Unknowability

What do we write about when we write about aliens? Of course, we mostly write about ourselves – even when we're writing about cat-aliens. Perhaps especially when we're writing about cat-aliens, because despite all the behavioural studies we don't, really, have any idea about what cats are thinking, what they feel, the nature of their sense of self. We can try to imagine all that, but whatever we imagine is a transposition of what we think cats might think, a reflection of a reflection of ourselves.

And when we try to write about actual aliens, who come to us not from the dark of our gardens but the dark between the stars, we're trying to fill, maybe, the gulf between our small little lives and the vast vacant uncaring unknown. When we're kids, we look up at the stars and imagine kids like us looking back, from some planet like our planet. Because recontextualising the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar is what kids do, that's their superpower. And then we grow up, and realise that outside Earth's thin envelope of air there's nothing human or familiar. When we look up at the stars, the unknown indifferently stares back.

Very near the beginning of one of the best, and probably the best known cinematic depictions of an alien encounter, 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's a scene where a family of man-apes huddled together at night under an overhang, wide-eyed, unsleeping, while the dark everywhere outside this inadequate shelter is resonant with murderous cries. And very near the end of the film, we see, in the eyes of an astronaut falling through a transdimensional wormhole opened by an enigmatic alien artifact, that same fearful gaze behind the reflections of impossible wonders flickering over a helmet visor.

We're still afraid of the dark.

Back in the 1990s, there was a belief that physicists were getting close to formulating a Theory of Everything – to reducing the complexity of the universe to an equation that could fit on a T-shirt. Such was the muscular optimism of the twentieth century. We know now that the universe is not only stranger than we once imagined: it could well be stranger than we can imagine. As Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, has pointed out, 'there may be some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us – just as quantum theory was beyond the first primates.'

This doesn't mean that the universe isn't comprehensible, only that we're only just bright enough to know that we aren't bright enough to know everything. And we also know that unless we are truly alone in the universe, or unless we've reached the outer edge of some kind of limit to intelligence that's inextricably woven into the intrinsic structure of the universe, that there are almost certainly other species out there which are considerably smarter than us. Highly-evolved species of aliens which have already figured out what mere humans simply can't.

We can only guess what they might be like. Sometimes, as in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe or John Varley's Eight Worlds future history, they treat humans and other inferior species are troublesome infestations. Sometimes, as in Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, they keep their existence hidden from mere primitives like us because they know that even the most casual contact would blow our tiny minds. And sometimes, as in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, David Brin's Uplift series, and Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, they want to help.

The Jackaroo in Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere want to help. Kind of. Maybe. They claim, anyway, that they are here to help, and gift humanity with fifteen habitable exoplanets and the means to reach them – but they won't explain why they want to help us, or to what end, or what happened to their many previous clients. Even more than cats, they're fundamentally unknowable. Perhaps there's a universal law: any species which can sufficiently understand and manipulate the fundamental properties of the universe to traverse a significant portion of it is incomprehensible to those species, like ours, which can't.

But while we can't understand them, aliens smart enough to understand the universe would also be smart enough to have a complete theory of everything human. We can't yet understand the minds of cats, but hyperintelligent aliens could see us whole, know us in ways we can't know ourselves. They could, if they wanted to, game and manipulate us in ways we can't begin to see, for reasons we may never be able to grasp. And even if they didn't toy with us, even if they were honest and open and completely straight forward, their innate superiority would inevitably create mistrust and resentment. They would reflect not only the unknowability of the universe, but our fear that we do not, perhaps, measure up to what it expects of us.

Transect: The Dome To Greenwich

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 When I began my brief career as a university lecturer, there were slightly more women than men amongst the life science students. Yet the majority of postgraduates working towards their Ph.Ds were men, and of the seven lecturers in the School of Plant Sciences where I worked, only one was a woman. Hope Jahren's memoir Lab Girl is, amongst other things, a clear-sighted polemic, based her own personal experiences, about that imbalance, and the barriers and prejudices women scientists must overcome. She describes her rural Minnesotan childhood and her early interest in science, how she learned to perform lab work, and her struggle to establish a research career and her own laboratory, aided and abetted by her partner in research, Bill, whose passions and eccentricities match her own. Punctuated by lovely little essays on the life of plants, those strange machines that from sunlight, water and air create the energy that fuels life on Earth, it's a terrific exploration of the culture and practice of science, and a fierce, candid and funny account of a scientist's life.

Midnight Special

The first science-fiction film from writer/director Jeff Nichols begins, as a declaration of intent, with a scene that only partially reveals its truth. Two men, Roy (Michael Shannon, who also starred in Nichols's Take Shelter) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are watching TV in a motel room whose windows have been sealed with cardboard. The TV news reports the kidnap of a young boy, Alton Meyer; Roy is the chief suspect; Alton (Jaedon Lieberher) is in the room, reading a comic under a sheet and wearing headphones and blue goggles. The kidnap isn't a kidnap at all: Roy is Alton's biological father, and has rescued his son from a cult led by Alton's adoptive father, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard, flintily uncompromising). Just after Meyer orders a follower, Doak (Bill Camp) to get the boy back by any means necessary, the cult's premises are raided by the FBI. They want the boy too.

A thriller involving car chases and shoot-outs in Louisiana back roads, motels and gas stations slowly mutates into something stranger and never quite fully explained; Nicholls backfills the story via hints and terse asides. One of the comics Alton reads is a Superman adventure, and like Superman he possesses powers fueled by the light of the sun -- he can intercept radio signals, including those deeply encrypted by the secret services, and his eyes emit rays of powerful white light that can be destructive but can also beguile (which is how Lucas, in a moment glancingly referred to rather than shown, was recruited). Unlike Superman, though, Alton has little control over his abilities, hence the cardboard-covered windows and the twilight vampiric existence of the fugitives.

The paranormal is anchored by the gritty naturalism of its Southern flatland milieu and by very human concerns: the joys, sacrifices and responsibilities of parenthood, and the nature of belief. Belief, here, is more important than understanding. Faith trumps mere facts. Roy, formerly a member of the cult, and wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst, who comes into her own in the final scenes) have resolved to take back their son and help him reach a place that's special for for reasons only Alton knows. Meyer and the members of his cult believe that Alton is a messiah prophesying the end times, and although Meyer is quickly sidelined, Doak and his sidekick continue to doggedly track the fugitives, possessed by grim faith ('What do I know of these things?' former electrician Doak wails at one point). The FBI believes that Alton is a threat to national security. And Alton believes that he will find enlightenment at the end of the journey, but the exact nature of that enlightenment isn't fully explained until the very end.

