Hear This

Recently received, and now available for purchase from Infinivox, a 3 CD collection of unabridged readings of 'Mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction':

'Last Contact' by Stephen Baxter
'The Something-Dreaming Game' by Elizabeth Bear
'Grandma' by Carol Emshwiller
'Lambing Season' by Molly Gloss
'None So Blind' by Joe Haldeman
'Kin' by Bruce McAllister
'Gene Wars' by Paul J McAuley
'Bright Red Star' by Bud Sparhawk
'Far As You Can Go' by Greg van Eekhout

Editor Allan Kaster tells me that he's podcasting some of the stories; you can find them by poking around in his blog ('Kin' is up right now).

Life's A Beach

It’s fun, if a bit dizzying, trying to write a novel that’s partly set on various moons of Saturn while all kinds of new discoveries are beamed back by Cassini. The latest confirms what we more or less knew - that the flat, radar-reflective bodies at Titan’s poles were almost certainly lakes of liquid ethane and methane - but it’s a most excellent discovery nonetheless. Especially as evaporation of the lake during summer at Titan’s south pole has created a beach. Hmmm....

Googled

So there I was, walking along a street in my neighbourhood, minding my own business, when a black Opel Vectra with a tall camera-laden pole sticking up from its roof went past: one of the infamous camera cars that Google is presently using, somewhat controversially, to photograph streets in major cities in Europe for Google Earth. After a brief moment of existential confusion, I remembered that I was carrying my little digital camera - but I was too late. The all-seeing eye had moved on. I had missed my chance to photograph Google photographing me. Other people have been more successful, and those scamps at the Register have made a neat mashup of Google Maps and sightings of their cars - including one getting a parking ticket.

Assuming Google uses the footage they shot today, if you check out in the near future Thornhill Road, London, N1, I’m the harrassed-looking middle-aged guy in the blue shirt and dark glasses.

If you want an alternative to Google Earth, by the way, try this wiki.

Light Of Other Days

From the family archives, here’s a photograph of the aquatic dodgems in Hotham Park, Bognor Regis. That’s my uncle nearest the camera, with an unidentified friend at the helm. They’re about to be rammed, in slow motion, by the boat coming in on the left. Note the lack of safety straps, life jackets or any other kind of protection apart from the rubber bumper wrapped round the coffin-like hulls of the doughty little motorboats. We were a tougher lot, back then.

The photograph was obviously taken from another boat, with a tilt that gives it a lovely sense of dynamic motion. Looking at it, I have a sense memory of a rainbow sheen on soupy green water, the tang of the blue haze of burnt petrol that hung over the little lake, and the frustrating lag between turning the steering wheel and winning any change in direction - a fine practical lesson in Newton's laws of motion.

90% Perspiration

My family weren’t so poor that we had to eat cold gravel of a morning, but we certainly couldn’t afford to have a summer holiday every year. And when we did go on holiday, it was to stay with our great-aunt, who ran a boarding house in Bognor Regis (a semi-detached Edwardian villa at 25 Canada Grove, it’s now part of a residential care home, so it goes). British readers will know that Bognor has a certain reputation, courtesy of a century of day-trippers, Butlins, and King George V’s infamous death-bed comment. He’d already been to Bognor to recover from a serious illness in the bracing sea air, and was grateful enough to allow it to add ‘Regis’ to its name. But when he fell ill for the final time, and one of his doctors expressed the hope that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor again, he raised himself up and pronounced the phrase that’s stuck to the town ever since: ‘Bugger Bognor.’

But in the 1960s I could find little to fault. There was the promenade, and the sandy beaches, with little tidepools full of mysterious life. There was the pier, not then truncated by a storm, complete with theatre, candy-floss stalls, and a slot-machine arcade that featured a laughing sailor that scared the bejeesus out of me. There was the boating pond for toy boats, and there was Hotham Park, which had one of the smallest zoos in the world (I seem to remember the most exotic animal was a porcupine), a Crazy Golf course, the other boating pond equipped with motor boats got up as dodgem cars, and later on, an extensive miniature railway. There was also a pretty good library, one of the first in Britain to boast a computerised catalogue, where one thundery August I read something like fifty UFO books.

Those were the days.

Although I liked Bognor well enough, I never really caught the holiday habit. When I was at university, I worked in the summer to stay solvent, didn’t have time for a holiday while working for my Ph.D, and then treated trips to academic conferences as holidays (don’t feel sorry for me; one year I visited South Carolina and Hawaii, stopping off at Los Angeles in between, and returning via the WorldCon in Chicago).

All of which is preamble to the fact that this year, it doesn’t look like I’ll have time for a holiday, what with being halfway through the second draft of the ongoing, which is due to be delivered in October, not to mention expecting at any moment the proofs of The Quiet War. Hey, but it’s still the best job in the world . . .

