Mars Rocks

 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

There Are Doors (21)

The Influence of Anxiety

The cheapest shot in the lazy or inept interviewer's arsenal is: 'So, what are your influences?' Polite or anxious authors will, through obfuscation, circumlocation and denial, provide endless material for follow-up questions ('So what precisely drew you to the work of George Herbert Wells?') and pseudo-psychoanalytic speculation that will pad out the rest of the session nicely.  No need to have read or thought about the author's work: job done!

If I'm ever asked this question again, I'll refer the interviewer to this brief list:

HP Sauce; a cloud I once saw on June 2nd 1972, around 2:30 pm; sunstars glittering off the windshields of traffic on the Santa Monica freeway, 1981-1983; scribblelarks; the proper motion of Antares; eschatological dread; the odour of secondhand books; the label on the Camp Coffee bottle; the exhaust beat of a Class 3F steam locomotive echoing up the winter valley; Zoom ice lollies; the welt on Action Man's face; several wasps; the map of the British Empire; the second half of the Twentieth Century; rain in Bristol; rain on Lake Champlain, Vermont; the rain that fell elsewhere; airport wi-fi; the motion of cigarette smoke in the beam of cinema projectors; the song of the fan heater; pine needles underfoot; 21a Dartford Close, Manchester; a shopping list I once found in a secondhand copy of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (between p122/123); a tray of glass eyes; whatever it was I last ate; the tea I'm drinking right now; every book I ever read; everyone I have ever met; every last second of my life, so far.

Where Cyberspace Went

One winter the wrong type of snow caused chaos on the British railway network: soft powdery stuff that infiltrated the electrical systems of trains and, when it settled, wasn't deep enough for snowploughs to remove. Now, it turns out out that the latest refinement in transmission of share-trading information is stymied by the wrong kind of rain.

Once upon a time, high-frequency share trading relied on data piped through fibre-optic cables. But in the glass threads of the cables light travels at about two-thirds its speed in a vacuum. And when nanoseconds count in the frenzied automatic trading that's far too slow. In the US, that information is blurted through the skies via microwaves, high-frequency millimetre waves, and now, beams of infra-red laser light. A good fraction of cyberspace, the place where billions of pounds of currency and shares are traded every day, now inhabits the sky, and the traffic is entirely between machines that shuffle gigabytes of data in the space of a single human heartbeat.

But the rise of the machines is not yet complete. The average droplet size of London's rain is smaller, disrupting laser-light transmissions. As Donald MacKenzie points out in his article on the arm's race in high-frequency-trading communications, 'if you’re a Londoner, and are spooked by the idea of lasers flashing stock-market data overhead, be grateful for drizzle.' Engineers working for trading companies strain at the outer limits of physics, but as yet there's nothing they can do about the British weather.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (16)

For descendants of European colonists, the Australian Outback is a palimpsest of apocalyptic fable. A place where law and morals fail; a pitiless landscape where ramshackle settlements that need only minimal set-dressing to portray the ruins of civilisation's end. Wake in Fright shows how upright teacher John Grant was undone by a lost weekend in a rough outback mining town; the inhabitants of The Cars That Ate Paris prey on passers-by; a serial killer stalks backpackers in Wolf Creek (2005); lawmen turn bad in The Proposition and Red Hill; and in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Mad Max, a policeman relentlessly chases down the outlaws who killed his family.

Rover invokes something of Mad Max in its day-after-tomorrow end-of-civilisation scenario.  It's ten years after the Collapse. Apart from desultory army patrols, the Outback is as lawless as the mythic Wild West. Petrol, water and bullets command a premium. When a wanderer (Guy Pearce) loses his car to a trio of fleeing bandits, he sets out to get it back by any means necessary. Along the way he picks up Rey (Robert Pattinson), the brother of one of the bandits, who was wounded and left behind, and the unlikely duo carve a bloody path across the desolate landscape as they head towards the bandits' hideout.

Like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, Pearce's wanderer is gruff, efficiently violent and single-minded. He does have a name - Eric - but refuses to give it. He's also sparing about his background, and refuses to explain why the car, an ordinary unblinged sedan, means so much to him; he only opens up to a soldier who briefly detains him, explaining that he killed his unfaithful wife and her lover ten years ago, and has been waiting to be brought to justice ever since. But that's it. The simpleminded Rey is slightly less opaque, a natural-born follower who transfers his loyalty from the brother who abandoned him to Eric (director David Michod's previous film, Animal Kingdom, was also about double-crossing siblings), but the film's premise, set up with great panache, is never really developed.

In the similarly terse film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (directed by another Australian, John Hillcote), the father's guilt at surviving his wife is tempered and given direction and meaning by his need to preserve the life of his son. All Eric wants is his car back, and we never find out why until the very last moments of the film. The existential minimalism of the story-telling is admirable, but its lack of exposition and stubborn refusal to give any insight into Eric and his mission, or into the nature of the bandits' crime, leaves the viewer with a series of tense and violent scenes that don't cohere, and characters that fail to communicate much of significance to each other. It's a pity, because this day-after-tomorrow western looks terrific, the acting is fine, and Antony Partos's score ratchets up the tension even when the story doesn't.

London Marvels and Oddities

The World SF Convention takes place in London Thursday to Monday this week. Here are a few things visitors may like to search out while in town.

Thomas Hardy's Tree
A little to the north of St Pancras Station is St Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. When the railway was built in the the nineteenth century, it cut through the old cemetery and Thomas Hardy supervised removal of the graves. Hardy's tree, in whose shade he's supposed to have eaten his lunch, still stands, surrounded by a ruff of headstones. You can also find the memorial tomb of Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (famous in her own right for being the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women), as well as the graves of Dr John Polidari, who shared the Swiss lakeside villa with Lord Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley when Mary wrote Frankenstein (Polidari wrote a vampire story), and the architect Sir John Soane, which inspired the design of the iconic red telephone box.
SFF connection: Frankenstein, vampires

Sir John Soane's Picture Room
The Soane Museum in Lincoln Inn Fields houses the eighteenth century architect's collection of books and artworks in the townhouse he built and left to the nation.  Three walls of the Picture Room, containing works by Hogarth and Canaletto, are cunningly equipped with hinged panels that slide out to display layers of pictures.
SFF connection: TARDIS

The Irish Giant
Directly across the square from the Soane Museum is the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Hunterian Museum, where you can marvel at examples of surgical procedures, anatomical oddities and the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the 7' 7" tall 'Irish Giant'. Worried that on his death his body would fall into the hands of John Hunter, the eighteenth century surgeon who founded the museum, Byrne left instructions that he should be buried at sea, but Hunter bribed Byrne's wards to seize his prize.
SFF connection: brains in jars, resurrection men
 
George Frederic Watt's Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice
Located in Postman's Park in Little Britain, just north of St Paul's Cathedral, this touching memorial consists of ceramic tablets with brief descriptions of the incidents in which nineteenth century heroes and heroines perished while saving lives.
SFF connection: steampunk tragedy

Darwin's Walking Stick
A whalebone walking stick topped with a skull, once owned by Charles Darwin, is amongst the many oddities and wonders, most related to medical science, collected by Henry Wellcome and displayed in the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road.
SFF connection: a sculpture inspired by J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition is also on display

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
Commissioned when the Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to South London, these concrete sculptures embody the theory of Sir Richard Owen that dinosaurs really were terrible lizards. Extensively restored, they stand in a landscaped garden.
SFF connection: dinosaurs. Really weird dinosaurs.

