange for his soul," the mournful man said, and there was a hush as if an angel had passed overhead.

The old man took another drink and said, "Well I don't know if that be true, but I do know one time Bobby Johnson couldn't play a lick to save himself. I got the story straight from Son House. Bobby Johnson, he could play harmonica right enough, but he was always fixin after playin gitar. Hung out every joint and dance and country picnic there was, pesterin the players to give him a chance, but he was so bad it wasn't even funny. Anyway, he went away maybe a year, and I don't know if he went to the crossroads with Legba or not, but Son House told me when he came back he was carryin a gitar, and asked for a spot like old times. Well, Son was about ready to take a break, and told Bobby Johnson to go ahead and got himself outside before the boy began. But that time it was all changed. That time, he tol me, the music he heard Bobby Johnson make put the hair on his head to standin."

It had the air of a story told many times. There was a silence, and then the mournful man said, "He near to burnt down the place tonight, and that's the truth."

The old man said, "Son House tol me Bobby Johnson tol him a man called Ike Zimmerman taught him how to play, but what truth's in that I don't rightly know."

Turner, whose first name was Isaac, felt an airy thrill.

The burly man in the bib coveralls hauled himself to his feet, using as a support one of the posts that propped up the corrugated tin roof that sloped above the porch. He pointed at Turner and said, "You fools tell this stranger whatever’s on your minds, an you don’t know who he is."

"He tol you he scouting talent, Jake," the old man said. He told Turner, "You come on down to Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow, Mister New York, I show you stuff on the harmonica you ain’t never before heard."

"He ain’t no scout," the burly man said. "He got the look of the law about him."

He came down the steps towards Turner, a mean glint in his eyes.

"I’m just passing through," Turner said, and raised his hand to his chest, ready to collapse the Oppenheimer Pinch if he had to.

"Don’t pull no gun on me," the burly man said, half-angry, half-fearful, and swung clumsily at Turner and turned halfway around at sat down with comic suddeness.

The door of the jook joint opened. Yellow light fell across the yard. A slightly-built man in a chalk-stripe suit stepped out, a guitar slung across his back, a fedora tilted on his head. It was Robert Johnson. He looked directly at Turner and said, "Why, Isaac. You come back. I always wondered if you would."

Coming Soon

 Coming to Kindle next month...

Table of Contents:

The Two Dicks
Residuals
17
All Tomorrow's Parties
Interstial
How We Lost the Moon,
   A True Story by Frank W. Allen
Under Mars
Danger: Hard Hack Area
The Madness of Crowds
The Secret of My Success
The Proxy
I Spy
The Rift
Alien TV
Before The Flood
A Very British History
Cross Roads Blues

EDIT: Every eBook needs a good cover.  This one is by Michael Marshall Smith

How It Works For Me

Story develops from character and situation.  Narrative and theme develops from story.

Clickety-Clack

I was chatting with Jon Courtenay-Grimwood last night, after the Clarke Awards, and we got onto the topic of switching from typewriters to word processing, and how it changed our work habits.  Amongst other things, we both retyped final draft pages if we made more than five mistakes when using a typewriter, and we both wrote to the end of the page at the end of a work session; if this meant stopping in the middle of a sentence, then we wrote the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and the next day inserted a fresh sheet of paper in the machine and carried on from there.  I doubt that anyone, now, reaches their self-assigned word (rather than page) count and stops dead in the middle of a sentence.  You just keep going, chasing that blinking cursor across the screen.  And if you're in the middle of a particular juicy and exciting scene or section, there's a temptation to keep going until the end - which means that the next day you have to cold-start the next scene from the very beginning, and risk getting blocked.  Always leave something you want to write for the next day.

I have a small nostalgia for the steady clickety-clack* of the keys imprinting thoughts onto paper letter by letter, but none at all for the messy task of ribbon-changing, of having to stop to disentangle keys that jammed together because I was typing too fast, or of waiting for a streak of Tip-Ex to dry.  And I never was (nor am I yet) a touch-typist.  As soon as personal computers became affordable, I bought one, learned how to use WordPerfect 4.2, and never looked back.

The mechanical, linear process of typewriting meant that serious revisions were left until the draft was completed.  Now, of course, you can worry away forever at what you've just written, and the changes are writ on water instead of paper.  The process is a lot more playful than it once was, takes place on the screen as well as inside your head, and is kind of . . . indefinite.  When you typed the final word of a manuscript and ripped the paper from the typewriter's platten, there was a real sense of completion, albeit momentary.  For even in the days of typewritten MSS, there was a nagging feeling that there were still changes that needed to be made once the story or novel had made it, after editing, copy-editing and proofing, into print.  That sense is perhaps a little stronger now.  Unless you print it out straight away, there's a temptation to go back time and again to a word-processed document: to tweak and fiddle and adjust this or that sentence, to endlessly fine-tune.  Nothing is ever really finished.  Instead, you have to let it go.


Which brings me to the ongoing novel, which has now about three-quarters finished in first draft, and has reached the point where, rather than start to tie everything up and aim it towards the last sentence (I do know what it is), I have the growing urge to start over, change everything that needs fixing or revision, and cut away all the persiflage.  As usual, I didn't discover the theme of the novel until it had progressed a fair way.  The plot has grown far too complicated, as I followed all kinds of exciting leads.  And just the other day, I realised that I'm missing a whole section that really needs to be included, and not just because it will contain some cool stuff about the fate of Earth, a chiliastic crusade, and involve the hero in some difficult moral decisions.  Well, it can be dropped in later.  Right now, this thing, like a shark, needs to keep moving forward.  That imperative hasn't changed, at least.

*(UPDATE) Of course, the keys really went clack clack clack, but (this isn't an original thought; I can't remember who said it) the human mind imposes a narrative on everything, turning the steady tick tick tick tick of a clock into a time-directional tick tock tick tock.  Does Chinese water torture work because the intervals between drips are just long enough to prevent the subject imposing a tick-tock narrative?  Does the lack of coherent narrative drive us crazy?

(A)temporality

The London Underground is an old system.  Its pioneer and prime mover was born in the eighteenth century.  The system itself was built before the unification of Italy and before the creation of Germany.  Its first travellers wore top hats and frock-coats; there are early photographs of horse-drawn hansom cabs parked outside the underground stations. Oscar Wilde was a commuter on these subterranean trains, travelling from Sloane Square station to his office on Woman's World at the bottom of Ludgate Hill.  Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin could both have used the Underground.  The coffins of William Gladstone and Dr Barnardo were both transported beneath the earth in funereal underground trains.  Jack the Ripper could have travelled on the Underground to Whitechapel: the station was served by the East London Railway.

Peter Ackroyd, London Under

Gollancz SF At Fifty

Victor Gollancz Ltd, founded in 1927, started publishing science fiction and fantasy in 1961.  Many will, like me, remember hunting down Gollancz hardbacks with their distinctive yellow jackets in library SF & Fantasy shelves in the 1970s and 1980s.  The family firm of Gollancz was sold by Victor Gollancz's daughter, Livia, to Houghton Mifflin at the end of the 1980s.  A few years later, Houghton Mifflin sold Gollancz to Cassell, which was bought by Orion in 1998; the Gollancz name lives on as its SF and Fantasy imprint.  And now Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy is having a little contest to celebrate its anniversary. Pick what you consider to be the best title from 25 SF and and 25 fantasy books published by Gollancz, and you might win a subscription to SFX magazine, and a copy of each of the top 10 titles from both lists.  And gosh, my novel Fairyland is up there in the best SF list...

