The Doctor's Story

From War of the Maps:

‘People of our age sometimes have the foolish notion that they must prove that they have not been brought low by time,’ the doctor said. ‘After living full and useful lives, they suddenly realise that the end of the road is only a little way ahead of them. They begin to fear that they are no longer relevant. That the world is moving on without them. They believe that there may yet be time for one more grand adventure, want to prove that they can still make a mark and win respect. But an important part of growing old is accepting without regret that all lives end in some kind of failure. We never do everything we hoped to do, or do what we have done as well as we would have liked.’

‘Are you talking about me, doctor?’ the lucidor said. ‘Or are you thinking of yourself?’

‘Oh, I got over my foolish need for adventure when I was very much younger. It is a story of madness and failure with a kind of happy ending. Or so I like to think.’

When she was a student, the doctor said, she had become interested in medicinal herbs. The creator gods had seeded the world with a wealth of plants that possessed healing properties, but only a small number had ever been cultivated, and many had died out in the wild. But now and then a new species was found, or ones thought lost to the world were rediscovered, and after she had earned her medical qualifications the doctor used a small inheritance to fund a plant-finding expedition of her own.

‘I lived for a year amongst the folk who lived in the mountains to the north of this town,’ she said. ‘Although they are a patriarchal people, being a woman turned out to be to my advantage. Most of their healers are women because caring for people is considered women’s work, and while their men would tell anyone about everything, their women confided their secrets only to each other. And, eventually, to me. With their help and advice I found several useful plants unknown to my profession, including one whose leaves yielded an effective painkiller when mashed with slaked lime. And because I worked hard to gain the women’s trust, I was at last allowed to take part in a ceremony they called “Touching the Hands of the Godlings”.

‘It involved the ritual ingestion of a small portion of a mushroom found only in the mountains. A mushroom said to have been used by those who were ridden by godlings when the world was still dewy fresh and everything in it was their plaything. I was inducted into the secret by a shaman who seemed to me then to be incredibly ancient, but probably was no older than I am now. She and the other old women of her village took me into a system of caves, where she and I were stripped naked and bathed, and I was painted from head to foot with patterns of dots and dashes that matched the patterns of the tattoos that covered her body. Prayers were sung, and she led me deeper into the caves, at last squirming through a narrow passage to a kind of cell whose flowstone walls were painted with the likeness of godling spirits: slender long-limbed human figures each with a single large eye, and decorated with the same patterns as the shaman’s tattoos and my body paint. There, in the light of a single small clay lamp, the shaman chewed a portion of her sacred mushroom, and with a deep kiss transferred it to my mouth. It was a solemn, thrilling moment, and it changed my life. Not so much for what I saw, but for the obsession it planted in me.’

‘What did you see?’

‘We sat together for a long while, and when I was beginning to believe that nothing would happen the painted figures on the walls began to move in the flicker of the lamp’s flame. They danced, and stepped down and invited me to join in their dance. The ceiling of that little space was so low I couldn’t stand, yet I seemed to be in a much larger space, and the godlings took my hands and spun me around and passed me from one to the next. They talked to me, too. Or sang. Of what, I can’t recall, but I do remember the feeling those songs and that dance gave me. It wasn’t unique. Many experience it through prayer, meditation or ecstatic trance. Some say that it is the most primal state of consciousness, gifted to us by the gods. Perhaps you have experienced it yourself. But there, deep underground, out of my mind on shaman spit and mushroom juice, it seemed to last forever. A feeling that there was no part of me separate from the world, and no part of the world was separate from me. I felt that I had floated off into a limitless ocean that contained all of time and all of space, and at the same time I felt that ocean opening up inside me.

‘At last it subsided, and the godlings faded back into the walls. The little clay lamp was still burning steadily, and when the shaman guided me back to the cave entrance I discovered that it was still night, and scarcely more than two hours had passed. I wanted to experience the vision of the dance again, craved it as an addict craves soma, but as far as the shaman was concerned it was a rite of passage that should not and need not be repeated, and neither she nor the other women, nor any others I asked in the other villages, would tell me where that mushroom grew. I begged. I tried to bribe them. I tried to threaten them. Nothing shifted them. I looked for a year, walking mountain trails familiar and unfamiliar, and never found it.