Microcosms

Scientists have discovered that myriads of tiny water droplets float in natural tar pits in Trinidad and Tobago, each 'teeming with diverse ecosystems of bacteria and methane-producing organisms'. Tiny world-engines converting hydrocarbons into life; miniature biospheres dispersed through the tarry dark like planets scattered across space. If microbes can thrive there, the scientists suggest, regions where groundwater mixes with methane and ethane ices on Saturn's moon Titan may also be hospitable to life.

The first life on Earth evolved around 3.8 billion years ago, but multicellular life - macroscopic algae, fungi, plants and animals - evolved just 0.8 billion years ago. For three billion years, life on Earth consisted of single-celled prokaryotic microorganisms: bacteria and archaea.  Energy-hungry multicellular eukaryotic organisms were able to evolve and diversify only after one group of bacteria, the cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, developed a form of photosynthesis that produced free oxygen as a waste-product. Even now, prokaryotic microorganisms are still found everywhere in Earth's biosphere, from deep inside the Earth's crust (bacteria discovered near a gold mine 2.8 kilometres underground thrive on sulphur in anaerobic groundwater and hydrogen produced by decay of radioactive elements) to the stratosphere. Sulphur-reducing bacteria form the basis of rich ecosystems around deep sea vents; thermophilic bacteria tint the water of hot springs in Yellowstone Park and elsewhere.

One species entered into symbiosis with early eukaryotic cells and its descendants survive as the mitochondria that produce ATP, the chemical that's the basis of our cells' energy economy. Other species inhabit our skin and guts: the human microbiome accounts for between 1 and 3% of our body mass, outnumbers our cells by 10 to 1, and may contain more than a hundred times the number of genes in our own genome. We're each a bacterial microcosm. Living spaceships patchworked with dozens of ecosystems, carrying trillions of passengers.

While we search for signals from alien civilisations, for charismatic megafauna like us, the first aliens we discover may be weird microorganisms lofted on the plume of a geyser rooted in the world ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa or the polar sea of Saturn's moon Enceladus, thrifty sulphur-reducing extremophiles deep in the Martian crust, or tar-eating microbes in a Titanian hot spring. Or maybe we'll spot the characteristic chemical signature produced by methanogenic bacterai in the atmosphere of an exoplanet around a distant star. And if we do ever find creatures like us and the alien ambassador shakes the hand of the President of Earth, it won't just be a meeting of minds, but an exchange between two ancient and indescribably diverse empires.

Comet Terrain

Photos: ESA

What's interesting about the first close-ups of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (apart from the fact that they were taken by a robot spacecraft that has taken more than ten years to rendezvous with and go into orbit around an object currently plunging sunwards at 55,000km per hour) is that its landscapes aren't entirely alien. There are step terraces and a cirque of cliffs, a scattering of car-sized boulders and what looks like an alluvial plain, or perhaps a sheet of snow. Elsewhere there are craters, and rounded pits like sinkholes. Like the mountains and cliffs and plains of Saturn's icy moons, these features are composed of ice and dust rather than rock and soil, but although they are unearthly and formed by processes as yet unknown, they are not unrecognisable. Like the landscapes of the outer moons, there's something of the sublimity of icescapes of the Alps and Himalayas, the Arctic and Antarctic, in them. They are utterly remote from human experience, but they are something that the human imagination can appreciate and attempt to encompass. They are not exotic forbidden zones. They are destinations.

Polish Covers ...

... of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun (hat-tip: Konrad Walewski).

Novels Aren't Selfies

'Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading, or of watching movies, or of seeing plays, though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends. The concept of identification implies that the reader or viewer is, to some degree at least, actively engaged with the work in question: she is thinking herself into the experience of the characters on the page or screen or stage.

'But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.'

Rebecca Mead, 'The Scourge of "Relatability".'

Something Has Been Lost

That bare yellow sky.
Those rolling rounded hills.
That first footprint.
Those first words for the ages.

That frail craft, bright in the distance.
Those tracks leading away from it.
That feeling that everything has changed for ever.
That something has been broken.
That something has been lost.

Mirror In The Sky

A book by Stephen Webb with the somewhat cumbersome title If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens - Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life tackles the enduring question first posed by Enrico Fermi: our galaxy is big and old and should be teeming with alien civilisations - so where are they? Webb's book is a fun and thought-provoking read (he provides a handy link to a document summarising his ideas here), but why stop at fifty answers? Why not five hundred, five thousand, five million?

The thing about aliens is that the only thing we know about them is that we don't know anything about them. We don't even know if they exist (Webb thinks that they don't). Recent research explores the possibility of detecting alien civilisations by the air pollution their industries create. It's kind of boggling that we actually have the technology to do this right now, although it only works for planets orbiting uncongenial white dwarf stars, and there might only be a small window of opportunity before the aliens either clean up their act or are strangled by their own effluent. And maybe, unlike us, most civilisations are too smart to produce air pollution in the first place, or perhaps most never go down the industrial road.

When it comes down to it, the question isn't 'why aren't they here?' Instead, it's actually 'are they anything like us?' Could we recognise them, and would they recognise us? If a lion could speak, we would not understand him, but if he sang we might recognise it as song. We hope that aliens might share something with us: music, mathematics, Marxism, motorways. When we search the sky for signs of life, we're really looking for a mirror.

Quiet War Ebooks Update

Pleased to announce that the ebooks of both In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening's Empires are at last available from both Amazon and iTunes. In The Mouth of the Whale can also be bought in Nook format, and I'm told that Evening's Empires they should be available on Nook any day now.

Unlike, say Kindle Direct Publishing, where you can upload your formatted book with a mouse-click or finger jab because you are interacting directly with a combined publisher and retailer, commercial ebook publishing is a bit more complicated - especially when a British publisher is dealing with retailers in another country. In this case, two digital distributors where involved: the publishers sent the ebook files to a distributor here in the the UK, which then sent them on to one in the US, which then registered the titles and turned them over to retailers, who processed them and made them available to readers. It was that handover to retailers where a bit of a glitch has delayed publication; the process is usually automatic, but the software stalled, and so the books have had to be pushed through by hand ('pushed through' is the actual technical term, reminding us that the net really is just a series of pipes). All of this activity, exposed by that pernicious glitch, reminds us that mass-market ebook publishing isn't quite as cheap and labour-free as we might imagine.

But anyway! At last all four Quiet War novels are available in both the UK and the US. And the two short story collections, Stories of the Quiet War and Life After Wartime are also available, although only on Kindle. I don't have access to the rest of the pipes, right now. . .

UPDATE 25/07/14 The ebook of Evening's Empires is now available from Barnes and Noble.

Some Other Things I'm Doing Next Month

First of all, I'm appearing at the above, on a panel exploring the thematic differences between SF and fantasy. More details here. And this is my schedule for the World SF Convention:


Bagpuss vs. Treguard
Thursday 15:00 - 16:30
Alex Ingram, Juliana Goulart, Paul McAuley, Sarita Robinson, James Harvey.

