The Lost Innocence of UFOs

In the 1960s and early 1970s, my family's summer holiday was invariably a week in my mother's home town, Bognor Regis, on the south coast of England, where we stayed at my great-aunt's traditional seaside boarding house. When I reached my teens, the usual attractions of the beach and pier, the small zoo and boating lake, silly golf and slot machine arcades, had begun to pall. In an especially wet August in 1970, mostly trapped indoors and having read the books I'd brought with me, I joined Bognor Regis library and discovered that although its science fiction selection was disappointingly sparse, it had a solid two-shelf collection of UFO books (it also had one of the country's first computerised borrowing systems, with slotted plastic machine-readable tickets). And so, on that rainy holiday, I read my way through the lot.

There was a certain hypnotic fascination in their painstaking, trainspotterish taxonomy of UFO sightings, renderings of encounters with aliens in dull prose clogged with cliches and opaque details that failed to evoke any sense of wonder, and lengthy disquisitions on the fortune-cookie wisdom imparted to the chosen few by beings supposedly wise beyond human understanding. I once interviewed the physicist and author John Barrow, who told me that a common factor of the crank mail he received was that its authors attempted to develop a theory of everything using only schoolbook algebra. Similarly, the authors of those UFO books attempted to reduce the uncaring vastness of the cosmos to a human scale, with narratives in achingly ordinary people were chosen by aliens for revelation or experimentation, and their mundane lives were given as much weight as the descriptions of the aliens and their craft, and medical procedures somewhat less unpleasant than the real thing.

This strain of UFOlogy still persists in corners of the internet where sightings are recorded alongside images of Martian rocks that, because they look a bit like guns or coins or statues of human figures, must actually be guns, coins etc. But the cultural phenomenon of UFOs has not only diminished but mutated into something much less cozy. Stephen Spielberg captured that change in two films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET: The Extraterrestrial, in which alien intrusions into skilfully rendered domesticity are far less threatening than ruthless government agencies bent on preventing the general population from discovering the truth. Since then, UFOs have become associated with suicide cults like Heaven's Gate or the Order of the Solar Temple, and absorbed into the hot stew of millennial, mostly right-wing paranoia which aggressively promotes the belief that almost every aspect of modern life has been infiltrated by government conspiracies invisible to all but the chosen.

In its first incarnation, The X-Files embodied a version of that paranoia, suggesting that a quisling government was conspiring with hostile aliens bent on invading and colonising Earth. The new series, though, suggests that the aliens actually came in peace, and were traduced by a global conspiracy of 'über-violent ultra-fascists' planning to use stolen alien technology to mount an attack on democracy in general and America in particular. That the aliens are as much victims of a conspiracy as the rest of us is, I suppose, a slight improvement. A hopeful readjustment of the reputation of extraterrestrial intelligence. But I still miss the naive hopefulness of those old UFO books, back when aliens came here only to help.

Strange Gifts From The Gods

‘For most consumers—who learn about new technologies only when they brighten the windows of an Apple store or after they’ve already gone viral—it’s easy to imagine that technological progress is indeed dictated by a kind of divine logic; that machines are dropped into our lives on their own accord, like strange gifts from the gods.’
Meghan O’Gieblyn, As a God Might Be –Three Visions of Technological Progress

Among other things, Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere play with the long-established SF trope of ancient alien technologies that disrupt human society, get inside our heads, have agendas of their own. A trope that, like most, is really about our fear of our own future (which is why fictional futures are almost always worse than the actual future when it catches up with the present).

The smarter technology becomes, the more we lose control over it. We are not the customers of social media; we provide the data it sells to advertisers. Most of us no longer programme computers; we buy software and apps approved for use in the operating system’s walled garden. Smart phones contain smart assistants that answer our questions, but they also brick if they’re repaired with unapproved components. An NSA machine learning algorithm extracts profiles of possible terrorists from metadata gathered from mass surveillance of Pakistan’s cell phone networks, random decision forests assign scores, and profiles with the highest scores are forwarded to the CIA or the military as potential targets for drones or death squads -- theoretically, assassinations could be carried out without human intervention. The NSA program that uses that algorithm is called SKYNET.

Truly advanced technologies aspire to the condition of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monoliths. Pursuing cryptic plans of their own, changing and manipulating us in unknown, unpredictable ways. Strange gifts of the gods, indistinguishable from magic. All we can do is hope to appease them by cargo-cult ceremonies that borrow gestures and language from science. Already, many machines in daily use are imprinted with a warning that echoes the curses sometimes set on ancient Egyptian tombs: Warranty Void If Opened.

Something Coming Soon

The future of humanity is haunted. By alien ghosts.

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people.

The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.

The Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post, copies of this beautiful French translation of my novella The Choice, from Le Bélial'. I believe that publication date is February 11th. There's an ebook version too.

In other short-story news, Lightspeed Magazine have reprinted my story 'Transitional Forms', and the latest edition of Clarkesworld includes a new story, 'The Fixer', which was partly inspired by this.

Now Hear This

The paperback of Something Coming Through has been out in the world for a couple of weeks now,  and the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, will be published in a couple of months (the 21st of April, to be precise). At the same time, my publisher will be releasing unabridged audiobooks of both novels in the UK (and, I assume, the rest of the EU). So if that's how you like to take your fiction, both of them are now available for preorder - here and here, for instance. Although there are audiobook versions of some of my shorter fiction - notably in Allan Kaster's series,The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction - it's the first time any of my novels have been turned into audiobooks, so I'm somewhat excited.

Oh, and by the way, now that Something Coming Through is out in paperback, the ebook is considerably cheaper. Just saying.

You Can't Get There From Here

Like chaotic systems, novels are highly sensitive to initial conditions. But it's often a mistake to think that you can fix the one you've just started to write by reworking the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence. The initial conditions of a novel, the warm little pond where it was first nurtured, precedes the first word. The tone of the novel's narrative and the sequence of its story are shaped by decisions made before you start to write. The history of the characters and their place in history, the privileges they possess and those they lack, so on, so forth, determine what might happen to them, and the decisions and actions they make in response. Sometimes, when the novel you think you were writing starts to become something else, it's because you haven't been true to to its characters and their situation, and you can retrace your steps until you find the place where you went wrong, and start over. But sometimes the novel you're writing becomes something else because that's what it was all along. And then you have two choices: either step up to the plate and own it and have fun finding out where it takes you next, or run away and try to fix the initial conditions so they'll come out the way you want. I know which I prefer.

