Pavane

Some books stay with you forever.  You encounter them at an impressionable age; they strike an inner resonance with uncanny accuracy; you can return to them again and again, and always find something new.  Keith Roberts' alternate history, Pavane, recently reissued by Old Earth Books and reviewed by Michael Dirda, is one of my personal favourites.  I found it in the Ace edition, with the terrific cover by Leo and Diane Dillon (above) that Old Earth Books have used in their reissue, in a Church jumble sale in the small Cotswold town where I grew up.  I was fourteen or fifteen.  Maybe sixteen.  The paperback was a couple of years old, sitting not amongst other books but amongst a scatter of bric-a-brac, an alien artifact from another world.  I was already a stone science-fiction reader, getting most of my fix from the local library.  We were poor.  I couldn't afford books, but bought what I could anyway.  And bought this, and read it, as I recall, in a single sitting, and then reread it again, in an attempt to understand it.

I'm still trying to understand it.  It changed the way I thought about science fiction.  Divided into measures than hand the narrative from character to character, it's the story of another history, in which the Catholic Church ruled England some four hundred years after the assassination of Queen Elizabeth the First, suppressing various technologies.  A world of steam road trains, hand presses, semaphore towers flashing signals across the land, the Inquisition at large, and revolution in the air.  An English novel: its setting, in and around Corfe Castle, evoked with lambent touches and imbued with English weather and tough English romance; its stories told in full-on tough, tragic mode. Its characters may shape its history but are also shaped by it, hurt by, die by it.  Unlike much of the stuff I was reading at the time, it presents no easy solutions; its world is not some puzzle easily solved but is as obdurate and hard-grained as the real world.  There is human muddle, human suffering, human triumph.

It showed me, I think, that science fiction stories did not need to be peopled with lords and ladies (as Roberts titles one of his measures), child-messiahs, orphans who just happened to fit the lock of their world as if oiled. That stories could be about ordinary people, yet reflect larger movements, larger stories.  It showed me that science fiction could aspire to the condition of literature.  I taught me about the telling detail; about how to evoke an entire world by observation of the particularity of things.  Roberts is very good at showing us how things work, by dropping in the exact image, and describing how people use them, and how they change the people who use them.  There are DNA-traces of Pavane in most of my novels, but most especially, I guess, Pasquale's Angel and Fairyland.  It's one of the books that makes me want to write better, even if I know I can never better it.

Form

“For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything had to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing”. Writing is more about destroying than creating.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle

The Eye of the Hydra

I've mentioned before that when I was a practising research scientist I investigated symbioses between animals and unicellular algae, and my chief experimental organism was the humble green hydra.  It's a freshwater coelenterate (a relative of jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals, which use specialised stinging cells, cnidocytes, to catch prey and to defend themselves and move about) that's easy to culture in the laboratory and reproduces by asexual budding, so in a relatively short time the researcher can grow up a large, cloned population (hydras can also reproduce sexually, but if they are kept in constant conditions it's a rare event).  It's also a wonderfully simple animal, with just two cell layers separated by an acellular mesoglea, a mouth ringed by tentacles at one end, and a foot, or pedicule, at the other, which adheres to the substrate.  There are relatively few types of cells, a simple nerve net, and that's about it.  So it's a useful lab model not only in the investigation of symbioses, but in all kinds of developmental studies, too.

Here's one of the most recent, and most interesting.  Researchers using a non-symbiotic species of hydra have discovered that its stinging cells exhibited a sensitivity to light - they are more likely to fire at low levels of light or in darkness, while bright light actually inhibits their firing.  That's interesting in its own right - hydra prey on water fleas and other small swimming animals, whose activity may correlate with the activity of the hydras' stinging cells.  But there's more.  That activity is regulated by a species of light-sensitive chemical, opsin, which is also found in the visual systems of higher animals, including mammals.  So although hydras don't have physical structures analogous to eyes, they are photosensitive, and that photosensitivity is regulated by a chemical that has a very similar function in the human eye.  The 'eye' of the common ancestor of hydras and the eyes of higher animals (fish, fowl, mammals, us) share a common pathway.

Parenthetically, it would be fun to examine to role of opsin in the behaviour of green hydra, which will migrate towards a bright light shone in one corner of their culture dish, presumably to maximise the photosynthetic output of their symbiotic algae.  It might also be interesting to discover if green hydra's feeding behaviour is diurnal, or if it is just as active feeding by day as at dusk, or night (the polyps of reef-forming corals seems to photosynthesise by day and feed by night, getting the best of both being a plant and a predator).

There's also an important evolutionary angle, as one of the researchers, Professor Todd Oakley, points out: "What good is half an eye? Even without eyes there are other functions for light sensitivity that we may not be thinking of."

This is precisely the problem that Charles Darwin raised in On The Origin of the Species, in a sentence that's often quoted by opponents of evolutionary theory:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

 Darwin went on to say (and this is the bit that his opponents often miss out):

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

On The Origin of the Species, 6th Edition, Chapter 6

Darwin goes on to describe examples of possible transitional forms.  The photosensitive 'eye' of the hydra is one such, and may help us understand 'how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light', one of the first steps in the evolution of the complex mechanism that is helping you read this.

Near, Far

Fiction about the near future, as many people have noted, is most often like a funhouse mirror of the present. It distorts and exaggerates our current fears and preoccupations; it takes current trends and pushes them as far as they'll go without breaking down into incoherence.  It's science fiction in its most purely satirical mode.  Like costume drama films, it contains the fingerprints of the time in which it was composed.  It doesn't go out of date; it loses context.  It's also becoming more and more difficult to do, as the present increasingly becomes its own self-engulfing parody.

Fiction about the far future, on the other hand, digs deep into the past.  Given all the problems of attempting to predict the near-future - black swans, non-linear dynamics, the law of unintended consequences - it certainly makes no sense in consciously trying to project any part of the present on to the far future.  Instead, writers suggest that archetypal human narratives and historical principles will survive every kind of technological change, and reappear in different forms.  James Blish's Cities in Flight series, for instance, is underpinned by the theories of Otto Spengler.  Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was inspired by Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Frank Herbert's Dune and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun are different takes on Messianic figures.  Old-school space opera, with its palaces and empires, its sword-wielding heroes and princesses, echo Hollywood's romance with medieval history.  And so on, and so forth.  Like fantasy, the narratives of far-future science fiction are shaped by patterns of Story.  Unless you believe, like those who champion the technological Singularity (aka Rise of the Machines, or the Rapture of the Nerds), that the far future lies on the other side of an intellectual event horizon. That the far future will not only be impossible to predict, but also impossible to comprehend.  That it is an end to Story and the heat death of science fiction, and we cannot utter a single syllable about what follows.  But where's the fun in that?