Why Aliens are Cool again
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00
Stephen Foulger, Dougal Dixon, Paul McAuley, Gert van Dijk, Jonathan Cowie

Space on Screen
Friday 15:00 - 16:30
Jaine Fenn, Chris Baker, Bridget Landry, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds

Signing
Saturday 15:00 - 16:00 (at the PS Publishing Dealer's Table)

Reading: Paul McAuley
Sunday 11:30 - 12:00

Botanical Conquistadors
Sunday 18:00 - 19:00 Helen Pennington , Paul McAuley, Howard Davidson, Dr Lewis Dartnell

100 Best Science Fiction Films

Time Out has organised a wide-ranging poll to work up a snap-shot of the current top 100 science fiction films. I was one of the participants: for what it's worth, here's my top ten (sneakily listed in chronological order so I didn't have to rank them, although I do have a favourite, as you'll see), and a short explanatory note. All but one of my choices are featured in the top 100, by the way.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
Road To The Stars (Doroga k zvezdam) (Pavel Klushantsev, 1957)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
Quatermass And The Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
The Man Who Fell To Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997)
Children Of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

Almost 50 years after I first watched it with slack-jawed wonder, I still think that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not only the greatest science-fiction film, but also one of the best films ever made. Quatermass and the Pit deals with similar themes of uplift and fall within the confines of Hobb’s Lane and its Tube station. Road to the Stars (a significant influence on Kubrick) begins with a portrait of rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and ends with an expedition to Mars; like 2001's Pan-Am shuttle and space station, it’s a reminder of the ambitious futures we have lost. Alien introduced an iconic monster and one of science-fiction’s best heroines, while the cluttered, grimy claustrophobia of its spaceship inverts Kubrick’s chilly antiseptic aesthetic. La Jetée’s haunting examination of time and memory, the portrayal of an alien seduced and corrupted by human appetites in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Children of Men’s story of loss and redemption, prove that science-fiction films can move the heart as well as the mind. And the blackly comic satires of Brazil and Starship Troopers, and the stark warning of The Day the Earth Stood Still, are all still cuttingly relevant: a reminder that, at its best, science fiction holds up a distorting mirror to ourselves and our times.

UPDATE Amended because The Man Who Fell to Earth was made in 1976 not 1987. And Quatermass And The Pit was 1967 not 1957...

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (15)

In Thomas M. Disch's The Genocides, where a kind of alien Japanese knotweed turns Earth a vast monoculture of itself, a ragged group of survivors reminisce about favourite movies and movie stars and other fragments of the common culture that once helped to bind civilisation together. Anne Washburn's Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play, takes that idea in a different direction, exploring the unreliability of memory and the power and mutability of story.

There are three acts, episodic glimpses of life after the fall set years apart. In the first, a ragged group of survivors of a recent and comprehensive plague sit around a camp fire, trying to recall an episode of The Simpsons, 'Cape Feare' (the one where Bart's nemesis, Sideshow Bob, combines the roles of Roberts Mitchum and De Niro).  In the second, seven years later, the group have become travelling players, putting on live action reconstructions of Simpsons episodes and 'commercials' that recall the unregarded luxuries (ice, Diet Coke, baths) of their lost world. And in the third, seventy-five years after the fall, their descendants stage a spectacle in which a trickster/devil figure, Mr Burns, comes for Bart Simpson's life.

The first and second acts were both a bit too long: the first lost dramatic tension when characters took turns to recite lists of their missing; the second overextended its exposition of the play's themes and ended with a bit of cliched melodrama, although its portrayal of the dynamics of a troupe of actors was funny and affectionate.  But the last act, a full-blown musical, was astonishing, carpentered from the scraps of the Simpsons, pop songs, hip-hop, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Night of the Hunter and much else that littered the first two acts, and staged with spectacular brio. A genuine transformation of pop culture into a rich and strange theatrical ritual about loss and rebirth. It was too long too, but I didn't care.

One Of The Things I'm Doing Next Month

So I'll be at the Nine Worlds convention on Saturday August 9th, doing this:

Cyberpunk: exploring society in the corporate machine age (.net)
10.00am - 11.15am
Science fiction in a science fictional real world.
Panel: Anne Charnock, Fabio Fernandes, Laurie Penny, Paul McAuley

I'll do my best to avoid any trace of nostalgia for the good old days of sockets in the back of the neck and razorblade fingernails and other tropes that predate the eversion of the net into the actual.

 Afterwards, I'm signing at the Forbidden Planet stall 11:15am - 12:15pm.

Best SF 31

Happy to note that my little story 'Transitional Forms' is included in Gardner Dozois' selection of the best science fiction stories of 2013. Table of contents over here.

Dead Media Edition

Here's the opening of Evening's Empires in punched card form, via this nifty site. Any day now, according to my publishers, ebooks of Evening's Empires and In the Mouth of the Whale will be available for readers in the US. In fact, you can already buy ebooks of In the Mouth of the Whale for Nook readers and from iTunes. Other formats will follow soon, although apparently there are Problems that haven't yet been fixed. Back in the day, many common problems with data-handling could be solved by picking the cards off the floor after you'd dropped them or a card sorter had spat them out, and shuffling them back into order. Life probably wasn't easier back then, but when the interface between the world and the net throws a glitch, it sometimes it seems that it was.

Träumen Roman

It was a fat Gollancz hardback with a yellow cover, so I must have written it in the late 1980s, presumably between Four Hundred Billion Stars and Secret Harmonies. Or perhaps, in the dream, it was my first novel. I was pleased to find it in the secondhand bookshop, so I must have lost or given away all my copies. A one-word title I can't remember, now, on waking. Did it begin with an 'R'? A 'P'? Somehow I knew, in the dream, that it was set in one of those cities on the edge of time, or a city in a virtual reality realer than what we like to call reality. A kind of dream within a dream. And I also knew that the narrative was shared by three protagonists, each speaking in the first person. Something about visions or abilities they were trying to make sense of, and something about finding a secret location in the city that would explain everything, once they all realised they contained or represented different parts of the key. There was a long quote in the acknowledgments about the blues singer John Lee Hooker. From Charles Shaar Murray's biography, perhaps, although that was published after Gollancz discontinued their signature yellow jackets. Still, dreams have their own logic and chronology. I remember thinking, as I thumbed through that unborn dream book, that it wasn't especially well-written - that it was just as well that the only copy could be found in the bookshop which dissolved when I woke up.

Not Your Usual Ultraviolence

I'm quite often late to the party these days, but usually not quite this late.  First published in the US in 2011, Kameron Hurley's God's War won a British Fantasy Society award and the 2011 Kitschies Award for Best Debut Novel, and after it was published in the UK in 2013 was shortlisted for the Clarke Award. I was at the ceremony, where extracts from the contenders were read out (an idea that was much, much better than it first sounded), was taken by the novel's strong voice, and bought it a couple of days later. Not my usual route to a book, but hey, as long as it works.