In Short

Charles Baxter, New York Review of Books:

O’Connor’s central idea is that the short story is a more private art than that of the novel. And its dramatis personae are of a different order: more solitary, isolated, and uncommunicative. Going out on one of several limbs, O’Connor claims that we do not identify with most short-story characters. Instead, we find in stories “a submerged population group” made up of lonely outcasts, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo….” He is thinking here of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and its central character, Akaky Akakievich, and Akaky’s distant, echoing similarity to Christ:

What Gogol has done so boldly and brilliantly is to take the mock-heroic character, the absurd little copying clerk, and impose his image over that of the crucified Jesus, so that even while we laugh we are filled with horror at the resemblance.

Allied to romance rather than realism, the short-story form, O’Connor suggests, does not provide the kind of necessary space for a writer to build up a worthy and heroic individual as novels do. Remembering an author’s stories, we therefore recall a population group and not an individual. As a consequence, what we encounter in short stories are these exemplars of various subcultures, “remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent,” a class of people who were largely invisible to us before our reading. Accordingly, the central feeling of short stories, O’Connor asserts, is that of the loneliness associated with that particular group.

The Dead

Originally posted January 2nd 2011 as My Grandmother's Photograph Album.

 

One of the memes endlessly circulating the Sargasso of the internet is that the living now outnumber the dead. It seems to be based on the exponential mathematics of the population explosion: if two people have three children, and if those children each have three children, and so on, and so on, then in only a few generations it's a mathematical inevitability that there will be more living descendants than dead ancestors.

But like too many simple ideas it has a fatal flaw: we tend to underestimate the numbers of the dead. One calculation, quoted in a debunking article published in the Scientific American, suggests that around 106 billion people have been born; since only 6 billion are currently alive, 94% of all people ever born are dead. Or as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick suggested in their foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.'

An inspection of old photograph albums confirms this simple truth. Here are the dead, in their multitudes. They are dressed in antique costumes, stand in front of new cars, hold up babies. They are often on holiday.

 

We know so little about them. Many are nameless, now. Yet they wait patiently for us.  They have plenty of time, after all. The universe is still young: a little less than 14 billion years. Whether it expires in a Big Crunch or subsides in a long Heat Death, many more billions of years stretch ahead. We'll all be dead for far longer than our pre-birth non-existence.

 'Come on in. The water's fine.'

Now In Paperback

Alien Impulses And Strange Memes

From Something Coming Through, published in paperback Thursday January 14.

The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.
 
‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’
 
There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.
 
Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.
 
Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.
 
‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth!  Uth!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different.  Uth!  Uth!’
 
Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.
 
Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking among her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.
 
Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp.

They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park.  Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.
 
This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that.  She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

We Thought He Was Saying Hello But He Was Really Saying Goodbye

Another Country

Over Christmas I read, with increasing enchantment, a lucky find in a charity shop - a 1970s Penguin edition of Mary Renault's The Bull From The Sea. Which I first read it more than forty years ago in my school library, where I also discovered the novels of The Lord of the Flies* and The Lord of the Rings. It's the sequel to Renault's The King Must Die, taking up Theseus's story after he returns from Crete and inherits a kingdom after his father, believing Theseus to be dead, commits suicide. Its first-person narrative is vivid and vital. The action -- and there's a lot of action in a story that encompasses the rise and fall of Theseus's reign -- is spare and swift:

The Kolchians kept a good watch and saw us landing, though there was no moon; but it did not give them long enough to get their goods up to the Citadel, and they left a good deal behind. We fought in the streets by the light of the burning houses; and the men of Kolchis giving way before us we caught up in the mountain road with the mule-train that had the gold.

The episodic narrative does sometimes feel that Renault is ticking off boxes as she covers the rest of her hero's life. But the storytelling, omitting everything that isn't essential and framed through Theseus's restless, pragmatic eye, is masterful and relentlessly propulsive, and with sharp economy effectively conveys a rich sense of its antique world. Not for Renault baggy descriptions of every room and every minor character, or discursive sidebars on the sewerage system of Athens or the pantheon of her Gods; instead, much of the sense of the world is conveyed through action -- by what Theseus does, or what he thinks about the people and situations he encounters, and the problems he must solve. It's a paradigmatic example of how worldbuilding serves the story, rather than vice versa. It's also (something rare these days) a story square in the tragic mode, as Theseus chases the unattainable carefree days of his youth, and loses, piece by piece, everything he loves. Not Renault's best novel, but better than almost everything else.


*The Lord of the Flies was pretty much a mandatory text in English schools at that time, but as far as I was concerned, it wasn't set at O-level, and at A-level I moved into the science stream, so was able to read it unencumbered by the feeling that I was doing some kind of work. Later, I helped to organise a showing of Peter Brook's adaptation at the school cinema club.** The teachers grew increasingly quiet and still as anarchy deepened, but perked up when the naval officer appeared.

** It was a county grammar school with the pretensions of a minor public school; I was a bright kid from a poor family who shamelessly benefited from its facilities.

And What Have I Done?

Another year over, a new one about to begin...

In 2015 I wrote, mostly. First up, a new novel, Something Coming Through, which brought together some ideas I've been working up in short stories for the past ten years or so. About the way that technology has become a cargo cult that is changing us in ways we can neither predict nor, as yet, fully understand. About what might happen if we were given free and easy travel to other planets right now. About mysteriously helpful aliens, the Jackaroo, and what happens when the Other understands you better than you understand yourself.

I finished writing a second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, in the first half of this year. It's related to Something Coming Through but works as a standalone, and is scheduled to be published in April 2016, a couple of months after the mass market paperback of Something Coming Through and a couple of months before Fairyland is reissued as a Gollancz SF Masterwork.