Size Matters

This brilliantly simple graphic by Adam Grossman neatly illustrates how the scale of human achievement is dwarfed by the size of the galaxy.  We've been emitting radio transmissions for about a century now, and since they travel at the speed of light, the very first transmissions have reached a theoretical distance of one hundred light years from the Sun.  (As Emily Lakdawalla points out in the Planetary Society blogpost where I first found the graphic, the inverse square law means that those transmissions would be so incredibly attenuated as to be undetectable except by the magic of advanced alien technology.)  This means that all of the transmissions to date are contained within a sphere of two hundred light years' diameter.  The graphic shows just how small that is, compared to the size of the Galaxy - if you click to embiggen the image, you'll see that a little blue dot in the centre of the enlarged square: that's us, that's as far as we've reached out.

Space opera's central conceit is to imagine that human influence can extent across the entire breadth of the Galaxy.  Across billions of stars, and about 120,000 light years.  And cosmology operas imagine that humanity can influence the billions of galaxies beyond our own, the fate of the observable universe, and even multiverses beyond that.  Which is why, of course, breaking or getting around the Einsteinian lightspeed barrier is such a common trope, in space opera.  While some writers - Alastair Reynolds springs to mind - have cleverly incorporated the long spans of time required to traverse interstellar distances at sublight speeds into their plots, they usually (as far as I'm aware), limit themselves to so-called near-space.  Conventionally, that isn't much bigger than the volume of the little blue dot.  That image really brings home why it's so necessary to break the speed limit if you're going to have any kind of comprehensible galaxy-spanning plot, and introduce human dramas to the galaxy's vast stage.

Symbiosis

Way back in the 1990s, when I had a day job, I used to do research into plant/animal symbioses, and taught, amongst others things, an advanced course in symbiosis.  All eukyarotic organisms are the products of at least one symbiotic event.  The cells of animals, plants and fungi contain mitochondria, organelles that are, amongst other things, the source of most cellular chemical energy.  Mitochondria were once independent organisms, probably related to Proteobacteria, which entered into an endosymbiosis with the ancestor of eukaryotes - one of the defining steps in the evolution of life on Earth.

In addition to mitochondria, cells of algae and green plants also contain plastids, the organelles responsible for photosynthesis.  These, too, were once independent organisms, and now researchers believe they have identified the host and symbiont that are the ancestors of all species of algae and plants.  It's a hugely exciting piece of work, with equally huge implications.  DNA sequencing shows that the plastid of a species of glaucophyte, a small group of obscure, microscopic blue-green algae, retains genes associated with early cyanobacteria, the photosynthetic bacteria from which plastids are believed to have evolved.  Comparison with the gene maps of a variety of plastids suggests not only that all algae and plants evolved from a single symbiotic event, but also that another organism was involved: 'the DNA includes genes similar to those from ancient bacteria similar to the Chlamydiae bacteria.'  If the hypothesis is correct, the bacteria (which were probably some kind of parasite) have all but vanished, leaving only a few of their genes in plastids, a little like words from the languages of long-vanished civilisations that live on in English and other modern languages.  It isn't a unique phenomenon - one of the more unexpected results of the human genome project was the discovery that genes from retroviruses make up something like 8 per cent of the human genome.  We are the expression of texts from many sources.

Days Of Future Past

I'm digging deeper and deeper into the third draft of Evening's Empires, so apologies in advance if posting here gets a bit sparse. Like a variation of Zeno's paradox, the closer a novel gets to completion, the more of my time and brain it consumes.

I didn't stop writing when I went away last week for my first SFX Weekender, a huge gathering of fans of science-fiction TV series and films, and science-fiction in print.  This was at Prestatyn, a small resort town in the north-west corner of Wales; specifically, at the Pontins holiday camp.  It wasn't for the faint-hearted.  There were at least 4000 fans in attendance, stretching the fairly basic facilities to near but not quite breaking point, forming Soviet-style queues for autographs and food, filling the huge arena where the main, media-related events were held, providing a very good showing at the panels where authors did their stuff.  The median age seemed to be well below that at more traditional SF conventions, and the level of enthusiasm and energy was constantly high.  There were previews of films, and writers of all kinds did their best to sell their new stuff (and there were some serious queues to get autographed books), but what struck me was a large part of that enthusiasm and energy was aimed at the past.  At actors from TV shows long since ended, and films made before a good percentage of the attendees were born.  It's something that's also evident at more traditional conventions, too.  And inevitable, I suppose, given that most afficiendos are exposed at an early age, and are indelibly printed with the stuff they loved first.  Like everything else, the future is never what it once was.

What there wasn't, as someone else has pointed out, was some kind of chill-out space that might have provided a respite from the noise and crowds.  Like the other authors, my timetable wasn't exactly crowded with events, and I spent a lot of time talking with old and new friends.  It would have been nice to have had a space for conversation that wasn't a hundred-foot-long bar (there was a pub, but it was as crowded as everywhere else).  Actually, there was a good quiet space, but it was off-site, at the hotel where I was staying - I decided to opt out of the complete Pontins experience.  There was also a fantastically long and almost entirely deserted beach, butressed with impressive concrete fortifications to prevent erosion.  A good place to walk and think - so good I stayed on an extra day, and missed the inevitable queues for coaches that replaced the railway service on Sunday, after the whole thing ended.

That's Entertainment

Property War

No doubt the new glass extension of the BBC's Broadcasting House at Portland Place is supposed to neatly frame All Souls Church, but walking up Regents Street this afternoon it struck me that it looked like nothing so much as a pseudopod of a huge amoeba poised to engulf the spire and strip it of its stony nutrients.  Imagine, in a city like London or New York where space is at a premium, buildings warring with their neighbours in an attempt to expand their footprint.  The borders between them as black and necrotic as the borders between neighbouring colonies of coral, an interzone of conference rooms and offices frozen in the act of morphing from one function to another.  A struggle upwards in an attempt to shade out each other's solar panels.  Mines and countermines in the foundations.  Raids into enemy volumes by extensible corridors; cadres of ninja IT technicians running illicit cables through ducts to tap into the power systems and mainframes of the opposition.  Sound systems screaming advertorial propaganda.  Late stage capitalism at its most feral.

