Scenery

When you're flying from moon to moon in the Saturn System you're never short of beautiful views.

The Quiet War, Chapter 4(i)

Much later, Macy Minnot would come to believe that Emmanuel Vargo had been the first casualty of the war. But when she first heard about the ecosystem engineer’s death she thought that it was nothing more sinister than bad luck. A freak medical mishap. An accident.

Like Macy and the rest of the construction crew, Emmanuel Vargo spent the twelve-week voyage from Earth to Jupiter in the deep sleep of artificial hibernation, drugged and chilled and consuming a minimal amount of oxygen and water while the Brazilian cargo ship fell through eight hundred million kilometres of sunlit black vacuum. He was still asleep when the ship went into orbit around Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons, and first-class passengers and hibernation coffins and cargo pods were offloaded onto a tug that descended to the port, a cluttered slab cantilevered above a dusty plain west of the city of Rainbow Bridge. The tug touched down on a scorched landing apron with the lumbering delicacy of a hippopotamus attempting ballet. A mobile crane unlatched from the tug’s cargo frame the truck-sized pod that contained the hibernation coffins and transported it to a pressurised hangar where the coffins were extracted one by one and loaded onto flatbed carts that trundled through subsurface tunnels to the medical facility at the edge of the port. That was where Emmanuel Vargo began to wake, and that was where he died.
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Welcome To The Future

You come boiling off the flight from hell, two hours delayed out of Heathrow, another hour stacked over O'Hare, some rugrat kicking the back of your seat throughout, and a fat drunk snoring on your shoulder. You're anxious to make your connection with a domestic flight, but first you have to pass through this:

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror. MORE AFTER THE JUMP:

Have a nice day...

The Quiet War, Chapter 3

It was the most important funeral to have been held in Brasília for more than twenty years. The avenues around the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida were clogged with limousines and flitters. Drivers and security details eyed each other with professional interest. Drones wove amongst treetops. Helicopters beat wide circles under the hot blue sky. Wolves prowled the long park, Eixo Monumental, and half the city was paralysed by interlocking rings of security.
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Born Under A Wandering Star

It seems out that the sun may have wandered far from where it was first formed. So in one sense we're all hobos.

For some reason, thinking of SF novels about the hobo life, I forgot all about James Blish's Cities In Flight series, which describes an interstellar civilisation in which cities use antigravity motors to wrench themselves free from Earth and soar through the Galaxy, looking for work. Which was pretty dumb of me, especially as I provided a blurb for the SF Masterworks edition: 'An outrageous imaginative coup . . . Crammed with high adventure yet illuminated by a searching intelligence, this four-part epic completely reinvented the traditions of space opera'.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Byte?

One of many sites with advice for would-be professional indigents. Apparently panhandling is now a career-path.

Don't confuse panhandlers with hobos by the way. Hobos have their own code, and their own handchalked version of email. Not to mention their own national convention.

(Many writers are fascinated by tramps and hobos, possibly because most have a lurking dread about ending up on the streets. This is one of my favourite novels about falling from the world above into the world below. There are of course many others, although I'm hard-pressed to think of an SF example. Maybe William Gibson's Virtual Light fits the bill, although its protagonists really inhabit a kind of pirate utopia.)

The Quiet War, Chapter 2

Cash Baker was just twenty-six, with eight years’ service in the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, when he was selected for the J-2 singleship test programme. From inauspiciously ordinary origins in a hardscrabble city in the badlands of East Texas he’d risen through the ranks with astonishing speed. Luckily, he’d received as good an education as anyone in his neck of the woods could reasonably expect, and one of his teachers had spotted his preternatural mathematical ability and given him extra tutoring and steered him towards the Air Defence Force. He scraped into the top percentile in the induction tests, was streamed straight into basic pilot-training at the academy in Monterrey, and a year later, on a hot, thundery day in August, marched at the head of the graduation parade for the class of 2210. He started out flying fat-bellied Tapir-L4s on supply missions to remote camps of the Wreckers Corps east of the Great Lakes, was quickly promoted to the combat wing of the 114th Squadron, flying fast, deadly little Raptors, and distinguished himself in a string of air-support missions during the campaign fought by General Arvam Peixoto’s Third Division, clearing bandit settlements in and around the ruins of Chicago.
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The Quiet War, Chapter 1

Every Monday and Friday until its publication on October 16, I'll post chapters from my new novel, The Quiet War, at the website. Here's the first:

Every day the boys woke when the lights came on at 0600. They showered and dressed, made their beds and policed the dormitory, endured inspection by one of their lectors. Breakfast was a dollop of maize gruel and a thimble of green tea. They ate quickly, each boy facing one of his brothers across the long table, no sound but the scrape of plastic spoons on plastic bowls. There were fourteen of them, tall and pale and slender as skinned saplings. Blue-eyed. Their naked scalps shone in the cold light as they bent over their scant repast. At two thousand six hundred days old they were fully grown but with traces of adolescent awkwardness yet remaining. They wore grey paper shirts and trousers, plastic sandals. Red numbers were printed on their shirts, front and back. The numbers were not sequential because more than half their original complement had been culled during the early stages of the programme. READ MORE...