PS Unlikely Worlds Trufact: James Joyce got married to Nora Barnacle in Bognor.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

In the latest Guardian book review pages, Alastair Campbell, former Commissar of Communication for Tony Blair, seems to think that book reviews shouldn’t be about the book you’re reviewing, but about what the book has to do with you. Reviewing Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Campbell writes:

I did have a plan to run 50 miles on my 50th birthday last year but a cycling injury to my calf - like Murakami, I also do triathlon - grounded me. Now, also like him, my running is accompanied by constant worries about aging, reflected in ever slower times.

He is in a different class to me, as runner and novelist, and throughout he gives the sense that he cannot be one without being the other. He has done 25 marathons and written 11 novels. I have done one marathon and written two novels . . .

And so, and so on, in a clumsy and mix of competitive envy and vain-glorious boasting. Pooter lives.

Meanwhile, in the same pages, M. John Harrison shows you how it’s done, framing the territory the book in question appears to inhabit, before getting under its hood and finding out what it’s really made of:

The post-disaster story has a deep ambivalence about the worth of that which has been lost. Its traditional purpose is to defamiliarise the world we know, and express our two worst fears: that the built environment will collapse, leaving us without material support; or - worse - that it won’t, saddling us in perpetuity with everything we hate about it, from office work to shampoo ads. Its purpose is to deliver a little frisson. So it’s clear from the off, then, that Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work, though it appears to take place in the same querulous psychic space as, say, I am Legend or Survivors, isn’t a post-disaster story at all.

I confess to having a blind spot for Julian Barnes’s novels, but his introduction to a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters is very fine indeed, from the opening self-deprecatory anecdote about his first encounter with Fitzgerald, to his sharp observations of how novels and novelists work, and the special qualities of Fitzgerald’s writing:

Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when the material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

And:

[Fitzgerald] didn’t like to offend: on one occasion she went to vote, and as she left the polling station, ‘to my disgust the Conservative lady outside snatched away my card, saying - I’m only taking ours, dear - I didn’t like to say I was Liberal for fear of hurting her feelings - she had put a nice green hat on and everything - I often see her in church.’

That ‘nice green hat’ is a pure writer’s touch...

I have to say that I think the condescending ‘dear’ is a nicely vivid stab at fixing a character, too. And thanks to Harrison and Barnes, I have more books to add to my reading list . . .

James Who?

Kim Newman reviews a Filipino mashup of Batman and Bond.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Porte

There are fewer windows than it seems in the trumpe l’oeil frontage of Pollack’s Toy Museum on Scala Street, not far from Newman Passage. You can read more about it in Peter Ashley’s London Peculiars, a great compendium of photographs and prose about ‘curiosities in a capital city.’ Pollack’s Toy Museum, maintaining the tradition of the toy theatre, belongs to the class of little magic shops, old-fashioned one-off emporia that give cities and towns a touch of wonderful, unexpected eccentricity. A couple of other personal favourites are the Algerian Coffee Shop and Gerry’s Wines and Spirits, both on Old Compton Street. Any other suggestions?

A Little Light Research

As everyone knows, you can’t trust everything on the Internet. But it does hold all kinds of treasures for the working author in need of a quick fact fix. Like fabulous pictures. And maps of other worlds. My latest discovery is this neat little solar system clock that shows the positions of the planets at any given time. Forward the outer planet view to 2225 AD to find out what my characters have to deal with in the ongoing (it’s an applet, so if you want to check it out you’ll need Java).

Now some people might think that making sure that all the planets are lined up in their correct position is taking research a little too far. Especially as my characters are buzzing about the Solar System on ships powered by fusion motors that haven’t yet been invented. Could it be that I’m taking this hard SF lark a mite too seriously?

Well, maybe. But the fusion motor is a convention -- shorthand for some kind of advanced space technology if not yet realisable is at least possible. And it doesn’t mean that my characters are able to buzz about at impossible speeds, so that means that not only does the Solar System still seem like a big, roomy place, but the relative position of the planets they’re travelling between is important. And since that’s important to my characters, it means it’s important for me to try to get it right, or at least to hint at the problems this may causes interplanetary travellers every now and then. Besides, while I’m not above stretching the odd fact or two if they get in the way of the story, in this case the relative positions of the planets have helped me to focus on the direction of the narrative. Sometimes this research lark pays off.