Roy's conviction in the necessity of what he must do appears as resolute and unchangeable as Calvin Meyer's belief in the apocalypse; his face is shuttered by a granite-jawed impassivity that only occasionally allows a glimpse of his very human self-doubt and the anguish of his parental dilemma. Lucas, Roy's childhood friend, has a more conventional character arc, an ordinary man caught up in the extraordinary, a disciple who learns to believe and in doing so achieves a state of grace. Likewise, Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) a young NSA agent affiliated to the FBI, comes to true understanding of Alton's powers. As does, in the unhurried unfolding of the story, Alton himself, becoming ever more remote, ever more certain that he is not as divine as Calvin Meyer believes, but is not quite human either. The film withholds its key revelation until the last scene, an apparition that raises more questions about Alton's origin, and the nature of our reality, than it answers. Although it's a vision that's both unexpected and vividly rendered, it seems somewhat mundane, especially to those familiar with the memes of science fiction, a stab at transcendent wonder that doesn't quite convince. Fortunately, there's much else in this elliptical, enigmatic parable that does shine with an authentic light of otherworldly strangeness.

Wall Of The Ancestors

Found on a walk, somewhat inelegantly positioned at the Thameside edge of Aragon Tower, Pepys Estate, Deptford: sculptor Martin Bond's Wall of the Ancestors. Faces include those of Grinling Gibbons, Queen Elizabeth I, Tsar Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano, and Sir Frances Drake, all past residents of the area now occupied by the Pepys Estate (Pepys worked nearby, at the original Trinity House). I like the Bridget Riley-style trompe l'oeil underneath it, too.

Aragon Tower was sold by the Borough of Lewisham to developers and the proceeds used to refurbish and regenerate the rest of the Pepys Estate. Residents in the tower, mostly council tenants, were moved out and the flats were transformed into upmarket duplexes and sold on the open market. An early example of the kind of displacement now common everywhere in London. Wrong kind of faces, maybe.

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I wonder, is it a coincidence that computers achieved their dominance at just the moment that life on earth became so cataclysmically imperilled? I wonder if that was a driver, if part of the urge to escape feeling, to plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention, comes from the anxiety that we will one day be the last ones left, the last species surviving on this multifarious, flowered planet, drifting through empty space. That's the nightmare, isn't it, to be abandoned in perpetuity? Robinson Crusoe on his island, Frankenstein's monster disappearing on to the ice, Solaris, Gravity, Alien, a weeping Will Smith in I am Legend wandering the desolate, unpeopled, post-plague city of New York, begging a mannequin in an abandoned video store to please say hello to me, please say hello to me: all these horror stories revolve around the terror of solitude without the prospect of cure, loneliness without the hope of alleviation or redemption.

Olivia Laing: The Lonely City

Slime Planet

From Into Everywhere:

It had no name, only a number assigned by a rip-and-run survey team before the rise and fall of the two empires, and it was old, about twice the age of Earth. The tectonic plates of its lithosphere had set in place after its outer core had cooled and solidified; any mountains it might once have possessed had long ago weathered to dust; after its magnetosphere had decayed most of its original atmosphere had been blown away by the solar wind of its star. It had been cold and virtually airless when the so-called Old Old Ones, said by some to have been the first of the Jackaroo’s clients, said by others to have been the Jackaroo’s precursors, had arrived, thickening its atmosphere and rebooting its hydrological cycle by bombarding the vast ice-cap on the dark side with comets diverted from the red dwarf’s threadbare Oort cloud. Now the slime planet was cloaked in a reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and ammonia, and a shallow sea turbid with ferrous iron spread across its substellar hemisphere, broken by a single sodden land-mass near the terminator between light and darkness. Enormous rafts of sticky foam generated by blooms of photosynthetic bacteria floated everywhere on the sea, and colonies of stromatolites grew in a few muddy bays on the sunward edge of the lone continent.

Those colonies were what had brought Tony Okoye and the crew of wizards here, in a three-way partnership with the broker on Dry Salvages who had purchased the old survey team’s report. Unprepossessing mounds like melted candle stumps, built from layers of sediments and bacterial filaments and slime, the stromatolites contained nodes of archival genetic material and communicated with each other via a wide-bandwidth transmission system constructed from arrays of microscopic magnetic crystals. The chief wizard, Fred Firat, believed that they were the remnants of a planetary intelligence, a noosphere woven from algorithms that were the common ancestors of the various species found in active artefacts left by the Elder Cultures. A root kit or Rosetta stone that would unlock all kinds of secrets, including the causes of sleepy sickness, Smythe’s Syndrome, counting disorder, and other meme plagues.

Fred Firat had the grandstanding rhetoric and unblinking gaze of someone who carried the fire of true crazed genius, and like all the best salesmen, prophets and charlatans he was his first and best convert to his cause. He was convinced that the scant data buried in the records of that old expedition pointed towards something of fundamental importance, had sold the idea to Ayo and Aunty Jael during a virtuoso performance via q-phone. Which was how Tony had found himself embarked on what might be the biggest score of his freebooter career.

Disruption

A couple of decades ago, back when I was a scientist as well as a science-fiction writer, I worked on plant-animal symbioses. My lab spirit animal was the humble green hydra, a freshwater relative of jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Green hydra are relatively easy to grow. So long as they are fed and kept at a constant temperature, they reproduce, like the one in the picture below, by budding off copies of themselves. You can quite quickly fill glass trays with thousands of cloned hydra derived from a single parent.

Like certain of their marine relatives, green hydra possess a population of symbiotic algae: an average of twenty or so green single-celled Chlorella lodged in vacuoles inside each of the digestive cells of the hydra's endoderm, like individually-wrapped apples in supermarket baskets. The Chlorella release to their host about half of the carbon they fix by photosynthesis, in the form of the simple sugar maltose; the hydra supplies nitrogen and phosphate. But as far as the hydra is concerned, it is not an obligate relationship. If you expose green hydra to intense light in the presence of the herbicide DCMU, which specifically disrupts the chain of reactions by which photosynthesis converts light energy to chemical energy, the Chlorella cells are internally poisoned and, dead or dying, are expelled by their hosts. The hydra are, to use the term coined by the inventor of this method, bleached. Turned into algae-free albinos that provide useful controls for experiment that probe the symbiotic relationship.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. Currently, reef corals in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere around the world are bleaching. Spitting out symbiotic algae (brown zooxanthellae rather than green Chlorella) whose photosynthetic capabilities have been adversely affected by a rise in sea temperature above the normal seasonal maximum. It's the third mass global bleaching event in less than two decades (the first, the first ever, was observed in 1998; the second in 2010). Unlike green hydra in the laboratory, reef corals need their symbionts to survive. Some corals can recover,  reacquiring zooxanthellae from the environment or from remnant populations in their tissues. The rest die. In the areas of the Great Barrier Reef affected by this bleaching event, about 50% of the reef corals are expected to be lost.

It's a signal event in global warming. It shows us that the effects of human activity can reach inside the cells of reef corals, reach into the chloroplasts of their symbiotic algae, and disrupt their normal activity. A vast uncontrolled experiment, with no planning or endpoint, in the only biosphere we possess; the biosphere we must also inhabit. There are no controls.

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Selections of Charles Dickens's journalism, part of background research for a thing I'm working on as a break from the novel I'm supposed to be writing. I love the moments when he turns his acute perception on himself, like this, from the end of 'Gone Astray', an essay about a child's eye view of the terrors and wonders of London's densely populated maze:

The venerable man took me to the nearest watch-house; -- I say he took me, but in fact I took him, for when I think of us in the rain, I recollect that we must have made a composition, like a vignette of Infancy leading Age. He had a dreadful cough, and was obliged to lean against a wall, whenever it came on. We got at last to the watch-house, a warm and drowsy sort of place embellished with great-coats and rattles hanging up. When a paralytic messenger had been sent to make inquiries about me, I fell asleep by the fire, and awoke no more until my eyes opened on my father's face. This is literally and exactly how I went astray. They used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am an odd man, perhaps.

Incidentally, has anyone ever analysed the influence of Dickens on Gene Wolfe, with especial reference to Severain's voice in The Book of the New Sun?

Drowned Worlds

Very pleased to be part of this -- an original anthology of stories about the Anthropocene, where we all live now. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it's due to be published on July 12. Jonathan has some more information about it, including the table of contents, over on his blog. My story, 'Elves of Antarctica', set on the Antarctic Peninsula, is a kind of prehistory of the novel I'm presently writing.

O Superman

There may be one or two minor spoilers ahead.


By now we know what to expect from a Zack Snyder film, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the first in a projected series of films about the superhero team that's been a staple of DC comics since 1960, doesn't disappoint. Stylised bouts of ultraviolence disrupted by slow- and fast-motion; fantastically detailed fan-pleasing set pieces; carefully composed shots rendered in the dark tones, high contrast and shadows of comic-book noir: all are present and correct. Characterisation, narrative logic and light and shade, not so much.

Still, although it's clearly less important than the apocalyptic action, there is a kind of through-line to the story of this long dark noisy film. The boss fight between Superman and General Zod that wrecks much of Metropolis towards the end of Man of Steel is shown again, this time from the point of view of Bruce Wayne. The skyscraper offices of Wayne Enterprises are demolished and many of his employees are killed; he wants to avenge them. Meanwhile, the government is trying to undermine Superman's reputation because they fear he is uncontrollable, and Lex Luthor, who bamboozles the government into giving him access to Zod's wrecked spaceship and Kryptonite technology, wants to get rid of him too. But first, he wants Superman to deal with Batman, who is causing all kinds of trouble for Luthor's criminal empire. Or maybe Luthor just wants to see a good fight -- played by with jittery malice by Jesse Eisenberg, he's given to fractured, inarticulate monologues that suggest he doesn't know himself.

Maybe, like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Luthor is into chaos, but at least the Joker had a coherent ideology. And while the Joker reveled in his villainy, Luthor seems to find it a burden. One of the film's problems is that no one seems to be having much fun. Poor Superman: only his mother and Lois Lane have faith in his innate goodness. And Batman's pursuit of vengeance is similarly joyless. In the Christopher Nolan films, Bruce Wayne was driven, but he had fun playing the recklessly flamboyant billionaire. Here, he's just driven, drowning the sorrow of a joyless one-night pick-up by chugging a bottle of vintage wine. All is grim and dark and gritty. There are explicit visual references to 9/11, and as in the aftermath of 9/11, the end justifies the means, from torture to pre-emptive assassination, the government is militarised, and there is much talk of vengeance, but no sign of forgiveness. Batman has reverted to his early, gangster-slaying incarnation, torturing criminals for information and branding them so that they'll be killed in jail by the other inmates. Despite the explicit code embedded in his origins, Superman (is that a bird about to crash into that building? is it a plane? no, it's . . .) continues to kill. If we get the superheroes we deserve, then the superheroes we get here mean that we're in deep trouble.

That's not the only problem. Motivation and characterisation are mostly realised through flashbacks,  dreams, and terse statements of intent. There's much exposition via computer files, including teasing glimpses of the Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. Superman's dead human dad shows up in a dream to give a pep-talk, because (I guess) the dead Kryptonian dad of a previous incarnation showed up as a hologram in Superman Returns. There's a dream sequence in which Superman commands stormtroopers whose uniforms are emblazoned with his sigil: a foreshadowing of a possible future storyline that will puzzle anyone who has only a glancing knowledge of the mythos.

It isn't an entirely terrible film. The fights are nicely choreographed, and there are some lovely moments of eye-candy (not a few borrowed from Miller's The Dark Knight Returns). Both Henry Cavill (Superman) and Ben Affleck (Batman) are excellent (Affleck's chin is definitive). Amy Adams does her best as the sparky girl reporter who keeps needing to be rescued. Laurence Fishburne continues to bring gravitas to Perry White. The acid quips of Jeremy Irons' Alfred are rare glimpses of humour. And Gal Gadot is a wonderful Wonder Woman, but doesn't have much to do until the final showdown, when her crooked grin suggested that she actually enjoys being a superhero facing up to a desperate fight to the finish with a super foe.