Fairyland was my sixth book with Gollancz.  My first, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published 23 years ago, in, yes, a yellow jacket, when Gollancz was still independent publisher Victor Gollancz.  My editor was Malcolm Edwards, and I still remember our first meeting.  Gollancz was housed in a Georgian building with a tall narrow frontage on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.  (Later, I would discover that the company owned the property backing on to the townhouse, creating a Dickensian maze of offices and corridors and odd spaces that ran through the block (was there a courtyard?  Were there clerks making entries in ledgers with quill pens?) to the next street.)

As I recall on that first visit, the reception wasn't a place to linger.  No comfy sofas, coffee tables, vases of cut flowers. There were piles of books wrapped in brown paper and a couple of motorcycle dispatch riders kicking around the small, dimly lit room.  The receptionist, working behind a counter, directed me upstairs.  All the way up to the top, several floors of winding rickety stairs to a kind of penthouse with a lot of glass looking out over London rooftops, where Malcolm presided with unflappable affability over his first empire.  He moved on just before Gollancz was swallowed by Houghton Mifflin; I stuck it out until just before Cassell, and Gollancz, was bought by Orion, under the direction of . . . Malcolm Edwards.  It's a small world.  Now I'm back with Gollancz, and my old titles have or are coming back into print, and I'm working on my nineteeth novel.  Twenty-three years.  As Matty Ross says towards the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.

From My Red Left Hand

I'm pleased that most commentators took my previous post in the satirical spirit in which it was intended.  It's true, as Ilya2 remarked that you can find no (or hardly any) SF novels written after the 1980s entirely constructed from cliches, but plenty of movies (movie directors and producers are always about thirty years behind the bleeding edge of written SF, perhaps because they are inspired by the SF they read in their childhoods). But as others point out, these kind of cliches do keep recurring.  The problem with cliches is they're strange attractors.  They're the first thing you think of when constructing a scene or a scenario. They're seductively simple to use. The trick is to turn them upside down and take them apart and put them back together in a new an interesting way. Make it bigger and noiser. Go back to the reality, instead of a blurred fourth-generation photocopy.  Or do something else instead. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to construct similar very short novels out cliches mined from fantasy, horror, literary and other genres. Or as per Lois Ava-Matthew's suggestion, to extend this one into a trilogy.

Onwards. Two of my horror short stories have been taken up for reprint inside a week.  One, 'Inheritance', was my ninth published story, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction no less; it will appear in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, edited by Stephen Jones, and will be published by Ulysses Press in the autumn. The other, 'Take Me To the River', will appear in New Cthulu: The Recent Weird; edited by Paula Guran, it's due to be published by Prime Books in November.

I've always loved the horror genre; in the my formative years in the 1960s and early1970s, I read every one of Herbert van Thal's anthologies, tried to catch every Hammer film that appeared on TV, and was so thoroughly chilled by Jonathan Miller's TV adaptation of M.R. James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' that I chased down everything by James that I could find. Writing horror stories isn't merely an homage to these primal influences; it's also a kind of left-handed exercise that allows me to flex a different set of writing muscles.  Most especially, it allows me to write something contemporary, and to draw on stuff from my life 'Take Me To The River', for instance, is set in Bristol - where I lived for seven years - during the long, hot summer of 1976, and recasts some of my experiences of the free festival scene.

Oh yes, here's the list of contributors to Paula Guran's anthology.  I hope old H.P. would approve:

The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman's Other Model (1929), Caitlín Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R'lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Miéville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb

How To Write A Generic SF Novel

Your hero must be likeable and sympathetic at all times. Like James Bond in the Roger Moore era, he’s quick with a quip, and is unruffled by any situation. No amount of exposure to suffering or slaughter should alter your hero in any significant way, although he is allowed to shed the odd manly tear or to express cold steely determination to do something about the death of a loved one. This makes him even more sympathetic. But all trauma is temporary; showing genuine emotion is difficult, and can hold up the plot. A secret past is always good -- you don’t have to deal with the parents. No bad deed goes unpunished; no good deed goes unrewarded; anyone who disagrees with your hero must suffer for it. Everyone’s behaviour has a rational explanation -- Freud is useful in this respect. No one refuses to get with the plot. Everyone acts their part, and is in character all the time. All problems are solvable. Traditionally, SF heroes solved problems by application of intelligence and scientific knowledge. These days, you can substitute lasers or AK-47s for scientific knowledge. Or swords. The equivalent of the internet or mobile phones are used only when the hero needs to find something out. Usually someone else does the actual typing. Don’t include any science that might frighten the readers.  Anything found in SF written before the 1980s is usually okay. Nanotechnology is basically magic. So is genetic engineering. Also quantum mechanics. Virtual reality is more or less the same as a video game. Planets can be treated as a single country, with uniform climate and culture, and no more than three unique features that distinguish them from Earth. Always include some non-Americans for local colour; like the Irish steerage passengers in Titanic (the movie), they're cheerful, deferential, and possess a quaint and lively culture. Also include either a kickass woman who can do the unacceptable things that would make your hero unlikeable, or a wise old soothsaying woman who speaks in parables and knows things that can’t be found on the internet. See also: sidekick comedy robot. Infodumps can put off readers. Have your characters tell each other about their situation instead. Bars are good places to do this. Bars are also great places to meet people. Unlike airport bars, spaceport bars are packed with colourful characters who all know each other. Aliens can usually be found in the corners of spaceport bars, or in a mysterious rundown quarter of the city attached to the spaceport. They’re basically cats.  Or turtles. Or some other pet animal. They often lack a sense of humour, which puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with humans. Interstellar merchants can be found in another corner of the bar, trading in spices, exotic liquors, and rare elements. No matter how technologically advanced your future society might be, its sociology and economics are basically those of the seventeenth century.  Also its battle tactics. All spaceships are big. Very big. Except the one owned by the kickass woman. And they never run out of fuel, power, breathable air, potable water, food, or reaction mass. Despite possession of gigantic highly-advanced starships, wars are usually won by your hero and a few good marines. Death is optional. At the end, everything is as it was before, except your hero is richer, more powerful, and married to the right woman, who is never the kickass woman.
There’s your story.
Goodnight, children.

Another Day, Another Interview

This one, over at the SFX blog, is short and sweet, answering some good questions from Tom Hunter on Fairyland, eBooks and more.  Completely forgot to mention that I have a self-published eBook out, the novelete City of the Dead. Or that I'm planning to republish my short story collection, Little Machines (originally a limited edition hardback from PS Publishing), some time in summer.  So now I've mentioned them here.