Don't

Two lists of what I guess you could call anti-advice for aspiring (science-fiction) writers, one from Nick Mamatas, the other from Charlie Jane Anders at io9.  I suggest you pay particular attention to #2, 5 and 10 in the first, and #3, 9 and 10 in the second.

Genre writers are often urged to show character through their actions.  By what they do rather than by what they think and feel. Working on the new draft of Evening's Empires, I'm reminded all over again that it's what they choose not to do that's also important.

In The Mouth Of The Whale

It's publication day of my new novel, and I've added a couple of pages to my web site, one featuring links to all twelve chapters I've made available, the other a brief piece on writing the novel.

There's other free stuff on the web site, by the way - stories and articles, and extracts from other novels.

Only Forward

From a short article by John Naughton on how word-processing changed the way we write:

The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing".

Which strikes me as a pretty accurate description of the problems many people have when they try to write their first novel. Of course, established authors aren't immune from these sins, but in my limited experience of teaching creative writing one of the main reasons first drafts tend founder and stall is that the author spends weeks and months drafting and redrafting the first chapter, trying to get it absolutely right before moving on to the next. My advice is to keep going. Revise the first draft when you have a complete first draft. And when you have assembled the complete skeleton of the story, you will almost certainly find that your precious first chapter contains passages that are no longer relevant. In fact, the entire first chapter might usefully be omitted. (Many authors, confronted with this unpalatable fact, can't quite bring themselves to kill their darling, which is why far too many novels have superfluous scene-setting prologues. In italc.)

Pulgasari

Across the Thames to Borough High Street and the Roxy Bar and Screen for a showing of North Korean monster movie Pulgasari. It's by no means a good film, but it's important and interesting because it's a rare glimpse into the mindset of the famously secretive Last True Communist State™, and because one of its directors, Shin Sang-ok, was kidnapped from South Korea on the orders of Kim Jong-il, then heir presumptive of supreme leader Kim Il-sung, in 1978.

The story is as simple as a fairytale, a kind of amalgam of Godzilla, Seven Samurai and Sparticus, filmed in the style of lowest-common-denominator Hong Kong Chop Socky movies. The land is oppressed by decadent rulers who confiscate the peasants' tools and cooking bowls so that they can be melted down and turned into weapons. The eldest son of a blacksmith plans to join the rebels; when his father refuses to cooperate with the authorities and is arrested, the son attempts to intervene and is likewise thrown in jail. The dying father creates a doll, Pulgasari, out of rice grains and infuses it with his dying breath; later it comes to life when a drop of his daughter's blood touches it, and starts to eat iron, and starts to grow. Pulgasari rescues the blacksmith's son from execution, the son leads a revolution that, aided by the now gigantic monster, overthrows the king and his armies. But the victorious peasants must now feed the ever-hungry Pulgasari with every scrap of metal they possess; they're no better off than before. Only when the blacksmith's daughter sacrifices herself to the monster's appetite is its rampage finally ended.

Although the monster-in-a-suit was masterminded by Japan's Toho studios (Pulgasari is played by the same actor who played Godzilla in the leaping lizard's 1980s incarnations) some of the special effects are crude, to western eyes the acting is melodramatically overwrought, concentrating on big, simple emotional gestures, and the cutting is either erratically abrupt or the print I saw has been sliced down from a much longer film. Yet Pulgasari also possesses a kind of innocent charm, with the best beard-stroking villains I've seen in a long while, some terrifically detailed sets for the monster to wreck, and the kind of epic battlescenes that are possible only when the director has an entire army at his disposal and doesn't seem to have much care for the safety of his extras. But despite the simplicity of its story and message - war is a Bad Thing, mmkaay? - Pulgasari is also a weirdly ambiguous film. Perhaps it is no more than crude propaganda intended to show how the warmongering West was oppressing its population and threatening the entire world with endless war involving horrific superweapons - like Godzilla, Pulgasari is clearly a metaphor for the atomic bomb. If so, the militarised state of North Korea is just as guilty, and scenes of starving peasants butchering a horse for real and eating tree bark echo actual famines suffered by its population. Did the film's state producers fail to see these parallels, or did they know exactly what they were doing but thought that the film's audience would accept the propaganda (if that's what it is) at face value? Or did its kidnapped director manage to pull off a sly coup de theatre mocking his captors? Impossible to tell.

Later, waiting for the bus outside London Bridge Station, with the Shard leaning into the winter night. What would alien eyes make of that? A monument to Western ambition and power, or a signifier of the failed dreams of the never-ending rise in profit touted by the propagandists of late-stage capitalism?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 12

You can now read chapter 12 of In The Mouth of the Whale at the web site. Or begin at the beginning.

It brings us up to the end of the first part of the novel, and will be the last I'll post for a while. Meanwhile, I have another novel to finish, and I'm getting to grips with the requirements for publishing ebooks on platforms other than Kindle . . .

In other news, I'll be at the SFX Weekender at the beginning of next month, and the British National SF Convention, Eastercon, at, er, Easter.

Listening to: 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' Richard and Linda Thompson
Reading: Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog
Writing: Revising a short story

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now up on the web site. Chapter 1 is over here. And you can now preorder the Kindle edition for the price of a paperback (also available for preorder on iTunes).

Currently listening to: 'Down on Penny's Farm' The Bently Boys
Currently reading: Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway
Currently writing: see Red Ink

Red Ink

As publication of In The Mouth Of The Whale inches closer, I'm working on what I hope is the penultimate draft of the next novel, Evening's Empires. My first short stories and my first novel were composed entirely on a typewriter; while I confess to a certain minor nostalgia for the only forward method typewriters imposed on you, I don't miss interleaving bond, carbon and bank (onionskin) papers, necessary to get a duplicate copy in a time when photocopies were scarce and expensive, and I was never a big fan of Tipp-ex and other correction fluids, or retyping a page if it contained more than three errors in it. I was an early adopter of word-processing and love its fluidity of composition, but I still maintain one tradition from the old keys-on-ink-ribbon-on-paper days: I still print out at least one draft of whatever I'm working on, and go over it with a  red pen in hand.