It's set in an indeterminate future on a colony world where a religious war has been raging for centuries, kind of like a blend of First World War trench warfare and last century's conflict between Iran and Iraq. Nyx, a dogged, damaged bounty hunter, so broke she sells her womb, is tossed into prison by her enemies, raises a crew when she's released, and takes on a commission to find an off-worlder on the wrong side of the interminable war, racing against those same enemies, who this time want her dead. Its pulpish narrative is more than a little uneven (although I quite like the way Hurley takes to extremes Elmore Leonard's rule to miss out the parts readers skip over), but Hurley is very good at showing, not telling, the details of Nyx's world, where a kind of Islam contests with a kind of Christianity, men are sent to war by a tough unflinching matriarchy, magicians manipulate insect-based biotech, and shape-changers attract the attention of those off-worlders. And like Joanna Russ's Alyx, Nyx isn't simply a woman who beats men at their own game, and God's War is rather more than a simple inversion of cliched sci-fi and fantasy hack-'em-ups.

For a start, there are clear consequences and costs to the outbursts of violence that punctuate its story: Hurley's anti-hero is damaged and brutalised by her chosen life. We see her most clearly through the eyes of one of her crew, Rhys, a second-rate magician from who dislikes what she does yet still loves her, although it's more complicated than the kind of hero-worship by the female love-interest in a more conventional novel, because Rhys is an avowed pacifist. He's also a refugee from the enemy country, and in his adopted home encounters prejudices against both his sex and nationality. He's beaten up by a gang of women, dons a burqa to escape the disapproving female gaze, and in short must deal with the kind of problems that women in our world must deal with.

It's not only a great example of how science fiction and fantasy can point up the faultlines of our own society; it's also an exemplar of the way that writers should always challenge preconceptions. There are far too many SF and fantasy novels which don't colour outside the genre lines. Far too many that reuse tropes without examining them, or transpose received notions from the author's culture directly into the future. And far too many in which women are the victims, or the prize or reward for the hero, or little more than the object of the male gaze - the author's as well as the characters. (It's not a problem peculiar to science fiction - how many crime novels start with a murdered woman?) God's War challenges that kind of default assumption on every page, and the result is hugely refreshing and thought-provoking.

There Are Doors (20)

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (14)

A veteran of the Iraq war, Leroy Kervin, lies in a coma after unsuccessfully trying to commit suicide; one of his nurses, Pauline, juggles work and caring for her ungrateful, mentally-ill father; Freddie, who works as a night-watchman in Leroy's group home because he can't earn enough to make ends meet in his day job, takes on a tremendous risk to pay the medical bills for the treatment of his young daughter.  Willy Vlautin, of Portland-based band Richmond Fontaine, writes songs that are condensed short stories about people living hard lives of quiet desperation; The Free, his fourth novel, contrasts his raw and heartfelt reportage with a dash of surrealism.

As the stories of Pauline and Freddie cross and recross, Leroy, a science-fiction reader, dreams of trying to escape with the woman he loves from a dystopian version of America where gangs of vigilantes, the Free, hunt down those who have been indelibly marked by a test 'to weed out those who think from those who are soldiers.' The America of Leroy's nightmares, like all dystopias a distorting mirror of its present, becomes a counterpoint to the quests of Pauline, who becomes entangled with a troubled young runaway, Jo, and of Freddie, who has to set out on a journey in his ailing car to recover his daughters from his deadbeat wife and her selfish boyfriend.  Against its dark backdrop, ordinary moments of kindness and bravery shine a little brighter, a little more hopefully (and, thinking of the bloodbaths and torturefests of some contemporary science fiction and fantasy, I can't help wondering how dark our waking world seems to have become, to need such a grim contrast).

Vlautin's portraits of people down on their luck, and the stoic way they face up to injustice and hard choices, are drawn with plain but sympathetic detail; the mundane daily struggles of their lives are delineated by bills and shopping lists, the bone-ache of routine, and frank conversations with strangers caught up in the same kind of problems - deadbeat bosses, a health care system that can bankrupt ordinary people, a social system where old values and certainties have been replaced by zero-hour contracts and the ever-present the threat of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Likewise, the O. Henry sentiment of the intertwined stories - a damaged war veteran who tries to kill himself in a moment of clarity; a father making a sacrifice to take care of his daughters; a nurse trying to save a young patient from her bad choices - is tempered by a tough, clear-eyed realism. The runaway, Jo, goes back to the abuse of her life on the streets because it is all she knows; having to take care of his daughters give Freddie a renewed purpose in life, but his worries about medical bills and insurance still loom over him. As Leroy's dream quest runs out, the characters in the waking world find hope in renewed or newly found love, and heroism in surviving each new day. And that, this affecting novel, suggests, is sometimes all we can hope for: the small but vital moments of human grace it chronicles might just be enough to keep away the dark world of the Free.

'Brazil'

Cover by Peter Strain. Publication scheduled for October 31.

Under Mars, In Denmark

I've just finished the edits of my new novel, Something Coming Through, and the BFI monograph on Brazil.  Much rereading and rewriting, much adverb hunting, now all done and dusted.  This weekend, I'm one of the guests of honour at Fantasticon 2014, in Copenhagen.  As part of the fun, my first work to be translated into Danish will be on sale: a short story collection, Under Mars, selected and translated by Niels Dalgaard:

Here's the table of contents:

Under Mars indeholder følgende ti noveller: Antarktis begynder her (Antarctica Starts Here), Tilflyttere (Incomers), Under Mars (Under Mars), Festplaneten (All Tomorrow’s Parties), Genkrigene (Gene Wars), Hvordan vi mistede Månen, en sand historie af Frank W. Allen (How We Lost The Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen, Rev (Reef), To gange Dick (The Two Dicks), En meget britisk historie (A Very British History) og Dr. Luthers assistent (Dr Luther’s Assistant).

First And Last

Quoted by Nalo Hopkinson in a recent tweet, here's Samuel R. Delany pithily summarising how his dyslexia affects his writing, in answer to a question put to him by Junot Diaz: 'I'm a very bad writer. What I am is a good rewriter.'

Actually, I don't know many people who write near-perfect first drafts. I certainly don't. Well, okay, I have written a few short stories more or less straight out, but that was a rare confluence of luck and inspiration, and they were very short short stories. But with novels I find the trick is to keep going to the end, and to resist the temptation to start revising halfway through. To keep pushing forward, somehow. To let the narrative and characters find their own logic and flow (and to let them surprise you: I'm still childishly delighted when they do). And when I reach the end of the first draft, the real work begins - making the story comprehensible to itself, and to others. It doesn't finish until the proofs are pried from my hands.

Right now, I'm at the ante-penultimate stage with Something Coming Through: folding in the notes and comments and corrections from my editor, and polishing the text one last time. In some ways an oddly nostalgic task, like reading the diary and looking at the photographs of a holiday you took in some other country a couple of years ago. That odd roadside shrine, that beach, the cafe where you ate breakfast every day, the little lizard basking on a stone . . . Meanwhile, the difficulties you had getting there in the first place are all forgotten.

In Print Or Pixels

Sometimes I'm asked by US readers whether they can buy a particular title of mine. So I thought it would be useful to list what's available in print and ebook in the UK and the US so that I can point enquiries towards it. Apologies in advance: this is going to be a post that's a) pretty listy and b) completely self-promoting.