Also published in 2015, a big fat paperback of the Confluence trilogy, reissued with two associated stories. Some people think that it's my best work. I'm pleased to see it back in print after a long hiatus. And I turned two out-of-print novels, Players and Mind's Eye, into ebooks - Kindle only, at the moment, I'm afraid. Players is a police procedural revolving around a massively multiplayer online game. Mind's Eye is a weird thriller that moves from London to Iraq in a chase after the origin of mind-altering entoptic glyphs and the strange family history of its protagonist.

There was a smattering of non-fiction, and two short stories, 'Planet of Fear' (in Old Venus, edited by G.R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) and 'Wild Honey' (in Asimov's SF). Both have been selected for upcoming Best of the Year anthologies. I also wrote, and sold, four short stories that should see print in 2016, and I'm in the middle of writing a novel I don't want to talk about for the usual superstitious reasons, except to say that it's one I've been trying to find way of writing for some time.

Based on previous years, I could predict that I'll spend much of 2016 writing, too, but one thing I've learned from writing science fiction is that making predictions is a chancy business. Meanwhile, a Happy New Year to all who've stopped by here. Let's hope it's a good one.

Dream Logic

In the gardens of my childhood, a subdivided acre behind the row of four rented cottages, I was digging in the soft deep dirt for lugworms, usually found in the intertidal sand of beaches. I excavated one and dropped it in a plastic bag with an inch of seawater in the bottom, but abandoned the search when I uncovered a hollow chamber the size and shape of a child's balloon -- I was afraid of being attacked by the bees which I knew had made it. With the kind of narrative skip common in dreams, I noticed that the sports field next to the gardens had been dug up to reveal the salt dome beneath. Workmen were carving the white salt into a replica of the hills that rose above our little valley. So far, they'd only roughed out the contours, and created a miniature of the parish church. The tall wire mesh boundary fence was gone and big hawthorn bushes had been planted in its place, each bent like an elbow, to create the beginnings of a hedge. I walked along it, towards my childhood home. And then I woke up.

More Listing

This time, ten films from 2015 (in the UK) that I really liked, in no particular order.


Birdman (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Hard To Be A God (dir. Alexei German)

Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland)

Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller)

The Falling (dir. Carol Morely)

It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell)

The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

A Most Violent Year (dir. J.C. Chandor)

Most Disappointing Beginning To A Series: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Worst Theme Park Ever: Jurassic World

Worst/Best Punning Title: Bridge Of Spies

Most Hoo-Ha! American Sniper

Two Hours I Won't Get Back: Fantastic Four

Possibly The Best Film I Haven't Seen Yet: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

The Inevitable List Redux

A short-story collection and nine novels published this year that I enjoyed reading. Looking back, I realise that I haven't read much new science fiction, apart from short stories. I need to catch up. Three non-fiction books I especially liked were: Oliver Morton's history of climate change and geoengineering, The Planet Remade; Luc Sante's chronicle of the old, tough City of Lights, The Other Paris, and Owen Hatherley's tour of Eastern Europe and its architecture, Landscapes of Communism.

Signs Of Life

The western end of London Wall is a forbidding entry to the City of London. Brick and concrete, glass and steel buildings rise ten, twenty, thirty stories high in an elephantine fortification. One building, faced with panels the colour of Elastoplast, straddles the four-lane road, with a branch of Pizza Express suspended in its arch. Giant foghorns painted red and blue cluster in front of another. But off to one side, in the lee of the Museum of London, is a small open space where a few stretches of the old wall of London still stand. Medieval brick and stone built on Roman foundations. In an embayment there's a neatly planted herb garden, maybe three metres long and a metre across, the green shoots of narcissi showing in this warm December. And a desire path has been trampled by human feet across the grass, swerving around a bulwark as it angles towards the rectangular ponds at the rear of the Barbican.

I was there to visit the Museum of London's Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition. From which you learn that most murders don't involve unraveling clues left by meglomaniacs to taunt the police, but are manhunts for men whose violent chaotic lives have fatally intersected with their victims. 'Luckily for us, most criminals are stupid -- that's why they're criminals,' a Portland, Oregon cop once observed to me, when I accompanied him on a ride-along. One of the exhibits was what looked like a pair of child's stilts, constructed by a Victorian burglar to make fake footprints to mislead the police. He was convicted because the prints of his own shoes were found next to his false trail.

E-Anecdote

An anecdote is not necessarily a datum, and all that. So this is just an observation I found interesting. I was doing a Q&A with a university creative writing class this week, and midway through the professor asked a question of his own: how many of the students read e-books on any media, from Kindles to iPads? Out of around twenty, only three raised their hands.

The New York Times recently reported that e-book sales have fallen in the first part of this year, suggesting that the survival of printed books isn't as precarious as once thought. Certainly, those students, all of them digital natives and presumably a target audience for purveyors of e-books, prefer the printed page. It wasn't the time and place to go into any detail as to why, but for authors who, like me, are putting some or all of their back list* out as self-published e-books, it is interesting. Who is the audience? One survey suggests that e-book consumption 'seems to be a habit acquired after the age of 24.' Are we missing out on a rising generation of readers, who think that e-books are no substitute for printed books, which don't need expensive devices to read them, and can be bought cheaply secondhand?


*See the blog's sidebar for links to short stories, short story collections, and two novels that fell out of print.

Meta-Miracle

I saw a 35mm print of Tarkovsky's Stalker a few weeks ago, deep in the mazy bowels of the Barbican Centre. Based on the novella Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Strugasky, its narrative follows a stalker who guides two clients through the forbidden Zone, an area imprinted by some unspecified event, to a room that is said to grant the true desires of those who enter it. Not their spoken, conscious wishes or ambitions, but something much more dangerous: their heart's desire. It's a slow-paced meditative film that leaves the interpretation of much of its dreamlike story and images to the viewer, and like a dream its atmosphere clings to you for some while afterwards. Whenever I think of the wretched Stalker, who keeps returning to the Zone even though it has made a ruin of his life, I'm reminded of a couple of lines from T.H. White's The Once and Future King (also, amongst other things, the story of a quest): 'The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. And ever, says Mallory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.'