Which is what I'm doing right now. Because I have the idea, never tested, that it is easier to spot goofs on the printed page rather than on the screen, I prefer to annotate hard copy than make electronic notes. (Has anyone ever done a serious study of this? If not, surely it wouldn't be too hard to set up a randomised experiment where, say,  half the test subjects proof-read a text on screen and the other half proof-read it on paper, and then swapped from screen to paper and vice versa and corrected another text.) Some of my corrections are of punctuation and spelling; others highlight instances of repetition, correct factual errors, or change the order of a sentence to eliminate ambiguity. But the most important changes are the notes to myself about glitches in plot, action, and character. Some are terse; others spill all the way down the page, or are linked by looping arrows to paragraphs at the top or bottom of the page; really serious second thoughts are continued on the blank side of the page, with the command OVER written in the margin and underscored two or three times so I don't miss the annotations when I start over, and begin to make changes on screen. At this point, I'm the first person to read through the entire novel; I realise that I've become kin to the kind of creature who annotates library books with scornful exclamation marks and sarcastic underlinings.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of In The Mouth Of The Whale has been posted on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, it's this way.

In other news, my short story 'Gene Wars' is featured in the January edition of Lightspeed magazine. [Edit: you can now read the story for free. And there's a brief interview with me, too, conducted by Andrew Liptak.]

Currently listening to: 'I Don't Get it', Cowboy Junkies
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Currently writing: Hacking away the excess from the ante-penultimate draft of Evening's Empires.

Interstellar Travel

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood's black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

Discovering this fragment of D.H. Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death' in Grayson Perry's The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum reminded me of the importance of the metaphorical power of science fiction. Something so often forgotten, these days, when too often it's mistaken for a literal report on the future.

The Excitement Of The Found Image

Why even hard science fiction shouldn't be considered to be in any way a facsimile of the scientific method:
In just three sentences, M. John Harrison nails what science fiction is really all about.

Just Received

The author's copies of In the Mouth of The Whale. Always strange and exciting to hold in your hands proof that something that started out in your head has become a mass-produced object, out there in the world. I like the cover even more now I realise that there's an image on the back, too. Sidonie Beresford-Browne, who also did the covers for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, has done a great job.

Fragment From A Work In Progress

‘Let me tell you about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew, in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were sometimes represented in popular fiction about the future, although the one into which I walked in my dream was much more detailed than any picture of imaginary cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with row upon row of windows. Some cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. Clad in differently textured and decorated stone, but all white in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone.  Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only white gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No trees, no growing things of any kind, and no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank canvases and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.

'In some dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint able to transition from one place to another. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would be dressed in waking life, which to them must have seemed as strange and antique as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway. The citizens of the city were men and women who were each different and each similar, in the way of members of the same family look alike. They had brown skin and black hair cut short in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in combinations of pastel colours. There were no children. In my day birds nested on ledges of buildings as if on cliffs, and people kept certain kinds of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. Only adults of varying ages. There were many of them, but the walkways and monorail trains were not crowded because the city was so large.

‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western faces, at the foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), one of the inhabitants came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and said that although this was his present, it was not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, but there were other paths I might take.’

'Satisfied' - Tom Waits

'Video Games' - Lana Del Rey

'Field Song' - William Elliot Whitmore

'The Way It Goes' - Gillian Welch

'Quail and Dumplings' - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

That Was The Year That Was

In 2011 I finished one novel, In The Mouth of The Whale, and got a good chunk of writing done on the next, Evening's Empires. I published a novella, 'The Choice', in Asimov's SF and wrote two short stories. One, 'Bruce Springsteen', appeared in the January 2012 edition of Asimov's; the other is for the second volume of Stephen Jones' Zombie Apocalypse series, out sometime in 2012 I believe. Five novels were reissued as ebooks by Gollancz (they went live in January, a bit later than planned, so I'm counting them here). One, Four Hundred Billion Stars, my first, was written on a typewriter. The others are Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland. Like many genre authors, I have a big back catalogue of stories, and this year I experimented with releasing a few of them as ebooks. First up was a novella, City of the Dead, followed by the reissue of a short-story collection, Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback, and then a collection of five stories sharing the same future history, Stories From the Quiet War. Conclusions so far: it's better for authors to release stories in small, cheap collections or as singletons, rather than book-length collections. As usual, the feeling that I should write more (the usual freelancer terror of not being productive enough) is counterbalanced by the conviction that I must write better.

I didn't read much new fiction this year - too busy writing it. discovery of the year was Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers, a wonderfully deadpan black comedy set in Goldrush California. I thought the first half of China Mieville's Embassytown, an SF fable about the cage of language, was one of the strongest and strangest depictions of the alien I've read for some time. In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie the past is an alien planet; the description of the hunting and capture of a Komodo dragon is as densely weird as any interplanetary expedition. Christopher Priest's The Islanders revisits the world of his Dream Archipelago, and within its tour guide format the fragments of several stories twine and merge: one I need to reread. I'm a big fan of Don DeLillo, so snapped up The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories as soon as it came out; from the tropical inertia of 'Creation' to the desperate obsession of 'The Starveling',  DeLillo's Martian gaze perfectly captures fragments of human foolishness in the amber of  recent history.

In non-fiction, James Gleick's The Information is a marvellous and lucid history of how we preserve and use the stuff we know, and how if shapes our lives. Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality is an equally lucid exploration of the current theories of multiverses. Gordon Matthews' The Ghetto at the Center of the World may be confined to a single building in Hong Kong, but his stories of a microcosm of globalisation reflect the huge currents in capitalism that affect every part of the world. Just over a hundred years ago, Amundsen's expedition reached the south pole; geologist Edmund Stump's The Roof at the Bottom of the World weaves personal stories of rockhunting in Antarctica with a history of Antarctic exploration, and is packed with jaw-dropping photographs of the continent's austere beauty. There are more great photographs in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, a memorial of the architecture of the Communist equivalent of the Gernsback continuum, and a way of life and thought now all but extinct, here in the twenty-first century.

God's Own Christmas Ornament

In what is one of the best images ever taken by the Cassini spacecraft, Titan and Dione hang in front of Saturn's rings. Like Earth, Saturn has seasons caused by the tilt in its axis. It's presently spring, in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The sun is behind and above the viewpoint, and the shadows of the rings are cast across the southern hemisphere.

The image is in true colour, by the way, so it is exactly what you would see if you were floating in the observation cupola of a clipper outward bound from Rhea en route to Jupiter.

Night Movies

On the night of the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice, nine of my favourite films in which the story takes place over a single night. What did I miss?