In the UK

The following titles are available in print and ebook form (although older titles may be a bit hard to track down outside of online or specialist bookshops):
Four Hundred Billion Stars
Eternal Light
Red Dust
Pasquale's Angel
Fairyland
Confluence
Cowboy Angels
The Quiet War
Gardens of the Sun
In the Mouth of the Whale
Evening's Empires

There are also several story collections and individual stories that I've published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.  They're available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, and other countries covered by KDP:

Stories:
City of the Dead
Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple
Prisoners of the Action

Collections:
Little Machines
Stories of the Quiet War
Life After Wartime

 In the US

 The only titles still in print in deadwood format are Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun; again, they're probably only available via online or specialist bookshops. But you can order other titles via the Book Depository, which offers free worldwide postage.

As for ebooks, the following titles are available in Nook, Kindle and iTune formats:
Four Hundred Billion Stars
Eternal Light
Red Dust
Pasquale's Angel
Fairyland
The Secret of Life
Whole Wide World
White Devils
Confluence
Cowboy Angels
The Quiet War
Gardens of the Sun
In the Mouth of the Whale
Evening's Empires

I'll do my best to keep this updated. All additional information gratefully received.

UPDATE#1 Michael Rossow and Brian both have kindly pointed out that The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World and White Devils are available on Kindle in the US, but In The Mouth of the Whale and Evening's Empires aren't.  The first three are invisible from the UK but the last two are visible with $ prices because Amazon's site has geolocation that imposes local publishing rights.  I spoofed it with Hola to get the correct US customer view.

UPDATE#2 (9 July 2014) In The Mouth of the Whale is now available in Nook format in the US. Hopefully it will soon be available in Kindle format too, as will Evening's Empires.

UPDATE#3 (19 July 2014) In the Mouth of the Whale is now available on Kindle in the US, and in the US iTunes store.

UODATE#4 (21 July 2014) Evening's Empires now available on Kindle in the US.

Meanwhile, On Mars

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Malin Space Science Systems

Taken by Curiosity Mars Rover's Right Mastcam, May 3, 2014. More here.

Reality Closing In

Last year, NASA scientists used a 3-D printer and panoramic images taken by the Opportunity Mars rover to reconstruct a plastic model of the largest meteorite ever found on Mars.

Eleven years ago, a similar reconstruction featured in my short story about a Mars-themed amusement park, 'Under Mars', published in Peter Crowther's Mars-themed anthology Mars Probes, and republished in my collection Little Machines. Getting harder to keep up.

They walk through a crystal gateway into the next slice of the park's pie. Red rocks and red sand dunes saddle away into the trompe l'oeil distance of a painted backscene. Signs point towards the Viking landing site, the secret flying saucer factory, the Mars landing simulation, the life on Mars display.

"It works in here," Homer says, tapping his head. "Focus makes the impossible real. It suspends disbelief. It makes fake reality as real as you and me. I was plugged into one of the NASA rovers, Buzz, travelling through Nirgal Vallis. I was on Mars."

"You're on Mars right now," Buzz says, turning in a circle with his arms out, taking in the red sand (dyed Florida beach sand fixed into shape with resin), the pockmarked red rocks (each hand-carved from Arizona sandstone), the red crags (ditto).

"I never did try it in the park," Homer says, "but I'm told it works just as well here as with VR."

"You're serious about this stuff, aren't you?"

"It's the real deal. When we're done with this little job we'll try it out. You and me, what do you say?"

"I'd say you've done so much of this stuff you don't know what's real or not any more. Hey! Quit it!"

Because Homer has grabbed Buzz's arm, is steering him off the main path.

"I want to show you something," Homer says.

Buzz pulls free. "Man, what's wrong with you?"

"It won't take but ten minutes," Homer says stubbornly.

Buzz knows better to argue. It's always been this way: Homer making up his mind, and Buzz going along with it. Homer is the go-getter, the man with the plan; Buzz is the sidekick.

The path winds between bigger and bigger rocks, dives into an artfully simulated crevice in the arc of a crater's rampart wall. The room beyond is low ceilinged, red lit, and, apart from a bored docent lounging in the far corner, completely deserted. Tall glass cylinders are scattered across the black rubber floor, and Homer walks straight across the room to the largest, in which a red lump of rock half a metre high sits on a black display stand.

"There," Homer says. "That there is real."

"Come on, Homer. It's just plastic. A model."

"I know that. I'm not fried. But it exists. It's sitting on Mars right this moment, in one of the canyons in Deuteronilus Mensea. A robot took twenty-eight days to scan that rock right there on Mars, and a laser stereolithograph used the information to build it up out of polymer. Look at it, Buzz. It's a fossilized stromatolite, just like the ones found in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks on Earth, which in turn are just like living stromatolites found in certain shallow bays of the Australian coast. See the striations, like pages in a book? Each one is a layer of sediment trapped and stabilized by a year's-worth of growth of mat-forming microorganisms. There was life on Mars, once upon a time. This is the hard evidence."

Giving It All Away

As a bit of promotion for the paperback of Evening's Empires, Tom Hunter has interviewed me for London Calling magazine. If you're located in the UK, you might want to click over even if you're not interested in my blether, because there's a link at the end to a competition with a set of my books as a prize, as well as the chance to download, absolutely free, the ebook collection Stories from the Quiet War. Unfortunately, the offer isn't available to those outside the UK (although I guess that if you know how to spoof your location, you could grab the ebook . . .).

Define 'Define'

The problem I have with this series on literary definitions, and Anita Mason's article in particular, is not the clickbait idea (and perfect example of circular logic) that genre fiction somehow lacks one or more of the essential qualities that elevate literary fiction above all other categories. Or even that literary fiction is the center from which all else radiates (and if it is, it must have sunk there, displacing everything that came before it, because literary fiction, like science fiction, is an invention of the twentieth century). No, what's problematical is the idea that there are boundaries between different types of fiction that exactly map onto the narrow range of publishing categories defined by labels on bookshop shelves.

Those labels can be a useful guide to browsing customers, but as taxonomy not so much. There are too many exceptions to pat definitions like Mason's. As far as I'm concerned, there are no boundaries. Everything's a continuum. Or maybe a series of strange-attractor vortices in n-dimension space. Who knows? Who cares? That last, perhaps, being a more important question than how to fit divots of the vast, wild landscape of fiction into a numbered series of sterile pigeonholes.

Afresh

A little over twenty years ago, on April 5th 1994, Channel 4 broadcast the last interview given by the playwright and novelist Dennis Potter, then in the terminal stage of pancreatic cancer. He famously described how the immediate prospect of death heightened his awareness of the world:

'At this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west, early. . .  Last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both much more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know . . . The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.'

Anyone rudely confronted by their own mortality can attest to the absolute truth of this. Three years ago I was finishing a long course of chemotherapy, unsure whether or not I would survive, and the blossom then was, yes, whiter and frothier and blossomier than any blossom there ever had been. It wasn't the immediacy of childlike wonder, or the ecstatic visions of William Blake, or the intensity celebrated by the Romantic Poets. It was the understanding that there was only the moment of seeing, and the nowness of that moment. Of seeing the world as it was, not as you expected it to be be. Seeing it afresh.