‘By then I had run out of money. I took a job in a city in the mountains of the south-west, hoping that I might find the mushroom there, but had no better luck. I dread to think what might have happened to me if I had. Fortunately, I was young, and was able to outgrow my foolishness. The obsession slowly lost its grip, and when I learned that the doctor who ran this infirmary died I applied to take his place and was successful. I have been here ever since, treating the townspeople as best I can and cultivating a little herb garden, and have never regretted it. And there is the happy ending.’

Hampstead Heath, January to June

I take a photograph or two whenever I go for a walk on Hampstead Heath. There's no plan, no search for the ideal image; the photos are little more than snapshots of whatever catches my attention. Memos taken with an old Android phone, some unprocessed, some with simple filters. Here are six, from the first six months of this year.

January

February

March

April

May

June

Three-Park Problems and Forest Bathing

It's a commonplace amongst writers that if you become blocked or jammed, or have simply run out of inspiration, the best cure is to go for a walk. I live in one of the most built-up boroughs in London, but despite the lack of open spaces I have a local loop of a couple of kilometres that takes in three small parks and is usually just about long enough to work out the kinks in simple problems in narrative dynamics. Solutions often arrive sideways while thinking about something else or while being simply absorbed in the exercise of walking, courtesy of some process or sub-agent working away below the upper flow of consciousness.

I take that walk two or three times a week when I'm working on something. And for the past couple of years I've taken to walking around the woods and meadows of Hampstead Heath early every Sunday morning. The Japanese have a term for it. Shrinrin-yoku. Forest bathing. Immersion in the green light and forced perspectives beneath a forest canopy.  The birdsong and the cathedral hush. Hampstead Heath is one of London's larger green spaces, elevated on a ridge above the simmering brawl of the city's basin, but you wouldn't ever mistake it for a true wilderness. Even so, despite the early-bird joggers and dog walkers, it most often manages, like certain passages of music, to lift me out of myself for a brief while.

It's possible that these walks may have informed the unplanned traverses across unpopulated landscapes that both the narrator of Austral and the protagonist in War of the Maps are forced to take, although a similar traverse was also the backbone of my first novel, Confluence is a journey down the length of a world-spanning river, there are similar hikes and tours across various moons in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and Cowboy Angels is an American road trip. If you write for long enough, common themes begin to emerge. Chorography and landscape writing may be foregrounded in my most recent work, but both have been there from the beginning.

Not Even Past

Taken from Google Street View, this image of one of the boundary walls of Keble College, Oxford, shows the faint trace of part of an old graffito. It's just where the new section of wall meets the old; just above the piece of street furniture. Six letters. Three a complete word, three a fragment. OVE YOU. It might seem meaningless now, but I knew the graffito when it was still whole, back in the 1980s, when I was working in a laboratory nearby. And I knew that it was a line from David Bowie's 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide':

OH NO LOVE YOU'RE NOT ALONE

'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' is the final track on Bowie's science fictional concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. An odd, fractured song about failure and redemption, in which an aged rock and roll star wandering the uncaring streets of a doomed city on a doomed planet is swept up and saved (or torn apart in Dionysian frenzy, according to Bowie's exegesis of the stage show) by his fans. The quote, wrenched out of context, painted in bold white letters on red brick, seemed like a cry from the heart, part desperation, part caritas, in what can sometimes be a cold and lonely city, where the wealth and storied traditions of the university's colleges are often intimidating and alienating to students who haven't transitioned smoothly from the same kind of wealth and tradition of public schools. An offer of connection. A reminder of our common humanity.

It always caught my attention when I walked past it, I've thought about it now and again, in the thirty plus years since I first saw it, and it's strange to see now that this ephemeral fragment of my past has survived time's abuses. A reminder that even something as transitory and fugitive as street art might not be completely overwritten by the future.