The Thing 1982 dir John Carpenter
The crew of an isolated Antarctic base are infiltrated by a shape-changing alien. Unable to trust each other, they're picked off one by one as they try to stop the alien escaping. Yes, I know it begins in daylight, but the action really starts, with eye-popping SFX by Rob Bottin, as the stormy Antarctic night falls.
Best moment: Touched by a hot needle, self-aware alien blood leaps out of a petri dish.

Into The Night 1985 dir. John Landis
Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) has a dull job, an unfaithful wife, and can't sleep. When he accidently saves Diana (Michelle Pfieffer) from Iranian thugs in an LAX parking structure, he becomes embroiled in a plot involving smuggled jewels. David Bowie appears as a private detective who mistakes Ed for a veteran player.
Best moment: Stunned by narcolepsy, Ed watches an entire Cal Worthington commercial.

Night On Earth 1991 dir Jim Jarmusch
One night, five cities, five cab drivers and their fares, and a Tom Waits' soundtrack.
Best moment: Cabbie Corky (Winona Ryder) turns down casting director Gena Rowlands' offer of a part in a movie. She'd rather be a mechanic.

The Warriors 1979 dir Walter Hill
Framed for a murder that threatens to trigger gang warfare, a small but resourceful gang, the Warriors, must cross hostile territories in New York to reach a midnight summit, their only chance to prove their innocence. A great action film from great action film director Hill, set in tough old New York. With a story loosely based on Xenophon's 'Anabasis'.
Best moment: Warrior's leader Swan (Michael Beck) and gang-girl Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) meet cute.

Collateral 2004 dir. Michael Mann
After cab driver Max (Jamie Fox) drops off lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave businessman who turns out to be a suave hitman. As the paths of his two fares intersect, Max has to work out how to save himself and the last victim on Vincent's little list.
Best moment: A coyote crosses the path of Max's cab, on an LA street turned into a ghost of itself by halogen streetlights.

Die Hard 1988 dir. John McTierman
When New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) turns up at his wife's office Christmas party, he becomes the only man who can stop a terrorist plot. You know the rest. There's a famous scriptwriting class that uses Casablanca as an exemplar. If you want to write a script without a superfluous scene or line, study Jeb Stuart and Stephen E de Souza's adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel.
Best thing in the movie: Bruce's vest.

Night of the Living Dead 1968 dir George Romero
A mixed bunch of people hide out from flesh-eating zombies in a remote farmhouse. Things don't go too well. Shot on a shoestring budget, it set the template for zombie and spam-in-a-cabin horror films every since. Has one of the bleakest endings of any film.
Best moment: Involves a little girl, her father, her mother, and a basement.

After Hours 1985 dir. Martin Scorsese.
Word-processing drone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is plunged into a nocturnal Kafkaesque nightmare when he ventures into Manhattan's Soho to meet a girl he picked up in a coffee shop.
Best moment: Paul is turned into a living statue, to hide him from a vengeful mob.

It's A Wonderful Life 1946 dir. Frank Capra
On the worst night in the life of small town businessman George Bailey (James Stewart), apprentice angel Clarence (Henry Travers) demonstrates the worth of a life he thinks a claustrophobic dead end by showing what things would be like if he'd never been born. Key moments in his life are shown in flashback, so I think it counts. And the night in question is Christmas Eve, so hey. In his novel, Suspects, film critic David Thomson sets It's A Wonderful Life at the root of American noir. He has a point.
Best moment: Cornered by cops on the bridge where Clarence forestalled his suicide attempt, a humbled George Bailey asks for his life back. And snow starts falling around him like a blessing.

The Dead Hand Of The Past

Outside the office window, a funeral cortege clip-clops past, headed by a carriage drawn by two black horses with black plumes affixed to their heads, drawing an open carriage in which the coffin lies inside a glass bier. Like the last resting place of Snow White. As William Faulkner once said, the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. Always useful for a science-fiction writer to be reminded of that.

Working on a short story. After finishing a draft, I realised that it had been so laborious because it started in the wrong place. Which is why it was mostly back-story instead of narrative. You'd think, after writing some eighty-odd short stories I'd know by now where one wanted to begin.

Lauren Beukes has assembled a reading gift guide from the recommendations of many of her interesting friends. I was very pleased to be able to recommend this wonderful collection of photographs. More here, and here.

It may be cheeky of me to recommend one of my own books, but why not try this e-book collection, at a suitably cheeky price?

A Haunting We Will Go

So I met up with indefatigable editor Stephen Jones and several other local bookish characters for pre-Christmas drinks, and he pressed into my hand a volume of one of his latest books, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, an anthology of new and reprinted ghost stories. It features numerous luminaries of the horror field, including Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Lisa Tuttle, and also includes a rewritten version of one of my early short stories, 'Inheritance' - my ninth published story, in fact, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1988. I'm best known for my science fiction, but I've been a fan of horror stories from way back, turned on by Universal and Hammer films, the Mayflower horror anthologies, the Pan Books of Horror Stories, and the stories of M.R. James. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while the rest of the family were at Midnight Mass, I was frightened half to death by Jonathan Miller's famous TV adaptation of James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad'.  Lonely beaches never seemed the same afterwards. And now one of my stories is between the same covers as one of the master's, 'A Warning to the Curious'. How cool.

Also cool - my novella, 'The Choice' has been selected by Rich Horton for his Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 Edition. Table of contents here.

Don't Call Me Sherly

Long ago, during a class that introduced me and a bunch of my 11-year-old peers to the school library (where I soon discovered a complete set of H.G. Wells' work, but that's another story), our English teacher asked a question: 'Where does Sherlock Holmes live?' My hand wasn't the only one to shoot up, and I forget who gave the correct answer. But I do remember that as far as our teacher was concerned it was the wrong answer. 'You see, boys, Sherlock Holmes was never alive. So he could not have lived anywhere.' I've never forgiven him for trying to turn the treasure house of the library into a mausoleum.

He picked on Sherlock Holmes because Holmes is one of the most famous fictional characters in fiction, who had one of the most famous addresses in literature: one of us was bound to know the answer (you know it, of course). Sherlock Holmes is so famous that you don't have to have read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories, or to have seen any of the numerous films in which Holmes has appeared (more than any other fictional character), to know several singular facts about him. I first encountered him in an anthology of the original stories, in a limp-covered volume dating from the 1920s; I've just encountered him again in a preview of his latest film incarnation, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Oh dear.