Supermoon/Magnolia/London

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (10)

In the middle of one of my favourite films, Wim Wender's Paris, Texas, the central character, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), has a strange encounter on a freeway overpass. Travis, who's been missing for four years, has been brought to Los Angeles by his brother Walt after wandering into a bar in the Texas badlands and collapsing. He slowly recovers his memory and is reintroduced to his young son, Hunter, who has been raised by Walt and his wife. When Travis decides that he has to find his estranged wife, he and Hunter leave together on a road trip back to Texas. The encounter happens just before they start off, during one of Travis's long, lonely walks:



It's as if Paris, Texas briefly intersects with another film - an SF disaster epic in which the unheeded warnings of a crazy man turn out to be prophetic. And yet it also fits in with the outsider view of America - the emptiness of its landscapes; the unceasing rush of its roads; the everyday surreality - that's so beautifully captured by Wenders and his cinematographer, Robbie Mueller. In that context, the idea of meeting a raggedy prophet of a science-fictional disaster is no stranger than, say, the shot in which the camera pans to reveal two giant dinosaurs in the parking lot of a truck stop in San Bernadino.

Interview

New French magazine Yggdrasil recently interviewed me about The Quiet War for its forthcoming first issue. Here's the English version, by kind permission of editor Jean-Francois Micard, who asked the questions:

Yggdrasil: The Quiet War is a space opera situated in the near future and in our solar system. Was it important for you to stay close to the predictable reality?
Paul McAuley: It was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality. I don’t believe that SF is in the prediction business. Instead, it should be exploring the vast range of possibilities that open up from signs and wonders in the present. As far as The Quiet War is concerned, I felt that it was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality for two reasons. First, the novel was inspired in part by the images of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn sent back by the Viking 1 and 2, Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. By the tremendous variety of the landscapes of the moons, by the deep and strange histories implied by their forms, and by their sheer unexpected strangeness. By the subsurface ocean of Europa, the sulphur volcanoes of Io, the geysers of Enceladus, the vast equatorial mountain range of Iapetus, the lakes and dunes and cryovolcanoes of Titan, and much more. Second, I like to have a link between the present we all share and the futures of my various novels. It’s important to me - if not to the reader - to know how we might get from here to there.

In this future, the world supremacy switched to Brazil, which gave you an alternate point of view about the world. Do you think that after decades of European / US-led SF, the time is right for an SF that explores other areas of the world, like in The Quiet War, or Brazil or River of Gods from Ian McDonald for instance?
Futures in which Anglocentric late-stage capitalism are by no means the only possible futures. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. My first three novels shared a future history in which another version of a Greater Brazil became the dominant political force on Earth. But yes, the time is definitely right, now. The Cold War ended two decades ago. America is still the only world superpower, but China and India are catching up fast.  And who knows how the democratic revolutions in the Middle East might revitalise Arabic culture?

Your work as a whole goes through a lot of settings, from space opera to techno-thriller, or even noir steampunk. Is it necessary for you to move through genres like this rather than settle in one and develop from there?
It’s necessary for me to write the book I want to write next. Commercially, it might have been better for my career if I had expanded the star-spanning space-opera future of my first three novels, but instead I wrote a novel about Mars, and then an alternate history involving Leonardo da Vinci. Because I’ve been interested in Mars for as long as I can remember (one of the first SF novels I ever read was HG Wells’ War of the Worlds); because I wanted to write a novel about Renaissance Florence. At one point I was pushed towards techno- thrillers, but the kind of techno-thriller I wrote were, typically for an SF writer, pro-science rather than Awful Warnings. I’m also an avid reader of crime novels, and when I was given the opportunity to write a crime novel I seized it. One day I’d like to write another. Meanwhile, I’m having a lot of fun with my new space opera future history.

You work for years as a scientist, and The Quiet War is full of very precise scientific details. Is it important for you to have this amount of accurate details?
Because I know a little about scientists and scientific culture, I try to get that right - especially as there aren’t that many novels about science, and scientists, even in SF, and it’s a big and important area of human endeavour. And because many of my SF novels are about how humans find ways of living in new landscapes, I like to get those details right, when the landscapes are real. I wanted, in The Quiet War, to get as close as possible to standing on the surface of Dione, or tramping through a riverine canyon on Titan. I wanted the experience in close up: what things look like, the way hills and craters were shaped, and so on. Along with travel writing, science fiction and fantasy are the last refuge of the pastoral.

Do you keep up to date personally with new scientific discoveries and theories?
I try. All SF writers should try keep up to date with that kind of thing, shouldn’t they? I follow developments in fields I am interested in, and I am also a big believer in serendipity - in the happy accident, in stumbling over something that fits into the narrative I happen to be constructing. The internet is very useful in that regard.

Sri Hong Owen and Averne are called (in French) sorcières génétiques. Do you think that, ultimately, science is akin to magic / witchcraft?
Not at all.  The whole point of scientific experiments is that they can, in theory, be replicated by anyone. That’s why scientific papers can be dull and baffling to the layreader - they contain all kinds of detail required to make such replication possible. Science allows industrialisation and mass production because it defines predictable cause and effect based on shared observations and experiments. Magic on the other hand is personal. Every operator has different skills not shared by others, and every operation is as unique as a handwritten book.

Contrary to what a lot of people believe, you prove here than each moon has its own characteristics, and influence its settlers. When many writers just invent new world, do you take more pleasure in building them around accountable facts?
It’s much more satisfying, for me, to have a map. No matter how sketchy. The map does not of course contain every detail. It is not the territory it represents. But it provides a framework within which the imagination can work. Without that framework, when anything is possible, and while you might say that the imagination should be free to create anything it wants, if anything is possible then nothing is of any real value.

The Quiet War is about a war that doesn't have the fury of 'traditional' wars, it's mainly about micro-actions like sabotage and bacteria. Do you feel the wars of the future will have that dimension?
They’re already growing in that direction. 9/11. The stuxnet worm attacking the software that controls Iranian nuclear facilities. Drones. The idea of netwar - conflicts that are not controlled from the top down, like conventional armies, but are organised in all-channel networks.

It's not really a war in the traditional sense about territories and resources, but more about what kind of future wants humanity. It's also an exploration of different social/political/philosophical systems, Earth being settled in an ecological conservatism when the extraterrestrial colonies evolved into various social systems. Which one is your favourite?
The idea of city states in which every citizen has a share in the commons, and can influence the direction and development of their society by earning social value through good works is to me very appealing. And so is the idea that in the near future the human race will face up to what it has done to the Earth, and start to make amends. But in The Quiet War, the green movement has been hijacked by nondemocratic cabals and turned into an ideology that excuses all kinds of repression, so it wouldn’t be a very comfortable place to live. Although readers of both novels will find that things do change . . .

Each of the colonies are, in essence, an utopia. Is it harder to write about utopias rather than dystopias?
It’s much harder to write about uptopias because it’s hard to make them nteresting. If a place is perfect, and everyone is happy, what happens? Ordinary everyday human dramas, of course, and these are fine and enduring subjects for the novelist, but perfect utopias are fixed places. Nothing changes. Novels about them too often lapse into long descriptions of the plumbing system, and guided tours of the munipal steam creche and the balloon works. Fortunately, the cities and settlements of The Quiet War’s outer system are flawed utopias. They are tested by pressures from within and without, and the drama in the two novels is derived from how they resist those pressures, how they fail, how they adapt.