And there's a personal resonance, because a good number of my novels have been about how the future can be shaped by the intransigent past. In Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere, human destiny is warped by the gifts of kindly aliens and remnants of the technologies of their long-lost former clients. The narrator of Austral is trying to escape the consequences of her family history in a world altered by the kind of climate change we're going to hand down to our children's children. And the dogged hero of War of the Maps sets out on a long journey across a world abandoned by its creators because he has discovered that his past isn't yet past. The future is palimpsest and bricolage, shaped by our present as surely as our present had been shaped by the past. What will survive of us?

War of the Maps

I started work on the new novel on January 1st 2018, and a year and a week later turned in the final draft to my agent. Although, of course, there will be changes yet to come in the process of turning it into a book, it has reached its proper shape and feel. Here's a short extract from somewhere near the start:

The forest was scarred by tracts of dead trees; the valley sides were cut by erosion gullies and long rockslides. The climate of the entire map was changing, altering its weather, disfiguring its land without regard for boundaries or politics. The heartland of the Free State endured long summer droughts now, and its winters were colder and wetter. And while most mirrors dimmed each winter, as they always had, some were permanently dimmer than they once had been, and one, at the tail of the Sandday arc, had in the last century shrunk to a faint red spark. Some said that the creator gods had stinted when making the world; others that the world’s slow dying was part of their design. Yet still people were born and met and married and died to make room for the next generation, and life went on, somehow. Perhaps the creator gods had made people better than they had known or intended.

There Are Doors (25)

Recently Read

She Has Her Mother's Laugh, Carl Zimmer, Picador, 2018

We are more than the sum of the combination of genes we inherit from our parents, and that combination is in any case never as simple as two halves making a whole. That's the basic thesis of Carl Zimmer's intimidatingly large but beautifully lucid exposition of the history, ethics and science  of heredity, illuminated and tied together by human stories, from Luther Burbank's alchemical talent for producing hundreds of new varieties of fruit, flowers and vegetables, the 'feebleminded' girl at the centre of a study that underpinned the eugenic movement in the United States, and the implications of Zimmer's agreement to have his own genome sequenced, and the bacterial population of his bellybutton analysed:

When I looked over my spreadsheet, I could see that seventeen of my species were unique to me. One type, called Marimonas, had only been known from the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean. Another, called Georgenia, lives in the soil. In Japan.

On discovering this, I e-mailed Dunn [the biologist conducting the study] to let him know I'd never been to Japan.

"It has apparently been to you," he replied.

Zimmer's book is likewise as wide-ranging and crammed with unexpected revelations, from the search for genes that control variables such as height and intelligence to mosaicism and human chimeras, and from tracking the flow of genes in human populations to the inheritance of a cumulative culture that may reach back at least seven million years, to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. It's an exemplary explication of how the narrow definition of heredity, limiting it to genes, has been overturned. We are the product not only of our genetic inheritance, but also the social network and history of our immediate family, and our shared culture and an environment altered by human activity. Readers of Austral may see a parallel, here.

Associated Reading: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us, by Ed Yong, and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History Of Life, by David Quammen

The Happiest Days Of Our Lives

(An extract from Austral's account of her and her mother's long walk towards freedom after escaping from the prison of Deception Island.)

The days and days of walking blur together. It’s hard, now, to sort dreams from actual memories. I remember climbing to Mapple Valley’s high southern crest and seeing a panorama of parallel razorback ridges bare as the moon stretching away under the cloudless sky. I remember a circle of upright stones in a mossy chapel in the forest below the Forbidden Plateau, lit by a beam of sunlight slanting between the trees. The glass and concrete slab of some plutocrat’s back-country house cantilevered out from cliffs overlooking Wilhelminia Bay. The broken castle of an orphaned iceberg grounded on a rocky shore, with freshets of sparkling meltwater cascading down its fluted sides and a thick band of green algae tinting its wave-washed base. But did we really see, in the pass between Starbuck and Stubb Fjords, an albino reindeer poised near the thin spire of an elf stone named The Endless Song of the Air? Did we glimpse a pyramid set on a remote bastion of bare rock in the ice and snow of the Bruce Plateau? I’ve looked long and hard, but I’ve never been able to find it on maps or in satellite images. And did we really see people dancing naked in a circle around a huge bonfire in a forest glade near Tashtego Point? I can’t be certain that it wasn’t one of my dreams, but whether it was real or imaginary the memory of it still wakes the pulse of drums in my blood.