I was more or less unable to write then, but something of that immediacy is what all fiction writers aspire to, of course. To make the world new; to see it afresh. To find the detail that makes a particular moment spark in the reader's mind. In genre fiction, by definition mostly furnished secondhand, it's especially important to make things new. To see them again as they really are. That spaceship. That world. That fat orange sun fixed just above the flat horizon. Those ruins. That clear-eyed person, her giant shadow preceding her as she picks her way through tumbled stones, seeing them as they really are, in that moment of discovery.

Book Birthday

Out today: the UK paperback of Evening's Empires. It's the fourth novel to be set in the Quiet War universe, but you don't need to have read the others (although I hope you will): its story is self-contained. If you'd like an introduction to my Quiet War stuff, there's Life After Wartime, a low-price Kindle ebook collection of short fiction that also contains the first chapter of Evening's Empires.

'The Quiet War was one of the best books McAuley has written, and Evening's Empires makes an excellent companion to it.  These are books that, if there is any justice, will shape the stories we tell about our solar system for many years to come.' Interzone

'McAuley's work has many sweet spots, and this book is smack in the middle of a big one.' Locus

'The whole thing is wrapped in a melange of weird cultures and mind-boggling tech and steeped in a thoughtful and intelligent vision of the future, but, unlike some of his peers, McAuley delivers a tight-knit, propulsive storyline too. Grown-up SF that still manages to pack a punch.' Starburst

' Evening's Empires is a great addition to the 'Quiet War' sequence to date and a rollicking adventure that would very much appeal to readers of Alistair Reynolds and Iain Banks.' Concatenation

'Evening's Empires is everything you could possibly want from a science fiction novel, from the grand visions to the plausibility to the engaging story this book hits all the right notes.' SF Book Reviews

Here We Go

I'm supposed to be doing a chapter-by-chapter outline of the new novel, but over the past week I have written three and a bit chapters instead. So much for discipline. I hoped to prove that I could map out new territory and pick my route before setting off, but as usual I'm discovering where I need to go by going there, at the rate of roughly 1500 words a day. Every writer has their own walking pace; this appears to be mine. Meanwhile, the cow parsley is frothing in unattended corners of the parks and graveyards of North London, and the horse chestnuts are candling. Spring is moving in the air, and in the earth below*, and in what I hope will be another book, better than the last. Always hope for a new and better destination, when you set out.

*Wind in the Willows

Down To A Sunless Sea

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

From Evening's Empires:

Escorted by the assassin and her sisters, Hari passed through an airlock into a short tunnel lined with stained white ceramic, where hidden machines blitzed him with microwaves, neutrino beams, and X-rays. He was forced to surrender his book, felt a small surge of relief when it was returned to him after it had been interrogated inside a virtual space as ancient as the tunnel’s security protocols. It was the only thing he’d brought with him. He’d left everything of his old life behind, but he hadn’t been able to abandon or give away the book, and not just because it was a memento of the dead man who had saved his life, or because it had smuggled the copies of the eidolon and the djinn aboard Pabuji’s Gift. He had carried it through adventures and hardships; its stories had amused and amazed and informed him; he was bonded to it by something stronger than sentiment or gratitude. And he hoped that some trace of the djinn might still be hidden inside it; it was a faint and foolish hope, but he needed all the help he could get.

With two of the assassins in front of him and two behind, he descended a ramp that spiralled down a vertical shaft. A small zoo of machines squatted in alcoves and niches cut into the raw, rough ice of the shaft’s wall.  Most were dead, mantled with frost, but a few reached out with brief whispers of microwaves and a man-shaped bot stepped forward to watch the little procession go past, its eyes burning red in the chilly shadows of its crypt.

A string of lamps hung down the centre of the shaft, and presently Hari saw that their little lights were reflected on a black circle below.

Water. The still surface of the buried sea.

Three streamlined scooters were moored at the bottom of the ramp. Hari climbed aboard one behind one of the assassins, as he’d once ridden behind Riyya, and the scooters drove down a long tunnel and at last emerged into a limitless cavern. An icy overhead stretched away in every direction, lit by chains of floating lamps. Swales and humps like inverted hills, fins, long gashes fringed with stalactites dozens of metres long. Grids of illuminated rafts hung all around, dangling streamers of red and brown weed. In the far distance, a chain of fat spheres dwindled into the deep dark.

Hari felt a flutter of relief. As he’d guessed, as he’d hoped, Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters hadn’t entirely thrown off their human instincts. They lived close to the overhead of their pocket sea. They were vulnerable. And because they hadn’t shut down his p-suit’s deep radar, he could see the floor more than two kilometres below, could glimpse immense bulkheads, walls, curving away, delimiting a chamber was less than five kilometres across. He supposed that it had been sealed off from the rest of the subsurface ocean so that it could be warmed and oxygenated. A small, vulnerable bubble habitat.

His escorts drove him to a pod hung from a smooth bulge of ice where small schools of fish flickered amongst a fuzzy turf of red weed and clusters of fleshy flowers pulsing on bony stalks. They pushed him through the entrance, a moon pool at the base where external hydrostatic pressure was balanced by internal atmospheric pressure, and sealed him in. It was spherical, the pod, chilly and damp, divided into three levels by mesh platforms. In the lowest level, a teardrop-shaped cleaning bot that had clearly gone insane was slowly working its way around the rim of moon pool, following a shallow, circular groove it had carved into the floor. It might have been working there for centuries.

There was no link Hari could latch on to, through either his bios or the suit comms. He couldn’t open any windows in the pale walls.

He wondered if the Saints had managed to intercept Pabuji’s Gift. The manikins controlled by the eidolon and the copy of the djinn should be enough to hold them off, but even if they gained control of the ship it didn’t matter. By now, its course had been set and its motor had been shut down. If the Saints tried to take control, if they tried to restart the motor, they’d trigger his little surprise; if they didn’t, it would activate itself in a little under seven hours. Meanwhile, there was nothing Hari could do until Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters decided to talk to him.

He had a long wait. He couldn’t detect any toxins or contaminants in the pod’s atmosphere – a standard nitrox mix – but he kept his p-suit sealed. He watched the clock he’d set up in his visor display tick down, tried not to think about the potential flaws in his plan. Such as it was. He mostly sat still, trying to seem calmer than he felt.

The insane cleaning bot completed a painfully slow circuit, began another. At last, with three hours remaining on the countdown, a patch in the opaque wall cleared. He ankled towards it, felt a flutter of relief when he looked out and saw a little cluster of faint shapes rising through the black water. Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters were coming for him.

Paperback published on April 10th

100,000 Stars

Here's a neat little demonstration of our insignificance. Move the slider on the right to zoom out from the sun and through the solar system. past the nearest, named stars and the next 100,000 stars, onwards to the edge of the Milky Way. Or click on the button on the upper left to get a tour and some context.

Räzboiul Liniştit

Out around about now in hardback, Räzboiul Liniştit, the Romanian edition of The Quiet War, translated by Nicu Gesce (who kindly sent me the image of the cover). Pleased to see that the publishers have gone with Sparth's cover illustration, first used in the US Pyr edition.

As it says in the blurb:

In secolul al XXIII-lea, Pământul, distrus de schimbările climatice provocate de poluare, este condus de câteva familii puternice şi de aşa-numiţii „sfinţi verzi” ai acestora. Milioane de oameni lucrează la reconstrucţia ecosistemelor devastate. Alţii au preferat să plece pe sateliţii lui Jupiter şi Saturn, unde au creat o varietate de habitate,protejate de atmosferele inospitaliere cu ajutorul unor vaste corturi sau ascunse sub scoarţa aştrilor respectivi. Aici şi-au dat frâu liber imaginaţiei şi au pus în practică până şi cele mai fanteziste teorii ale geneticii.

Însă pacea fragilă dintre Pământ şi colonii este ameninţată de ambiţia „exteriorilor” de a se răspândi prin întreg Sistemul Solar şi de a grăbi evoluţia umanităţii... 

Evening's Empires In Paperback

Something that never gets old: the arrival of a box of author's copies. In this case, the paperback edition of Evening's Empires, due to hit the shops and big box warehouses on April 10th. Hey.

Scribble Scribble Scribble

In the comments to my last post, I was asked about stories about the Jackaroo, those helpful aliens who gift humanity with a bunch of marginal worlds littered with ruins left by previous client races.  There aren't that many:

‘Dust', first appeared in Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
‘Winning Peace’, first appeared in The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
‘Adventure’, first appeared in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
‘City of the Dead’, first appeared in Postscripts, 2008
‘Crimes and Glory’, first appeared in Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2011
‘Bruce Springsteen’, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2012
‘The Man’, first appeared in Arc Infinity Spring 2012

'Crimes and Glory' is over at the Subterranean site (although perhaps for not much longer), and you can buy a Kindle version of 'City of the Dead' for a few pennies or cents.

Meanwhile, and this is one of the reasons posting has been so sparse here lately, I've just turned in the first of two Jackaroo novels to my editor at Gollancz.  It's called Something Coming Through and is currently scheduled for publication in the UK in February 2015.  I've also been working on a BFI Classics book on Terry Gilliam's fabulous dystopian comedy Brazil, which will be published (I think) in September, as part of the BFI's SF season.  There's just a week to go before the deadline, and I still have to revise the conclusion and introduction and organise the footnotes. More later.

On Mars On Mars On Mars

One of the lovely things about NASA is that you can poke around the raw images taken by their robot explorers. The image above was taken by the mastcam of the Curiosity Mars rover on the February 23rd. It shows layered rocks weathering out amongst flows of sand in the foreground, the long arc of a ridge with low hills beyond, and in the background, hazed by the dusty atmosphere, the flank of Mt. Sharp, Curiosity's ultimate destination (the original is here - click to embiggen).  It's a composition as beautiful as a Chesley Bonestell painting, lacking only a couple of astronauts hunting for fossils in some long-dry stream bed. You want to walk out into it, kicking rocks as you go.

Take Me To The River

The omnibus edition of the revised Confluence trilogy is published today as a trade paperback and  ebook editions in all formats. A fat doorstopper of a package of 994 pages containing three novels - Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars - and two associated short stories, 'Recording Angel' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties.' It's taken a few years and some hard work to get it back into print, so I'm thrilled that it's now been released back into the wild.

The story of a boy and his river, here's the moment when its hero reaches the capital city of his world:

At first the houses were no more than empty tombs with narrow windows chipped into their carved walls and smoke-holes cut into their roofs, improvised villages strung along the terraces at the old edge of the Great River.  The people who lived there were very tall and very thin, with small heads and long, glossy black hair, and skin the colour of rust. They went about naked. The chests of the men were welted with spiral patterns of scars; the women stiffened their hair with red clay. They hunted lizards and snakes and coneys,collected the juicy young pads of prickly pear and dug for tuberous roots in the dry tableland above the cliffs, picked samphire and watercress in the marshes by the margin of the river, and waded out into the river’s shallows and cast circular nets to catch fish, which they smoked on racks above fires built of creosote bush and pine chips. They were cheerful and hospitable, and gave food freely to Yama and Prefect Corin when they halted at noon.

Then there were proper houses amongst the tombs, straggling up steep, narrow streets, painted yellow or blue or pink, with little gardens planted out on their flat roofs.  Shanty villages were built on stilts over the mudbanks and silty channels left by the river’s retreat, and beyond these, sometimes less than half a league from the road, sometimes two or three leagues distant, was the river, and docks constructed from floating pontoons and the cut-down hulls of old ships and barges, and a constant traffic of cockleshell sailboats and barges, sleek fore-and-aft rigged cutters and three-masted xebecs hugging the shore. Along the old river road, street merchants sold fresh fish and oysters and mussels from tanks, and freshly steamed lobsters and spiny crabs, samphire and lotus roots and water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and little red bananas and several kinds of kelp, milk from tethered goats, spices, pickled walnuts, fresh fruit and grass juice, ice, jewellery made of polished shells, black seed pearls, caged birds, bolts of brightly patterned cloths, sandals made from the worn rubber tread of steam wagon tyres, cheap plastic toys, cassette recordings of popular ballads or prayers, and a thousand other things. The stalls and booths of the merchants formed a kind of ribbon market strung along the dusty shoulder of the old road, noisy with the cries of hawkers and music from cassette recorders and itinerant musicians, and the buzz of commerce as people bargained and gossiped and argued. When a warship went past, a league beyond the crowded tarpaper roofs of the shanty villages and the cranes of the docks, everyone stopped to watch it. As if in salute, it raised the red and gold blades of its triple-banked oars and fired a charge of white smoke from a cannon, and everyone along the old road cheered.

That was when Yama realised that he could see, for the first time, the farside shore of the Great River: a dark irregular line of houses and docks. The river was deep and swift here, stained brown along the shore and dark blue further out. He had reached Ys and had not known it until now. The city had crept up on him like an army in the night, the inhabited tombs like scouts, the streets of painted houses and the tumbledown shanty villages like the first ranks of foot soldiers. It was as if, after the fiasco of the attempted rescue of the palmers, he had suddenly woken from a long sleep.

Figures In A Landscape

Here's a good lesson in writing from Graham Greene's A Sort of Life:

Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn't be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm - little else. Perhaps I should have turned to Stevenson to learn my lesson: 'It came all of a sudden when it did, with a rush of feet and a roar, and then a shout from Alan, and the sound of blows and someone crying as if hurt. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw Mr Shaun in the doorway crossing blades with Alan.'

There's another useful lesson in Kidnapped (from which Greene so approvingly quotes) - the way in which, as Margot Livesey puts it, Stevenson describes 'landscapes that both shape and reveal the actions of the characters.' This isn't about the way in which landscapes can reflect emotional weather or moral character. That can be useful, no doubt - especially in science fiction and fantasy, outwith the constraint of depicting real landscapes.  But it can tend towards the pathetic fallacy: goodness inhabiting lovely woods of silver-leafed trees and evil lurking in lands ruined by dark satanic mills; the functional logic of future cities depicted by clean white towers linked by monorails. But I mean instead the ways in which characters can be shaped by the landscapes of their childhood, and how their responses to new landscapes can reveal their strengths and weaknesses.