Such a shame, then, that the film too often strains for profundity it doesn't deserve, and its muddled, ponderous story hinges on the bathos of a stupid coincidence. Its relentlessly nihilistic grim one-note tone also threatens to taint the upcoming films in the League of Justice universe, whose inception, here, is almost an afterthought to the gladiatorial excesses. So far, Marvel's Avengers won't be quaking in their boots.

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Gaia Vince: Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

Adapting to the Anthropocene will be as challenging as colonising Mars, so we'll need all the ingenuity we can muster.

First Lines

From the upcoming novel and four stories due to be published this or next year.


There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. 
Into Everywhere


The origin story we like to tell ourselves is that our little town was founded by a grumpy loner name of Joe Gordon, who one day quite early in the settlement of First Foot parked his RV at the spot where one of the ceramic roads left by an unknown long-lost Elder Culture cut across the new two-lane blacktop between Port of Plenty and the open-cast iron mine at Red Rocks. 
'Something Happened Here, But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was.' (Tor.com, 2016)


On the sixth day of every month Fernanda Wright negotiates the rings of security around the Stratford tesseract and lays a flower at the tomb of her undead husband. 
'Rats Dream of the Future' (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2016.) 


Mike Torres saw his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. 
'Elves of Antarctica' (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris, 2016.)


It really did look like Mars. 
'Life Signs' (For an as yet unannounced anthology.)

Tomb Taxonomy

From Into Everywhere:

Most of the tombs were small, and most had collapsed or been buried by wind-blown sand that over thousands of years had cemented into friable rock. In certain places, tombs had been built on older tombs, creating tells ten or twenty strata deep. Many were empty, but fragments of Elder Culture technology, usually sympathy stones or the mica chips that contained the entangled pairs of electrons that underpinned q-phone technology, could be found in some, and tesserae were embedded in the walls of others. No one knew if the tesserae had been created by the Ghostkeepers, or if the Ghostkeepers had excavated them from ruins left by other Elder Cultures and used them as decoration or markers for reproductive fitness. Almost all of them were inert and of only archaeological interest; those that still generated active eidolons were highly prized.

Like all tomb raiders, Lisa and Willie had eked out a living from sales of mundane finds while dreaming of discovering the kind of jackpot that would kickstart a new industry or technology and make them so rich that they would never have to work again. They sifted through the middens of abandoned hive-rat nests – the fierce little creatures dug deep and sometimes brought up artefacts. They found their way into intact chambers where eidolons might kindle from shadows and lamplight. When everything else failed, they sank shafts into the mounds of collapsed tombs. Willie disliked digging. Not just because it was hard work, although that was a consideration, but because it disturbed what he called ‘the flow’.

The City of the Dead was a sargasso of history, according to him, with strange tides and currents, backwaters and eddies. Everything flowing into everything else.
 
If they found no intact tombs or abandoned nests, Willie preferred to dowse rather than dig. He would wander over the parched landscape with two lengths of copper wire bent into a pair of L-rods, delicately pinching the short arms between thumbs and forefingers and narrowly watching the quiver and dip of the long arms. Circling a spot when the rods began to twitch, insisting that Lisa start digging if they violently see-sawed.
 
Willie’s dowsing had a surprisingly good hit rate – slightly better than chance, according to Lisa’s Chi-squared tests – but he preferred spelunking, and so did Lisa. Finding their way into spaces untouched for thousands of years, where the psychic traces of the creatures that had built them yet remained. She remembered spiral tombs augered into the earth. She remembered labyrinths of broken stone. She remembered one huge, cool, bottle- shaped chamber lit by a shaft of sunlight from a high crevice. As Willie had climbed down the swaying rope ladder, orange fronds clumped in the splash of sunlight on the floor had suddenly broken up and scurried off in every direction, seeking the safety of shadows. A kind of colonial beetle-thing, it turned out, with symbiotic plants growing on its shells. Lisa remembered another chamber, this one long and low, where eidolons had exploded around them like bats: after they’d sold the tesserae that generated them, she and Willie had lived high on the hog for two months.
 
She remembered the time the truck’s LEAF battery had run out of charge at the western edge of the City of the Dead, a long way from the nearest settlement, with the eroded range of mountains that marked the edge of the Badlands shimmering at the horizon. Willie had pulled his trail bike from the load bed and roared off with the battery strapped behind him. He’d said that he’d be directly back, but a day passed, and another, and there was no sign of him and Lisa couldn’t pick up a phone signal. She discovered that she didn’t mind being stranded. She had plenty of food, enough water to last a couple of weeks. She slept in the back of the truck’s crew cab during the day and watched the starry sky at night. Dissolved into the antique silence of the desert. Looking back, she’d never been happier.
 
On the fourth day a hot wind out the south blew white sand from the crests of sand dunes. The sky grew milky and the sun faded to a dull smear and the horizon closed in. The truck’s door seals couldn’t keep out the dust and Lisa had to tie a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. Everything was covered with a fine white bloom. Her eyes itched madly.

Willie drove out of the tail end of the storm towards sunset. He’d been caught up in a business deal, he said, but it hadn’t panned out. Lisa didn’t bother to ask. It might have been a lead on Elder Culture ruins or a poker game, a girl or a spell in jail. In the morning they mounted the recharged LEAF battery and drove to Joe’s Corner and bought water and food and went on.
 
Those were the days of their lives until they finally hit their jackpot. Until the Bad Trip.

Into The Wild

Into Everywhere now available as an ebook in the US. I think that it's the first time one of my titles has been available over there before being released over here. So make the most of it, US readers.

Publication date in the UK for the ebook, audiobook and dead tree version is April 21st

High-Rise

'I'm a fast learner,' Dr Robert Laing soothingly tells an obstreperous neighbour who accuses him of a minor breach of rubbish-chute etiquette. Laing (imbued by Tom Hiddleston with cool semi-detached superiority) has just moved into a flat on the 25th floor of a new high-rise, midway between the lower levels inhabited by ordinary middle-class families and the heaven of the penthouses of the rich, including Anthony Royal, the architect who designed the building. Soon, he will need to deploy all of his charm and adaptability to survive the apocalyptic transformations of this vertical microcosm of society.