I’m trying to tell you how happy we were, Mama and me. Not only in those few moments indelibly fixed in memory, but also during the uneventful hours of walking through the forest and crossing meadows and hiking up long slopes of scree or snow, or when we rested beside a little campfire, taking turns to braid each other’s hair or simply sitting in companionable silence. The times we picked berries together in some sunny clearing or amongst the sliding stones of a mountainside, or spear-fished in icy rivers, or gathered sea moss and limpets from the salt-wet stones of the sea shore.

Some old-time writer once claimed that happy families are all alike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. If that’s true, then happiness can be attained only by sacrificing or suppressing some part of whatever it is that makes us different, by unselfishly giving up our wants and desires and submitting to something larger than ourselves. Family. Society. God. But in those long summer days, walking south with Mama, it seemed to me that happiness was a gift that fell on us as lightly and freely as sunlight. It was as simple as lying on wiry turf with the sun warm and red on my closed eyes, or the heart-stopping shock of jumping into a meltwater pool. It was a gift the world gave you if you gave yourself to the world.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (19)

Photograph by Shirley Baker, 1966.

Post-Normal

When I was writing Austral, the idea in the next century or so parts of Antarctica might become warm enough to support forests and fjords was a deliberate heightening of climatic trends: setting the novel in a near future that otherwise hadn't drifted too far from the present meant that the narrative could keep the effects of climate change in the foreground. Three years later, things have changed. A group of scientists has suggested that even if we're able to keep the rise in average global temperature to less than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, as per the Paris Accord, it may not be enough to prevent a catastrophic domino effect that could push the planet's climate system towards a Hothouse Earth. And throughout the summer of 2018, catastrophe and climate change have been inextricably linked in the news headlines, suggesting that some kind of tipping point may have been reached. That some kind of new normal has been established. Higher than average temperatures across global land and ocean surfaces, devastating wildfires in Canada, California and Europe, the breakup of old, multilayer ice in previously frozen waters in the Arctic, and much else, have helped to drive home the idea that global warming is real, with serious consequences in the here and now. It's even informing the fake news fantasies of far-right pill-peddling hucksters, who claim that weather-controlling weapons based in Antarctica are firing powerful energy beams that can split hurricanes in two. Somehow, Senator John Kerry and a buried alien city may be involved. I missed a trick or two, there.

Not for the first time, the present has overtaken the speculative scenarios of science fiction. Closed the weirdness gap between now and what might be. At the end of The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner's multistranded novel about environmental and societal collapse, the smoke from the bonfire of America civilisation drifts across the Atlantic to Ireland; this summer, smoke and other pollutants from extensive wildfires in Canada reached northwest Europe. It's hard, now, to imagine any kind of plausible near future that doesn't foreground the effects of climate change; it's increasingly difficult to distinguish headlines in the happening world from scenarios lifted from fictional dystopias and catastrophes.

But although climate change is reshaping the happening world and casting a long shadow across the future, its endpoint remains unclear, and there's still space for speculation about how we might survive it, and how it might change us. Kim Stanley Robinson's heterotopic New York 2140 and the hypercapitalism of Sam J. Miller's Blackfish City are interesting, and interesting different, explorations of how society might be reshaped by climate change. N.K. Jemisen's triple Hugo winning Broken Earth trilogy may be set on a far-future Earth where magic operates, but its magic system is at service to a kind of geoengineering, and its plot turns on the lengths to which people must go and the sacrifices they must make to save a world broken by catastrophe: hard lessons that have critical relevance to our present predicament. The future may not be what it once was, but creating human-shaped possibilities is still a good way of discovering what we think is important, here in the present. And of reminding ourselves that any new normal is only temporary; that there is no constant now, except for change.

