Players - 6

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

‘Have you remembered anything more about him?’

Before driving to the Farrells’ house Summer had phoned around Portland’s five precincts in case Edie Collier’s boyfriend had reported her missing, but she’d had no luck.

Randy Farrell said, ‘I saw them together once, by accident. I was on the floor above them in the Lloyd Center, looking to buy something for Lucinda’s birthday. I saw Edie with some young guy outside the multiplex there.’

‘Did you get a good look at him?’

‘When I spotted them, like I said, I was on the floor above. By the time I had ridden down on the escalator, they’d split. Went to see a movie, I guess.’ Randy Farrell was quiet for a moment. Summer glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He was looking at something inside his head and the corners of his mouth were turned down. Saying at last, ‘I just realized that was the last time I saw her.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two weeks ago to the day. I got Lucinda a crystal dolphin. She loves shit like that. Edie didn’t even send a card, I’m sorry to say.’

‘That was the only time you saw Edie’s boyfriend?’

‘If the guy she was with was her boyfriend, yeah.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I didn’t really get to look at him.’

‘Well, was he white or black?’

‘White.’

‘How old would you say?’

‘I guess about Edie’s age. Maybe a little older, it’s hard to say.’

‘Edie was eighteen.’

‘Nineteen next month.’

‘So this boyfriend, Billy no-last-name, was eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Maybe a little older. I didn’t get a real good look.’

‘How tall was he?’

‘I was pretty far away.’

‘Taller than Edie? Shorter?’

‘Maybe a head taller. He had black hair, too, shoulder length.’

‘What he was wearing?’

‘Jeans, I think. Blue jeans. And a big plaid shirt, some kids wear them like a coat over their T-shirt? Like that. And he had a briefcase too. Apart from that, he looked like any of those kids who hang around Pioneer Square.’

‘What kind of briefcase?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it metal or leather?’

Randy Farrell thought for a moment. ‘I guess it was more like one of those cases you carry those small computers in. You know, with a shoulder strap.’

‘A laptop computer case.’

‘I guess.’

‘Did you get a look at his face?’

‘I only saw him from behind.’

‘Shoulder-length black hair, blue jeans, a plaid shirt. And a computer case.’ It wasn’t much, but it was something. There couldn’t be too many street kids who lugged around a laptop computer - or, at least, its case.

Randy Farrell said, ‘Edie told me they were in love. She showed me this cheap ring he bought her. Way she talked you could see she thought he was Mr Wonderful, but don’t you guys say that in a murder case the first suspect is the one nearest the victim?’

‘I don’t have an opinion one way or another, Mr Farrell. It isn’t my case.’

Snakes On A Plane

Kim Newman has to see it on the day of release because there are no press shows; how could I resist the invitation to tag along? Along with the usual ads and trailers the presage the main feature, there’s one of those short films for Orange mobiles in which a star makes a pitch that’s derided by a committee of movie execs interested only in product placement. This time the star is Steven Seagal, and the piece is snappily directed and packed with sharp one-liners and neat parodies on action movie tropes. In short, it’s everything that the main feature aspires to be. The set-up is famously simple. Brutal Hawaiian gangster Eddie Kim wants to get rid of a witness (Wolf Creek’s Nathan Phillips) to his slaying of a public defender, and arranges for a big crate full of venomous snakes and equipped with a timer release to be placed on the 747 in which the witness, under the protection of Samuel L. Jackson’s FBI agent, is flying to Los Angeles. The snakes are released and people start dying as the 747 lumbers into a tropical storm. The mayhem on the plane is fine, there are some good jokes and shocks, air stewardess Julianna Margulies is a nice foil to Samuel L. Jackson’s cool, and of course there’s the famous line added after the webstorm of publicity. But the movie can’t make up its mind whether it’s a spam-in-a-cabin slasher or an Airplane!, the snakes, mostly very obviously CGI’d, are a pretty monotonous multi-headed enemy that doesn’t do much but snap and lunge, a promising sub-plot with a rogue snake farmer is dismissed too quickly, and the action sags for about twenty minutes before picking up for a slum-dunk ending. Snakes On A Plane doesn’t live up to its hype (what movie could?), but it could have been a lot worse than it is, and at ninety minutes it definitely doesn't outstay its welcome.

Here's Kim's pithier review.

Players - 5

It was a straight shot down the I-5, through the Willamette Valley to the beginning of Oregon’s banana belt. It started to rain soon after they set out, but forty miles south of Portland the sun broke through, lighting up a ragged chasm in the clouds, probing farmland on either side of the freeway with slanting fingers of light. Randy Farrell spent the first part of the trip zoned out in the back seat of the Police Bureau Taurus, waking only when Summer turned off the I-5 at Springfield for a pit stop at a Wendy’s. After picking over his plain burger and fries, he disappeared into the men’s room. Ten minutes later, Summer went to look for him and found him out back by a Dumpster, sucking on the last half-inch of a tightly rolled joint.

‘I’m licensed to use it,’ he said, giving her a defiant look. ‘It helps control the nausea I get after I eat. You don’t believe me, I have a registration card my doctor gave me.’

‘I don’t need to see your card, Mr Farrell. I’ll wait by the car until you’ve finished, but don’t be too long.’

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

The Hearts of Conspiracy Theorists Everywhere Quicken

According to Sky News, NASA has lost the original footage of man's first steps on the moon.

Playlist

After seeing the picture of my office that I posted here, Fred Kiesche asked me about the CDs lined up above my computer - what are they, and do I listen to them while I work? Mostly, like the fat wedge of Steely Dan, they’re the overspill from the groaning shelves downstairs in the living room, leavened with a bunch of recent arrivals - stuff by The Handsome Family, Richmond Fontaine, Drive-By Truckers, Ali Farka Toure, Roy Harper, Lokua Kanza, reggae compilations... Pretty mainstream stuff, really (the racks of 1920s and 1930s American music are all downstairs).

I don’t listen to much music when I’m doing the first draft, but having familiar stuff on random play on the computer helps rhythm and flow of the endless redrafting (it has to be familiar stuff, so it works mostly on my back brain). The older I get, the less distraction I can tolerate.

Some of my novels have a soundtrack; some don’t. Players doesn’t, because I think that using musical preferences as a short-hand for characterization in thrillers is a bit of a tired cliche - and too often it’s a form of showing-off by the author too.* I suspect that if Summer Ziegler listens to anything, it would be jazz-lite solo singer stuff; she certainly doesn’t slump down in an easy chair at the end of the day and sip bonded bourbon while listening to Dock Boggs.

*I know, I know: I'm guilty of it in Whole Wide World, but the punk thing is supposed to be part of John's voice rather than a quirky character tic. Honest.

On the other hand, Cowboy Angels, which was partly inspired by the idea of the lost, weird America Greil Marcus wrote about in Lost Republic does have a soundtrack. Here it is (the songs on it are either name-checked or hinted at in the text, and appear in narrative order):

Man Gave Names To All The Animals - Bob Dylan
Hook And Line - Hatton Brothers
Acony Bell - Gillian Welch
Kentucky Avenue - Tom Waits
Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention
Wolf Among Wolves - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
America - Simon & Garfunkel
Romance in Durango - Bob Dylan
Cold Cold Cold - The Handsome Family
Lost in the Flood - Bruce Springsteen
I See A Darkness - Johnny Cash
Slow Train Coming - Bob Dylan
I Dream A Highway - Gillian Welch
Train Song - Tom Waits

The McLuhan Test

Professor John Sutherland, in an article in the Guardian Review, passes on Marshall McLuhan’s simple but sage advice on how to decide whether or not a novel is worth buying. All you have to do is open the book at page 69 and read it; if you like that page, you’ll like the book.

In that spirit, here’s page 69 from the paperback edition of Mind’s Eye. I hope you like it. (More extracts from Players are in the pipeline, by the way, but I can't guarantee which will contain the material that will appear on page 69 of the finished book. )

5.

Harriet’s instructions took her to the edge of the London A-Z, to Enfield and a small café in the middle of a short row of shops hunched in the thunder and diesel wind of the A10's busy dual carriageway. Her handler, Jack Nicholl, had arranged the meeting with an MI5 agent, Susan Blackmore, and an informer in the Kurdish community. ‘She’ll be very protective of the guy,’ Jack Nicholl had said. ‘If anything looks funny to her, she’ll blow the meet and I won’t be able to fix you up with another. So be cool, and do everything she asks.’

Harriet allowed Susan Blackmore to pat her down in the café’s toilet. The MI5 agent searched Harriet’s handbag and confiscated her mobile phone for the duration.

‘If I see any sign that my man is going to be followed, I’ll call this off at once,’ she said.
‘I understand.’

‘And I’ll also call it off if I think someone is eavesdropping, using a video camera, or taking photographs.’

‘You don’t have to worry -- ’

‘And I will sit in while you talk with him. That’s not negotiable.’

‘Of course.’

Harriet bought two coffees and followed Susan Blackmore to a table outside the café. The MI5 agent was in her late twenties, only a year or two older than Harriet. She wore her mouse-brown hair in a ponytail pulled back

That Was Then, This Is Now

In these troubled times, when even toothpaste is a suspect substance, it’s far harder to practice do-it-your-self rocketry. How innocent we were, back then, in the Cold War, how innocent.

Rocket Boy

A little while after my tunnelling exploits, I discovered chemistry. One of my chemistry teachers had worked in an explosives research laboratory during the Second World War, and showed us how to make thermite, what happened when you dropped potassium metal into water, and why it isn’t a good idea to hit lead azide with a hammer. And in those days (back when there was still a space race), you could go to a chemist’s shop and buy strips of magnesium, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, aluminium powder, both kinds of iron oxide . . .

And then there was the mix of a certain weedkiller (now outlawed) and sugar that formed a junior but potent version of thermite. With a length of guttering as a Fireball XL5 style launch pad, lightly modified plastic bottles, and my weedkiller/sugar mix, I was in the rocket business. Some of the rocket bottles flew a surprising distance; one certainly surprised me by shooting about a hundred feet into the air in a graceful arc that carried it over the brook into a trash pile in the yard of the blast furnace. Like Wernher von Braun, I had aimed for the stars, but hit a civilian target instead. Luckily the small fire that the burning rocket bottle started went out before I had to wade across the brook to deal with it. Even more luckily, I still have all my fingers and thumbs; the only souvenir of my rocketry experiments is a small oval scar at the base of my right thumb.

Talk Is Free

I had to turn off comments for a while because a spambot fell in love with this blog. I think it has gone somewhere else now, so comments are back on. If you're interested, that is.

Dig This

The story of the tunnelling exploits of the Hackney Mole reminds me of my brief childhood career of making trenches and tunnels that invariably collapsed after only a couple of feet. Although I was inspired by stories of British soldiers digging their way out of German prisoner-of-war camps, I failed to pay sufficient attention to the technical details of props and linings. Besides, it was easier to carve mazes out of the abundant stands of stinging nettles that grew under the apple and pear trees of our little orchard, or to build camps from sticks and willow branches on the tiny island in the wide shallow pond at the bottom of the disused lock.

I grew up in the third of a row of four Elizabethan cottages in the little community of Dudbridge, a couple of miles from the Cotswold town of Stroud. To the front we had a view of a factory; to one side was the factory’s sports ground and to the other, across a brook, a small blast furnace; and at the rear was the pond where the brook ran into the old disused canal, and the prospect of countryside beyond. The cottages were each no more than three rooms stacked one on the other with a kitchen and bathroom tacked onto the back, but the acre of gardens behind them were a generous playground, and at a very early age I was allowed to roam farther afield, and expend my considerable energy in the tracks and hollows and abandoned quarries of Selsley Common.

Children are natural guerrillas, and the many of the books I read as a child - Just William books, the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons, Wind in the Willows, and Lord of the Flies - acknowledged this. I hope there are equivalent adventures in contemporary children’s books, but the few I have read were either examples of urban realism dealing with ‘issues’, or full-blown fantasy. Are there any that treat children as creatures whose natural behaviour is much more like that of Ratty and Mole and Badger (there is no better example of a den than Badger’s home in the Wild Wood) than the contemporary idea of children as miniature, unfallen, unformed adults?

Going Underground

I moved to London ten years ago, and very nearly bought a ground-floor flat opposite a derelict house that was owned by the famous Hackney Mole. Oddly, the estate agent didn’t mention at the time that with only a little excavation I could have had access to the Mole’s underground empire.

Players 3

On the way to confront his boss, to find out just how badly the man had screwed up while he’d been away, Carl Kelley came across one of the security guards in the trophy room. The guy had no right or reason to be there. A computerized system allowed or denied residents, guests, visitors and employees access to different parts of the mansion’s towers and outbuildings according to codes in the electronic bracelets everyone had to wear. The security guards who manned the main gate and patrolled the perimeter of the estate were allowed into the gatehouse, the kitchens and the staff dining room, that was it, but here was the new guy who’d started work just last week, Frank Wilson, wandering around a room reserved only for those with the highest privilege rating.

The trophy room took up much of the ground floor of the main tower: adobe walls hung with the heads of cougars and antelope and pronghorn deer; leather armchairs, low tables and zebra-skin rugs scattered around the central open-hearth fireplace, with its platform of rough stone and its copper hood that was as big as the vent of a Moon rocket. Carl stood just beyond the open door, a wiry middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and black cargo pants, an athletic bag slung over one shoulder. The security guard, Wilson, was bending to look at things in low alcoves, leaning close to things on shelves, turning now as Carl walked across the room towards him

‘This is some place, huh?’ Wilson said, with a quick, false smile.

‘I hope you didn’t touch anything,’ Carl said. ‘It takes for ever to reset the system.’

Each collectable and piece of art was tagged with an RFID chip, a little printed circuit that sent out a coded signal when pulsed with a specific radio frequency. It was possible to bring up a virtual schematic of any room in the mansion and see the pieces standing in place like chess pieces on a board. If anything was moved by so much as an inch, its icon would turn red and started blinking; if it was carried off, the computer would lock down doors and trigger the alarms.

‘I was just looking, is all,’ Wilson said. He was a good six inches taller than Carl, and wore a light blue shirt with black epaulettes that matched his pants. A nightstick, a radio and a five-cell flashlight were hooked to his belt.

Carl said, giving it right back to him, ‘Did you see anything that took your fancy?’

‘I bet you’re wondering how I got in here. What happened, I was checking the lights along the driveway,’ Wilson said. He pulled a voltage tester from the back pocket of his pants and showed it to Carl. A pair of eights was tattooed on the knuckles of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. ‘Maybe you noticed some of them haven’t been coming on when they should. Anyhow, I saw the main door was open, I thought I should check it out, and I found the door to this room open too.’

Carl said, ‘It’s a funny thing, but the main door wasn’t open just now.’

‘I guess I must have shut it when I came in,’ Wilson said.

The man was still smiling, but something had hardened in his gaze. It took Carl back to the army, and to the orphanage before that. Two guys sizing each other up, neither ready to back down.

He said, ‘That door won’t open for anyone who isn’t supposed to be here. I got to be somewhere, but first I’ll have to let you out.’

He let Frank Wilson walk ahead of him, across the trophy room and through the doorway into the double-height foyer beyond, the man looking left and right, checking out the stuff in glass-fronted steel cabinets, in niches cut into the pink adobe. Pieces of Japanese armour mixed up with scratch-built fantasy pieces. Cases of knives and knuckledusters. Human skulls modified with sagittal crests, fangs, bony spines or frills. Stairs curved to the left and right, and high above hung a kind of chandelier of welded steel and a couple of dozen TVs, old-fashioned cathode-ray tubes without casings, circuit boards and bundles of wires open to the air, the TVs facing in different directions, showing different scenes from Trans, the computer game that had paid for all this.

Wilson said, ‘He sure has a lot of stuff. Like a museum, uh?’

‘This is my favourite piece,’ Carl said, stepping over to a niche under the sweep of the left-hand staircase, where a ceremonial sword rested on two pieces of black oak, its curved blade pulled halfway out of its red lacquered scabbard, a red tassel hanging at the end of its pommel. ‘It’s Korean, three centuries old.’

‘It’s nice,’ Wilson said without any enthusiasm, clearly wanting to get out of there now.

Carl said, ‘They used it for executions. I tried it out myself once, on a dog. Sliced through the neck-bones like they were butter.’

Players 2

Before driving over to the Southeast Precinct, Summer had checked out Edie’s stepfather, Randy Farrell, on the computer, and confirmed her suspicion that he had a record. White male, black hair, brown eyes. Five foot seven, one hundred forty pounds -- not a big guy, but he had thirty pounds and a couple of inches on her. His D.O.B. made him fifty-four years old. No scars or other identifying marks, no FBI number . . . Most of his crimes were minor -- housebreaking, receiving or attempting to sell stolen goods -- and he’d been given plenty of second chances or through plea agreements had received probation instead of jail time, which made Summer suspect that he was some detective’s confidential informant. But he’d served time in the gladiatorial arena of state prison at Salem after having been convicted of conspiracy to rob, and with no less than three charges of assault to his name it looked as if he was quick to use his fists. She remembered that he’d sat right behind his stepdaughter in the courtroom, arms folded across the front of his denim jacket, hair lacquered back from his temples, sucking on a permanently sour expression; remembered how he’d bulled up to her in the busy corridor outside the courtroom after Edie Collier had been sentenced, asking her how she liked sending a young girl to jail, turning on his heel and stomping off after she’d advised him to take it up with the judge. Randy Farrell’s wife, Edie Collier’s mother, had a record of violence, too: threatening behaviour and several charges of assault, including one on a high-school teacher that had gotten her a year’s probation, plus one charge of public drunkenness and three DUIs; her driver’s licence had been suspended after the last, two months ago.

Anticipating trouble, Summer was happy to have Laura at her back as she walked up to the bungalow. It was dusk now. Lights were burning in a couple of the bungalow’s windows, but Summer had to lean on the doorbell for more than a minute before she saw movement behind the three stepped panes of frosted glass in the front door. When it opened, Summer straightened her back and held up her badge, saw from the corner of her eye Laura move her right hand towards the Glock holstered on her hip. But the man who stood in the doorway was a skinny scarecrow, barefoot in a dressing gown that hung open over a T-shirt and boxer shorts, his face sallow and sunken and sporting the makings of a black eye. It took Summer a long moment to recognize in this ruin the man she’d faced down outside the courtroom just six months ago.

He stared at Summer without seeming to recognize her, stared at Laura, and said, ‘Whatever you’re selling, I don’t need it.’

Summer asked if she could speak with his wife.

‘What kind of trouble has she gotten herself into now?’

‘She isn’t in any trouble that I know of, Mr Farrell. Could you have her come to the door?’

‘Lucinda ain’t in any fit state to talk to the police. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’
‘It’s about her daughter, Mr Farrell. If she can’t come to the door, you should let us in. We need to talk with her.’

The man’s attitude, a junkyard dog defending its turf, evaporated. ‘This is about Edie? What happened? Is she hurt, in hospital somewhere?’

‘Let us in, Mr Farrell. We need to talk to your wife.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Randy Farrell said, and closed his eyes for a moment.

Laura said, ‘We don’t want to talk about this out here, Mr Farrell, in full view of your neighbours, and I’m sure you don’t want to either. So why don’t we go inside?’

‘I guess,’ Randy Farrell said, standing aside. ‘But I should warn you, Lucinda’s more than half in the bag, and she ain’t taking prisoners.’

Summer and Laura followed him down a narrow hall stacked with cardboard cartons. The air was hot and close, and stank of cigarette smoke and greasy cooking.

‘In there,’ Randy Farrell said, with a wave of a hand towards an archway filled with the flicker of TV light.

Lucinda Farrell slumped on a plastic-covered couch, a blown-up bear of a woman in a pink sweatshirt and grey sweatpants, clutching a tall glass half-full of icecubes to her bosom as she watched Oprah on the big TV across the room. A fifth of vodka, a gallon jug of orange juice, a washing-up bowl heaped with popcorn, and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs crowded a bamboo coffee table. When Summer stepped into the room, Lucinda Farrell looked at her and said with shrill but forceful scorn that cut through the laughter and applause of Oprah’s audience, ‘I got nothing to say to any cops, so why don’t the both of you march straight on out of here.’

Randy Farrell said from the archway, ‘Take it easy, why don’t you? They got something to tell you. About Edie.’

‘Edie? Fuck her. Fuck you too, for letting in these fuckers.’

Summer switched on the ceiling lights and in the sudden glare crossed the room and punched off the TV and took a position directly in front of the woman on the couch. Laura was standing just inside the archway, ready to block Randy Farrell if he tried to cause trouble. Summer said, ‘How about we start over, Mrs Farrell?’

The woman stared at Summer. Bleached hair dry as straw stuck out around her pugnacious face. ‘My daughter ran out on me four months back. Anything she did, it isn’t my problem, she’s over eighteen now. So how about you say what you got to say and get out.’

Summer waited a beat, making it clear that she was doing this in her own time. ‘Mrs Farrell, your daughter was found badly injured this morning, in woods near a town by the name of Cedar Falls. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that she died on the way to hospital.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Randy Farrell said softly.

Lucinda Farrell leaned forwards and with the frowning concentration of a small child sloshed a good three fingers of vodka into her glass. She added a splash of orange juice, sucked down half the drink, and said to no one in particular, ‘So that’s that.’

‘Mrs Farrell, the Sheriff’s office in Cedar Falls would like you to make a formal identification -- ’

The woman flapped a hand. ‘She was dead to me when she left this house. I told her so, she said she didn’t give a fuck, and she hasn’t been back since. So why should I give a fuck now?’

‘You need to do the right thing by your daughter,’ Summer said.

‘I already done all I could by her,’ Lucinda Farrell said flatly, and drained the rest of her drink.

Summer tried to talk her around, but the woman retreated into stubborn silence, clutching her glass in her swollen paws and glaring at a spot somewhere beyond Summer’s left shoulder. At last, Summer said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about this again.’

‘Switch on the fucking TV on your way out. I wanna see Oprah ask Demi Moore about her toyboy.’

Summer ignored her request, and in the hallway asked Randy Farrell if Edie’s biological father lived in Portland.

‘He died in a car accident way before I met Lucinda. Edie kept his name, but if she has a father -- Jesus, had one -- it would be me.’

Summer said, ‘I’ll have to come back tomorrow, Mr Farrell. I have to talk to your wife again.’

‘Won’t do any good.’

‘The local police need her to ID her daughter. It’s a formality, but it has to be done before they can release the body. And at some point your wife will have to think about funeral arrangements.’

Randy Farrell shook his head. ‘Lucinda meant what she said about Edie being dead to her. She never once tried to find her after she ran off, never once visited her when she was in jail . . . ’

‘Talk to her, Mr Farrell. Tell her that she needs to do the right thing by Edie. I’ll come by
tomorrow morning, talk to her again.’

‘She sets her mind to something, that’s it. Edie was the same way.’ Randy Farrell looked at Summer and said, ‘How she ended up, out there in the woods. You have any idea how she got there?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Farrell. It isn’t my case.’

Before setting out for the Southeast Precinct, Summer had called the Cedar Falls Sheriff’s office and talked briefly with Denise Childers, the detective in charge of the case. The woman had been friendly enough, but hadn’t given anything away.

Randy Farrell said, ‘She didn’t have any reason to leave Portland I knew of. You should ask her boyfriend what she was doing out there.’

When Summer had been given this job, she’d believed that she wouldn’t get much out of it. If she messed up, she would confirm Ryland Nelsen’s unvoiced suspicion that she was a hotshot promoted beyond her experience and capability. And if she did okay she’d probably be landed with every next-of-kin notification the Robbery Unit had to deal with: it was the kind of dirty, thankless task that male cops liked to pass on to their female colleagues because, according to them, women had better people skills. Now, though, she felt a twinge of interest and said, ‘Do you have a name and address for this boyfriend?’

Randy Farrell stared past her for a moment, then said, ‘I think it was Billy something.’

‘Do you have a last name? An address?’

Randy Farrell shook his head. ‘I never met the guy, and I only talked to Edie one time after she took up with him. She told me she and him were living out of his van. I wasn’t too happy, hearing that, but she said she was doing fine.’

‘When did she leave home?’

‘First week in February, just after her birthday. She and her mother had a big bust-up.’

‘And she ran off to be with her boyfriend?’

Randy Farrell shrugged.

‘How long had she known him?’

‘Let’s put it this way, I’d never heard of him before she ran off.’

‘Does he have a job?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘They were living in his van. Where did they park at night?’

‘Somewhere over near the airport I think.’

Laura said, ‘I’ll ask the guys in the Northeast Precinct to keep a look out. Mr Farrell, do you know if they had a regular spot where they parked at night? Up in Piedmont, maybe? Maywood Park?’

‘Somewhere near the airport, that’s all I know.’

‘How about you tell me something about this van,’ Laura said. ‘Make, colour -- anything at all.’
‘Like I said, I never met him, and I never saw his van either.’

Summer said, ‘Take your time, Mr Farrell. Anything you can remember could be a big help.’

‘I remember that she was happy, when I saw her. She had plans, she was thinking of going back to school . . . What will happen to her if no one looks after her? To her body, I mean?’

Summer said, ‘If no one claims her, the state will serve as sponsor.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. And the state will bury her in a cardboard coffin without a marker. She doesn’t deserve that.’ Randy Farrell paused, then told Summer, ‘I know who you are. You’re the one arrested Edie just before Christmas. You were in uniform then, but I don’t forget a face. Listen, it’s okay, I’m not blaming you for what happened to her, but how about cutting me a break?’

‘If you want to help Edie, Mr Farrell, you should persuade your wife to go make the ID.’

‘You need someone to make the ID? How about you take me to Cedar Falls,’ Randy Farrell said.

‘I’ll take care of whatever arrangements need to be made, too. I have money.’

‘Perhaps I should come by tomorrow and talk to your wife again.’

‘It won’t make no difference. But I want to do right by Edie, even if Lucinda doesn’t.’

Summer saw that the man was genuinely upset. ‘I’ll tell the police in Cedar Falls about your offer, Mr Farrell. That’s the best I can do right now.’

‘I was like a father to her, you understand? I helped raise her for more than ten years, I want to do right by her now . . . You tell them that. Also, you should explain that I have cancer of the liver and I can’t drive on account of my medication, the side effects. I get these blackouts. So you tell them, if they want someone to ID her, either you take me, or they’ll have to come get me.’

Summer took out one of her cards and handed it to him. ‘If you remember anything you think might be useful, anything at all, give me a call and I’ll pass it on to the detective in charge of the case. But right now, Mr Farrell, maybe you should go look after your wife. I think she’s more shaken up than she lets on.’

Outside, Laura Killinger hitched up her Garrison belt and said, ‘Edie Collier was brought up by those two, and all she had on her sheet was shoplifting? She must have been some kind of saint.’

Players 1

Late Tuesday afternoon, the Robbery Unit of the Portland Police Bureau, Detective Sergeant Ryland Nelsen called Summer Ziegler into his office. He didn’t ask her to sit down, so she stood in front of his desk, straight-backed in a cream blouse and black skirt, waiting for him to finish studying a custody report. She’d dressed for a court appearance that had eaten up most of the day, and she’d been working late, finishing paperwork. She wished now that she’d gone straight home at the end of the shift, because she was dead certain that her boss was about to hand her yet another petty errand.

He took his own sweet time with the report, reading both sides, saying at last, ‘Do you believe in karma, Detective Ziegler?’

‘As in fate?’

‘As in be sure your sins will catch up with you.’

‘I believe it would make our work a lot easier if karma caught up with all the bad guys.’
Ryland Nelsen dropped the report on his desk, leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his grey buzz cut. ‘Cast your mind back to last December. You arrested a young woman name of Edie Collier.’

Summer thought for a moment. ‘She tried to boost a couple of cashmere sweaters from Meier and Frank, the store detective challenged her, she made a run for it. I was cruising the area, helped chase her down. She got thirty days’ county time plus two years’ probation.’

‘She got county time for shoplifting? All my arrests should go up before that judge.’

‘She was already on probation for another shoplifting offence, plus she had a bunch of priors. She pled guilty at arraignment and the judge told her he was going to give her a short, sharp shock, stick her in jail over Christmas in the hope it would straighten her out. But I guess it didn’t.’
Summer also guessed that Edie Collier must have gotten into something much more serious than shoplifting if she had come to the attention of the Robbery Unit, which investigated thefts involving use of a weapon or threats implying the presence of a weapon; mundane property crimes like shoplifting were handled by uniformed police and precinct detectives.

‘I don’t know if it straightened her out or not,’ Ryland Nelsen said. ‘I do know that a couple of fishermen stumbled across her in woods way the hell south of here, near Cedar Falls. Know where it is?’

‘I’ve driven past it.’

‘On the I-5. Me too, but I never stopped. Anyhow, she was badly injured from some kind of fall, and she died before the paramedics could get her to hospital. The local police are treating it as a suspicious death. They identified her from fingerprints and found out that her last known address was in Portland, and their Sheriff put in a call to the Chief’s office, asked if someone in the Bureau could inform Edie Collier’s parents and persuade them to make the trip to Cedar Falls for formal ID and disposition of the body. And, well, the request bounced down the chain of command to the officer who last arrested her.’

‘Me,’ Summer said, with a falling sensation.

‘You,’ Ryland Nelsen said, pointing his forefinger at her and cocking his thumb gunwise. ‘During your time in uniform, were you ever asked to do a next-of-kin notification?’

‘No, sir. We left that kind of thing to detectives.’

‘And just three weeks ago you got your detective’s badge . . . See what I mean about karma?’

Blue World

The films of M. Night Shyamalan more often have their roots in literature rather than in other films. His latest, Lady in the Water, is no exception: like many of the novels of Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle and Jonathan Carroll, its plot turns on the realisation by its hero that he is an archetype inhabiting a mythic story he can survive only by coming to terms with his true nature.

Lady in the Water’s premise, that the root of human sin is due to a break with the wise inhabitants of the Blue World of water, is rather silly and made sillier by a sententious voice-over that explains it, but its story is simple enough. A water nymph named, er, Story (played by the ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard), has been sent to find the writer she’s destined to inspire, so that he can finish the book that will, eventually, save the world (I’m not giving anything away by noting that the world-saving writer is played by none other than the film’s director). She’s helped by Cleveland Heap (Paul Giamatti), who finds her in the swimming pool of the apartment building where he works as superintendent. With the help of Korean student Young-Soon Choi and her mother, Heap must unriddle the bedtime story into which he’s been plunged, and locate the writer and the other people needed to help Story complete her quest and protect her from her enemy, the hyena-like Scrunt that haunts the apartment building’s grounds.

Most of the plot twists are derived either from the deus ex machina rules of Story’s quest, or from cases of mistaken identity as Heap tries to find amongst the apartment building’s tenants those predestined to help Story. And there’s the rub. M. Night Shyamalan’s best films are driven by conflict between vividly-drawn counterpart characters - ghost and ghost-whisperer in The Sixth Sense; hero and villain in Unbreakable. But since a football team of people are needed to protect and help Story, and there are at least two candidates for every place on the team, there are so many named characters packed into the movie’s 90-odd minutes that there’s little space to develop most of them beyond stock types.

The central characters fare little better. After a strong introduction, Story does little but huddle in the shower and refuse to divulge vital information, and even Cleveland Heap fails to stir the audience’s empathy when he finally realises his true nature and comes to terms with the Hero’s Wound that drove him to hide away from the world in a modest job in a modest apartment building. The Scrunt provides several good shock moments, there’s plenty of typically crisp dialogue and clever ideas, and there’s fine comedy relief from Young-Soon’s obtuse mother and an acidulous film critic (a nice cameo by Bob Balaban). But Shyamalan’s failure to develop strong central characters leaves the mechanics of his plot and the paint-by-numbers symbolism of his story overly exposed. For a movie that promises world-changing events, Lady in the Water ultimately feels as hermetic as the bubble of water in a snow-globe.

Where I Get My Ideas From - Part 40581 Of An Endless Series

Down to the West End last night to catch a preview of M. Night Shayamalan’s Lady in the Water (I’ll post a review in a couple of days). Sitting outside the Bar Italia in Soho, we were engaged in conversation by an eccentric fiftysomething fellow in a kilt who was treating his old Italian mother to dinner (she was the very picture of an old Italian mother, complete with cloche hat and shawl, somewhat in her dotage and addressed by her doting son with affectionate exasperation; if you put the pair of them in a novel you’d be accused of stereotyping). In short order, we learned that he was a cellist and had been down to Sussex on some kind of camping holiday (don’t go there) that seemed to have involved country dancing. Then his attention wandered to a young couple sitting down with their baby and after a little to and fro the father (also Italian) brought the baby over so that the old Italian mother could not only admire it, but also give it a wee cuddle - something British parents would almost never do. Meanwhile, the restless and voluble kilt-wearing son had wandered over the café across the road to make more friends. I love this crazy town.

Players: The Cover

Here’s a rough of the cover for Players. I very much like the menacing glow burning through the trees (much of the novel is set in the woods of South-west Oregon, where I spent some time last year; they are both lovely and spooky - especially spooky when there’s a lull in the ambient insect- and bird-song, and you think: bear).

I’ve just finished the copy edit, and now I have to work up notes about the changes I made, and key in all the changes in the hard copy to the electronic version of the text. I’ll start putting up some chunks from it soon.

Chasing Perfection

I’m coming up to the final stretch of copy-editing work on Players. After that, the manuscript will be checked over at the publishers, and then it will go off to the printers. When I get a set of proofs, I’ll have a last chance to correct infelicities, repeated words, howlers and simple spelling mistakes before the book goes into production. Almost inevitably, some mistake or other will get through; you can chase perfection as long as you like, in the company of your editor, sub-editor, copy-editor, friends . . . but it's like Zeno's paradox. You can only approach the target in ever smaller increments, you can never reach it.

You might think that poets have it easier - their books, after all, usually contain far fewer words than the average short story, let alone a novel. But as Don Paterson notes in a day-in-the-life article in the Weekend Guardian, they have to watch out for a special horror - inadvertent acrostics formed by the first letters of succeeding lines. On the other hand, he’s able to read his poems line by line backwards to ferret out glitches; just try doing that with a novel. I dare you.

Caveat Emptor

These people claim to have one of the guitars once owned by legendary Blues singer Robert Johnson (thanks to Steve Baxter for the tip, and Jack Womack for the link). Frankly, I think they need to provide little more provenance than ‘it looks like the one in the photograph’ before they get their $6000000.

The Butterflies of Memory

Just received my copies of Ian Watson’s terrific short-story collection, The Butterflies of Memory.

My introduction begins like this:

If you’re of the opinion that science fiction is above all else a literature of ideas, then Ian Watson is your man, and this collection, which contains more than enough ideas to set up a couple of lesser writers for life is very definitely your cup of meat. Of course, ideas aren’t everything. For one thing, apart from a few incredibly rare once-in-a lifetime, fifty-carat, career-defining originals, ideas are as cheap and ubiquitous as advertising. Ideas, good or bad, are the human animal’s speciality. Day in, day out, we see clouds and think them very like whales. We put together two and two and make five. And even if you do have an idea that’s both brilliant and original, in the end it’s what you do with it that counts, and that’s where qualities like hard work, talent, and that indefinable but instantly recognisable quality, voice, come into play.

Ian Watson knows all about this, of course. Check out ‘How to be a Fictionaut’, which not only has a lot of fun with the myth of ideas and originality, but also pushes the notion of the anxiety of influence about as far as it will go.

This isn’t to say that the ideas on display here aren’t witty, outrageous, daft, unsettling and plainly fantastic, because quite frankly that’s exactly what they are. But more importantly, they have also been woven into stories by a writer who not only possesses a restless and capacious imagination, but also knows exactly what to do with his ideas, and has an enviable talent for stretching them in unexpected ways, testing them to destruction, or using them to smash open accepted notions about the way the world works.

I Don't Just Make It All Up, You Know

In her New Scientist cover story about hypervelocity stars, Maggie McKee reveals where I got one of my ideas for Eternal Light. (You have to be a subscriber to view the article. Or you buy a copy of the magazine.)

Superman Redux

So I didn’t get around to reviewing Superman Returns, but Roz Kaveney did, generating much comment.

English Summertime

Out to a favourite pub for Sunday lunch, and then a slow walk back home, along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. I used to walk along the canal regularly when I lived nearby, and in my ten years in London, I’ve seen its dilapilated Victorian brick factory and warehouse buildings be replaced by smart but mostly soulless apartment buildings right on the water. One of these, the Gainsborough Buildings, on the site on what was once a film studio (where Alfred Hitchcock worked, before he left for Hollywood), made an appearance at the beginning of Whole Wide World. It had not yet been built when I began the novel; now, it is a small, exclusive city-state in the badlands of Hackney - ordinary citizens can’t even walk or drive past them, because the council has obligingly blocked off the road. There are many more blocks like this along the canal, now, and more to come. The neglected and overgrown dereliction of the old buildings gave the feeling of how London might be if it had been abandoned to nature; a long, narrow mixture of wilderness and industrial heritage running through North London and the East End. Now, it’s more like a tawdry imitation of the sets of Blade Runner, with badly designed yuppie hutches elbowing each other for a stretch of coveted waterside real estate. A taste of things to come, as the marshlands and playing fields along the River Lea disappear under the Olympic developments.

But if you could ignore the serried windows of the apartment blocks, there are still barges puttering along the canal and houseboats moored up alongside the towpath; and the hot sun beat gold highlights from the water, the weeds were all in ragged bloom, and the hot dust of the towpath was as silky as talcum powder underfoot: summertime, in England.

Only Correct

Here’s a picture of the corner of my office where I’m currently working in the copy-edited manuscript of Players. It has already been subjected to my editor’s scrutiny, of course, but having taken her comments to heart and made the appropriate modifications, the manuscript is back again. This time just about every page contains corrections and suggestions for micro-improvements; it’s time to rethink every line all over again. More importantly, it has been marked up for the typesetter with time-honoured hierogylphic instructions, and you realize that the novel that has been a more-or-less private conversation with yourself for the past year or so has begun its journey towards the bookshops.

I once visited Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass; the view from the study, down to the Charles river, is preserved for the nation. Maybe poets need to look out of windows; most writers I know face away from potential distraction, like so many penitents.

Superman v. The Planet Of Slums

I was lucky enough to attend a preview of Superman Returns yesterday; I may write a short review at some point, but meanwhile I’ll content myself with saying that I do believe it’s going to be a good old-fashioned summer blockbuster. Haven’t had one of those in a while.

I’ve also just finished Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. Sometime this year, for the first time in human history, the number of people living in cities will outnumber the rural population. And one billion people will be living in slums circling the cities of the South. Planet of Slums describes the evolution of the megaslums and the rise of an urban population that is completely disconnected from ordinary economics and politics. As with all of Davis's books (which include the classic City Of Quartz, one of the best books about Los Angeles ever written), it’s packed with vivid summaries and extrapolations of current trends backed with trenchant argument, imagining a future in which the enclaves of the rich make war against the squatters and outcasts that inhabit vast squalid termitaries of the displaced and dispossessed.

Secret Doors

I promise not to put too many pictures up here, but I thought I should at least have a go at linking one or two. This is from my research files for Cowboy Angels. It’s the route that field agents use to reach the gate between their reality and ours, located on the 49th Street side of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The two doors open onto a stairway and a freight elevator that give access to a loading platform in Grand Central Station that fell into disuse after the station’s own power plant was demolished following a switch to ConEd as a source of electricity. There’s an unconfirmed story that President Roosevelt, in his specially adapted automobile, was whisked from train to street via the freight elevator when he visited New York.

If you’re wondering about the low resolution, it was taken with my thumb-sized Philips wearable digital camera.

More Dick

Joshua Glenn has a thoughtful piece on the film of A Scanner Darkly and director Richard Linklater over on Slate.

On The D.

Yesterday to a preview of A Scanner Darkly in a plush screening theatre in Warner Brother’s London headquarters. Director and screenwriter Richard Linklater is clearly a fan of Philip K. Dick’s work; his adaptation of Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about an undercover cop falling apart under the insiduous influence of the brain-killing drug Substance D, is, some necessary compression apart, faithful to both the text and the melancholy spirit of the novel. It was shot as a live action film and rotoscoped by computer animation to provide a graphic novel look that works pretty well; it’s hard, really, to see how the scramble suit effects could have been done so effectively otherwise. Hallucinatory weirdness is kept to the minimum, although there’s some very subtle distortion here and there, especially towards the end. Given that the story is largely plot-free and packs a lot of dialog, it does sag a little in places, but does its best by Dick's intricate drug-fueled paranoid riffs, is seasoned with some lovely touches of black humour, and the diminuendo ending, containing just a flicker of hope, is faithful to that of novel. Fans of Dick’s work will almost certainly love it, but I fear that its bleak, amorphous plot will have limited appeal to the general public. Keanu Reeves as undercover narc Bob Arctor is basically Keanu Reeves; Robert Downey Jr is a tour de force as the manically unpleasant James Barris; Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder turn in solid performances, and Rory Cochrane is going to hate being called the new Jack Black.

Forbidden Planets

I’ve just received the proofs for my story, ‘Dust’, one of a round dozen collected in the anthology Forbidden Planets. Others are by Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Scott Edelman, Matthew Hughes, Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds, Chris Roberson, and Adam Roberts. Edited by Peter Crowther, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Stephen Baxter, it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the classic movie.

Another story, ‘Winning Peace’, the one I was writing in April, set in the same future history as ‘Dust’, will appear in Gardner Dozois’s and Jonathan Strahan’s The New Space Opera.
Back now to reading Cowboy Angels (for the first time in three years) and making notes for the many tweaks needed to bring it up to speed.

Stalking Alfie

All novelists worth their salt must work their way under the skin and into the minds of their characters; it’s a necessary step on the way to thoroughly inhabiting the novel’s world. Some try to create a character by listing his likes and dislikes, by asking how he behaves while eating with a group of people, how he reacts to rain or sun, how he reacts to someone much poorer than him, or to someone much richer? And so on, and so forth. One is reminded of the attempts of phenomenologists to describe and catalogue their sensory experiences - the relationships between ideas in their minds and the things in the world that they represent. Others, especially comic novelists, borrow extensively from people around them, exaggerating and mixing traits from a variety of acquaintances. My approach is probably the most common, and is much less systematic. It’s rather like stalking a bird through a dense forest. I know that it’s small and brown, and sometimes I can hear its song, but I need to see it entire, just for a moment, before I can know what it is.

In Mind’s Eye, I had the name of the main character from the first. (Names have a talismanic importance - they must strike the right chord in the memory.) Alfie Flowers: a sturdy London name. I knew that Alfie lived in London, and I knew a good deal of his family’s history, and knew that he suffered from an atypical form of epilepsy - it’s a necessary part of the story - and that this made him cautious, made him look at the world at a slant in case it surprised him in the wrong way. After a false start involving trading old Airfix kits on eBay, I knew what he did for a living too: he was a street photographer, following in the footsteps of his missing father, a 1960s hip fashion photographer turned war documentarist.

It took a little while longer to find out where he lived. I find that walking helps to loosen knotted thoughts and joggle ideas together; I walk a lot, when I’m writing the first draft of a novel. On my way back from a long ramble one day, about a hundred yards from my home, I realized that I standing across the street from where Alfie Flowers lived: a narrow plot of land beside the North London railway, with a small, old bus garage and a couple of caravans. He lived in one of those caravans, and had his darkroom in the other. In summer, he ate his meals outside, at a picnic table. And so on.

But I didn’t see him clearly until he was returning home on a crowded train:

Alfie slumped in his corner, a large, somewhat shapeless man, like a bear that hadn’t been properly licked into shape by its mother, his blond hair a disarrayed halo, wearing a red check shirt and baggy black elephant cords, his bag clutched to his belly, his big feet in strap sandals. He had prehensile toes, long and double-jointed, thatched at their second joints with pads of dark hair.

At last, I was on the inside.

Sidewise Award Nominations

This year's Sidewise Award nominations have been announced. The award, which has been been presented since 1995, recognizes excellence in alternate history.

Long Form:
Ian R. MacLeod, The Summer Isles (Aio Publishing)
Sophia McDougall, Romanitas (Orion)
Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor)

Short Form
William Barton, "Harvest Moon" (Asimov's September 2005)
A.M. Dellamonica, "The Illuminated Heretic" (Alternate Generals III, edited by Harry Turtledove, Baen April 2005)
Kim Newman & Paul J. McAuley, "Prix Victor Hugo Script"
Jason Stoddard, "Panacea" (SciFiction, September 14, 2005)
Lois Tilton, "Pericles the Tyrant" (Asimov's, October-November 2005)

It’s rather cool to find our little jape up there with stories published in traditional venues.

A Perfect Storm

Wildly extrapolating from a tax case involving Richard Mabley and Judy Finnegan (the insipid British version of Oprah), The Sunday Times claimed that television ‘personalities’, footballers, and authors would no longer be able to claim the fees charged by their agents against tax. Even worse, this ruling would be applied retrospectively; everyone would not only have to pay back money claimed against tax this year, but for the six years previously.

Now, most authors have agents who take from between 10 and 20% of their clients’ earnings as fees. And most authors aren't exactly rolling in money; the average income of a freelance author in Britain is around £7000. Paying back money legitimately claimed against tax would be crippling. Naturally, this wild rumour-mongering agitated a lot of people and led the Society of Authors to send out an email reassuring anxious authors that they almost certainly wouldn’t be liable to pay back thousand of pounds (or millions of pounds in the case of mega-bestsellers like J.K. Rowling).

The Sunday Times’ story was in fact nonsense, as the British tax authorities were quick to point out. And now the case has just been settled in Richard and Judy’s favour. They can claim their agent’s fees against tax because they are, after all, entertainers; it seems that it was a good thing that Richard imitated Ali G. on breakfast TV.

Which leaves me wondering what the scaremongering was all about. Was it the usual excessive fact-free speculation that our press is so fond of these days? Or was it something more sinister? The Sunday Times story suggested that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, wanted to claw back tax from celebrities to help make up a vast deficit in his budget - celebrities are soft targets because they don’t want to make the kind of fuss that would let people know how much they earn. And Gordon Brown is not only in line to become Prime Minister when Tony Blair finally steps down, he’s also believed to be rather more left wing than Blair. Some people aren’t happy about that. Was the whole story whipped up to besmirch the Chancellor’s good name, and lose him the support of a constituency of high-profile, vocal, left-leaning creative types?

If it was, it has succeeded only in whipping up a small but perfect storm of comment. It looks like J.K. Rowling will be writing the introduction to Gordon Brown’s next book after all.

Hothouses For The Imagination

I was an ordinary child in all but one respect - I was able to read around the age of three, a couple of years before I was enrolled in the little Church of England village school in Selsley, at the top of a long steep climb from our cottage (this was Gloucestershire in 1960; although we lived in one of a tumbledown row of four Elizabethan cottages with an iron foundry on one side and the recreation fields of a nearby factory on the other, it was pretty rural). My father was in the navy, and usually away; when I was a teenager, he and my mother divorced, something unusual and peculiarly shaming in England, in the early 1970s. We had little money, and few books. But there was always the library.

When I was quite small, the library was a library van that came by the village school once a week. A little later, I joined the library in Stroud, a lovely, light, modern building. It wasn’t where I first encountered science fiction - one of the few books my family owned was Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - but it was where I began to actively seek it out, working my way through the oeuvres of Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, amongst others. When I moved to the grammar school at age eleven, I discovered a complete set of the Everyman Edition of H.G. Wells in the Junior School Library, and that set the seal. I needed more, the junior section Stroud Library wasn’t enough, and with some special pleading by my mother on my behalf, I was allowed tickets to the adult section a couple of years earlier than the rules allowed. I’m forever grateful to my mother, and to the librarian who waived those rules. I was let loose on a treasure trove, and by the time I was 15 or 16, I had read my way through the essential science fiction classics and the novels and short-story collections of the burgeoning New Wave, and was branching out into the next-door crime shelves (Ed McBain was a particular favourite) and serendipitous discoveries elsewhere. I started reading John Updike, for instance, because I picked up Rabbit, Redux one day, puzzled by the odd title, and discovered that it was set during the summer of the first moon landing, and was written - wow - in the present tense. Thirty years later, I would be told by one American publisher that they couldn’t take White Devils unless it was rendered into ordinary past tense because otherwise no American reader would be able to understand it.

I was a science geek, and didn’t take English at school beyond what were then O-levels. But while my formal education in English ended at the age of 16, there was always the library, a place where I was able to continue my erratic self-education in the art of the fiction, absolutely free, well into my university years and beyond.

Now, libraries aren’t what they were. Too many are closing down because too many local councils see them as easy targets when relatively small savings have to be made. And there are too many demands on them as well; they’re no longer exclusively about the printed word, but must cater to demands for computer access and CD and DVD lending too, all on ever-shrinking budgets. It’s a rotten shame, ably documented in Tim Coates’s blog (thanks to The Grumpy Old Bookman via Maxine at Petrona for the link).

I think of all the kids like me, weird kids, bright kids, enquiring kids, from backgrounds where books don’t furnish a room. What will they do without these marvellous hothouses of the imagination? If not for libraries, I wouldn’t be the semi-respectable tax-paying novelist I am today; and I don’t think that I’m unique amongst writers in owing libraries a massive debt. Not a bad return for what is, really, a public pittance.

Shameless Part Two

If I hadn’t been ‘resting’, I would have noted that David Hartwell’s Best SF 11 was published on May 30. I haven’t seen a copy yet (chiz, chiz) but no doubt it’s crammed with great stories, not to mention my own ‘Rats of the System’.

Shameless Part One

You have to be these days. So, shamelessly, you may be interested to know that Mind’s Eye is out in paperback as of today. You can buy it here at 20% off retail price, and help jack up my pathetic statistics a notch or three.

According to the back cover:

A strange piece of graffiti daubed on the window of a London restaurant is the catalyst that propels Alfie Flowers into an intriguing mystery - and a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse. From the back alleys of London’s street culture to the chaos of post-war Iraq, in his desperate search for the source behind the mysterious symbols, Alfie finds that he in turn is being chased. Someone is determined to do whatever it takes to stop him finding out the truth.

Deep within an ancient network of caves lies a dangerous secret. A secret connected with the disappearance of Alfie’s father some twenty years before. A secret that someone will kill to keep.

According to me, it’s a thriller about a race to capture the secret of mind-altering drugs and neolithic entoptic patterns that starts off on the streets of London and ends deep inside caves in Kurdistan, in which Alfie Flowers discovers just how deeply his family and the mysterious Nomads’ Club were entwined.

Want to know more? Read the first chapter.

Off Duty

Cripes, has it been more than a week since I posted anything here? Well, I have been ‘resting’ after spending the last three weeks polishing Players, which has now been delivered to the publishers. It needed rather more work than I first thought, and as always, at this stage, I was fully immersed in the work. I find that spending as much time as possible working each day is the best way to get the entire book inside your head, so that when you tweak one part you instantly know which other parts will be affected by the change. So when I realized that Carl Kelley would need to tell Dirk Merrit about the plot to rob him, because it gave Carl the perfect excuse to head off to Los Angeles, I also knew that Dirk Merrit would be in on one of the subsequent deaths, and that this would later affect a couple of paragraphs in the closing chapter. And because I had everything in my head, I was also able to work put exactly where I needed to sharpen and underline the motivations and feelings of just-promoted hotshot detective Summer Ziegler, and make sure that her scenes were always from her point of view. I could also see which scenes were too long or too short, and prune out a couple that were actually unnecessary. And I realized too (it’s obvious; I’m stupid) that it really is better, in a murder mystery, to keep chapters short and focussed on one character rather than switch back and forth between parallel scenes.

All of which sounds as if I didn’t really plan this out or think it through before I started writing it, which isn’t quite true. But I tend to be a seat-of-pants writer and like to find out things as I go along, even at this late stage, rather than exhaustively plot and plan everything; it means a lot more work, but I also have a lot of fun exploring alternative plot lines. I’ve thrown out what must amount to about 50% of what ended up in the novel - an opening sequence in which Summer rescues a street kid from a beating, for instance, chapters involving her confidential informant, and scenes set at her deceased father’s half-built house - but I think now that what’s left in is absolutely necessary.

Anyway, it’s a glorious day today, and I’m off to snoop in some of the neighbourhood gardens which are open for charity.

Saving The Stone

From William Gibson, via Jack Womack, this lovely story about how the London Stone, and if legend is to be believed, the metropolis itself, was saved.

Plugging Away

Tardily, via Locus, I see that James Sallis has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times.

Well, it’s about time. I’ve been a fan of Jim Sallis’s writing for years - I still remember being knocked out by the delicate, elliptical evocations of otherness in ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ and ‘Faces, Hands’ back in the late 1960s. He’s edited New Worlds, written a couple of dozen sf stories (collected in Time’s Hammers), still reviews for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but these days he’s best known for his Lew Griffin mysteries, set in New Orleans. Now he’s two books into another mystery series, and from the profile I learnt about a novella, Drive, published by a small press that I immediately ordered from Big South American River. If only I was more on the ball -- I could have bought it in Powells last year, when I was in Oregon doing research.

All Shall Have Prizes

Finalists for the 2005 John W. Campbell Memorial Award:

Baxter, Stephen TRANSCENDENT Gollancz
Cash, Steve THE MEQ Del Rey
Gerrold, David CHILD OF EARTH Benbella
McAuley, Paul MIND'S EYE Simon & Schuster UK
McDevitt, Jack SEEKER Ace
Macleod, Ken LEARNING THE WORLD Tor
Macleod, Ian R. THE SUMMER ISLES Aio Publishing
Marusek, David COUNTING HEADS Tor
Sawyer, Robert J. MINDSCAN Tor
Stross, Charles ACCELERANDO Ace
Traviss, Karen THE WORLD BEFORE Eos
Wilson, Robert Charles SPIN Tor

When The Spam Hits The Fan

‘My Theory of Evolution is that Darwin was Adopted’ is my favourite randomly generated spam header of the year. Pure Monty Python.

Not that I approve of spam, of course, even if it is a good source of names for evil child-eating drug-riddled galactic overlords.

A Very British History

Further to my recent post about alt.space.hist, I've posted my story A Very British History at the other place.

The Dangercon

Here’s the programme for a small one-day not entirely serious fundraising convention - Plotka.con.pi The Dangercon - at which I’m appearing, along with Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and many others, on 27 May.

What’s it for? James Bacon, the organiser, writes:
This will be a one-day mini-con in aid of the League of Fan Funds, the Trans Atlantic part of which I am administrating. As you may know its an altruistic fund, sending a European delegate over to the World Science Fiction Convention in the states. The event is timed to coincide with the close of voting in the 2006 race for the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), giving attendees in the UK a last opportunity to vote as well as hearing the winner announced on the night.

PROGRAMME
12.00 Subverting sex roles in Dangermouse Fandom
13.00 Virtual Guide to a Literary Brentford by Lee Justice and Graham Hill
14.30 ConFounding Tales presents "Death in the Air" The Spine-Chilling tale of the Heisenburg Disaster...
Simon McRory, Dougs Spencer
16:00 Alternative Londons, with Kim Newman, Paul McAuley and Paul Cornell
17.30 Comics one should read, but not by Alan Moore
Jim de Liscard
19.00 Year of the Teledu Fanny Family Fortune Ashes.
20.30 The influences on The Doctor as a character.
Paul Cornell, Kim Newman and Paul McAuley.
(voting will close at 9pm)
22.00 Fan Fund Auction, which will break for the announcement of the TAFF winner.

Alternative Programme, on the roof.
14:00 How to Kung Fu with instructor Jess Bennett.
17:00 D.I.Y. Artist Trading Cards with Flick.

VENUE
Plokta.con. pi: The Dangercon on Saturday 27 May 2006.
12 noon to 12 midnight in The Horseshoe Inn, 26 Melior Street, London SE1 3QP.

The Way It Wasn't

Ellen points me towards another alt.space.hist movie. It looks good. If only I had broadband (do you really think that this writing malarky pays enough for me to afford all mod cons?). I’m sure there must be more out there, and I don’t mean Capricorn One.

I love this stuff. It not only allows you to wallow in nostalgia, but also puts history back on the right track. I’ve even made a tiny contribution of my own, in the form of the short story ‘A Very British History.’

Apostrophe Apocalypse

Never mind red spots. Today I have been mostly taking out commas.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be mostly putting them back in.

Later on, I’ll be heading into town, to see the more-famous-than-me SF writer Stephen Baxter. I want to give him a DVD copy of a marvellous Russian faux documentary, The First on the Moon. It’s a very clever and enthralling mashup of existing and faked material that creates a Secret History of the Soviet manned Lunar program, with a lovely, poignant coda. Given Mr Baxter’s interest in alternate space programs, I’ll be intrigued to see what he makes of it. The DVD was passed on to me by Kim Newman, who was given it at a film festival, and as far as I know, the film hasn’t had a theatrical release in the UK or the US, although it was shown at the recent SF film festival here in London. But if you do get a chance to see it, don’t miss it.

A Little Spot Of Red

This week I received the edit of my crime novel Players (Simon & Schuster are publishing it in February 2007), and I’ve been busy ever since correcting the embarrassing errors in continuity and consistency that my aimiable but eagle-eyed editor has spotted, and also giving the text what I call its final polish.

Now you may think that when I or any other author submits an MSS it should be letter perfect. In my case, if only. As far as I’m concerned, writing a novel is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge - no sooner have you finished, than you spot loose rivets, the odd patch of rust... But this polishing business isn’t only about correcting bloopers. I’ll be doing that in earnest after the copy editor gets through with it. It’s also something like what used to go on in the Royal Academy in the nineteenth century, during the Varnishing Days set aside for Academicians to make the final touches to their exhibits, toning down or heightening completed works before they were displayed in the public arena of the Exhibition room. John Gage gives a marvellous account of an instance of Turner’s competitive fine-tuning of his painting Helveotslyuys, which was shown with Constable’s Opening of Waterloo Bridge:

[Turner’s work was] a grey picture, beautiful but true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable’s ‘Waterloo’ seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while [Constable] was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the ‘Waterloo’ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. [C.R. Leslie] came into the room just as Turner left. ‘He has been here,’ Constable said, ‘and fired a gun.’ . . . The great man did not come again into the room for a day and a half; and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.

That’s what I’m trying to do (but much more modestly) right now.

That Hugo Thing

Last year in Glasgow, at Interaction, the World Science Fiction Convention, Kim Newman and I introduced and hosted the Hugo Award ceremony. And hey, our little double-act received a nomination for the Hugo for best short dramatic presentation:

Battlestar Galactica: "Pegasus" (NBC Universal/British Sky Broadcasting; Directed by Michael Rymer; Written by Anne Cofell Saunders)
Doctor Who: "The Empty Child" & "The Doctor Dances" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by James Hawes; Written by Steven Moffat)
Doctor Who: "Dalek" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by Joe Ahearne; Written by Robert Shearman)
Doctor Who: "Father's Day" (BBC Wales/BBC1; Directed by Joe Ahearne; Written by Paul Cornell)
Jack-Jack Attack (Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation; Written & Directed by Brad Bird)
Lucas Back in Anger (Reductio Ad Absurdum Productions; Directed by Phil Raines; Written by Phil Raines and Ian Sorensen)
Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony (Opening Speech and Framing Device; Written and performed by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman; Directed by Mike & Debby Moir)

If, for whatever reason, you’re interested in seeing what we got up to, the organisers of Interaction have made a video of the introductory speech available at the convention’s web site. You can even compare it with the script.

Science Fantastique

It’s Saturday morning, the forecast rain hasn’t yet materialised, so G. and I decide to go into town to see the giant rocket ship that’s crashed a test-tube’s throw from the headquarters of the Royal Society. It’s big all right, like a Land-of-the-Giants streamlined beer barrel with a red-lensed porthole; when we get there, a work crew and a crane are busy removing it from the hole it made in the road. An onlooker tells us that the giant elephant is just across the Mall, and so it is, towering above a happily bemused crowd. Attendants are decking it out in oriental cloths, and the giant girl-child (who clambered out of the rocket ship yesterday) is slowly making her way towards it.

All of which is part of a very wonderful four-day spectacle that has taken over streets and public places in central London, and liberated the imaginations of the city’s workers and visitors. Created by the French theatre company Royal de Luxe, it was first staged in Nantes to mark the centenary of Jules Verne’s death, and while it’s clear that the French know a thing or two about the honourable and ancient tradition of civic street theatre, I think Londoners should rise to this challenge. After all, we have ten years to work out how to stage scenes from War of the Worlds in time for the 150th anniversary of H.G. Wells’s birth.

Beach Not Sea

We used to think that there were canals on Mars. We used to think that Venus was covered in jungle on which rain never ceased falling. We used to think that Titan was covered in oceans of ethane. As usual, the truth is so much more wonderful: familiar and utterly strange and with its own compelling logic.

I've Got Your Quote Right Here

Sandwiched between title and text, an epigraph provides a clue to the theme of a story, chapter, or novel; that is, the unifying idea or collision of ideas that binds the whole thing together. Choosing the right epigraph is a tricky business whose success relies as much on serendipity as it does on native cunning. It’s not just a question of finding an apposite and pithy quote. If you adorn your beloved work of art with an epigraph that reeks of pretension, wilful obscurity or banality, you’ve handicapped it before it’s out of the gate. Avoiding the Bible, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets is a good start (yes, that means you, Robert Heinlein), but the whole business is so fraught with peril that it’s surprising that any writers ever bother. We’re just natural risk-takers, I guess. Or rotten show-offs.

For there are surprisingly few authors who haven’t succumbed to temptation. A quick, dirty, and completely non-scientific trawl through my library revealed that only J.G. Ballard and Pat Cadigan seem to be wholly innocent. It also showed me just how many SF and fantasy authors get around the problem of finding exactly the right bon mot by the simple method of making one up instead. Tim Powers used a quote the fictional poet William Ashbless to provide both an epigraph and title for On Stranger Tides; Greg Egan has used poetry attributed to fictional characters as epigraphs to Permutation City and Distress. Other writers cunningly use fictional quotes as both epigraphs and infodumps; Isaac Asimov quoted extensively from the 116th Edition of Encyclopaedia Galactica in his Foundation novels; in Dune, Frank Herbert borrowed from, amongst others, The Manual of Maud’Dib, A Child’s History of Maud’Dib, and Maud’Dib’s Favorite Recipes for Dip (I may have made one of these up). Stephen Baxter’s use of epigraphs from the works of Hama Druz in Exultant continue this fine and thrifty tradition.

As for me, I have not one but two epigraphs for Cowboy Angels:

‘We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: "Damn, we’re Americans."’
Lieutenant-General Jay Garner

‘We blew it.’
Wyatt, Easy Rider

Shameless Self-Promotion

Maybe I should say something about the contract I just signed. It’s with Gollancz, it’s for three novels, and one of them has been written, while the other two are at the golden vapourware stage. The one that has been written (but not finished, as it is currently being parsed by my eagle-eyed editor, and I have some ideas about what needs to be changed, too), was once called Look For America, but is now Cowboy Angels. Five points if you know which the two songs, one by Bob Dylan and the other by Gram Parsons, I stole that from. It’s had an interesting history, mostly due to publishing nonsense I don’t want to go into (at least, not yet). I wrote it directly after I finished White Devils, starting early in 2003 and turning it in early in spring 2004, which is where it languished until I resold it to Gollancz. It’s currently scheduled to come out in August 2007, an incubation period more like that of a literary novel than a genre novel that’s a cross between 24 and Doctor Who (or The Man From U.N.C.L.E and The Time Tunnel for you older readers). It’s about a retired CIA agent brought back into service to track down an old friend who has started murdered different versions of the same woman. For this CIA isn’t our CIA; it’s based in an alternate version of America that calls itself the Real, in which a method of travelling between alternate histories (Turing gates) was invented in the late 1960s. The Real has been interfering with other Americas and imposing its own version of democracy on them ever since, until the adventures in other Americas, and the CIA’s budget, were scaled down after Jimmy Carter was elected President. But as our hero tracks his old friend through different versions of America, he stumbles on a plot to reverse peacenik Carter’s policy . . .

Well, it’s pretty clear where in the happening world my inspiration for this came from. And I hope to turn the delay in publication to my advantage by stirring in a few glancing references to the Real’s versions of Things You Just Can’t Make Up that have since popped up in our own America’s adventures. Because I’m still just as angry about the whole sorry shooting match in Iraq and Britain’s shameful role in it as when it kicked off, I think I still have a good sharp edge, and I also think I have a much better perspective on it, too.

As for the other two novels, they both share the settings of my ‘Quiet War’ stories. One will be about the Quiet War itself; the other about the aftermath. At the moment they’re a growing pile of notes and a number of attempts at a first sentence, so I better not say any more. Since I’m hopeless at multitasking, I won’t be making a formal start until the edit of Cowboy Angels is out of the way; and there’s also another novel that needs some work, too, but more about that some other time.

A Real Big Robot

The guys who built this have clearly seen the Terminator movies...

That Was The Week That Was...

In which I finished a short story, wrote a very rough draft of another that I’m not going to call 'Big Space Robot', wrote an introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s short story collection, went to the Clarke Awards and cheered Geoff Ryman’s win for his very fine novel, Air, indulged in silliness with booksellers courtesy of one of my publishers and received two advance copies of the handsome paperback of Mind’s Eye from the other. Oh, and signed a contract for a Dutch edition of Mind’s Eye, and for a three book deal...

Not that I’m asking for indulgence for not having added anything here in the past few days, you understand.

Bears Find MacDonald's

This item in last week’s New Scientist about ‘evolution operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with ‘evolutionary illusions’’ has been bugging me. It’s not just that it sometimes uses ‘evolution’ when it means ‘selection’ (selection is what operates on individuals, as in selection for an Olympics team; if it operates on enough individuals with enough consistency over enough time, so that those individuals with one genetically determined quality produce more offspring that other individuals of the same species, then evolution kicks in . . . but that doesn’t seem to be going on in the examples quoted). Or that at least one example, of sea turtles fatally mistaking city lights for the gleam of moon- or star light on the ocean, doesn’t have any evolutionary content; so far, we don’t have any evidence that those foolish turtles are evolving to live on land, although to be fair perhaps turtles that use other cues than light to navigate them towards the moon-dappled sea may survive more often, and thus the sea turtle species evolves). It’s also because it assumes that the urban environment is a novel niche, which it may not always be (squirrels occupy parks and gardens with trees - what’s novel about that?), and it doesn’t address the question of why some species live in cities and some don’t, perhaps because it raises the spectre of ‘preadaptation’, or colonisation of empty niches. After all, if you plant some trees in a city, don’t be surprised if species associated with trees turn up. And it makes no mention of the one species on which urban living may consistently operate at an evolutionary level: human beings.

On the other hand, the analyses of the effects of urban living on animal behaviour are fascinating, and the scientists quoted in the article are quite right to be excited: they seem to have found an empty research niche to colonise, and one which seems to be tremendously productive. Already, more than fifty per cent of human beings alive today live in cities, and cities are using up more and more of the countryside around them, not only as sites for buildings and roads, but also for industrialised agricultural production and leisure. In Britain, there are now very few areas which are in their original ‘natural’ state; almost all British fauna and flora have already adapted, and perhaps evolved, to cope with human intrusion, or are surviving in shrinking island niches.

Indulging a Meme

It’s my birthday today (‘Happy birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me,’ yadda yadda), so it’s the day to indulge the blog birthday meme.

Three cute things that happened on this day . . .
This is about as close as I can get to ‘cute’: today is World Book Day - I like the idea of a rose being given away with every book purchased. Also on this day: in 1896, motion pictures premiered at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, New York; in 1838, Brunel’s steamship the Great Western docked in New York after a record-breaking voyage across the Atlantic.

Two birthdays . . .
J.M.W. Turner, and Shirley Temple Black (by coincidence, when she was a child, my mother was a fan of Shirley Temple, and I still have a promotional booklet celebrating the eighth birthday of the winsome moppet).

One death . . .
William Shakespeare (it was also his birthday).
Now if you’ll excuse me, there are candles to blow out on a cake.

The Three Ages of Mars

Scientists mapping mineral deposits have concluded that Mars went through three distinct eras: about half a billion years of being warm and wet, followed by a 600 million year period of intense vulcanism, and then three and a half billion years of dry deep-freeze. Was the first era long enough for life to have arisen?

Wild Flavour

I’ve just started in on Karl Taro Greenfield’s China Syndrome, an account of the events surrounding the SARS epidemic of 2003. Not only is it a great account of the detective work that identified the causative agent (albeit slightly wonky on a few of the technical details - he doesn’t quite get how electron microscopes work, for instance), but it’s told from the Chinese perspective, and he has an amazing range of contacts. And framing the story is a wonderful perspective on the explosive free-for-all growth of the Pearl River Delta, the first of China’s Special Economic Zones in the Era of Wild Flavour, that’s as crammed with pumped-up weirdness as any science fiction novel.

Watching You, Watching Me

Is it wrong to think that the implications of this item from The Observer:

Theme park visitors will soon be able to opt for electronic tags which let security cameras record a personalised DVD memento of their day out. Entrants to Alton Towers in Staffordshire will be offered wrist bands containing tiny Radio Frequency Identification chips that will allow them to be watched as they used the park and filmed on rides.

are more than a little sinister?

Caught in the Draft

I’m now on the third draft of the short story, and I’ve learned that the narrator knew that his brother was dead before the story begins, that he retrieves the astrophysicist’s body from its lonely orbit around the brown dwarf, and that the alien, All This Useless Beauty, tells the navy garrison about the narrator’s attempt to escape because, for reasons of its own, it wants his story to be more exciting.

‘Draft’ is a very flexible concept in the age of the infinitely malleable word-processed document, but I still write most stories and novels more or less as I did when I used a typewriter: each draft is printed out and marked up with corrections and notes, which form the basis of changes made to the next draft. But unlike my typewritten manuscripts, a considerable amount of redrafting happens on screen, as sentences grow or shrink, move from one place to another or vanish altogether, and I no longer have to retype pages that have more than three mistakes on them, dab on blobs of correction fluid, or make up sandwiches using carbon paper for the final draft.

You Can’t Make It Up

Further to yesterday’s entry, I’ve just finished James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love, a dense and chewy novel that thoroughly deserves all the plaudits it has garnered. An interview with the author which first appeared in the online magazine Three Monkeys is appended to the end of the paperback, and contains this observation:

I don’t believe in the idea of completely fictional worlds. You can never separate made-up milieux from the words you use to describe them, words which will, unavoidably, resonate in the readers’ heads with the not-made up milieux they have experienced. I read a lot of science-fiction in my early teens and I recognised all the worlds there, every one.

This is something that every reader and writer of science fiction knows, of course, but it’s rare to see it stated by someone from outside the genre. Indeed, science fiction is often attacked by those who have not read it for being entirely made up - an accusation that’s increasingly used by lazy commentators on all works of fiction that are not obviously rooted in the direct experiences of their authors.

On lacking an angle

The paperback of my novel Mind’s Eye is due out in June. As usual, a couple of months before the great day, my agent asked my publishers what might be happening on the marketing and publicity front. As it happens my publishers have some good news about a couple of promotions by big booksellers, and promise to do their very best to get some exposure in the round-up review columns of newspapers and magazines. So all is cool; unless your books regularly hit the upper reaches of the bestselling charts, you can’t expect a paperback edition to set the world on fire. But part of one sentence in their response to my agent’s routine query did catch my attention. It’s this: ‘there’s no real feature angle regarding Paul’s own experience to exploit re this book.’

Now, I’m not about to diss my publishers or publicist. Far from it. It’s a routine response that reflects an admirable realism about the media climate in which they have to operate. And it’s that climate that I want to discuss.

Y’see, as far as the British mainstream media is concerned, it isn’t enough for you to be a novelist who just happens to have had a novel published. Yawn. Big deal. Happens all the time, and novels aren’t, well, y’know, sexy or immediate, are they? And that’s why no journalist wants to talk to a novelist unless either he or she has incorporated some raw and bleedingly obvious chunk of their own life in their novel, or unless he or she is notorious for some reason that has nothing to do with the book they happen to have written. Far easier, after all, to sell an interview with someone notorious or famous, (and do the research via the clippings library and Google), than an overview of somebody’s writing career (and read the bloody books). And so most of the novels that win the attention of the Sunday supplements, glossy magazines, and TV and radio are: (1) those (almost always written by journalists) that lightly fictionalise some current ‘issue’; (2) those in which, as in the self-help positive-thinking psychotherapy industry, the author works through a trauma in his or her own life; and (3) those which are part of a package of products exploiting the brand of someone famous for something other than writing books.

This isn’t, I say again, the fault of the publishers, who can no more influence the media than they can the weather, or the buying policy of big-chain booksellers. No, it’s the fault of a muddy collusion between a facile, money-driven PR industry and lazy journalists and commissioning editors, and it’s why all too many high profile novels are little different from misery memoirs and the ghostwritten ‘autobiographies’ of celebrities who have ‘triumphed’ over what others might think are the usual traumas of childhood, and why the articles about their authors always tread over the same already well-trodden ground.

But listen - here’s a secret. All novels embody in some form or another the author’s experience. That’s why there are no novels written by babies. It isn’t because babies can’t write (celebrity novelists can’t write either - that’s why they have people who do it for them); it’s because babies don’t have any experience. They don’t have anything to write about.

It’s quite true that there’s no feature angle regarding my own ‘experience’ to ‘exploit’ re Mind’s Eye. Nevertheless, Mind’s Eye does contain a good deal of my own experience - my own life. To take something bleedingly obvious: the hero of the book, Alfie Flowers, lives around the corner from where I live. He slouches around the same streets, wears the same kind of black leather jacket, is a regular in the same pub, and talks to the same kinds of people as I do. Not only that, but like me his grandparents loomed large in his childhood, and he was close only to one parent (his mother died when he was very young; my father was never much around when I was a kid, and he eventually divorced my mother). But Alfie Flowers isn’t me, of course. He isn’t the author. He’s this other character, Alfie Flowers, who insists on having his own hang-ups and his own agenda . . .

Wait a minute - I’ve just realised something. The fact that I don’t have an angle is all Alfie’s fault.