Proof Of Life

NED

A little over five years ago I was told that I had bowel cancer. This was in in an office half-full of broken furniture and with a view of a weedy car park, the former site of the Odeon and Paramount cinema. A conjunction of bathos and cheap symbolism that would be rightly edited out of any fiction. Five years on, the office, the building it was in, and the car park, are all gone. Erased by redevelopment. Five years on, after major surgery, seven months of chemotherapy and a small nervous collapse manifesting mostly in anxiety attacks, I'm still here. And I've just been told that my latest and hopefully last CT scan has shown no trace of the disease. Five years on, I'm not cured, because there is as yet no way of determining that a cancer patient is entirely free of cancer cells. But I am no longer in remission. I am, prosaically, inelegantly, happily, NED -- No Evidence of Disease.

For which I am of course, immensely grateful. To the NHS, and the staff of University College Hospital London, where I was treated. To my steadfast partner, and everyone who offered condolences and support. To all, again, thank you.

But after a brief surge of elation at the good news, in which, yes, the world did look more vivid and significant, as if leaving the cinema after watching a terrific and involving film, life resumes. Partly, this is because someone close to me is currently undergoing treatment for cancer. So cancer is still a very large part of my everyday life. But also because while having cancer is life-changing, no doubt, life goes on anyway. Other stuff insists on happening. The world inconsiderately does not pay full attention to you, and you are not continually bathed in the glorious light of revelation. Which is probably just as well, as it sounds awfully tiring.

But you are, of course, abruptly confronted with your own mortality, and the stark realisation that part of your body, that marvelous intricate communal cooperative which you've mostly taken for granted, has rebelled. Cells have regressed to an embryonic state. They are no longer cooperating. Instead, all they want to do is feed and divide. And given the chance, they will continue divide and spread until that marvelous cooperative collapses. They are so greedy for life that they don't care that their greed will kill you, and kill them too.

That knowledge is a continual low level dread, and the needling reminder that comes at odd moments in the day, and lies with you, unsleeping, at night: remember, you have cancer. And often it seems the other way around, a version of the old Russian joke. You don't have cancer. Cancer has you.

There are two narratives imposed on cancer patients by much of the media. There's the foot soldier in war against cancer, bravely battling the odds. And there's the stoic saint bravely facing her looming unavoidable fate. But if treating cancer is a battle, the patients aren't the foot soldiers. They're the battlefield. And while most of us would all like to aspire to the condition of sainthood, only some of us achieve it.

So, I was no foot soldier. I was a battleground. And, regrettably, I was no saint, either. I had a few low-key and somewhat sentimental and commonplace Damascene moments. I was privileged to witness the ability of my fellow patients to endure with dignity and humour (there's no darker humour than the humour of the chemo ward) the various indignities and travails of treatment. But mostly I tried to get on with my life, which meant that I continued to write books and stories and articles, travel when I could, pay the gas bills, so on, so forth. And maybe it was a selfish or unimaginative way of dealing with the situation, but hey. It mostly worked for me.

Five years on, then, I'm no longer a patient, but I am not cured. There is no cure. I am NED. I am still subject to survivorship statistics, although the odds have increased massively in my favour. Five years ago, my odds of surviving the next five years -- staying alive with or without evidence of cancer in my body -- were about 60%. Now, because most recurrences of cancer happen within five years of the original treatment, my odds of surviving the next five years are little different to those of everyone my age who hasn't had cancer.

That needling little reminder hasn't yet fallen silent. I doubt that it ever will. But it's now in the past tense. It no longer says, remember, you have cancer. It says instead remember, you had cancer. It's no longer a warning. It's a valediction.

The View From My Window Today

Low afternoon sunlight and leaf colour in London.

Upcoming, In Black And White

Two different views of life after the coming of the Jackaroo, those willfully enigmatic aliens who are here to help. Whatever that means.

First up, the paperback cover for Something Coming Through, scheduled for publication in January next year. Second, the cover for Into Everywhere, due out in March 2016. Just the draft version at the moment, but it can be found elsewhere in the internet so I thought I'd throw it up here.

More later, you bet.

Continuum

In the purest kind of science fiction, the characters are in service to the story, and the story, whether it's about exploring alien megastructures (Rendezvous With Rama) or dramatising the unforgiving nature of orbital dynamics ('The Cold Equations'), is strung on a spine of actual or extrapolated science. But the pure quill of so-called hard sf quickly shades into fictions with more human concerns which respect the scientific spirit but have a focus that's elsewhere. That may be more interested in changes in society driven by science and technology, and the moral dilemmas those changes create, than in the actual science. And that in turn shades into the kind of sf in which science, or the vocabulary of science, or science's angle of attack, is used to illustrate a moral dilemma or some aspect of the human condition present in the actual world. The kind of story that has begun to dominate the Hugo Awards; the kind of story that this year's iteration of the Sad Puppy group railed against. John Cho's 'The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere', for instance, or Rachel Swirsky's 'If You were a Dinosaur, My Love'. Humanist stories that appear to be the antithesis of hard sf, yet in fact respect the scientific rational and central importance of science in our culture as much as the purest, hardest hard sf. Stories that, like hard sf stories, are informed by the time in which they were written, for although scientific verities secured by empiric evidence may be immutable, the culture of science, because it's a human construct, is not.There's no us v. them. No central core that must be defended from impure outsiders. It's a continuum.

A Thing I Should Have Mentioned Earlier...

I'm taking part in the Gollancz Festival at Waterstone's London Piccadilly branch today, along with a small horde of other authors. It's sold out, but if you're coming along don't forget to bring or buy something for me to sign.

In other news, I appear to be working on a new novel. And I've sold a Jackaroo short story, 'Something Happened Here, But We Don't Know What It Was', to tor.com. It'll be published in summer next year. My short-story mojo has made a slight return. Not sure where it has been, but I'm glad that it's back and hope that it will stick around so I can do something with a few more ideas that have fallen on me in the past year. Paraphrasing John  Updike, writing short stories is like playing in the waves off a lovely beach; writing novels is like striking out across a choppy sea with no clear destination in sight.

The Martian

Not so much a review as a series of thoughts, so ... mild spoiler alert.

There have been stories about astronauts stranded on Mars before, of course. Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon, Rex Gordon's novel No Man Friday, and the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars have all turned on various kinds of Martian shipwreck (and one of the characters in my novel The Secret of Life refused to leave the home she'd made on Mars when offered the chance of rescue). But The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and based on the novel by Andy Weir, brings a couple of new ideas to the game.