War Of The Maps

Went out yesterday and bought a pack of paper, and printed off the second draft of the new novel, ready for rereading and editing. (I'll probably get through two of those red pens.) It's due to be delivered to the publishers early next year, and although I don't yet have a publication date I imagine it will be some time in the first quarter of 2020. It's set in the far future on a crumbling macrostructure (aka Big Dumb Object) with the surface area of 400,000 Earths, so there's some worldbuilding involved. Most of it trying to make sense of everything the protagonist encounters as he travels further than he expected, rather than a formal interrogation of the world and its peoples -- hopefully the process of discovery avoids the kind of over-thought underpinnings that are too often visible in fictions set on imaginary worlds, gives plenty of space for serendipity and bricolage, and helps keep me interested. Maybe the reader, too.

News From Antarctica

Today is publication day for the mass-market paperback of Austral, my novel about a short but somewhat troublesome walk across the fjords, forests and ice fields of the Antarctic Peninsula in the not very distant and somewhat warmer future. Please do check it out.

Coincidentally, I received confirmation that Big Talk Productions have taken up an option to use Austral and a couple of associated short stories as the basis for a multi-season TV programme. This is a long way from actual production, of course. And given that most options don't pan out into actual programmes, this may be as far as it goes. Still, it's a very nice boost to my morale, especially given the timing.

Meanwhile, here's a short section of Antarctic history that didn't make it into the finished book, first published here in October last year.

Desert Island Books

One of the neat things I did as the guest of honour at the Satellite 6 convention last weekend was talk about my desert island books, in an interview with a format similar to the venerable Desert Island Discs radio programme. If I was cast away on a remote island in the tropics, what essential volumes would I take with me ? Here they are:

1) On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (1859). I used to be a research biologist -- how could I not choose this, the most famous and most important book on biology yet published? Based on evidence gathered from his voyage on The Beagle and years of observations, ideas and experimental work in the years since, this is the keystone of Darwin's theory of evolution, explaining in beautifully lucid prose the simple principles by which the vast complex diversity of life on this planet developed. It was controversial when it was published, and is still in certain quarters, but has survived every challenge and test, and is one of science's greatest achievements.

2) The Adventure of Alyx, by Joanna Russ (1967 - 1970). Back in the formative years of my science fiction reading, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, there were far more women working in the field than some would have you believe. Joanna Russ was one of the best, and although The Female Man is perhaps her finest novel, I have a soft spot for Alyx. Independent, clever, determined, adaptable, clear-minded, ready to mete out violence when it's needed -- in short, a typical hero of sword-and-sorcery stories, except that she's a woman. In the early stories collected here she's a barbarian working on the shady side of an ancient Hellenic milieu, much like Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (who are mentioned glancingly in one of the stories). In the short novel Picnic on Paradise, having been accidentally scooped up by archaeologists from the far future, she's tasked with escorting bunch of hapless tourists across a war-torn planet. Scornful of the blandly pleasant utopia in which she finds herself, she's the original of scores of kick-ass heroines, redeemed from cliche by Russ's sharp prose and observations. If you want to know why so many of the protagonists in my novels are women, here's a major reason.

3) Pavane, by Keith Roberts (1968). At age 13 or so, I found the US paperback edition of Roberts's masterpiece in a local jumble sale. I have no idea how it got there -- accident, luck, fate -- but it instantly became one of my favourite books. It's set in an alternate history where Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated and the Roman Catholic Church regained control of Britain and the development and use of technology. A patchwork of stories develop a portrait of England where wolves and a hidden race of Old Ones still roam forests, messages are transmitted through chains of semaphore towers, the printing press is banned, the church uses the inquisition to suppress the spread of clandestine knowledge, and rebellion is slowly growing. It's a haunting, detailed portrait of Deep England and lives straining against the fetters of power: Roberts's best work, and the best alternate history yet written. My alternate history novel, Pasquale's Angel, in which the great engineer Leonardo Da Vinci kickstarts the industrial revolution a couple of centuries early, is in part a mirror-image homage.

4) Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985). Sub-titled The Evening Redness in the West, a major theme of McCarthy's novel, based on historical events, is man's propensity for war and gleeful ruin. Two characters, the unlettered Kid, and an all-knowing Judge, join the Glanton gang of scalphunters that murder their way along the Mexican-US border. Only the Kid and the Judge survive, until a final encounter years later. Unsparing descriptions of violence and the vast and unforgiving landscapes of the American West are vividly conveyed in McCarthy's sparse Biblical prose; history is revisioned as a fantastic nightmare from which which reason struggles to wake. Widely praised as McCarthy's best novel, and one of the best American novels of the twentieth century it's a challenging benchmark that I admire intensely. It isn't exactly an influence, but it is one of the books I dip into when my inspiration needs a stiffener.

5) Hav, by Jan Morris (omnibus volume collecting Last Letters From Hav (1985) and Hav (2006)). Jan Morris is best known for her travel writing; this linked pair of novels are an outsider's exploration of the Mediterranean principality of Hav, where West and East coexist in a city whose deep history is underpinned by a variety of secrets and unique customs. The first novel chronicles the author's attempts to penetrate Hav's mysteries; the second her return to a city despoiled by revolution and the intrusion of the instruments of late-stage capitalism, yet where stubborn elements of its strangeness have resisted change. A fantasy venue populated by lovingly-drawn eccentrics that holds up a mirror to our own world and its colonial 'global culture'; a brilliant, detailed piece of world building.

6) The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard (2001). I mentioned that my formative years as a science-fiction reader were the late 1960s and early 1970s. That's when the New Wave was still a major agent of change in the genre, and J.G. Ballard was the new waviest of all the New Wave writers. This monumental volume contains all the stories that blew my teenage mind back then, with early examples of Ballard's condensed novels, later assembled into The Atrocity Exhibition, and precursors of Empire of the Sun, drawing on his childhood experiences in a prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai. Prescient, weird, essential stuff, hugely expanding the possibilities of the genre, before transcending it.

7) Get In Trouble, by Kelly Link (2015). A terrific collection of short stories by one of the finest fabulists of our time. I started out writing short stories, I'm still writing short stories, I still want to learn how to do better, and Kelly Link is one of the best short-story writers working today. Reading one of her stories is like watching the performance a table magician: although the trick is done right in front of you, you can't quite see how it subverts reality. They mostly feature girls and young women on the cusp of claiming their own lives, drawing on familiar tropes and making them new, often by relocating them in our digitally-dominated panopticon. Her characters may be haunted by ghosts and troubled by vampires and werewolves, but they're also hip to fantasy lore, and there's always some kind of grounding in actual and emotional reality. Link's three other collections are terrific too, but this one is the latest, was nominated for a Pulitzer, and contains my favourite of her stories: 'Two Houses', a story within a story told on an interstellar ship which, like all the best science fiction, questions the difference between the true and the real.

8) The Once and Future King, by T.H. White (1938 -- 1958). If I had to choose only one book, this would be it. I found it in the school library when I was thirteen or fourteen (along with William Golding and Mary Renault) and I've loved it ever since. A great, singular, haunting masterpiece that like Blood Meridian examines humankind's propensity for war, but from the point of view of someone who spends his entire life searching for an alternative. It is, famously, a retelling of Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, one of the great foundation stones of British myth. White relocated it to a magical version of the fourteenth century (whose actual kings and queens are mythic ghosts), beginning with the education of an orphan stable boy, the Wart, by a backwards-living Merlin, who fortifies moral and political instruction with direct experience other ways of living by transforming the Wart into a variety of animals, from ants and hedgehogs to geese and hawks. The Wart is, of course, Arthur Pendragon, pulls the sword from the stone to establish his legitimacy, and establishes the round table and attempts to find an alternative to might is right by using might to do right. And fails, because of all-too-human mistakes, but in the last pages, in the last hours before the final battle with his illegitimate son Mordred, passes on the flame to a page, who is, of course, Thomas Mallory. A brief recounting of its story can't do justice to this great novel. It's a unique book, crammed with humour and tragedy, fantasy and history and frank whimsy, with brilliant passages about hunting, falconry, jousting, and so much more. A great work in the tragic mode, intensely human and humane -- there are a couple of passages that still, after many re-readings, bring a prickling to my eyes. I wouldn't be without it.