Dead Wood Promo

I recently put up my short story 'A Brief Guide To Many Histories' on the website; now ManyBooks offer it in all kinds of formats under a Creative Commons license.

It's one of three new stories by me in Postscripts #15, the bumper all-SF issue of the magazine. The vanilla hardcover is already on the market, and Pete Crowther, maven of PS Publishing, tells me that the signed editions will be back from the printer in a week or so. Get 'em while they're hot!

Maybe Not So Smallish

Are the bookshelves of my local charity shop operating some kind of version of Douglas Adams's infinite improbability drive?

Today, I dropped into the shop and picked up a ex-library edition of Tom Disch's poetry collection Burn This. And a couple of hours later I learn, via Ed Champion, about this tribute.

There Are Doors (13)

On the far side of Smithfield Market Edna Sharrow can run no more and in the cool shade of a tree at the boundary of the churchyard turns to confront the girl who has followed her.

The girl is an ordinary girl. Slender. Grainy skin. Pale blue eyes and dirty blond hair scraped back. Dressed in a grey pyjama-like suit zipped up the front. Shoes like small white pillows. An unremarkable child of the stones, except that the black light burns within her.

Edna draws herself up and says that she will deal only with the master, not his familiar.
The girl shakes her head and says, He’s busy elsewhere, but I can help you. What is terrible is that she is not afraid. No, her look is one of pity. She says, I shouldn’t have sent you away. I should have helped you right away. But I was scared. I admit it. It’s my first time.

I don’t need your help, Edna says.

You poor old thing. You don’t know, do you. You don’t know that you’re dead.

And the black light beats around Edna like wings and she is falling away from the world. For a moment she catches hold of the tree and she remembers her mother holding her up in the sharp cold of a long ago Boxing Day, to see the hunt ride by.

Look at the pretty horses, she cries, and her heart leaps with the joy of the long-ago moment of lost innocence, and she falls through the door of the sky.

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Not By Fire

Hey, we’re still here. And my broadband connection has come back. So much for the naysayers who predicted the end of the world when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. I guess they can come down from the mountaintops now, and dispense with the sackcloth and ashes.

Or maybe not, because so far the scientists at CERN are just testing their new toy. They don’t start smashing fundamental particles into each other at tremendous and possibly world-destroying energies (or not) until next month.

(If you want to know what might happen if the naysayers had been right, you might care to check out my short story ‘How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen’. Currently available here or in an audio version, until I get around to coding it I’m afraid. (Don’t worry, it has a happy ending.))

I was pleased by the blanket coverage of actual science in the media, but do find it rather worrying that the only way scientists can get any real attention these days is to be wrongly accused of plotting to blow up the world. If we keep up this inattention it really will be over for us, as a species because we need a whole bunch of cleverness to get us out the mess stupid applications of good ideas have gotten us into.

There Are Doors (12)

The shadowy army Mr Carlyle took from Edna Sharrow were ghostly shells cast off by people during moments of extreme emotion. Knots of terror and fear she’d used to intimidate and frighten and control. So it’s only fair, she thinks, to strip her enemy of his familiars and take from him everything he sheds in his last moments. To make what’s his hers.

She drifts south and east through Clerkenwell towards Smithfield Market. If he’s tracking her, she’ll lose him there, in the echoes of the charnel house it once was. Blindside him.

She’s so occupied with her plans that she doesn’t see the girl until she steps out of the shadow under St John’s Gate, as if from one world to another. Calling to Edna, apologising for sending her away, saying that she should have dealt with her at once.

Edna Sharrow draws on her last reserves, but the girl stands her ground. Black light beats around her, a hearth-heat that withers the laces that bind Edna’s soul, and Edna runs from it in a blind panic towards the sanctuary of the shambles.

Part Part 1 2 3 4

Island In Space

Out beyond the orbit of Mars, on its way to rendezvous with comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ESA's Rosseta spacecraft has just flown past asteroid Steins. Here's a brief movie of the encounter. We've grown so used to seeing scenes like this in SF movies that it takes a small effort of imagination to kindle our sense of wonder and remember that this is the real deal: real rock, real spacecraft.

Is it just me, or does it look like there's a face carved on the back side of the asteroid as it dwindles into the outer dark?

There Are Doors (11)

Edna Sharrow slurs and sidles along the streets like a leaf blown by the fumy slipstream of the endless traffic, through crowds of foreigners. Many of them humpbacked with rucksacks. Many coloured. As if her dear England has fallen to a foreign power while she slept in her lair. She’s hungry again, eyes children as she drifts past. Babies. Flinches from a dog that explodes into rage.

She drifts east, towards her enemy’s compass point of splintered black light. Remembering a girl. An ordinary girl telling her that Mr Carlyle wasn’t in. Telling her to go away. Sending her away. But that must be a story Edna is telling herself to cover up the hole in her memory. For a mere slip of girl could not have any power over one such as she. No, she has been tricked by her enemy, and he will pay for that, and for everything else.

When she can no further she passes through a gate into a small park and curls up under a laurel bush. She dreams of ranging through the dark clothed in the sinew and hot stink of a fox, and wakes choking on a mouthful of bloody pigeon feathers. And rises, renewed. Today she will have her revenge.

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How Not To Write A Short Story

1) Get drunk first.*

2) Spend three hours every day in front of the mirror intoning your mantra: ‘I am bottling the lightning. James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield are ants in my afterbirth.’

3) You can never do too much research.

4) Try to work out what magazine editors want before you start to write. Study the stories they publish very carefully. Work out their average word count. Work out average sentence and paragraph lengths. Which words appear most? Which appear least? Or not at all?

5) Choose a room in your house for a study. Better still, build a custom-designed shed in your garden. Insulate it, install mains electricity, decorate it in a soothing but stimulating shade of green. Choose the perfect desk and chair. Spend several weeks in stationers and art supply shops choosing the best brands of paper, pens, pencils, notebooks etc. Buy a top-of-the-line laptop and an industrial laser printer. Build bookshelves and fill them with dictionaries, encyclopaedias, how-to-write manuals, Strunk & White, Partridge’s Usage and Abusage, The Writers’ & Artist’s Yearbook, Brewer’s Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature etc etc. Read everything from cover to cover. Maybe you should paint the walls a perky but soothing shade of blue instead. Or go on a writing course...

6) It’s important to get the first page absolutely right. Don’t be afraid to rewrite it 1000 times. Did I say page? I meant sentence.

7) spelyn n punctooashun r killin creativitey man dnt b a sheap

8) You can never spend too much time on the internet mongboards, dissing published writers. The fuckers.

9) Get a bad crack addiction. When you clean up you’ll have a ton of killer material.

10) Get a life instead, and enjoy it to the full.**

*Warning: may actually work. But not for everyone.
**Recommended.

It's A Smallish World

Last week I picked up an out-of-print novel by Paul Watkins (Archangel) in the local charity shop. It reminded me of what a good and interesting writer he is, so I did the Google thing and the Amazon thing to check out what he’d been doing lately. And for a moment it seemed that his latest novel is called The Quiet War. Except that it isn’t a novel, and it’s by a different Paul Watkins.

Sometimes it seems that the universe is trying to send you a message, but you can never be quite sure what it is or whether it really is for you.

Unfinished

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, my mind unstringing itself, I’ll get ideas about the next day’s work. Solutions to seemingly intractable problems about character or plot. Last night, though, I had a dream about a short story. It was printed on a wraparound for the review section of the Saturday edition of the Guardian newspaper. Black letters on white paper. Twenty-four point type. About two hundred words a page, four pages. No title, just a name - not mine, someone I know - at the head of each page.

It was an SF story about two omniscient post-Singularity AIs passing through a black hole into the universe next door. Where the black hole was a white fountain, kick-starting creation. The pair of AIs as gods, shaping their new universe. And the smallest of the pair, quicker-witted but less powerful than his companion, saying at every significant tick in the universe’s evolution: ‘Dude, this is so like last time.’

I woke up before I finished reading it, so I don’t know how it ends. I wonder if the author does. Maybe he’ll read this and get in touch, Experiment In Time style.

There Are Doors (10)

It’s Richard’s house in the little square mews in Notting Hill. Was once Richard’s house. For of course Richard is long dead. Edna Sharrow is not so mad that she does not know that.

Poor charming courtly Richard and his coterie. She remembers the delightful evening when the Leader held court here. A splendid man, holding all of them in thrall. As powerful in his way as Edna, then just a smidgeon over sixty and sitting neat and tidy as a closed clasp knife in a corner of the room. The Leader so tall and handsome, and his beautiful wife, and his wife’s mad daughter, who whispered to Edna, I know you.

But why is she here now? She had been at the door of her enemy. His house in Princelet Street, shuttered and quiet. And here she is without any memory of transition, like finding herself on the wrong page of her own story.

Something bad happened, she thinks, and in her panic she fled and came here, looking for help. But Richard hung himself in his prison cell on the day when he and all the rest of the world learned that the Fuhrer had committed suicide, and time has taken care of all his friends.

For the first time since breaking her long seclusion and stepping out into the world Edna feels afraid.

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A Good Deed In A Naughty World

I've just discovered that the online magazine Fanzine has published a short story by Scott Bradfield. I've been a big fan every since I read some of his early short stories in Interzone, back in the Paleolithic: smartly-written absurdist parables, goofy and sweet, but always with a sting in the tale. Kind of like the films of Preston Sturges. He hasn't published much recently, but there's a collection of good stuff still in print - Hot Animal Love. And it's well worth trying to track down a copy of his novel Animal Planet, too.