To give a trivial example of the former, Yama, the main protagonist of the Confluence trilogy, is raised in a semi-military household sited in a vast and ancient necropolis. He values order and hierarchy, nurtures an ambition to become a soldier, and is steeped (more than he realises) in casual, everyday encounters with the past. All of this affects his ideas about the wider world, and influences his plans and the way he attempts to overcome the obstacles he encounters. The shape of his travels down the length of his world was already laid down in the bone-white paths between the tombs where he played as a child.

As for how landscape can reveal character, there's nothing better than those chapters of Kidnapped in which David Balfour and his friend Alan Breck (who crossed blades with Mr Shaun in the passage quoted by Greene) tramp across the heather of the Scottish Highlands after escaping a shipwreck. Stevenson's evocation of the spare, bleak nature of the landscape is masterly, as is his exploration of the different reactions of David, a Lowland Scot pitched headlong into this alien territory, and Alan, who was raised there. The hardships they endure expose their differences and test them to breaking point; yet each has qualities the other needs to survive their adventures.

Confluence is structured as the long journey of a young man searching for the truth of his life: who he is; where he came from; where he's going. Yama travels from his childhood home to the capital, and then doubles back and heads downriver towards the world's end. All the while I kept in mind lessons learned from Stevenson's use of landscape and character, especially in the passages in which Yama's self-appointed squire, Pandaras, searches for his master and helps him reach what they mistakenly believe will be the end of their journey. And I also kept in mind the plain fact that even the most hostile landscape is indifferent to human suffering. Surviving it is a hard test, but surviving the people encountered in it is even harder.

Water, Everywhere

Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; globe illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (©); Adam Nieman.

Earth is the blue planet. Two-thirds of its surface covered in oceans; its skies are swathed in cloud. And here in England, right now, it seems most of the air is water falling steadily from the sky. But how much water is there, compared to the mass of the Earth? The graphic, borrowed from the US Geological Survey, shows it's not as much as you might think. The largest blue sphere is the water in Earth's oceans; the smaller sphere to the right is the total amount of freshwater (in the ground, in lakes, rivers and swamps); the tiny sphere below that is the amount in rivers in lakes - the fresh water that's readily available.

There's also a hidden ocean in the upper mantle, in pores of clays and other minerals, and water in the rocks deep in the lower mantle, maybe all the way to the earth's core. No one knows for sure, but best estimates are around two oceans worth - which means the total amount of water on and in the planet is around 0.1% of its mass. It isn't much, compared to icy moons like Jupiter's Europa, or Saturn's Enceladus. But maybe just enough to allow civilisations like ours evolve. Because if the water content of the Earth was just 1% of its mass, rather than 0.1%, it would be a water world, completely covered in deep ocean.

Water worlds may be very common. Three quarters of the catalogue of discoveries made by the Kepler space telescope are mini-Neptunes: planets up to ten times the mass of the Earth, but with low density, suggesting that they possess thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere. Those close enough to their stars may have lost most of their original atmosphere, blown away on the stellar wind, leaving behind rocky cores completely enveloped in liquid water.

Although life might thrive on many of them, it is unlikely than any world that lacks dry land could harbour an advanced technological civilisation like our own - how could you smelt metals, or build a computer underwater? So while the equivalent of dolphins of intelligent squid may evolve on these planet-wide oceans, they probably wouldn't be able to develop ways of escaping their planet, or communicating with us. Another factor contributing to the Great Silence, perhaps. As the people of Somerset and the Thames Valley know, you can definitely have too much of a good thing.

Obligatory Shot Of The Product In A Box

Walk-On Part

Writing a novel is a process of discovery. It can be intensely frustrating as you try to make headway through landscapes that are, at first, little more than shadows in fog, but it's also intensely rewarding, and full of unexpected surprises, as the world gains shape and focus and internal coherence, and the characters begin to take control of their lives.

When I wrote the last sentence of the Confluence trilogy, I knew far more about its hero, Yama, than when I had begun. After all, we'd walked a long way together, sometimes down paths that had been previously mapped out, sometimes along unplanned diversions and into unknown territory. He's an orphan who wants to escape the petty clerkship his adopted father expects him to take up; wants to find his real family and where he came from; wants to become a hero without any clear idea of the cost. And he does become the hero of his story, as he was always intended to be, but he is not its only hero.

A little more than halfway through the first book, he encounters Pandaras, a pot boy in an inn who warns him of a plot against his life, and helps him escape. Beyond a few lessons in the iniquity and history of the city in which Yama had lost himself, that was about all the use I had for this minor character. But Pandaras had other ideas. He appointed himself Yama's squire, followed him through the gates of the Memory of the Palace of the People, the administrative heart of the great bureaucracy that rules the world, and accompanied him on a voyage down the length of the world's great river. By the third book, Yama and Pandaras have become separated, and the narrative alternates between them as Pandaras searches for his master, and finds him, and loses him again.

None of this was planned from the outset. But just as Pandaras made himself indispensable to Yama, drawing on the skills learned from various relatives in various trades (unlike Yama, he has an extensive family), so he also made himself indispensable to the narrative. Yama is not a high-born hero. He does not serve the masters of his world. He doesn't even want to become one of its masters. He is instead a hero of the ordinary people of the world, the hoi polloi of which Pandaras is an exemplar.* The people who are, as he puts it, the strength of the city.

Yama is a hero to Pandaras, and by serving him Pandaras also becomes a hero: he endures and must overcome his own hardships and perils, and suffers his own grievous wounds. He was the character I'd been looking for without knowing it, until he turned to Yama in that candlelit room in the inn, in his clean, much darned shirt and a pair of breeches, small and unremarkable, and warned him that he was in trouble, and advised him how to get out of it. In novels, as in life, we should always pay attention to people like him.

(*He's also, a point I forgot to make before posting this, a counterpoint to Yama's predestined exceptionalism.)

Something Coming Through Coming Through

I've just finished the last draft of Something Coming Through, my next novel. And by finished, I mean that it still needs to be read through before it's sent off to my editors at Gollancz, and then it has to be edited, copy-edited and proofed before it's published. And then I'll read it through again, to check for stray typos which can be corrected in the paperback edition. There's always something that slips through: in 1984: Selected Letters, Samuel R Delany describes to one correspondent the work of correcting the 17th reprint of his bestselling novel Dhalgren, and the errors he decided to let go.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The story's done; what's left are steps in a production process that turns thought into print.

Something Coming Through is set in my Jackaroo universe, first explored in several short stories.  Trickster aliens have gifted the ailing contemporary human civilisation with 15 worlds orbiting various red dwarf stars and the means to reach them. In London, Chloe Millar is searching for a troubled young man who is compulsively drawing pictures of a landscape on Mangala, one of the Jackaroo's gift worlds. On Mangala, an investigator and his novice partner become embroiled in a murder involving an ancient alien artifact. And as Chloe's search and the murder investigation draw together, it become apparent that the Jackaroo's concept of help is stranger than anyone could guess...

Fantastic Art

'There has always been fantastic art. Particularly in times of internal and external upheaval. Fantastic art has always taken up a position between the world of ideas and the real world. It reflects the tension between the two, the degree and nature of their non-congruence.'

         Hanna Höch, 1946