It's the sequel to director Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film, which turned Holmes into an action hero in a lightly steam-punked Victorian London, and featured rapid-fire comic banter between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Watson (Jude Law) and elaborate bullet- and explosion-ridden set pieces punctuated by sequences of slow motion, time-slicing, and other techniques Ritchie previously deployed on his gangster films. I thought it was rather good fun.  Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is more of the same, but ups the stakes by introducing Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), whose fiendish plans soon puts a crimp in Doctor Watson's honeymoon.

The plot is very loosely based on 'The Final Problem', the story in which Conan Doyle tried to kill off his most famous creation. It kicks off with an explosion in Strasbourg and an encounter between Holmes, Irene Adler, the femme fatale who helped him in his previous adventure, and a fistful of goons, and barely pauses for breath in a headlong dash that involves gypsies, anarchists, a chase across Europe, and diplomatic skulduggery. It's not a bad film, as noisy spectacles go. Its varied locations are packed with period detail, Downey turns in another fine comic performance, Law's Watson is an able foil to Holmes' quick-fire eccentricities, and the postmortem reveals of how the great detective foresaw and confounded the knavish tricks of his enemies are as clever as in the first film.

But it isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't add anything new to the canon, and it doesn't quite know what to do with most of the supporting characters. Although Mycroft Holmes is drolly played by Stephen Fry, the script doesn't do much to show that he's Holmes' smarter, older brother, except to call him Sherly. I would have liked to have seen more of Simza Heron (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy), the gypsy whose brother has been caught up in Moriarty's plans. Rapace's performance is lit by smouldering intelligence, but like the other women in the film she takes second place to the bromance between Holmes and Watson, whose sparring banter is sharp and lively at its best, and as camp as a pantomine dame at its worst (the film's humour is laid on with a broad brush: the only thing funnier than a man in a dress is a middle-aged man clad only in his dignity).


The film's big problem is that in hindsight, once the dazzle and noise of the action sequences has died down, the logic of its narrative falls apart. To be fair, it's a problem common to most action films, and to quite a few genre novels, too (writers: if you rely on big set pieces to keep the narrative flowing, you're in trouble - especially if your biggest and noisiest set piece takes place in the middle of the story rather than towards the end). More fatally, for this particular action film, the menace and significance of its villain diminishes as the film progresses, and Moriarty's fiendish plan is the stuff of a thousand action movies in which the villain promotes war for fun and/or profit - Mission Impossible IV uses the same old tired trope. Here's a bit of useful advice for budding evil masterminds: if your brilliant scheme involves starting a war somewhere, it probably isn't that brilliant, and will inevitably be thwarted at the last moment. Throw a couple of henchmen in the shark pool, relax with a martini salted with orphans' tears, and think of something else.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available on the web site. Haven't started yet? Here's Chapter 1.

This is the last chapter I'll post this side of the New Year. I'll put up three more early in January, taking us to the end of the first part of the novel.

Currently listening to: 'Don't Grieve After Me', Ernest Phelps
Currently reading: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Currently writing: a short story, very slowly

Through The Past, Darkly

When it grows dark, as it does early in the afternoon, now, the details of the slice of London visible through the window of my office diminish to the spur of a cul-de-sac and a shadowy rise of land flecked with lights, and I'm reminded of looking out of the window of the attic bedroom I once shared with my brother. When I was a teenager and it became too noisy, downstairs, I would retreat to the attic and work on some piece of tyro fiction (all long lost, like the cottage), pecking at a typewriter perched on a scrap of wood laid across my knees, my shins burning in front of the one-bar electric fire, my fingers freezing.

There wasn't a house directly opposite, as there is now, but there was a warehouse looming at the far left-hand edge of the gardens shared by the four cottages of which ours was the third, and there was a railway beyond, as there is here, although the railway of the lost past was not in a cutting but was somewhat elevated, a branch-line station closed just a few years before. And then the breast of the steep slope up towards Selsley village, whose lights twinkled in the night just as the lights of Highgate twinkle now, just a handful, mostly hidden by winter-bare trees.

I finished a draft of the next novel a couple of weeks ago and will return to it at the beginning of the New Year, knowing at last the shape its narrative makes from beginning to end. I was thinking about a couple of short stories - the one I should write, the one that wants to be written right away - when the past ambushed me. I've been living here ten years, and it has only just occurred to me how familiar the view is, on a winter's night.

Like In the Mouth of the Whale, the new novel shares the same future history of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and is set some 1500 years after the events in those two novels. But while In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the atmosphere of a gas giant and in an archipelago of worldlets orbiting Fomalhaut, the new novel starts some fifty years later, in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. And although its story riffs off an event foreshadowed at the end of In the Mouth of the Whale, you don't need to have read one to enjoy the other, much as you don't need to have read the first two novels to enjoy In the Mouth of the Whale. It's called Evening's Empires, by the way. Among other things, it's about the persistence of the past.

In The Mouth Of The Whale - Chapter 8

You can now read Chapter 8 of my forthcoming novel In The Mouth Of The Whale, over at the blog. Or you can start from the beginning.

Currently listening to: James McMurtry, 'See The Elephant'
Currently reading: Ghetto at the Center of the World, Gordon Mathews
Currently writing: I'm taking a short break...

More Ebookery - Special Promotional Prices

I'm pleased to announce that I have published a new e-book. Stories From The Quiet War is a collection of five 'Quiet War' stories, including a previously unpublished novella, available only as an e-publication at the special price of just £0.86, or $1.34. I've also lowered the price of my short story collection, Little Machines, to just £1.71, or $2.67. Prices are good until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale. The cover of Stories From The Quiet War is, like those of my other two e-books, by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Introduction To Stories From The Quiet War

One of the stories collected [in Stories From The Quiet War], ‘Second Skin’, was the first short story I wrote in what would become the Quiet War sequence. Written way back in 1996 and published a year later, it contains several of the signature tropes of the sequence – the setting on an obscure little moon of one of the outer planets in the aftermath of a war between Earth and outer system colonists, vacuum organisms, the pursuit of the gene wizard Avernus, weaponised biotech, huge construction projects built by robots, and so on.