It's a film whose beats are snaps of inspiration and the appliance of science. Unlike Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian doesn't dramatise the effects of solitude and the continual struggle for survival on its lone protagonist. Like his departed colleagues, who left him behind in the confusion of a dust storm, the stranded astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is a scientist, come to Mars not to fight monsters or set up a hotdog stand or moon about ancient crystal cities, but to do science. And he goes about the business of survival in a thoroughly intelligent, rational and convincing way, confronting each problem and sciencing the shit out of it. As on Mars, so on Earth. Once they realise that Watney is alive, NASA scientists and engineers begin to devise a way to rescue him, and like him they must work with what they have, within the immovable limitations of physics and orbital mechanics. As in Apollo 13, the ticking clocks of dwindling resources and orbital windows drive the drama; unlike Apollo 13, there are few glimpses of the hinterlands or interior lives of its protagonists. Its gaze is not unsympathetic, but is cool and vast, more comfortable with technical details than messy human lives.

That same gaze pans across vast panoramas of Mars as we now know it from the camera eyes of spacecraft in orbit and rovers and robot landers. Views from high above showing Watney driving across vast desolations in a Mars buggy are resonant with the Romantic sublime: the works of man lost in the enormous emptiness of nature. There's a wonderful Martian sunset, and a nice shot showing Watney sitting on a rocky ridge and looking out across the ochre landscape: part of a short passage in which in which, in a rare moment of introspection, he reflects that everywhere he goes is new territory, his every footprint the first.

Despite the film's claim to verisimilitude, there are, inevitably, compromises made for dramatic purposes. The dust storm that kicks off the story is far more violent than any possible in Mars's thin atmosphere; Watney recovers an actual probe that landed near the landing site of his fictional expedition by digging it out of an unlikely dune, presumably deposited by similar storms. I appreciate the dramatic reason -- the excavation nicely parallels the unveiling of its Earthbound twin in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory warehouse -- but it misses an opportunity to show Watney finding it by navigating the rocky landscape where it actually landed, and which it extensively and famously imaged. Likewise, the region where he's stranded, Acidalia Planitia, contains some fantastic geology -- outflow channels where ancient floods have modified the landscape; tens of thousands of mounds that might be extinct mud volcanoes; huge boulder fields and areas of shattered blocks -- but while an actual expedition to the region would most definitely science the shit out them, they're never mentioned in the film. A pity, I think, as they could have been used to give a sense of Mars as a place with its own deep dynamic history.

But the film is after all called The Martian, not Mars. And its story of tribulation and dogged survival, of the triumph of one man's will, and of human ingenuity and cooperation, is upliftingly optimistic. No wonder, despite a subplot that depicts technicians outwitting NASA politicians, the agency has thrown its weight behind it. It not only shows us how it would be for humans to walk on Mars; it's also a hymn to the space industry's scientific and technical capability, and to the spirit of exploration.

News From Pluto

'If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top, but that’s what is actually there.' Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator

Hard To Be A God

Back in 1975, in a review of Thomas M. Disch's collection Getting Into Death, M. John Harrison highlighted a passage in one story, 'The Asian Shore', and excoriatingly compared its uncompromising realism with the airless constructions and frictionless problems and discourse of much contemporary SF. In the story, an American recently moved to Istanbul, haunted by an identity crisis, crosses the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city and comes across a boy crying by a public fountain. It's winter. The boy has been sent to collect water in two buckets, but he is shod in plastic slippers with a thong that must be grasped by the first and second toes. When he tries to walk, freezing water slops onto his feet, his numb toes lose his grip, and he cannot keep his slippers on. He can't leave them behind, and he can't leave the water buckets, either. But as far as the story's non-Turkish-speaking protagonist is concerned, the worst of it is the horror of his own helplessness:

He could not go up to the boy and ask him where he lived, lift him and carry him -- he was so small -- to his home. Nor could he scold the child's parents for having sent him out on this errand without proper shoes or winter clothes. He could not even take up the buckets and have the child lead him to his home. For each of these possibilities demanded that he be able to speak to the boy, and this he could not do.

Harrison's explication of that passage made a huge impression on me at the time; as far as I was concerned, it epitomised the division between genre science fiction and the ambitions of the New Wave. And I was strongly reminded of it while watching Aleksei German's film Hard To Be a God, just released on Blu-ray in the UK.

An adaptation of Arkady and Bros Strugatsky's science fiction novel, it's an epic drama the director planned over four decades, spent a dozen years making, and did not live to complete  -- the final post-production work was carried out by by his widow and his son. Filmed in black and white, it's set on an alien planet whose people and history are much like our own, except that its nascent Renaissance has been snuffed out by the persecution of intellectuals and artists by a violent sect, the Greys. Its inhabitants are imprisoned by squalor, violence and meaningless ritual. Crumbling buildings are swept by seething rain or muffled by fog, and mired in glutinous lakes of mud and shit through which everyone must struggle on their daily rounds.

The film's densely imagined, claustrophobic world is depicted in crowded, busy scenes that deliberately echo the paintings of Breugel pere and fils, and Heironymus Bosch (many of the extras were chosen for their resemblance to characters in their work), and the restless camera not only immerses the viewer in the action but also becomes a character in the film. Passers-by often turn to address it with complaints or knowing looks; it roves with a kind of avid detachment over faces and animals, corpses and atrocities, peers under tables or into corners of rooms while elsewhere something else is always going on. Passages are reminiscent of the films of Terry Gilliam (especially Jabberwocky), Sergei Eistenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and Elim Klimov's World War 2 masterpiece Come and See, but the sheer density of its world-building and its unblinking documentation of human folly and degradation are arresting, exhausting, and wholly unique.

This universal misery is watched and recorded by a small group of anthropologists from Earth. The film's narrative, recounted in elliptical episodes, centers on one of them, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), who masquerades as a swordfighter descended from a local god. We are never shown the spaceship that brought him and his colleagues to this backward world, but he wears a crystal camera eye, his sword can effortlessly cut through armour, he plays jazz on a complicated clarinet, and affects an ironic detachment. He cuts off the ears of his enemies rather than killing them, and insists on a plentiful supply of hot water and white linen to set himself apart from the grimy, stinking locals, but gradually becomes mired in a struggle between the Greys and a rival sect, and an intricate sequence of betrayals. He wants to do good, but doesn't know how. He wants to stay aloof, but is forced to take violent action to defend himself. And it slowly becomes clear that his seprior powers can have no effect on the dead-end of the planet's civilisation: remove the Greys, and another sect will take its place; kill all the noblemen, and others equally violent and corrupt will take their place.