You began the novel as several short stories in that universe, do you plan to expand it beyond The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun? With other novels? Short stories?
I’ve just finished a novel called In The Mouth of the Whale, that extends the history of The Quiet War and the Gardens of the Sun across a leap of some twelve hundred years, and looks towards the history of the human species way beyond that. It’s set in the dust ring of Fomalhaut, and the atmosphere of a gas giant that’s believed to orbit that star. And right now I’m working on a novel set at about the same time as In The Mouth of the Whale, but in the Solar System.

Fairyland

The Grand Staircase of the St Pancras Midland Grand Hotel, which is about to open after years of renovation.  I have a tender spot for the place: it was the setting for the opening of my novel Fairyland, and very early on its hapless hero sweeps down this very staircase:

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

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

Fairyland was published sixteen years ago, while the hotel was still more or less a wreck (a great collection of pre-renovation photographs can be found here, showing what it looked like when I visited it, during a Christmas Art Fair, about a decade ago).  Fifteen years ago, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award - the first but by no means the last Clarke Award success for my publisher, Gollancz.  To celebrate the anniversary, and the e-publication of various of my backlist titles, including Fairyland, there's a bit of promotion going on at their site right now, complete with a competition.  Adam Roberts has put up a generous and long review of Fairyland (first published in a book about Clarke Award winners) on his blog, and there'll be other stuff turning up here and there too, including a special Gollancz newsletter, and some kind of competition for free books right here on the blog, towards the end of this week.

Reference

Via Talking Points Memo I came across a report of some crass eugenic-speak from a recently-elected New Hampshire State Representative, coupled with an unfortunate reference to a late SF author:

A 91-year-old freshman state representative has angered a Dover Community Partners staffer for his comments he doesn't support state funding for "the crazy people" who should be sent to "Siberia."...

Martin Harty of Barrington made the comments to Sharon Omand, a program manager at Community Partners, which provides behavioral health and developmental services for Strafford County. Omand had called Harty and other legislators to discuss measures in the proposed House Republican state budget that would make significant cuts to mental health services.

Omand told Foster's that Harty told her he disagreed with her about the need for funds for mental health services and he believed in eugenics.

"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," he told her.

Where does he get his ideas?

Explaining his thoughts, Harty said one of his main concerns is population explosion, and he is wary of funding a social issue that can't really be helped...

Harty referenced science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and his stories about a pending population explosion as someone whose messages he is "in tune with."

When I sent the link to a few usual suspects, Eileen Gunn pointed out that Harty was most likely channelling Cyril Kornbluth's satirical short story 'The Marching Morons', in which the US has become populated by lowbrows kept content by shoddy consumer goods and pointless jobs. In fact, Harty's idea about sending inverts Kornbluth's scenario: in 'The Marching Morons', the high-IQ elite have set up an Arctic retreat from the stresses of trying to run the US. As for Harty's claim of 'being in tune with' Asimov's messages about the population explosion, I really don't think so. Asimov, ever the rationalist, believed that the solution to over-population lay in promoting voluntary contraception, encouraging homosexuality, and world government. Not, I think, the typical views of a Republican - even of the New Hampshire variety.

Question - I have a vague memory, exclusive of title and author, of a short story in which criminals were sent to a walled territory to do as they would. Anyone know anything about this? Or of any SF scenario, apart from HG Wells' 'The Country of the Blind' or John  Varley's 'The Persistence of Vision' where the differently-abled have either volunteered for, or have been driven into, exile?

In The Mouth Of The Whale

My agent has just delivered the manuscript of my next novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, to Gollancz, so I thought I'd put up an extract:

It began like every other day. Ori climbed into her immersion chair and plugged into her bot, trundled it out onto the skin of the Whale, and helped her crew shepherd a pair of probes from their garage to the staging post. Fuelling and charging them, running final checks before they set off on their long journey down the cable. Important, demanding, finicky work, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The staging post was near the base of the Whale’s vertical cylinder, at the lip of the conical end cap that tapered to the cable’s insertion point. Immediately above, a marshalling yard spread like ivy around a tree trunk, bustling with purposeful movement. At the upper end, hoppers stuffed with a variety of raw construction materials scooted down rack and pinion tracks towards tipplers that seized and lifted them up and turned them upside down and mated their hatches with the hatches of bulbous freight cars. The hoppers shed their cargo with quick peristaltic shudders, were swung right side up and set down on return tracks on the far side of the tipplers, and zipped back to the refinery. Further down the yard, loaded freight cars assembled themselves into long strings that trundled away along one of the four parallel magrails that crossed the inverted hill of the end cap and converged on the cable, the strings rolling over flying bridges at the insertion point and gathering speed as they descended the cable towards the deck of fluffy white ammonia clouds that sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon, passing strings of empty cars climbing in the opposite direction.  More here...

Learning To Love The Alien

It's one of the chief signifiers of science fiction, the other, the alien, but in literary sf at least, it's a signifier that's fallen out of favour. There are still plenty of aliens in turning up in TV and film sf, and some even escape the cliches of messiah, seemingly unstoppable menace (until they catch a cold or get 419'd), or comedy sidekick.  But in literary sf, at least on this side of the Atlantic, where we don't have a tradition of military sf and the need for ravening hordes of easy targets, not so much. Oh, there have been a few, of course. Even some good ones, such as the bleakly inimical gene machines in Peter Watts' Blindsight, or the cruel and elegantly wasted aristocrats in Gwyneth Jones's Spirit. But on the whole, they've fallen out of fashion. My first three novels are a case in point. In Four Hundred Billion Stars, aliens were a tangible presence; a puzzle to be confronted and solved. In Secret Harmonies (aka Of The Fall, in the US), they were admonitory presences that may or may not have been intelligent, and died if human beings hung around them for too long. And in Eternal Light, they'd quit the universe, become as untouchable and about as understandable as angels.

After that, I more or less gave up on the alien business for the next fifteen years, but now I'm giving it serious thought again. It started with a short story, 'Dust', and grew from there into what's more of a scenario than any kind of future history. Just suppose we get one of the things we always thought we'd get in the future, back when the future was still a good place to be travelling towards. Suppose we get easy travel to other planets, right now. Suppose it's a gift from aliens who want to give us a helping hand. It isn't much of a gift - a few cold and dusty and barely habitable planets littered with ancient and mostly useless artifacts, but hey. What do we do with it? How would it change us? Would it change us?

I've been writing a few stories to explore the edges of this frame, but now I'm beginning to think that, after the next novel, I need to go a bit deeper. I need to take a good look at those aliens. What do they want? What are they? Not monsters from our ids, or distorted reflections of ourselves (or of our pets), that's for sure. Maybe in the end they're what they've always been - an articulation of the inhumanness of the universe. Or maybe they are their own selves, just as we are. I think it might be fun to find out.

Meanwhile, just to remind you, you can find one of those stories in my new ebook, City of the Dead.