In the stories, the war was pretty conventional, triggered by a failed attempt by colonists to free themselves from the control of powerful interests on Earth. The novels reworked that history, turning the ancestors of the inhabitants of the outer system into refugees whose growing ambitions to spread out through the Solar System and push human evolution forward threatened a fragile peace between themselves and the political powers on Earth. But the novels shared with the short stories my interest in how the large movements of history affect the lives of those caught up in them (and vice versa), and my fascination with the fantastically varied landscapes of the moons of the outer planets. That fascination was first sparked by the images captured by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking spacecraft as they sped through the systems of the outer planets. Here were sulphur volcanoes, icy landscapes cratered by ancient bombardments, a moon with bright and dark hemispheres, a moon whose jigsaw surface might hide a vast ocean of liquid water, shepherd moons embedded within a vast ring system, and so on, and so on. The kind of exoticism that science-fiction writers traditionally mapped on to planets of far stars, right on our doorstep. The Galileo and Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sharpened those images and revealed fresh wonders – the geysers of little Enceladus, the rivers and lakes of Titan. Here were real places, named, mapped in detail. All I had to do was insert figures in those landscapes. But how did they live there? How did living there affect them? What were their dreams, their ambitions?

I wrote nine ‘Quiet War’ stories over a period of about ten years, extending the history of the war, and exploring various locations on and inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually took the plunge and wrote a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.The first was about the causes of the war and the long build-up to final act of violence; the second was about the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished. Gardens of the Sun, set like the stories in the aftermath of the war, borrowed from several of them heavily modified settings and characters. The four stories republished here weren’t reworked into Gardens of the Sun, but the previously unpublished story, ‘Karyl’s War’, is a modification of an unused opening sequence of the novel and, like the novel, it contains rewritten passages from an earlier story (‘The Passenger’). It was intended to give a new perspective on the quick and violent conclusion to the long game of the Quiet War, but in the end I didn’t use it because I decided that I didn’t need to introduce a new character; the five main characters of The Quiet War were perfectly able to carry the various strands of the narrative forward. The Quiet War sequence has now been extended 1500 years into its future. A new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, is a self-contained story set at the edge of the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut, where one of the characters from The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun arrives in the middle of a war over control of the star’s single gas giant planet. There’s a big dumb object floating in atmosphere of that gas giant, probing for signs of life. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of an ancient cult. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution, and an exploration of the costs of longevity . . .

‘Second Skin’ and the other stories collected here are where all this began. The first steps on a long exploration of strange worlds, and the people who live there.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 7

So I've now posted Chapter 7 of In The Mouth Of The Whale. We're a little under one fifth of the way through the novel. If you want to start from the beginning, Chapter 1 is over here. In other news, I'm pleased to say that my story 'The Choice' has been selected by Allan Kaster for Audiotext's The Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 4 and by Gardner Dozois for his The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.

Currently listening to: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 'I Call Upon The Author To Explain'
Currently reading: Edmund Stump's The Roof At The Bottom Of The World
Currently writing: an introduction to Stories From The Quiet War

Ebookery

I'm collating a collection of 'Quiet War' stories for publication as an ebook. Titles will include 'Making History', 'Incomers', 'Second Skin', 'Reef' and 'Karyl's War'. The first four are reprints; the fifth is the alternate beginning of Gardens of the Sun previously trailed here, rewritten to form a self-contained novella.  So, five stories, more than 70,000 words, price just £0.86, or $0.99 until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale.

The cover, by the way,  is by Michael Marshall Smith.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of In The Mouth Of The Whale now up at the web site, for your reading pleasure. If you haven't started yet, Chapter 1 is this way.

Currently listening to: Johnny Cash, 'Hard Times (Come Again No More)'
Currently reading: Karin Fossum's Broken
Currently Writing: Notes for short stories

Startling Stories of Super Science

The scientist's beautiful daughter. The crackpot inventor (see also: Here's one I made earlier). Science mostly proceeds by saltatory leaps (see also: Evolution). It came to me in a dream. It was like a bolt of lightning (see also: I work best when my life is in danger). We scientists are above your petty emotions. There's nothing algebra can't prove. Young scientists are always right; old scientists are almost always wrong (see also: What did Einstein ever do for us?). Argument by analogy. Argument by syllogistic fallacy. Argument in the pub (see also: Repeat what you just said). You can go directly from hypothesis to prototype. Scientists are in it for the money. Some ideas will be discovered only once in human history (see also: Mine! All mine!). Only my unique skills will make this experiment work (see also: magic). Important ideas are always accepted straight away.  The importance of an hypothesis is inversely proportional to the number of experiments needed to test it. A car battery, a glass tube and the guts of an old radio: we're good to go. The element or biological derivative that's key to the existence of a star-spanning Empire is invariably found on just one planet (see also: unique chemical elements). Genes are basically Lego. Genetic mutation is always expressed via morphological change. The aliens did it.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of In The Mouth Of The Whale is now up on the web site.  If you want to start from the beginning, here's the link to Chapter 1.

In other news, my novelette 'The Choice' will appear in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6.  He's posted the table of contents on his blog; it includes stories by Stephen Baxter, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Geoff Ryman, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . .  Looking forward to reading all of it.

Currently listening to: The Handsome Family, 'Flapping Your Broken Wings'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders
Currently writing: The epilogue to the next novel; a story for a new project.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 4

I've just posted Chapter 4 of my forthcoming novel to the web site  If you're late to the game,why not catch up with Chapters 1, 2 and 3 first?  Special bonus: a podcast of my short story 'Little Lost Robot.'

Currently listening to: Leon Redbone's 'Mr. Jelly Roll Baker'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders.
Currently writing: the long epilogue of the next novel.

Hugo

The conjunction of 'family-friendly' and '3-D' is not auspicious, even if the film in question is directed by Martin Scorsese. But from the first shot, a kind of reverse of the famous flying scene in Peter Pan, with the viewpoint swooping over the crowded and crooked roofs of a snowy, early 1930s Paris, ducking under the eaves of the arched roof of a train terminus, and closing in on the eye of a boy peering through a chink in a clock face at the bustling life from which he, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, is excluded, Hugo establishes itself as a triumphant and lovingly crafted work imbued with Scorsese's passion for film and film history.

The boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), is an orphan.  After his clockmaker father (Jude Law) died in a fire, Hugo fell into the care of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), and after his uncle disappeared he continued the work of maintaining the many clocks in the station.  He lives in the wainscot world of the station's clock towers and hidden passages, snatching food from stalls and shops because he can't cash his uncle's salary cheques, avoiding the attention of the station's inspector, played by Sasha Baron Cohen as if Peter Cook was impersonating the child-snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Hugo's only link with his dead father is a complex automaton found in disrepair in a museum storeroom.  Hugo has been stealing the cogs and ratchets he needs to bring the automaton back to life from the station's toy shop; the irascible owner, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), catches him red-handed and confiscates his precious notebook containing vital sketches and plans, and the clockwork of the plot is set in motion.