The parallels between the fantastical world of this compassionate, compelling, witty, intelligent film and our own are obvious; the contrast with much contemporary science fiction, with its super heroes, worlds designed to reward their protagonists, and simplistic morality plays, is as strong as it was forty years ago.

Cover Reveal

Science Friction

In the early 1970s, Samuel R. Delany and his ex-wife Marilyn Hacker edited four volumes of a little magazine, Quark. Original short stories and poetry. Speculative fiction. New Wave experiments in inner space. Stories by Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Joanna Russ, M John Harrison, Kate Wilhelm. An early piece by Christopher Priest. Cool stuff, and a nice little cross-section of science fiction at a certain node in its history. I have the first two volumes, and after a few years of failing to spot the other two at dealers' tables at SF conventions (not that I was looking very hard), I took the search online. A book dealer in New Jersey had a nice copy of Quark 3 at a keen price. I ordered and paid for it, he packaged and dispatched it . . . and somewhere between New Jersey and London, it went astray.

Translating an impulse into an order on some merchant's web page and arranging the paperless transfer of credit is largely friction free, apart from the mediation of touch pad or keyboard. But pressing the virtual BUY button sets in train a hugely complex set of processes in the physical world, involving two different postal services and two sets of customs, at least one air freight company and one of its planes and the plane's crew, a trans-Atlantic flight, various air traffic control systems, two airports . . . The kind of stuff glimpsed at the edges of the narrative of Castaway; the infrastructure hymned in John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay's Aerotropolis. We think about it when we shop online about as much as we think of abattoirs when we order a hamburger, which is to say hardly at all. Until something goes wrong, and the friction of actual things moving through the actual world makes itself known. And something did go wrong, in transit, with the copy of Quark 3 I ordered. I never did get the book, but because the transport system tracks objects via their unique codes I was able to find out that that it reached my local sorting office, which tried twice to deliver it . . . to a house number one digit different to mine.

It's a very twenty-first century experience, this kind of futile omnipotence: you can see where things went wrong, but only when it's too late to do anything about it. You have the information, but you can't use it to solve the problem because although the system allows you to be an observer, it doesn't allow you to be an agent. I know, because the bookseller kept a scan of the postage label, that the address was correct when he consigned the book to the maw of the machine. And I know that somewhere, somehow, the address changed. Perhaps either US or UK customs opened the package to check it, and slapped on a new label with a miskeyed address. Perhaps the label was subtly damaged, a smudge or rip changing the last digit of the house number from 8 to 9. Maybe, like the fly that falls into a teletype printer at the beginning of Brazil, and changes the name Tuttle to Buttle, there was an actual bug in the machine. In any case, no one was in on the two occasions, two weeks apart, when the postman tried to deliver the book to the wrong address. While-you-were-out cards were left, addressed to me; presumably, the home owner shrugged and threw them away. And when no one came to collect the book after the second delivery attempt, the sorting office sent it off to the depot that handles international mail, so that it could be returned to sender.

I know the dates of the attempted deliveries, and the date of return, but after that the trail goes cold. A month has passed. The book hasn't yet come back to the bookseller. I hope it does. It was - I hope it still is - a nice clean copy of a paperback more than forty years old. I wouldn't like to think that my stupid impulse to buy it consigned it like some hapless hero to a journey with no clear destination or way back; that the frictionless scratch of a little itch of desire, a momentary impulse that crossed the Atlantic at the speed of electricity, has been the undoing of a fragile innocent little memento of history and imagination.

Status Update

I've now consigned the much-scribbled-on copy-edited manuscript of Into Everywhere to my long-suffering editor. Into his actual hands, after I tramped through London's implacable August weather, enough rain that it was as if the waters of a new creation &tc, to Gollancz's new offices. Where I was told, at the front desk, that they don't accept packages, presumably because it's the twenty-first century, and it's all infopipes now. But however you deliver it, there's always a feeling that you haven't finished the novel so much as abandoned it -- even though you know that there comes a point where actual improvement gives way to mere tinkering, it's hard to tell, when you've been working on something so closely for so long, where that point actually is. Next up, in the march from vague notion to thingnicity: proofs and cover art. I've seen a cover rough already, and it looks rather good.

Meanwhile, I've sold two stories, one of which, will be my hundredth in print, more or less.* One, 'Rats Dream of the Future', to Asimov's Science Fiction; the other, 'Elves of Antarctica' to an anthology of original stories about climate change, Drowned Worlds, Wild Shores, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Not so much science fiction that last; not any more.



__________
*because amongst other things I'm counting two collaborations with Kim Newman

So Long, Dione

Although it was fairly flat compared to Iapetus, and lacked impressively large features like Tethys’s Ithica Chasma, or Rhea’s two great multi-ringed impact basins, Dione’s moonscapes were nevertheless highly differentiated. Satellite surveys and a century of exploration had not yet exhausted them; gypsy prospectors like Karyl could make a living from searching out volcanic deposits of phosphates and nitrates and sulphates, veins of breciated carbonaceous chondrite material from cometary impacts, and the remains of stony or iron meteorites.

It was a lonely life, sure, and often frustrating, with long dry spells when strike after strike uncovered nothing useful. But like all gamblers, the occasional reward drove him ever onward across Dione’s cratered plains and smooth plains, through the troughs and labyrinthine badlands. Sometimes, especially late in the afternoon, with low sunlight mingling with Saturn’s pastel glow and the moonscape curving away on every side glowing like beaten bronze and everything casting two shadows, one short and one long, like the hands of an old-fashioned clock, Karyl’s heart lifted and turned on a flood of happiness, as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed, the only witness to Dione’s pure, bleak, uncanny beauty.

Words from 'Karyl's War', Stories From The Quiet War.
Images from Cassini's last close encounter with Saturn's moon Dione, August 17, 2015. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

Confluence Paperback

Published today: the hefty paperback edition of the reissued omnibus of the Confluence trilogy. Three novels and two related stories; 935 pages. As it says on the back:

Confluence - a long, narrow, man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. A world served by countless machines, inhabited by by ten thousand bloodlines who worship their absent creators.

This is the home of Yama, destined to become a clerk until the discovery of his singular ancestry. For Yama appears to be the last remaining sion of the Builders, able to control the secret machineries of the world.

Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and discover if he is to be its saviour, or its nemesis.

Two Men Looking For U.N.C.L.E.

Another day, another film that's the origin story of an old franchise rebooted for a new generation. But unlike Fantastic Four, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is an action film that instead of footling around with the laborious construction of a Macguffin delivers what's expected of it from the outset. In Cold War Berlin (Kennedy's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech is on the TV, so it's 1963), CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB operative Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) duel over East German car mechanic Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), daughter of a missing atomic scientist (Udo, not the actual atomic scientist Edward). But when their bosses realise that Gaby's father is building a nuclear weapon for a gang of fascists, Solo and Kuryakin are forced to work together, helping Gaby to find her father and infiltrate the fascist organisation.

The story is a nod to the central trope of the TV series, where innocents routinely became entangled with Solo and Kuryakin's espionage underworld. The odd-couple pairing between suave former art thief Solo, and Kuryakin, a by-the-rule-book strongman with severe anger management issues, is enlivened Gaby's presence - from the outset it's made clear that she has her own particular skill-set, and she gets the best of Kuryakin in their flirtatious exchanges. Elizabeth Debicki is a fine villain, by turns smouldering and icy, the mostly Italian settings burst with sumptuous colour, the costumes are achingly stylish, the soundtrack is punchy, and Guy Ritchie directs the action setpieces with the style he honed on his two Sherlock Holmes films. It's very much an homage to period action films rather than a knowing pastiche.

It's unfortunate, then, that the chemistry between the two male leads doesn't quite gel. Exchanges meant to be snappy too often fall flat; Cavill's Solo is a little too ponderous (and his American drawl is startlingly similar to Christian Bale's in American Psycho - I kept expecting him to break into a short disquisition about the merits of Burt Bacharach). Hugh Grant, as a deceptively bumbling British spy chief, gets the better of both of male leads; Alicia Vikander's nimble and witty turn as Gaby outclasses them all. And because the film concentrates on how Solo and Kuryakin met and why U.N.C.L.E. was set up, the actual plot, with its chases and confrontations with playboy villains, ex-Nazis, double agents and atomic weaponry, is somewhat exiguous and implausible. It's understandable, I guess, that the setup of a fifty-year-old TV series needs to be explained to its young core audience (the film also gives a quick, clever reprise of the basics of the Cold War in its opening credits, and later illustrates the essentials of the Second World War - Adolph Hitler had a hand in it, apparently), but it's something that the original The Man From U.N.C.L.E. neither bothered with nor needed. An entertaining caper, lovely to look at, but one that left me wishing that it had spent more time on plot than setup, and found a better balance of substance and style.

New York, New York

Fantastic Four

I didn't have any great expectations when I saw a preview showing of Fantastic Four a couple of days ago, so at least I wasn't disappointed. A reboot of the 2005 film, apparently made so that Fox could hang on to the franchise, it makes some radical changes to the origin story of Marvel's first superhero team: Reed Richards, supergenius elastic man; Sue Storm, with the ability to become invisible and generate force fields; Johnny Storm, human torch; Ben Grimm, stone-clad golem. But none of the changes are improvements, and the film fails to weld together three different narrative sections into a coherent whole. It starts with a slice of Spielbergian wonder as schoolboy Reed hooks up with Ben while searching for an essential component for his teleportation device; then jumps forward a few years when Reed is recruited to a hothouse academy and falls for Sue Storm; and finally takes a turn into grimdark territory after the teleporter accesses the weird energies of an alter Earth, and transforms the four heroes and the villain (as in the comics, helpfully called Victor Von Doom).

The major problem is that this version of the Fantastic Four's origin story isn't as much fun as the original, in which Reed developed an interstellar spaceship that ran into trouble as soon as it left Earth, exposing Reed, Ben Grimm (who was piloting it) and Reed's fiance Sue and her brother Johnny to the radiation of the Van Allen belts. The 2005 film was a variation on this - exposure to cosmic radiation on Reed's privately-owned space station. In both, Reed's wealth gave them independence and allowed them to become celebrity heroes: having superpowers could be troublesome (especially for Ben Grimm, with the world's worst skin problem), and the four squabbled and fell out in the way all families do, but on the whole being one of the team was pretty swell.

Not so much in the new version (and here, I guess, mild SPOILERS), where the transformation doesn't happen until more than halfway through the film, and the four nascent superheroes become pawns of the military-industrial complex. Despite the lead actors' best efforts to breathe life into their characters, it's a disjointed mess, focusing on construction of the plot MacGuffin and gloomy moral quandaries at the expense of the bits where the superheroes strut their stuff and the crucial annealing of the four as a team. If only it would put an end to the formulaic origin story - hero gets power, fights villain they've accidentally created, establishes franchise identity - repeated across original film treatments and reboots. But it probably won't even succeed in that.

Comet Dirt

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR

It looks, someone responded when I posted the above to Twitter, like my back yard. It's actually the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, taken from a distance of nine metres by the Philae lander, at the very end of its descent after being released by the Rosetta comet chaser. The lander failed to anchor itself and in the comet's feeble gravity bounced off the surface several times, ending up wedged in the shadow of a low cliff. Without enough sunlight falling on its solar panels the little lander went into sleep mode after its battery power ran down, but recently woke again because the intensity of sunlight has increased as the comet makes its closest approach to the sun. A short while ago it transmitted a fat batch of data, just published, including that close-up of its first, very temporary landing site. Which does, yes, look like a patch of garden dirt. Or maybe the hardcore of a building-site car park. Or the surface of Mars, or of the Moon. Which either suggests (if you hate the idea of space exploration) that travel to other planets is a waste of time, or (if, like me, you geek out on planetary science) says something interesting about the universality of dirt. That there are similar geological processes on comets and planets that grind bedrock fine, and with the aid of gravity and wind (or the eruptive jets of comets) distribute the material in a more or less even blanket. That a comet isn't a simple ball of ice, but possesses dirt and boulders, cliffs with mass-wasted talus slopes, and even what look like rippled dunes.