J.G. Ballard's experimental collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), was the template for a loose thematic trilogy of novels that explored the effects of technology and the urban environment on human sexuality and psychology. Rather than resisting change or attempting to impose order on chaos, Ballard's characters embrace the freedom to explore and act out new states of being, from fetishism of cars and car accidents in Crash (1973) to the ways in which the liminal urban space of Concrete Island (1974) and the brutalist architecture of the self-contained tower of High-Rise (1975) translate into psychological states and human narratives.

In High-Rise, petty resentments and suburban hedonism are amplified by the claustrophobic architecture; as the veneer of civilisation cracks open, the inhabitants revert to savage tribalism and are gripped by a mass psychosis that traps them inside the building that has been designed to satisfy their every need. Directed by Ben Wheatley from a screenplay by Amy Jump, the film follows the novel's narrative arc pretty faithfully, beginning with the infamous scene where Laing sits on the terrace of his flat, roasting the leg of an Alsatian, and then looping back to Laing's arrival, and his introduction to the hedonistic lifestyle of the high-rise's middle floors by his upstairs neighbour Charlotte Mieville (played by Sienna Miller with a nicely judged mix of boldness and vulnerability). Charlotte also introduces Laing to Royal (Jeremy Irons as a limping acidulous demigod dressed in Bond-villain white) and Richard Wilder (Luke Evans in thuggish proletarian denim), a TV documentary maker who lives on the ground floor with his children and heavily pregnant wife. As the building's lifts and utilities begin to break down and social divisions -- defined by money rather than class -- fuel violent strife between floors, Wilder's increasingly brutish resentment drives his obsessive attempts to ascend to the top floor and confront the building's creator, a counterpoint to the descent of the rest of the inhabitants into apocalyptic warfare.

While David Cronenberg's film of Crash (1996) displaced the novel's setting from the 1970s to contemporaneous Canada while accurately replicating Ballard's cool, martian gaze, High-Rise makes the 1970s London setting of the novel a central feature of its aesthetic. There are slow pans across supermarket shelves packed with color-coded blocks of packaging; ranks of immaculate period cars stretch away in a vast parking lot; the apartments are nicely detailed, from the brass-and-glass furniture and orange and brown wallpaper of the lower floors to the wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting and modular sofas of Royal's penthouse. The opulent interiors contrast with the brutal concrete exterior, bracingly framed against the sky and increasingly, as anarchy grips and the inhabitants party until dawn, depicted in the magic hour when the nuclear fire of level sunlight burns through the windows of its apartments.

Rather than attempting to impose a conventional plot on Ballard's clinical anatomisation of collapse and transfiguration, Wheatley uses montage and images shattered by a child's kaleidoscope to fast-forward the disintegration and mounting insanity to its violent conclusion. A man leaps from a high balcony and smashes, in exquisite slow-motion, into the bonnet of a parked car; in the  supermarket, peaches grow coats of mould; barricades block corridors and staircases; black binbags stuffed with rubbish bulge from rubbish chutes and clutter even the penthouses. The violent excesses of this gorgeously shot period dystopia are guyed by the kind of absurdism Wheatley has deployed in earlier films, notably Kill List and Sightseers. It's mostly a good match for Ballard's deadpan parodic humour, but is sometimes a little too broad: Laing's obstreperous neighbour and a cantankerous caretaker are little more than grotesque caricatures; a scene in which Laing turns up in a suit to a penthouse costume party and is roundly mocked by Royal's neglected, imperious wife (Keeley Hawes) and her acolytes veers towards sitcom farce; a roving gang armed with a BAFTA trophy is perhaps an in-joke too far.

Ballard's novels are powerful and disturbing because they mirror our own lives with far more closely than we'd like to admit -- their portraits of collapse and wild abandon are only a few degrees from what we call normality -- but comedy redefines normality by violently distorting it. Fortunately, such lapses in tone are rare. High-Rise is a gloriously subversive slice of anarchy, a mix of arthouse and grindhouse that, like the novel, relishes its remorseless deconstruction of what we like to think of as immutable human behaviour.

Getting There From Here

When I delivered the manuscript of Something Coming Through, my editor asked several times when it was set. In which year? How far from now? Ten years? Twenty? There are aliens, and half the story takes place on another planet, amongst ruins left by alien cultures, so it was obvious -- wasn't it? -- that it had to be set in the future. Here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, no one has yet set foot on another planet, and human exploration of the Moon is receding into history. Apart from fantasies of dreaming yourself to Mars or revisionist histories in which the Space Age didn't die with the Cold War, the future is the only place where easy travel to other planets is possible.

But if you take the future seriously, it has to be seriously different from the present. And that's a problem if you want to explore the ways in which the weirdness of life on other planets can warp and twist your characters: it can be difficult to foreground alien weirdness if the background is equally estranging, equally unfamiliar. That's why 2001: A Space Odyssey uses the trademarks of familiar companies, a space station interior that resembles an airport lounge (the Djinn chairs were a contemporary 1960s design), a dull corporate meeting, and banter about the authenticity of chicken sandwiches to undercut the future shock implicit in a journey to the Moon. The domestication of the future heightens the reveal of the monolith in its moon-pit because it is an alien irruption into a setting rendered as banally as the present, rather than being just another strange artifact in an unfamiliar landscape littered with dozens of equally strange artifacts. Likewise, Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye use the familiar cliche of a space navy that resembles the Royal Navy to throw the weirdness of its aliens into stark relief.

But too often the deployment of a historical paradigm to furnish the setting of a space opera or planetary adventure -- the Roman Empire, the Wild West, India during the British Raj, so forth -- is either a lazy default or a comforting simplification. A nostalgic reinterpretation of a Golden Age that never was. A historical espirit d'escalier (all those endless replays of the Vietnam War...). And too often domestication of the future not only strips out its inherent strangeness, but also elides the strangeness and strange complications of the present; too often, futures are less futuristic than the here and now.