I was going to write something about The Dark Knight, but work intervened over the weekend, and it seems a bit pointless to contribute to the deluge of opinion and comment and sheer hype on the net and elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I liked it a lot, and it certainly delivers the film we were promised at the end of Batman Begins, when the Batman turns over a card to reveal it’s the joker. It isn’t the best film every made, and it certainly isn’t as good as Godfather 2, but it’s a fine large-scale Hollywood action film, although very dark and very grim, but hey, in these times maybe we get the Hollywood action films we deserve. Christopher Nolan has done a great job in bringing the franchise bang up to date, dropping the gothic noir in favour of a technothriller sheen. The bank robbery in the opening five minutes is a worthy homage to Michael Mann, the master of technothriller films: William Fitchner, who plays the shotgun-toting bank manager, played crooked financier Roger Van Zant in Michael Mann’s Heat. Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is full of malign energy, twisting like a snake on a punji stick, winning the iconic moment competition when, dressed as a nurse, he walks away from an exploding hospital. Christian Bale is forced to act with nothing much more than his chin when he’s in Batman gear, but he’s grimly elegant as Bruce Wayne, and does a great bit of truck fu. Forget the critical gabble about how the film repositions our ideas of heroes and heroism; although it does attempt to say something about how far you can go when trying to protect citizens without losing sight of what you’re protecting in the first place, it fudges the issue with a get-out clause that may work as a plot twist, but doesn’t hold water in the real world. And besides, the kinetics of action films means that it’s impossible to maintain any kind of serious dialogue or examination about any kind of issue. And this is a seriously kinetic bit of film-making: if it’s spectacle you want, it definitely delivers.

There Are Doors (7)

Located in Newman Passage, a narrow dogleg between Newman Street and Rathbone Street in Fitzrovia, this door has been much spruced up since a prostitute led Carl Boehm’s murderous photographer through it at the beginning of Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom.

It leads now into the Newman Arms pub, which connects us back to the previous entry in this erratic little series, for during the war George Orwell used to drink here while working for the BBC. Back then, the pub didn’t have a spirits license so it served only beer; Orwell used it as the model for the pub in 1984 where Winston Smith tries and fails to learn about life before the Revolution from an old prole. And as mentioned before, my friend Kim Newman’s grandmother typed up the manuscript of 1984 . . .

Spectacle In Search Of A Story

Down into London town (where developers seems intent on narrowing every pavement to half its normal size, leading to Bladerunner-style pedestrian jams) to see a preview of Hellboy II The Golden Army. Which, as long as you accept it for what it is, is a decent enough couple of hours entertainment. What it is, of course, is a comic book film with great art design, some decent acting, and an exiguous find-the-coupons plot. Or rather, plot coupon: namely the third portion of a crown that, when reassembled, enables the wearer to command an army of indestructible soldiers created on the order of an Elf king in the long ago, and which an Elf prince now wants to control so that he can get his revenge on the perfidious human race who’ve destroyed his forests. Or something along those lines. The supernatural equivalent of the FBI - the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense - gets wind of the prince’s plot when an auction house is overrun by ravenous tooth fairies when it puts one of the parts of the crown under the hammer, and Hellboy steps in to clean up the mess.


Ron Perlman is once again perfectly fine as an ordinary working schmoe who just happens to be the red-skinned spawn of the Devil with an indestructible stone fist, and is ably supported by pyrokinetic girlfriend (Selma Blair), newtboy with a brain the size of a planet (Doug Jones, replacing David Hyde-Pierce) and their hapless boss (the great Jeffrey Tambor, twitchily anxious to do right by his superiors). There's also Teutonic smoke-in-a-suit new guy Johann Krauss, basically a couple of actors taking turns in a steampunk diving suit, voiced by Seth McFarlane. Director Guillermo del Torro and his design team create a couple of zoos’ worth of weird creatures, notably in a densely populated Goblin Market. There’s also a very fine sequence right at the beginning that uses puppets to set up the plot, framed as a bedtime story read to a young Hellboy by John Hurt, briefly returning as his kindly mentor.

So far, so good. But between the noisy and nicely choreographed action sequences there’s not much story, and the narration proceeds by a series of awkward jerks. Since there’s only one plot coupon to be scooped up by the prince, the second act is padded out with a couple of romance sub-plots that don’t quite dovetail with the rest of the movie, there are an awful lot of plot holes and seen-it-coming-in-the-first-reel twists, the usual ordinary people don’t understand superheroes schtick, and the dreaded golden army don’t really get to show its stuff. But it does the business, there are touches of fin de siecle sadness that play nicely against Hellboy’s truculent, wisecracking noir hero, and it’s crammed with del Torro’s trademark weirdness. Now here’s a director who’d be a perfect fit to direct a film version of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. Now there's a story.

Tomorrow: The Dark Knight.

True Names

I'm now pretty sure that the title of the ongoing project, which is kinda sorta a sequel to The Quiet War, is The Gardens of the Sun. Of course, my publishers may well disagree, for all kinds of appropriate reasons, but as far as I'm concerned that's its true name, just as the true name of Cowboy Angels is Look For America. Like most writers, I feel that names have secret powers.