But even outwith the fact that it's part of the rind of a comet, the dirt in the image isn't ordinary dirt, of course. It's mostly water ice. Pebbles and shards and grains of water ice frozen hard as rock, leavened with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ices, and tainted with a variety of toxic chemicals - hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide, sulphur dioxide, carbon disulphide, formaldehyde, methyl isocyanate, acetone, propionaldehyde, acetamide . . . 'If you could smell the comet, you would probably wish that you hadn't,' as one of the Rosetta team wrote in the project's blog. But in that poisonous cocktail are compounds that probably played key roles in Earth's ancient prebiotic chemistry. You couldn't grow flowers in comet dirt (although if you were one of the Quiet War's Outers, you might seed a comet like this with vacuum organisms that would mine useful organics), yet it contains the stuff of life: stuff that may have seeded the Earth with necessary precursors. That patch of comet dirt is a reminder of where we came from.

A Very Pure Form Of Hunting

‘I’m not a hunter,’ Summer said, ‘but isn’t a crossbow an unusual choice of weapon?’

‘It’s a very pure form of hunting – you only get the chance of one shot, so you must make absolutely sure that it is the kill-shot. You say you are not a hunter, but isn’t that why you are here?’

Dirk Merrit was amused, and seemed to believe that he was in complete control.

Summer said, ‘Maybe you could show me the crossbow. The one you used to kill the cougar.’

Both Denise and Dirk Merrit looked at her. Then the man turned and walked around the central fireplace to a set of tall glass-fronted cabinets. He opened a door, lifted out a crossbow, and carried it back to where Summer and Denise stood. It was bigger than Summer had expected, modern and very definitely lethal, with a pistol grip and a skeletal stock. Dirk Merrit rested it on his forearm, explained that the bow part was called the prod and the prod was attached to the table or deck, that both the prod and the deck were made out of carbon-fibre composite, the weapon had a draw weight of one hundred fifty pounds and loosed a twenty-inch arrow at a velocity of two hundred feet per second.

‘You can attach a telescopic sight, but I never use one. The lethal range is less than a hundred yards, and I prefer to get as close as possible. I admit to being something of a purist. For instance, I use a goatsfoot lever rather than a powered winder to draw the string.’

Dirk Merrit explained that the arrow generally killed someone not by shock but by massive haemorrhage, so it was necessary for the marksman to have a good working knowledge of the anatomy of his prey, and to be able to think in three dimensions when placing his shot.

‘You might say that it is not so much a shot as a lethal incision.’

Summer said, ‘Someone?’

Dirk Merrit stared at her and she stared right back. The air between them seemed to hum. On the TV behind him, the Mad Max warrior was hacking his way through tangles of creepers that were more or less the same colour as Dirk Merit’s blood-capped eyes.

Summer said, ‘You said “someone”, not “something”.’

‘Mmmm. Did you know that it’s forbidden by Papal edict to use the crossbow against Christians?’

‘Are you saying that you only shoot Muslims, Mr Merrit?’

‘If I did, I’d hardly be likely to tell you, would I? Even in the current political climate.’

His smile was back in place, but he seemed wary now, no longer the master of his domain.

From Players

Farewell, Fantastic Pluto

I am older than the space age, although not by much. I was only a toddler when Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, was too young to take any notice of the news about Yuri Gagarin's path-breaking orbital flight four years later. But I have a very clear memory of seeing, on the black-and-white television set the teacher brought into the classroom of Selsley Primary School for the occasion, images of the Moon's surface transmitted by the robot craft Surveyor 1 after its soft landing on the Ocean of Storms. That was on June 2, 1966. A little over three years later I was woken by my mother in the middle of a summer night to see Neil Armstrong make his historic first step. I remember the images captured by Pioneer 10 as it sped through Jupiter's system, Viking 1's first glimpse of Mars's rock-strewn surface, the softly tinted picture of a frozen beach sent from Titan by the little Huygens lander. And a few days ago I watched on the same screen that I'm now typing this, via NASA TV's internet channel, the presentation of the first high resolution images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft. Less than sixty years after Sputnik the first era of solar system exploration is over . . .

More over at Strange Horizons.

Paper Work

Although I was doing some basic computer programming back in the early 1980s and bought my first desktop computer back in 1984, using it to write my second novel and finding that word processing was a huge improvement over working on my old electric typewriter, so on, so forth, I'm not a digital native. Didn't grow up with computers, let alone the internet; can't contribute anything to the debates about Scrivener v. Ulysses; still use notebooks for research and stray ideas, and scrap paper to unravel and re-ravel tricky sentences, jot down notes about the next day's work and for general doodling. And still find it tricky to copy edit and proof manuscripts on the screen, which is why, thanks to the patient tolerance of my editor, I'm currently working through the copy edit of Into Everywhere on an old-school printed manuscript with pencilled mark-up. Rereading the novel on actual pages reveals infelicities that somehow weren't apparent when working on various drafts on screen. And there's something satisfying about using pen, pencil and eraser to make changes, rather than fiddling with Microsoft Word's accursed change tracking system: something more immediate than tapping on keys. Something more like work. Perhaps because, not being a digital native, I still locate work in the real world. In the scratch of pen on paper, the flow of ink, the wobbly pressure of an eraser as it removes pencil marks. Also, and this is crucial, there's a definite shift in perception when I'm leaning over the page and looking down instead of looking straight ahead. It's somehow more engaging, makes it easier to displace the blooming buzzing confusion of the rest of the world, and tracking sentences word by word with the point of a pen instead of following a cursor sets up a rhythm that refines my concentration in a different way. Engages different muscles; different neural pathways. Maybe those pathways were laid down in the years I spent writing stuff down instead of looking at screens and tapping keys; maybe they're a hardwired response to a different perspective. Try it and see.

A Big Box Of Big Paperbacks

Advance copies of the Confluence paperback. Three novels. Two stories. One fat book.

Aviles, Spain