In an essay about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris, Philip Lopate points out that in shots of freeways the director 'disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb when the estranging future has already arrived?' Likewise, Something Coming Through isn't set in any specific future, with a clearly defined path that leads back to the here of now, but in a free-floating present that's no more than a slightly heightened version of the actual present, where we all live. I didn't want the weirdness of a fictional future to be a distraction from the weirdness I wanted to write about. I wasn't interested in the descriptions of voyages and vessels which often take up a large part of science fiction novels about other planets. I wasn't interested in the how and the why of travel to other planets; I was interested what happened to the voyagers after the end of the voyage. Better, I thought, for this little fairy tale about gifts that aren't what they seem to start where we are now, in a familiar place inhabited by people like us, with concerns and histories and desires and failings like ours. The alien worlds and the aliens, living and dead, were estrangement enough.

Something I Did Earlier

Heads-up for German readers: Heyne have just released ebook editions five of my novels -- Vierhundreit Millarden Sterne (Four Hundred Billion Stars), Verborgene Harmonien (Secret Harmonies), Ewigen Licht (Eternal Light), Rotor Staub (Red Dust), and Feenland (Fairyland). Heyne have grouped the first three in 'The Alien Cycle' as they are all set in the same future history, but they are essentially stand-alones. And Secret Harmonies is, for various reasons, out of print in the UK, the US and elsewhere, so if you can read German, here's your chance.

Elsewhere, you can read my short story 'Transitional Forms' for free, courtesy of Lightspeed Magazine, and off to the right are, as always, links to Kindle ebooks of other short stories and short story collections. Sometime in the next few months, I'll be adding to that ebook list A Very British History, a collection of stories from the first 25 years of my career. A few print copies are still available from PS Publishing, if that's your preference.

Scribble Scribble Scribble

Very pleased to announce that I have just signed a contract with Gollancz for two new novels -- as always, a commitment that's both exciting and daunting. Both are stand-alones, which is to say neither is the first volume of a trilogy, a future history, or a series. Both are science fiction.

I've just completed the second draft of the first novel. Or is it a lightly-revised first draft, with some sections that have been rewritten three or four times? Word processing is seamless and fluid, but it can sometimes be a little too fluid. That's why I like to print out at least one draft, and amend and correct it with a red pen, line by line, page by page. It's a habit that goes back to the distant time in the previous century when I typed my first short stories and my first novel on a typewriter. I like to think, perhaps erroneously, that it gives the whole a certain coherence.

I don't want to say anything more about it at this stage. Partly out of superstition; partly because the novel is still evolving. I'm still at the discovery stage. I'm still being surprised. But I do know that part of it is set in the places shown on the map below -- shown as they are now, that is, not as they might be, in the novel's imaginary somewhen.

The Lost Innocence of UFOs

In the 1960s and early 1970s, my family's summer holiday was invariably a week in my mother's home town, Bognor Regis, on the south coast of England, where we stayed at my great-aunt's traditional seaside boarding house. When I reached my teens, the usual attractions of the beach and pier, the small zoo and boating lake, silly golf and slot machine arcades, had begun to pall. In an especially wet August in 1970, mostly trapped indoors and having read the books I'd brought with me, I joined Bognor Regis library and discovered that although its science fiction selection was disappointingly sparse, it had a solid two-shelf collection of UFO books (it also had one of the country's first computerised borrowing systems, with slotted plastic machine-readable tickets). And so, on that rainy holiday, I read my way through the lot.

There was a certain hypnotic fascination in their painstaking, trainspotterish taxonomy of UFO sightings, renderings of encounters with aliens in dull prose clogged with cliches and opaque details that failed to evoke any sense of wonder, and lengthy disquisitions on the fortune-cookie wisdom imparted to the chosen few by beings supposedly wise beyond human understanding. I once interviewed the physicist and author John Barrow, who told me that a common factor of the crank mail he received was that its authors attempted to develop a theory of everything using only schoolbook algebra. Similarly, the authors of those UFO books attempted to reduce the uncaring vastness of the cosmos to a human scale, with narratives in achingly ordinary people were chosen by aliens for revelation or experimentation, and their mundane lives were given as much weight as the descriptions of the aliens and their craft, and medical procedures somewhat less unpleasant than the real thing.

This strain of UFOlogy still persists in corners of the internet where sightings are recorded alongside images of Martian rocks that, because they look a bit like guns or coins or statues of human figures, must actually be guns, coins etc. But the cultural phenomenon of UFOs has not only diminished but mutated into something much less cozy. Stephen Spielberg captured that change in two films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET: The Extraterrestrial, in which alien intrusions into skilfully rendered domesticity are far less threatening than ruthless government agencies bent on preventing the general population from discovering the truth. Since then, UFOs have become associated with suicide cults like Heaven's Gate or the Order of the Solar Temple, and absorbed into the hot stew of millennial, mostly right-wing paranoia which aggressively promotes the belief that almost every aspect of modern life has been infiltrated by government conspiracies invisible to all but the chosen.

In its first incarnation, The X-Files embodied a version of that paranoia, suggesting that a quisling government was conspiring with hostile aliens bent on invading and colonising Earth. The new series, though, suggests that the aliens actually came in peace, and were traduced by a global conspiracy of 'über-violent ultra-fascists' planning to use stolen alien technology to mount an attack on democracy in general and America in particular. That the aliens are as much victims of a conspiracy as the rest of us is, I suppose, a slight improvement. A hopeful readjustment of the reputation of extraterrestrial intelligence. But I still miss the naive hopefulness of those old UFO books, back when aliens came here only to help.

Strange Gifts From The Gods

‘For most consumers—who learn about new technologies only when they brighten the windows of an Apple store or after they’ve already gone viral—it’s easy to imagine that technological progress is indeed dictated by a kind of divine logic; that machines are dropped into our lives on their own accord, like strange gifts from the gods.’
Meghan O’Gieblyn, As a God Might Be –Three Visions of Technological Progress

Among other things, Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere play with the long-established SF trope of ancient alien technologies that disrupt human society, get inside our heads, have agendas of their own. A trope that, like most, is really about our fear of our own future (which is why fictional futures are almost always worse than the actual future when it catches up with the present).

The smarter technology becomes, the more we lose control over it. We are not the customers of social media; we provide the data it sells to advertisers. Most of us no longer programme computers; we buy software and apps approved for use in the operating system’s walled garden. Smart phones contain smart assistants that answer our questions, but they also brick if they’re repaired with unapproved components. An NSA machine learning algorithm extracts profiles of possible terrorists from metadata gathered from mass surveillance of Pakistan’s cell phone networks, random decision forests assign scores, and profiles with the highest scores are forwarded to the CIA or the military as potential targets for drones or death squads -- theoretically, assassinations could be carried out without human intervention. The NSA program that uses that algorithm is called SKYNET.

Truly advanced technologies aspire to the condition of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monoliths. Pursuing cryptic plans of their own, changing and manipulating us in unknown, unpredictable ways. Strange gifts of the gods, indistinguishable from magic. All we can do is hope to appease them by cargo-cult ceremonies that borrow gestures and language from science. Already, many machines in daily use are imprinted with a warning that echoes the curses sometimes set on ancient Egyptian tombs: Warranty Void If Opened.

Something Coming Soon

The future of humanity is haunted. By alien ghosts.

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people.

The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.

The Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post, copies of this beautiful French translation of my novella The Choice, from Le Bélial'. I believe that publication date is February 11th. There's an ebook version too.

In other short-story news, Lightspeed Magazine have reprinted my story 'Transitional Forms', and the latest edition of Clarkesworld includes a new story, 'The Fixer', which was partly inspired by this.

Now Hear This

The paperback of Something Coming Through has been out in the world for a couple of weeks now,  and the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, will be published in a couple of months (the 21st of April, to be precise). At the same time, my publisher will be releasing unabridged audiobooks of both novels in the UK (and, I assume, the rest of the EU). So if that's how you like to take your fiction, both of them are now available for preorder - here and here, for instance. Although there are audiobook versions of some of my shorter fiction - notably in Allan Kaster's series,The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction - it's the first time any of my novels have been turned into audiobooks, so I'm somewhat excited.

Oh, and by the way, now that Something Coming Through is out in paperback, the ebook is considerably cheaper. Just saying.

You Can't Get There From Here

Like chaotic systems, novels are highly sensitive to initial conditions. But it's often a mistake to think that you can fix the one you've just started to write by reworking the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence. The initial conditions of a novel, the warm little pond where it was first nurtured, precedes the first word. The tone of the novel's narrative and the sequence of its story are shaped by decisions made before you start to write. The history of the characters and their place in history, the privileges they possess and those they lack, so on, so forth, determine what might happen to them, and the decisions and actions they make in response. Sometimes, when the novel you think you were writing starts to become something else, it's because you haven't been true to to its characters and their situation, and you can retrace your steps until you find the place where you went wrong, and start over. But sometimes the novel you're writing becomes something else because that's what it was all along. And then you have two choices: either step up to the plate and own it and have fun finding out where it takes you next, or run away and try to fix the initial conditions so they'll come out the way you want. I know which I prefer.

In Short

Charles Baxter, New York Review of Books:

O’Connor’s central idea is that the short story is a more private art than that of the novel. And its dramatis personae are of a different order: more solitary, isolated, and uncommunicative. Going out on one of several limbs, O’Connor claims that we do not identify with most short-story characters. Instead, we find in stories “a submerged population group” made up of lonely outcasts, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo….” He is thinking here of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and its central character, Akaky Akakievich, and Akaky’s distant, echoing similarity to Christ:

What Gogol has done so boldly and brilliantly is to take the mock-heroic character, the absurd little copying clerk, and impose his image over that of the crucified Jesus, so that even while we laugh we are filled with horror at the resemblance.

Allied to romance rather than realism, the short-story form, O’Connor suggests, does not provide the kind of necessary space for a writer to build up a worthy and heroic individual as novels do. Remembering an author’s stories, we therefore recall a population group and not an individual. As a consequence, what we encounter in short stories are these exemplars of various subcultures, “remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent,” a class of people who were largely invisible to us before our reading. Accordingly, the central feeling of short stories, O’Connor asserts, is that of the loneliness associated with that particular group.

The Dead

Originally posted January 2nd 2011 as My Grandmother's Photograph Album.

 

One of the memes endlessly circulating the Sargasso of the internet is that the living now outnumber the dead. It seems to be based on the exponential mathematics of the population explosion: if two people have three children, and if those children each have three children, and so on, and so on, then in only a few generations it's a mathematical inevitability that there will be more living descendants than dead ancestors.

But like too many simple ideas it has a fatal flaw: we tend to underestimate the numbers of the dead. One calculation, quoted in a debunking article published in the Scientific American, suggests that around 106 billion people have been born; since only 6 billion are currently alive, 94% of all people ever born are dead. Or as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick suggested in their foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.'

An inspection of old photograph albums confirms this simple truth. Here are the dead, in their multitudes. They are dressed in antique costumes, stand in front of new cars, hold up babies. They are often on holiday.

 

We know so little about them. Many are nameless, now. Yet they wait patiently for us.  They have plenty of time, after all. The universe is still young: a little less than 14 billion years. Whether it expires in a Big Crunch or subsides in a long Heat Death, many more billions of years stretch ahead. We'll all be dead for far longer than our pre-birth non-existence.

 'Come on in. The water's fine.'

Now In Paperback

Alien Impulses And Strange Memes

From Something Coming Through, published in paperback Thursday January 14.

The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.
 
‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’
 
There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.
 
Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.
 
Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.
 
‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth!  Uth!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different.  Uth!  Uth!’
 
Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.
 
Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking among her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.
 
Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp.

They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park.  Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.
 
This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that.  She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

We Thought He Was Saying Hello But He Was Really Saying Goodbye

Another Country

Over Christmas I read, with increasing enchantment, a lucky find in a charity shop - a 1970s Penguin edition of Mary Renault's The Bull From The Sea. Which I first read it more than forty years ago in my school library, where I also discovered the novels of The Lord of the Flies* and The Lord of the Rings. It's the sequel to Renault's The King Must Die, taking up Theseus's story after he returns from Crete and inherits a kingdom after his father, believing Theseus to be dead, commits suicide. Its first-person narrative is vivid and vital. The action -- and there's a lot of action in a story that encompasses the rise and fall of Theseus's reign -- is spare and swift:

The Kolchians kept a good watch and saw us landing, though there was no moon; but it did not give them long enough to get their goods up to the Citadel, and they left a good deal behind. We fought in the streets by the light of the burning houses; and the men of Kolchis giving way before us we caught up in the mountain road with the mule-train that had the gold.

