Our Fictionless Futures

Last week, my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, asked a question on Twitter: ‘Can anyone think of an SFnal future that has an explicit reference in it to that future's own SF?’ A few of us responded, mostly referencing alternate history novels nested within alternate history novels; it was Malcolm Edwards who pointed out that Vernor Vinge’s Tatja Grimm’s World featured a mobile publishing house that, as it turned from producing fantasy to science fiction, helped to bootstrap its own civilisation. Tatja Grimm’s World was first published in 1969. More than forty years later, examples of science fiction in fictional futures are still rare.

As Walter John Williams pointed out in his blog, just a month earlier, ‘For almost the entire history of science fiction, the one thing you would never find in a science fiction novel was, well, science fiction. Every person in a science fiction story behaved as if science fiction itself was never invented.’ There are a fair few depictions of science-fiction novelists in science fiction set in the present: Kurt Vonnegut’s recurring character, the hack SF author Kilgore Trout, is probably the best known example; in Barry Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, an SF author finds himself in his imaginary future; an SF author tours and escapes Hell in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno; a failed SF author, after surviving burial by remaindered copies of his novel during an earthquake, helps save a remnant of humanity in the disasterous disaster flick 2012 (although more by his driving skills than any deep knowledge of SF tropes); the hero of Walter John William’s cyber-thrillers This Is Not A Game and Deep State is not only a former SF writer but also an RPG gamer. And so on.

But in the futures it has made its own, SF itself appears to have died out. Worse, the novel itself appears to have died out, too. There are poets (Rydra Wong in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17; the Kid in Dahlgren); musicians (the touring orchestra in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness; the discorporating singers in Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song; any number of revived/cloned rock stars); painters (the evolving robot artist in Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Zima Blue’); and sculptors (J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’), but precious few far-future novelists. The only one I can call to mind is Katin Crawford, the moon-fixated perpetual student in Delany’s Nova, who wants to revive the lost art of the novel and after endless false starts finds his subject matter in the adventure on which he embarks, and writes the novel you, the reader, hold in your hand (although doesn’t that make it a memoir?). I’m sure there are other examples, but on the whole, writers of fiction about the future don’t believe that written fiction will survive into the future, even as eBooks. In The Quiet War, I hinted that novels had been rolled up into immersive role-playing sagas, but even RPGs and their descendants may have a limited shelf-life: Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, features an obscure cult that’s preserved otherwise forgotten archaic computer games. It seems that as far as SF writers are concerned, the future is inimical to fiction of any kind ...

Starships

I've been thinking about Luca Zanier's fantastic series of photographs of places of power ever since I came across them, via Mrs Deane. With their hyperrealistic lighting and perfectly framed compositions, they look like outtakes from unmade or unknown Kubrick movies.  They also look like, I've just realised, starship control rooms.

Changing course in a starship would be a rare, momentous, and potentially catastrophic action.  Everyone aboard would participate - if only to watch.  There would be no need for panels with buttons and blinking lights.  The 23rd Century equivalent of iPads would take care of that. But one thing Star Trek definitely got right: you'd need a space where people could gather to discuss what to do, and to watch the biggest and best HDTV screen you could buy.  Of course, any reality-based starship design would probably be a compact tincan stuffed with AI, genetic codes, and templates for machines that could build machines that could build habitats and creches (or bigger, better AIs).  But in an ideal imaginary case, there'd be something this:

A Sense Of Yearning For A Future That We All Knew Would Never Come To Pass

My interest in pop music came late in my teenage years, long after I began to devour every SF novel I could find. We had more books than singles or LPs in the house: the singles were my sisters, the LPs my mother’s small collection of film soundtracks. My grandmother, who lived next door in the 1930s, had an old windup 78 player set in a cabinet, with one of those recurved horns that acted as a loudspeaker. There was Top of the Pops, which everyone seemed to watch in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the enforced jolliness and restricted playlist of Radio 1, and the pirate radio stations my sister chased across the dial of our radiogram, and that was about it until one day in 1972 I bought my first LP: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders for Mars (I still have it). It was SF; it was a concept album with a proper narrative arc; I played it to death.

I’m still a fan of Bowie. Bowie in his 70's pomp, at least. And every since Jack Womack pointed me to it, I’ve been following the track by track story of his career on the blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. It recently reached one of my all-time favourite Bowie songs, “Heroes”, anatomising both the song and the circumstances of its creation in wonderfully acute detail. Even if you’re not especially interested in “Heroes”, or David Bowie, it’s worth reading for its insights into the creative process. Here’s the important stuff that’s often left out of creative writing courses. Starting from scraps of discarded material. Pulling the structure together using a mixture of technique and improvisation and use of found material. Finishing it in a final burst of inspiration (or desperation). All of this at least as important as any planning; all of it following instinct rather than agreement on what's allowable.  Sure, studio recording is a collaborative effort, but Bowie is at the centre, and very often, especially during the Long March of writing a novel, even before your editor becomes involved, isn't writing is a collaboration - a dialogue with your past selves?

Robert Johnson

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Soon

 Coming to Kindle next month...

Table of Contents:

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

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

How It Works For Me

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

Clickety-Clack

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

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

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


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

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

(A)temporality

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

Peter Ackroyd, London Under

Gollancz SF At Fifty

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

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

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

From My Red Left Hand

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

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

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

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

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

How To Write A Generic SF Novel

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

Another Day, Another Interview

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

Supermoon/Magnolia/London

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (10)

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



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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairyland

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

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

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

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

Reference

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

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

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

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

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

Where does he get his ideas?

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

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

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

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

In The Mouth Of The Whale

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

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

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

Learning To Love The Alien

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

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

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

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

Debatable Zones

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

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

Edgelands: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts