Proof Positive

On Friday, I received a copy of the bound proofs of The Quiet War, well on its way towards becoming an actual book. Here it is, sitting on top of the printed MSS of the first draft of the ongoing. As for that, I've read the draft and made notes on structural changes that need to be made to make the narrative coherent - moving chapters around, deleting material that doesn't move the story forward and noting where there are gaps and inconsistencies that need to be fixed. Next, I'll be working through the text line by line. Some people can do all their drafting directly on screen; I need to make marks on paper, to create a physical history of first and second thoughts which I then transfer to a new draft. Perhaps it's a hangover from my first stories and novels, which were composed on a typewriter. The fact that you had to retype a page if you had second thoughts really concentrated the mind, back then.

But before I get into all that, I'll have to deal with page proofs of The Quiet War, correcting goofs that made it through the various drafts and the editing and copy-editing process, combing out typos and making other last-chance fixes before it goes back to the printers for production in time for publication in October. As in farming, every stage of book production has its season...

Natural Art

Particles + gravity + time = beauty

Commercial Break, Encore

Recently received: the French edition of The Secret of Life, transformed, by the alchemy of translation, into Une Invasion Martienne. You can read an online interview about the book, conducted by Eric Holstein, here.

Elsewhere, you can watch Tom Waits’s press conference about his tour, or listen to the world’s oldest known recordings of computer music, made in 1951. No, it isn’t ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...’ But it's pretty close.

Commercial Update

I've just been told by my hero editor that Gollancz has decided to reprint the Future Classics edition of Fairyland, and hang the expenses. I'm mightily pleased, needless to say.

Elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair memorialises what's being lost around the London Olympic site.

Commercial Break

Cowboy Angels has just been published in paperback, retaining the lovely and evocative cover of the trade paperback/hardback. The publishing group (Hachette Livre UK) that owns the imprint that publishes my stuff (Gollancz) is currently in dispute with amazon.co.uk because the latter want to keep an even higher percentage of the retail price. I’m on the side of my publisher on this one: all publishers have already shaved their margins to the bone, major retailers like Amazon already get more than 50% of the retail price, and cutting the percentage the publishers make on the sale of each book even further would ultimately cut the diversity of titles they could publish. Amazon has been removing sales buttons from some Hachette titles and ‘delinking’ some titles from features like ‘Perfect Partner’ but so far Cowboy Angels hasn’t been affected by these strong-arm tactics. Like many authors I use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com by default to point you to where you can buy my stuff online, but there are plenty of other places, such as the Guardian shop (the Guardian just gave the paperback a nice capsule review).

Over at Locus, Graham Sleight reviews all eight titles of Gollancz’s ‘Future Classics’ series, including Fairyland. That particular edition has gone out of print and because the lovely, prizewinning covers are very expensive to produce, none of the titles in the series will be reprinted. Which nicely but unfortunately illustrates my point about publishers’ margins . . . Although Fairyland is no longer available at Amazon, some bookshops still have a few copies, and I hope to have some good news about a new edition soon.

Rock And Roll

I’m old enough to remember when the physics of 2-D chunks of space junk colliding and splitting into smaller fragments in the primeval video game Asteroids seemed genuinely cutting edge. Now, it seems that something like that may be occurring in Saturn’s F-Ring, whose rapid changes may be created by colliding chunks of rock. Yet again, you just can’t make it up.

Talking of old video games, I highly recommend Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong, a classic new kid/old gunslinger contest involving Donkey Kong and the Screen of Death.

It Isn't Easy Being Green

Down through the early morning heat into the centre of London to see a preview of The Incredible Hulk. More of a correction to rather than a sequel of Ang Lee’s outing with the angry green giant, the second of Marvel Studio’s productions isn’t actively bad, but it’s a disappointing follow-up to the flawed but feisty Iron Man. Still, it starts out well. The creation myth that occupied much of Ang Lee’s movie is recapitulated under the opening credits, efficiently showing how a laboratory accident cursed nuclear physicist Bruce Banner with a monstrous alter ego, the Hulk. The story opens with Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, hiding out from General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, who considers him property of the US Army, attempting to learn how to control the anger and stress levels that cause him to transform into the Hulk if they rise to high, and making a connection with the mysterious Mr Blue, who promises a cure. After evading an attempt to snatch him, Banner ends up back in America, on the run with former sweetheart Dr Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), heading to New York and a rendezvous with Mr Blue, who turns out to be cell biologist Professor Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake). Meanwhile, an experienced soldier (Tim Roth) detailed to capture Bruce Banner is first treated with Super Soldier serum, and when that doesn’t satisfy his thirst for power forces Professor Sterns to give him the full Hulk treatment . . .

Like its protagonist, the movie is divided into two, and the preliminary hide-and-seek between the US Army and Bruce Banner in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro is a lot more exciting and engaging than the blockbuster CGI fest of the second half. A bigger problem is that the human characters aren’t much more appealing than the CGI creatures. Throughout, Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner much as he played ‘John Smith’ at the beginning of Fight Club: mousily quiet and severely repressed. It’s a good take on Banner’s predicament and works well in the opening sequence, but doesn’t develop into anything interesting and lacks Fight Club’s knowing irony. Partly, this is because the nature of the beast means that the lead actor always disappears when the action starts, but in between CGI rampages Banner remains an enigma, and although he’s a scientist, he shows little interest in what it means or feels like to become the Hulk; although Betsy Ross’s new flame is psychiatrist Leonard (who in the comic books was briefly Banner’s psychiatrist, before a dose of Hulk serum transformed him into Doc Samson), the movie misses the chance of a meaningful conversation between him and Banner.

Some nice moments hint at the bones of a better film underlying the blockbuster flab: Banner and Betsy Ross start to make love but can’t follow through because Banner’s arousal might trigger the Hulk; a brief, punchy scene ends with Betsy Ross letting rip at a crazy New York taxi driver, something Banner can’t allow himself to do; a Beauty and the Beast idyll between Betsy Ross and the Hulk references both Frankenstein and King Kong. But these are few and far between, and although there are enough nods to the myth to satisfy fans, and director Louis Leterrier (who scored a hit with The Transporter) gives the action scenes a gritty and visceral feel, especially in a chase through the alleys and rooftops of the favelas, the plot, like one of the episodes of the '70s TV series, doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Instead, a couple of moments that have nothing to do with the movie’s story, including a brief walk-on by another Marvel character, aim us towards the next in the series. Let’s hope it’s a lot meatier than this.

Ice Station Phoenix

The Mars lander Phoenix has touched down successfully at Mars’s north pole; first images are being posted at its official site. My first reaction to the panoramic photograph and close-ups, for what it's worth: ice-wedge polygons at every scale, water-ice right under that dusty surface.

And in another part of the Solar System, Cassini has imaged evidence of tectonic activity on Titan. A few years ago we didn’t know if Titan was covered in methane oceans or, if there were landforms, what they looked like. Now it is becoming a place with its own dynamic geography: chaotic hilly terrain, rivers and lakes, fault scarps, seas of dunes, volcanos ...

Meanwhile, I’m off to Norway, land of the squiggly bits. The usual spotty service will resume early in June.

The Wrap

The scan scarcely does justice to Sidonie Beresford-Browne's use of shimmering metallic colours, but here it is - the cover for The Quiet War.

Adding Up

Ian Fleming claimed to write the James Bond novels at the rate of 2000 words per day. 1000 in the morning, followed by lunch and a swim; 1000 in the afternoon, and then cocktails and the company of beautiful women. It took him six weeks of this regime to finish a novel. Nice work if you can get it.

I started the ongoing project on January 3 this year, and finished the first draft on May 20. At twenty weeks, it doesn’t seem to measure up to Fleming’s Stakhanovite rate of production - even though the ongoing is somewhat over 170000 words long, while the Bond novels, at 2000 words a day for six weeks, stack up at an economical 84000 words, I seem to have been overdoing it on the lunch and swimming and cocktails and company of beautiful women bit. In fact, I was hitting Fleming’s rate, at minimum, each week. It’s just that I had other stuff to do - such as dealing with the edit and rewrite of The Quiet War, and then its copy edit. That’s five weeks out of the schedule right there. A fair number of weekends were taken up with finishing a novella, and writing an essay, too. And at the beginning, despite a fair amount of forward planning and making detailed background notes, I managed to make my usual false start, discovering after a few weeks and some 70000 words that I wasn’t heading in the right direction or moving at the right speed. D’oh! Well, nothing for it but to start over, and hope that some of the stuff can be reused (which about half of it was, in the end).

Writing seems to me to consist of a) blundering about in the wrong direction, b) finding the right direction and hitting the groove and getting on with it, and c) rewriting. Ah, rewriting! How I love rewriting! After all, the first draft proves that the project has a beginning and an end. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out all the middle stuff, and making sense of notes like this (and this is one of the more intelligible ones): [need to cut this up into at least two chapters and in second sharpen tension between Ghosts and others, more on unbound nanotech and also make the attack and the death of Colonel Neves much sharper].

But first I have to finish writing a talk I’m giving at the Norwegian Festival of Literature . . .

Last Things

(Warning: contains major spoilers of well-known novels you should have read.)

I’m so close to the end of the first draft on the ongoing that I can taste it. And of course I am preoccupied with the all important last sentences. What scene or reverie will foreshadow them? What will they convey? How will they be shaped?

SF and fantasy novels not only have to provide an ending for their characters; they also have to give an idea of how the world in which they are set has been changed, and whether it will carry on changing, and in which direction. This means that endings are sometimes two-staged affairs, as in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, where the affairs of the world are set in order before we follow the major protagonists to their last farewell, and ordinary life closes over the ones who are left behind in the world. The ending of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has the same pattern: the world changes, and we see the protagonist, Case, settle into that changed world, and his changed life, and the last few sentences make an elegiac farewell to his erstwhile companions.

Elegiac farewells are common in SF and fantasy, especially when they end trilogies or longer series that are increasingly common to the form. It is a letting go not just of the characters, but the world they have saved, or created, or changed. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, the last volume of his trilogy about terraforming Mars and creating a new social order, we slip quietly from the new Mars and the presence of the woman who opposed terraforming throughout, and in her despair at the changes put herself in the way of death many times, until now, at the very end, she finds a way of accepting the world, and life: ‘ . . . She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand towards her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.’

There are at least two other main classes of SF and fantasy novel endings. The first is like a trap springing shut. The world has changed (or it has failed to change), and ending shows the protagonists caught in that change, or in their failure. George Orwell’s 1984 has a classic dystopian ending, in which after all his trials and tribulations of the hero has failed to escape - or rather, he has escaped by turning his struggle against the system against himself and from defeat plucked a pyrrhic victory, an ironic reversal in a novel in which the meaning of language has been famously reversed to suit its rulers: ‘Two gin-scented tears trickle down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’

There’s a similar kind of ending in Orwell’s Animal Farm, where a revolution has been absorbed into the socioeconomic frame it sought to overthrow. The last sentence has transcended the book: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

But this kind of ending isn’t always unhappy. Sometimes the trap springs shut on a moment of happiness, or at least, on tranquillity, or the reassertion of order. In Philip K. Dick’s Martian Timeslip, for instance, the threat of chaos had been averted and decency and goodness are shown to have triumphed in this quiet moment: ‘In the darkness of the Martian night [Silvia’s] husband and father-in-law searched for Erna Steiner; their light flashed here and there, and their voices could be heard, businesslike and competent and patient.’

But sometimes the end of the novel is not The End at all. It’s a slingshot, a sudden revelation that the business of change has not ended, or has only just begun. If Neuromancer ends in an elegiac farewell, the last novel in the loose trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ends in a slingshot that propels the protagonists into an alien cyberspace that has meshed with ours. One of the most famous slingshot endings (not just because it helps resolve the enigmatic ending of the film) is that of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the Starchild dispatches missiles aimed at him:
‘ . . . he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
‘But he would think of something.’

Clarke liked slingshot endings, or sudden reversals. At the end of Rendezvous With Rama, as the eponymous alien spaceship powers out of the Solar System, the novel ends with this last thought (Clarke’s italics): ‘The Ramans do everything in threes.’

The ending of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz famously showed that its ending was merely the beginning of a new turn in its epicycles of history (note the spare prose, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road): ‘A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.’

How will the ongoing project of mine end? That would be telling. You’ll have to read the rest of it first.

From I, Robot to iRobot

As Justina Robson pointed out on a recent panel about near future SF, things like this are all very well but most of them don't clean in the corners properly because they are designed by men. There's a woman on the team behind this, so maybe it does better.

I see from the new issue of Interzone that my big space robot story, 'Little Lost Robot', is now a coming attraction...

Incoming

The blurb for The Quiet War:

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.

On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition.

The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it’s too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war . . .

From the prison cities of Earth to the scrupulously realised landscapes of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, The Quiet War’s exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?

When We Were Cool

There’s long been a close and sometimes fruitful relationship between science fiction and the music of popular beat combos. In a recent article (in the Guardian, but not on-line as far as I know), Jon Savage provides a useful corrective to the motion that SF-influenced is dominated by heavy metal and prog rock bands (with David Bowie as a glam outlier to the latter): Joy Division and a host of 1970s punk and post-punk bands were informed and influenced by SF of the period, available in cheap paperback editions along with all kinds of pulp fiction and experimental and fringe literature. Savage also highlights the importance of independent bookshops as beacons of the offbeat; in the case of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, these included shops run by David Britton and Mike Butterworth, such as House on the Borderland and Orbit: vital beacons of alt. culture.My favourite song of the period remains The Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’, but it wouldn’t take much thought to work up a top twenty . . .

Currently reading: Titan Unveiled by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, not only full of insights about Saturn’s largest moon, but also a great account of the science and engineering that underpinned the Cassini mission and transformed Titan ‘from an object of speculation to a planetary world with its own set of processes and observable effects.’ And makes me want to write a bunch of stories set there as soon as possible.

Slip Sliding Away

A few days ago, the Guardian published a big page 3 article about a proposed NASA mission to a tiny Earth-crossing asteroid (here’s the original proposal, which I think firms up an idea that has been floating about for a while). Obviously, NASA needs new, eye-catching missions for its so-new-it-isn’t-yet-built next-generation spaceship, and this isn’t a bad one. Some useful science might even be involved, although a swarm of tiny robots might be much better at manoeuvring around a flying mountain than human beings. But I can’t help thinking that if astronauts are going to catch a ride on an asteroid, it shouldn’t be back to Earth, but up up and away....

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to work out if I can incorporate as a plot point in the next novel the mind-boggling notion that the entire surface of Titan might be slowly rotating on top of an ocean of ammonia/water, pushed by winds. Are there tectonic plates, as in Earth? Are there huge titanquakes? Do strings of volcanoes form as the surface migrates above hotspots, as in Hawaii? Will sat-nav work? Hmmm...

Some Wit, Little Irony

Into town for the general press preview of Iron Man. Directed by John Favreau, the action is as hard-edged as the new incarnation of the Bond series, and while there’s the expected ton of CGI, there’s also room for some smart dialogue and good performances. Most notably that of Robert Downey, Jr, who carries the movie with his charmingly charismatic take on Tony Stark, effortlessly shading from wisecracking irresponsible playboy to wisecracking tortured genius. Gwyneth Paltrow does her nuanced best with the two-dimensional character of his PA, ‘Pepper’ Potts, while Jeff Bridges amply fills the Gene Hackman role as bald, cigar-chewing, jovially menacing father-figure.

The movie does a fair job of filling a summer-blockbuster shaped hole, and the first act, apart from shifting the venue from Vietnam to Afghanistan, sticks pretty closely to the origin story published in Tales of Suspense 39 way back in 1962. (I picked up Iron Man’s story a little later, along with Thor and the Fantastic Four, not really out of choice, I have to admit: the spinner in my local newsagent stocked Marvel rather than DC comic books.) Problem is, the origin story - warlord kidnaps American armaments genius, forces him to create a copy of his superduper new missile system in a cave, and is surprised when he creates an invincible suit of armour instead - is pure hokum. And while the warlord may be leader of a multinational terrorist group, he's still a cliche of oriental fiendishness (he's also a diluted version of Iron Man's original nemesis, the Mandarin), To be fair, the script makes some attempt to deal with the paradox at its heart - Tony Stark responds to a brutal lesson in blowback from his own arms company by building a more powerful weapon, in an era where we've had ample real-life lessons that no amount of high-tech can give our military adventures happy endings - but in the end it simply sidesteps it, and delivers an entertaining but pretty predictable WWW-style slug-fest. Still, after the very noisy denoument, the movie doesn’t entirely waste the saving graces of its sly wit and Robert Downey, Jr's mischievousness: there’s a neat parting shot that slings us straight towards part two of the franchise.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I do. It’s goes past my office while I scroll down, scroll down, scrowl down, making corrections suggested by my copy editor to the manuscript of The Quiet War. For after the editing and the rewriting, comes the nitty-gritty word-by-word sentence-by-sentence analysis of the text for bloopers both factual and grammatical, repetition, inconsistency, repetition, general stupidity and much else. I’m lucky. I have a fine copy editor with a magpie memory (which means that he can remind me that I used the neologism ice-rock throughout, except for the one time I used icerock), a thorough working knowledge of usuage and abusage of written English, and a pretty good sensitivity for register - the difference in voice between scenes that have different emotional contexts, or between viewpoints. He’s also incredibly clear on what he thinks should (ought?) to be changed, so it wasn’t much of a hardship, no really it wasn’t, to spend the weekend wincingly going through the marked-up manuscript, and then making the appropriate changes to the electronic file. Now I have to read it through again, s*l*o*w*l*y, and then it goes back to the publishers, who will send it to the typesetters to be set in book form. And then it comes back to me again, one last time, so that I can check for any bloopers that skated past, or somehow introduced themselves. Amazingly, there will still be some mistake lurking in the final text, which I will be able to find by the simple method of opening the finished book at a random page and letting my eye fall on a random line.

Somehow, I managed to spend a lovely afternoon, the sunniest and warmest so far this year, in a pub and walking on Hampstead Heath, discovering that the ideal accessory for someone who needs to meet other people is a ten-week-old toy poodle (not mine: my friends’).

I also finished a kind of autobiographical essay for the Postscripts magazine in which I’m the featured author. It’s called How Was The Future For You? and starts like this:

In July, 1969, it seemed to me that the road to the future was as straight as a monorail line, as predictable as an eclipse. Harold ‘white heat of technology’ Wilson was prime minister. The long years of austerity that had followed the Second World War were slipping into history; London was swinging like a pendulum do. The British prototype of Concorde frequently overflew my school, piloted by the inimitable Brian Trubshaw. Nuclear power promised unlimited electricity too cheap to be worth metering. A hovercraft service linked Dover and Calais. The first decimal coins were being struck in the Mint, replacements for the half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, thrupenny bits, and copper pennies, halfpennies and farthings of the l.s.d. system inherited from the Romans.

I was fourteen. I read science fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else, and watched every episode of Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Thunderbirds Are Go. I’d switched allegiance from the Victor, a comic that endlessly refought the First and Second World Wars, to TV 21, which promoted a future full of big machines and bigger explosions. My mind had been expanded by 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (setting aside the stuff about monoliths) laid out the game plan for the thirty years: shuttles owned by Pan-Am; wheel-shaped space stations in Earth orbit; giant Lunar cities; expeditions to the outer planets; brilliant, almost human computers; quietly competent scientist heroes. And now, July 16 1969, in the lunch hour of one of the last days of the summer term, I was sitting in warm sunshine on a grass bank of the school playground with several friends, listening to a transistor radio tuned to a live broadcast from Cape Kennedy, Florida, USA, the launch of Apollo 11. The future would never again be so hopeful, so full of promise.

But in the blue and sunny expanse of the sky which the Apollo astronauts left behind on their way to the Moon, a small cloud about the size of a man’s hand was beginning to drift towards the sun.

Shortly

I’ve just received the proofs of my short story ‘Adventure’, which will be published in Lou Ander’s Fast Forward 2, coming realsoonnow. As previously mentioned, I have a short story (well, half a short story, strictly speaking, as I wrote it with Kim Newman) in the recently published The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow. And tomorrow is the publication day of The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan*, which includes another of my short stories.

And that, as they used to say in TV ads for 50 piece kitchen-knife sets, isn’t all. The Big Space Robot story, cheekily called ‘Little Lost Robot’, has been accepted for publication by Interzone. And this summer Postscripts magazine will be publishing an all-SF edition to coincide with the World SF Convention at Denver, and as I’m the featured author, it will include no less than four of my stories. One, ‘Looking For Van Gogh At The End Of The World’ is a reprint - although it’s the first time it will appear in print in English. The other three, ‘The Thought War’, ‘A Brief Guide to Other Histories’ (which shares the setting of Cowboy Angels), and ‘City of the Dead’, are originals. There’ll be an extract from The Quiet War, too.

Admittedly, the stories in the SRB of SFF and The Starry Rift were written a couple of years ago, but in between working on drafts of The Quiet War, and starting the first draft of the next novel, I seem to have found the time to finish five new stories in the past eight months: a fairly intensive burst of productivity as far as I’m concerned. But now I have to get back to the novel in hand. Two-thirds of the first draft are done, and it’s just beginning, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, to ride on its own melting (to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost).

*Jonathan has not only set up a website full of information about the book, but he also offers readers a chance to win copies of the book by entering a simple competition.

Very Big And Very Very Far Away

The newsblog sfsignal runs a Mind Meld feature in which SF authors pontificate about various topics. #16 is about space opera.

Currently reading: Sputnik Caledonia, by Andrew Crumey
Currently listening to: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Here Comes Everything

In 2004, I had the privilege of being invited to take part in a workshop about the design of an online Encyclopedia of Life, which would catalogue essential details of the1.8 million known species of animals, plants, fungi, algae, protists, bacteria and viruses. Scientists, computer mavens and a couple of SF people (myself and the august John Clute, who is a trustee of the Telluride Institute, which organised the workshop -- he can be seen kneeling at the right of the group in the photograph above, taken with my trusty keyring camera), spent a pretty intense time in the little town of Telluride, Colorada, discussing what needs an Encyclopedia of Life could satisfy, and attempting to design a useful template for its pages. Much more work has been done since by a small army of unpaid volunteers, and now a site housing the first 30,000 pages has gone live. Although I made but a microscopic contribution, I feel immeasurably thrilled that it’s up and running.

Oh My God! It's Full Of Cards!

Long before the internet, Paul Otlet planned a world library based on index cards. The remains of his Mundaneum, which he and Le Corbusier proposed to house in a vast ziggurat, are documented here (link via New Scientist).

Small Earthquake

I’ll be doing to the following panels at Eastercon:

Friday 21st
15.00-16.00 ‘Don’t Give Up The Day Job’

Sunday 23rd
15.30-16.30 ‘Writing The Near Future’

17.00-18.00 ‘Gollancz authors’ signing session’

If you’re going to be there, don’t forget about the little competition...

In other news, Albino Hernadez Penton tells me that his Spanish translation of ‘Rocket Boy’ has just been published in the Peruvian magazine Alfa Eriidiani 2DA Epoca (warning: fairly major download).

Bad Science

I’ve been watching with increasing inattention the BBC’s thriller series, The Last Enemy, which not only made a hash of the very interesting topics of universal surveillance and misuse of biotechnology, but had a clunking plot that advanced mostly by someone abducting the hapless hero and then telling him what was going on. But although I was almost horizontal with boredom by the end of the last episode, I was amused to see the appearance of the good old B-movie trope that any scientist can solve any puzzle by use of a microscope. In this case one scientist was peering down the eyepieces of optical microscopes of decreasing value and power at least three times, the last a student lab microscope that didn’t even have any illumination, stuck on a corner of a bench between a centrifuge and some kind of spectrometer. Now, microscopes can be very useful and powerful instruments -- I used to work with one in the 1980s that cost more than my house. But they are by no means universal tools, and although cytology (the study of cellular structure) is still very important - especially in pathology - since the advent of molecular biology it’s no longer the prime way by which we understand the internal workings of the cell. And much cytology is not done with optical microscopes, and even the most powerful electron microscope wouldn’t tell you how a mysterious virus could affect people of Arabic descent, but not white Europeans. Tsk.

Ringworlds

We all know that Saturn has rings. Now there's evidence that one of its moons may have rings too.

Competition

Today is World Book Day in the UK (elsewhere in the world it's celebrated - hooray!- on my birthday), so I thought I'd give away one of my books. And as I will be attending Eastercon in a couple of weeks, I further thought that I would create an opportunity to meet at least one of the people who check in here.

So to win a signed copy of the increasingly hard-to-find hardback of COWBOY ANGELS you have:
(a) to be attending Eastercon
(b) know the answer to the following question: in which Bob Dylan song are cowboy angels mentioned?
(c) No, don't tell me now. Find me at Eastercon. First person to give me the correct answer f2f wins the prize.

Put Out More Flags

The mass-market paperback of Players, my crime novel about role-playing games and a seriously narcissistic wannabe serial killer, is published today. You can buy it here, or in any good bookshop (check the SF section if you can’t find it with the other crime novels). Otherwise, as you were.

There Are Doors (6)

George Orwell lived at 27a Canonbury Square, Islington in 1945, when he was writing 1984, although much of the work on the novel was done in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, Scotland. The entrance to his basement flat wasn’t on the square itself, but through an unassuming gateway around the corner, close to Canonbury Tower.

UnlikelyWorldsfactoid: the grandmother of my friend Kim Newman rented the flat from Orwell while he was on Jura, and as part payment typed up the manuscript of 1984.

Chronocules

Phil asks some questions about The Quiet War:

i've read six short stories in the sequence, Second Skin, Sea Changes.., Reef, The Passenger, Dead Men Walking and Making History. are there others that i may have missed? are you planning on gathering them all in a short story collection? i noted a reference to Greater Brazil in one of them which would tie the sequence in with 400 Billion Stars and your earlier novels although i can't work out the chronology.

The stories published so far are, in order of first publication:
‘Second Skin’ (1997)
‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ (1998)
‘The Gardens of Saturn’ (1998)
‘Reef’ (2000)
‘Making History’ (2000)
‘The Passenger’ (2002)
‘The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (2002)
‘Dead Men Walking’ (2006)

Another story, ‘Incomers’, is due to be published in April this year, in an anthology of stories for teenage readers, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan. So far, there are no plans to collect them together, I’m afraid. And apart from sharing a country called Greater Brazil, neither the stories nor the novels have anything to do with my earlier future history.

Although it’s possible to fit these stories into a rough chronological order -- ‘Making History’ is somewhere near the beginning of things and ‘Reef’ and ‘Second Skin’ are towards the end -- I wasn’t cunning or foresighted enough to work up a proper future history from the start. That’s why, when I started working on the background for The Quiet War and Outer Dark, I realised that I wanted to take things in a slightly different direction. (If I was cleverer than I am I wouldn't make my life so complicated.)

So the stories should be considered as a loosely affiliated set of fictions in their own right, rather than spinoffs, sidebars, or episodes waiting to be stitched together in some kind of fix-up. Although the novels share some of the background and history (and even characters) of the stories, the novels start from a slightly different place, in a slightly different timeline. And it’s my hope that the novels will benefit from the recent avalanche of new information about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn from Galileo and Cassini probes. I couldn’t have done this without them, not to mention Pioneer 11, and the two Voyagers, and of course the teams of scientists and technicians who designed and flew them, and gave form and names to the fantastic diversity of moonscapes they discovered.

Aspire

After I delivered the edited MSS of The Quiet War to Gollancz, I visited the row of little secondhand bookshops in nearby Cecil Court. It’s one of the few streets in London that still maintains the tradition of harbouring the workplaces of various representives of a trade cheek by jowl, and thus, for a bibliophile, it’s horribly full of temptation. Too much temptation: I came away with a first edition of William Golding’s The Spire.

I already have a paperback edition, signed by Golding just after he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published his penultimate novel The Paper Men. He rarely did signings, and I had to queue for a fair while in Blackwells (on Broad Street, Oxford, just around the corner where I worked in those days) before I got my turn with him. A novice to book signings, having already bought The Paper Men in hardback, I purchased a couple of paperbacks at the till beforehand as the price of admission, and also had him sign my first of The Scorpion God, one of the first hardback books I ever bought, (at a much reduced price, in Bristol, a couple of years after it was published). I’ve been a fan of his work since school. Unlike many schoolchildren of my generation - I did the sciences instead of English Literature - I wasn’t taught The Lord of the Flies as a set book, but I read it anyway, and then read everything else of his that I could find. But despite his early popularity, and the Nobel Prize, he seems to have fallen out of fashion after his death; this and his early and enormous success with his first novel means that first editions of his novels (apart from The Lord of the Flies) are fairly plentiful and therefore fairly affordable.

One reason for his unfashionability may be that he never wrote the same book twice, thus resisting easy academic explication. And he is also, it has to be said, something of an old-fashioned writer, not only in his thorough grounding in the classics, but in his assumption of a God-like but detached, forensic point of view. Thus, he never explains or enters the minds or emotional states of his characters, except when the novel is narrated in the first person (and even though his ‘Tarpaulin’ trilogy is written in the first-person, it is in the form of a journal kept to flatter and impress the narrator’s rich and powerful uncle, so we’re kept at one remove from his real thoughts and feelings). Instead, emotion is conveyed only by its physical manifestation; yet this forensic detachment, married with limpid yet incredibly precise prose, conveys very clearly great emotions in a manner that’s both ironic and sympathetic, and on occasion tremendously moving: in The Inheritors, the discovery by the Neanderthal Lok of the bones of his murdered child is, for me, one of the most heartbreaking passages in English literature. It’s the evocative power of his extraordinarily concise, clear-eyed and accurate descriptive prose that first hooked me, and still enthralls me. All of which is a small part of the explanation of why the epigraph of The Quiet War is from Golding’s Free Fall: ‘The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.’ For the rest, you’ll have to read the book.

This Is This

There’s a lot to argue with in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, including his dismissal of the importance of story (contrary to the dust jacket puff he isn’t at all interested in the ‘machinery of storytelling’, whatever that is), and his rather fussy obsession with hierarchies. But there’s a lot of good things too, notably his sustained meditations on the many ways by which character can be conveyed, and his acute sentence-by-sentence anatomisation of judiciously selected passages of prose. And then there’s this:

. . . A convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference . . . but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude. And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage.

Which seems to me to cut straight through the heart of the Gordian knot into which science fiction has currently tied itself, in fits of embarrassment, over ‘relevance’ and ‘probability.’

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

I spent a fair portion of Saturday printing off the edited and rewritten version of The Quiet War. Now it will go off to the copy editor, who’ll scrutinise it for every kind of goof and mark it up, and then I’ll get a final chance to fix the prose before it gets set. This morning, frosty and crystalline, a fine long walk along Regent’s Canal and hooking through Camden to Regent’s Park. Where snowdrops and daffodils are in bloom together, a very odd sight to someone used to gradation of the seasons. When I started this blog, two years ago, I noted in early April that my neighbour’s magnolia tree was just coming into bloom; this year, about six weeks earlier, it’s not that far off. It’s like being caught in one of those scenes in the old movies, where calendar pages flip by to signify passing time, except they’re blowing past all at once, as the whole wide world teeters on its axis . . .

There Are Doors (5)

Aside from the bicycle lock sleeved in blue plastic, this gate could happily feature in a corner of a Piranesi print of antique ruins. It was once the entrance to the now-defunct Tower Theatre, next door to Canonbury Tower, a tall and brick-built Tudor tower built during the reign of Henry VII for William Bolton, Prior of St Bartholomew. Sir Francis Bacon once lived there (and died after catching a chill while experimenting with preserving chickens by stuffing them with snow), as did playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Washington Irving. It now houses the Masonic Research Centre.

Perchance

At the Wellcome Museum’s exhibition on sleep and dreaming, this quote by Hugo Gernsback: ‘Anyone who has a dream should see a doctor.’ Also a cover from one of Mr Gernsback’s magazines showing an editor inside a kind of giant, electrified bed-spring supposed to banish sleep, so that the editor could work on even more inspiring magazines 24/7. In the permanent exhibition, Darwin’s walking stick, topped with a miniature carved skull with emerald eyes, no doubt capable of shooting out evo-devo rays should any henchmen of the Bishop of Oxford menace him.

There Are Doors (4)

One of the butcher shops in the General Market Building at the Farringdon Road end of Smithfield Market, part of the new market built by Horace Jones in 1851-66. It has been empty for several years as conservationists and developers argue about its fate; in three months, the planning authorities will decide if it will be redeveloped, or demolished and replaced by the usual steel and glass office block. Meanwhile, it moulders on, as if in a post-apocalytic city whose inhabitants have long deserted it.

Space Cowboy

One of the muscians covered by Tony Russell’s most excellent Country Music Originals, The Legends and the Lost, is a cowboy singer with the splendid name of Jules Verne Allen. He was born in 1883, so it’s quite possible that his parents were fans of Verne; the novels for which Verne is remembered today were all published before 1880. For the life of me, I can’t think of anyone else named after a writer of science fiction or scientific romance; after characters, yes (there must be plenty of forty-year-olds whose hippy parents named them Bilbo or Gandalf), but writers?

In Living Colour

This extract from James Woods’ forthcoming book, grandly titled How Fiction Works, probably isn’t especially useful to budding writers who puzzle over how to make their characters seem, if not real, then at least vivid. But he’s especially good on why Dickens’s characters seem real even though they shouldn’t, provides some useful taxonomy, and vents the following pithy denunciation which chimes very loudly with some concerns of my own:

Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with’, or didn’t think any of the characters grow.’

Now I think book clubs - and anything else that encourages people to not only read books they might not otherwise read but also discuss them - are the most marvellous things. But there’s a definite danger, when not thinking deeply enough about your engagement with a novel, of falling into the procrustean mode of Hollywood script reports, and Woods nails it.

As far as I’m concerned, physical description is the least useful way of realising character (usefully, I can discard every novel that begins with the hero looking into a mirror and meditating on her appearance, saving much time for more engaging stuff). What characters say and what they do and how they react to other people are far more useful than physical appearance, and so are their qualities -- their virtues and vices and all the rest. If it’s shorthand you need to ‘get in’ a character, then forget hair and eye colour. Are they forthright or reticent? Optimistic or glum? Thoughtful or careless? And if you want to create two memorable characters in one stroke, then play two opposites against each other in a double act: Holmes v. Watson; Don Quixote v. Sancho Panza; Morecombe v. Wise. It isn’t rocket science; it’s alchemy.
Meanwhile, I have to dive back into the final polish of The Quiet War, not to mention the first draft of Outer Dark...

Face-Off

The internet may be more science-fictional than we think, and possibly not in a good way.

There Are Doors (3)

On the west side of Rose Alley in Southwark, formerly the site of the first of the Bankside theatres (The Rose, built in 1586-7), is one of the last Victorian buildings that hasn’t yet been replaced by characterless modern offices - although given the cry of defiance and despair painted across its wall, it won’t be long. Appropriately for the location, the unassuming entrance is decorated with a frieze of Tudor roses.

That Was Then; This Is Now

I made a microscopic contribution to this roundup of the best genre titles of 2007 and preview of what’s coming this year, assembled by Robert Thompson.

Credo

I spent much of the year past working on The Quiet War, a space opera novel set on and around the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I’ve just finished the first thirty pages of a similar project, Outer Dark, which moves the history begun in The Quiet War forward across some twenty-odd years. In the past couple of years, while I’ve been planning and writing The Quiet War, I’ve noticed during that time that a certain small-c conservative chill has crept across the SF field. The Mundane SF movement is one obvious symptom, but there are many others, adding up to a kind of retreat from SF’s usual concerns (most notably, as far as I’m concerned, a cynicism about the likelihood of colonisation or even human exploration of the Moon and other planets), and a crisis in self-confidence about the genre’s best-known tropes.

Has SF lost its grip on the future? Is so-called mainstream fiction making better use of SF’s tropes? Should SF be exclusively concerned with ‘reality’ and ‘realistic’ extrapolations - things that are possible from our point of view here in the last quarter of the first decade of the twenty-first century? As far as I’m concerned, maybe, no, and definitely not. I’m not against near-future ‘realistic’ SF (hell, I’ve written plenty), or the idea of Mundane SF per se, and I’m looking forward to the Mundane SF edition of Interzone guest-edited by Geoff Ryman. But I do have severe doubts about its claim that it is The Only Way Forward, and all other forms of SF are irrelevant, foolish or even dangerous.

Here are a few principles that have informed the construction of The Quiet War and Outer Dark:

1) SF’s principal strength is not realism; it’s one part internal consistency, two parts imagination, and three parts self-belief.
2) SF isn’t only about known knowns and known unknowns; it’s also about unknown knowns. Given that two hundred years ago most people in Europe were peasants relying on human and animal muscle power to get their work done, why do many SF writers insist that in two hundred years technology will not be radically different from present technology? Let’s face it, who in the SF field fifty years ago saw cell phones coming? Or the PC and the Internet?
3) The future will almost certainly not be dominated by the USA and freemarket capitalism.
4) Self-interest is a poor driver in any society, yet it’s the only motivating force for characters in too many recent SF novels
5) It’s possible to imagine SF heroes other than freebooting entrepreneurs. I mean, the dot.com boom is so over.
6) It’s possible to imagine a society where science is the dominant driving force of the economy and science and the arts are the main occupations of the population.
7) What will really happen if our children are smarter and kinder than us?
8) True AI is less likely than a manned landing on Mars.
9) Most moons in the Solar System are made of water-ice; with a little power, you have all the water and oxygen you need.
10) We know a lot more about closed-system ecosystems than we did in the 1970s, when O’Neill colonies were first proposed. And we have better vision of the architecture and material science of the future, too
11) Colonisation of space will not be driven by self-interest or the profit-motive.
12) History teaches us that history doesn’t teach us anything. Laboured comparisons between the present and past events are pointless. The future will have its own agenda.

There Are Doors (2)

Space alongside Fenchurch station ripe for renovation, with signage surviving from the 1930s, just before the station was rebuilt. It isn’t difficult to imagine passing through this door into a wooden-floored office where clerks with rolled shirtsleeves caught up by bands sit at desks writing in leather-bound ledgers, or pipe-smoking draughtsmen work at drafting tables, and in the deep cutting beyond the windows small black steam engines puff into the station alongside underground trains in the old maroon livery. Note the apt name of the estate agents dealing with the sale of this railside property: Brunel Estates.

There Are Doors (1)

The doors to the post room of St Bartholomews Hospital, to the south of the southern edge of Smithfield Market, have not yet fallen to the vast work of renovation as the National Health Service institution is converted into a trust. Lacking a kickplate, and seemingly last painted somewhere between Lady Chatterley and the Beatles’ first LP, the doors show the wear and tear of a generation or two of laden couriers who’ve used their boots to kick them open.

It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It

I’ve just learned that two of my novels, The Secret of Life, and Whole Wide World, have been made available for download to those whizzy new kindle devices from amazon.com. I’d rather that they were also available as actual printed-on-dead-wood books, which are still holding their own against all comers, but there you go.

Apart from these electronic reissues, in this year Fairyland was given a new lease of life by Gollancz, I published two new novels, Players and Cowboy Angels, and delivered a third, The Quiet War. I had just two short stories published, but wrote four more; hopefully, these and two or three others should be published in 2008.

I seemed to read more non-fiction than fiction this year, but among the novels I especially enjoyed were The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon, Spook Country by William Gibson, Brasyl by Ian McDonald, The Land of the Headless by Adam Roberts, and Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe. Most of the stand-out non-fiction I read seems to be historical, including Buda’s Wagon - A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston, The Lodger - Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl, and On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein. Schultz and Peanuts by David Michaelis is not only an exemplarary biography but also an acute dissection of the entanglement between art and the everyday life of the artist.

I spent most of 2007 in front of a computer screen; outside, the world has become a more precarious place than when 2006 rolled over. So be careful out there, and have the best 2008 you can.

Gamma Minus

Over at the Carpetbagger blog, Steve Benan reports that President George Bush’s policy on stem cell research may have been shaped by a misreading of Huxley’s Brave New World (link via Jack Womack).

The Refuge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7151190.stm

(I couldn't resist - read (sadly out-of-print) The Secret Of Life to find out why.)

Just When You Think You're Out...

Sandy Auden very kindly tells me that uksfbooknews has posted a Q&A about Cowboy Angels.

Ghost Of A Christmas Present

When I was a kid, I didn’t have enough money to buy new books on anything like a regular basis, so I bought comics instead. I was a devotee of TV21, with its strip versions of Gerry Anderson’s oeuvre and the back story of the Daleks (but not Doctor Who, who was licensed elsewhere), and of Marvel Comics - Iron Man, Thor, and the Fantastic Four (not because I preferred Marvel to DC, but because Marvel comics were what my local newsagents had on their spinner racks). But before that, I was a regular reader of The Victor. I no longer have copies of any of the comics I bought, but I still have the annual pictured above, a Christmas present from 1966.

Inside, we were still fighting not only World War II, but World War I as well (in those days, when post-colonialism was beginning to bite deep into the British psyche, we clung as tightly to those victories, as we still cling to our World Cup victory that year). There were knock-off versions of Tarzan (‘Morgan the Mighty’) and James Bond (‘The Wonder Man’, more like the Man in Black in those Milk Tray advertisments than Bond, to be honest), and a Western strip, ‘The Town Tamers’, led by Dusty Fogg. My favourite, though, was ‘Tough of the Track’, in which working class hero Alf Tupper regularly beat toffs on the athletic field after a hard week of heavy welding, and on a diet of fish and chip suppers:

Each day Alf worked in the scaling yard, and each evening he trained. At night he slept in a tool shed on the recreation ground, unknown to the groundsman...

Things were different then, all right.

Apart from some minor cosmetic work, Unlikely Worlds will be taking a break over Christmas. Happy holidays to one and all - and happy 90th birthday to Sir Arthur.

Listening to: Songs of Survival - Traditional Music of Georgia
Reading: The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard; Nonviolence, Mark Kurlansky

Furnished Early In Books

In her Nobel lecture, Doris Lessing makes some fine and moving points about the hunger and necessity for literature in Africa, but is less convincing in her argument that the internet is diverting young people in the West from books. There have, let’s face it, always been distractions and alternatives to the solitary pleasure of immersion in a good book; Facebook and all the other time-wasting fads that pass through the internet like flu in a turkey farm are merely the latest. And given that they get a bare minimum of advertising and media exposure in comparison to films, video games, music and TV, books are probably punching above their weight.

Lessing also suggests that writers come from homes furnished with an abundance of books. Well, I don’t know about that, but most writers definitely seem to have caught the reading bug early, were voracious readers as children, and are voracious readers still. In my case, we didn’t have that many books in our damp little cottage. Maybe thirty or forty. I still remember some of them, because I read and reread them so often. On the Beach. The Cruel Sea. The Battle of the River Plate. What Katie Did. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The Three Musketeers. My grandmother, who lived next door, had about twice that number, mainly faded and dusty Everyman editions (and most of those copies of Shakespeare’s plays) picked up as part of the mixed lots she liked to bid for in auctions. She had a big pile of copies of Reader’s Digest, too; part of being ill, when I was a child, in addition to a bottle of Lucozade and a new comic, was reading four or five Reader’s Digests a day, something that furnished me a fairly eccentric and eclectic view of the world. So I definitely had a serious reading habit, and because we didn’t own many books, and because I couldn’t afford to buy many, either, it was the public library, and the library of the grammar school, that kept it satisfied. Addicts find their fix where they can; back then, before I could afford the hard stuff, even the back of a cereal packet would do.

Away from the distraction of blogging, I seem to have worked out how to finish my big space robot story, started this summer but left fallow because I couldn’t work out what the twist was and where it bit. Sometimes these things come in a glad rush; all too often actual work is involved.

'Rats of the System' in Romanian

Când îl descoperise racheta de vânatoare, Carter Cho tocmai încerca sa camufleze modulul spaÛial.

ReuÕise sa scape de pe ce mai ramasese din nucleul cometei distruse, sapase o groapa potrivita cu flacarile produse de ambalarea motorului Õi îngramadise micuÛa dar rezistenta nava ina untru, apoi îÕi închise eremtic costumul spaÛial Õi se caÛara afara din cockpit ...

That’s the Romanian version of the begining of my short story ‘Rats of the System’ which has just been published in the December isssue of Sci-Fi magazi. (Thanks to Catalin Moraru.)

Roll Up, Roll Up!

Ellen Datlow has just send me this retrotastic Barnum and Bailey style cover for her upcoming anthology (I know the title implies that it’s Del Rey’s, God bless ‘em all, but it wouldn’t have happened without Ellen). It includes a novelette (20,000 words: that’s a novelette, right? I’m a bit vague about the taxonomy) that Kim Newman and I wrote together. And 15 other original stories selected by one of the finest editors in the field. Here’s the list of contents. Pretty damn good, huh?

Introduction Ellen Datlow
The Elephant Ironclads Jason Stoddard
Ardent Clouds Lucy Sussex
Gather Christopher Rowe
Sonny Liston Takes the Fall Elizabeth Bear
North American Lake Monsters Nathan Ballingrud
All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World Carol Emshwiller
Special Economics Maureen McHugh
Aka Saint Marks Place Richard Bowes
The Goosle Margo Lanagan
Shira Lavie Tidhar
The Passion of Azazel Barry N. Malzberg
The Lagerstätte Laird Barron
Gladiolus Exposed Anna Tambour
Daltharee Jeffrey Ford
Jimmy Pat Cadigan
Prisoners of the Action Paul McAuley and Kim Newman

Pure Pulp

Another of my Woolworths finds, and one of my first encounters with raw, primeval space opera. Published in 1968, the stories date from a decade earlier; my favourite is still Edmond Hamilton’s ‘The Starcombers’, which has all the tropes (vagabond starsailors attempting to make a living in a state of pure and untrammelled capitalism, ancient alien artifacts, a ferociously strange niche in a dying world) of the pure quill. The Easy Eye gimmick is long-forgotten; it does actually work, but large type means more pages than usual, which probably wasn’t a great economic model in the cutthroat world of pulp publishing.

I can’t now remember if I bought more short story collections than novels because I preferred collections, or if there were fewer novels on offer. Long exposure to the publishing industry suggests the latter.

The House On Amherst Avenue

Rick McGrath's search for J.G. Ballard’s childhood home in Shanghai.

You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here...

When I was a teenager, living in a small town and too impoverished to buy new books, my only source of SF apart from the local library was the dump bin of the local Woolworths, which contained a headily promiscuous mix of all kinds of imported and startlingly cheap US paperbacks. That’s where I picked up The Asylum World, mesmerized by the disturbingly psychotic cover. John Jakes is best known as the author of bestselling Bicentennial series, about American history seen through the lens of a single family, but before that success he wrote scads of fantasy and SF, including this swift, bleak satire. Published in 1969, it describes the travails of a delegation of Martian colonists on a diplomatic visit to Earth. Jakes is very good at the violent seediness of a New York turned into an insane asylum, which wasn’t much different from the contemporary actuality. He’s pretty good on the laviscious corruption of Earth’s politicians, too; the president is an idiot puppet of his Secretary. Sound familiar?

Mastermind Of Horror

Published in 1965, this collection is Fontana paperback’s second attempt to reinvent H.G. Wells as a horror writer; the first was The Valley of Spiders. Mind you, with ‘The Cone’ they definitely had a point:

He clung, crying, to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone . . . A rush of suffocating gas whooped up at him and when the momentary red had passed . . . there was a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, clutching and fumbling at the chain - and writhing in agony . . .

This vividly nasty little squib about revenge and a blast furnace really spooked me when I first encountered it, age 11, in one of the green-backed volumes of the Everyman edition of Wells’s work. Not only because Wells describes the torment of the furnace owner’s rival with an almost indecent relish, but also because I happened to live next door to a small iron foundry, and never again could look at its smelter with the same innocence.

More Free Stuff

I’ve just put up my short story ‘Interstitial’ on the web site. It’s an end-of-the-world story that takes off from the theory that life had survived at least one bottleneck caused by a runaway effect that created a snowball Earth and ends in the kind of conflict between the military and scientists that powered most 1950's sci-fi movies, with a tip of the hat to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Imagine it in scratchy black-and-white, with John Agar playing the hero.

I’ve just finished and sold the zombie story (they’re not really zombies; they’re Boltzmann brains). It’s presently called ‘The Thought War’, but that might get changed by the time it appears (in Postscripts next year, if everything goes to plan). Right now, I’m working on/playing with a couple of others that I set aside in the summer so that I could make the final push on The Quiet War. My version of a holiday.

It’s A Small World But I Wouldn’t Want To Paint It

I feel exceptionally dense: until I saw a trailer for a BBC documentary last night it never before occurred to me that Mark Everett, aka E of Eels, who has written several of my most favourite songs, ever, is the son of Hugh Everett III, who fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-four, devised the many-worlds theory. Checking through my Eels CDs I find that the drawing on the inner back face of the jewel case of Electro-shock Blues is from Hugh Everett III’s school biology textbook. It shows a boy crying over split milk. In another universe, of course, the milk is unspilt. In another universe, Hugh Everett III received a full measure of the recognition he deserved for his ideas while he was yet alive. We can’t get there from here, but we know, now, that it’s almost certainly true.

As well as feeling dense, I also feel a little guilty, because there is only an oblique reference to Hugh Everett III in Cowboy Angels; in the timeline buried inside the story it was necessary for someone to come up with the idea earlier.

Presently rereading: Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. Presently playing: Blinking Lights and other revelations, Eels.

Free Stuff Free

I’ve put up some more free stuff over on the web site: appreciations of Kim Newman and Michael Marshall Smith, the introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s Zima Blue, and reviews of DVD box sets of Budgie and The Beiderbecke Trilogy. I’m also, slowly, making content on the site available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons licence.

Vast Saharas

And not made of sand either, of course, this being Titan's sand dune seas.

I'm moving further out for the next novel, but I'm still obsessed with Saturn and its exotic entourage.

Entrained

I’ve been working on a short story, and finding yet again that I’m not particularly bicameral; I find it hard to conjure up even the briefest blog entry after working on fiction. The external life of a writer, writing, isn’t especially exciting, alas; perhaps that’s why most fictional representations of writers are about writers not being able to write. Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes A Novel (collected in Amphigorey) is one of the best and funniest depictions I know of the actual process.

Saturday, I walked down to St Pancras Station to check out the new Eurostar terminus. Another favourite walk, in the gloaming along Regents’ canal towards Camden, turning off at St Pancras Old Church (the story starts off in the churchyard, with the appearance of what appears to be a zombie), and sneaking into the station around the back. The place is quite as full as one of W.R. Frith’s paintings; the statue of Sir John Betjeman (who campaigned against the station’s demolition) is delightful; the long sleek trains look quite at home. The champagne bar that dominated the PR turns out not to be a vast length of darkly polished wood lit by low hung lamps and attended by louche customers and waiters in black waistcoats and white aprons, but a series of booths strung alongside platform 1, with a kind of hut affair at the entrance and no doubt featuring the longest walk to a restroom in the history of any bar since the advent of indoor plumbing. And unfortunately, the buffer end of the station is dominated by a thirty-foot staue of a man and a woman falling into an embrace. Titled The Meeting Place, this monstrous piece of committee-art is a bad mistake, I think. And since it is situated under a huge and beautiful period clock, it's a) superfluous and b) in the way. Also, as the couple are dressed in contemporary clothes, it will look tremendously dated in, oh, ten years or less.

But these are minor quibbles. The restoration of the station and its overarching roof is a triumph, and my neighbours have already taken one of the first trains to France and report that it’s as quick and smooth as any on the Continent. No more waiting outside Waterloo for the 1650 to Penge to clear the junction: I can now walk to a station in twenty minutes, and be in Paris inside three hours.

Presently reading: Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road.

Oh Yeah

The other thing I did on Monday, apart from watch Beowulf and see a big plume of smoke over London that briefly woke the poison spider meme that lurks in the basements of our brains, post 9/11, was send of the manuscript of The Quiet War to my editor at Gollancz. Which is no longer quite the ceremony it once was, involving a hot laser printer, a ream and a bit of paper, a large envelope, parcel tape, and a wait at the post office. Instead you just press this button, and off it goes into the ether.

The Quiet War came out at more or less 170,000 words, a tad over the estimate of 150,000 made before I wrote the first word. I cut something like 50,000 words along the way, so I think they are the right 170,000 words, more or less. It would be easy (and fantastically lazy and indulgent) to make it twice the length, with no change in plot or incident. But it wouldn’t do the book much good. I like to write long and cut back, which isn’t the most efficient way of writing perhaps, but lets me see what works, and what is necessary.

It’s loosely based on the background and back story a sequence of stories I wrote over the past ten years, although I’ve made some pretty drastic changes; necessary changes, as the sequence emerged piecemeal rather than being thoroughly planned. So it’s a second draft of a future history, about the way in which history works through human lives, and how human lives and human ideas work on history. It follows five main characters through a tight tangle of storylines that all resolve in a conflict that slowly and inevitably develops into war, through design and circumstance. A collision between stasis and evolution, between a conservative elite that’s consolidated power after catastrophe, and a new generation hungry for change, even though it can’t quite define to itself what that change is going to be. There are spaceships and space battles, chases and alarms, vacuum organisms, floating gardens in Saturn, gene wizards, spies, and extraordinary ordinary people, cities and oases scattered across the very real icescapes of half a dozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn (I owe a vast debt to the robot probes Galileo and Cassini, not to mention the Huygens lander)... In short, it’s a kind of space opera.

I should of course be pressing on with the next novel, and I am beginning to make notes on the notes I wrote at various intervals in the past year or so, but having worked with furious concentration for about eight months, with just a couple of weeks off here and there, I’m unwinding a little. Stepping back, to make the next great leap. Maybe I’ll scratch the itch of this short story that’s been bugging me. And in any case, I’m hardly finished with The Quiet War; there’ll be an edit to deal with, by and by, and a concentrated spot of polishing, the copy edit... I definitely need a rest.

Celeb spot: Gilbert & George piss-elegant in camelhair coats, Commercial Street, Spitalfields. Not entirely unexpected as they live around the corner, but it still evoked a tiny frisson.
Current listening: Songs of Defiance, Music of Chechnya and the North Caucasus, compiled by Michael Church, and Oddities and Marvels of the Human Voice, compiled by Jack Womack. Current reading: E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome To Hard Times.

Space Truckin'

I like to think that Jules Verne would be pleased by this highly practical spacecraft.

Beowulf In The Valley Of The Uncanny

Out to the IMAX cinema in Waterloo with Mr Kim Newman to see the 3D version of Beowulf. Given I’m not big on heroic fantasy and think The Vikings was about as good a film as it was possible to make about sword-swinging looting and pillaging Danes, I was pleasantly surprised. The script nicely compresses the poem into classic Hollywood three-act format and adds a couple of neat plot twists, and the story, in which the hero takes on a monster, the monster’s mother and a dragon (not to mention a bunch of sea serpents), is perfect subject matter for the technique of using digitally-enhanced live action within a computer-rendered setting, previously deployed by director Robert Zemeckis in Polar Express. Digital animation means that anything is possible except, because of the Uncanny Valley effect, entirely believable scenes in which the actors do nothing but talk to each other, and so the first half, where most of the exposition lies, is sometimes a bit laboured and reminiscent of cut-scenes in computer games (even if they are the most exquisitely detailed cut-scenes you’ve ever experienced). It doesn’t help that Ray Winstone, otherwise fine as the misguided hero, occasionally lapses into broad Cockernee (‘I have come to kill a Monstah!’), and the scene where he gets naked before his fight with Grendel is distractingly reminiscent of the opening of Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me. But once the story gets going and hurtles towards its tragic-heroic conclusion it grips more firmly. There are stunning coupes de theatre, including a wonderful reverse tracking shot through a dark and wintery wood, dynamic action scenes, and the best goddamn dragon I’ve ever seen: once it roars into action the film literally takes off. If you’re going to see it, though, be good to your inner 13-year-old kid and make sure you catch it in IMAX 3D; I don’t think that it will quite work in any other format.

Coming out of the cinema, heading over Waterloo Bridge, there was a vast plume of smoke rising to the east and unpacking above the Thames and South London; just for a moment, Kim and I wondered if This Was It again; nope, just a very big fire at a disused bus garage in the Olympic site in Hackney: bonfire of the vanities.

One Hundred Futures

In the post today, a copy of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 of short short stories first published in Nature. You can read my contribution, ‘Meat’, here.

In The Cut

Yesterday, visited the Tate Modern to see Doris Salcedo’s installation. One of my favourite walks, through Islington and down St John Street past Smithfield, Little Britain, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and across the Thames on the wobbly bridge. Like a descent back through the centuries, from Islington’s nineteenth century suburb and Georgian squares, down to the twelfth century when Smithfield was ‘Smoothfield’, where horses were sold, and St
Bartholomew’s Hospital was founded, and on to the timeless river.

Salcedo’s installation is a riverine crack that runs down the floor of the huge Turbine
Hall. Impressive in execution, cunningly made so that the bottom can’t be seen, but dwarfed by its surroundings, and rather too obviously a construct, with its new wire grid and fresh concrete. The barabarian in me thought that it might be imporoved by jets of vapour spouting at unpredictable intervals, and perhaps some Lovecraftian tentacles grabbing at art-lovers, who seemed unsure how to react, mostly getting photographed straddling it, or dipping the tip of their shoe into the narrow void. No one fell in while I was there.

Cyberyarn

'A stitch, in essence, is a pixel.'

Back To The Future

I rewatched Children of Men the other day and enjoyed it as much if not more (because I could pay more attention to the scrupulous texture) the second time around. One of my movies of the decade, so far. In one of the extras, the philosopher/critic Savoj Zizek (who is always good value) commented that what was happening in the background of the movie was more important than what was foregrounded. I think that’s true for all good science fiction.

From The Tightrope

Richard Ford, one of the modern masters of the short story gives a masterclass:

Great stories are congeries of plan, vigour, will and application, but also of luck and error and intuition and even, God knows, sudden inspiration, for all of which there is no key, and in the midst of which things often just happen - a fact that should make us like stories even better for their life-mimicking knack of seeming to come out of nowhere, thereby fortifying our faith in art and life’s mystery.

Do Tell

I now have the power to scan - and here's the cover rough for the mass market paperback of Players, which my publishers reckon is solidly commercial (and who am I to argue?). There's a crossbow in it, but it's also about MMOPRGs. And hubris.

Reading: Dylan's Chronicles (soundtrack:The Bootleg Series Volume 1). Rereading: Alastair Reynolds's Absolution Gap.

Peace Breaks Out

I’ve just finished the final draft of The Quiet War, and must now contemplate the next, which is presently called Outer Dark. But now I have to go off and write an introduction to a collection of stories about AI...

Elsewhere, Paul Kincaid is pleased by the health of the short story market, Jeff Vandemeer is unimpressed by mere comptence. And Mark Lawson, post-Booker Prize, feels that authors can choose between ‘the smooth and brightly lit genre path that winds through entertainment, optimism and simplicity’ to ‘adulation, mansions and fame’ (yeah: right), or the ‘dark and densely tangled’ path of yer actual literature, which leads to ‘bleakness, experiment and sentiments which many will consider unspeakable or unreadable’. No wonder the poor dears of the literary field need champagne-fuelled award parties to cheer them up. They really do suffer for their art, you know.

The Actual

I’ve been so busy with the ongoing that I quite forgot to mention the 30th anniversary of the end of Cowboy Angels, but here’s a photograph of one of the featured events from that crucial day; of course, you’ll have to read the novel to find out how it fits in.

And here’s something completely different - the graphics and onboard sounds of the tracking instruments of the Cassini-Huygen’s probe during its descent to the surface of Titan. Which is where my head is currently at.

Credo

James Wood, in a review of Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, published in The New Yorker:

Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction was a rival life, a ‘counterlife’, to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real.

Eye Spy

Watching you, watching me.

Weather Report

It’s winter, in the northern hemisphere of Titan. The temperature is a frosty minus 180 degrees Centigrade, and methane/ethane rain is gently falling and filling the lakes.

Information Wants To Be Free

This week I've mostly been blowing things up on Dione. But I have posted a couple of new extracts of Cowboy Angels over on the website - you can now read the prologue and first three chapters for free.

Currently listening to: Closer, Joy Division; The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, Bob Dylan; Icky Thump, The White Stripes.

The Hot Breath of the Future

Uh-oh.

The Chill Hand of Mortality

In an interview published in The New Yorker, part of the publicity for his new novel Exit Ghost, Philip Roth says this:

. . . at this stage of the game I’d much rather spend my reading time - as I have been doing - revisiting, for the last time around, other writers, like Conrad and Hemingway and Faulkner and Turgenev.

So now, in addition to books (some as yet unwritten) I haven’t yet read, books I don’t ever want to or need to read, and books I’ve read but won’t ever read again, I have to look forward to a time when I have to concentrate on books I really must reread, one last time, before it’s too late. At least, if I’m carried off in the middle of rereading one of my favourites, I won’t have to worry about never knowing how it ends.

In the same issue, Louis Menand beautifully evokes that old, still-potent romance:

. . . I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Before The Fall

While researching Cowboy Angels, I spent a lot of time figuring out what Manhattan might have looked like before it was settled by any humans. Eric Sanderson's project came a little too late, and would have saved me a lot of trouble...

(Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Rorschach Moon

Iapetus close-up.

Heads or Tails

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which attempted to apply quantum mechanical equations to both the subatomic world and the macroscopic world we ordinarily inhabit. It’s long been accepted that subatomic particles like electrons or photons exist as both wave and particle until collapsed when an observer makes a measurement; Everett’s proposal that hawks, handsaws, and human beings also exist in a multitude of simultaneous states - parallel worlds - has been much more contentious. But now, at a meeting at Oxford University, reported in the latest issue of New Scientist (you need to be a subscriber to read the full report, but Peter Byrne has blogged the meeting for Scientific American), David Deutsch and his colleagues claim that ‘key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel worlds’. Or to put it another way, if they’re right - and it’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence - every time we make a decision, the universe really does split into two parallel branches. Coin-tossing may never be the same again.