Debatable Zones

As an exercise, the reader might like to substitute 'science fiction' and 'sf writers' for 'poetry' and 'poets' in the following:

The edgelands are a complex landscape, a debatable zone, constantly reinventing themselves as economic and social tides come in and out. Of course, the idea of edgelands does not just refer to parts of the physical landscape. It's a rich term for poetry, too, and can maybe break down other dualities. Poets have always been attracted to the overlooked, the telling details, the captured moment. And the moment is important here, too. If parts of remote rural Britain feel timeless (though this feeling is, of course, illusory) then the edgelands feel anything but. Revisit an edgelands site you haven't seen for six months, and likely as not there will be a Victorian factory knocked down, a business park newly built, a section of waste ground cleared and landscaped, a re-war warehouse abandoned and open to the elements [or a Zeppelin factory swarming with zombies - PM]. Such are the constantly shifting sands of edgelands that any writing about these landscapes is a snapshot.  There is no definitive description of the edgelands of Swindon, or Wolverhampton, only an attempt to celebrate and evoke them at one particular time.

Edgelands: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Books Do Furnish A Room

Rereading

So SFSignal asked me: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

My answer below; answers from other people here.

Any book worth its salt should be able to withstand a second reading, but there are some that excite and move me at every reencounter. Here are a few:

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. A man finds himself stranded on a traffic island after a car crash. At first he can’t escape. And then he doesn’t want to. A powerful, deceptively simple updating of the Robinson Crusoe story.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. A man comes to a wounded American city, leaves as a hero-poet. After the fall of New Orleans, it’s more relevant than ever.

Libra by Don DeLillo. Oswald as tragic hero.

Neuromancer by William Gibson.  Still fresh and startlingly original, despite a thousand imitators.

The Inheritors by William Golding. Neanderthals encounter modern humans, with fatal results. All of Golding is worth reading and rereading, but this is my favourite.

Climbers by M. John Harrison. A beautifully written, intricately structured memoir/novel about memory, obsession, and the unrelenting reality of the world.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Diagrammatic, yes, but the sections set on Anarres are truly powerful and moving, and it’s one of the few SF novels to attempt to portray a genuinely original society from the inside.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. America primeval.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. Alyx, a barbarian kidnapped by the future, leads a gang of squabbling tourists across an alien wilderness. Alyx is the template for every wisecracking kickass heroine in cyberpunk, the new space opera and much else, but she’s the original and best, tough and funny and tender and wise.

Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. The detailed life and times of Updike’s American Everyman are, like America itself, inexhaustible.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. A marvellously eccentric fantasy about King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Matter of Britain that begins as a juvenile comedy and ends in tragedy and renewal. The death of Beaumont gets me every time. And no one does infodumps like White, who seems to know everything about Medieval Britain, which he remakes into a world that never was but should have been.


Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. The fall of America, as told to her diary by a young girl. The best, and chronologically the first, of Womack’s Ambient sequence.

So, which books do you recommend?

City of the Dead

Just up on amazon in both the UK and the US, at as reasonable a price I could manage, the Kindle ebook edition of a recent science-fiction novelette, City of the Dead. My first but by no means last venture in e-publishing.  Cover by Michael Marshall Smith; no DRM. Enjoy!

Imagination

Reality

Reminder #2

Along with fellow guests of honour Juliet McKenna and Kari Sperring, I'll be at the small but perfectly formed one-day convention Picocon this Saturday.  If you see me, say hello.

Slowly working on the new novel, meanwhile, and thinking about a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', that jumped into my head the other day.  In the way they do, sometimes.

Reminder #1

...that with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod I'll be speaking and taking part in a roundtable discussion at the LSE Thursday 17th. It's a free event (but you need to book tickets) organised by the Department of International Relations as part of the university's Space for Thought Literary Festival.

Book Stack

Here are a few of the books I bought in the past couple of weeks (the paperback pile is about twice as high). From the top:

D.G. Compton, Ascendancies and Farewell, Earth's Bliss. Compton is a highly underrated British SF writer, probably best known for The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, which anticipated reality TV and was made into a so-so film, Death Watch, by Bernard Tavernier. Farewell, Earth's Bliss is somewhat atypical - a darkly funny story of redemption set on Mars, used by Earth as a dumping ground for the worst kind of criminal. Ascendancies, like many of Compton's novels, views a near-future society in close-up, through flawed protagonists. Here, a widow and a hapless insurance agent try to out-game each other in a near future transformed by falls of fertilising dust and random disappearances of people via a mysterious process associated with eerie choral music and the scent of roses.

T.M. Disch, The Prisoner. Novelisation of the cult TV series. Disch and The Prisoner are a closer fit than you might at first think.

Stephen Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. Charity shop find, shortlisted for the Clarke Award a couple of years back. Adventures in Un-Space.

Stanislaw Lem, Eden. Secondhand bookshop find. A spaceship crashes on a planet of metaphors.

Jack Womack, Ambient. Womack's first novel, the third, chronologically, in his 'Dryco' series. Uncannily prophetic social satire; opens with one of the best bookshop scenes ever written.

The Ones You Do, Daniel Woodrell. Signed first edition of the third of Woodrell's St Bruno mystery novels (I bought the other two, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, in a sale at the fabulous Powell Books, Portland, Oregon, a few years ago).  Woodrell is one of my favourite writers, a poet of American interstitial lowlife. His second novel, Woe to Live On, was made into a film (Ride With the Devil), as was his last, Winter's Bone.

Making It Personal

Simon asks a question that I think is too good to be left under the fold:

Something has been bothering me for sometime about Sci-Fi and you seem the kinda guy to shed some light on it. How come Sci-Fi writers before recent times never mentioned/envisaged personalised settings in technology (you know - screen savers, font, pictures - things that reflect/feedback ones personality in objects). It seems that even the greatest kept faith with the idea of mass homogenised technologies which were no doubt linked to the ideas of societies and objects in the post industrial age. I mean it would have been nice if Rick Deckard would have played around with the personalized settings of his mood organ? I think personalised settings say a lot about notions of liberty, society and people’s interaction with technology – seems an under explored area (you just gonna tell me that I’ve simply just missed all the right books?!!)

 I have not one but three answers. And a question.

First - and I know I've said it before- science fiction really isn't in the prediction business. What it really does is hold up a distorting mirror to the time in which it is written, and takes current directions and preoccupations and speculates wildly about them. It doesn't predict the future, but a rich variety of possible futures.  Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets it wrong, as in the example at the top of this post - Kelly Freas's terrific painting of a space pirate swarming aboard a rocketship with a slide rule between his teeth.

Second, modern science fiction came of age in the post-war years, when techniques of mass production deployed during the Second World War began to spew all kinds of consumer goods. The growth of the American military-industrial complex in the 1950s and 1960s not only produced the largest and most modern armed force in the world, it also stimulated a huge increase in civilian living standards. SF written at the time reflected that, often in satirical, dehumanised dystopias: Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451; Fredrick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants; much of Philip K Dick's work. Deckard's mood organ doesn't have personalised settings because that's the point: it's a machine for standardising human emotions in a future where the line between real and artificial human beings is confused.