Hugo enlists the help of Papa George's goddaughter, Isabelle (Cloe Grace Moretz) to retrieve the notebook; Isabelle is more than willing because she wants a real-life version of the adventures in the books she loves. When he discovers that she wears around her neck the heart-shaped key that's necessary to make the automaton work, Hugo is finally able to set the machine in motion.  It draws a picture of an iconic moment in an old film Hugo's father described to him, and the pair become detectives into the life of Papa Georges.  And it's here, as they delve into cinema history, that the film really comes to life. Moments from the great silent films spin around them; a film historian recalls a visit to the studio of a pioneering film maker, whose methods and techniques are recreated in loving detail (with a entirely apt cameo by Scorsese).  The film maker is Papa Georges, of course, who has renounced his past after he was forced to sell his celluloid archive to a chemical firm, which melted them down to make moulded heels for women's shoes; the two children conspire to bring about his return to the public eye, a task that's complicated, as you might expect (but not exactly as you might expect) by the attentions of the station's inspector.

Adapted from Brian Selznick's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it's the kind of old-fashioned tale in which clues are found in libraries, the mission is not to save the world but to bring the past back to life, and the only villain is time. Its CGI and 3-D effects serve the story and contribute to the intricately furnished station set rather than punctuate the narrative with crude thrusts of shock and awe.  There's plenty of steam, there are dizzy plunges and pursuits through the cogs and escarpments of huge clocks, and there's also the automaton. Does Hugo's fantastical embroidery of a real-life story (because the story of the film pioneer who disappeared, and (like many of his 'lost' films) was found again, is true) contain enough steampunk flourishes to win it a Hugo?

Lynn Margulis

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as a scientist and university lecturer.  Most of my research investigated the symbiotic relationships between animals and single-celled algae: how the sizes of populations of algae within animal cells were regulated, movement of photosynthetically-fixed carbon from algae to host animal, movement of ammonium and amino acids from host animal to algae, and so on.  My chief research organism was green hydra, a common freshwater polyp that conveniently reproduces asexually by budding off new animals, so that uniform cloned populations can be grown in the laboratory (the image at the head of this piece is of a single green hydra digestive cell, with its population of symbiotic Chlorella algae clustered at the base of the cell), but I also worked on sea anemones and reef-forming corals.

I'm reminded of this by news of the death of Professor Lynn Margulis, who was one of the prominent workers in the symbiosis field.  She was a friend and research associate of my Ph.D supervisor, Professor Sir David Smith, and I met her not only when she visited his labs, but at conferences in the UK and abroad.  She was always a whirlwind of energy, promoting her ideas and probing everyone else's with intense acuity.  She had forged a career at a time when women were in a minority in the sciences, and for years championed the highly unfashionable idea that mitochondria (the energy-generating organelles found in almost every cell of eukaryotic organisms) and plant chloroplasts (the organelles where photosynthesis takes place) had once been independent organisms that had established a symbiotic relationship with the ancestors of animals and of plants.  This theory of symbiogenesis had been first advanced by K. S. Mereschkovsky and Ivan Wallin in the 1920s, but had passed into obscurity.  Lynn Margulis dusted it down and supported it with evidence that pointed to the residual bacterial characteristics of the two types of organelles, and their possession of small amounts of DNA.  That the symbiotic origin of both mitochondria and chloroplasts is now widely accepted is due almost entirely to Lynn Margulis's dogged and tireless work.


She advanced the idea that flagellae in animal cells were the remnants of bacterial symbionts with rather less success (one problem is that the whip-like flagellae don't possess any DNA), and her efforts to expand the idea that the central driver of evolution was symbiotic acquisition of new DNA rather than mutation of nuclear DNA likewise has not meet with much success.  But she was also an early promotor of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, published papers in the then unfashionable field of exobiology, and her symbiogenesis theory is a cornerstone of the idea that symbiosis and other forms of cooperation have made important contributions to the evolution of life on Earth. I admired her hugely. Ava atque vale.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available here.  The previous two chapters are here, and here. The next chapter will be posted on Friday 25th November.

An Analogy

Came to me while I was watching Hearts of Darkness. At its best, science fiction's portrayal of the future is similar to the portrayal of the Viet Nam war in Apocalypse Now.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 2

Here's the second chapter of my new novel, In The Mouth Of The Whale.  (The first chapter is here.)  No spoilers here, for those who might want until the novel is released into the wild in January.

Currently listening to: Peg Leg Howell: 'Low Down Rounder Blues'
Currently reading: Don Delillo: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Currently writing: the last chapters of the second draft of the fourth Quiet War novel

Endorsing The Future

This dates from the early 1980s, I think, back when hand-held computers you could program in  BASIC were cutting edge. One small measure of how important Isaac Asimov was, as a cultural figure: he wasn't just the default face of American science fiction; he was also the default face of popular science writing. Now, as the newspapers and TV news keep reminding us, everything is like science fiction, so science-fiction writers are no longer needed to explain how amazing some bit of technological kit is, because we've come to expect the amazing. Now, we have hand-held computers with full-colour touch screens, wireless connectivity to the whole wide world, memories equivalent to the content of the Library of Congress, and magical AI assistants. And everyone takes them for granted. And it's kind of cool, because it means we really are living in the future.  But what would be truly amazing, these days?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 1

My new novel, In The Mouth of the Whale, is scheduled to be published in January next year. Following a long tradition, I'll be posting serial extracts every Monday and Friday from now until publication day.  Here's the beginning of the first chapter:

When the Child was a child, a sturdy toddler not quite two years old, she and her mother moved to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the north-west corner of the Peixoto family’s territory in Greater Brazil.  It was an old place, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an old garrison town on the Rio Negro, serving an army base and a depot for workers in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps.  Civilians, mostly descendants of Indians and early settlers, lived in a skewed grid of apartment blocks and bungalows beneath the green breast of the Fortaleza hill.  Senior army officers, supervisors, and government officials rented villas along the Praia Grande, where in the dry season between September and January a beach appeared at the edge of the river.  There was an airfield and a solar farm to the north, two schools, a hotel and half a dozen bars, a scruffy futbol pitch, a big church built in the brutalist style of the mid-twenty- first century, and a hospital, where the Child’s mother, Maria Hong-Owen, had taken up the position of resident surgeon.

Read more here.