The episodic narrative does sometimes feel that Renault is ticking off boxes as she covers the rest of her hero's life. But the storytelling, omitting everything that isn't essential and framed through Theseus's restless, pragmatic eye, is masterful and relentlessly propulsive, and with sharp economy effectively conveys a rich sense of its antique world. Not for Renault baggy descriptions of every room and every minor character, or discursive sidebars on the sewerage system of Athens or the pantheon of her Gods; instead, much of the sense of the world is conveyed through action -- by what Theseus does, or what he thinks about the people and situations he encounters, and the problems he must solve. It's a paradigmatic example of how worldbuilding serves the story, rather than vice versa. It's also (something rare these days) a story square in the tragic mode, as Theseus chases the unattainable carefree days of his youth, and loses, piece by piece, everything he loves. Not Renault's best novel, but better than almost everything else.


*The Lord of the Flies was pretty much a mandatory text in English schools at that time, but as far as I was concerned, it wasn't set at O-level, and at A-level I moved into the science stream, so was able to read it unencumbered by the feeling that I was doing some kind of work. Later, I helped to organise a showing of Peter Brook's adaptation at the school cinema club.** The teachers grew increasingly quiet and still as anarchy deepened, but perked up when the naval officer appeared.

** It was a county grammar school with the pretensions of a minor public school; I was a bright kid from a poor family who shamelessly benefited from its facilities.

And What Have I Done?

Another year over, a new one about to begin...

In 2015 I wrote, mostly. First up, a new novel, Something Coming Through, which brought together some ideas I've been working up in short stories for the past ten years or so. About the way that technology has become a cargo cult that is changing us in ways we can neither predict nor, as yet, fully understand. About what might happen if we were given free and easy travel to other planets right now. About mysteriously helpful aliens, the Jackaroo, and what happens when the Other understands you better than you understand yourself.

I finished writing a second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, in the first half of this year. It's related to Something Coming Through but works as a standalone, and is scheduled to be published in April 2016, a couple of months after the mass market paperback of Something Coming Through and a couple of months before Fairyland is reissued as a Gollancz SF Masterwork.

Also published in 2015, a big fat paperback of the Confluence trilogy, reissued with two associated stories. Some people think that it's my best work. I'm pleased to see it back in print after a long hiatus. And I turned two out-of-print novels, Players and Mind's Eye, into ebooks - Kindle only, at the moment, I'm afraid. Players is a police procedural revolving around a massively multiplayer online game. Mind's Eye is a weird thriller that moves from London to Iraq in a chase after the origin of mind-altering entoptic glyphs and the strange family history of its protagonist.

There was a smattering of non-fiction, and two short stories, 'Planet of Fear' (in Old Venus, edited by G.R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) and 'Wild Honey' (in Asimov's SF). Both have been selected for upcoming Best of the Year anthologies. I also wrote, and sold, four short stories that should see print in 2016, and I'm in the middle of writing a novel I don't want to talk about for the usual superstitious reasons, except to say that it's one I've been trying to find way of writing for some time.

Based on previous years, I could predict that I'll spend much of 2016 writing, too, but one thing I've learned from writing science fiction is that making predictions is a chancy business. Meanwhile, a Happy New Year to all who've stopped by here. Let's hope it's a good one.

Dream Logic

In the gardens of my childhood, a subdivided acre behind the row of four rented cottages, I was digging in the soft deep dirt for lugworms, usually found in the intertidal sand of beaches. I excavated one and dropped it in a plastic bag with an inch of seawater in the bottom, but abandoned the search when I uncovered a hollow chamber the size and shape of a child's balloon -- I was afraid of being attacked by the bees which I knew had made it. With the kind of narrative skip common in dreams, I noticed that the sports field next to the gardens had been dug up to reveal the salt dome beneath. Workmen were carving the white salt into a replica of the hills that rose above our little valley. So far, they'd only roughed out the contours, and created a miniature of the parish church. The tall wire mesh boundary fence was gone and big hawthorn bushes had been planted in its place, each bent like an elbow, to create the beginnings of a hedge. I walked along it, towards my childhood home. And then I woke up.

More Listing

This time, ten films from 2015 (in the UK) that I really liked, in no particular order.


Birdman (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Hard To Be A God (dir. Alexei German)

Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland)

Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller)

The Falling (dir. Carol Morely)

It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell)

The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

A Most Violent Year (dir. J.C. Chandor)

Most Disappointing Beginning To A Series: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Worst Theme Park Ever: Jurassic World

Worst/Best Punning Title: Bridge Of Spies

Most Hoo-Ha! American Sniper

Two Hours I Won't Get Back: Fantastic Four

Possibly The Best Film I Haven't Seen Yet: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

The Inevitable List Redux

A short-story collection and nine novels published this year that I enjoyed reading. Looking back, I realise that I haven't read much new science fiction, apart from short stories. I need to catch up. Three non-fiction books I especially liked were: Oliver Morton's history of climate change and geoengineering, The Planet Remade; Luc Sante's chronicle of the old, tough City of Lights, The Other Paris, and Owen Hatherley's tour of Eastern Europe and its architecture, Landscapes of Communism.

Signs Of Life

The western end of London Wall is a forbidding entry to the City of London. Brick and concrete, glass and steel buildings rise ten, twenty, thirty stories high in an elephantine fortification. One building, faced with panels the colour of Elastoplast, straddles the four-lane road, with a branch of Pizza Express suspended in its arch. Giant foghorns painted red and blue cluster in front of another. But off to one side, in the lee of the Museum of London, is a small open space where a few stretches of the old wall of London still stand. Medieval brick and stone built on Roman foundations. In an embayment there's a neatly planted herb garden, maybe three metres long and a metre across, the green shoots of narcissi showing in this warm December. And a desire path has been trampled by human feet across the grass, swerving around a bulwark as it angles towards the rectangular ponds at the rear of the Barbican.

I was there to visit the Museum of London's Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition. From which you learn that most murders don't involve unraveling clues left by meglomaniacs to taunt the police, but are manhunts for men whose violent chaotic lives have fatally intersected with their victims. 'Luckily for us, most criminals are stupid -- that's why they're criminals,' a Portland, Oregon cop once observed to me, when I accompanied him on a ride-along. One of the exhibits was what looked like a pair of child's stilts, constructed by a Victorian burglar to make fake footprints to mislead the police. He was convicted because the prints of his own shoes were found next to his false trail.