Night of the Lepus

More animal bioterror. I wonder if the crazed rabbit was in contact with the kamikaze ducks...

Rabbit contaminated water supply
Pitsford reservoir
Water supplies were declared safe on 4 July

A rabbit has been named as the cause of a sickness bug which was found in water supplies in Northamptonshire.

Customers in 100,000 homes were told by Anglian Water to boil tap water for up to 10 days after the Cryptosporidium outbreak on 25 June.

The firm said a rabbit gaining access to the treatment process led to the bug at Pitsford Treatment works.

The Happening World

Foul play or kamikaze attempt to create world's lamest metaphor?

Okay, I admit it: I've gone slightly stir crazy, stuck in front of a screen attempting to hack my way into the second draft of the ongoing and generally behaving like one of its characters, holed up in a refuge in a hostile environment. But I think I have the first part nailed, and the sun appears to be shining outside . . .

Yes, But What Are They Saying About Us?

From Science Daily:

When it comes to cellular communication networks, a primitive single-celled microbe that answers to the name of Monosiga brevicollis has a leg up on animals composed of billions of cells. It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered...

...With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear? "We don't have a clue!" says Manning, "but this discovery is the first step in finding out."

'More elaborate and diverse than any multicellular organism' including us, I guess. Hmm, maybe Greg Bear's idea that prokaryotes are the secret rulers of Earth (in Vitals) isn't so far-out after all...

Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

‘. . . there are moments when a soul released from its cave of flesh will speed towards a mortal mind as it lies entranced in sleep, will curl across its surface, frothing, like waves across a beach, touching its tenderest parts and causing dreams to rise from its depths, like the bubbles of burrowing clams. And we awake, knowing we have been touched by something beautiful,whose beauty we shall never understand, knowing only that we have been witnesses to its inexpressible passing. We call her name, if we can remember it, and ask her to remain a moment longer, only a moment. But already she is gone.’

The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch 1940 - 2008

There are tributes from people who knew him here, here, and here. Go read his books, and his stories. Read The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song. Read the stories collected in Getting Into Death and Fundamental Disch. He was a damn fine writer. He was one of the writers who meant a lot to me when I was a lonely teenage sci-fi geek in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Update: Daily Kos has posted a fine memorial essay.

Evolution Strikes Back

A little while back, I mentioned Carl Zimmer's marvelous book, Microcosm, which uses research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli to illuminate every aspect of the new biology. One chapter was given over to discussion of the work of the team led by Dr Richard Lenski. One of Lenski's papers, showing evolution of a new trait by E. coli (the ability to grow on citrate) in laboratory conditions, attracted the attention of Richard Schlafly, the right-wing Christian activist who runs Conservapedia. Schlafly demanded Lenski's data, resulting in the following illuminating exchange, documented on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site, in which a closed mind meets a surgical strike.

(Link via Roz Kaveny and John Crowley.)

(By the way, it's instructive to follow the open-minded scientists link on Conservapedia's page about Lenski. Hmm. I thought those guys didn't like to be called Creationists any more, preferring the less contentious 'supporters of intelligent design'.)

Spaced

Out today, issue 217 of Interzone, which includes my story 'Little Lost Robot' (aka the big space robot story) as well as stories by Karen Fishler, Paul Tremblay, MK Hobson, Suzanne Palmer and Jason Sandford.

I was going to write something about WALL-E, which I saw last Sunday, but a bit of Googling will reveal a myriad indepth reviews. So I’ll just say that the first forty minutes is one of the best bits of SF cinema I’ve ever seen. The candy-coloured satire of the second half is less successful (and contains a gaping plot hole) but the odd-couple romance between the infinitely curious and engaging WALL-E and the advanced probe EVE carries the day, with a definitive Tinkerbell moment that had the small children in the audience gripped. Increasingly, SFX-rich movies seem pointlessly noisy and frenetic*; WALL-E shows how the same tools can be used in a rich and painterly fashion.

*mind you, the first five minutes of the new Batman movie look great.

Current reading: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

And Junot Diaz has an excellent take on the sandbox game where I’m spending rather too much time shooting cops, mafia hoods and flying rats.

Relocation, Relocation

Stick a dome over this proposed design for a sustainable hotel in Shanghai and imagine it in a crater on Dione or Iapetus...

Shake And Bake

First wet chemistry results from the Phoenix Lander shows that Martian soil is highly alkaline, and definitely interacted with liquid water at some point. The water isn't a surprise, but the alkalinity is - a lot of people thought that Martian soil would be highly acidic and, without being extensively modified, inimicable to plant life. Instead, according to the lead chemist, in one of those quotes that the media loves, you might be able to grow asparagus in it. Yeah, but think of the shipping cost and the carbon footprint.

(Lunar soil, by the way, is suitable for marigolds.)