But has any science fiction explored personalisation of technology? You bet. Much of cyberpunk explores the way in which technology can be subverted and repurposed.  'The street,' William Gibson famously wrote in his short story 'Burning Chrome', 'finds its own uses for things.' My question is this: what's the earliest example of personalised technology in science fiction? In the stories in Larry Niven's future history, published in the 1960s and 1970s, asteroid miners personalised their space suits with paintings (much as vans and motorcycles were customised, back then). But there must be earlier examples . . .

Palimpsest

Davos In Space

I want to tell you about a few things that inspired the back history of The Quiet War. Let’s start with the World Economic Forum. An annual gathering in the small alpine town of Davos where, inside a ring of steely Swiss security, the mega-rich mingle with world leaders and high-grade chugging teams from humanitarian aid charities:

There's a definite pecking order to the annual jamboree of global leaders. The creme de la creme of the world elite get a chopper in from Zurich airport. Mere chief executives of multinational companies arrive by limo. Meanwhile, charity leaders, religious figures, journalists and hoi polloi trundle up the mountain around icy hairpin bends in complementary shuttle buses.

The 2011 meeting has just ended. But what would happen if the guests never left?

That’s kind of like the scenario in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel’s elusive driving force, John Galt, disgusted by the way in the world has turned to socialism, sets up a refuge in the Colorado Rockies where innovators and go-getters hole up and go on strike while all around them, for want of their talent and energy, everything goes to hell in a hand-basket. An unlikely scenario, it seems to me: a fantasy underpinned by the kind of enormous but fragile egotism that prompts little boys to take their ball away when it looks like they’re about to lose the game. More likely to fall apart in all kinds of interestingly savage ways than to hold the line. I much prefer El Rey, the dark mirror-image of Galt’s Gulch in Jim Thompson’s The Getaway: a luxurious Mexican hideout where criminals can enjoy the fruits of their big scores until the money runs out - and that’s where their problems begin, because once you’ve checked in to El Rey, you can never check out . . .

It’s no surprise that something like the World Economic Forum Meeting should be held in Switzerland. Aside from scenery, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, looking after other people’s money is what Switzerland is all about. Protected by the Alps, the Swiss armed forces and secret police (every other person in Geneva looks like a secret police), and centuries of imperturbable omerta, it’s one of the oldest tax havens.  Great Britain isn’t far behind. British citizens able to claim that they are non-domiciled residents can stay at home and pay only a notional amount of tax. Others can shelter their cash in the offshore tax havens of the Channel Islands (more secret-police omerta) and the Isle of Man (Viking omerta). And doors along the streets of the capitals of British overseas territories and former protectorates and colonies in kinder latitudes glitter with brass plates for local firms that are fronts for international banks, businesses and individuals who benefit from low, low local tax rates.

If the rich can’t keep their money close to where they have to live, they like to visit it as often as possible. And because most tax havens are islands, or border the Mediterranean or Caribbean or the Indian Ocean, many of the mega-rich own a yacht. Preferably a really big yacht. Not only because it screams out your status as it jostles amongst its fellows at Cannes, say, or Bermuda’s Hamilton Harbour, but because it can act as a temporary refuge should things go badly pear-shaped: in theory, your creditors can’t touch you on the high seas.

But suppose things go pear-shaped all over the world? Even the biggest floating tax refuge, The World, needs to touch land and resupply. If climate change, economic collapse, popular revolutions and war collide in a perfect storm, the mega-rich will need their own Galt’s Gulch/El Rey.

We’re back to The Quiet War, where the mega-rich flee first find refuge from that perfect storm in New Zealand, a stable Western democracy that’s nicely remote and pretty well placed to ride out the worst effects of rapid climate change.  Then things get worse and the mega-rich up and leave Earth for the Moon, and take over and expand a Japanese colony. (Do you really think Richard Branson is interested in space tourism? It’s really cover for development and manufacture of space yachts for the far-sighted rich.)

But even the Moon isn’t far enough. As the Earth recovers, its new power blocs chase after the mega-rich, who split into two. The more aggressive group heads to Mars, tries to drop an asteroid on Earth, and are blasted to oblivion. The rest, including most of the scientists, engineers and technicians who kept the Moon colony running, flee to the moons of Jupiter, and then spread to the moons of Saturn, where they develop a scientific utopia quarantined by distance. But eventually even that isn’t far enough . . . The taxman has a longer reach than even John Galt could imagine.

UPDATE: Those yachts keep getting bigger. Also, Galt is the elusive mastermind of Atlas Shrugged, not The Fountainhead: corrected (thanks, N.E.).

Reboot

When people ask me how to write a book, I usually tell them to start at the begining and keep writing until you reach the end. It sounds a little snarky, I know, but it's genuine advice born out of hard experience.  It's easy to start a book; hard to reach the end.  Either because you find something else to do that seems a lot more fun and life-enhancing than sitting at a notebook or a computer day after day, or because you've started in the wrong place and can't get past the opening scenes.  The latter happens to me a lot.  Not every time, but fairly frequently, so that by now I no longer panic when I realise that the 10,000 words I've set down aren't going anywhere because I can't get to where I want to go from the place where I began.

That's what's just happened with the new book, and it's okay.  It's part of the process.  As usual, I've been finding my way into my character's world, and most of what I've set down is backstory and scene-setting that doesn't really advance the plot.  I may use some of it elsewhere; the rest is useful mulch.  Stuff I need to know to tell the story, even if it isn't in the narrative.  It happened with The Quiet War - I was 30,000 words in that time.  Too much background; too much hesitation before plunging in.  It didn't happen with Gardens of the Sun because it picked up The Quiet War's story, and I knew enough about the fictional framework to work out exactly where I needed to start up again.  All good.  But then I had the same problem with one story strand of In The Mouth Of The Whale, and I didn't get that fixed until I realised that the character was a librarian, not a cop.  A small change that made all the difference.

I was diverted from the new novel, in fact, because I had to deal with some useful comments my agent made about In The Mouth Of The Whale.  Fixed those, sent the MSS back to my agent, who's about to send it off to my editor.  Went back to the new book, saw it wasn't right, and inside a day had rebooted with a new beginning.  Starting where the narrative really starts, as far as the character is concerned.  And now that he's in a lot more trouble than he was before, I feel a lot better.

Inspiration

The cottage in which I grew up was the third in a row of four, with a large shared back garden that ran down to the ruins of a canal lock. A little way beyond was a station on a single-track branch railway line affectionately known as the Dudbridge Donkey.  Before the Beeching Act killed it off, small steam and diesel locomotives hauled goods trains back and forth; my route to primary school crossed the line and on my way back home I'd often see a locomotive rootling about with a few wagons in the truncated goods yard.  I've retained an abiding affection for railways ever since.

Before Lord of the Rings, there was the Chronicles of Narnia, written by Tolkein's fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis.  I read them over again when I was a child.  My favourite was the origin story, The Magician's Nephew.  It featured a wood between worlds where you could, by stepping into one or another of its many shallow pools, access alternate universes.