In the tradition of the radio programme, I was also asked which luxury and piece of music I would like to take with me. As a luxury, I chose the International Space Station: unlike Robinson Crusoe, I wouldn't loot it of necessaries, but would watch as over the years it became an offshore Ballardian reef, technology colonised and transformed by the collective work of humble polyps.

As for music, I chose Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. I first heard an excerpt from it in 1979, just a few years after it was first performed, when David Bowie helmed a radio programme about his favourite music. Like much minimalist music, its hypnotic cadences are good to write to. This extract is from the very final part; like the LP set I bought, it's truncated from the original, but ends on a very science-fictional question.

Twelve Tomorrows

The novel I'm presently working on won't be published until next year (or possibly the year after), but I do have a few new short stories scheduled for release in 2018. The first, a weird biological apocalypse number, 'Chine Life', is in Twelve Tomorrows, an anthology of original SF stories published by MIT and edited by Wade Roush. It's out on Friday May 25th, so why not order it now? Here's the Table of Contents:

Profile of Samuel R. Delany - Mark Pontin and Jason Pontin
The Woman Who Destroyed Us - SL Huang
Okay, Glory - Elizabeth Bear
Byzantine Empathy - Ken Liu
Chine Life - Paul McAuley
Fields of Gold - Liu Cixin
Resolution - Clifford V. Johnson
Escape From Caring Seasons - Sarah Pinsker
The Heart Of The Matter - Nnedi Okorafor
Different Seas - Alastair Reynolds
Disaster Tourism - Malka Older
Vespers - JM Ledgard

Armchair Space Travel

Yesterday I started my 64th orbit around the Sun, and I wondered, idly, how much distance that represented. Turns out it's quite a lot more than I thought, but compared to the outer limits of the solar system, let alone interstellar space, not very much at all.

The average radius of the Earth's orbit is about 150 million kilometres, handily defined as one astronomical unit, and the circumference of its slightly elliptical orbit is around 940 million kilometres, or around 6.27 AU. So even if you do nothing all year but sit in your armchair, your track around the Sun would, if unraveled and straightened out, reach somewhat beyond the orbit of Jupiter.* And by simply staying alive for 63 years, I've managed to travel 395 AU, or more than 59 billion kilometres. That's about ten times the average distance of Pluto from the Sun, and nearly three times the distance of Voyager 1 from Earth (currently 141.9 AU).

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and officially reached interstellar space in August 2012, after it escaped from the influence of the Sun's magnetic field, but it's still inside the region influenced by the Sun's gravity. Out there, far beyond the planets, are two clouds of icy planetesimals, the origin of comets that now and then fall on long, long orbits towards the Sun. The first is the Hills cloud, a disc-shaped belt extending 2000 -- 20,000 AU from the Sun, and beyond that is the spherical Oort cloud, which may reach out as far as 50,000 AU, a substantial fraction of a light year.

At its steady rate around the Sun, it would take 319 years for my armchair-based mode of space travel to clock up a distance equivalent to that of the inner edge of the Hills cloud, and almost 8000 years to pass through the Oort cloud. As for the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, that's 4.25 light years away, or around 268,700 AU; so far, my travel around the Sun amounts to just a tiny fraction -- 0.15% -- of that interstellar gulf. It would take 42,900 years to make a one-way trip to Proxima, and I'm already out of warranty. Space is big, and life is short. Yet still I move.


_______________________
*Armchair space travel is more complicated that spinning around a fixed point. The Sun is orbiting the Milky Way galaxy at around 230 kilometres per second relative to the galactic centre; the Milky Way, along with the rest of the Local Group of galaxies, is plunging towards the Great Attractor at around 600 kilometres per second; and spacetime is expanding. But let's keep things simple.

Spring

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

As you grow older, anniversaries are too often bittersweet, or remind you of the vertiginous abyss of backwards time you've ascended. This one is the latter: on this day thirty years ago my first novel was published. Written so long ago that it was typed, because home computers and word processing software weren't common back then (although my second novel was written using WordPerfect 4.2, on a computer that, with its printer, cost about the same amount as a good secondhand car). Typed out at least three times, in fact, because there were three drafts, and because if I made more than three typing errors on a page, I retyped the damn thing.

I'm a British writer, but the first edition of Four Hundred Billion Stars was a paperback original in the US, partly because there wasn't that much British publishing in the late 1980s, but mainly because I'd acquired an American agent after publishing a handful of stories in American science fiction magazines. Some of those stories were set in a future history that Four Hundred Billion Stars and the two novels that followed it share, mixing the history of the faltering expansion of human colonisation of the near stars (Larry Niven's Known Space universe was one of its touchstones) with speculations about alien intelligence, cosmology, and deep galactic history. I'd been playing with that future history for some time; it was the setting for the first story I sold, at age 19 (it was never published, because the magazine which bought it promptly went bust: my first lesson in the exiguous nature of SF publishing). Which is why the novel features old school tropes such as faster-than-light travel and a heroine with a low-grade psychic power; ideas about red dwarf stars, brown dwarfs and weird biology were somewhat more cutting edge, but it is at heart a planetary adventure, and looking back at it I can see that I was, like many beginning novelists, writing my way out of my influences.

It went on to win the Philip K. Dick Award (jointly, with Rudy Rucker's Wetware), was published in hardback by Gollancz in the UK and sold to a respectable number of foreign markets, and has more or less been in print ever since (you can buy it in paperback or in ebook). It may not be the favourite amongst my novels, but after thirty years I'm still inordinately fond of it; not just because it was the first, but because of the debt owed to it by everything else that followed.

Note In Passing

I've been deep in the new novel ever since January 1st; that and a couple of other things are why it's been quiet around here lately. But now that the buds are breaking in the neighbour's magnolia tree and the weather is occasionally springlike I've been outside a few times. There was a thing on AI and science fiction in Cambridge University, and an interview for the Economist magazine's TV channel (on the immersive set of the Secret Cinema's showing of Blade Runner), and right now I'm getting ready to head out to Eastercon, where amongst other things I'll be one of the authors reading from and signing my stuff at the Imagined Things Bookshop (3pm Saturday 31st, if you happen to be in Harrogate).

Meanwhile, I still have a novel to finish (it's a 100,000 word novel that's just passed the 100,000 word mark, with some way still to go). Maybe I'll put up a few bits from it here when I get to the second draft and things start to take on their final form. And maybe there'll be time to put up some other stuff too -- after the recent and ongoing Facebook privacy scandal, perhaps blogs might become fashionable again.

One Year

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (18)

High-end fashion cosplay from Gucci's 2017 Fall/Winter Ad Campaign.

Three Questions

(My answers to three questions asked by SFX Magazine for their book issue.)

What are you working on at the moment?
 I’m thinking about the novel I’ll be trying to write in 2018. A kind of samurai western set on an artificial world after the sun has evolved into a white dwarf and the Andromeda Galaxy has collided with the Milky Way. Kind of thing.


What would be your "desert island book(s)"? (ie the one(s) you can keep going back to again and again)?
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King has long been my desert island book. It’s a retelling of the Arthurian myth in which an orphan named Wart, mentored by Merlyn (who lives backwards in time) becomes king, attempts to create a chivalric age in which his rule isn’t enforced by violent men in metal suits, and how he fails, yet never quite gives up hope. It’s the kind of novel into which the writer pours his entire life, a wonderful baggy monster that comfortably contains low comedy, high romance and deep tragedy, not to mention hugely entertaining infodumps on everything from falconry to the politics of ants. I’ve read it a dozen times, two passages still spring tears, and I like to believe that reading it has made me a better writer.       


What are you most excited about in SF/fantasy publishing?
 The increasing number of novels that aren’t published as science fiction yet use the SF toolkit or contain some weird element, and the increasing recognition that the world is no longer what it once was and never will be again, and we must find new ways of telling stories about it.