In the late 1960s, I loved to watch The Time Tunnel, a briefly-lived series created by Irwin Allen in which, as the opening narration of each episode put it:

"Two American scientists are lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time."

Murray Leinster, widely credited with the invention of parallel universe stories, wrote the tie-in novel.

Where do science-fiction writers get their crazy ideas?

My Grandmother's Bestiary

A few pages from one of the first books I ever owned, a Victorian volume on natural history given to me by my grandmother when I was a small youngling.  According to its unknown author:

The following pages were commenced solely in the hope of affording such a simple, and, at the same time, such a systematical introduction to the Linnean System of Zoology, as might induce young persons to an earnest pursuit of the study of Natural History . . .  it has, throughout, been his constant endeavour to divert the attention from secondary causes, and to turn it to the Almighty and only Source of Being, Power, and Truth.

As far as I was concerned, the first part worked; the second, not so much. The illustrations strive towards accuracy, but are infused with a certain degree of anthropomorphism.  I especially like the snakes, revelling in their sneaky, snakey nature.

Kindled, ibooked

While I'm still contemplating bringing out old and new short-story collections as ebooks, Gollancz, my British publishers, have published five of my backlist novels in electronic format.  They include: Four Hundred Billion Stars and Eternal Light, early examples of new space opera that chronicle the adventures of Dorthy Yoshida as she travels to the centre of the galaxy and back again; Red Dust, my Martian ninjapunk novel; Pasquale's Angel, my alternative history Renaissancepunk novel; and Fairyland, my first biopunk novel.  Each for the very reasonable price of £4.49, or $7.33, on Kindle.  They're also available, I'm told, as ibooks, but I'm one of the few authors who haven't converted to Apple, so I haven't been able to check.


Four Hundred Billion Stars, by the way, is my first novel, published by Del Rey as a paperback way back in 1988.  I wrote it on a manual typewriter, and because photocopying was expensive in those days, I typed the final version on a sandwich of bond, carbon, and bank paper (I still have the carbon copy, somewhere).  Now it's out there in the cloud.  Science fiction!

In Public

So next month I'll be appearing at not one but two universities in London.  The first gig* is at the London School of Economics, where on February 17 I'll be sharing a platform with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod and talking about science fiction and international orders as part of a one-day literary festival.  It's free, but you'll need to get a ticket - details on the web page.

And two days later, on the 19th, I'll be appearing at Imperial College's Picocon 28, with fellow Guests of Honour Juliet McKenna and Kari Sperring.  I'm giving a talk and reading, starting at 11.30, I believe.

EDIT: *apologies for the inappropriate use of 'gig'; I came over all rock and/or roll for a moment

When You Wish Upon A Star, Be Careful To Choose the Right Star

Apropos the mention of star-watching in the last post, XKCD's latest (click to embiggen):

Getting Into Death

Here were Joshie's beginnings. A dystopian upper-class childhood in several elite American suburbs. Total immersion in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The twelve-year-old's first cognition of mortality, for the true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will end. The totality of it. The self-love. Not wanting to die. Wanting to live, but not sure why. Looking up at the nighttime sky, at the black eternity of outer space, amazed.
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Which set me to thinking about my own long-ago self, when he was at that golden age. Was he really getting into death, back then, when he got hooked into the mainline of SF?  I don't think that he thought that he did.  He was a bright, disorganised kid living in a small town, and like many such he wanted to get out.  SF opened up new worlds to him. America. The future. Easy travel to other planets.  And some of his favourite stories - Theodore Sturgeon's 'The Way Home', Tiptree's 'Beam Me Home' - were about about ways of escape.  When he looked up at the stars in the summer nights sky, he wasn't thinking about eternity. He was wondering if someone like him was up there on a warm wet blue planet circling a yellow star, looking up at their night sky and thinking what  he was thinking.  He was projecting.  He wanted out bad, and SF was balm to that ache.

Well I got out, and I became a scientist, which is what I wanted to be, and then I became an SF writer, which I also wanted to be, and how cool is that?  And now I think, about the SF I read and the SF I write: yeah, in one way or another, it's all about death. I'm just starting in on the editing process of a novel about avoiding the inevitable and the costs this could incur, which is one reason the quote caught my interest.  It's something I've been thinking about.  Also, when I tweeted part of the quote at the head of this, my friend Andrew McKie tweeted back 'I have long maintained the death thing. There's audio somewhere of me droning on to Kincaid about it at a BSFA thing.'  Hard to argue about this with Mr McKie: he once worked for the best bit of the Telegraph - the obits department.  To borrow a line from Michael Connelly, death is his beat.

I used to think SF was all about change, but all change means leaving something behind. I left behind my childhood when I quit that little town for university, and never really came all the way back.  Death is a more permanent kind of change. And if you avoid it somehow, that will change you too.  You won't be some eternal extropian twentysomething, planning to turn a galaxy into beer and pizza.  You'll be something so deeply weird the future equivalent of all the world's armies would try to take you down if you ever returned to Earth.

But we're not just talking about childhood's end, or the all-too-brief span of human life, in SF. We're talking about the end of everything. The end of the universe, maybe flattening out forever, maybe crunching back down into the Singularity of a new universe, maybe giving birth to hundreds of new universes. We're talking about the end of reality.  We're talking about hard, important questions. If everything is in flux, what is useful and what isn't? What do we do with our knowledge about the immensity of the universe and the seemingly microscopic size of our place within it? How can we make sense of that, and learn to live with it? Is it really possible to develop strategies to avoid the heatdeath of the Universe or surfing the wave of a new Big Bang? And what then? And what then...

E-Bookery

Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to comment here or on Twitter.  All very useful, especially as there was reasonably general agreement about the price range.  It seems to me that if I go ahead with this crazy idea I should price the OOP collections at around £4.20 (which includes the VAT eBooks attract), or possibly a little lower.  That would come in at a little under $7 at the current exchange rate, which might be a bit high for US readers, but perhaps not too high (Would they have to pay VAT?  I realise that I have no idea.  If not, the price would be well under $6.)  That's somewhat less than the price my UK publishers are charging for a couple of OOP novels that have sneaked out as eBooks.  I wouldn't charge much more for the new collection, to be honest.  All of three would consist of reprinted stories after all.

A couple of other points, if you can bear it (authors do tend to go on and on about eBooks, so forgive me).  The price of printing a book is only a small part of the cover price.  Editing, production design, maintaining offices and warehousing and distribution add a bit more.  A large chunk goes to the end seller; much smaller chunks go to the publisher and author.  So the idea that eBooks are much cheaper to produce because they aren't physical objects isn't exactly right; although they are somewhat cheaper, new books still have to be edited, given cover art and so on.  As for the price difference between hardback and paperbacks, at the moment, some people are still willing to pay extra for the latest book by their favourite authors, just as they're willing to pay extra to see a film in a first-run cinema.  That will change, I think.  (it would also be nice if hardbacks in the UK were all printed on acid-free paper, to give them the kind of permanence of US editions.)  At any rate, OOP titles revived as eBooks should definitely be cheaper.  Some are very cheap indeed - presumably in the hope that what's lost per unit will be made up in greater volumes of sales.  Not sure I want to go there quite yet.

One commentator raised the point that people below a certain age expect books to be free. As I'm well above that certain age, and still earn my living from writing and selling fiction: I don't.  And I still buy books at full price, when I have to.  But if it's free fiction you want, then look here.  There's a small anthology's worth of free stuff.  And you're welcome to distribute under the terms of the Creative Commons License.  Think of it as a gift, or as a taster for stuff you can buy.  Whatever.

PS Chris asks why the Confluence trilogy isn't back in print.  Good question!  I'm trying to persuade my UK publishers to do just that.  Hopefully in one nice fat volume.  And failing that option, I do have the eBook rights...

UPDATE: Again, thanks for commenting; thought I'd reply here rather than under the fold.  Various people have given me cogent reasons not to simply stick with Amazon/Kindle.  My plan now, such as it is and if I go forward with my idea to self-publish those OOP collections, would be to use Kindle as an experiment, and then go to the more open format ePub format, which appeals to me because it is supported on all kinds of platforms (including Stanza, which I use), and I think gets around the licensing problem . . . but it looks like it'll be a steep learning curve.  RFYork - thanks for the link to Charlie Stross's blog post on why books aren't cheap and to talkie_tim and Blue Tyson for supporting arguments : exactly.  And here are a couple of good posts on why pirating books hurt the author rather than sticks it to the 'greedy publisher'.  I especially like Saundra Mitchell's suggestions for ways that the problem can be turned around to help the reader and the author.   More news, when I have it.  Don't hold your breath, though; I have one book to edit, and another to write, and I'm seriously short on the kind of Victorian can-do energy that enabled Charles Dickens to be a novelist, a magazine publisher, and a smash-hit performer (and killed him, in the end...).

A Question

So I'm giving some serious thought to republishing, as ebooks, two out-of-print short-story collections,  The Invisible Country and Little Machines.  Also, to compiling and publishing in ebook form a substantial new collection featuring the 'Quiet War' stories and some other space-opera stories.  How much would people be prepared to pay for ebook versions of a previously-published but OOP short story collection?  And how much for a new collection?  ('Nothing' isn't an answer, by the way.  I have meet the costs of publishing (new covers, formatting and so on); also, I have to eat.)

Cowboy Angels And The Old Weird

Cowboy Angels, now available in the US, describes a journey across a variety of alternate Americas; it's structured like a road movie, and like all good road movies it has a soundtrack.  Music features over and again in the narrative - the opening scene has Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming playing in the background, there’s more Dylan sprinkled here and there, a fond memory of some old dance tunes, and an anachronistic guest appearance by Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings. The music is more than decoration, more than texture.  It stands for something lost. Something that the hero, Adam Stone, is looking for, even though he doesn’t realise quite what he’s found, and how he can redeem it, until the closing pages.

A major influence on Cowboy Angels was Greil Marcus’s book Invisible Republic. It’s an extraordinary meditation on the Matter of America and its lost and shadow selves that widens out from an examination of the music that Dylan and the Band made together in the basement of the Band’s rented house in Woodstock, NY, where Dylan had retreated after his bruising World Tour with the Band in 1966 (the electrified passages of his concert were greeted with howls of derision and anger by folk fans; one famously called out ‘Judas’, to which a rattled Dylan replied, ‘I don't believe you . . . you're a liar,’ before turning to the Band as they gathered up the opening of "Like A Rolling Stone" and telling them to ‘play it fucking loud!’). The Basement Tapes may be the way into the central argument of Invisible Republic, but at the heart of the book is a collection of obscure folk music compiled and curated by Harry Smith and issued in 1952 as the Anthology of American Folk Music, described by Marcus as ‘an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings originally released on and generally forgotten by such still-active labels . . . [that was] the founding document of the American folk revival.’ Divided into three sections - ‘Ballads’, ‘Social Music’, and ‘Songs’ - it chronicles tales of archetypal murder, revenge and disaster, music of public celebration and appeals to God, and songs of ‘wishes and fears, difficulties and satisfactions that are, you know, as plain as day, but also, in the voices of those who are now singing, the work of demons - demons like your neighbours, your family, your lovers, yourself.’

Inspired by the cadence of a phrase ‘the old free America’ used by the poet Kenneth Rexroth ‘to describe the country he thought lay behind Carl Sandburg’s work’, Marcus named the territory that opens up out of Smith’s Anthology as the ‘old, weird America’. It is the territory where there still lives all that is strange and distinctive of the lost, gone world inhabited by the singers of the songs collected by Smith, and its capital is Smithville: ‘a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act, a declaration of a weird but clearly recognisable America within the America of the exercise of institutional majoritarian power.’

This is the America that Adam Stone is searching for as he travels through alternate Americas and discovers a weird, secret world of conspiracies working within conspiracies, a world where the dead live again, a woman can be murdered over and again, the past is as mutable as the future and one is hand in hand with the other, and where a lost love can be rescued from death, if you are willing to pay the price.

The old singers, the traditional people whose end Dylan saw in the early 1960s, after they had been rediscovered by fans and brought out to play at the Newport Jazz Festival and other venues, were all gone by the time I first visited America in the early 1980s. But I was able to glimpse traces of their world while I was living in Los Angeles, and during visits in the years immediately after my stint as a legal alien. A world before the spread of strip malls, exurbias; before Clearwater and Fox News; before the corporate homogenisation of what seemed like an unquenchable abundance of deep history, of regional tradition and variety.

I remember on one visit driving in my hire car around the Beltway of Washington DC an hour after deplaning when Simon and Garfunkel’s 'America' came on the radio, and I was so lost in the gap between the yearning of the song, its personal resonances, and the actuality of driving in America that I missed my exit and had to park in a street sunk deep in twilight and the deep quiet dream of suburbia to gather my wits. (The secret name of Cowboy Angels, the original title vetoed by its publishers but surviving as the title of its central section, is Look For America.) I remember driving across the state line into North Carolina where fireworks were everywhere advertised for sale and the radio was suddenly full of bluegrass and hellfire preaching. I remember driving past the wreckage of an Antebellum house, of finding Raleigh-Durham airport full of Civil War reentactors (I have a memory that they carried their rifles onto the plane - it may be false, but those were certainly more innocent times).

Those were the days of Ronald Reagan, who if he did nothing else brought back to America the idea of hopefulness, who in his 1984 acceptance of the Republican Party nomination invoked the image of America as a city on a hill:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

It's an image that, as Greil Marcus notes, may have been intended as a sign of American triumphalism, but three hundred years before was a warning, a prophecy of self-betrayal invoked by John Winthrop in 1630 to describe to his fellow Puritans what awaited them in the New World, and what would happen if they failed to meet its promise:

For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs: soe that if wee shall deale faslely with our god in thos worke wee haue vndertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from vs, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake euill of the ways of god and all professours for Gods sake; we shall shame the face of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses vopn vs tll wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.

That doubled image of alternate Americas - the shining city as testament to glory or as a curse on failure - is at the heart of Cowboy Angels' story; the story of the kind of America Adam Stone’s America has become, and what he does about it.

Stonecutters

'Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, We do.'